The Body in the Clouds

by Ashley Hay

  Dan Southwell had heard about the balloon, and in those long shipless days he confessed to Dawes he’d dreamed about making one himself—the lieutenant hadn’t made it sound difficult—and floating over the ocean to find their missing fleet, their missing supplies. Surely that thought must have occurred to the lieutenant too, wondered Southwell, no matter that he always couched his imaginary voyages in terms of mapping, and weather, and other experiments. “But then what’s up there, sir—the bodies, you said, from who knows how long . . .”

  Listening to the silence of Dan Southwell’s hesitation, William Dawes watched a small cluster of clouds drift and adjust while a length of cloth flapped lazily on a line. It billowed to round fullness just as Dawes turned his head down from the sky, so that he thought he saw his balloon again. And he sat up, laughing: the promise of a bit of a breeze, a bit of fabric. How high would he need to go, and how far, to find his comet? Maybe all the way back to Greenwich, where he could land on the lawn and discuss those clearly erroneous calculations with the Astronomer Royal. He could sample some clouds on the way, chart the flight of some birds. He could check the accuracy of any maps against any land below. He could see about those bodies too—maybe that’s where the surgeon’s mysterious hand and arm had come from, dropped down from the sky in some disruptive storm right back at the beginning of their time in this place. I’ve been gone too long, he thought sharply. I need to get home.

  He was wondering what he might have said aloud when Southwell said again, “But those bodies, Lieutenant Dawes? And those fearsome ghosts that swoop down for your throat? Wouldn’t you be scared of all that, up in your balloon?” Sometimes, when they spoke, Southwell saw that his friend’s attention had slipped away somewhere, somewhere else. Once, he’d asked him about it, and Dawes had laughed and said he was just up in the air, checking the dent that this south head made between the ocean and the harbor. Now, the birds fell silent and the air felt heavy—like the roar in your ears when you yawn, thought Dawes, his mind still far from his friend.

  “Lieutenant Dawes, sir,” Southwell persisted. “Wouldn’t you be scared?”

  “The things we believe might be just as frightening to them,” said Dawes. “We have our own resurrection. And they have very beautiful words for other things—for dreams, for make-believe, for flying through the air like a bird, like a spear: nángami, búnama, wómera. Their word for clusters of falling stars is beautiful—molu-molu—although they fear shooting stars as terrible portents. And book, they have a word for book now too.” The conversations, the lists of words and meanings each knew from the other, continued to grow.

  “For book?”

  “For book, for telescope, for compass, for reading glasses, for window, for biscuit, for jacket,” said Dawes. “For so many things they may never have thought to see. And for us—they call us after somewhere a great way off: berewal. They call us be-re-wal-gal. We make our way, naming plants and birds and spiders. And the natives walk around us, and name us and our possessions, make it all part of the things they can talk about.”

  He’d felt better once he knew that the black people had given the white people their own name, their own classification. He couldn’t have put it entirely into words, but he’d had moments of fear, before he knew they were tagged as be-re-wal-gal, when he’d wondered if the soldiers, the settlement, this little spike of empire might all have been a product of some native imagination, some nighttime dream, like his conversations with the now-faded Judith Rutter. That they were be-re-wal-gal made them real, and really here, and for William Dawes at least there came with that a surprising kind of certainty, or comfort.

  Turning his head again, he took in the wide blue sweep of the ocean, and sat up a little to watch the sunlight bouncing on the facets and surfaces of the water. There was something transfixing, tranquil about it, and while he listened to Dan Southwell talking—about a couple of whales that had passed, heading north, the possible return of the aurora, the shine of a moonrise he’d seen coming up out of the ocean the previous week—he stood, rubbed vaguely at his throat, and felt himself stepping closer and closer to the light on the water, closer and closer to the edge of the high sandstone cliff where the country began.

