The Body in the Clouds (27 page)

The seat in front of him shuddered a little as the Russian woman turned, pulling her legs up underneath her and changing the angle from which she was soothing her father's face.

Dan looked up to follow the movement, and there was the old man, exactly as he had been.

Exactly.

Yes
, thought Dan,
he is dead.
There was no question, no emotion, no catching the moment of a soul sneaking out. The man was no longer a man; the daughter must have known; and Dan saw, just for a second, what the nothing after death really was. Nothing. He saw the daughter push up her sleeve, check her watch, and he thought,
She's waiting, she's waiting for something before she tells anyone.
His own watch told him they were almost four hours out of Singapore—almost halfway to Sydney.

The plane was dark and still, most people asleep or staring at their television screens.
Maybe if the plane is more than halfway to Sydney
, thought Dan, quite distinctly,
it will keep flying with a body on it. If the plane was less than halfway, maybe they'd make it turn back.
The woman's hand kept up its rhythm, down to the water bottle, up to the forehead, down to the water, up to the face.
What a place to die, thirty thousand feet up in the air and stuck in this cold metal tube
, thought Dan, although it hardly mattered, he supposed, in the instant of its happening.
Whatever it was, it must have been peaceful, or I'd have noticed
. He felt his shoulders flinch a little: that goose, that grave
. Wouldn't I have noticed?

At last, when a flight attendant came through the dimness with brimming beakers of water, Dan reached over and took two. ‘The old man in front,' he said, ‘I don't think he's—I think you should . . .'

She leaned over, placed her hand on the old man's shoulder and pulled it away almost immediately. ‘Excuse me,' she said to the daughter, ‘are you all right? I'll try to find you a—' And she disappeared back along the aisle. In the space between the seats, Dan watched a tear run down the woman's face; it had reached the line of her jaw by the time a voice came over the intercom asking for a doctor. She was Caro in the cab, on their way to the restaurant from the Ferris wheel on his birthday. She was his mother, years ago, before his father died—but never, Dan realised now, never that he saw afterwards. There was more in this quiet stream of tears, thought Dan, than any loud or elaborate sobbing. This was pure hopelessness, or exhaustion, or resignation.

On the other side of the empty seat, Cynthia stirred a little in her sleep, her feet shifting under their blanket.

He expected more noise, more activity; he expected them to turn the lights on in the plane, or to make some official announcement. But everything was very quiet, very slow somehow. A man came from another seat somewhere, pressed his finger to the Russian man's wrist and shook his head, and someone unrolled some kind of first-aid kit. The Russian woman pulled herself further back into her seat, pressed herself against the window, away from the commotion. There was movement, but only for a few minutes, and then the body—not the Russian man anymore— was picked up and carried towards the back of the plane, wrapped in a blanket.
They must have somewhere they put them
, thought Dan.
They must be prepared.

Another voice cut through the darkness. Was there anyone on the plane who spoke Russian? But no one raised their hand this time, and the Russian woman stayed sitting, smaller, in her seat, the blanket pulled over her knees.

‘I don't think she's all right,' said Dan to the next attendant who passed. ‘Isn't there anything—she spoke some English before; we talked about rivers and books.' He didn't know if he should try to talk to her again, or should leave her, just sitting, with the now-empty seat beside her.

The flight attendant shook her head. ‘We'll do everything we can when we get to Sydney,' she said. ‘There'll be someone waiting to meet her there.' She frowned. ‘But are you all right, sir? Is there anything I can get you?'

‘No, no,' said Dan quickly. ‘No, nothing to do with me, I'm fine.' It sounded more flippant than he intended; he'd just wanted the Russian lady to know someone was thinking about her.

Between the seats, he tried to catch her eye, to smile, to make some acknowledgement of something. But the woman's eyes were closed tight, whether she was sleeping or not.
To have come this far
, thought Dan. He wondered if she'd be able to stay in the city she'd been sure would help her father. He wondered if he should give her his number—not that he'd be in the country for much more than a week—or his mother's number, or Charlie's.

