Free The Body in the Clouds by Ashley Hay Page B

onto the plate, measured a dollop of gravy. ‘You know.’ Looking at Joe but nodding towards Joy, the way he’d seen men do when there were secrets to be kept, things best left unsaid. ‘I suppose, with the moon and everything, and if you’d been dancing . . . sometimes walking home you might see a shooting star.’
    â€˜You can’t get a better end to a night than a shooting star,’ said Joy. ‘We used to walk down to the water every night when we first came here, in case we saw one. We should go again, love. Ted could come with us. I was always happy with a star, but Joe’s one for comets—a much bigger ask.’ She smiled at her husband. ‘Although one’s bound to turn up some day. For you and your old astronomers.’ Her fingers linked through her husband’s without either of them seeming to notice.
    The clock on the mantelpiece chimed, and she pushed her chair back from the table. ‘Some of the men come round,’ she said. ‘Did Joe tell you?
    A few beers and a few stories—maybe we can see about the stars another evening.’
    In the backyard, on the steps, on the grass, the men settled like a tableau from an old painting, fragments of sentences sitting against the click and fizz of opening beer bottles, as if no one could get beyond the shortest comment or observation until they’d taken a good few mouthfuls. A line from the newspaper; a joke from the radio; they jostled and settled and took their first sips with the first flight over the South Pole (‘And I reckon that’s better than Kingsford Smith,’ Ted heard one man mutter to Joy as if it was a treacherous suggestion), some calculation that proved the earth was billions of years old—‘more than 1.8 billion,’ specified another voice—and news of a meteor that had slammed into South America like millions of tons of dynamite. This last made Joe pay particular attention. ‘Blood-red sun and a sound like artillery shells,’ said someone.
    Where Ted grew up, a phrase like that would loop the conversation straight back into the war, but in this new world someone said instead, ‘The size that sound must’ve been, when you think about how far away you could hear them blowing up the north shore’s cliffs for the bridge.’
    Here, it always came back to the bridge, always came back to the work—and how grateful they were for it against the price of butter, the price of steak, and the lines and lines of hopeful workers that Ted had stood in for years, turning out earlier and earlier to see if there was a chance of a shift for the day. It was something, he thought, to lean back against some permanence. But underneath the drinking and the banter sat other topics—things about the scale of the job, how impossible it was, its danger. Like the danger in trusting that two metal arms would meet high over the water thanks to the columns of sums done half a world away in London and a spider’s web of surveyed lines and angles held on a separate sheet of paper. Like the dangerous sparks of those smaller bits of riveting, red hot and shooting through the air from cooker to boilermaker like shrunken stars. Like the way the two halves of the arch swayed and swung from their pivots to the south, to the north, when the wind came in hard from the east, from the west, closing down work for fear the men would all be brushed off, shaken free. But as close as anyone got to poetry was some mention of the trails left by boats overnight and in early mornings, still visible on the harbour when the first men went up for the day.
    Do they dream about it? thought Ted. Do they dream about climbing high above it, about how it will look the day it’s done? Do they ever dream things that leave them panicked and breathless?
    He was starting to think his dream must be about falling. He was starting to feel a little less afraid of it, now he knew he’d stay