The Body in the Clouds (3 page)

Ted

I
t was not how his mother had wanted it to turn out—the mines, she'd hoped, would keep him close to home—but Ted Parker had dreamed of working this job since he was a kid and the newspapers started writing about what it might look like, when it might start. From his bedroom window, at night, he'd watched the moon lay down a thick, bright bridge of light across the ocean, and when he closed his eyes he'd see that bridge translated, luminous and elegant, to the middle of the city up the coast. He dreamed of all the shapes it might take, all the noise its creation might generate. He dreamed of working on its deck, its beams, on its foundations, anywhere. In the best dreams, though, he was soaring above it, silent like a bird, or, later, with the purring engines of an aviator's plane. To be on it would be one thing, but to be up above it again—there was a thrill in that, an anticipation, that the boy could hardly put into words. If he could get to the city, if he could be part of it, who knew what might be possible?

By the time the tenders were awarded and the project was fixed—a baseline designated to ensure that the two perilously suspended halves would meet; a particular arch chosen to be beaten out across the air for a particular amount of money—by the time the land had been blasted and reshaped to take its weight and its spread, his mother had given up trying to talk him out of going. She'd worry about him, she said, if he ended up hung out over the water with next to nothing to hang onto, and if his father had been alive he'd surely have put a stop to it. But she'd sat through enough breakfast recitations—maybe steel, maybe concrete, maybe stanchions, maybe suspension—that she stopped suggesting the pits, the trains, the delivery job on offer from the local grocer.

On the night before he left at last to try his luck with Sydney's big bridge, Ted woke suddenly from the darkest part of his sleep, his fingers working at the edges of his bedclothes and his heart racing. He lay still, found the layer of silence that held the sound of the ocean as it folded itself against the sand, and tried to find his way back into his dream. There'd been noises, shouting, the usual busyness, and then something had grabbed at his throat, taken his breath away, cut off his own shout. All he could recover was a sensation of shock, of escape; he didn't want to think about what it might mean.

‘Bet there's only a few will have come as far as you for it, love,' his mum said at breakfast, folding paper around a packet of sandwiches.

But of course men had come from everywhere for it, nothing unusual in Ted's coming at all—although nobody else he met admitted to dreaming about it, or mentioned the alchemy that seemed necessary to ensure that the two halves, inching out into open space high above the water, would meet up one day, solid and sure, sometime in the future.

He was young then, just fourteen—though ‘fifteen,' he'd said, off the train and with sandwich crumbs sticking to his jumper. They told him he needed to be twenty-one to work on the arch, so he took whatever bits and pieces of jobs he could to keep himself nearby: days carting bricks away from houses that had been demolished, days down in the deep cavities that would hold the bridge's southern footprints, days on the ramp that would become its approach. But always he was some way away from the bigness of being on the thing itself. He didn't really mind; near enough, he reckoned, was good enough, and he got to see it creeping and creeping, a little further every day. He got to see its routines and rhythms, to hear the percussion of it coming together. And some days, when the light was right, he thought he could see fragments of it sketched against the sky, like a blueprint sitting beyond the busy movement of the men up in the air.

The first time he'd come to the city, at seven years old, he'd followed his mum through quiet, dark offices. It was about the war, about his dad, and it was the first time, too, that Ted had understood his dad wasn't coming home. After hours of sitting on a hard-backed chair in a hallway, his mum had grabbed his hand and walked him fast out of the building and into the light, up this street and down that one, so jerky and erratic that he wasn't sure she knew where she was going. She'd stopped at last by the water, sitting herself down on its very edge with her feet dangling, like she was seven years old herself. She'd talked to him about the war, about its ending, about the men waiting to come home, about a great wave of sickness—she'd said ‘flu' but he heard ‘flew' and had an image of lines and lines of men flying against the clouds, trying to get themselves home. ‘Because he's so far away,' she'd been sobbing by then, ‘and there's no chance they'll bring them back to bury them.' He'd lain back on the wharf, patting at the hem of her coat now and then, looking at the shapes the clouds made against the sky. There was a ship in one. There was an alligator in another. There was a tall man running with his coat flared out behind him—and Ted could remember thinking that maybe it was his dad, trying to run around the world and home.

