The Body in the Clouds

by Ashley Hay

  Yet at the base of his own quietly religious soul, it seemed to Dawes that if ever there was a venue for transformations, this might be it. Another week on, and the place itself stood so remarkably altered. There were more tents between the trees, the Governor’s portable canvas house sat larger and more sturdy, and the new leaves of the British-born plants were trying to make their way in newly regulated rectangular beds where everything had grown unchecked and untrammeled before. Coffee, indigo, the cactus that would deliver bright red cochineal from its bugs—these were the things expected to thrive. And now the year itself was turning towards what should be its autumn, while local leaves still sat greenly on their trees and only Dawes’s thermometer gave any indication of the seasonal transformation that must have been happening, in some other, less obvious way, all around them.

  “Should we cheer for the newlyweds?” asked Tench mischievously after the vicar had given the final benediction.

  “We should cheer as much as possible,” said John White, “or it’ll be groans of God give us strength.” He’d have had more time for discussing the intricacies of bread and wine if he could have made anyone talk to him about where he might find some fresh vegetables, now that he had more than a thousand bodies ashore to care for. Yes, those vegetable beds were pressed with seeds and new green had sprung up here and there. Early sprouts looked promising, but even in the short time since “taking this place on for the empire,” as the surgeon, an eyebrow raised, liked to put it, so many of those little leaves and buds had withered and failed, peas one week, cabbages the next.

  “Anyway, marriage is as beneficial for the body as it is for the heart—do them all a power of good,” the surgeon added. “I should have doled out a measure of lime juice for their wedding breakfast.”

  “A delightful memory for them,” said Tench. “A lovely thing to think of through their years together.” Here they were, this group of men, learning each other’s tempers and humors, learning the footfall of one from the footfall of another, learning each other’s stories. It was less cozy to think that this would be the size of their company for who knew how long—just these men, just each other, and whatever the dimensions of this place proved to be. William Dawes had already calculated that the indigo-blue hills to the west were at least forty miles distant, if not fifty, and that distance had begun to feel as far as it was possible to imagine to men who only weeks before had managed always to keep in mind the thousands of miles that lay between the wake of their ships and England.

  “To the newlyweds, then,” said White. And the men cheered, almost seriously, each one with a wedding day to remember cast straight back to it. “And how’s your locket, Lieutenant?” The surgeon turned to one of the younger men, who might not have wanted the entire company to know that he carried a portrait of his wife on a necklace of ribbon, that he kissed it every night, and so fervently that he was afraid of wearing the image away altogether. But there seemed no use denying it, and he ignored the snickering to announce that it would be his own wedding anniversary in a month or so, and he hoped they would all toast the happiness of his marriage then.

  White slapped him on the knee. “That’s it, sir—don’t let them mock you,” as if he himself would have been the last person ever to mention the matter in public.

  “I’m sure most of us have a locket, one way or another,” said Tench, but gently. “Some keepsake to hold as a little piece of the rest of the world.” He had his own memento of his father, dead four years ago, almost to the day, and he nodded his head to acknowledge him under this vast new sky.

  “I dream less of her now,” the young man with the locket confessed, as if there was some relief in saying anything aloud about his wife. “And sometimes I’m afraid when she turns to look at me she’ll be one of those intemperate hussies we brought out here.”

  “That’s the way of it,” said the surgeon. “That or these tales I already hear of convicts taking up with the Indians, however many beads and mirrors that might be worth.” He took a deep breath. “Although I suspect such encounters are taken more than exchanged.” He turned back to the young man. “But not to worry, you’ve got your little picture to remind you of the right face, whoever you wake up with”—and a great “ho” of merriment surged over the young man’s outrage that anyone could suggest such a thing.

  A little apart from the group, William Dawes smiled sympathetically. “When I woke this morning, just for a moment, I couldn’t remember my father’s face—it was only a moment, but . . .” He raked his fingers through his thin hair; the moment had been breathtakingly unnerving. “Be thankful for your locket, Lieutenant. I’m sure you will see her properly a while yet.”

  The young man blushed, Tench coughed, and the surgeon puffed his cheeks full of air and held it there. “If it’s seeing things properly,” he said, “I was coming back from visiting the Governor this afternoon, and a woman stopped me in a state of some distress: said she’d seen an alligator running between the tents, and that it was the second one she’d seen in a fortnight.”

  “An alligator?” Dawes shaded his eyes with his hand, trying to see the surgeon’s face more clearly. “What kind of an alligator?”

