The Body in the Clouds

by Ashley Hay

  “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 favorites, 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 flip-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 harbor, 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 colored 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 tires 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 armor-plated feet of a suit of chain mail. “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.”

  Dan laughed. “Gramps’s dream for us realized. Did you ever get him up there? He’d’ve loved that.” From the water’s edge, a loud group came sprawling up the hill. They were in their fifties or sixties, some in regular day clothes, some more dressed up, with a bride and groom at their head and bottles of champagne being passed around. Dan smiled, but saw Charlie stiffen as one of the party stumbled backwards towards them, steadying herself on too-high heels as she framed a picture of the group with her camera.

  “You’re shooting into the light from here,” said Charlie, but too quietly for the woman to hear. “You’ll get nothing but dark shapes, and most of them moving.” Standing to offer herself as a photographer, she collided with the woman, who had stumbled again, and fallen this time, with a thud.

  “Oh,” she laughed, “well, that’s enough to take your breath away.” She took Charlie’s hand and hauled herself up.

  “I said you’re shooting into the light from here,” said Charlie. “I can take it for you if you want.” And she took the woman’s camera and raised it to her eye, shaping the air with her other hand as if it might mold and still the scene.

  “I wouldn’t worry about trying to get them to stand still, love,” said the woman, dusting her bottom, her hands. “We’re all color and movement today.”

  Charlie clicked, paused, and clicked again—three or four times in rapid succession. The last frame caught the bride’s skirt flaring as she turned to laugh, her face in the sun, and Charlie smiled, passing the camera back to the woman who stood now, her shoes off, more carefully balanced on the grass.

  “I hope you like them,” said Charlie. “I hope your friends will be very happy.” She watched as the woman stepped back onto the path, a little too tentatively, and headed off with her party. “Something nice about pictures of m
oving people,” she said then, sitting down again next to Dan. “A bit smudged, so you can’t really tell if they were there or not. The space around them looks more permanent than they do.”

  Dan narrowed his eyes: everything looked more permanent than people this morning, but he suspected that that was more to do with jet lag. That truncated version of his flight home that he’d thrown down for Charlie almost as soon as he was through her door—it suddenly felt as if he’d made a perilous journey around the world, rather than an easy and comfortable one. Maybe it was traumatic; but it must be less traumatic than having your grandfather pass away. Dear Caro, he thought, I’ve come too late and the sun is bright. The place looks real but it looks like the people might disappear in an instant. I miss you. Overhead, another batch of grey-suited climbers clattered along the bridge’s underbelly, the jingling and rattling of their safety clips drawing Dan’s eyes back up towards them and away from his train of thought.

  “Okay,” said Charlie at last. “Okay. So I bought myself a ticket for the climb pretty early on—wanted to check it out to see if they might let me take a camera up sometime; ordinarily you can’t take anything with you. They even make you take their handkerchiefs, not yours, and they make you strap them to your wrist so they can’t fall off or blow away. I came in, put on the suit, walked down the road—where you saw that lot—and climbed up the first stairs to the gangway beneath the road deck. Even being on it, feeling the metal under your hands, being so close to the rivets, to the shapes, being able to smell it somehow . . .” Her laugh was low and round. “I know, it sounds a bit religious. But all those stories, Dan, he’d told us all those stories.

  “And we start to climb and the guides are telling us this and that: how much metal, how many men, straight bits making big curves, all the stuff about the design. Up these ladders, your head poking up between lanes seven and eight of the cars, which scared the shit out of me, and up, and up, and then you’re out on the arch, standing on top of it, sky and birds and clouds above. A big wide staircase of steel curving up towards the sky. Just like Gramps said. I started humming that song of his: ‘I’m Sitting on Top of the World.’ Felt like there should be a sound track of that playing somewhere. The funny thing is, when you’re standing on it, you’re still looking around as if you should be able to see the bridge somewhere else in the city, like you in the flat this morning. And you’re trying to look in every direction, work out where everything is—it feels so different when you’re up in the air, you know.”

  And Dan nodded.

  In a tree beside the road below, a kookaburra began to sing, its satisfied gurgle following the shape of the hill to where Charlie and Dan sat, cross-legged, and looking east, one waiting for the other to continue.

  “They always sound like they’re practicing vowels,” said Charlie as the bird hit the end of its trill. “Trying to get their beaks through the oooos and the aaaahs. I’d miss them, I reckon, if I was away for ten years. Anyway, there we are, four hundred feet up in the air, having our photos taken by the guide, and they start to tell the story of the man who fell off the bridge, dived into the harbor, and survived.”

  “They start talking about Gramps.” Dan grabbed her shoulder. “That’s fantastic, Charlie; must’ve been strange hearing it up there though, thinking that all these people were going to know about it now.”

  “Weird.” She nodded. “Weird because they keep calling him Vince Kelly. Not Joe Brown.” Talking across Dan’s frown, across the hand he held up towards her words. “But of course, it’s a great story—off the road deck and getting himself into a straight dive, and coming up with a broken rib and his shoe leather up around the tops of his legs. It’s a great story.”

