The Body in the Clouds

by Ashley Hay

  Ted shook his head, watching the tiny ripples the breeze made across the harbor’s surface. “It’d be planes for me if I wanted to get through the air. Aren’t they amazing, the way they glide and turn?” They’d had Amy Johnson over the two halves of the bridge a week or so before; now someone was running a book on whether they’d get Charles Kingsford Smith back to the harbor before the arch was done. “It’d be interesting if you could remember what you saw when you were going down,” he said at last, to no one in particular, “but I guess you’d be so scared you wouldn’t remember a thing.” As he blinked, he saw the rush of movement, the flash of blue, from his dream.

  “Good job you’re on the barges then, mate,” said the bloke next to him, bringing him out of his reverie. “Out of the way of temptation—here’s another.” The diver, his arms held out from his steeled body like a crucifix, had only the tips of his toes holding him onto the deck. Tall, broad-shouldered, with thick curly hair, he looked like a frame frozen from a movie, and then he pushed himself back and away from the tower, legs and arms coming in together like a pincer before he straightened himself out to drop down, down, down like an arrow into the water. The surface of the pool was hardly disturbed. Joy clapped and whooped.

  “Wasn’t that Kelly?” she called. “Roy Kelly? That one you said dives some lunchtimes round the bridge? He’s got the grace of a bird.” Joe made a snorting noise. “But look, look, here we go.” Her boy, from the backyard—the one they were there to clap for—was climbing the ladder and creeping out to the end of the deck. “I hope he remembers to breathe,” said Joy quietly, watching his steps become more and more tentative the closer he came to the open air.

  He reached the end of the platform, his toes curling down around the deck as if to remind himself there really was nothing in front of him, and he stood—arms extended but facing out and away from the tower—for almost too long before he seemed to bounce forward, no turns, no twists, and plunge towards the pool.

  “Get yourself straight,” Ted heard Kelly call from among the audience, a thick towel around his neck. But the boy hit the water with his legs flailing and part of his back flat against its surface. The splash was enormous.

  “Eeooww,” said Joy, “maybe we shouldn’t tell him we saw that.” But there he was, dripping and proud in the middle of them in less than a minute, his eyes bright and his towel draped exactly like all the other men’s: one of the club now, one of the gang.

  “You’d love it,” he whispered to Joy. “Like flying, Mrs. Brown, like flying for a bit.”

  “All I’m saying,” said Joe, standing up and making a point of adjusting his sleeves and his hat to indicate that he, for one, was ready to go home, “is that if Bradman keeps making three hundred, the Poms won’t get a look-in. Ready, love?”

  There was another splash—a flat, slapping noise—as another inexpert diver hit the surface of the pool. Ted and Joy winced at the same time, both back on the bridge, in the middle of the night, when Joy’s shoe was lost to the wet darkness. The size of that sound, that splash.

  “Terrible,” called Kelly from the side, but he slapped the diver on the back and wished him better luck next time—“And get yourself straight, lad”—as the boy climbed out of the pool and made for his towel. The winter sun was dipping towards the horizon, and Joy linked one arm through Joe’s, one arm through Ted’s, called her last encouragement to the young man they’d come to see, and went out through what was left of the afternoon’s glow. She hummed Ted’s top-of-the-world song as she went, looking up towards the clouds as though more men might come diving from the sky.

  And trusting us to lead her home, thought Ted.

  From below, from some angles, it looked like a dance. Waiting for one of the foremen in the shadow of the southeastern pylon, Ted ruffled Jacko’s ears and wondered if he recognized the donor of one of his nicest chops. “A lucky mutt, aren’t you, mate?” Twirling the soft fur around in his fingers. It felt like velvet.

  On a clear day, the sun would be high: at midday, the bridge cast one straight line of shadow across the water, an exact transposition of where it sat. It was one arch now, its two arms eased together, despite everyone’s skepticism, across days and nights of work peppered with temperatures rising and falling, the steel expanding and contracting, and all sorts of other distractions. There was even a whale, surfacing beneath the metal and sending a great spray of water up into the air. “Thought we were in for a bath,” said Joe to Ted, who’d missed seeing the waterspout and couldn’t work out how to ask someone to describe it so he could see if it matched the nocturnal spray he and Joy had heard.