  “A fourteen-foot one,” said John White, “as opposed to the eight-foot animal she’d seen the week before last. A very sane woman, I’d say on the whole, but she was adamant about this.”

  “I think it would be quite comforting to see an alligator at the moment,” Tench said carefully. “Almost everything we see is so new, at least an alligator would be a thing we might find somewhere else, a thing from some known part of the world.”

  “I’m not sure I’d like to find one getting about in my tent, sir,” said the surgeon. “And certainly not one that ran to fourteen feet.”

  “True, but I had one of your birds laugh at me for the entire duration of my shave this morning,” said Tench. “And a creature that laughs is a disconcerting thing. I’m still not clear on how kangaroos might be put together, and why they jump, and I don’t even want to think about the size of the creatures that make those hisses out in the darkness every night. At least I know what an alligator looks like. And at least it wouldn’t laugh.”

  “I heard Lieutenant Dawes say this would be a place where anything might happen,” someone said, looking to Dawes for confirmation. “I heard about that alligator the other week too, but I didn’t think it sounded comforting. I just figured it was the next strange thing to turn up here, like the hand and arm.”

  A hand and an arm washed ashore; the surgeon had spent hours poring over them, trying to explain whose they were. Ultimately, though, all he could say was that they had belonged to a white person—and he wasn’t even sure if it had been male or female. And no one seemed to be missing them that he could see.

  As the young sailor said, they were just the next things to appear, as if people had been more or less expecting the unexpected since they’d reached their antipodes. Take the two French ships that had appeared at the heads of Botany Bay precisely as the British fleet made to decamp north to Port Jackson: the extraordinary coincidence of their intersection, and that strange do-si-do of maritime might. It almost belied Dawes’s own sense of being out of the world, knowing that the French were just a few miles away, as usual, even closer than the distance they usually kept across the English Channel.

  “A place where anything might happen,” Tench mused. “That should keep us all in good conversation for as long as we’ve only ourselves to talk amongst. Not to mention being rich fodder for all our literary aspirations.” Watkin Tench, like the surgeon, belonged to the band of men who had sailed with publishing contracts in their portmanteaux and hoped to write up the days, the birds and animals, the potentials and disappointments of this place, novel as it was and unrepresented in their catalogs of natural history. “You should be writing yourself, Lieutenant Dawes, what with your appointments with comets and stars.”

  Dawes smiled. There’d be no shortage of material, he suspected, but p
erhaps one of time. “Maybe a miscellany,” he said, “or something along the lines of the French encyclopedia.”

  “You might be our antipodean Dr. Johnson,” the surgeon boomed, slapping his knee at the thought. “You could start with alligators, then bits of bodies, comets . . . and with the fertility of imagination that our convicts already display, I warrant you’ll have all manner of exciting entries—there’ll be gold and dragons claimed in this place before we’re six months landed, if that’s not what the alligators are already.”

  “The antipodean Dr. Johnson.” Dawes smiled again and made to take his leave. “As your publishers all know,” he said, shifting the balance of his weight away from his frail leg, “it’s none of it real until it’s written down and read in London.”

  Ted

  WHEN TED and his mum, or Ted and his gran, sat down to their tea, the space between them held salt and pepper shakers, a dish of butter, and the clatter of cutlery and plates against a scrubbed wooden table, the wide pages of the day’s newspaper. Neither asked the other what they had done during the day, assuming that they already knew, and their quiet rhythms of different chewing tended to fall in time before the meal was halfway through.

  When Joe and Joy sat down to their tea, there was a white cloth across the table and the space around the chewing was filled with the busy darts of their conversation. The butter dish was exactly the same as his mum’s—and this was the first and, Ted was afraid, possibly only thing he could think of to say.

  “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.”

  “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.”

  “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 . . .”

  “Positively beneficial?” suggested Ted. It was one of his gran’s favorite 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.

  “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 midair too. They were both tall, like Ted—“a bit stringy,” his gran would have 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 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.

  “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 harbor’s turning tides. The beginning of the day felt as far back as history. This was a whole new world.

  “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.

  “Have you got a sweetheart then, Ted?” Joy pushed the potatoes towards him, the gravy jug in its wake.

  “Well . . .” He scooped a potato 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.”

  “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, how dangerous. 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 w
ork 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 harbor 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 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 on to the idea of their feet on the ground—the idea that they’d been there, that they’d be there again.

  “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.”

  “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 farthest, 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.