The Body in the Clouds

by Ashley Hay

  Later, called to account for his time with his young pupil, to provide information for one of the long dispatches prepared over months for whenever a ship might sail back into the world with it, Dawes watched as the Governor’s secretary curved his hand in a sweeping arc across a clean sheet of paper. All clear, said the gesture, all ready.

  What might go into that letter? wondered Dawes, knowing he still had little to report of the philosophies and beliefs that the Governor wanted to pour forth like confectionery into the cupped hands of London’s gentlemen—let alone a comet. Tell them about the things we see and the things we think we see, he thought. Tell them what it is to live with no news from England, from anywhere. Tell them of our strange landscape of poxed bodies washing ashore, and that we’ve put on a play, with a length of colored paper and a handful of candles in a hut. Tell them how we loved it, how we loved pretending. For all of which, he knew he was one of the few officers who’d asked to stay longer if he could—there was still so much to see, and his certainty about Miss Rutter was fading as inexorably as an often-caressed picture in a locket.

  “Lieutenant Dawes?”

  “Sir. I wonder if it might be appropriate to say that we begin to make some way with the language—there are several lists of words coming together now between us.”

  The Governor’s scribe dipped his pen into ink and turned to his master, who said, “We should perhaps wait until we can send the lists themselves. What else?”

  “There are the stars, sir.”

  “But still not that comet of yours, Dawes?” It was getting to be something of a joke.

  “I mean the natives’ knowledge of stars, sir. If they follow prey through the forests, it seems they use the skies to find their way home. They have names for the Clouds of Magellan that we have taken down already. I am sure no one would mind giving up the words from their lists ahead of their own publications, if it was for some official dispatch.”

  The Governor slapped at an insect that had perched on his leg. The impossibility of finding things to say when all you really wanted to post home was another long shopping list. Dawes’s comet would have been something—if it had ever turned up. The natives’ stars were perhaps less important than some pleasing conversion of their souls. But one must send information—always information. He turned to the man with the ink, the pen, the pause. “And have you put down that the natives are harmless, that they avoid those parts we most frequent, that they always retire at the sight of two or three people armed?” The secretary flicked back through his pages, nodding along.

  If he stood quietly, William Dawes could still make all the trappings and incisions of this frail little place disappear. The great gashes left where trees had been worried out and pits dug for rocks, for clay. The tents and huts that would only need a single puff of imagination to wipe them away, and the settlement itself, straggling at spots from Sydney Cove and out along the river now to pretty-sounding Rose Hill and beyond. Even the brick walls of the Governor’s new house, with its luxurious stairs, its shimmering glass window panes that threw small new rainbows at certain times of the day, its pictures of the royal family brought around the world to impress whoever was found here: it could all be pulled at one end so it unraveled like a fraying cloth.

  On one expedition, walking farther west than any Englishman had yet walked in this place and returned, Dawes had looked back across the fifty-odd miles to the coast, towards the settlement, and almost relished its invisibility. We may all perish, and all evidence of us would be swept from the face of this earth in no time. Like Roanoke. Even here in the Governor’s rooms, he could finish that sweeping away in an instant. It was a glorious daydream, every little piece of change and settlement that they’d made—and made so hard—winding back and back until the harbor was as quiet and as empty as when they’d first come.

  “Dawes! Honestly, here I am looking for your opinion, sir, and I find you in the clouds. Now, what knowledge of their beliefs have you managed to extract from this child you are talking to? What does she know now of ours?”

  Dawes straightened to attention again. “I’m sorry, sir. I’ve told her many things about our church, and our worship, but it’s mostly laughter that she gives back.” Which, he thought, was not altogether a bad trade.

  “Laughter.” The Governor let out a long, slow breath.

  “. . . ‘graves comma but the body in the’—I think we have something here already?” said the secretary, resting his pen and going on in the formal voice of recitation: “ ‘And the question has been asked, do the white men go thither?’ ”

  “All right,” said the Governor. “So that’s all for now—other than that we are here, we are waiting, that we expect at least five hundred men to be sent for the garrison, and that we have had nothing of the world since 1787. I have gravestones for enough of us already, with the parson still waiting for a church. But if I push anyone to build it at the moment I’m afraid there’ll only be the funerals of the builders for him to officiate over. And still I have officers who can’t row around the harbor without losing their bearings. Even the Judge-Advocate says he has moments of panic wondering where he is.” He was talking into a corner of the room, as if Dawes had already gone, and his finger hovered over the point that marked South Head on his map, where men were now posted to scan the horizon for the supply ships the settlement so desperately needed to appear.

  Three times he tapped it, as if performing some incantation, before he looked up and said to his lieutenant, “I think that’s all?”

  And as Dawes made his salute and stepped outside, he heard the Governor’s voice—“Read the last back to me”—and the slug of something pouring into a mug. It would be months before the letter could be sent, months before they’d send their next messages back into the world. “Just the section on future state, would you?”

