The Body in the Clouds

by Ashley Hay

  “It’d be something to be able to do that,” he said at last, poking his finger at the page and embarrassed when he touched it. He leaned in, anxious that he might have not only smudged the paper but somehow smudged the real structure as well.

  “You can always try,” the woman said, her words drawn out and distracted by her task. “You could get yourself some pencils.”

  “I thought of that—not me, but my friend Joy. I reckon she’d be able to draw it from memory, straight off.” None of this blocking in and planning, he thought. Joy would make one big confident line straight off and there it would be.

  “Well, do that,” said the woman, her eyes busy again with their quick up-down shuffle. “Was there . . . ?”

  And Ted said, “No,” and then, “Thank you,” and went down the hill to the workshops, his barge.

  At the end of the week, he thought, he’d buy Joy a packet of pencils and a notebook. Her bridge, he reckoned, would be drawn more delicate, more . . . There was a poetic word on the tip of his tongue, and he trawled through the crevices of his memory as the morning sun rose higher.

  “Gossamer,” he said at last and aloud, surprised by the strange shape of rarely spoken syllables. Gossamer and gold to airy thinness beat. He laughed at himself—he’d caught the edge of the Mascot Padre’s poetry. Must be something from back in school.

  Dawes

  IN THE early-morning sunlight the web shimmered and glistened like a handful of jewels. At its center, heavy among the delicate dew and the strong strands of silk, sat the spider, still and waiting. Heading up from the observatory’s point, William Dawes found the web strung across the pathway; heading in the opposite direction, the surgeon found it also blocking his track; and the two men looked at each other across the gossamer as if they’d found some great strong wall between them.

  “A big belly on that thing,” observed the surgeon from his side of the spider, “and it looks like it’s walked against wet whitewash—see the markings on its legs?”

  Leaning forward, Dawes pressed his finger against one of the web’s strands, testing its tension, its strength. He pulled his finger away as the strand snapped, and stepped back to watch the spider register the break, the tear. “The colors, once you start to look at them,” he said. “And you have to get them down to so few words to describe them for entomology: white, brown, black.” He was talking more to the spider than to John White, and White, stepping forward, bent over to address the spider too.

  “And you’re tricky things to keep once we’ve got you,” he said. “It’ll probably be a box of dried-up thorax and legs that gets back to London, and the gentlemen there will have all the fun of working out which piece goes with what—which is how it looks like the kangaroo was put together in the first place.” He crouched in towards the spider’s movement. “I wonder if you’d wait here till this afternoon, my friend,” he said to it. “I’ll be back with a vial and we can begin our acquaintance.” He stood up. “On which matter, I saw one of your fellow gentlemen, clearly hungry for some new acquaintance, dancing with a kangaroo last night. It had its paws around him like an embrace, and round they went and round.”

  The spider moved along its web towards the breach made by William Dawes’s finger. That will be Tench’s next suggestion, thought Dawes flatly. He’ll see me dancing with a kangaroo.

  “Your spider seems amenable to waiting for you,” he said aloud, watching the creature’s movement. “More interested in assessing the damage I’ve done, I guess.” And the repair work was already underway, a new line reaching from one disconnected point towards the other while the two men watched from their respective sides of its bridge. They stood so still in the face of this activity that the camp seemed to fall into silence. William Dawes moved first, the straightening of his body in its red coat making such a gash of movement that John White too pulled himself up sharp, as if he’d been called to attention. He coughed then to cover his startle.

  “They call you an ingenious sort of observer, Lieutenant Dawes, sir,” he said. “How go your own collections and observations of the beasts around this place? How goes that cyclopedic project of yours?”