Although that old wharf had been eaten up by the site's comings and goings, Ted wondered if that was why he loved that particular spot, the place that would take the bridge's south-eastern weight; if that was why he still sat there, whenever he had the chance, and looked up into the sky; if that was why he loved the bridge itself: for the idea that he might be able to get higher, or that his dad, still running, might find it and be able to climb right back down to earth.

Really fifteen, then sixteen, seventeen. Ted took the shifts he could get and slept on a cot on his gran's veranda. It was not too bad, out on the coast, and not so different from the place he'd grown up in a hundred miles south. He could keep an eye on the sea, on the gulls and the waves and the other things he liked about the land's shore. The sound the water made, and the nights when the moon rose clear and huge up over its horizon, the light glowing and so thick that he had no doubt he could step onto it and walk out forever. He'd thought about it, stepping off the boardwalk, pushing into the water and out through the surf, fully dressed, all the way beyond the breakers. A daft thing to do, he knew, shaking his head at himself, and he stayed on the shore, leaning back to pick out the few stars his dad had taught him, the Cross, of course, and Sirius, the Dog Star. He always hoped for a meteor before he got too cold and had to head home.

‘He's a funny thing,' said his gran to his mum, ‘down the beach at all hours for the moon and what-not.'

She suspected there was a girl, but Ted hardly knew how to talk to any he met in daylight, let alone in the dark of an evening and waiting for a moonrise. He didn't mind dances, and the city ones were better than the ones back home—more girls to choose from so they were less likely to remember you and chase you down the next week. But he liked the pictures better, and sang their songs under his breath whenever he did find himself walking some girl home, for want of anything to say. ‘I'm sitting on top of the world, just rolling along, just rolling along.' He never dreamed of the girls, although he dreamed of the dancing sometimes, the bridge almost always, and whatever it was that had woken him so sharply, so shockingly, the night before he came up to the city still came to him, some nights, and shook him out of his sleep. He could pick the where of it now, if not the what: in the dream—in the nightmare—he was standing near the harbour's edge where his mum had taken him after the war; standing near the harbour's edge where one of the bridge's four huge feet now pushed up from deep inside the ground. On some weekends, or after a shift if the light was still good, he'd wander down there, thinking about his dad, wondering what it was he saw in that instant before he was awake.

It was there, one day after work, that he met Joe, both of them crouched down and staring out towards the water, just a few feet away from each other in the dusk. Joe saw him, called out, getting his question in first, ‘What you doing here, mate?'

In the fading light, Ted started at the voice and thought, for a moment, that he was looking across at some vision of his father: the man's hair, the man's bearing, even the sound of his voice was somehow familiar. He made up a line about waiting for someone who obviously wasn't coming, standing up and stretching as if he ought really to be giving up, heading home. But, ‘How 'bout you, then?' he heard himself ask instead.

‘First site I worked on down here,' said Joe, stepping towards him with his hand out. ‘Joe Brown. I've seen you here sometimes. You always waiting for someone who doesn't come?' His smile was friendly, not teasing or accusatory, and Ted smiled back. ‘No, no,' said Joe, ‘I like it here too when there's not so many people around. It's a good spot to sit and watch.'

Ted nodded. ‘My mum brought me down here when I was a nipper and we sat for hours.' It felt like enough of an explanation to get him around the lie of the friend who never arrived, and Joe smiled again, acknowledging that.

‘What about a drink then?' he asked, turning away from the water and up towards the city. Ted paused, taking one last look at how much the two halves of the arch had grown that day, before he turned as well and followed Joe up the hill and around to the pub.

His glass cold between his fingers, Ted studied the other man in the pub's light. Joe was taller than him, and older, but had the same bright grey eyes as Ted's, the same fine blond-brown hair, the same slender frame, the same wide, friendly smile. Not his dad, exactly, but maybe like the reflection in a mirror that could show him what his dad might have looked like in a different world. Joe was talking about his own first day working on the bridge, back when the earliest excavations were being made, the earliest gashes hewn into the rocky ground.

