The Body in the Clouds (37 page)

The dog freed itself, made for the gutter with a terrible swagger, and took two or three steps before it realised it was injured, it was in pain, and it sank onto the concrete, unable to move any further.

It yelped then, but only once, heaved itself up again somehow, staggered, lurched, fell. There were so many screams cutting across its broken body, and then a terrible, nasty silence.

‘I didn't know if that was a person or a dog,' said someone next to Charlie. ‘Not that one would be better than the other.'

‘I did not want to see that,' said Charlie quietly.

Dan closed his eyes, seeing the furry rump trapped under the wheels, the way it had wriggled itself out and assumed—it knew how its paws worked, how its legs worked—that it could just stand up and walk away. He swallowed the taste of vomit, his breath bubbling horribly in his throat.

The old man was crouched down next to his pet among a forest of legs, three or four people on mobile phones.

‘He'll be right, mate,' said someone, but Dan wasn't sure if he meant the old dog or the man—and wasn't sure that it was going to be true of either of them.

In the back seat of the cab, the woman looked around blankly, uncertain of what had happened. Her eyes scanned the people on the pavement, caught sight of Dan—who raised one hand, wanting somehow to acknowledge her, to soothe her—and moved on. The cab driver took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes, and accelerated away before his hands were back on the wheel. ‘That woman,' said Dan, ‘she looked like the Russian woman on the plane.' He wasn't even sure if this was true, but he wanted to give Charlie something to think about that wasn't what she'd just seen. ‘She said she thought Sydney looked beautiful when we landed this morning. We talked about reading
Gulliver's Travels
—I was thinking about when you and I read it, when we were young, but I couldn't remember if we'd ever finished it.'
Light and easy
; the thought came out of nowhere.

‘I did not want to see that,' said Charlie again, stepping off the kerb as the lights changed in their favour. ‘Come on, let's go.' Stepping wide around the huddle on the footpath that was the dog, the man, the misery of it all.

‘I mean,' said Dan, running on, wishing he could stop and knowing he was making something worse now, not better, ‘it's not much of a story to bring you, a man dying on a plane, and then his daughter running over a dog in front of us. If it was her; if it was—'

‘No,' said Charlie, stopping his words and balancing his gait as he weaved a little next to her. ‘But Gulliver's better. Maybe we can start reading the same books again, just on different sides of the world. Then we can argue about what they meant and whether they were good.' Smiling a little, leading the way.

Dan smiled too, but he read books with Caro now—sometimes simultaneously, sometimes ones she'd just finished. And sometimes, just before they slept, she read him a page or two of whatever she was part way through, and he'd drift into a different sleep with the sound of her voice and its words like waves turning a little pulse against a shore. That, he thought now, was one of his favourite things about being with Caro. And there were never any arguments about it.

Reaching Charlie's building, reaching its elevator, Dan leaned back against the mirrored wall and let his eyes shut properly. His body felt even heavier as the cabin pushed up from the ground.

‘Here,' he heard Charlie say as the door opened, and he watched again as a triangle of light spilled again into the dark hallway from her opening door. ‘Here you are, I'll make another coffee—try not to think about it.'

His tiredness had reached a pitch somewhere between drunkenness and nausea, and he leaned in towards her bathroom mirror, splashing handful after handful of cold water onto his face.

‘Dan? There's coffee.' His cup on the side of the table away from the view.

He took another too-big, too-hot gulp. ‘So my mum,' he said, the skin inside his mouth tingling. He was trying not to think of the heaviness in his head. ‘You said she's not as young—'

‘No, no, she's fine—I didn't mean you should worry. Just that she'll be a bit more lonely. She was visiting Gramps, Ted, almost every day, and I'm away a fair bit, and you're . . . on the other side of the world. She's fine.' Charlie nodded. ‘I took some pictures last week, in the hospital. Here—I made some prints for your mum.'