  It was his name, and shouted, that made him turn back towards the land; the other man must have seen some bird or beetle he wanted to know about, and Dawes felt his face compose itself into what he hoped was a learned look. But it was what was behind his friend, away to the west—it must be in the harbor just down from his own rooms—that caught Dawes’s eye: a great spout of water surging up, up a hundred feet into the air, maybe more. He took a step back to steady himself and felt his good leg plant itself so firmly that the land seemed to shudder and tilt—as if he was just newly ashore again and still coping with his sea legs. He took a second step to right his frail, stiff leg and the world tilted again: the shocking gasp, the shocking rush of air when a step is taken and there’s nothing in the space where the foot had hoped to stand.

  Once before, on that long hike as far west as anyone had gone, he’d bent his head so intently to the task of counting his paces, tracking his own location, that he’d lagged behind and taken one step too far and felt that same sickening lurch of unexpectedly empty air. If I tripped here; if I fell here; if I died here—he’d paused, his hands grabbing at a sapling so that he righted himself too quickly and almost toppled in the other direction. If I died here half the settlement would think I was just the latest to try to walk home. And he’d sat breathing deep and holding on to the number of paces he’d reached so that he could stand up, walk on as if nothing had happened, and catch up with the rest of the party.

  This time, when his hands reached for some useful sapling, some well-placed branch, he found he was scrabbling with grass and grazing the stubble of sandstone. Opening his mouth to call to Southwell, he saw his friend’s face working in rapid grimaces and already too far above him. The sea surged and roiled against the cliff below. Not this, he thought, not here. And, I want to see what made that tower of water. His right hand got some purchase on a low shrub; his left foot twisted its toes between two close rock ledges.

  “Can you throw something down?” he called up the cliff, and Southwell was back in an instant with the great white sheet that his mind had turned into a balloon not five minutes before. Dawes had an image of himself grabbing at its four corners, its dome swelling with wind and drifting him up, up, and gently up to the top of the cliff. Except, of course, that he’d keep going, keep hanging on, and head west, fast along the harbor to reach the last fine mist of that waterspout.

  One heave, another, and he was back on the bluff, his hands stinging and another rip in his uniform’s fabric.

  “Thank you.” He nodded to Dan Southwell, made formal by awkwardness.

  The young man nodded back carefully. “You’re all right, sir? Your foot? Your leg?”

  Patting his shin with more heartiness than he felt, Dawes smiled. “All fine, all here,” swinging back around to look at a harbor that lay clear and calm again under the sun. “When you called to me,” he said at last, “what was it you wanted to draw my attention to?”

  “Your attention, Lieutenant Dawes?” Southwell frowned. “I only called when you began to stumble; your feet were falling so fast towards the cliff, and I called to try to turn you from the steps you were taking.”

  “So there was nothing—” He paused. “You didn’t see—” Another silence, and he eased himself carefully back down onto the ground, the solidity of the flagstaff against his back.

  Southwell seated himself opposite, studying the lieutenant’s face. Dawes’s eyes had shifted to that middle distance again, and he began to speak, slowly and quietly, as if he was feeling his way through sentences for which he didn’t quite know the words.

  “I think sometimes,” he said, “that I spend so much time drawing this place from above, or staring up into its heavens, that some part of me has become stuck up there permanently, trying to put all i
ts pieces together, and I lose myself on the land. That’s all this is. That’s all this is.” And as he laughed, he heard Southwell joining in, kind and friendly.

  “Well, you gave me a scare, sir, and I’m glad I could bring your attention back to your feet and the ground.” From any other man but Dawes, such talk would sound alarming. But Southwell smiled again at the lieutenant, and proposed another helping of breakfast before he began his walk back along the ridges to the observatory. And although Dawes nodded, and smiled, and took the dish with some relish, he sat gazing, between mouthfuls, back towards the settlement, and forgetting for minutes at a time to chew, to swallow, perhaps even to breathe.

  The way his eyes glistened, Dan Southwell said later, they looked almost luminous.

  “Still waiting?” Watkin Tench asked that night as he sat with Dawes outside the observatory’s quiet space. And until he jerked his thumb up towards the comet-less night sky, Dawes wondered how his friend knew of his midday apparition.

