The Body in the Clouds

by Ashley Hay

  “Mímadyimi?” Dawes would say cheerfully against their nighttime fears. “What’s the matter with you?” No wonder the newcomers muttered that they wondered where he was sometimes.

  This place had always been a place of imagination: the remnant of the idea of a Great Southern Land presumed to exist to balance the globe; the remnant of the idea of verdant grass and cool water promised by Captain Cook, by Sir Joseph Banks in that mythical “Botany Bay.” People were still imagining it from the other side of the world, even now when real things had been claimed and named and classified and published. One optimist dreamed for it a vast and bounteous future, complete with Art and Industry and a mighty bridge spanning the harbor—which would have sounded as fanciful to the people who lived in its shabby settlement as the gossamer bridge Dawes had proposed years before to the surgeon.

  At least he’d leave a bridge of words between the new people and the old, thought Dawes, and everyone could keep talking if he was sent home. Some part of him trusted he would stay, simply because he knew how to say a long time: tarími. “Tarimíba inyam ngalawaba. I will live here a long time; I will stay a long time.” And he knew the native name for this place—Warran. But if they did send him home, the words would stay, like the tracks left by those curled vessels that carried his interpreters to the observatory’s point and back, little stripes of movement laid onto the harbor. Because perhaps he never would find his way back again, if this really was a place of lost pathways and indistinguishable inlets that could shift and move like Laputa. All those officers who still got lost in the coves closest to the settlement—still unable, after almost four years, to tell which was which, or where they were. And now there were convicts who believed that China was a scant one-hundred-and-fifty-mile walk to the north; some had set off for its promise.

  If this place was as malleable and mobile as that, then at least his translators—Boorong, Balinderri, Nanberri, Wauriweeal, Berangaroo, Djalgear, Pandul—might help him pin it down, and his brightest star, Patyegarang, who not only taught him her words but was learning to read his own, could act as its envoy, its bridge. She’d refused his English at first. Why should she learn his words, she’d argued, when he understood so perfectly what she was saying in her own? But his books had fascinated her—When would he read to her? Would the vicar read to her instead if he had no time? Now she read their pages herself. Some nights, their lessons lasted so long that she was still there when Dawes went to take the temperature of the sunrise. Some nights, they talked so long that she fell asleep where she sat, muddling the words for candle, for blanket, in her tiredness. And when she crossed the harbor in her small canoe in the morning, he stood watching the line its course etched across the water’s surface, like a pathway etched onto a map.

  If he did find a way back, with the embodiment of his now-faint image of Miss Rutter—Mrs. Dawes—he’d make his balloon and take them both, his wife and Patye, up through the clouds and into his bird’s-eye view of this place.

  “William Dawes.” Standing behind him in the doorway, Patye. “William Dawes.” She nodded towards one of the big ships, lolling on its anchor in the cove.

  “Not yet,” he said. “I don’t know yet if I sail home or not. And if so, I don’t know when.” He shrugged, and she shrugged in return, picking up a book from his desk, flicking through its pages, and pausing here and there when something caught her eye. “ ‘The word, which I interpret the “Flying” or “Floating Island” is in the original “Laputa”,’ ” she read, slow with care, and, “ ‘I ventured to offer a conjecture of my own, that “Laputa” was “Lap outed”; “lap” the dancing of the sunbeams in the sea, and “outed” a wing.’ ”

  “So well, you read so well, Patye,” said Dawes as she smiled, put the book down, and sat herself on a chair. “Nothing more?” And she shook her head, pointing to the doorway: someone was coming along the path.

  “Come in, sir, come in,” said Dawes, falsely hearty, but the man waved the words aside—no, he wasn’t stopping, just passing to say that the Governor would decide who stayed, who embarked in the next weeks, and that if Lieutenant Dawes had any good word he’d like put in or spoken . . .

  But Dawes waved the offer aside in his turn. “The Governor will decide,” he said simply. He was doing good work—had done so much of it in the colony’s life: that surely stood for something. “In the meantime, perhaps my friend here could read a little for you, that you might tell the Governor of her progress?” He scanned his pile of books and papers for something more appropriate than Gulliver, pushed the Psalms towards her. “Maybe one-thirty-seven, the Lord’s song in a strange land?”

