Cloudland (2 page)

When she saw how fast those clouds were travelling Lucy sat up, fully awake. The bright cloud smashed into her window so hard she expected the sound of a crash and the silence was strange. She rubbed her eyes. When she opened them again a pattern of shadows in the cloud took shape. Lucy felt a jolt of shock. There was a face – a boy's face – in the cloud. No, he
was
the cloud. There was a boy made of cloud, staring at her.

Lucy's bones felt numb. She looked at the other
passengers. The man across the aisle had his head on his shoulder; his body was heaving and collapsing in time with his snores. The woman in front of him was staring at the TV screen. Lucy turned back to the window. The cloud boy was still there. His hair was white, and his lips and eyebrows, and he was so pale the light shone through him. His eyes were grey but at the centre, where his pupils should have been, there were flecks of white. If he hadn't been watching her so intently, Lucy would have thought he was blind. His mouth kept moving as though he was trying to tell her something but all she could hear was the roar of engines. She touched the window. It was shivery-cold.

Then the light that shone through the cloud boy faded. He looked dirty, suddenly, and thin. The second, darker cloud was close now, massed behind him. A pounding started in Lucy's ears, louder than the engines, as she realised it wasn't a cloud chasing the boy – it was a creature, a bundle of black skin with the look of rags. It had no eyes, no mouth, nothing you could call a face, but it reached out fronds, as if tasting air, and in this way, dragged itself to the cloud boy. Even in the plane, behind the window, its malice brushed cold fingers over Lucy's skin.

Like a living shadow, it poured over the cloud boy's shoulder. He pressed his face against the glass, so close Lucy could see his feathery lashes. He was scrabbling at the window, trying to find something to hold, when the creature slithered across his face, covering his eyes. With a sudden tug, it pulled the cloud boy back. The next instant, Lucy found herself staring at blank blue sky.

‘Fasten your seatbelt!' A flight attendant stood in the aisle, glaring down at Lucy. Lucy saw his lips opening and closing. Still she couldn't fit the sounds he made into words. She could hardly believe the other travellers were still there: the man across the aisle blowing his nose, the woman in front of him lost in a book; the world whirring away, just as it had been.

‘I said, fasten your seatbelt! We're about to land.'

‘Maybe not all here,' said the man across the aisle, gazing at Lucy and tapping a finger against the side of his head.

‘The parents ought to warn us,' said the flight
attendant, seizing Lucy's seatbelt and fastening it himself.

Lucy barely noticed. She was so stunned her mind kept fixing on random details: the way the flight attendant combed oiled hair across a bald patch on his head. ‘I can't
think
,' she whispered to herself, pressing her hands against her eyes. A moment later, the plane thumped down.

‘England!' breathed the man across the aisle, pressing his plump hands together.

In a daze, Lucy followed the other passengers off the plane, down a long corridor with fluorescent lights that made everyone look queasy and tired. She was moving so slowly people kept shoving past. When she stepped out of Customs at last, Lucy tried to force herself back to reality. She told herself that she had arrived, she was in London – but the whole set-up seemed bizarre. She had never seen the airport so empty. Everything looked toy-sized under its high steel roof, and people's teeth seemed too big for their faces.

Lucy pushed through swing doors into the Arrivals Hall. Searching the crowd of expectant faces, she felt that old familiar click of disappointment: her mother wasn't there. Lucy put her suitcase down and stood watching families hug each other while couples
shared out bags. The hall emptied out. The quieter it got the more Lucy could hear: trolleys rasping over the linoleum, the flurry of different conversations. Finally, Lucy was the only one left.

After what seemed like an age, a man in a blue shirt, straining at the buttons, came down the escalator and waddled towards her. ‘Lucy Wetherley?' She nodded. ‘We've been calling you over the PA,' he said accusingly.

She had barely registered the announcements, their words lost in noise and static.

‘A message from your mother,' he added after a pause, passing Lucy a sweaty scrap of paper with
BUS 98
written on it in thick red texta. ‘She called to say the little one's poorly and would you mind catching the bus?'

