The Body in the Clouds

by Ashley Hay

  “Hi there,” said Dan, feeling inappropriately tall as he stood up next to his stool. “Are you supposed to be here?”

  Silence as the boy tried to wind his own leg around the stool’s long cool metal one. Dan looked around: the sullen man was still drinking two stools along, and there was a nest of Japanese children playing around the potted plants just outside the bar. No sign of the family he thought this kid belonged to—no sign of anyone looking for a missing kid.

  “So,” he said, sitting down again and feeling no less awkward, “where are you going?”

  “To see my grandma,” said the boy. “She lives a long way away and I’ve never seen her before.”

  Unhelpful, thought Dan. He didn’t know whether to ask the boy if he was lost or not—if the boy didn’t know he was lost, and was quite happy weaving himself around a bar stool, was it better not to draw attention to the fact, better not to scare him with the idea of it, better to try to head him towards some information booth? Or was it better to keep him in here, in the one place, where someone could find him?

  Dan took a sip of his beer, then another. “All right then, what’s your name?”

  “Dan,” said the boy.

  “Great,” said Dan. “That’s my name too.” He tried to remember anything he knew about talking to kids, which was nothing, and whether it was against all the stranger-danger codes to offer them something to eat or drink when you found them detached from where they should be and bouncing off your bar stool. Probably against, he thought. He reached out a hand—then pulled it back. That was probably banned too. “I’m just going to put my book away, Dan, and maybe we can go and have a look for your mum.”

  The boy smiled. “My mum’s got a new bag,” he said, standing with his hand up, ready to be led somewhere, as Dan hooked his backpack over his shoulder. Okay, thought the taller Dan. Okay. He scanned the bar and the causeway outside again. Still no sign of a parent trawling the crowd, and no sign of the family from across the aisle, missing one. He’d never realized before, but he was slightly scared of children.

  “What color’s your mum’s hair?” he asked.

  “Yellow.”

  “Let’s see how many people we can find with yellow hair before we find your mum.” They stepped out of the bar, the smaller Dan with a firm hold on the bigger Dan’s hand, counting through each yellow-haired lady he saw: “Not that one, not that one, not that one.”

  As they neared the bookshop, the taller Dan caught the sound of a different tone of voice. There was the family from across the aisle—father, daughter, mother—and it was the mother’s voice he could hear, asking if anyone had seen “a little boy, blond, please, have you seen him? We were here a quarter of an hour ago.” The smaller Dan ran towards her, and before he’d called out—before she could even have registered the sound of his feet against the carpet—she’d swung around and opened a hug for him. There he was, there he was; scooped up and back where he should be. Dan watched the look on her face as her eyes opened, saw Dan, and narrowed a little.

  “He wandered into the bar,” said Dan. “I recognized him from the plane.” Her eyes narrowed further. “I’m sitting across the aisle from you. Going to Sydney.”

  She smiled then, peeled one arm out of the hug and reached over for Dan’s hand.

  How formal, he thought, but she didn’t shake it, she squeezed it, and the pressure against his own fingers, his own palm, was warm, almost intimate.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I thought I knew you from somewhere—but you know, it’s so frightening in a place like this. I don’t know what he was thinking—you could have been anyone . . .” Apologizing for the way her eyes had narrowed.

  The two Dans raised a hand to each other in a wave.

  “See you on the plane,” said Dan.

  “I’m going to visit my grandma,” said the little boy again.

  Back in the bar, Dan bought another beer and reopened Gulliver, but the words tangled against each other and in the end he leaned back, drinking his way down through the cold drink. What time was it in London? Maybe the middle of the night, maybe the beginning of the next day. Caro would be asleep: he could see her room, its big window and the glow cast by the streetlamp outside. He could almost imagine the rise and fall of her breathing. He closed his eyes. Such a thing, to watch someone sleeping—there was trust in it, and vulnerability. He wondered if she’d ever sat and watched him; he liked the idea. It made him feel safe.

