The Body in the Clouds

by Ashley Hay

  “Another layer,” said Joy that night. “Something for the next lot to dig up, like Joe dug up that old brick.” And it was funny, thought Ted, that the past could be set up for the future as quickly, as easily as that.

  Joe leaned back, blocking a shape in the air with his hands to show off the size of the brick. “All those years buried,” he said, “buried and forgotten; they think it was a keystone, you know—not just a regular brick, but the keystone for an arch.” He smiled a little. “Still wish I could overhear what they talked about, with their nips of rum—probably gardens and gossip and all the same stuff we talk about now.” He raised his cup towards Joy, towards Ted, and then, “There’s work going out at the airport, Russian George says. Said we should head out tomorrow, see what’s happening. You’ll stay with us, Ted, no question. And we’ll see how George can fix us up for something to bring in the shillings.”

  Ted smiled. It hadn’t occurred to him that he might leave—hadn’t occurred to him that he might have to. He was halfway through rereading Gulliver with Joy and he wouldn’t have wanted to break off in the middle—Gulliver, after all, was about to reach the flying island of Laputa. Again. Such a little piece of conversation, and such a big thing resolved; he turned his smile from one to the other.

  “It’d be something to be near the planes,” he said. “About the only thing that would make up for not seeing the bridge all day.” There was a rumor that Smithy would fly by when it opened, and Ted wanted to make sure he knew when to look up, and exactly where, to see that sleek tube of silver.

  In the mash of plans for the bridge’s opening, someone had suggested that the families of the bridge’s dead men walk across first.

  “There’s not so many of them as would slow down the ceremony,” said Russian George.

  “But it’d be a bit depressing,” said Joe. “Reckon they should be aiming for jubilation, shouldn’t they?”

  “Send Kelly across,” said Ted and Joy at the same time.

  “Miraculous,” said Joy.

  “Marvelous,” said Ted. You couldn’t do better for jubilation or celebration.

  But it was a band of the workers who led the way in the end, a banner slung out in front of them, and only slightly held up by some trouble with a man on a horse, his sword glinting in the sun. Ted and Joe, in step in the middle, were so far from the edge that the view was invisible and they might have been walking along any landlocked boulevard.

  Still, it was extraordinary the way it reared up, opened up, to receive you. Approaching along the road from the south, the height of the arch seemed to disappear altogether—foreshortened, one of its artists might have said—so that all there was to the bridge was the boxy rectangle of its frame directly overhead. And then you were in it, in the guts of it, looking up through the crosshatching of cords and struts to the blue and the sunlight above. Flags flicked their color in the breeze from the summit of the arch, and an occasional plane, higher again, turned a metallic glint towards the ground. Inside, in the center, it was enormous; Ted almost lost his footing with his head thrown back to take it in, and the line of workers behind him was ready to walk on over the top of his pause.

  “Come on, Teddy, keep it moving,” someone called, “and watch how your feet are falling.” There was a rumor—no one knew if it could be true—that the vibrations of them all marching in step could bring the whole thing crashing down with a great splash into the harbor.

  But it looked so graceful, so elegant, the way its two lines curved, one larger, one smaller, the way that web of steel jumped between them, linking, tightening, and holding, no matter how the footsteps fell. And all around, the cheering, and the noise: from the sound of it, all of Sydney had been pulled into this great big thing, this great big magnet. No chance of hearing her talking to herself today, thought Ted, wishing he could touch just a bit of her steel, feel its smoothness, its strength.

  In the crush of the crowds—they said more than a million people had pressed into the city—Ted lost sight of Joe, made his way into a pub, reckoning on one drink before he headed home. The barmaid smiled, nodding her head towards the bustle outside. “You part of all that?” she asked, and Ted nodded, too proud not to say he’d marched over with the first band of workers.

  Her eyebrows raised. “That’ll be something to tell your grandchildren one day.”

  The cold bubbles fizzed inside his mouth; sure, there were stories he could tell. And he told her about walking for work from the beach back when he’d begun, about the graceful curve made entirely of straight lines, about the view from the top in the dead of night, the city’s lights thrown over the land below like a blanket of sparkling jewels.

  “You’re the poet of the bridge,” she laughed, and he laughed too.

  “Tell you the best one,” he said, and he started the story of Roy Kelly’s dive, that throwaway line beforehand as his spanner had fallen—“S’pose someone’ll be going over sooner or later”—and the sharp retort, “Don’t be so damn silly.” He gave that line to Russian George, thickening his voice into a suitably round accent and apologizing for the “damn.”

  And then it was the day, it was the hour, and he was telling the story as Kelly himself—he knew what the water looked like, rushing up, as well as he knew what the man looked like, rushing down. How many times had he seen it, in its pieces, awake and asleep, over the years? “Then I came up to the surface, and I was alive, marvelously alive.” The woman’s chin in her hand, her eyes shining.

  For the rest of her life, thought Ted, she’ll tell people that story: how she poured a drink for the man who went off the bridge and survived, how she had a drink with him the day it opened.

  “What’s your name, then?” she said, taking the empty glass as he pushed it across the bar.

