The Body in the Clouds (28 page)

He was asleep.

Outside in the night, an owl called twice, three times, over the rattle of a window. Inside, Ted had stepped straight into the dream that had stalked him, an air gun heavy in his hands, his body stiff against the punch it made when he let its pressure meet the rivet, and all the bits and pieces of the bridge tightening and firming around him. His feet were planted, sure, on the metal framework and the light line of rope that marked out one boundary of the air in which he might stand lay taut across his back.

Below, in the water, something shifted, and as he bent towards it—it looked like a gesture, like a wave, but he couldn't see anyone there—he stepped out somehow, under the rope, and there he was, in mid-air. And down on the grass under the bridge's heavy southern pylon a man stood, fussing at the ears of a dog and looking up at the disturbance. Looking up towards his flight.

That was the first second, and he knew immediately—he must have been practising this dive in his mind for years—that if he could fold himself into a tuck, he could use the force pushing upwards to flick himself straight, feet first, head up.
Bend in the middle, bend in the middle, and use the wind rushing by to turn yourself—like the motion of a clock's pendulum. If you can move your body fast enough, it will generate its own momentum.
One chance, bend and straighten.
You've got one chance to bend and straighten.

That was the second second.

The world blurred into blue, green, blue, red, blue, grey, blue, blue. He felt his hand move towards his nose, his mouth, trying to protect them from the surge of the harbour's water.

That was the third second, and he was awake, his body still trying to fold itself, to flip from falling head first to feet first, his stomach clamping the covers tight. There it was; there it was at last, the dream whose pieces he'd been catching, the dream whose story he'd scrabbled after. He'd dreamed Roy Kelly's fall—been dreaming it for years.

Turning onto his side to face the wall, he traced the shape of an arch, a rainbow, a rising sun with one finger. It should mean something, he thought, but he was buggered if he knew what. Still, there he was, smiling in the dark because he'd seen, at last, this familiar, fleeting sequence of images, and he'd seen for the first time the whole picture they made.
A dream, just a dream, just a dream
, he thought in time to the ins and outs of Joe's snores from the other side of the wall. As if that one moment had been waiting for him, somewhere, all along.

He traced another arch onto the wall.
But what about seeing yourself standing somewhere else in a dream, when you're in another person's body, looking at yourself standing down on the grass with a dog?
He rolled the other way, wriggled himself down a bit to look out the window.

‘Lucky to have the job,' he heard his mother saying, ‘that's all there is to it. Wherever it is, and whatever you're doing, you're lucky to have the job. Don't make it more than that.' Eyes closed; eyes opened; eyes closed; eyes opened. And somewhere in between—he wasn't sure if it was outside or inside his head—he saw the bright and speedy streak of a shooting star.

Almost asleep again then, he fell into a deep dark-blue space that he recognised, for the first time, as the lowest point of that fall.

On the other side of the wall, Joe's snoring stopped at last and Ted pulled his blanket a little higher towards his chin.
I'm sitting on top of the world
, he thought, and then,
Just flying through air, just flying through air.

It was only a few weeks before Roy Kelly came back to work, presented with a medal—‘gold,' said someone; ‘bronze,' said someone else—inscribed to mark the miracle. There were rumours he'd been given a watch too. Ted looked for it, new and shiny, on the boilermaker's arm—he looked for the new bright blue in Roy Kelly's eyes. But he never seemed able to get a clear look at either and, as the right angles of the suspended deck spread themselves back from the middle of the curve towards its landlocked ends, he saw less and less of the miraculous diver altogether.

Less and less, then, of all the bridge boys; the backyard beers wound down at Joe and Joy's. The job was rounding up, finishing off, and the stories the men told each other now on the rare nights they did still gather had turned away from where they'd come from and what they'd done to wondering what they might do next. The deck met the ends of its arch; the pylons took on their slick silver granite coating; the road came in layers of asphalt, concrete; the last of the sixty thousand gallons of thick grey paint went onto the steel.