  “Most of my time is taken up with time,” said Dawes. “The clocks, you know, and the skies, and the weather, and waiting for my comet. I expect it soon. I do keep an eye on the plants though; I’ve got a pile pressed and drying for when I’m settled down there”—waving his hand towards the point where his observatory was coming into being—“but no time to look at them closely . . .” Dawes trailed off as the spider moved lightly back towards the center of its web. “The best I can hope for is to gather it all together later.” He laughed. “What we’re all trying to do here, I suppose. And now there are the surveys, and the maps, none of which get us any closer to clearing or building . . . It would be easier if we could weave a place out of our own kind of web, like this creature. Spin a church one morning, some barracks after lunch, and a good new hospital for you, sir, through the following day.”

  John White laughed, the noise round and loud against the moment’s quietness. “A church made of gossamer,” he said. “That would be a pretty thing. And it’d probably last longer than the mud and the timber we’re building with at the moment.”

  “Or a bridge,” said Dawes, arcing his arm across the harbor’s blue water. “Imagine that, catching the light . . .” Dawes half closed his eyes, seeing a near enough suggestion of silky struts and stanchions through their lashes. “Only don’t mention it to the Governor or he’ll have me surveying the lines it would need to get it off the ground.”

  They both laughed then, their heads bowing towards each other over the web and taking care not to interfere with its silk. William Dawes imagined the spider, its various eyes watching two big fleshy shapes coming in towards it, blocking its light, its sky. Did it feel threatened? Did it feel anything? He imagined their heads nodding from above; his automatic vantage point, up in the air and configuring coastlines and prospective streets. That would give the best view of two men, stopping suddenly, leaning, concentrating, and then making the courteous bob of one of Watkin Tench’s dances—step together, dip, step apart—with the thin sheet of spider’s silver suspended between them. Above, a kingfisher let out its raucous laugh—noisier and rounder than the surgeon’s—and Dawes wondered if it had been watching their heads too.

  “They do make me smile, those birds, with their big voices and their furry chests,” said White. He’d had one shot not many days before, and it lay skinned and scrubbed on one of his benches—a fine specimen of these birds that had laughed at him over the months. He’d found himself earlier that morning stroking at the softness of the buff feathers under its throat and talking to it quietly. Setting off along the path—the wrong way, away from the town—it was only Lieutenant Dawes he could have hoped to meet for his next conversation. And here he was, with the spider, and the laughing, their own and that of the boisterous relative of his precious dead bird.

  “Were you coming to see me, sir?” Dawes asked. “Was there something you wanted?”

  The surgeon cleared his throat and frowned, and his pause lasted so long that Dawes wondered what he might say next. But it was nothing of soft feathers or a yearning for conversation.

  “Just vegetables,” he said at last. “I’ve more and more patients in dire need of something fresh. I thought you might see something, some plant, some tree—anything that might feed us—when you were out and around with the surveys. If you could look while you’re . . . if you might already . . .”

  Dawes shook his head. “Although to be honest, sir,” he said, “with all the measuring and mapping I sometimes think I could walk past a banquet and not notice it, and I must be the only man here who thinks that.” Every second exchange around the cove conjured an imagined menu or a remembered taste, while people sat down to meal after meal of salt rations—and were issued less and less of those. They were a study of waiting, as Tench said, and none much better at it than any of the others
.

  The surgeon winced. “I cut a man open when he died the other day, and there was not a blessed thing in his stomach—not a thing. I stood there with Tench staring at this great gaping emptiness as if it was the worst kind of monster. The Indians are starving now too, you know, all of us hungry together. And then that earthquake: a more superstitious man—and we’ve too many of those—could have thought it the end of the world. What do you think, Lieutenant Dawes? How long do you think it will be before they come?”

  Tucked somewhere in his mind, William Dawes had a table of calculations of the different days on which ships might appear; it followed the same kind of logic as the numbers that predicted the arrival of his comet. The first letters begging supplies had been sent back almost before the fleet was out of sight of the English coast, so the ships acquitting those lists might have arrived quite quickly in the fleet’s wake. The next waves of letters, sent from the ports at which the fleet had called, would have needed more time to make the journey back to England—a few weeks from Tenerife, four months from Rio, six months from Cape Town—and then the furnishing of their provisions, and then that eight-month sail to this deep, far south.