  “No,” he said, “I don’t think so. There must have been something wrong with the calculations—nothing I brought from London made sense of it. And of course I’m still waiting for the papers the French astronomer promised me—caught up on our missing ships, I suppose.” He drained his mug, hoped the comment sounded wry rather than desperate, and rubbed the map his thumbnail had etched on his trousers back into smoothness. “I expect it’s up there somewhere,” he said, making a show of standing to end the night, “or something is. But perhaps I’m not the man to see it.”

  And as he walked towards his room, his blanket, his tiredness made his feet feel impossibly light, as though he really was rising up off the ground, up towards the vantage point of all those maps. Under what word could he describe what he thought he’d seen for his dictionary, he wondered as he settled to sleep—water or spirit? Badu or mawn?

  Perhaps he should row out across the water tomorrow to see if that splash had left any trace of itself or of its cause. How many passes of the harbor would he need to make, he wondered, before he found any evidence of whatever it had been—or before the surgeon came to haul him quietly home.

  Dan

  AS THE image of thick white mist swirled and faded, Dan’s head lolled against the window, hovering just above sleep. He had some sense of his breathing, in and out, slow and gentle, like the rocking of a little boat on shallow water. Now, behind his closed eyes, he was seven again and sitting cross-legged with Charlie on her back stairs, her grandfather above them on the veranda in an old cane chair. It was summer—he could hear cicadas, and he could smell the wet earth in the veggie patches where Gramps had poured buckets of water onto lettuces, tomatoes, radishes. Charlie was picking at a scab on her knee—Dan remembered too, or knew in some part of his memory, that she’d fallen over on the roller skates she’d been given for Christmas—as she wheedled a story out of her grandfather: “Just one more, just one more before bedtime.” It was evening, and the light was starting to fade, draining the color out of the end of the day like some shadowy bleaching so that anything real, anything in the landscape, looked like it was only an idea, a monochrome suggestion.

  “When I first knew your grandmother,” Charlie’s grandfather began, “I wanted to fly. The way those planes used to loop and curve over the harbor, as if they were writing a message in the clouds—if you could be quick enough about reading it. Took me years to find out about Icarus; all that time I could’ve been collecting cockatoo feathers and getting my wings together. Because I reckon if Icarus could get a good enough updraught from a tower in some old palace, I’d’ve been right as rain and up through the clouds if I’d scampered up to the top of the bridge and launched myself off there. And we were still putting it together then—I could’ve climbed up bold as brass and gone off the top of it.

  “Anyhow, you both know about Icarus—I’ve told you about him before. And a mate of mine, in the next war, got himself to Greece and saw the place where Icarus flew. A strange spot, he said, built in a valley but raised up somehow, so you could always feel a breeze passing; probably Icarus thought you could trust it to be there when you needed it. He wrote me a letter about it, this mate of mine—silly bugger got himself shot before he could get back home, but it meant a lot to me that he’d gone after the flying boy for me and checked out how he’d done it. A frame of feathers, a high enough spot, and a great big leap into the blue with all your trust and confidence in it. And don’t get too close to the sun. That’s all—you just had to step off, you know, you just had to step off.”

  “Like the day you went off the bridge, Gramps.” There was a plea, small and singsong, in Charlie’s little voice, as if she might trick an extra story out of her grandfather.

  “That was a day—late spring, and the water so blue, and that dog barking over on the south. They say I pirouetted like a dancer in the air before I went down through the blue. And all those other blokes diving in and cheering and shouting. Seventh to go in, kids, and the first to survive.” Leaning forward to ruffle Charlie’s hair. “That did me for flying for a while, of course.”

  In the dream, the backyard, the veggie beds with their sweet wet soil, fell away to the harbor’s blue, and Dan felt himself falling suddenly, falling down through the air towards the water, a man’s voice yelling from below, “Get yourself straight, get yourself straight, lad.”

  He felt something at his belt—a spanner—felt his hand moving up to free it, and felt himself brace for the change of his own weight as the spanner dropped towards the harbor below, the harbor that was rushing up to meet him.