  The sound of the secretary clearing his throat rattled and rasped against the air: “ ‘That they have some idea of a future state appears from their belief in spirits, and from saying that the bones of the dead are in the graves, but the body in the clouds: and the question has been asked, do the white men go thither?’ ”

  Do the white men go thither, thought Dawes, stepping onto one of those presumptuous streets he’d marked out and turning towards the laughing girl and whatever she wanted to tell him today. The body in the clouds.

  Walking on, he crossed Sydney’s precious stream on its flimsy bridge of logs, a structure celebrated as so civilized and settled when it had been installed more than a year before. The stream was close to exhausted. He looked along the shoreline towards his point, his white-roofed building in the distance, and there it was again, that sense of anticipation, of something about to happen, right here and right now—if he could only imagine what. The bodies in the clouds, he thought, a little flippantly. Maybe sometimes they slip and fall. He shrugged to himself, and ducked inside, sitting down opposite Boorong.

  “Mr. Dawes,” said the girl, smiling. Smiling back, he took up a pencil, held it at the height of his eyes for a moment, then let it go so it fell to the ground with a clatter.

  “To drop,” he said carefully. “To fall.” He repeated the action.

  The girl nodded. “Yini,” she said, tracing the line of the fall with her finger. “Yiningmadyémi.”

  Dawes repeated the words, transcribing them as best he could into his notebook. “Yiningmadyémi?”

  “Yiningmadyémi,” said the girl. And she pointed at Dawes. “Muramadyémi,” she said. You let it fall.

  Taking a deep breath, William Dawes bent forward and scraped the heavy table across the rough floor. The room filled with a sharp sound, harsh and jarring, and opposite him Boorong tensed and flinched.

  “Your mawn,” he said slowly, replicating her gesture of beaked fingers swooping down towards a throat, and she nodded. He pointed outside to the sunshine. “It comes now?”

  She nodded, and then shrugged, closing her eyes and tilting her head. “Nangadiou,” she
said, making a dainty snore.

  “I see,” he said. “It comes at night too, when we sleep. And it comes with a strange noise.” He frowned. “Like a bird?” He pointed to a parrot, its colors looping against the blue outside, and she shook her head.

  “Goo-me-dah,” she said, shivering a little.

  “A ghost?” he asked. “A spirit?” Wondering what sound or action he could make to clarify this. “Goo-me-dah,” he repeated at last, sounding out its syllables. A ghost that comes day or night. He paused, then stood quickly, gesturing for her to follow, and together they climbed the hill towards the British graveyard. “Spirits from the dead?” he asked, pointing to one of the graves. “Mawn?”

  She looked around, anxious and unsure. Yes. And then she reached over, squeezing the flesh on his forearm and pointing up, squeezing the bone in his index finger, pointing down.

  “Yes,” he said, “yes: the bones in the ground and the bodies in the clouds—perhaps like our resurrection.” He stared at the rows of graves. Early on, when their burials were newer, fresher, some of these graves had been disturbed, opened twice, three times. “Dogs,” the Governor had said, ordering their repair. But perhaps, thought Dawes now, his mind stumbling like it was taking quick, impulsive footsteps, perhaps there was something literal about the passage of the bodies to the clouds—here in my place where anything could happen. He clicked his jaw, his ears filling with a roar of air: you could think the strangest things.

  “The bones in the ground and the bodies in the clouds,” he repeated at last, turning back to Boorong. “And the spirits . . .” he began, his hand rising in unison with hers, the two of them swooping down. And they stood together under the day’s sun, watching each other in a silence as thick as ocean fog.

  Ted

  THERE WERE moments sometimes in the middle of a shift, the middle of a day, when for all the noise and machinery and movement around him, Ted was sure he heard the site fall silent. His mum would have said he’d just fallen into a daydream—at least once a week someone had to yell to break his trance: “Oi, Teddy, here.” But Ted thought it was nicer to imagine that some kind of synchronized lull, some moment of harmony had come onto this big and busy thing and made a pause, a breath, a nothingness. He never noticed the exact moment the quiet began, only when it was there, thick, and then, a moment later, all the usual sounds crashing in again.

  He wondered if the bridge’s retinue of artists noticed it, tucked around the site with their pencils, their paints, their cameras; he noticed them more now, after his conversation with the lady under her black umbrella. He’d even taken some of the photographers out on the barge and seen them hoisted up into the creeping structure of the bridge above. He didn’t mind the ease with which other people went up into the air so much, now that he’d stood up in that air himself, but he still made the occasional grumble to mask the excursion—heard Joy doing it too.

  He wondered if the passengers on the ferries noticed these random patches of quiet as they looked up to see how much further the enterprise was reaching each day. He wondered if the people who lived close to the bridge noticed it—the people tucked into those houses left when great swathes of space were cleared to accommodate its construction, or the children at their desks in the school nearby. Such a racket most of the time; did anyone ever manage to dim it down to background noise? Or was that what his mind had managed to do, when the world fell into silence, just once in a while, and unpredictably?

  On some of those nights in the backyard at Joe and Joy’s it had been on the tip of his tongue to ask if anyone else registered these stillnesses—but that would be like saying something about the beauty of the thing; the kind of sentence that got stuck somewhere, not quite said. Although, “It’s even more beautiful once you’ve been up there at night, don’t you think?” Joy had whispered once under a wash of gripes and boasts and explanations in the yard. It felt dangerous to leave the words hanging in the air.