Lucy could almost hear her mother's pretty, gasping voice, her flustered charm persuading this official stranger to leave his comfortable chair and find her
precious little daughter
.

He laid his fleshy hand on Lucy's shoulder. ‘Do you need help, love?' He was bald but he had a bristly moustache, which made his lips look like fat worms. ‘It's not safe these days …'

‘I'll be fine on my own.' Lucy shrugged him off, grabbed her suitcase and walked outside to the
bus shelter. She felt she was watching some news footage about a girl, tired but otherwise ordinary, who stepped out of the airport through sliding doors and faded, step by step, into thin air. It was raining, of course: the kind of rain that leaves you soaked before you notice you're getting wet. A boy about Lucy's age huddled in the bus shelter. He was all in black – black jeans, black Converse sneakers and a black jumper – and so skinny he looked like a fold-up person.

Lucy sat at the far edge of the bench. The boy's eyes slipped over her. ‘Good to see someone else isn't wanted here either.' He had a posh person's way of speaking, as though his mouth was rounder than other people's, but his voice didn't seem to belong to him. The rich ones at school had money in the way they looked at people, as though they were judges awarding marks out of ten. This boy was looking at Lucy in the pleading way of people like Katrina Timms, who had to eat her lunch in hidden corners of the school, chewing endlessly on her sandwich.

Lucy hadn't told anyone about her parents' divorce. She felt almost humiliated by the intimacy of it – all their tears and squabble. ‘My mum's held up, that's all,' she said. ‘Because of the weather.' That
was how people spoke of it now: the weather – as though that word held all the mystery of what was happening to them. They never spoke of the rain.

The boy took a box of matches from his pocket. She heard a match strike. He slid an envelope into the flame.

‘I've been waiting here an hour. They say they're running emergency schedules, which means they're hardly running buses at all.' As he spoke, the boy kept turning the envelope, watching its flames run from the wind. It was one of those official envelopes; its plastic rectangle caught fire with a popping sound and left a chemical taste in the air.

‘So how come no-one's meeting you?'

He smirked. ‘They haven't the slightest idea where I am. I've just burnt the letter telling them I was kicked out of boarding school, meaning I've got a week to kill before they expect me home.' He shook the last fragments of envelope into the air and watched the ashes float, spinning, out of the bus shelter until they fell straight down under the soft weight of rain.

‘You flew here? How did you get a permit?'

He shook his head. ‘I caught the bus. I was
hoping
for a flight to Paris but they wouldn't let me on the plane.' He pursed his lips and blew out a sigh. ‘I've decided I'll give myself a little London break instead.
No uniform, no muscle-faced rugby heroes …'

His self-pity sounded like boasting. Lucy shrugged and let his voice lose itself in the sound of rain. She noticed they had built a sandbag wall around the airport, plastered with neon-coloured advertisements for dinghies and water purifiers. Around it, the floodwaters made a black lake.

Lucy shivered suddenly, remembering the dark creature in the clouds. She jerked her head sideways and looked down the road. The bus should have been here by now. Her jeans kept sticking to her legs and she could feel water dripping from her hair, making runnels down the back of her neck. As she watched, the rain paled and thickened. She was looking into the shimmering vagueness of mist. The silence was so strange it made a gap in Lucy's mind. The rain had stopped.

The boy pointed: ‘Is that your mother?'

An old woman stepped out of the mist onto the pavement. For a moment, Lucy thought the woman was made of mist. Enormous sunglasses hid most of her face, which was narrow and pale. She was in gumboots, and her dress looked like an old tartan blanket. Her silver hair was tangled in a brown knitted scarf so long it went twice around her neck and still trailed in a puddle.

Ignoring the boy, the woman stopped in front of Lucy and peered at her down the crooked length of her nose. ‘Hurry up. I can't hold off this rain forever.'

‘What?' Lucy stared at her.

‘I'm January,' the old woman answered. When she saw Lucy's blank look she stamped her gumboot in a puddle, splashing water on their shins. ‘Didn't the Heir explain all this?'

