Free The Body in the Clouds by Ashley Hay Page A

was the first and, Ted was afraid, perhaps the only thing he could think of to say.
    â€˜It must be strange being underneath when everyone thinks of being up,’ said Joy. ‘If I worked there, I’d want to be up—up as high as I could.’
    â€˜It’s Joy’s heart’s desire,’ said Joe, ‘that I’ll sneak her up there one night, show her the city from up in the sky.’ But he shook his head, pushing potatoes onto his fork with his knife. ‘My grandad, another Joe, he was always superstitious about women getting in to where he worked.’
    â€˜He was in the mines, love,’ said Joy—the exchange had the feel of something repeated over and over—‘and if women going under the ground is bad luck, then women going so far over the ground should be . . .’
    â€˜Positively beneficial?’ suggested Ted. It was one of his gran’s favourite phrases, although she usually attached it to hot milk if you couldn’t sleep, or a flannel tied around your throat if you had a cold coming on, rather than the idea of climbing a great metal ladder up towards the clouds.
    â€˜Positively beneficial,’ said Joy, smiling, and she reached over and patted his arm so that he flinched a little, the red rushing up from under his shirt—back in school, asking the teacher where Gulliver’s flying island was in the atlas. ‘A fellow two streets over snuck his wife up the other week; he said there was another fellow who took a girl up there and convinced her to marry him while she was looking at the lights and the view. You see, Joe, you could get me to agree to anything if I was up in the air.’
    Joe shook his head. ‘I don’t need to change your mind about anything, love,’ he said peaceably.
    His cutlery suspended over his plate, Ted looked from one new face to the other: it seemed impossible that this time last week he hadn’t even known they existed. Joy’s hand was on Joe’s arm now, her knife laid down, her fork poised in mid-air too. They were both tall, like Ted—‘a bit stringy,’ his gran called it—but the light made their heads shine blond where Ted’s usually blond hair seemed darker and all bristle. And their eyes, their brown skin, their slender arms and fingers looked like they might have come from the one person, not two different people. He shifted the fork in his hand so his grip matched Joe’s, matched Joy’s. The way she was looking at him, her eyes bright, her face expectant.
    â€˜You’ll have all new stories for me, with that whole different perspective on it to him’—nodding towards her husband—‘won’t you, Ted? Down there on the water, while he’s up in the clouds.’
    Swallowing hard, wondering what to say, Ted caught the smallest movement of one of Joe’s fingers underneath his wife’s arm, soothing, stilling. Somewhere, a long time ago, he’d seen his dad do that with a dog that was turning itself inside out with barking. But in the instant of remembering, he couldn’t recall his father’s face at all, and put his knife down to feel for the wallet in his trousers. His dad’s picture was in it and he could rebuild the bones, the glance of that face, for himself. His fingers made out the leather rectangle, and his body relaxed a little, registering a new ache in his legs from learning to stand on top of the harbour’s turning tides. The beginning of the day felt as far back as history. This was a whole new world.
    â€˜Just a blur at the moment,’ he said at last, self-conscious in the face of her enthusiasm and wishing he had some better story to tell. He’d leave the talking to Joe tonight; he’d concentrate tomorrow, bring her something then.
    â€˜Have you got a sweetheart then, Ted?’ Joy pushed the potatoes towards him, the gravy jug in its wake.
    â€˜Well . . .’ He scooped a potato