There was Ted Parker, wide eyes gazing out across the rooftops of the city view. And there was Dan's mum, her hair a little darker, her face a little thinner than how Dan always pictured her, and her first pair of glasses tucked high on the top of her head. She was smiling; she was squeezing Gramps's arm, she was happy. She was reassuringly herself.

There you are
, thought Dan.
They didn't matter, all those years on the other side of the world.
But he knew that wasn't quite right.

‘What did Mum say about the whole Ted thing?' he asked then, tilting the photo towards the light.

Charlie smiled. ‘Not a lot. Said it didn't change the person Ted had been and all he'd done for us. Said I was going to have enough loss to deal with without losing him before he died. And she did say, incidentally, that she'd never believed the story about flying off the bridge, was always terrified it'd make you want to climb up there and give it a go. I told her you'd piked out the last morning you were here, when we'd promised each other we'd climb up and see the sunrise. I didn't tell her you'd gone up there years ago with some girl . . .' Seeing the look of surprise on his face, she said, ‘Somebody told me at a party once.'

She pushed another pile of photographs towards him: the cable tunnels from the bridge's foundations, with other slivers of its size, its structure, its setting framed up in other shots. The men who'd found the old stone, she said—‘the men who'd really found it'—had found a ring in the wall nearby and made up some story about it being a place where convicts were chained. ‘But it must have been the observatory, William Dawes's observatory, and Ted and Joe were much more taken with the idea of him than with the idea of convicts and shackles and big heavy bolts.'

Her index finger tapped at the side of one of the prints, touching its corner and bouncing back from the small pinprick it made. ‘Some guy, William Dawes,' she said softly. ‘Out here on the
Sirius
to watch for a comet that doesn't come, and then all the things he gets busy with in the meantime—stars and maps and words and treks. This lovely description of it being Dawes's job to amalgamate all the courses each person reckoned they'd walked during a day when they were out on an expedition, the coordinates of their compasses, the number of steps they'd taken. They said he could do it almost without interrupting a conversation.'

Charlie had dug for this other, older man as far as she could, running up against the wistful letters of historians, writing as the bridge was being built, about how sad it was that someone like him should almost have slipped out of view altogether—so few papers, such little evidence. That place under the south-eastern foot of the bridge—which Dawes had called Point Maskelyne, for the Astronomer Royal, to acknowledge the role of astronomy in the beginnings of Sydney—had ended up named to honour him instead. Dawes Point had since had its earlier, gentler name brought back alongside it: Tarra. His name, and the older name, back in conversation. Someone had found the lists of words he'd collected from those first conversations he'd had; someone had found his meteorological records from that first observatory—the journals that Charlie had used for her photographs. But most of what he'd left, the ideas and information he must have generated, had disappeared from view.

‘Then again,' said Charlie now, clicking open the folder on her computer that held all her weather images, ‘there were those who said at the time that he wasn't always visible to mortal eyes, so maybe he was always going to fade away, a little mysterious. “Not visible to mortal eyes”: I think that was one of Gramps's favourite lines.'

Dan watched the images dissolve one into the next; the blues and whites of the weather, the neat newspaper type of the modern forecasts, the careful handwriting, sepia, in ruled columns, of the eighteenth-century records. It was particular handwriting, handwriting that had been concentrated on.
Violent thunder. Pleasant cool breeze.
Days when the sun was
somewhat obscured.
Days when the sun
shone through the haze
.
Sea breezes. Hailstones.
Sometimes a
shower of small rain
.

‘I imagined things to tell him in the end—I didn't think he'd mind. I read about those early French aeronauts who went across the Channel in their hot-air balloons and I imagined William Dawes dreaming of building his own balloon and flying over this place he was mapping. I read about the Englishman who came up with the first classifications for clouds, a decade or so after Dawes was here, and I imagined Dawes staring at the shapes of clouds, wondering how they might be classified, and wondering about the stories they might hold. I read about the settlers and the Eora dancing, and I imagined William Dawes dancing slowly down by the water. His handwriting always reminded me a bit of yours.' She zoomed in on one of the columns of sepia text on her screen. ‘Like it never changed from the handwriting you learn at school.' She zoomed in again so the letters blurred and fuzzed. ‘Just the next round of stories, I guess.'

