Read The Body in the Clouds for Free Online

to reach the ground.
    â€˜It’s all right,’ he said. ‘It won’t matter if we’re a bit late—it’s my birthday, after all.’
    â€˜It’s a bit rude,’ she said. But she was beside him again, her pale hair spreading across his shoulder. ‘Looks like a comet’s tail,’ she said at last, nodding towards the blurring line of vapour as it caught the last of the sun’s light.
    â€˜That bloody comet,’ he said, hoping she’d laugh. The night they’d met, she’d seen a comet, picture-book perfect and sitting low along the horizon. ‘Look,’ she’d said, pointing, ‘look, look out across from that tree.’ He’d looked, looked out across from every tree, but he hadn’t seen it. Part of him, he suspected, hadn’t believed it could be real. Shooting stars and satellites were one thing, he’d teased her later, ‘but who gets a comet on their first night together?’ And she’d teased him about looking in the wrong place at the wrong time. ‘But I was looking at you,’ he’d said, laughing.
    So when she told people the story of how they met, she talked about the comet. When he told people the story of how they met, he talked about how surprisingly cold a spring night could be. He did wish he’d seen it: it made hers a better story than the one he told.
    And she did laugh now, catching at his hand and kissing it. On the pavement below, a set of couples twirled and turned, dancing to music that Dan and Caro, sealed in their bubble, couldn’t hear. The brightness of the women’s skirts flared against the solid dark of their partners’ suits. Alongside, on the river, a small boat pulled away from a wharf, the white trail of its wake surging wide as it picked up speed.
    â€˜Why aren’t there more boats on your river?’ Pointing down, Dan traced its path along the glass.
    Caroline’s finger followed the same line. ‘I suppose the tubes and the buses are faster, and go where people want them to go.’ She paused. ‘There must be some ferries, though—I remember going on one, out to Greenwich, when I was little.’ She spun towards the east, as if she might see the very boat itself, still plying the Thames. ‘We went to the observatory, all those clocks and telescopes, and we stood with our feet on either side of the prime meridian.’ She wiggled her shoes further apart, as if the line now ran through the middle of the wheel’s cabin. A playful thing, and Dan reached out, grabbed her hands, and stood with his feet opposite hers, mirroring her position.
    â€˜The east and the west,’ he said. ‘When I was little, I could never get my head around those lines, the prime meridian, the dateline, how something could be one thing on one side of it and another on the other—east or west, today or tomorrow. I couldn’t imagine that it was possible to actually straddle one of those lines without fracturing yourself somehow. And the way this one little place somewhere in England dictated where everything was and what time it was there. Must have been funny in places that had just been going along before that, thinking they knew where they were and what time it was, then they found out about Greenwich.’
    â€˜I’ll take you there sometime, satisfy these touristic urges of yours,’ said Caroline. ‘You can see if you do break in half with one foot east and one foot west.’ Craning her head back, she watched the cabins above as they slid across the sky, everything turning gently towards the ground. ‘This reminds me of that ride at Disneyland, the Peter Pan one, when those little chairlifts sweep you up and over the streets of London.’
    â€˜That would be too touristy even for me,’ said Dan. ‘Although I suppose I should go to the French one while I’m here—be silly to be so close and not go,