The Body in the Clouds

by Ashley Hay

  “Imagine if you were living two hundred years ago and you saw something like that in the sky,” Charlie would say. “Imagine. You’d think it was God or something, wouldn’t you?”

  Dan took a drink from the flight attendant, took too big a mouthful, and turned back to the window. From nowhere, below, he saw the huge silver body of a plane with a dark blue tail—he could see its insignia quite clearly—as it cut at right angles across his plane’s trajectory. His mind stammered. How big was a plane? How close must it be if it looked that big, took that long to pass by his window? A hundred feet or so? But that couldn’t be right. He could see the color of the pilot’s hair—“Fuck me.” Should he tell someone? Had anyone noticed? Should it be there? Should he be there?

  Cynthia yawned and turned the page of her book. The picture of the clouds below, framed by the window, was clear again.

  He finished his drink in three gulps, holding the last mouthful against his teeth, his cheeks, scanning the horizon for anything else that might appear. It was unnerving enough when you saw other planes, made miniature on other far-off flight paths, but this . . . He shivered. The rush in the airport, all the people queuing with bags, their shoes off to be x-rayed, and the screens and screens of departures, the endless abacus of flight numbers. It didn’t bear thinking about, how many planes were being kept apart, kept in the illusion of a pristine empty sky, at any one time. How many people were moving so far up above the earth, between somewhere and somewhere else.

  He uncapped his pen. A plane just cut underneath us—close enough for me to see the pilot’s head and the name on the tail. No one else seems to have noticed. I wonder where it was heading. I wonder whether we were in the wrong place, or it was. I wonder how long it would take people to realize if we disappeared up here.

  I’m going home.

  Dawes

  IT WAS an extraordinary cloud, long and narrow and very straight, as if a stripe of color had been erased from the blue or a line of longitude, cutting perfectly from north to south, had been drawn onto the sky’s curve. William Dawes stared at it for a while, watching as it began to blur, as it faded to let the sky’s blue through more and more brightly until, in the end, there was only a sky so clear that he wondered if he had imagined it.

  He shook his head and came back to the industry around him, the last tweaks and tightenings of the frame for his roof, the last securing of his rounded timber walls. They seemed so sturdy, but the surgeon said ominously, “Just something for them to find ruined when they come looking for us and find our place abandoned like my namesake’s Roanoke.”

  Shading his eyes now, Dawes held on to optimism. Yes, the Governor had said, his observatory would be built—and yes, it would be built on the point Dawes coveted, the point he had called, with the Governor’s permission, Point Maskelyne, in honor of the Astronomer Royal.

  The little promontory of land was changed beyond measure, bits hewn out and leveled, and the grasses and coverings pulled back to show more and more gashes in the soil. Here were walls. Here was the break for a door. Here was a snug and solid space. And leaning against the trunk of one tree that rose up farther along the ridge was the great white square of canvas that would stretch across the frame for a roof, ready to be rolled back on its casters, ready to open his room to the stars. It was something, in this place, to watch the quickest pencil sketch become an edifice, and in only a few months—particularly when all the other surveys and designs he’d made for the Governor’s Albion had so far come to nothing.

  “Lieutenant Dawes, sir?” The voice came from down by the shore. “These rocks, sir, very flat—are they the kind of thing you want to fix the clock into place?” The man was kneeling on the ground, his hand smoothing two big rectangular slabs of stone like a merchant displaying a fine piece of silk.

  Dawes crouched down, almost tipped off balance by the sudden movement of the man spitting at a fly that brushed near his lips.

  “Fish?” said the man, and smelled his fingers. “These rocks smell like fish, sir.”

  “Maybe they were used for cooking,” suggested Dawes, running his own fingers across the rock’s grain, bringing them up to his nose. It was definitely fish. He corrected himself. “Maybe they are used for cooking,” he said. “We should leave them, I think.”