One last man fell, and died, and a team of painters was dispatched to clean his blood off the granite.

The noise dimmed and the bustle quietened. The barges stopped coming and going. The workshops sat silent. And the bridge looked like a whole bridge as the city adjusted to its shape, its size, to the way it could insinuate itself into so many different views and aspects. The tallest thing in Sydney's profile, the thing that came closest to the clouds.

And Joe, it seemed, was right. As plans for its opening hatched and bloomed, the memory of the structure's evolution dimmed a little every day. It would be just another road that people walked along, already impervious to the time before, when it wasn't there, and to everything that had happened in between. It would be just another road that people walked along, up in the air, between the blue of the sky and the water, as if it was nothing at all.

But sometimes at night, the dream still blinked on and off inside Ted's mind, and once, watching a ferry's path across the water, he imagined standing where Kelly had stood, standing like a diver with his toes curled over the edge of the steel, ready to push himself out and away and into the air. It was the buzz of an aeroplane that broke his daydream; men with newsreel cameras getting ready to make pictures of his bridge for the world.

For three weeks, they tested it with every weight and strain they could think of—could it withstand winds of a hundred miles an hour? Could it withstand a change in temperature of more than a hundred degrees? Could it bear the weight of ninety-six railway locomotives, jammed in buffer to buffer? It could. Standing below by its south-eastern foot, Ted watched the light change. If he stood long enough, he might see the precise angle of the sun that threw the bridge's reflection perfectly onto the water, might see the creeping shadows of dusk as the air darkened almost to the darkness of the frame itself, right round to those early-morning stripes the night's boats left behind. Overhead, the engines rolled on, one by one, paused, waited, and then began to roll off.

As they puffed out of the sky and back onto the land, Ted crouched down again with Jacko, both listening to the machines' fading thunder. It was an awkward squat—his feet often still felt like they were planted on the barge, suspended over the harbour's movement. He supposed he'd get used to dry land again, after a while. Funny, too, to think of this land being under cover now, protected from the sky and all its weather by the roof of the bridge. Funny to think that the sky above it that he'd gazed at as a boy, the sky taken in by Joe's patient astronomer, was blocked out completely, that the rain would have to find its own sneaky chinks and crevices to get through to the grass that would grow, smooth and obscuring, over all the disturbance of the bridge's site and foundations. The long tubing tunnels that had snaked down a hundred feet into the land, into the bedrock, to hold the two halves of the arch apart from each other with that intricate web of cables, had been filled in, disappeared and buried as if they never existed.

‘Another layer,' said Joy that night. ‘Something for the next lot to dig up, like Joe dug up that old brick.' And it was funny, thought Ted, that the past could be set up for the future as quickly, as easily as that.

Joe leaned back, blocking a shape in the air with his hands to show off the size of the brick. ‘All those years buried,' he said, ‘buried and forgotten; they think it was a keystone, you know—not just a regular brick, but the keystone for an arch.' He smiled a little. ‘Still wish I could overhear what they talked about, with their nips of rum—probably gardens and gossip and all the same stuff we talk about now.' He raised his cup towards Joy, towards Ted, and then, ‘There's work going out at the aerodrome, Russian George says. Said we should head out tomorrow, see what's happening. You'll stay with us, Ted, no question. And we'll see how George can fix us up for something to bring in the shillings.'

Ted smiled. It hadn't occurred to him that he might leave—hadn't occurred to him that he might have to. He was halfway through rereading
Gulliver
with Joy and he wouldn't have wanted to break off in the middle— Gulliver, after all, was about to reach the flying island of Laputa.

Again. Such a little piece of conversation, and such a big thing resolved; he turned his smile from one to the other.

‘It'd be something to be near the planes,' he said. ‘About the only thing that would make up for not seeing the bridge all day.' There was a rumour that Smithy would fly by when it opened, and Ted wanted to make sure he knew when to look up, and exactly where, to see that sleek tube of silver.