  The time in Sydney was even harder to work out, his mind too numb to know how to try. Dan yawned, taking out Gramps’s big round pocket watch in case it might still carry the trace of Sydney’s time, all these years later. He sniffed—stupid—and looked around for an indicator board. He’d be there soon enough, he thought, even if it was another hour before he had to get back on the plane. Finishing his beer, he went in search of the bathrooms.

  It felt risky to strip off and take a shower in the middle of an airport; there was something shocking about it. The water pierced the tired bits of his skin, sweaty from sitting strapped into a seat and doing nothing, and as his fingers fumbled with the carefully wrapped tablets of soap, Dan half expected someone to burst through the flimsy cubicle door. But the water was hot, and steamy, and endless, and he leaned against the side of the shower stall, his eyes closed. Must take up all your attention to have a kid to look after, all the watching and the worrying. But it wasn’t the watching or the worrying, he knew. It was all the loving. He took a mouthful of the water, rinsing it around his teeth, around his gums, and spraying it out like a waterspout.

  A decade; he’d been away more than a decade. And Caro was right: no matter how easy he always said it would be to take that twenty-four-hour flight home, he’d never taken it. He cricked his neck to the left, to the right, trying to steam the creases and aches out of it. He was always working over Christmas, and wanting a summer holiday in the northern hemisphere’s summer—and if someone suggested New York, or Madrid, or Istanbul, it seemed silly to pass up the opportunity and fly back to Australia instead. He’d got promotions, mortgages, a group of mates he drank with on Fridays and Saturdays. And then there was Caroline. It was easy to stay in London. Never mind his predictable recitative: he should have called his mum more, should have called Charlie—he was good at saying he would and bad at dialing the number. Time slipped by.

  His last day in Sydney, sitting at the edge of the harbor, on the steps that led down into the water straight under the bridge and its noise. He could see the shape of his feet, looking paler, smaller, and farther away through the water—Charlie’s feet tinier still, her toes wiggling next to his.

  “What do you reckon?” she’d asked. “Do you reckon you could dive in from up there?” Her head had arched so far back it should have cut her breath off. It was the one story she remembered her mother telling her, the one set of words through which she could find the sound of her mother’s voice.

  Dan shook his head again in the shower stall the way he’d shaken his head that day, and drips of water flew out around him. Too high, too far, too scary. He’d been scared enough, if he was honest, about getting onto a plane and buggering off to some city on the other side of the world. How old had they been? Twenty-five, twenty-six; so much an adult, he’d thought, wanting nothing and no one to get in the way of him and the world. He felt younger, less certain, now than he had then—not just because he was undressed and in the middle of an airport terminal. In the end, Charlie had kissed him on the cheek and sent him off in a cab to the airport. “I don’t like all that waving and disappearing through barriers,” she’d said. “I don’t think you can do departures well if you’re not going on a ship, with streamers snapping between the shore and the deck. And I’ve got stuff to do this afternoon.”

  He’d rung her as soon as he’d landed in London, rung her before he’d rung his mum. It was wrong the way her voice had sounded exactly the same as when she answered the phone from next door—except then they’d been able to hear each other dow
n the line and over the fence simultaneously. She’d sounded so close in that conversation, and in the conversations that followed, dwindling down to fewer and fewer. You just get busy. Dry, dressed, he dialed her number again. He had no idea what time it was where she was—he had no idea, really, what time it was here either.

  The recording was the same as ever, the same one he might have heard ten years ago, the same one he’d heard in London before he got on the plane. He heard himself leave almost the same message as he’d left earlier in reply—that he was coming home, that it would be great to see her, and bye. Then an afterthought, “And love to Gramps, of course. Tell him I’m waiting for some stories.” This time, though, he said his own name twice at the beginning. As if she might not recognize his voice.

  Pacing around the terminal, he glanced at the banks of watches and cameras he could buy, the litres and litres of alcohol, the boxes of chocolates that seemed inhumanly large, the multiple perfume shops that all sold the same things for the same prices. He should take something home—some perfume for his mum, some perfume for Charlie, a bottle of whisky for Gramps.