  But Patye demurred, squirming a little in her seat, ducking her head and sitting awkwardly on her hands.

  “No?”

  The messenger made his salute. “I will leave you with your lessons, sir,” he said at last. “I hope you’re able to continue them when the ships sail.”

  “If not,” said Dawes without hesitation, “wellamabaóu.” He smiled, enjoying the man’s blankness. “I’m sorry, that’s I will return. This language is becoming so familiar to me now.”

  In the stillness that followed the man’s departure, he opened the Bible to the Psalms, pushing the book towards Patye. “ ‘They that carried us away required of us a song, and they that wasted us required of us mirth,’ ” he read, his finger moving across the words as he spoke them. Badaya, badaya: to laugh so heartily, it almost hurt. “You wouldn’t read, Patye? You wouldn’t show the Governor’s man how much you knew?”

  “I was—” She dipped her head to one side, ear touching shoulder.

  “Bashful,” he said. “Wúrul?”

  “Wúrulbadyaoú. Ashamed,” she said carefully. “If I didn’t say it well.” She paused a moment, then: “There was more talk of going away?”

  “And of returning.” He smiled again, watching as she made a great show of pushing his books, his papers, out of his reach, before she stood and moved towards the open doorway, holding out her hand.

  “Ah, Patye,” said William Dawes, puffing the air out of his cheeks. “Perhaps you’re right—no more words for today.” And he let her lead him from the room’s darkness into the thick brightness of the day. He looked up as automatically as ever—but no comet. Of course it was years too late, invisible at noon, and now lost, he supposed, somewhere in the greater space of constellations and orbits.

  At the edge of his little firepit she crouched down, gestured for him to crouch as well. “Here,” she said, “here,” patting the ground next to her. And he sat, clumsily, his stiff leg straight, his good leg crossed beneath him. His mouth filled with the fire’s smoke, and he looked so long at its light that bright discs stayed in front of his eyes when he finally blinked. There was the tide, curling against the rocky shore below, and, following exactly the same beat, Patye was holding her hand up to the fire, warming its skin, and pressing that warmth into William Dawes’s own hand, cradled and upturned in his lap.

  It was the rhythm of the gesture he noticed first, the way her movement mirrored the in and out of the water. And then the gesture itself, the transfer of warmth, like comfort or a gift. Her face turned towards the fire, she was looking at its heat, not at her friend, and Dawes found himself staring through the flames, the harbor, the whole scene now imprinted so clearly on his memory, as the fire’s warmth traveled to his hand, to the center of his hand, through hers.

  “Ngalu piyala.” She turned from the fire, smiled at him. “Ngalu piyala: here we are, we two, talking.” Then her gaze went back to the fire.

  Watching the surface of the water, his eyes and mind suddenly tired, he felt the rhythm of her hand against his again and again, heard the low, soft sound of her breath like a breeze through the fine needles of the she-oak or the last hiss of a wave as it ran out against the shore.

  To the east, towards the harbor’s southern cliff, a white seabird swooped and dived down to the water, then another, and another, each catching the sun so the
ir feathers glistened like satin or lustered china.

  “Molu-molu,” said Patye, and she shivered.

  “Molu-molu,” Dawes repeated.

  Yes, they were like a shower of shooting stars: her terror, his beauty. The clouds above sat smooth and square, like the sails that had haunted Dan Southwell’s dreams—Dan Southwell, back out in the world somewhere. Dawes wondered what shapes he saw in the clouds now, wherever he was, on sea or land. Maybe the shape of the harbor’s high northern head that he’d stared at, waiting, so long. “And this?” He nodded towards the fire, her hand, his hand, the triangle of warmth she was making.

  “Buduwa,” she said. “Buduwa.”

  “You warm your hand by the fire and press the warmth into mine? Buduwa?”

  She nodded, but it sounded softer to him the next time she said it: “Putuwá.”

  “Buduwa; putuwá.” There it was again, the closeness between the sounds of different letters, and yet what different parts of your mouth you needed to make them. Such a friendly word, warm and generous: he wished it had an equivalent in English.