  The man shrugged; if it meant he was going to have to chip away at another couple of lumps of stone, he wasn’t happy. But as he stood up, his shrug froze, and his eyes narrowed. At the water’s edge stood two girls, their dark skin shiny and their eyes wide and clear. The man tensed, cursed, and spat again. There was no fly near his mouth this time, but a convict had been speared the previous week, and had died, and Dawes saw the reckoning in the man’s eyes; there was no use in pointing out that another native had been killed by the settlers as well.

  “Gentlemen,” said William Dawes, “we have some visitors.”

  “Probably them that went after a catch of our fish—probably cooked it down here right under your nose, sir.” The spitting man tucked a snarl around that short final word.

  “They’re starving,” said Dawes quietly. “They’re hungry, like us. Now please, we need to . . .” He took a step towards his visitors, and wished he knew some of their language, but his only options—wo-roo wo-roo, meaning “go away,” or kangaroo, for that strange hopping beast—seemed unhelpful. He tried “Good morning” and “Thank you for coming,” but the words hung unacknowledged in the air. The girls stood, still and quiet.

  If only he could convince them to accompany him up to the camp, to meet the Governor, to see the smallness of what they were doing. And of course it was small—a barren patch rubbed here and there, the line for a roadway nothing more than a paced-out suggestion between two points. If England summoned them home tomorrow, Dawes thought sometimes, the land would swallow any trace of them in no time, leaving only strange come-and-gone shadows in the stories these natives told. If he could tell these girls anything, he’d tell them this. “The size we look,” he’d say, “we’re nothing really, even with the noise and the mess we make. We’re incidental.”

  He took another step forward, patting his chest. “Mr. Dawes.” The girls patted their own chests and said, “Mr. Dawe,” swallowing the last letter. Dawes smiled. He tried “Welcome,” his hands spread wide in greeting, and again they repeated it. He tried “Good morning” again, with the same result.

  “What about a tune, sir?” called someone else, pushing in front of the man who’d cursed and spat. “They like a tune, I heard.” And he started to whistle. The girls smiled, pursed their lips, and began to whistle the tune in his wake, out by a bar or two, and out a note or two from each other, like some discordant round or a persistent echo. And then more of the men followed them into the beginning so that the point filled with whistles, chasing each other through phrase after phrase of the song “until the break of day.” A cheer, and a whoop, and Dawes was clapping too.

  Stepping towards them, he held out his hand—“Good morning,” he said again—and one of the girls, the younger, stepped forward, took his hand and held it as they stood, their eyes, their faces, their bodies so close together that each could see the breath in the other’s chest.

  “Good morning,” she repeated, and she held out her other hand. They made a cross now, like the makeshift stretcher that might carry a wounded man—left hand holding left hand, right hand holding right. He could feel her skin underneath his thumb, and it was as soft as his fragile rose petals had been long ago. It took all his concentration not to stroke the skin a little, to investigate its texture. A moment longer in the still silence, and then the whistling started up again and the girl, smiling, began to turn in a slow, careful circle. She was dancing with him, turning him around and around in time to the whistling.

  Dawes laughed—dancing at last, and where was Tench?—and held his visitor’s hands more tightly. Around they circled, around they went, all the men whistling and stamping, and the landscape spinning by in more and more of a blur as th
e song quickened, her steps followed it, and his steps followed hers. He heard the tune pull up grandly for its climax, and smiled. The water, the sky, the blocks of brick for his walls, the trees across the harbor; around they went in a loop. And as the whistling stopped at last, as the two dancers stepped back and broke their grasp, both stumbled a little.

  The girl regained her footing first, her feet moving easily through some extension of the dance. But William Dawes tripped on his stiff leg and fell, his weight hitting the shallow water of the shore with what sounded like the most disproportionate crash, almost thunderous. He looked around him, expecting to see the ripples, the bubbles, the white foam of some greater disturbance, but its blue surface was almost perfectly still.