  But even with the most imaginable slowness, the most tardy set of merchants requisitioned for supplies, and even with the most generous calculations of the time and space involved in the journey between England and Port Jackson, it felt reasonable to hope that at least one ship bearing some answer to all those requests might have made its way up the harbor by now. Still, as Dawes knew, the math of the situation could spin on for months to come yet, the only other possibility being that nothing was coming at all. And that was an unsayable thing, at least for now.

  “It must be soon, sir,” he said. “It must be soon.”

  “There was a fellow had me in fits last night making up newspaper stories of the ways we’d been lost,” said the surgeon. “Gales of wind sinking us and cliffs of rocks striking us and the convicts rising up and running off with us and a hundred other ways to our destruction. But on we go, on we go, unless all those things have already happened and this is some strange Irish limbo.” John White laughed. “I swear there’ll be mutiny among the women if they don’t get a proper pot of tea soon.” And his own lips smacked together once or twice, for sweetness, so that Dawes knew exactly what he’d been thinking.

  “I could put a kettle on, sir,” he said, “but I’ve only got the local stuff.”

  The surgeon shook his head. “No,” he said, “I’ll get back. I don’t know if I could bend low enough to get under this spider without upsetting it, and I would like to find it here again this afternoon. Nice to see you, Lieutenant; always nice. And if you do come across any creatures, any plants, that you’ve no time to make your own study of, you know where to find me.” He waved his arm with the kind of flourish that suggested that location was a manor house at least. “I’d say the door is always open but, you know . . .”

  “The canvas flap,” said Dawes and they laughed again, the kingfisher joining in. These birds always sounded to Dawes as if they were working their way through vowels, performing a series of exercises before singing, perhaps, or mounting a play in a hall with bad acoustics—their series of long aas, and short oos, and the hammering e-e-es. He found his own mouth following the shape of their calls and considering which other letters he’d need from his own alphabet to transcribe them precisely. Another thing for his records.

  The bird reached the stanza that was almost pure gurgle and stopped suddenly, ruffling its feathers and tilting its head to one side. Another pause, another shake, and it was in the air, its wings beating it up higher and higher into the sky, and then stretching as it glided out across the water.

  “ ‘For how shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?’ ” murmured the surgeon. “I’m on the psalms again, God help me,” he said briskly. “One a night, but don’t tell the vicar—he takes it as a sign of more religion when it’s really just a sign of nothing else to read.” He tipped a small salute towards the bird and watched as it soared and climbed, dipping to begin a huge sweeping curve. Around it came, its body solid against the light of the sky like a mark on a musical score and then thinning down—lighter, lighter, lighter—as it turned, until it disappeared altogether for a moment, invisible against the blue.

  “That, that,” said John White. “I remember the first time I saw that happen when I was a boy. I thought it was magic.”

  “It was a pale seabird out over the water at Portsmouth,” said Dawes. “I watched it disappear and I thought my father had made it happen somehow, like a trick.” The light and movement of an illusion.

  The beat of a wing, and the bird was dark again against the air.

  “I always think I should applaud,” said the surgeon, sighing. “All right then, and good day to you, Lieutenant Dawes. If you’re coming along the path, could I ask you step around my spider? I’ll be back to look for it later.” And he turned and headed away.

  Dawes watched as the kingfisher looped up towards the clouds, and around—visible, visible, invisible, visible. How fast would a man have to move, and in what sort of light, what sort of space, to manage a moment of disappearance? Here they were, collecting all sorts of information about samphire and spiders, about wind and weather, when maybe they were in the time and space for questions like this.

  He rubbed his eyes. He’d hardly slept the night before, trying to trick his mind towards sleep by separating the settlement’s layers of nighttime sounds. At the base of it all was the water against the rocks; high above everything else the hiss and growl of animals busy in the treetops and the undergrowth. And between that, the occasional call of the sentries, the regular tick of his clocks and watches, and the soft padding of feet—human, he thought, rather than animal—making stealthy, nocturnal visits to the camp. Perhaps it was their elusive native neighbors, thought Dawes, come to see if the white men hungered, if the white men dreamed, if the white men disappeared somehow in the darkness, like a bird against the sky at that one moment of its trajectory.

