The Body in the Clouds (23 page)

‘Nothing like tea on a cold night,' he said. And Ted believed, at that moment, that there must be nothing in the world of Joy that her husband didn't see, didn't hear, didn't know about.

It would be something
, he thought,
to have someone who took care of you like that.

As the winter thickened and the bridge's halves inched closer to each other, Ted's mum still worried about the maths for that magical moment of meeting being done half a world away in London by men who'd never seen where the big frame would sit, let alone how its two sections were supposed to join up. She even took the train to the city to see it herself, as if that might somehow make up for the absence of the mathematicians (‘Engineers, Mum,' said Ted), and pronounced it unlikely that the south side and north side would connect. ‘When you look at it from this angle, you can see just how squiffy that north side is, can't you? Can't you?'

‘I do think this harbour's capable of a miracle or two, Mrs Parker,' said Joy. It was a Saturday, and the three of them had taken their sceptical visitor to the place from where, Joe declared, it looked most like it would line up. ‘That group over on the north side waiting for the Second Coming—they believed their saviour was going to walk right in through the heads.'

‘I think you're pulling my leg about that too, dear,' said Mrs Parker, taking another of Joy's sandwiches.

‘No, no, Mrs Parker, whenever I went—'

‘Have a bit of cake, Mrs Parker,' said Joe over the top of Joy's enthusiasm. And he cut a hefty slice of sponge.

‘It's better than a birthday,' said Mrs Parker, looking around for her tea.

Later, on the platform, as the train's engine puffed great clouds of steam around itself, she brushed at Ted's arm and said again how nice it was he'd fallen on his feet with his landlords. ‘And I guess we must just hope that they take as long as they can to get those pieces joined together and finish the thing off, because who knows where you'll find work next, Ted, or how long that'll take you. And you could do worse than find yourself a nice girl like that,' nodding down to the square of sponge Joy had given her for the trip home. ‘You should see if she's got a sister.' She winked as Ted turned scarlet.

She squeezed his hand—an uncharacteristic closeness—and told him to be careful on the water. He could still feel the warmth her fingers had pressed into his palm as the train pulled away and took the tracks' first curve.

Heading home—Joe and Joy with held hands swinging between them, and Ted on the kerbside of the pavement like a canoe's outrigger—they stopped at a pool that abutted the harbour's water where a group of the bridge men were gathered. It was a diving contest, a handful of them scaling the high towers, and standing poised, rigid, for a second, a breath, before they tumbled and turned and straightened and disappeared into the water below. Russian George was there, his new wife whispering about the midnight trip they'd made to explore the bridge, and two or three of the other blokes who drank beer in the backyard.

It made no sense to Joe, diving: that a man who spent his working day gripping on for dear life should pass some of his weekend—‘Voluntarily, mate, quite voluntarily'—falling off something.

‘Diving off,' Joy would correct him—and Joe would wave his arms about, saying, ‘Diving, falling, dropping: makes no difference what you call it, love. It comes down to the same thing.' But Joy had promised one of the boys they'd be there to watch him. ‘He's excited,' she'd said, ‘and it must be exciting to do this, don't you think? Fly through the air?' And here they were, Joe distracting himself with the view out past the pool to the harbour's blue, and a loud conversation about the brilliance of Brad-man's batting during the recent English Tests.

‘This bloke coming down now went off the top of a crane's rig at one of the docks,' someone leaned over and said to Joy. Then, ‘What do you reckon, Teddy—would you be up for it?'

Ted shook his head, watching the tiny ripples the breeze made across the harbour's surface. ‘It'd be planes for me if I wanted to get through the air. Aren't they amazing, the way they glide and turn?' They'd had Amy Johnson over the two halves of the bridge a week or so before; now someone was running a book on whether they'd get Charles Kingsford Smith back to the harbour before the arch was done. ‘It'd be interesting if you could remember what you saw when you were going down,' he said at last, to no one in particular, ‘but I guess you'd be so scared you wouldn't remember a thing.' As he blinked, he saw the rush of movement, the flash of blue, from his dream.