  The girl was staring too. He heard her say a word that sounded like man, and he wondered if she was trying to say something about him, or perhaps about whatever had happened behind him somewhere on the water. But it was a rounder sound—“Mawn,” she said, “mawn,” flinching a little even as she offered him her hand and pulled him up from the ground. The whistling, the cheering, the clapping had stopped. What next? thought Dawes. What now? She let go of his hand.

  Her face frowned then, creasing itself first into a question, and then into something like fear or terror. She shivered, as if the warmth had gone out of the day, and Dawes realized that the sun had indeed disappeared behind some large, grey cloud blown in from nowhere. But she shook herself at the end of the shiver, as if she was shaking something out of her fingers, her hands, her wrists, and they stood facing each other, as awkward as any two people after a dance.

  “Mawn,” she said again, her right arm reaching towards the sky and its hand, fashioned like a beak, swooping down then and worrying at her throat, her neck. She pointed across the water as if she too had expected to see something else breaking through its surface. “Mawn,” she said. “Mawn, Mr. Dawes”—but it sounded like a question. She stepped back, her thumb rubbing the lines and creases on her palm as if he might have left some trace of himself on there. And then she patted her hands together and smiled, a wide, warm smile.

  Behind him, something unsettled moved among the men, and he wondered how to end this, to turn them back to their purpose. Then he saw her raise her hand and realized she was holding it out to shake his. “Mr. Dawes,” she said again, gripping his fingers and stepping in to pat at his chest. She gestured to her friend and they were gone, darting away over the rocks to the west.

  He looked up towards the sun, clear again, wondering what it was that had fallen from the sky and made such a noise in the still water. If this light could trick you, maybe the air played tricks with the sound. But he still had the sense that he’d just missed seeing something, might at least have caught a glimpse of it from the most peripheral corner of his eye.

  “Come on, gentlemen,” called Dawes. “Let’s get this up.” He scooped up the pale bundle of canvas like a week’s worth of the white tablecloths on which the officers still took their meals. And as he gave the word for it to be shaken wide and free, a puff of the harbor’s breeze arched his roof into a dome before it settled flat and taut across the struts of its frame.

  That new invention the French astronomer had extolled, the day they’d spent talking beside Botany Bay. That exciting new device—“Created by a Frenchman, of course, Monsieur Dawes”—a balloon, that could take you up into the air and across the sky—“So thrilling, Monsieur Dawes, to be above the clouds”—and he’d skated on through all the studies of electricity, and of optics, and of the atmosphere itself that such an invention might make possible. “All sorts of experiments with falling bodies, not to mention the balloon’s great use for topographers and cartographers, monsieur.” It was here, he had confessed, that he was thinking most of this New South Wales and of William Dawes in it. “The space so large, and your capacity to explore it so small. They will want surveys. They will want maps. They will want to know what is here, what is there, and what is in between. Think of all you could do, monsieur. Think of all you might see.” And the Frenchman had swept his arms out in a great flourish, upsetting a sheaf of papers. “Magnifique!”

  Yes, thought Dawes, as his balloon settled down into the roof it was supposed to be, magnificent. It would be something to be up above this place, to see so easily all the pokes and pinches of the harbor and its tributaries, to see all the way out to the hills that set their high blue line along the western horizon.

  But a balloon, of course, was folly. Even having an observatory was unlikely enough given that the vicar could only wonder aloud when someone might begin to talk of making him a church and the higher-ranking officers had started to quibble about the canvas they were living under. He’d do better, Dawes suspected, to wish for his balloon to make an impossible and unexpected appearance like one of the surgeon’s alligators, or the Botany Bay rose.

  Later, his instruments ashore and unpacked—one quadrant, three clocks, one sextant, one barometer, two thermometers, a protractor, and the precious pocket watch with sweeping second hand that had belonged to the Astronomer Royal himself—William Dawes felt completely arrived.

  Inside his snug new room, he let out a long breath. Waiting to get here, waiting to find a space for his observatory, waiting to raise its canvas. And now, here he was, the man put forward for this expedition for having several languages and a good knowledge of natural history. A man charged with supervising the skies. And a man with his own room built in the perfect spot for watching, for observing, for recording what might happen in this new part of the world.

