The Body in the Clouds (19 page)

At the end of the list of places Gulliver had visited was ‘New Holland'. Dan frowned, and looked again in case it was another word that he was misreading somehow. But no, there was Gulliver, going to the very place where Dan was going, the very place in which he and Charlie had sat, imagining themselves setting out in Gulliver's footsteps. How could they have missed that? Maybe they'd never made it to the end of the book (although he thought they had). Maybe the holidays had finished (although he was sure other books had carried on into recommenced terms). Maybe they'd lost the book—though he remembered how seriously they took the task of putting the books on their shelves. He could almost picture the spines of the books they'd read running back through years to little-kid stories about wombats and puddings. He flicked through the pages, picking at a word here, half a sentence there. Here was Gulliver coasting past New Holland—yes, he did remember that. Here he was back in England. But then this other antipodean chapter, tucked in at the end.
I began this desperate voyage on February 15, 1714–15 . . .

Perched on a high stool in the bright bar, Dan pulled the beer towards him and took the first, satisfying sip. A long sigh, loud enough to make the man two stools along turn and look at him. Dan smiled, tilted his drink a little. The man didn't smile back, looked at the counter; he looked a bit like the man who'd been at the other end of Dan's row—
Unless
, thought Dan,
everyone looks the same when they're flying too fast over the surface of the earth
. But in front of him was Gulliver, years away from home and probably presumed dead by all his family, finding himself a capacious canoe and making for Australia's coast. His eyes brushed over the lines, following the book's last days and nights and Gulliver's canoe, until they both arrived at
the south-east point of New Holland
.

‘It's stories we live by, Danny'—that's what Charlie's grandad said. He'd strung the two families—Charlie's, Dan's—together with stories, the coincidence of this, the sudden twist of that, and a gate he'd made in the fence between their two homes. There he'd been in the war, sending planes out over the very village in Europe where Dan's father—‘rest in peace,' Gramps dropped in automatically as he did at the mention of his own wife, or his own little girl, Charlie's mother—had been growing up. Why, one of Gramps's planes had probably bombed it once or twice. He'd pull out an atlas and find the very place. There it was, marked with a black spot, as if everything he said was proved true if a name was clearly marked on a map and Gramps could find it. Dan's mother would stand at his shoulder, nodding, and Charlie's grandad would smooth the atlas's page with his hand. ‘And here we are now, here we are.'

Dan's mother understood stories—she'd married Dan's father for his. Dan's father, older than her and with a thick accent that she always attempted when she talked about him. Dan's father, who'd walked out of the mess of Europe after the war, changing his name—his future, he'd said—as he went. She knew little about the place he'd come from, other than what it was called. And she knew little about his reasons for leaving. ‘When someone is willing to go so far,' she'd said to Dan once, ‘you might not want to know why.'

Caro had been intrigued. ‘You don't know what happened? You don't know why he left? You don't even know his real name?' And Dan would shake his head. Once or twice he'd thought of heading east from England, trying to find out, but nothing ever came of it. If his mum wanted to go, he'd said, he'd take her; for him, his dad was only the faintest outline of a gigantic shape, and the particular smell of a jumper, some cologne, of long-gone cigarettes and coffee. Names came and went in wars, it seemed—and Gramps had reassured him, not long after his dad had died, that half the blokes building the bridge had had at least a couple of names they answered to.

Now, in this bland bar, Dan stared blankly at Jonathan Swift's pages—even Swift'd had a handful of pseudonyms, he thought. Maybe it used to be an easier thing to do. He tapped the book against the bar, as if trying to settle its sentences, and something rammed hard into the legs of his bar stool, shaking him off balance so that he leaped to his feet and the book flopped onto the table, its creamy cover soaking up spots of beer and condensation. On the ground, bouncing against the stool, was a little boy, pale-haired and energetic. Dan turned his head. Did he look like the kid who'd been sitting across the aisle, or did he just look like any kid? The boy smiled and Dan wondered if it was because he'd recognised Dan, or would have smiled at anyone.

‘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 pot 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 realised before, but he was slightly scared of children.

‘What colour'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 recognised 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 . . .' Apologising 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 dialling the number. Time slipped by.

His last day in Sydney, sitting at the edge of the harbour, 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 further 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 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 down 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 dialled 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 name twice at the beginning. As if she might not recognise 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.