The Body in the Clouds

by Ashley Hay

  “It’s the strangest thing,” said Dan without thinking, without knowing exactly what he might say, “but flying home, I dreamed I saw the fall—Kelly’s fall; I even knew his name was Kelly. And then I dreamed I was diving in myself, like it was a competition. Like it was deliberate. The strangest thing,” he said again as the picture on the screen began to fade and change. “I don’t know what any of it means—especially not this morning.”

  “That’s what he meant when he said he’d seen it before and after,” said Charlie slowly. “Ted Parker said he was dreaming of that fall for years before it happened, and after too.”

  The screen went blank, came up again in a different series of photos: the middle of the city, the middle of the day, and Charlie must have been high above one of its parks, her camera up around the level from which Dan had imagined them earlier, all the people below reduced to the shorthand of round heads and streaking busyness.

  “Color and movement,” he said.

  “I was trying to work out how we must really look, smeared across time and space,” said Charlie. “What traces we must leave.” She laughed. “I keep coming back to the same story.” And she pushed the empty cups farther across the table so that Dan could get closer, find the angle that resolved each hurried blur into the single, sharp moment his eyes expected to catch.

  “I got one of those pedometers at an office Christmas party,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “Wore it for a week or so—we all got one, and everyone was fascinated by how far they’d gone, or hadn’t gone, compared to what they’d expected.” Remembered not knowing the length of his own stride; remembered all their abortive attempts to try to count each step of the most mundane excursion without the machine. Front door to tube. Office chair to elevator. No one, as far as he could recall, had ever managed to pay attention from one end of their journey to the other. “What I thought would be better though was if, instead of just counting the steps you took—unreliably, because one girl left hers on her desk all weekend and came back to work on Monday to find it claiming to have taken a hundred and sixty steps in the meantime—if it could draw you a track of all the places you’d walked that day, or that week, or that year. You’d have all these lines heading out in all sorts of directions, and I’d have the same path trodden over and over.”

  “Not fair to compare us,” said Charlie. “You go to the same place every day, sit at the same computer, do your job, move money around. I go to different places, look for different pictures. But the lines I was making to the bridge, to Gramps’s place, to the hospital would be so heavily inked they would have saturated any paper by now.” She looked up towards the tall glass windows as the light fell a little: the sun had gone behind a cloud. “Remember flying back from that holiday with Gramps when we were kids? Remember the way the water lit up like quicksilver as the sun hit it and we flew over the top?”

  Dan nodded. “I was thinking about that this morning. I was thinking about that when I was flying in, when we came out of the clouds and I could see the ground for the first time.”

  Charlie’s hands were up, her fingers spread like stars and her thumbs hooked together, the way a child might make the shape of a butterfly. She flexed her fingers like its wings, watching the pale shadow thrown by the movement.

  “And remember we saw the plane’s whole shadow gliding across the ground, so small, and so fast, that we got scared at how high we must be, how fast we must be going?”

  “No,” said Dan, trying to mirror her movement with his own hands, struggling to latch his thumbs together, to re-create the fireworks shape his fingers had made in that thick, white dream. “I remember the shadow but I don’t remember being scared—and you had the window seat.”

  “You had the window seat. You saw the bridge when we came in past the city.”

  He shrugged, wishing his fingers would flap like Charlie’s instead of arching like claws. He was sure he’d been sitting in the middle—sure Charlie had always scored the better view.

  “I always thought that was why Gramps gave you his watch,” she said then, “because when you saw the bridge that day, you said you always thought of him flying from it—that you thought of him, whenever you saw it, even when it was only in a picture.”

  Dan unlocked his thumbs, took the watch from his pocket, and slid it towards her. “I don’t remember that,” he said again, “but I found the watch in my bag when I was coming home. I always meant to give it back to you. Ted Parker’s watch.” Aiming for ceremony and forgiveness.

  “Joe Brown’s watch, really. Joe’s. My other grandfather’s,” said Charlie. She rubbed its silver on the leg of her jeans, adjusted the time for Sydney and laid it on the table so its tick reverberated. And she watched it for a moment, her hands tucked up at her mouth as though she’d been caught halfway towards prayer. She looked at the watch, looked at Dan, and began to rub her hands against her jeans. He could hear the purr of her skin against their fabric. Then she reached out and took his hands in hers so he could feel the warmth from the rubbing.