  He rubbed his eyes again; he needed more sleep. Maybe he’d take his copy of Gulliver along to the hospital, in case the surgeon wanted a change from the psalms. Last night he’d read again of the astronomers on Laputa, guiding the island’s flight with the lodestone at the center of their observatory and taunted by fears of a fiery comet streaking down and striking them from the face of the earth. Which is all we need, he’d thought. His own dreams, when he did sleep, flared with fire that dropped from the sky, so close, so close to where he lay, sizzling to nothing in the harbor’s water when he rushed to see its splash—his own comet, he presumed, or something unknown out in the night.

  The sooner the real comet comes, he thought, the better.

  Pulling himself up onto the rocky ledge that moored one end of the spider’s web, William Dawes stepped carefully over its anchoring line and jumped down on the other side, heading for the bustle of the rest of the camp and its smells of cooking. That thing with the bird, it was all a trick of the light; look at anything from just the right angle at just the right moment, and you could thin it down to insubstantiality. That was probably what the black men were doing in the darkness of their visits, calculating the angle at which you could look at the disturbance the settlement had made so that it disappeared altogether.

  The kingfisher landed back in the tree from where it had started, its tail neat and its feathers snug around its body. There was no hint in its shape, its still sitting, that it could fly at all, let alone that it had been in the air, and briefly of it, just a moment before.

  Dan

  AS THE plane turned onto the runway and began to pick up speed, Dan leaned back against his seat, closed his eyes, and saw quite clearly the shape of a man flying across the face of the sun. Somewhere, as far back as childhood, he’d started thinking about Icarus whenever he was in a plane that taxied, accelerated, and pushed itself, and him, up into the sky. It was a strange thing to think of, let alone
a habit to have kept up; it must have been from one of Gramps’s tales, one of the early drawn-out stories around which he and Charlie had built their ideas of truth and certainty. If Gramps said that if you watched a bird carefully enough, you might just see it disappear, like magic, against the sky’s blue, then it was so. If Gramps said that the Harbour Bridge was magic too, that the great big curved thing was “made entirely of straight pieces, my dears, entirely of straight lines,” then it was so. If Gramps said it was possible to fly there—“Not in an aeroplane, no, Charlie, but straight out from the deck of that bridge and down into the deep water”—then it was so. And if Gramps said that a young man called Icarus had once escaped from a prison on wings made of feathers and wax, then even when Dan’s world had solidified into currencies and trades, the last traces of the story were still lodged firmly enough in his imagination to be triggered by a jumbo’s thrust of acceleration, its sudden push up towards the clouds.

  “Still a bit of poetry in your mercenary soul, isn’t there,” Charlie would have said.

  And maybe he always thought of Charlie too, because there she was, in his mind’s eye, looking exactly as she’d looked the last time he’d seen her, years ago now. He couldn’t see himself, but he could see that she was sitting in the day he’d left home. She was sitting where they’d sat on the harbor’s edge, as if she’d been there all the time, if he’d thought to look.

  Stretching his arms, Dan looked along his row; there was an empty seat next to him, then a woman with her eyes closed. Beyond her came the thin public space of the aisle, and then a family sitting father, child, child, mother, across to the next aisle. On the other side of the plane, a woman, an empty seat, and a man leaning forward to look too—just as Dan was—so that for a moment he thought he was looking at a mirror somehow, the reflection ruined only by the asymmetrical family in the middle. Dan rubbed his hands across his eyes as the man at the other end of the row pulled a book from the seat pocket, and the illusion was broken. The plane lifted itself free of the ground, and Dan cupped his hand around the little screen in front of him. Thousands of kilometers to go.