The Body in the Clouds (32 page)

‘Dan?'

Sitting up too fast, his feet jerked against something hard—a table, the frame of a chair—and his hands pushed him up out of sleep. Brown carpet. Cream sofas. The huge thick window next to him. A complex light shade hanging from the ceiling above. For a moment—a breath, maybe long enough to count to three—he had no idea where he was.

‘Dan?' A hand on his shoulder and he turned to see Charlie there as the world slithered back into place, back into time. He squeezed her fingers, felt the pressure of the warmth they returned. ‘Where'd you go?' The ice had gone out of her voice, and she kept hold of his hand, smiling. ‘I've got so many things to tell you.'

‘About Gramps?'

‘Kind of. Come on—let's get out before you fall asleep again.' And as she pulled him up, he steadied himself against her, gave her the hug he'd missed on the way in.

‘I'm glad I came,' he said. Going down in the lift, he tried again, and failed, to piece together the shapes and turns of the streets that would connect where they were to where they were going.
Dear Caro
, he thought, imagining a postcard, an email, a text,
You'll be pleased to know that Sydney's streets have rearranged themselves while I've been away so it's not just London that I can't pin down. I'm walking with Charlie; I came too late; I wish you were here.
The higher sun shut his eyes into a squint as soon as he stepped outside, narrowing the tunnel of space he could see, and he strode out fast to keep up with Charlie's pace.

When they were little, when they came into the city, sometimes by ferry down the river, or by a train that clattered across the famous bridge, Dan and Charlie played a game, imagining everything disappearing, winding back to a Sydney that was only dirt tracks and rough tents and penned pigs and cows, not roads and pavements and smelly exhaust fumes. Gramps started them on it, telling them what the space had looked like around the bridge's big footprints—all through the industry of its creation, and then back further, back to tents, and trees, to British men in red coats, some with guns, some with compasses and telescopes, and then back before that again. Then Charlie began reading about remnant places, like the sand dunes below Kings Cross that people remembered from four or five decades earlier, when work on the bridge began. And it had kept them busy every trip after that: ‘Maybe this was a swamp; maybe there would've been great trees here; reckon you'd have had a view out forever from the top of this hill.' Charlie took to hunting for parts of the city where what had been there was still allowed to poke through—the waterline at the end of the Botanic Gardens where you could stand on the bumpy sandstone ledges with your feet in the harbour's coolness, the bushy reserves beyond the zoo and Middle Head on the opposite shore, still thick with birds and angophora, lizards and eucalypts. She sought out the little markers the city put down for other things that had changed or disappeared: the discs that marked the line of Circular Quay's foreshore as it had been in 1788 when the British came ashore; the pretty fingers of metal and glass that laid down the line their stream had taken, that one channel of running water that had dictated their choice to come here in the first place, and to stay.

Stepping over one of these markers now, Dan said, ‘Remember when we worked out we were walking up in the air?' Two little kids, each holding one of Gramps's hands, and he was telling them that what was left of the stream was now buried deep beneath their feet, that the level they were walking on now would have been up in the air for the first convicts, the first soldiers, the first few ladies.

‘Our feet up around their ears maybe,' he'd said. ‘Our feet walking up in the air.' Over the Tank Stream, around the line of the harbour, the city that day floating above whatever place the city had been one hundred, two hundred, thousands of years before. ‘Did we get lost? I can't remember. We had a picnic, down by the harbour—and there was something else, wasn't there? I always meant to ask Gramps what else happened that day.'

‘I can't remember,' said Charlie. ‘But I remember that thing of walking on air—that felt miraculous,' she said as he went to take a step forward off the kerb into the empty street and her arm flew across, blocking his chest. The light had changed; the traffic was coming. She hooked her arm through his, pulling him into step. He'd forgotten how tall she was, possibly even taller than him, if they turned back to back and both stood up straight, competing six-year-olds again. Long dark hair pulled back and perennially tanned skin. She looked great, hadn't changed at all.