  “Do you have anything that smells like white roses?” But that was Caro’s perfume, and who was he buying for—Charlie, ahead of him, or Caroline, behind?

  The young girl, thin herself in a paper-thin silk dress, frowned at him. “You know the name, sir?” He shook his head.

  Walking towards the transit lounge again—it was unbelievable how much he wanted to be strapped back into his narrow seat and on his way—he chose a couple of magazines at random from a newsstand, one hand fumbling for his phone while the other fussed with unwanted change. He redialed Charlie’s number without thinking and stood in the middle of the busy concourse, listening to it ring.

  “Hello?”

  “Charlie? Charlie? Hey, hi, it’s Dan. Listen, I’ll be home tomorrow—I don’t know if you got my messages—and I’m just in Singapore staring at all these perfumes. Do you want me to get you something?”

  “Dan?”

  “Did you get my messages? I’m on my way. Charlie?”

  “Dan. I’m sorry, my phone’s been turned off. I haven’t listened to any messages for a while. What did you say about perfume?”

  “Are you all right, Charlie?”

  “Your mother’s here—did you want to talk to her?”

  His mother? What time was it? “Sure—are you all right?” But she’d put her hand over the mouthpiece; he could hear something muffled, some discussion, and then his mother’s voice saying, “No, no, just tell him I’ll pick him up in the morning.”

  “It’s an early flight,” he said, as if his mother might hear. “It gets in at half-six or something—I’ll get a cab, really. Tell her I’ll get a cab.”

  “Half-six,” said Charlie, sounding like herself at last. “Half-six—listen to you, Mr. Britpop.” A long pause. “Okay, so we’ll see you tomorrow then?”

  “Charlie, are you all right?”

  “We’ll see you tomorrow,” she said again. “It’s great you’re coming.” And the line clicked while he stood for a moment, watching the seconds tick by on his phone. He disconnected at last with the slightest pressure of his thumb, looked back towards the perfume shop—too hard—and then forward towards his gate.

  The Russian woman and her father were just going in, the old man frail and hunched in a wheelchair with a hand-knitted blanket across his knees. What had they done to pass the time, Dan wondered, watching the woman struggle with her folder of passports, tickets, documents. Someone from the airline stepped towards the old man’s chair, and the woman dropped everything—paper everywhere—putting her hands up: “No, no, please, I am fine, he is fine.”

  “A certificate, ma’am, you should really have a doctor’s certificate so we know that it’s all right for him to fly.”

  “We came through—we came to London. From London today. There was no problem, there was nothing with this.” She was trying to scoop everything off the floor and sort through it at the same time. “Izvi’nite, pros’tite, please, please.”

  “He looks so unwell—we just need a doctor to say it’s all right for him to fly. You do understand, don’t you?”

  The old man, sallow and still until now, raised one hand as if he wanted to interject. His daughter dropped the folder of papers again as she tried to soothe him, to tuck his papery skin back under the blanket’s woolly warmth.

  “All right,” said the flight attendant at last. “Come through here and we’ll sort this out—we don’t want to inconvenience everyone else.” And she took Dan’s boarding pass and slipped it abruptly through the electronic reader. “Mr. Kopek, thank you.” She paused over the name. “Are you traveling with them?”

  “No, no—well, yes, they were on the same plane as me coming from London.”

  “You’re not Russian?”

  “No—Australian.”

  “Good.” She blushed. “I’m sorry—I didn’t mean that. It’s just so difficult with the language and no doctor and . . .” She waved her hands. “Sorry for the wait.”

  Walking towards the airbridge, he passed the Russians, tucked away to one side like a problem to think about later. He settled into his own seat; Cynthia appeared, settled back into hers.

  “Nice break?” she asked, as if they’d both just taken a holiday.