Dan finished his coffee, stared at the brown sludge in the bottom of his mug, the same colour as the journal's text, as if its shape might hold something for him. He snorted; he'd be visiting Cynthia's clairvoyant next.

‘My stories aren't so great,' he said carefully. ‘Death and near-death experiences from a weird trip home. And then, that dog.' He felt like he should apologise. ‘I don't think you need those stories in a week like this.' Straightening to smile, maybe to pat her shoulder or touch her arm, he caught the flick of something dark in one of her photographs and leaned towards the screen, his hand up to stop her clicking on to the next image.

‘Yes,' she said, ‘that's it. That's the one Gramps liked. I never see the movement straight off—but you're right, there it is, in the middle. Right day. Right time. That's the one he said showed the fall.'

‘It's the strangest thing,' said Dan without thinking, without knowing exactly what he might say, ‘but flying home, I dreamed I saw the fall—Kelly's fall; I even knew his name was Kelly. And then I dreamed I was diving in myself, like it was a competition. Like it was deliberate. The strangest thing,' he said again as the picture on the screen began to fade and change. ‘I don't know what any of it means—especially not this morning.'

‘That's what he meant when he said he'd seen it before and after,' said Charlie slowly. ‘Ted Parker said he was dreaming of that fall for years before it happened, and after.'

The screen went blank, came up again in a different series of photos: the middle of the city, the middle of the day, and Charlie must have been high above one of its parks, her camera up around the level from which Dan had imagined them earlier, all the people below reduced to the shorthand of round heads and streaking busyness.

‘Colour and movement,' he said.

‘I was trying to work out how we must really look, smeared across time and space,' said Charlie. ‘What traces we must leave.' She laughed. ‘I keep coming back to the same story.' And she pushed the empty cups further across the table so that Dan could get closer, find the angle that resolved each hurried blur into the single, sharp moment his eyes expected to catch.

‘I got one of those pedometers at an office Christmas party,' he said, rubbing his eyes. ‘Wore it for a week or so—we all got one, and everyone was fascinated by how far they'd gone, or hadn't gone, compared to what they'd expected.' Remembered not knowing the length of his own stride; remembered all their abortive attempts to try to count each step of the most mundane excursion without the machine. Front door to tube. Office chair to elevator. No one, as far as he could recall, had ever managed to pay attention from one end of their journey to the other. ‘What I thought would be better though was if, instead of just counting the steps you took—unreliably, because one girl left hers on her desk all weekend and came back to work on Monday to find it claiming to have taken a hundred and sixty steps in the meantime—if it could draw you a track of all the places you'd walked that day, or that week, or that year. You'd have all these lines heading out in all sorts of directions, and I'd have the same path trodden over and over.'

‘Not fair to compare us,' said Charlie. ‘You go to the same place every day, sit at the same computer, do your job, move money around. I go to different places, look for different pictures. But the lines I was making to the bridge, to Gramps's place, to the hospital would be so heavily inked they would have saturated any paper by now.' She looked up towards the tall glass windows as the light fell a little: the sun had gone behind a cloud. ‘Remember flying back from that holiday with Gramps when we were kids? Remember the way the water lit up like quicksilver as the sun hit it and we flew over the top?'

Dan nodded. ‘I was thinking about that this morning. I was thinking about that when I was flying in, when we came out of the clouds and I could see the ground for the first time.'

Charlie's hands were up, her fingers spread like stars and her thumbs hooked together, the way a child might make the shape of a butterfly. She flexed her fingers like its wings, watching the pale shadow thrown by the movement.

‘And remember we saw the plane's whole shadow gliding across the ground, so small, and so fast, that we got scared at how high we must be, how fast we must be going?'