‘Like the people who were waiting for Jesus to walk across the water between the harbour's heads,' said Dan. The way Gramps told that story, some days Dan and Charlie thought it really might have happened, back in the impossibly distant past of Gramps's youth, and that he himself might even have seen it.

‘Another of Gramps's miracles,' said Charlie, steering them left around a corner where Dan was sure they should have turned right. His feet braced against the steep slope of a hill, and by the time he looked up to orient himself they'd reached the huge buttressing wall that fed the roadway onto the bridge. There was a basketball court, tall skinny kids leaping high for the ball, higher for the hoop. Beyond its fence, with a heap of ratty plastic bags at his side, an old man in a tattered pink coat rocked back and forth on a bench, his eyes milky, his skin caked with dirt.

‘Been here for years,' said Charlie, heading towards him. ‘As long as I've been coming. Seems to be so many more of them now. And you think, you know, he must be someone's brother, someone's mate—don't they wonder where he went?' She reached down, put a handful of coins onto his stained cardboard plate. ‘I don't know: I reckon most people don't even see them anymore. This bloody government.'

‘Caro gets twenty pounds turned into pound coins every payday,' said Dan, ‘and walks along The Strand giving it to—' he pulled himself up against the word ‘beggars' ‘—guys like this.' He wasn't sure he'd ever handed over twenty pence, let alone a pound. The noise of movement on the bridge, eight lanes of traffic, the clatter of trains north and south, surged above like a thundering cloud; a door in the bridge's ramparts opened and a line of people in matching grey jumpsuits came out in single file and disappeared into another door a little way along.

‘Maintenance?' asked Dan.

Charlie laughed. ‘You
have
been away a long time. Come on.' She led him around the last sweep of road that delivered them under the bridge's Meccano to the place where it pushed itself out from its ramp of land, its ramp of road, balanced its weight on its one great big hinge, and leaned out to straddle the water and meet itself coming over from the other side.

The morning he left, they'd met here, at the bridge's southern feet, before sunrise, Charlie adamant they should find the old secret ways up and onto it, to start Dan's last Sydney day one hundred and thirty-four metres up in the air.

‘Best view of the city,' Gramps always said. ‘Best way to remember it, from above, with the sun straight out to the east, the light coming up through all the silvers and golds, and the harbour starting to wake up. That time of day, you can see where all the night's boats and ships have gone; their wakes leave lines etched on the water, and from up on the arch you can see them all.' But in the night's last darkness, the bridge a greater and heavier darkness above them, Dan had shaken his head, declaring himself happy to watch the sunrise from the grass instead.

‘Heights,' he'd said simply, sitting down with his bag at his back.

‘We'll regret this,' Charlie had said as the light made the silvers, the yellows her grandfather had promised. ‘We'll regret not having this story to tell.'

And Dan, shaking his head again, had said, ‘Don't like heights, and there's nowhere to leave my gear.' Didn't tell her he'd climbed up one New Year's Eve years before, with some girl whose name he'd forgotten, then as well as now—if you drank enough, he'd discovered, even vertigo could fall away. Didn't tell her that, and didn't tell her he'd seen the wakes of all the boats hanging on top of the water, like Gramps had said. It was funny how the things you hadn't said stuck in your mind as clearly as the things you had. They probably all seeped out sooner or later, the stories that had been misplaced, buried or kicked aside, waiting to emerge, as likely as not, with a new set of emphases and meanings. It was like looking at old packets of photographs, and the way the images you'd chosen as your favourites, as the most important at the time, were almost always supplanted by some detail tucked into one you'd almost tossed out years ago. Recast now; redefined.

So Charlie had shrugged, and they sat, and the sun came up, and the day came on, and they made their way through the morning under her grandfather's bridge.