Lucy shook her head. The boy was gaping at them openly now, a match burning forgotten in his hand.

‘The Heir?' Lucy repeated.

January jerked her head. ‘I saw him speaking to you. I was following him, watching the plane.' She drew her head back and stared at Lucy. ‘Ha! So you do know what I'm talking about!' With another
abrupt movement, she thrust a box into Lucy's hands. ‘Here. Eat these.'

It was a round box made of some cool material, paler than marble. Lucy pulled off the lid. Inside, like eggs in a nest of tissue paper, she saw a clutch of round white biscuits. It was so quiet she heard rather than saw the boy edge closer.

The biscuits had the self-contained look of a secret. The mist was making Lucy light-headed, as if she had no will of her own. She watched her hand reach out.

The first biscuit tasted like mist, it tasted like nothingness. For one moment, Lucy was conscious of all she saw: the rain-glazed pavement and silky-topped water flowing in the gutter. Then nothingness coiled down her throat, cool and pale. The outside world faded while, inside, she felt such radiance she thought her fingers would start trailing colours in air.

‘They're cloud biscuits,' said January. ‘Eat as many as you can.'

Already, Lucy was cramming biscuits into her mouth, feeling hungrier every time she swallowed. She could feel the mist's vague colours curling through her ribs.

‘Good,' nodded January. ‘You're ready. The mist is rising, dear. Climb as quickly as you can.'

The mist made January's voice echo from everywhere and nowhere. Lucy was floating easily – -not as though she was rising, but as though the solid world was dropping away. She remembered once when she was very young watching a balloon bump up into blue absence. How easily that balloon had disappeared!

Above Lucy, there hung a vast silence. The higher she floated the lighter she felt. Her suitcase, that weird boy, the bus shelter, the airport, the sandbags, the flood – everything dropped from her mind.

‘Aren't you coming?' she called.

‘Oh no!' January's voice was as reedy as a voice over the phone. ‘I'm the Gatekeeper. When you get there, wait for two Cloudians: Wist and Jovius. And do be careful. There are dangerous –'

January's voice faded out. In front of Lucy, and all around her, everything was white. It was the opposite of night but it was like night, too, the way it held her apart from everything. She had no feeling of fear or loneliness. She had become part of the mist, which seemed to have no end. She lost all idea of movement.

It was impossible to tell how much time had passed when, with a silent thump, Lucy came up against something that wouldn't let her through. She
twisted around and saw only whiteness above her. It wasn't mist – it was lumpy to touch – but the mist kept pushing her into it. Soon she was bumping and scraping across the face of it. She had to hold out her hands to fend it off. She was starting to feel she might suffocate when suddenly the mist forced her upwards, feet first, in a strung-out somersault. Her head came up and she broke into a shock of light and air.

At first, it was too bright to see, but when her eyes got used to the glare she stared around her, dazed. The mist had carried her into the clouds. Now she found herself in a vast, deserted hall, standing by a trapdoor into the mist under her feet. The ceiling was impossibly high. Columns extended in long rows around her. The freezing air bit at her fingers and her feet were so numb she couldn't feel the floor, but she hardly noticed the cold because the numbness spreading through her body felt the same as astonishment.

Lucy could not have said how long she stood gazing around her. For as long as she could remember, she had dreamt of visiting the clouds. Now that she was here, she saw what she had never managed to imagine. Everything shone, not as though light fell on it, but as though it was
made
of
light. It was a little like going out into fresh snow, high in the mountains – only there, empty patches revealed the underside of things: the dark struts of branches. Here in the clouds, everything was still and perfect. Lucy had a feeling this hall had been in existence for hundreds, even thousands of years.

‘I should feel afraid,' she whispered aloud. Her breath made white vapours that took a long time to fade. The air was so cold and bright she could almost see it glittering. It hurt to breathe. For a moment, red shadows trembled at the edge of everything she saw. She had to drop her head until her eyes cleared and, even then, she had a queasy impression everything was spinning. She took a cautious step and found herself counting
one, two
before she touched the floor again.