  “The best thing I learned from William Dawes,” she said. “There was a word here, when he came: putuwá. ‘I warm my hands by the fire, I press the warmth into yours.’ Nothing like it in English,” squeezing the cups his two hands made in hers, “but out of all the things he saw and did and found here, and all the things that happened, I reckon that’s the pick.” She let go, rubbed her hands warm again, and reached back across the table for his. “All the last night with Ted we kept this going—he said Joe and Joy used to do it, but they wouldn’t have known there was a word for it, and one from right here, in this place. He remembered one night before the war in particular: they were out looking for a comet and Joe Brown had warmed Joy’s hands that way as they stood there in the dark.” Warming and holding. Warming and holding. Then, “I’m sorry you came home like this—Gramps, and the other plane, and the old Russian man, even that poor dog.” She was tracing a line on the tabletop that looked like a section of coast, with inlets and streams, coves and capes. A curve in towards the west, an offset stub like a flourish at its end. “He turned us into cartographers, Ted Parker, convincing us every story was a point on some map. I stare and stare at all the different points and coordinates until I can see the connection. But it’s good you’re here now. It’s good you’re here.”

  She smiled, and Dan smiled in reply, rubbing his palms together for warmth, and pressing them onto her smaller, finer hands to soothe their restlessness.

  Dawes

  REACHING TO support himself as he went below, William Dawes felt the sharp sting of a splinter driving into his palm—winced and cursed, trying to see where it was. The belly of the Gorgon was dark and dim as she prepared to leave for England, and the contrast between these shadows and the hard December daylight outside flushed Dawes’s eyes of their sight for a second or two, maybe three. Blinded, he paused, right-hand fingers tentatively feeling around his left-hand pain—maybe to relieve it, maybe to pluck the offending spike free—and for the same two seconds, maybe three, the darkness seemed to have swallowed most of the harbor’s sound and movement too.

  William Dawes, still, alone, and quiet, preparing to sail back into the world. All he could hear was the faintest sprinkling of a piano’s notes—softly keyed, halting, and jarringly out of tune. Except the piano had been taken to a house upstream, he thought, so if this sound was a piano, it could only be an echo or a memory.

  It was Tench who stumbled against him, coming out of the day himself and blinking against the internal gloom. “My last sentence set down,” he said, waving a satchel of papers, “and dull it sounds at the moment: on the thirteenth of December 1791, the marine battalion embarked on board His Majesty’s ship Gorgon, and on the eighteenth sailed for England. I’m hoping for something a bit more—” he paused, and seemed to bite at the air in search of the right word “—literary once we get under weigh. I wonder which latitude we’ll have reached by the year’s end?” He clapped his hand on his friend’s shoulder
and propelled him back to walking. “Come on deck?”

  Nodding and stepping, Dawes pulled the splinter free, rolling it back and forth between his fingers. “I do wonder if I’ll ever see this place again,” he said, knowing how unthinkable that would sound to almost every other man on board, all happy to be heading home. “It feels a little more fixed now, a little more permanent. It feels like it’s here to stay.”

  Tench leaned back against the wall. “I don’t know if I’d go that far,” he said, “although it has defied the presence of John White and the weight of Albion.” He’d spent the previous week looking at grazing fields here, vegetable patches there, declaring this maize crop successful, that tobacco promising, that wheat problematic. And always the want of water, the ongoing want of water.

  Back in the light, the two men leaned against the ship’s roll and gazed across to Sydney. From offshore, from some angles, it looked as if William Dawes’s old daydreams of the whole place unraveling back to nothing might have started to come into effect, whatever his sense of its fixedness.

  “Four years, give or take,” said Tench, his eyes moving from the shadow of his own shape on the surface of the water to the town beyond. “And look at it—a few old huts scattered around, and the dried-up squares of some abandoned gardens. Your observatory, with its magazine and battery, still looks the most substantial thing we’ve got. Although now, of course, the instruments sail home with you, and your place is left to its guns.”

  “A different sort of watching and waiting for it now,” said Dawes. And gwara buráwa: the wind has fallen. How long would he be able to think in this other language?