  She reached for her bag, pulled an envelope out of its side pocket, held it out for him. He could feel the regular shape of a photograph inside it before he’d opened the flap. Kelly, he thought, sounding the name over and over. He was looking at a picture of a small disc, rose-gold against the palm of a man’s hand. “ ‘To celebrate his preservation from serious harm,’ ” he read aloud. “Is it a war medal?”

  Charlie laughed, but the sound was colder than it should have been. “This is the medal presented to Mr. Vincent Kelly—also known as Vic; also known as Roy—to commemorate his surviving—miraculously—a fall from the Sydney Harbour Bridge, as he did seventy-seven years ago, on 23 October 1930. The man who owns it now showed me—he collects stuff, memorabilia, and a magazine wanted me to shoot him for something the afternoon after I’d done the climb. So I went, started telling him this story, you know, my grandpa, the stories you grow up with, making conversation, this new Kelly in my head, not knowing what to think. And halfway through—I hadn’t mentioned a name—he smiled and said, ‘Mr. Kelly, Mr. Kelly,’ and showed me this little plastic bag with a medal in it. It was so small, sort of fragile, but I thought it looked like a war medal too.”

  Dan’s hand was waving now—“Kelly, his name was Kelly?”—as the dream he’d had during the plane’s endless night firmed and fixed in his mind.

  Charlie nodded. “Seems that the man whose medal it was had died ten, maybe twenty years ago now—maybe more. It felt warm, you know, like it’d been in the sun, or pressed against someone’s skin. I probably thanked him a bit too enthusiastically for showing it to me. Then I caught a bus to Gramps’s place and asked him who this Kelly was.”

  Her grandfather, sitting in his favorite chair, by his favorite window, the one that gave a glimpse of the water, of the bridge’s arch. Her grandfather, shuffling into the kitchen to put a kettle on for tea, wanting to hear all about her morning. He’d been waiting for her, he said, to report in on the climb. “How’d it feel, love? What did it look like up close? What kind of people went with you? And this bloke who started it up—what was he like, Charlie? What an idea. What a champion idea to get off the ground.”

  Reaching for the milk, measuring the sugar, stirring it round and round in the hot brown liquid until she couldn’t feel a single one of its crystals crunching under the spoon, Charlie felt as if time had slowed to a fraction of its regular pace. She set the cup down in front of the old man, set the two biscuits he liked with each cup of tea just as carefully on his saucer. And she tried to think of a way to ask him what she wanted to know.

  “They tell stories while you’re climbing,” she said. “They have these little headsets so you can hear the guides all the way up. They tell the story of the only man to go off the bridge and survive.” She didn’t pause, her eyes fixed on her teacup, not wanting to see what his face looked like. “But it’s not you they talk about, Gramps; it’s not Joe Brown. It’s a guy called Kelly. And I met the man who has the medal that was presented to you—to him—the medal with the line about preservation from serious harm. The medal you reckoned had been lost in the garden years ago when you came back from the war.”

  The regularity of sounds; a teaspoon against a saucer, the suck of the warm fluid. These were probably the oldest and most familiar sounds in her life. She glanced up, quickly, to see if she could see her grandfather’s eyes. But his head was down, concentrating on his tea, and his hand was as steady as ever when he lifted his cup again to his lips.

  “I only ever said it might have been lost in your gram’s garden, Charlie Brown,” he had said at last, pushing the wet biscuit crumbs he’d dropped into one neat pile on the Laminex table. “Lot of things got dug over and buried in those beds. Lot of things sprouted and grew there too.”

  He stood up, but tentatively, as if the floor had begun to shift and undulate under his feet. Charlie watched as he braced himself at the window. He rarely looked old—spry in his ninety-odd years—but a different shadow sat around the profile of his face, and she wasn’t sure if the breaths she could see in the movement of his shoulders belonged to tiny gasps, or small tears. Then he straightened himself, straightened a stem or two on the plants on the ledge, and fussed with a dead leaf here, a trickle of water there. Her tea was cold before he finally spoke.
>
  “Do you remember the rosebushes in that garden, Charlie Brown?” There was no clue in his voice that this might be a new or different story. “Do you remember that great white rosebush that grew in the middle of the bed? I always meant to take a cutting from that one—why didn’t I do that, before I left? It had the most beautiful perfume, like perfectly warm sweetness, and the petals felt like velvet. Truth and innocence, your gram always said that’s what white roses stood for. She carried them at her wedding, you know; there’s a picture—she looked gorgeous, of course—and her arms are just full of these big white roses, so rich, so huge, you wanted to bite into them.” Leaning against the bench, as if he was balancing against the rocking of a ship. “The day she got married.”

  On the harbor, a dozen yachts chased each other along avenues of wind—Gramps pulled the window against its movement, and the room jolted with an immediate silence. It was a long time before he turned back to face Charlie. She was holding her breath without realizing, and her chest began to ache before he spoke.

  “Well then,” he said, “so you’ve met Mr. Kelly, in a manner of speaking. He was a great diver, Charlie; they said he went off the top of a crane into the harbor once, and we saw him at the pool one afternoon. He was elegant, so elegant. And it was nothing short of miraculous the way he got himself straight before he hit the water the day he went off the bridge. To have been looking at the right place at the right time, love, and after such a long time of waiting . . .” He rubbed his face as Charlie frowned.