‘Good job you're on the barges then, mate,' said the bloke next to him, bringing him out of his reverie. ‘Out of the way of temptation—here's another.' The diver, his arms held out from his steeled body like a crucifix, had only the tips of his toes holding him onto the deck. Tall, broad-shouldered, with thick curly hair, he looked like a frame frozen from a movie, and then he pushed himself back and away from the tower, legs and arms coming in together like a pincer before he straightened himself out to drop down, down, down like an arrow into the water. The surface of the pool was hardly disturbed. Joy clapped and whooped.

‘Wasn't that Kelly?' she called. ‘Roy Kelly? That one you said dives some lunchtimes round the bridge? He's got the grace of a bird.' Joe made a snorting noise. ‘But look, look, here we go.' Her boy, from the backyard— the one they were there to clap for—was climbing the ladder and creeping out to the end of the deck. ‘I hope he remembers to breathe,' said Joy quietly, watching his steps become more and more tentative the closer he came to the open air.

He reached the end of the platform, his toes curling down around the deck as if to remind himself there really was nothing in front of him, and he stood—arms extended but facing out and away from the tower—for almost too long before he seemed to bounce forward, no turns, no twists, and plunge towards the pool.

‘Get yourself straight,' Ted heard Kelly call from among the audience, a thick towel around his neck. But the boy hit the water with his legs flailing and part of his back flat against its surface. The splash was enormous.

‘Eeooww,' said Joy, ‘maybe we shouldn't tell him we saw that.' But there he was, dripping and proud in the middle of them in less than a minute, his eyes bright and his towel draped exactly like all the other men's: one of the club now, one of the gang.

‘You'd love it,' he whispered to Joy. ‘Like flying, Mrs Brown, like flying for a bit.'

‘All I'm saying,' said Joe, standing up and making a point of adjusting his sleeves and his hat to indicate that he, for one, was ready to go home, ‘is that if Bradman keeps making three hundred, the Poms won't get a look-in. Ready, love?'

There was another splash—a flat, slapping noise—as another inexpert diver hit the surface of the pool. Ted and Joy winced at the same time, both back on the bridge, in the middle of the night, when Joy's shoe was lost to the wet darkness. The size of that sound, that splash.

‘Terrible,' called Kelly from the side, but he slapped the diver on the back and wished him better luck next time—‘And get yourself straight, lad'—as the boy climbed out of the pool and made for his towel. The winter sun was dipping towards the horizon, and Joy linked one arm through Joe's, one arm through Ted's, called her last encouragement to the young man they'd come to see, and went out through what was left of the afternoon's glow.
I'm sitting on top of the world
, she hummed, looking up towards the clouds as though more men might come diving from the sky.

And trusting us to lead her home
, thought Ted.

From below, from some angles, it looked like a dance. Waiting for one of the foremen in the shadow of the south-eastern pylon, Ted ruffled Jacko's ears and wondered if he recognised the donor of one of his nicest chops. ‘A lucky mutt, aren't you, mate?' Twirling the soft fur around in his fingers. It felt like velvet.

On a clear day, the sun would be high: at midday, the bridge cast one straight line of shadow across the water, an exact transposition of where it sat. It was one arch now, its two arms eased together, despite everyone's scepticism, across days and nights of work peppered with temperatures rising and falling, the steel expanding and contracting, and all sorts of other distractions. There was even a whale, surfacing beneath the metal and sending a great spray of water up into the air. ‘Thought we were in for a bath,' said Joe to Ted, who'd missed seeing the waterspout and couldn't work out how to ask someone to describe it, to see if it fitted the nocturnal spray he and Joy had heard. And then at last, after the drama of an appropriately magnificent thunderstorm, the central joint had eased in, locked together on its pins, the bridge's keystone. ‘Thank God she's home,' said the man in charge of her construction.

‘Home and hosed, mate,' said Ted now to the dog, glancing up at the darkening sky that had faded the arch's shadow to such a smudge on the water that he thought he might only be remembering what it should look like, and was seeing that instead.

Almost two months since those halves met, and the roadway was now hanging delicately underneath, working its way back out from the centre to the two original points north and south. ‘And a damn sight more exposed that feels than the stuff higher up ever did,' said Joe.