  Then George, the Russian, had said something about his months walking east to the Sea of Japan, keeping warm in winter, about watching the different shapes of snowflakes come down and settle on the pure, clear, whole white, and the rest of the group sucked at their beer bottles and brought up the football match that would be played on the weekend. He heard, thought Ted, he heard what we said—and he said the closest thing he could say to beauty.

  It felt different too walking out now after tea to look at the stars, not least because Joe had given up on his astronomy—“Too many nights staring up for no reason,” he said—and now stayed at home to have the teapot ready for them. “Get your shooting stars? Any sign of my comet?” he’d ask as they came through the gate.

  It only magnified Ted’s sense that they were walking around in a secret.

  “You’re quiet now,” said Joy one night—the “now’ a faint indication that she’d noticed something had changed since their climb. “Too cold? Or are you tired?” They were insignificant reasons for silence, back in the context of the here and the now.

  Stopping a block or two before the usual loop of their circuit, Ted shook his head. “It’s not that,” he said. “I don’t know. It’s just that I feel like I’m still waiting for something to happen—and I thought when we climbed . . .”

  “I know,” she said quietly. “I thought it would be more too; I thought it would make me feel more.” But as he opened his mouth to ask her what she meant, she was already turning for home. “It is colder tonight, though. I could do with an early cuppa.”

  And there was the kettle, steaming and ready, even though they were at least a quarter of an hour early—as if Joe could always see where they were, and knew exactly when they’d come through the gate.

  “Nothing like tea on a cold night,” he said. And Ted believed, at that moment, that there must be nothing in the world of Joy that her husband didn’t see, didn’t hear, didn’t know about.

  It would be something, he thought, to have someone who took care of you like that.

  As the winter thickened and the bridge’s halves inched closer to each other, Ted’s mum still worried about the math for that magical moment of meeting being done half a world away in London by men who’d never seen where the big frame would sit, let alone how its two sections were supposed to join up. She even took the train to the city to see it herself, as if that might somehow make up for the absence of the mathematicians (“Engineers, Mum,” Ted corrected her), and pronounced it unlikely that the south side and north side would connect. “When you look at it from this angle, you can see just how squiffy that north side is, can’t you? Can’t you?”

  “I do think this harbor’s capable of a miracle or two, Mrs. Parker,” said Joy. It was a Saturday, and the three of them had taken their skeptical visitor to the place from where, Joe declared, it looked most like it would line up. “That group over on the north side waiting for the Second Coming—they believed their savior was going to walk right in through the heads.”

  “I think you’re pulling my leg about that too, dear,” said Mrs. Parker, taking another of Joy’s sandwiches.

  “No, no, Mrs. Parker, whenever I went—”

  “Have a bit of cake, Mrs. Parker,” said Joe over the top of Joy’s enthusiasm. And he cut a hefty slice of sponge.

  “It’s better than a birthday,” said Mrs. Parker, looking around for her tea.

  Later, on the platform, as the train’s engine puffed great clouds of steam around itself, she brushed at Ted’s arm and said again how nice it was he’d fallen on his feet with his landlords. “And I guess we must just hope that they take as long as they can to get those pieces joined together and finish the thing off, because who knows where you’ll find work next, Ted, or how long that’ll take you. And you could do worse than find yourself a nice girl like that,” nodding down to the square of sponge Joy had given her for the trip home. “You should see if she’s got a sister.” She winked as Ted turned scarlet.

  She squeezed his hand—an uncharacteristic closeness—and told
him to be careful on the water. He could still feel the warmth her fingers had pressed into his palm as the train pulled away and took the tracks’ first curve.

  Heading home—Joe and Joy with held hands swinging between them, and Ted on the curbside of the pavement like a canoe’s outrigger—they stopped at a pool that abutted the harbor’s water where a group of the bridge men were gathered. It was a diving contest, a handful of them scaling the high towers, and standing poised, rigid, for a second, a breath, before they tumbled and turned and straightened and disappeared into the water below. Russian George was there, his new wife whispering about the midnight trip they’d made to explore the bridge, and two or three of the other blokes who drank beer in the backyard.

  It made no sense to Joe, diving: that a man who spent his working day gripping on for dear life should pass some of his weekend—“Voluntarily, mate, quite voluntarily”—falling off something.

  “Diving off,” Joy would correct him—and Joe would wave his arms about, saying, “Diving, falling, dropping: makes no difference what you call it, love. It comes down to the same thing.” But Joy had promised one of the boys they’d be there to watch him. “He’s excited,” she’d said, “and it must be exciting to do this, don’t you think? Fly through the air?” And here they were, Joe distracting himself with the view out past the pool to the harbor’s blue, and a loud conversation about the brilliance of Bradman’s batting during the recent English Tests.

  “This bloke coming down now went off the top of a crane’s rig at one of the docks,” someone leaned over and said to Joy. Then, “What do you reckon, Teddy—would you be up for it?”