In the mash of plans for the bridge's opening, someone had suggested that the families of the bridge's dead men walk across first.

‘There's not so many of them as would slow down the ceremony,' said Russian George.

‘But it'd be a bit depressing,' said Joe. ‘Reckon they should be aiming for jubilation, shouldn't they?'

‘Send Kelly across,' said Ted and Joy at the same time.

‘Miraculous,' said Joy.

‘Marvellous,' said Ted. You couldn't do better for jubilation or celebration.

But it was a band of the workers who led the way in the end, a banner slung out in front of them, and only slightly held up by some trouble with a man on a horse, his sword glinting in the sun. Ted and Joe, in step in the middle, were so far from the edge that the view was invisible and they might have been walking along any landlocked boulevard.

Still, it was extraordinary the way it reared up, opened up, to receive you. Approaching along the road from the south, the height of the arch seemed to disappear altogether—foreshortened, one of its artists might have said—so that all there was to the bridge was the boxy rectangle of its frame directly overhead. And then you were in it, in the guts of it, looking up through the crosshatching of cords and struts to the blue and the sunlight above. Flags flicked their colour in the breeze from the summit of the arch, and an occasional plane, higher again, turned a metallic glint towards the ground. Inside, in the centre, it was enormous; Ted almost lost his footing with his head thrown back to take it in, and the line of workers behind him was ready to walk on over the top of his pause.

‘Come on, Teddy, keep it moving,' someone called, ‘and watch how your feet are falling.' There was a rumour—no one knew if it could be true—that the vibrations of them all marching in step could bring the whole thing crashing down with a great splash into the harbour.

But it looked so graceful, so elegant, the way its two lines curved, one larger, one smaller, the way that web of steel jumped between them, linking, tightening and holding, no matter how the footsteps fell. And all around, the cheering, and the noise: from the sound of it, all of Sydney had been pulled into this great big thing, this great big magnet.
No chance of hearing her talking to herself today
, thought Ted, wishing he could touch just a bit of her steel, feel its smoothness, its strength.

In the crush of the crowds—they said more than a million people had pressed into the city—Ted lost sight of Joe, made his way into a pub, reckoning on one drink before he headed home. The barmaid smiled, nodding her head towards the bustle outside. ‘You part of all that?' she asked, and Ted nodded, too proud not to say he'd marched over with the first band of workers.

Her eyebrows raised. ‘That'll be something to tell your grandchildren one day.'

The cold bubbles fizzed inside his mouth; sure, there were stories he could tell. And he told her about walking for work from the beach back when he'd begun, about the graceful curve made entirely of straight lines, about the view from the top in the dead of night, the city's lights thrown over the land below like a blanket of sparkling jewels.

‘You're the poet of the bridge,' she laughed, and he laughed too.

‘Tell you the best one,' he said, and he started the story of Roy Kelly's dive, that throwaway line beforehand as his spanner had fallen—‘S'pose someone'll be going over sooner or later'—and the sharp retort, ‘Don't be so damn silly.' He gave that line to Russian George, thickening his voice into a suitably round accent and apologising for the ‘damn'.

And then it was the day, it was the hour, and he was telling the story as Kelly himself—he knew what the water looked like, rushing up, as well as he knew what the man looked like, rushing down. How many times had he seen it, in its pieces, awake and asleep, over the years? ‘Then I came up to the surface, and I was alive, marvellously alive.' The woman's chin in her hand, her eyes shining.

For the rest of her life
, thought Ted,
she'll tell people that story: how she poured a drink for the man who went off the bridge and survived, how she had a drink with him the day it opened.

‘What's your name, then?' she said, taking the empty glass as he pushed it across the bar.

He thought about it a moment, made a play of counting the coins for his next drink in the palm of his hand. Ted Parker wasn't the name of a hero
—and neither
, thought Ted,
was Roy Kelly
.
Bit too Irish
, as his mum would've said. He placed the coins on the bar towel, stacked carefully, biggest to smallest, in a heap. ‘Joe Brown,' he said.