  And then at last, after the drama of an appropriately magnificent thunderstorm, the central joint had eased in, locked together on its pins, the bridge’s keystone. “Thank God she’s home,” said the man in charge of her construction.

  “Home and hosed, mate,” said Ted now to the dog, glancing up at the darkening sky that had faded the arch’s shadow to such a smudge on the water that he thought he might only be remembering what it should look like, and was seeing that instead.

  Almost two months since those halves met, and the roadway was now hanging delicately underneath, working its way back out from the center to the two original points north and south. “And a damn sight more exposed that feels than the stuff higher up ever did,” said Joe.

  “The sense you had, up the top,” Joe had said after a beer too many one night when Joy was inside and away from his anxiety, “that you had magnets in your feet, spending so long crawling across the thing, working your way along its steel, so you knew exactly where to stand, and how, and for how long, and how to step away and move.” He couldn’t have said how they’d all learned that, but they had. “We knew what we were missing when we went from working on the arch to hanging the deck, and we had no idea what was going on anymore.”

  He’d heard one of the engineers talking about it one day.

  “I’m used to the height,” Joe heard him say, “you grow with it. But when we started putting in the roadway, well, we only had a flimsy rope alongside, and the steel was only about twenty-two inches across—”

  “Which’d be right,” Joe confirmed. “It’d be about right.”

  “—and all studded with rivet heads. Now with the shimmer of light on the water giving it that lovely mackerel surface,” the man had said, “it was suddenly all very confusing. I tell you, I felt most insecure for a while and I reckon that was about the first time I felt the height.”

  “Reckon that’s what we all felt too,” Joe said, knocking the top off another bottle of lager. The arch was one thing: gentle and elegant, but sturdy somehow. This roadway was just sheer, suspended, midair folly. And everyone seemed more anxious about hanging on as the rivets popped in. “Like we knew we were asking for trouble,” Joe finished at last, shutting himself up with a long draught as Joy came out through the back door.

  “Maybe that’s because a road through the air makes less sense than a curve,” Ted had suggested quietly, smoothing the wrinkles along the arm of his jumper as if he could transfer the smoothness to the job for Joe and his mates. Looking up from the barge, the roadway did seem to swing and float, impossibly fine and delicate.

  “Like a rainbow,” said Joy, hearing the end of his sentence.

  “Like the rising sun on an army badge,” said Joe.

  “Like a big hill floating in the middle of the flatness,” said Ted, and Joe mussed his hair as if he was a kid—mussed his hair just as Ted now mussed Jacko’s ears.

  “What d’you reckon, mate?” Ted leaned down and looked at the steel from a height that was closer to the dog’s perspective. “What would a dog think it looked like?”

  The dog seemed to consider the question, its head on one side and its gaze as clearly focused as Ted’s was. Their eyes followed the movement of different pockets of the bridge’s workers, Ted’s fingers tapping the time they kept on Jacko’s back, and Jacko’s tail keeping his own time to the bridge’s rhythm. T
heir noses both caught the first smells of early lunches being cooked up here and there. Their skins, one smooth, one furry, felt the warmth of the spring sun behind the clouds—it was the end of October—and both bristled a little as that warmth disappeared behind a thicker, colder cloud.

  And in one of those moments, one of those blissfully quiet moments when everything fluttered down to silence, Ted felt the dog’s hackles stiffen under his hand, felt his own frame freeze to tautness.

  Someone was falling; someone was falling off the bridge. A mess of movement at the top as his arms flailed, as his body made a desperate, awkward half-somersault. Then a stiffening as the body set itself in a straight line, head through to pointing toes, and the line dropped down to meet the blue. The surface broke, and Ted was sure he could see the body moving, still moving down in the deep, as if there was a light following it, illuminating it somehow.