He wondered if it really was Charlie's grandfather he'd been worried about at the beginning of the flight, or if it had been some presentiment about this old man who'd died above the world and in front of him. He closed his eyes and saw nothing but tired darkness, suddenly aware that he was rubbing the palm of one hand with the fingers of the other, but gently, rhythmically, like the light touch of a face washer or a handkerchief. His own skin felt smooth; his own skin felt warm.

Ted

I
n the days after Kelly fell—or dived—Ted kept falling back into that moment. Coming in on the ferry, something would disturb the water's surface and he saw again the waterspout a man could make when he hit the water from a hundred or more feet up. Walking by the workshops, someone would shout, and he heard again the calls that had followed Kelly's line through the air, through the water. Brushing against some softness—a cushion, a curtain, the next-door cat that wandered in sometimes— he felt the velvet of Jacko's ears between his fingers, felt the dog stiffen, himself stiffen and saw a man in the air and dropping down, one, two, three seconds and into the blue.

At home, Joy clipped any mention of the incident from newspapers and magazines, reading aloud the columns where Roy Kelly had talked about the accident. A couple of broken ribs and his boot leather jammed fast up around his thighs—they were his only injuries. And the papers said he was smiling; the papers said he was laughing: ‘ “I am often working near the edge of the bridge,” ' she read, ‘ “and on many occasions I have thought to myself, ‘Now, if you ever fall, Roy, you had better make sure that you hit the water feet first or head first.' So when I slipped and fell today, I concentrated upon saving my life—” '

‘ “Upon”?' Joe cut in. ‘ “Concentrated upon”? Kelly? That's fancy newspaper talk that is. Poor bloke probably couldn't speak for trying to breathe.'

‘ “—upon saving my life,” ' Joy continued. ‘ “I hit the water. I went under. There was a roar of water in my ears. My lungs felt as though they would burst. Then I came to the surface. I was alive, marvellously alive.”

‘Marvellously.' She paused. ‘Now there's a word.' Caught up by the story, by the moment, by the miracle, she made Ted tell her again and again about seeing it—couldn't believe Joe had missed the fall, the surfacing, the messy rescue when Roy Kelly was again almost drowned by someone's enthusiasm in trying to drag him out of the water. ‘Away on the other side,' she kept saying. ‘Of all the days to be away on the other side of anything.'

Joe shook his head, muttered, ‘Too much, too much.' Which Ted heard, but didn't acknowledge.

‘ “Marvellously alive,” ' Joy read again. ‘How magnificent to feel marvellously anything.' She took a deep breath, her fingers marking her place on the page.

‘ “I tried to clutch something, but there was nothing there to clutch and down I went. I turned a somersault—” '

‘I guess that bloody diving came in handy after all,' from Joe.

‘ “—and then I remembered that I must concentrate upon—” '

‘Upon again?' Joe scoffed, swishing water around the sink, flicking the dishcloth over the taps.

‘ “—upon entering the water either head first or feet first. I waved my arms and screwed up my body in an effort to do this. I began to fall down feet first and I almost felt satisfied. I clasped my right hand over my nose and my mouth. And then I hit the water. Unfortunately, I was not quite upright, otherwise I don't think that I would have been hurt at all. I did not go under very far, and it seemed only an instant from the moment I fell from the bridge to the time that I was struggling on the surface. Struggling and alive.”

‘Struggling and alive.' She sighed. ‘It's like something from the pictures, isn't it? I'll never be able to look at him the same way again. I wonder if he'll keep diving, when he gets out of hospital? Wonder if he'll go back to the bridge?'

It was evening, and a cool breeze was coming up from the river. Outside, in the garden, leaves and petals rode the current of the strongest gusts, and Ted paused, a stack of clean plates in his hands and his eyes distracted by a flash of white roses shaken free from their stems. The petals lifted a little way, and then, becalmed, began to float back down to the ground, tiny parachutes, or shards of dislocated cloud.

‘I should pick a bunch of those to take round to his wife,' said Joy, catching the end of the movement. ‘What a thing, to be told your husband had fallen, to be thinking the worst, even if it was only a second before you found out he'd survived.'