  He thought about it a moment, made a play of counting the coins for his next drink in the palm of his hand. Ted Parker wasn’t the name of a hero—and neither, thought Ted, was Roy Kelly. Bit too Irish, as his mum would’ve said. He placed the coins on the bar towel, stacked carefully, biggest to smallest, in a heap. “Joe Brown,” he said.

  The name of the best man he knew, tied up and part of the best story he’d ever told.

  “Have this one on me, Joe Brown,” the barmaid said, pushing the coins back towards him.

  There was no work on the planes; not much of it anywhere. In the end, Joe found a postman’s round and Ted went to the train yards, watched all the engines coming and going across the knitted pattern of the tracks. Every so often, he hopped onto a carriage and ran down to see his mum; he’d stay for lunch, sometimes for dinner, and if there was a full moon rising at the right time, he’d walk down to the sand and watch it pave its way across the water. Never stayed more than a night—he said he missed home when he was away from it, and his mother didn’t seem to mind that he didn’t mean this place where she was.

  On the way back, he took the underground train through the city, loving the moment when it reemerged into the sunlight and headed on over the bridge to the north side. It was strange being back on it, and the noise and push made by one engine seemed so small, so insignificant compared to the scores of them he’d watched line up for all those tests. But then the whole thing did seem smaller now—and people did walk across without even noticing where they were. The only stories he heard men telling were about missing the last ferry north and how—miraculously—they could make their way home across the water. That was as much of a miracle as they wanted.

  But sometimes, through the train’s window, he thought he caught a glimpse of something—maybe fluttering, maybe floating, maybe falling. Sometimes it was a bird, turning with the wind. Sometimes it was the glint of a plane’s metal skin, higher up. Sometimes it was less distinct, a shimmer, a curl in the air below. His neck might crane this way, then that, his eyes trying to dodge the angular grey struts and bands of his bridge. And once, with the window open, he was sure he caught the sound of a great splash in the water, sure he felt a spot of its wetness on h
is cheek. Once, with the window open, he was sure he heard shouts from the quieter shore that now lay below. Once, he was so sure he’d seen something he’d left the train as soon as it stopped on the north shore, walking back along the bridge’s footpath towards the south and peering down into the quiet calm of the harbor. A boat puttered past, a little girl in the stern, craning her neck to look up at the enormous shadowy thing blocking her sky. She waved at Ted, both arms high above her head, and Ted waved back as her boat disappeared below the deck. Shaking his head at his fancy, he started the long walk back to Joe and Joy, the water dipping in and out of view as he made his way along the river, cresting hills every so often and turning back for glimpses of this bit of the city, to the south, this bit, to the east, or an illusory curve or cross brace of bridge.

  Later, lying in bed, he tried to understand how something like that might work. If Joy was right and Roy Kelly was a miracle, then you’d expect him to leave something of himself behind—but would you expect there to have been hints about the moment before it happened? He supposed these were the sorts of thoughts you could only have when you were half asleep, but if something happened somewhere, if something singular, unexpected, happened in some particularly malleable place, maybe it couldn’t help but leave a trace—or alert you to its coming. People sat and waited for miracles, so there had to be signs that they would come. People went back to the spots where extraordinary things had happened, so there had to be evidence left behind.

  He thought about the boats’ wakes so clearly visible at sunrise. Everyone took them to mark the tracks of things that had traveled the night before. But what if they were the routes—the curves, the turns, the jibes and tacks—that some flotilla of boats was going to make that day, the next day, whenever? He liked that; it felt like a kind of magic calligraphy, a map coming into focus from an invisible world, the way photographs were said to appear on their blank sheets of paper. All you had to do was work out how to translate its message. And a man falling down into the water—surfacing, alive; really, that could only be the punctuation.

  Dawes

  WILLIAM DAWES flicked through the pages of words and sentences, adjusting a sound here, a dash of punctuation there. There were so many pieces of conversation in his little books now, all woven around a new vocabulary. The laughing suggestion, “kotbarabáng: he will cut,” from one woman as Dawes had carefully shaved her husband’s face; the discussions about washing taken to the vicar’s wife, about trying to get fleas out of jackets, about drinking tea, bathing in the morning, about the same word being used for ships and islands.

  There were prefixes and suffixes that changed a tense from past to future, that changed the number of people you were talking about, that changed the outcome of the action you were about to undertake. Because how you talked about rowing somewhere was different if you intended returning alone or with someone else in your canoe. And how you talked about being beaten differed if two of you had been hit by someone, or three.

  The intricacies were extraordinary; so many things still to learn. Yet here were pages and pages of words: winds, constellations, fish, trees, plants, and body parts. And beneath them all, on some pages, he could make out fragments of this coastline, that inlet, sketched in faint pencil.

  This collection of knowledge for his laughingly proposed compendium, and he had made a start on a dictionary. No alligators or comets, but twenty-odd pages of new words—Eora words; Kamarigal words; Darug words—although its alphabet was jumbled so that L came after W and then the whole notebook gave way to more lists. Names of people. Names of colors. Names of fruit. Still, “Mr. Dawes búdyeri káraga,” they said.

  “Mr. Dawes pronounces well.”