  Ted thought: That’s not where Joe’s working—who was it? Ted thought: Is he moving too quickly? Too slowly? Ted thought: How straight he’s stretched himself, and, Who else is watching? Who should I tell? Ted thought: His splash is going to reach right back up to the deck. Ted thought: That’s seven—and was surprised that he’d been keeping a tally somewhere of the men who’d died. Ted thought: The body’s gone down a long way to be under so long—and then the shouts and calls and the splashes of other men cut across his thoughts as they dived down from the barge he’d left.

  He glanced up at the sky, as if a rain of men might follow, glanced behind him towards the foreman, as if he might be shouting instructions, glanced out towards the harbor’s middle, towards the place the man had hit, and saw a ferry there, frozen, people pressed against the rail, looking, calling, and a flash of white like a signal as one woman’s gloved hands came up to her mouth in horror, again and again. But all he managed to say was the first part of “Oh”—just the very first part of its sound, like a complicated breath.

  And then there was the falling man, coming up again through the water, alive. Alive and waving.

  All around the site the men stared and cheered, and it seemed to Ted that he was looking straight across the neck of the harbor and into the fellow’s eyes.

  “It’s Kelly,” someone called, “it’s bloody Kelly.” And there he was, looking around as if for the towel that should be there after any dive. From the south side of the shore Ted was certain that Kelly’s eyes were bluer now, blue and clear and looking somewhere else altogether.

  Above, the clouds parted and the sun flared bright. The dog barked, the foreman called him to heel—and Ted, forgetting his errand, ran down to the shore and looked out towards the barge. He had to rejoin his crew.

  Dawes

  “TWO DAYS he’s been rowing himself back and forth,” said the surgeon. “Two days in a little boat from one side to the other.” He shaded his eyes from the sun, looked out to the boat as it headed north again, looked out to the other boat, rowing hard to intersect its path. Beside him, William Dawes shaded his own gaze, watched the wake left by the lone rower as it spread wide and blended back into the water’s surface. “One of your men too,” said the surgeon. “An officer from the Sirius. Or a lunatic from the Sirius now, I’m afraid. Though I’m surprised there aren’t more men reaching the end of their patience and their sanity, after all this time alone—not to mention the scurvy.” He sighed, rubbed his eyes. “Were you out on the hunt for him yourself, Lieutenant?”

  Dawes shook his head. “Hadn’t heard he was missing.” Down on the point, busy with his tasks, he was blissfully unaware of a lot of what was going on. The news of a fellow officer stealing a boat and rowing himself back and forth across the harbor nonstop hadn’t reached him at all; the news that the settlement had just eaten its last provisions of peas—six months before the Governor had anticipated they would run out—had. They’d been more than two years alone on the east coast of this continent; close to three years away from England itself.

  “At least he has the luxury of thinking he’s going somewhere, unlike the rest of us,” said the surgeon as the two boats collided and the several officers in one overpowered the lone third lieutenant in the other. “Like yourself, sir—on your way somewhere this morning?”

  It was a calm autumnal day, quiet and bright, and Dawes had been partway along the seven-mile walk between the settlement and its hopeful lookout on the harbor’s cliffs, when he’d come across John White and his lookout of a different kind.

  “A good clear day for looking out to the horizon,” he said to the surgeon, watching as the subdued officer was planted between two sets of constraining shoulders in their faded red coats.

  It was some view from the top of South Head, with the ocean spreading out and running all the way to Valparaiso. Dawes loved it, the size of it, the space of it compared to all the busy nips and turns and corners of the harbor’s shoreline. It was like the night sky, vast and available, although not for the appearance of stars or disappointing comets, but for the well-stocked ships that must—surely—appear soon.

  The tricks with which this settlement was trying to pull ships across the oceans: parties of men were sent regularly to Botany Bay to check for any arrivals and leave carefully painted signs that they might find—we’re here, we’re up the coast, sail north, turn left, and you’ll find us. A marker at the harbor’s heads, and letter after letter sent back by any available vessel describing precisely the location of the harbor’s opening, the trickiness of seeing it sometimes. A pyre, and a flagstaff, and then a watch had been set.