  “Tuck your head in, tuck your head in,” but instead he turned and twisted, looked up and there was the whole bridge—the slabs of deck that had already been hung, the arch that had met so perfectly in the middle, the pylons, the rivets, the struts, the girders—the whole thing unraveling as if it were a half-knitted pullover detached from its needles. Faster and faster until there was just one first section of arch reaching out from Dawes Point, and then that was gone too, and the old houses were popping up like parsley plants, a ferry terminal rearing up on the north shore opposite.

  The whole city was winding itself back. The houses went again. The wharves at the quay went. The tram terminus went. The pale sandstone of the customs house went and all the stores around the shoreline. Trees were shooting up as if they were just righting themselves after an accidental stumble, and straight below, a man in a red coat rowed out from Dawes Point in a tiny boat. There were tents, ships with huge white squares of sails rolled into their beams, and masts as tall as tree trunks. And behind that, a great wide silence, the occasional shout, the occasional gunshot, the occasional squeak of a pig or a dog. The water around the boat was the most beautiful sunlit blue.

  The man in the red coat looked up, reaching his hand towards Dan as he floated—it seemed—in the air. But instead of pulling Dan down he seemed to rise up to meet him, and then they were both inside some bubble of blue, the bridge was above them again and an ambulance siren—a sharp, modern sound—was cutting over everything, out of place.

  Dan turned, a swimmer’s tumble turn, although the blueness seemed like air, not water. Straightening, he saw the man in the red coat float gently back to the ground, saw him pointing up, higher. Twisting his head, Dan saw a man with a short grey coat flapping out around him like a cape, like wings, falling towards him, towards him, through him, and away. There were rows of men on the side of the harbor, lined up to the top of the arch where they stood, like weekend divers, waiting their turn for pikes and plummets down into the harbor. But the next movement he saw was the bright tail of a shooting star, not a man, down to the east, down towards the horizon and the ocean. It sizzled and spat a little as it hit the surface, and the silence around it rang—the precise bell of the seat-belt sign being turned off.

  Dan’s head hit the window and his eyes jerked open.

  “Something to drink, sir?” The flight attendant was leaning over Cynthia, a packet of pretzels on her outstretched han
d. Dan worked his mouth open and shut, bewildered, parched, and aching.

  “A gin—no, some tonic, thanks. And a lemonade . . . and a water.”

  Cynthia passed the miniature cans and bottles across to him. He’d never felt so thirsty.

  “Bad dream?” She was holding out her own bag of pretzels. “I don’t like these, if you want them.”

  “Thanks,” said Dan, ignoring the dream, ignoring her question. He wasn’t sure how he would have answered anyway. All he could think of was the air above the water, and the thickness of the blue. At least he’d found Gramps’s face again, no matter how disorienting it was to dream of falling through one of the old man’s stories. Perhaps it was an appropriate homecoming, he thought, being scooped back into the stories he’d thought he was flying away from all those years ago.

  He clicked open the can of tonic, nodding towards its fizz, its metallic smell. “This’ll be good,” he said, raising the glass towards Cynthia. She raised her glass in return, and opened her book again.

  Surrounded by white noise, his mouth full of sweat, round bubbles, Dan stared at his watch awhile. His moment of panic about Charlie’s grandfather had drained out a little through the dream, through the drink. Now he supposed it was all just due to tiredness, and dislocation, and some strange glitch from making this long and long-overdue trip home.

  He thought about Caro’s ultimatum—the here or there that she’d put so politely. Everyone pretended the world had shriveled to the size of a pea with planes and phones and emails and the rest of it, but you still had to choose if you were going to be here, or there. And the distance between the two choices was irrelevant—no one had yet worked out how to be in two places at the one time.

  Caro would have had an answer for that: he could hear her voice over the buzz of the plane. “What’s the thing where time happens all at once, past, present, and future mashed together? Maybe that would help . . .” He could hear her laugh. No, he needed the eighteenth century, when time and space were different things and people accepted distances, delays. Maybe there’d been a measure of grace in that.