  Watching and waiting as she paddled her small canoe across the water, William Dawes rubbed hard at his eyes until bright flares like the fire’s imprinted on them again. Looking up to the wide blue, the last glint of his fingers’ pressure flashed across his vision, but there was nothing falling from the sky; of course there never had been. It was a dream, a fantasy, a misapprehension snuck in through some chink in his imagination.

  Walking slowly, he circled the observatory, up to the ridge and between its trees, and down again to where the colony’s defensive little magazine sat, its bricks strong and sturdy. He leaned forward, patting its keystone and tracing the date etched there—1789—with one finger. His hand was as golden brown as its sandstone now, the texture of its skin as lined and ingrained as the rough rock. And the keystone’s promise had been right: 1789 had given way to 1790, to 1791. There would surely be a 1792 as well, and then another year, and another, whether or not William Dawes stood in this place long enough to see them.

  Buduwa; putuwá: he must write that down. Soft as a rose petal—he’d carry it like a poem. His own keystone.

  Dan

  ARMS HIGH above his head, fingers locking them into an arch, Dan winced at the bouncing and buffeting of the plane’s wheels against the runway and the sudden drag of a speed that belonged in the air meeting the still solidity of the ground.

  “Welcome to Sydney,” said a disembodied voice, and he saw his reflection smile in the window. Cynthia stowed her book; the family across the aisle began counting jumpers and toys, and the Russian woman reached between the seats to touch Dan’s arm lightly.

  “Welcome home,” she said. “It looks very beautiful.”

  He nodded towards the window in acknowledgment and saw the vast airport tarmac covered with lines and numbers, instructions in different-colored paints, the points of different-colored lights, like a map drawn directly onto the surface of the land.

  “Well, more beautiful away from here,” he said. “But thank you. I’m sorry you came so far and . . .” He glanced at the empty seat next to her, uncertain what to say.

  “Is no matter now.” Her face was blank.

  “And I wondered, could I give you my mother’s phone number, if there’s anything . . . ?”

  She shook her head slowly. “Welcome home,” she repeated, and gestured for him to join the slow-moving queue.

  Where would they take her father, he wondered as he began to walk: through the front door of the plane, like a passenger, or through the back, like a piece of cargo? He closed his eyes, let the push of the other passengers carry him forward. He was aching to be anywhere but inside this aeroplane.

  The floor of the airbridge squeaked and bounced, fragile—almost implausible—after the heavy certainty of the plane. Dan felt his legs shake a little against its movement, his feet bracing as he took each step.

  “Got to find your land legs,” said Cynthia, moving ahead of him. “Another flight survived.”

  Barking, thought Dan, and laughed. Perhaps he had become Charlie’s Mr. Britpop after all.

  In the cavernous arrivals hall the man in uniform seemed to spend too long comparing the photograph in Dan’s passport to the tired face in front of him.

  “You’ve been away a long time?”

  “Been years now, yes.”

  “And you’re in the money game . . .” Glancing at the immigration card. Dan shrugged. “Guess everyone is now, one way or another,” said the man, stamping a blank page in the passport so hard that everything in his cubicle shuddered. “Even the wife wants an investment property.” And he shrugged in return.

  Dan smiled. “Good luck with that then,” he said.

  Below him, in the baggage hall, people slouched against empty carts, peered at the black bags on the carousel that all looked the same, reached out to pat the dogs that combed the hall, sniffing and snuffling. “So sweet,” he’d heard a woman say once as a dog busied its nose against the outside pocket of her case with increasing interest. “Sweet,” the officer had agreed. “Particularly if it’s only a lamb sandwich that he’s interested in. Mind if we have a look?” And the woman had paled. Years ago, he’d seen her—wasn’t even sure which airport it was now—yet sometimes she came to the front of Dan’s mind and he wondered what had happened to her and why he’d thought of her. So many people you saw in a day, but she’d lodged in his memory, surfacing every so often and still so clearly delineated that he knew he’d recognize her if he ever saw her again.

