The Body in the Clouds by Ashley Hay

down at the water’s level, safe on his barge. Because these blokes were all walking in the sky, in the clouds, in the air. No wonder , thought Ted, they tell so many stories about getting to work rather than being there . Feet on the ground, they were holding onto the idea of their feet on the ground—the idea that they’d been there, that they’d be there again.
    â€˜You could hear it from ours and we’re an hour’s walk away, as I well know,’ said someone, ‘although I heard some chap in the shop say he was walking two hours in and two home.’
    â€˜I used to walk in from my gran’s some mornings,’ said Ted. ‘Two hours that was, to queue for a shift.’ And suddenly it was a competition: who’d come furthest, been highest, or pissed the greatest distance (with an apologetic mumble to Joy), or run the fastest on the steel.
    One bloke thought to tell a good story about riding all the way up from Gippsland to Sydney, which was thousands of miles, he was sure, and probably would have been thousands more again if he’d told it later in the night with a few more beers. But then another bloke had walked clear across Russia from somewhere near Moscow to the oriental coast. That was half the world, he said, and here he was.
    â€˜But you didn’t walk all that way specifically to be here,’ protested the boy from Gippsland, wanting the primacy of his ride established. ‘You walked all that way, sure, and found a boat, and sailed down to Sydney, and got yourself this work, but you didn’t make the trip for it, did you?’
    â€˜I would’ve,’ said the man, who had a heavy accent. ‘This is the sort of place a man would come half the world for.’ And he took a big swig of beer, to cover up almost saying something about beauty.
    â€˜No matter how far you walked, mate, and no matter how far you rode,’ suggested another voice, ‘I’d beat you both hands down running along that span.’
    The running had always intrigued Ted whenever he looked up into the sky; the way feet must have moulded around the new surfaces so they didn’t fall. It’s acrobatics , he thought, or a ballet , the troupe of men perched in their crepe-soled shoes, their rubber-soled shoes, gripping edges and walking narrow lines. And it must have changed how they stood on the ground, too, changed the whole set and bearing of their bodies, the way the work itself hardened different muscles and strengthened different postures. That new tiredness in his legs from standing on the fluid movement of the barge—how long would it be before he took on some new shape to accommodate that?
    Sitting among the men and their stories, Ted listened to a well-practised loop of the job’s conditions: no washrooms, no locker rooms, no tearoom or canteen for your lunch, no five minutes on the job to rinse the grime off your hands at the end of the day—if you wanted to do that sort of thing, you did it in your own time. ‘And if you’re up on the top, and you need to . . . well . . .’
    â€˜If you need to go,’ another voice said at last, ‘well, by the time it hits the water it would’ve disintegrated—there’d be nothing left. We’re over four hundred feet up at high tide. So you do your business, and by the time it’s halfway down it’ll have dispersed. Some blokes,’ another apologetic nod to Joy, ‘do it in a brown paper bag and let that go over the edge.’
    Up there, in his top-of-the-world air? Ted shook his head at them, which only encouraged them.
    â€˜Mate of mine says they—you know—on them shovels they use for feeding the fires to cook the rivets. Do their stuff on that, throw it off, cook the shovel clean, and then do their sausages on it for lunch. Handy piece of equipment, they say.’
    â€˜Another bloke says he did his in a bag, folded it up, and threw it over. And