  Dan Southwell was the watch, out on his own with the weight of the settlement’s anticipation pressing in behind him. Eyes peeled, eyes staring, for fleets that didn’t come—“Never will,” he’d started saying to himself.

  At least Dawes, who’d walked out in all directions and had gone farther in most of them than any other white man, looking for rivers that didn’t exist, ways through impassable ravines and gorges, anything to get beyond this first plain, thought nothing of a short hike east to the continent’s cliffs to take in the breadth of the ocean and bring Southwell whatever passed for news that week. Leaving the surgeon, he pushed on through the bush—picturing himself from above, a single point of red moving along a track that cut the different greens of the bush—and paused as he reached the top of the last rise, breathing the salt of that wide, dark blue, calling his greetings and waving a loaf of bread.

  It was enough to earn him Dan Southwell’s rating as the kindest man in the colony.

  And it was a kind of heaven to deliver news, new conversation; to tell this eager young man about the troubled officer and the perpetual motion he’d set up across the harbor; about another ship ready to sail out with more messages for the world; about a convict’s clothes taken by a native as the convict hunted stingrays—and about the stars he was plotting, the weather he was recording, the words he was learning. Southwell had seen the stacks of paper growing in Dawes’s room. He’d seen the books, the tables, the almanacs, the instruments with which Dawes was trying to mark out and understand this place, and he liked that every so often he had some private insight into them. It was like watching the magic of a map being copied with a pantograph, one nib tracing over the completed image, while its copy flowed out from the other, inked nib. This place was being written into being, “right before my eyes,” Dan Southwell had said one afternoon as another copy of the harbor’s dents and curves—the observatory facing the dark north shore—spilled out across a sheet of paper under Dawes’s steady hand.

  “And they brought him back to shore, in the end?” Southwell asked now, referring to the renegade rower, breaking off a chunk of the loaf and holding it out to Dawes with a mug of sweet-leaf tea.

  “They were trying,” said Dawes, sitting down with his breakfast. He suspected there’d been more concern about getting the boat back than recovering the man.

  Chewing on the bread, he gazed out towards the west and the one high line of blue hills that sat there, solid and defensive. Camarthen, they
’d been called, nodding to another part of Wales. The only thing anyone knew to exist beyond that was the King’s arbitrary line—cutting straight down one hundred and thirty-five degrees to mark the western limit of this colony’s claim, some nine hundred miles away—and William Dampier’s coast, hundreds and hundreds of miles beyond that again to the west.

  “How far that way have you gone now, Lieutenant Dawes?” Southwell asked him, swinging around to look past the little settlement himself, past the silver line of the river as it disappeared upstream. “Will you ever get through those ranges, sir? Will you see what’s on the other side?”

  “We’ll get through sooner or later,” said Dawes. “And who knows what we’ll find on the other side?” It was all jags and peaks and impenetrable trees, as far as he’d been able to go—the one place where even as good a reckoner as himself had struggled to keep count of his steps, keep track of where he was, and where he’d found it impossible to drag his gaze up into the air and imagine the land laid out beneath him. Fifty-four miles from the coast they’d managed in all the times they’d walked out; hardly far enough to change your view of anything.

  “You know, Mr. Southwell, I might start studying the clouds instead of the weather they make: another new thing to look at.” He lay back on the ground, taking in the sky.

  “There are some mornings I think I see sails in the clouds,” Dan Southwell confessed. Too many times his imagination had carved their white shapes into tautly rigged canvas, sure that ships were coming—slowly, so slowly—closer to the land, and then watching as they spread and dissipated against the sky.

  “Another job for my balloon: looking for your ships—and ships must be more reliable than comets, unless we are truly gone out of the world and forgotten,” said Dawes. His head was arched back so that his gaze took in only the blue, the white, the brightness of the morning sun. Land, people—all trace of them were gone.