  Coming through the last customs check, he caught sight of himself here and there, in metal surfaces, in glass ones. He hoped people would suck in their breath and slap his shoulder and say, “Mate, you still look the same,” or, “But you haven’t changed at all.” That’d be nice, he thought. That’d feel good. Then the glass doors that gave way onto the arrivals hall showed how his shoulders slumped, and as he pulled them up, he glimpsed, through his own reflection, a man holding a square of cardboard with his name written on it. Dan Kopek—his dad’s made-up name. “For wealth,” his mother always laughed at the irony, “for riches.” There could hardly be two of us.

  “I think you’re waiting for me?” The wheels on his case were having trouble taking corners, lurching as its weight tipped and weaved through the crowd. “I’m Dan Kopek, but I thought my mother . . .”

  “They called a car this morning to take you to the city, to Charlotte Brown’s address in the city.” The man rolled the cardboard in on itself, impassive. “You want to ring them to check?”

  “No, no.” Dan righted the awkward case. “As long as you know where I’m going.” And he followed the man out into the morning, the sweet warm spring air rushing up against him. His shoulders loosened a little: birthday air, right temperature, right weight, right brightness. A group of girls passed, thin and honey-brown in summer dresses, their voices loud with Caro’s accent. She should have come with me, he thought suddenly. It would have been fun to show her all my places. It would have been great for her to meet Gramps. Showing her off, he thought out of nowhere: I’d like to have shown her off.

  In the car, he took the backseat and slouched as he watched the buildings and busy streets pass. There was more traffic, and there were bigger cars. More freeways too, ribbons of concrete flying off where he remembered slow lanes and the stop-start of lights.

  “Where’s this place we’re going?”

  “Middle of the city—one of those new apartment blocks. You been away long?”

  Long enough not to know about new apartments in the middle of the city. Every second image through the window showed cranes, or hoardings, or deep pits waiting to be filled. Disoriented by the route, he thought for a moment the car was heading in the wrong direction, and was about to say something when the city’s skyline appeared from the crest of a hill—recognizable enough, even with its new spires and heights—and he leaned back again. He wondered why he’d never found a corresponding
ly familiar view of London. He knew pieces of it—Big Ben, the Eye, the dome, the Battersea Power Station—and he could count off the bridges along some of the river’s reaches, but he couldn’t have drawn the shapes of glass and steel running alongside any section of the river the way he thought he could here, even if this city’s topographies and connections were blurry in his mind. Sydney set itself up like a stage; maybe London, so much older and more organic, didn’t like to pose so much.

  He closed his eyes, back above the rows of rich sandstone cliffs and buttresses that he’d watched during the plane’s descent. Their color had been high, exaggerated by the early sun like the colors in the city were now, and any water tucked between them had turned to quicksilver as the plane crossed them. The first time he’d seen that happen was the first time he’d flown anywhere—a holiday when he was a kid, with Charlie and Gramps. Where they’d been going, he’d forgotten; all he could remember was how astonishingly big the country had looked, and Gramps’s stories about the “poor buggers sent out to map that with a bit of flour and a compass and off to try and measure the lot.” He’d seen quicksilver water. He’d seen their plane’s shadow skating fast over the land’s surface. He’d seen mountains and valleys, and ridges lined up like stored scenery with empty space behind—there was something comforting in the fact these things had still looked the same this morning.

  Eyes open now, the city itself looked like a cardboard cutout of shapes and blocks, with nothing behind its facade but that space, or a drop, or maybe even the edge of the world. One of those tricks your mind could play—he glanced up towards the clouds, their picture-book shapes nothing like the complex landscape of crevasses and peaks and spots of rainbow he’d just flown through. How quickly, how easily, you could move from above to below.

  When he opened his eyes again, he was deep in the city’s canyons, horns blasting and cars cutting in front of each other, all haste and self-importance. A bunch of kids—the girls looked so young, which made Dan feel old—tumbled out of a bar, headed for a convenience store with bright lights cutting the bright morning and shelves heavy with milk, candy, dailies, and glossy magazines. Straining to read the newspaper posters, to see what was happening in the world, Dan’s head jerked against the window as the car swerved and the driver swore.