‘Do you think they'll give him the money, even though he fell off and he's alive?' Ted hadn't meant the question to sound so blunt, but if you fell off, if you died, your family got some kind of compensation, a hundred pounds or so. Which was a peculiar kind of accountancy or reckoning, now that he thought about it.

‘An envelope of pounds couldn't buy you much of a miracle,' said Joy, ‘and I guess Kelly's already had his one of those.'

She smoothed the newspaper and stepped back into her recitation— the moment Kelly described as his worst: ‘ “When I hit the water and went under I felt afraid for the first time. I could hear nothing, see nothing, and feel nothing except the terrific pain in my side from my broken ribs. My brain was not functioning. And then I was on the surface again, striking out automatically for the buoy. With almost a shock I realised that I was alive. I could have shouted for sheer joy.” '

Ted smiled, remembering the relief of the moment after Joy's body had wavered on the arch; Joy smiled, imagining the exhilaration of Kelly, coming up for air, coming up to breathe.

‘Miraculous,' she said, ‘whatever you think about the flowery language, Joe. We think it's miraculous, on this side of the kitchen.' She nodded at Ted. ‘Better than Smithy, better than Bradman, and even better than the Second Coming.'

Ted laughed; he liked it when she made these jokes about her own extremity.

But Joe was shaking his head. ‘I'm not saying it's not tremendous Kelly's alive; I'm not saying it's not extraordinary. But you know,' he shrugged, ‘there it is, done now, and all those “upons” and “sheer joys”. In any case, they say he'll be back at work in next to no time.'

‘I just think it's irresistible.' Joy was staring into the garden, watching the wind brush its colours across the green. ‘You wait, it'll be told again and again. It'll be the story everyone knows. It'll be bigger than the bridge itself.'

Joe shook his head again. ‘Nope, the bridge is the big story—always has been, always will be. A year's time, two, when the thing's open and we're all rushing across it, no one'll remember Roy Kelly and his miracle. No one'll remember when it wasn't there, let alone what it took to make it. We'll be doing well to remember the names of any of the boys who didn't survive.'

Later, lying in the bath with his ears under the water, Ted thought about the end of the fall, about what Roy Kelly had said about being under so much water you could see nothing, feel nothing, hear nothing. In the bath, lying still, everything was magnified. Small sounds from around the house—from its pipes, its other room, its other people—pressed into the water and grew. A series of heavy clunks that was some nearby piece of plumbing. The sound of footsteps reverberating on the other side of the hall. Joe's voice, distorted into roundness, sending next-door's cat back into its own garden.

Imagine if the harbour had worked the same way, amplifying all the sounds of the bridge, all the sounds of the city, all the sounds of the boats to and fro and up and down the river.

It would have been blue
, he thought,
all blue, and that's what I could see—that's what I thought I could see in his eyes, when he came up, when he looked straight across to where I was standing.
How much space had been between them? It was maybe half a mile, Ted knew, and yet he was certain that his eyes had met Kelly's and that he'd seen their new bright colour.

He'd told no one about this and now, coming up above the bath water and ducking underneath again, he wondered if it would wash out of his mind sooner or later. Probably not, he reasoned, if, like Joy said, the story kept being told. And probably not if, the next time he saw Kelly, there were two blue eyes looking at him, that moment, trapped.

In bed, one book forgotten under the pillow, Joy's copy of
Gulliver
open face down on the floor, he lay, tensed in the night's darkness, toes pointing as far forward as they could and fingers taut on the mattress next to him like two arrowheads. He was Roy Kelly, tucked under the tight corners of hospital sheets, his ribs aching, and his skin weeping where his boot leather had been disconnected from the meld it had made with his legs. Joy said you could see the bridge from the roof of the hospital, from some of its windows. Ted was Roy Kelly, hobbling out of bed in the middle of the night, up to the roof, to check it was still there, the thing he'd defeated, the greatest dive he'd made. He was Kelly, leaning against a rail, picking out the darker arch against the dark night sky. He was Kelly, making an ordinary step and finding himself, extraordinary, in the air. He was Kelly, diving with blue above and blue below, and nothing but blue in between.