‘The sense you had, up the top,' Joe had said after a beer too many one night when Joy was inside and away from his anxiety, ‘that you had magnets in your feet, spending so long crawling across the thing, working your way along its steel, so you knew exactly where to stand, and how, and for how long, and how to step away and move.' He couldn't have said how they'd all learned that, but they had. ‘We knew we had when we went from working on the arch to hanging the deck, and we had no idea what was going on anymore.'

He'd heard one of the engineers talking about it one day.

‘I'm used to the height,' Joe heard him say, ‘you grow with it. But when we started putting in the roadway, well, we only had a flimsy rope alongside, and the steel was only about twenty-two inches across—'

‘Which'd be right,' Joe confirmed. ‘It'd be about right.'

‘—and all studded with rivet heads. Now with the shimmer of light on the water giving it that lovely mackerel surface,' the man had said, ‘it was suddenly all very confusing. I tell you, I felt most insecure for a while and I reckon that was about the first time I felt the height.'

‘Reckon that's what we all felt too,' Joe said, knocking the top off another bottle of lager. The arch was one thing: gentle and elegant, but sturdy somehow. This roadway was just sheer, suspended, mid-air folly. And everyone seemed more anxious about hanging on as the rivets popped in. ‘Like we knew we were asking for trouble,' Joe finished at last, shutting himself up with a long draught as Joy came through the back door.

‘Maybe that's because a road through the air makes less sense than a curve,' Ted had suggested quietly, smoothing the wrinkles along the arm of his jumper as if he could transfer the smoothness to the job for Joe and his mates. Looking up from the barge, the roadway did seem to swing and float, impossibly fine and delicate.

‘Like a rainbow,' said Joy, hearing the end of his sentence.

‘Like an army badge,' said Joe.

‘Like a big hill floating in the middle of the flatness,' said Ted, and Joe mussed his hair as if he was a kid—mussed his hair just as Ted now mussed Jacko's ears.

‘What d'you reckon, mate?' He leaned down and looked at the steel from a height that was closer to the dog's perspective. ‘What would a dog think it looked like?'

The dog seemed to consider the question, its head on one side and its gaze as clearly focused as Ted's was. Their eyes followed the movement of different pockets of the bridge's workers, Ted's fingers tapping the time they kept on Jacko's back, and Jacko's tail keeping his own time to the bridge's rhythm. Their noses both caught the first smells of early lunches being cooked up here and there. Their skins, one smooth, one furry, felt the warmth of the spring sun behind the clouds—it was the end of October—and both bristled a little as that warmth disappeared behind a thicker, colder cloud. And in one of those moments, one of those blissfully quiet moments when everything fluttered down to silence, Ted felt the dog's hackles stiffen under his hand, felt his own frame freeze to tautness.

Someone was falling; someone was falling off the bridge. A mess of movement at the top as his arms flailed, as his body made a desperate, awkward half-somersault. Then a stiffening as the body set itself in a straight line, head through to pointing toes, and the line dropped down to meet the blue. The surface broke, and Ted was sure he could see the body moving, still moving down in the deep, as if there was a light following it, illuminating it somehow.

Ted thought:
That's not where Joe's working—who was it?
Ted thought:
Is he moving too quickly? Too slowly?
Ted thought:
How straight he's stretched himself
, and,
Who else is watching? Who should I tell?
Ted thought:
His splash is going to reach right back up to the deck.
Ted thought:
That's seven—
and was surprised that he'd been keeping a tally somewhere of the men who'd died. Ted thought:
The body's gone down a long way to be under so long—
and then the shouts and calls and the splashes of other men cut across his thoughts as they dived down from the barge he'd left.

He glanced up at the sky, as if a rain of men might follow, glanced behind him towards the foreman, as if he might be shouting instructions, glanced out towards the harbour's middle, towards the place the man had hit, and saw a ferry there, frozen, people pressed against the rail, looking, calling, and a flash of white like a signal as one woman's gloved hands came up to her mouth in horror, again and again. But all he managed to say was the first part of ‘Oh'—just the very first part of its sound, like a complicated breath.