‘They used to bring dignitaries' wives down to look at the holes we were digging,' he said, laughing. ‘Very polite about it, they were, but you had to wonder what excitement they thought they were going to see.' He drained his beer, inclined the empty glass towards Ted. ‘Although we did dig up some fine stuff, old buildings and bricks, back from the convicts—made you realise how busy that place's been the past hundred and something years, with soldiers and ships and coming and going. You know they had astronomers sat here, years ago, on the lookout for comets. What a job that would've been, eh, Ted?' He paused then, lost in some middle distance for a moment. ‘The missus,' he said, blinking at last, ‘says I spend too much time looking back there—looking in the wrong direction.' He took the full, frosty glass Ted held out, and raised it in a cheer. ‘But you work on it, too, don't you?' Nodding back towards the site.

‘Whenever I can, here and there,' said Ted. It had been harder the past year, with more men hunting for work and fewer shifts offered to each to try to spread the work around.

‘Come talk to a mate of mine tomorrow,' said Joe, ‘who owes me a favour. We'll see what we can do.'

Early the next morning he was waiting for Ted, as he'd promised, steering him towards the foreman as though Ted was his oldest friend, to see what jobs might be on offer.

‘Be grand to be up in the air,' said Ted, taking in the line of the bridge, the two curves firming against the sky. He still hadn't made twenty-one, but he was sure there were a lot of blokes fudging things like this to get themselves some work.

Joe's arm swept out at the arches as if they were his old friends too. ‘You're as bad as my wife,' he said, ‘hankering after putting your feet where thin air should be. Makes no sense to me unless I'm being paid to do it.' He shook his head. ‘The way your toes ache at the end of each day from clinging on up there. There are some say it's easier as you go . . .' He shook his head again. ‘There are some who go up the first day, turn round and go straight down again and never go back. Dunno what stopped me doing the same—apart from the pay packet at the end of the week.' He laughed. ‘So where are you staying, mate?' And offered a room just like that— ‘Well, a veranda, really, but glassed in, and with a comfy cot.' A stop or two on the ferry and much closer than Ted's gran's out at the beach, and it was Ted's for the taking, he said, once they knew about a job.

‘What about your missus?' asked Ted.

‘Glad of the company,' said Joe. ‘She's greedy for stories about this place—you'll see what I mean. Besides . . .' he paused, ‘someone else putting in, you know; it all helps.'

Around them, the day was already busy, men making dark shapes against the metal, dark shapes against the sky, their hats like bits of punctuation. The noise was tremendous. Ted had never got his head around the mechanics of the thing, even after all these years. How did you get up there—and how did you stay up? How did you hear what anyone said? How did you brace yourself against the high clear space you had to stand in, move in, work in? It was amazing.
Top of the world
.

The foreman clapped Joe on the shoulder, asked after his wife, looked at Ted—‘I'll see what we can do'—and then at his sheets, his vacancies. There was work on the water, he said, someone was wanted for the barges that ferried the men about, the barges that ferried the pieces of bridge to the point where they could be hoisted into the sky. ‘Okay, son?' Shifts, shillings.

A hand held out, Ted shook it, and that was that. He was a proper part of it at last, even if he had to keep looking up.

The particulars of the thing: scores of men in the shops, on the ground, on the water, on the structure itself, fitting, bracing, heating rivets, driving rivets, driving cranes, rigging, painting, cutting, finishing, moving, yelling, running and flying up into the air as each section was winched into position. Across to the north from Dawes Point, the real centre of activity thumped and hummed in great sheds, built where rocks had been blasted away—the first assault of noise the project had made on the city, years ago now—and where each piece was brought as close as possible to its final shape before it was let outside and moved along to fit into the bridge that was growing. Shading his eyes against the morning sun, Ted was sure he could see the walls of the shed pulsing with everything that was happening inside them.
Sitting on top of the world
.