  “Nice,” said Dan. The now-familiar family filed into its four seats, the smaller Dan asleep against his father’s shoulder. His mother smiled across the aisle, raised her hand in half a wave towards Dan, and the plane filled up around them. Clipped into his belt, eyes forward, he could hear the flick of magazine pages as passengers anticipated their next movie, their next designated dinner and breakfast. And then came a sigh, like the sound that came with delayed trains in London’s Underground, and people began to realize how long they’d been waiting.

  They came along the aisle then, the younger woman, the frail older man, and two flight attendants arguing loudly with a man in a suit. “Without a certificate, Doctor, we really shouldn’t let him get onto the plane. Without a certificate from his doctor, he really shouldn’t be flying.”

  “She says he goes to Sydney for medical treatment,” the doctor said, shrugging as he glanced at his watch. “She says they have flown this far already.”

  “But he looks . . .” One of the attendants gestured towards the old man. His skin was dull, his eyes closed, and his breathing shallow.

  “Is just cold. Please,” said his daughter, “there is a doctor for him in Sydney.”

  “He’s flown this far,” the doctor repeated. “I can’t give you a certificate without an examination, and there’s no time for that—but if he’s come this far . . .”

  The other attendant sighed. “All right,” she said, “we’ve held everyone up long enough.” And turning to the Russian woman: “Do you need help getting him settled? Do you need any extra blankets?”

  The woman shook her head. “You are very kind,” she said.

  “Then let’s get going.”

  As Dan learned again how to put on his life jacket, how to count the seats to his nearest exit, he felt the bustle and attention of the Russian lady settling her father. He could see the furrows of her frown, between the seats, but the expression beneath the frown was exactly that of the smaller Dan’s mother when she’d turned and seen her little boy running towards her. And as he watched the Russian woman tuck the knitted blanket high around her father’s throat, he thought suddenly, It’s Gramps—that’s why Mum was there, whatever time it is. That’s why Charlie’s phone was off before. He stared up at the seatbelt sign, bright and bossy, and his breath tightened. He wanted to call again, wanted to know. As the plane accelerated along the runway, he unclipped his seat belt and tried to stand up. Cynthia’s hand reached over, making him sit down.

  “There’s nothing you can do,” she said, inclining her head towards the father and daughter in front of them. “I’m sure it will be all right. Poor girl.”

  Dan leaned his
head against the window again as the ground fell away, the asphalt, the city, the shape of the land. The clouds crowded in around him, and he lost the shape of Gramps’s face in his memory. This time, he was certain he knew what that meant.

  Us going up, he thought, and Icarus coming down. There was a painting of Icarus’s foot disappearing into the water—Gramps had a postcard of it on his lowboy—and a farmer or two, a whole shipload of people, going about their day, not even noticing the splash. Dan wondered now where it had come from, who’d sent it. It had sat propped up on the little cupboard as long as he could remember, and he would have bet it would still be there. These days, he thought, there’d be thousands of us up in the air in planes, maybe seeing something, maybe noticing something, two wings on fire, plummeting towards the water. Wondering what on earth we’d seen. His eyes felt heavy; his legs twitched a couple of times.

  He was asleep before the flight attendant had made her next announcement.

  Inside the Cloud

  THE WHITE was thick, heavy, and cold to the point of dampness; a hand held out from a face disappeared altogether and feet faded from view in the dense, still mist. It was quiet, and the clean smell of the air contradicted its solidity: it was ozone, or oxygen, or something pushed through purification.

  From above, from some angles, tiny chinks opened to show the sudden sweep of an arm, the rush of running, the collision of a body with something hard, large, unexpected. But there was no noise, just the thick sound of silence.

  In the dream, William Dawes counted his steps carefully. If he could get his bearings, if he could make out two fixed, distant points, he might calculate his position and work out where this strange space was. He sensed other movement, but could see nothing, and when he called out to hail whoever might be there—“Good morning”; he still didn’t know how to say it in the natives’ language—the silence swallowed his voice down to nothing. Perhaps he’d been up in the Frenchman’s balloon at last; perhaps he’d fallen out, his descent broken by this landscape of clouds.