  Settling himself outside, the dark harbor before him, the dark sky above, Dawes jostled his head, his body so it rested straight and firm. Eyes open, just a little more than usual, a little wider. This was his first night of watching, and he was back in the exact spot from which he’d watched the high-summer storm. Six months ago now, that cataclysmic arrival.

  The night was still, cold; it was winter, and the crispness of the air seemed to make the stars glisten and pulse a little more. Everything was where he now expected it to be: the Cross moving up to the center of the sky from the southwest, big bright Vega out to the northeast, and Jupiter almost directly overhead. How amazing it would be if his comet came on this first night. How amazing; how miraculous. He pulled a sheet of paper and a pencil towards him, ready for whatever might transpire. Here he was, the night and the sky and a column of calculations that said this much-anticipated comet might be near—start scanning, start looking.

  A star fell towards the east, and something shrieked from a tree nearby. Dawes’s right hand fiddled with the pencil; he scratched at the ground with his left. The pencil’s casing was smooth, the leaves his left hand found were smooth too, but neither were close to the velvet of holding the girl’s hand and dancing around. He could still see the shape her mouth had made as she smiled and took her leave; it was so long since he’d had anyone new to look at.

  Strange, the new stories that were surging around the camp. It wasn’t daytime alligators people believed they’d seen darting between their tents now; it was dark people, sneaking in at night, creeping between rows of sleeping bodies and—who knew?—stopping to stare, patiently and for a frighteningly long time, at those closed and unaware eyes. Now it wasn’t only Dawes who thought he heard their footsteps: his theory about those noises—about which he’d never spoken—had spread like contagion through the settlement. It was as if the sleepers feared their dreams might be sucked out and violated, as if some part of their soul had been made off with like a precious piece of clothing, a hoarded mouthful of food.

  The Governor had received the reports of these nocturnal visits, listened to them, noted them among his papers, and declared that they were only the effect of imagination.

  The sky above him still and settled, Dawes let his own thoughts wander a little.

  Dear Miss Rutter, I imagine you sitting with my father, taking a cup of tea in one of my mother’s cups. I imagine the rosy brown liquid being poured, its smell as y
ou bring it up to sip it—its heat, its sweetness—and the sound, like a bell, of your spoon set down against your saucer.

  Dear Miss Rutter, We often think of tea over here. There’s a local leaf that we pretend will do, but the color, the flavor, the scent: all are wrong. Snakes and lizards are regular dinner stuffs now. And more ships have gone; only three remain from the eleven that were our world, that could take us away as reliably as they brought us. The ships have discharged one cargo—our settlement—and sailed north to collect the next one—sweet Chinese tea—to carry back to you. And we are left here, brewing new leaves in kettles and trying not to notice the harbor’s emptiness.

  Dear Miss Rutter, In the sky above is a set of stars that might be a teapot. The surgeon says some of the women are coming close to mutiny for want of a cup of this beverage. A native girl came to my observatory and I danced a little with her, down on the shore, around and around. There was a great crash in the water at the end and she gave it a name, like “man” or “mawn,” although I have no idea what it might have been.

  Dear Miss Rutter, I cannot imagine with what words they talk about us, what words and names and stories.

  Arching his neck, Dawes tried to ease his shoulders, his arms, out of their cramped position. Overhead, the stars flickered and pulsed. They looked nothing like a teapot—he knew that—but it was a thing to think. Of course there was no letter to Miss Rutter either. Perhaps there was no longer even a Miss Rutter. There was no sign of his comet, even though some part of him had believed that it would appear on the first clear night he had an observatory. He would look up, and there it would be. Still, it was a glorious sky, and more familiar now too; he knew where to look for what, a whole piece of the world’s night etched onto his brain. This point too was familiar, and the dips and turns of the harbor’s coves. Things became what you expected to see so quickly, in the end.