  Taking up his pencil to add another phrase—“here we are, talking”—he mulled over the best way of transcribing its sounds, its syllables. “Galu piyala,” he tried; “ngalu piyala.” The different weights and inflections of moving a single sound to a slightly different part of your mouth; he loved trying to pitch the letters perfectly, place them perfectly, catch their smallest intonation or their subtlest emphasis. “Galu? Ngalu? We two are talking to each other. We are talking. Ngalu piyala.”

  Almost eighteen months lay between this day and the stumble he’d made at South Head, eighteen months since that sensation of the world falling away, the sight of that great jet of water streaming up. The longed-for ships had come—their ratio of ailing convicts to supplies all the wrong way round at first, so that the harbor seemed awash again with dead bodies, but white this time, not black. News of the world had come—wars and illnesses and political revolutions. And then more ships, and more people, and more stories, and a summer so hot that bats and birds had fallen from their perches, unable to hang on. Another infernal image.

  A whale had come too, frolicking and spouting off the observatory and making Dawes wonder if it was a whale he’d seen, all that time ago—a whale that, somehow, no one else had noticed.

  Through all of which, Dawes kept talking to his native neighbors, through the convivial times—one woman insisting on delivering her child as close as possible to the Governor’s house, as close as possible to the house of the man some of them called “Father”—and the conflicted ones—when the Governor had demanded revenge for the murder of his gamekeeper: two natives to be taken prisoner, the heads of ten others brought in bags to be displayed, as admonition, as deterrent.

  The strange negotiations Watkin Tench had undertaken, talking the total down to six prisoners, of which, he suggested, some might be “set aside for retaliation,” while the rest, “at a proper time, might be liberated.” Very well, the Governor had agreed, although if six prisoners could not be taken, “they should be shot.”

  That strange expedition, Dawes among its men, wishing he’d refused to go, and saying so, first to the vicar and later to anyone who would listen—irrespective of the dangerous insubordination of the statement. He’d needed this new phrase then: “Ngalu piyala. We are talking to each other.” Surely we don’t decapitate the people with whom we have these conversations? They’re living with us; their children are living with us; they are having their children among us. He’d needed more of the light, vital words that he knew now: badaya for laughter, gíttee gíttee for tickle, “poerbungána: take my hand and help me up,” or the particular song to be sung when a flock of pelicans passed by.

  Tench had shaken his head over his friend’s stance. “There will be more to this,” he’d said. “It will send you home, whatever you’ve said about staying, whatever you’ve told the Governor, the Astronomer Royal, about all the work that still needs to be done and you being the only person who might do it. It will turn this point of yours over entirely from science to gunpowder.”

  And whatever warm words he listed, whatever jokes and friendships he made, there were other questions Dawes could ask now, in his new language.

  “Mínyin gulara eóra? Why are the black men angry?”

  “Inyam ngalwi white men. Tyérun kamarigal. Because the white men are settled here. The kamarigal are afraid.”

  “Mínyin tyérun kamarigal? Why are they afraid?”

  “Gúnin.” The guns.

  The guns, thought Dawes now, pulling free the pages that held the last month’s weather and the list of the girls who were teaching him their language. His hand hardly paused as it passed over that still-blank sheet that he’d headed up so optimistically—Report of the Expected Return of the Comet of 1532 and 1661 in the Year 1788—more than three years before. He still looked, every night, so committed to scanning the heavens that Sydney’s newer residents—who knew him less, who found the distance he let his many occupations create between himself and the rest of the settlement inexplicable—made their own jokes about his tasks, his passions, and laughed that this busyness rendered him invisible to mortal eyes.

  Then let the immortal ones see me, he’d thought sacrilegiously when someone told him of this. All that time he’d spent imagining himself—his eyes, his gaze, his comprehens
ion—up in the air; better up there than embroiled in a mess on the ground.

  He straightened his records and inventories again. Sometimes he wondered if there was a way of arranging their points to make not a dictionary but a different sort of map, one with more layers, more dimensions, than foreshores, tracks, and river courses. A different picture of this place, and underneath it all the accompaniment of that sound, that rushing of air, of wind, of water, of something, and the constant sense that if he’d been able to turn, just once, a little sooner, or later, or farther, he’d have caught sight of something extraordinary—even if it was only from the corner of his eye.

  His dreams of comets—the one he still sought, and the apocalyptic one from Laputa with which he confused it sometimes in the dead of night—intermingled with what he knew now of goo-me-dah, dead bodies, the nasty diving mawn, or that local belief, learned so long ago now, about bones in the ground, bodies soaring to the sky. And these dreams collided with his memories of stumbles and falls, like the day on the harbor’s south head.

  “Mikoarsbi: his foot slipped.”

  At least now he dreamed in two languages, his and theirs—patiently plodding dreams of consonants and labeling; fast interlocutory dreams about who was saying what, in which language, and what it meant, and who might understand. While Watkin Tench dreamed that his manuscript proved word for word the same as the manuscript delivered by John White. While John White dreamed of the terrible omen of his name in a fledgling settlement: “More Indians with blue eyes,” he’d confess quietly to Dawes when he’d spent another night watching another settlement fail, another batch of white men disappear.