‘I always wanted to see old footage of it being built, shot over days and days and days but from the same place, so you could speed it up and see it drawing itself onto the empty space.' She'd laughed. ‘Remember that old book Gramps had? The vicar who took a photo of it every day from his window, and then talked his way onto it, him and his camera? Imagine if he'd taken his photos at midday—Gramps's dive might have left a fleck you could see. I always thought he should have set those photos up like a cartoon flick-book, so you'd go from empty space to the great big bridge as you flicked through. I might try to do that one day, if someone will let me near a building that's big enough and grand enough while they're making it.'

A city the size of London gave birth to new skyscrapers of all different shapes and sizes all the time. And each time he'd seen one reaching higher and higher, Dan had thought of Charlie, wondered if she'd ever found her building. He watched her now, bounding across the road towards the park, its grass greener than he remembered it. The name had changed too, with an older, softer word—Tarra—added onto the Dawes Point he remembered. He followed Charlie along the path and over the verge, and there was the harbour, the same deep blue, the same geometric shapes of boats, the same in and out of trees and land and roofs running ragged out towards the back of South Head and its lighthouses, which he remembered from the day he flew away.

‘I did some work down here when they started excavating the cable tunnels.' Charlie was crouched down against a sandstone arch that jutted up through the grass. ‘Remember the stories about how they tied the two halves of the bridge back and then eased them together? Remember the stories about the cables being slackened off and the great storm that blew up while they were trying to do it and the two halves touching in the darkness, although they told everyone it happened the next day so they could clap and cheer and think they'd seen it?'

Dan squatted beside her. He wasn't sure what he was looking at, a wall with rows of holes drilled into it, like the game he and Charlie used to play where you dropped coloured discs into rows of slots, or like a card cut to hold different strands of thread or wool.

‘Do you see?' asked Charlie. ‘The cables ran down from the end of the arch, fed through these holes, and then down to the anchor point a hundred-odd feet below. There are pictures of the men down there, standing in these wet sandstone shafts, and the huge steel cables running alongside them. They must have felt like they'd crawled into the guts of the planet. It was great to be here when they found all this: it was great to be able to shoot this bit of underpinning.'

Dan said, ‘Can I see the pictures?'

‘Sure—they're back at the flat.'

‘That's some flat,' he said again, and this time she almost blushed.

‘It's a bit posh, isn't it? But I like being able to see out to the mountains, and I like living up in the air. And I like that it lets me see the river winding away, and sometimes I like seeing the city without the bridge. I was spending so much time down here, and so much time trying to get Gramps to tell me all his stories about it so I could write them down and remember them for him, I was starting to have arch-shaped dreams.'

‘Thought you always did,' said Dan. It was the geometry of their childhood, and each time he'd heard himself telling one of its stories, Dan had imagined Charlie doing the same. There was a power in them; they were stories that people listened to, and remembered.

On the water below, a boat tacked and jibed, its white sail disappearing briefly as it went about and then flaring blindingly bright again in the sun. ‘But I guess you wouldn't want to lose those stories.' A pause, cluttered almost at once by cars and a siren, the blare of a ferry's horn.

‘When I was working down here,' said Charlie as the noises fell away, ‘someone told me there were hundreds of bridge workers whose names were lost completely, never written down. Like Russian George, who Gramps used to talk about, who walked all the way across Siberia to the coast and ended up here—I looked him up and there wasn't a record of him.'

‘I suppose Gramps must be written down somewhere—the miraculous man who fell off and turned it into a dive.' From above, among the rhythmic thunk of tyres on the roadway's joins, the circular clatter of the two tracks of trains, Dan registered a different noise, a metallic shunt, percussive, repetitive. The people in grey jumpsuits were making their way along the bridge's underside, and it sounded to Dan as if they must be walking on the metal frame in shoes made of metal themselves, like the armour-plated feet of a suit of chainmail. ‘What
is
that?'

‘BridgeClimb,' said Charlie. ‘Fabulously successful, fabulously popular— they attach you to the bridge with this nifty metal clip, and you climb up one side of the arch to the top, cross over, and come down the other side, all without ever being unsecured. Been going eight or nine years now.'