  Leaning out from the ship’s rail, he nodded towards his point, his little white building, the line of trees still standing along its ridge, the water turning slowly against its rocky shore. “We’ve seen some seasons,” he said, straightening up, “years in and out, the stars, the nights, the aurora.” Through the glare, he could make out some movement against the white walls of the observatory, like letters trying to settle onto a page. Squinting, leaning out farther again, he smiled: they’d come to watch him in farewell. He wondered who would teach them now, and who they would teach—the surgeon, the vicar, the other officers and office bearers, whoever would listen. He hoped the conversations would keep going; he would send them more books when he reached England.

  When I reach home—and there was Miss Rutter, smiling, a white rose dropping from her fingers. It had been so long since he’d seen her.

  Raising one arm in a wave, he saw them gesture in return and smiled again. “They have this word, Lieutenant,” he said to Tench. “Buduwa—putuwá. It means passing the warmth of your own hand, your own skin, into somebody else’s. A pretty word, don’t you think? It makes me feel the paucity of English.”

  Tench shook his head. “Your idealism and your optimism, sir.” But—“Pu-tu-wá”—he sounded the syllables out to himself. “Where will that sit in your great project?”

  Fashioning his hands to mark out a block, Dawes said quietly, “My keystone, sir, my keystone,” and his friend followed his gaze back onto the land and up to the white wall and its busy figures.

  “Of all of us,” said Tench at last, “I suspect you’re most likely to come back here, to see how it turns out.”

  Here was the pull, the turn of the water—everything ready to be off and away.

  But Dawes shook his head. “There’ll be something waiting for us in the world that changes all the things we think we’ll do,” he said. From inside this harbor, as he knew so well, there was no sign of open ocean or clear horizon, let alone what was happening somewhere else and how that might press in against you. At first that had felt isolating; now he wondered if it had been protective.

  Either way, such thoughts weighed heavily on some men and not at all on others—such as the captain who’d arrived with his load of convicts just four or five months before, who’d brought not a single letter, newspaper, journal, or report from the world. Desperate for some information, a story, an inkling of anything happening elsewhere, Tench had rowed six miles out to sea to greet the ship, only to discover its ignorance.

  “I never thought about the matter,” the captain had said, as he stood a moment, rubbing at his head, suggesting that perhaps Britain was at war with Spain. Tench leaned forward for his every word. Had he heard that? Was it Spain? And if so when, and where, and why? The captain had rubbed his head again. He couldn’t honestly remember, he’d confessed, and couldn’t remember what the trouble was about—if, indeed, there was trouble at all.

  “I cannot wait,” said Tench now in a voice that strained itself through clenched teeth, “to be completely consumed by news and gossip and the events of as many people and places and happenings as possible.” And Dawes saw him disappearing under pages and pages of paper, so hungry for every detail they held.

  Below the observatory, a kingfisher began the low and guttural gargle of its laugh, pushing up into its vowels, its aaas, its eees, its ooos.

  And will I hear you again? Dawes ducked his head, trying to catch a glimpse of its creamy feathers and seeing, instead, the gentle and continual rearrangement of the audience outside his old quarters. Already his old quarters—already the place where he no longer lived.

  I saw a girl on the shore, the day we sailed in, he thought, and now she—or her sister, or her friend—stands up a little higher, with her own sisters, her own friends, and we can hail each other in words we all understand. They named us be-re-wal-gal; we come from berewal. And now—he raised both his hands high as the order came for the ship to make sail—now we head back to that great way off. He waved. The group by the observatory waved their reply.

  Beside him he heard Tench’s laugh and turned to see him also waving and grinning towards the shore. “Mr. Darwin,” he said. “I was thinking of Erasmus Darwin and his poem about the ‘Visit of Hope’ to our lost little place. Art and Industry. All those ‘broad streets’ he imagined—that you’d surveyed. All those ‘tall spires’ he dreamed—that you’d laid onto the Governor’s plans. All those ‘dome-capped towers’ and ‘bright canals,’ and his ‘proud arch, colossus-like,’ binding the ‘chasing tide’—ha! Imagine the size a bridge would need to be, to close that gap.” His finger etched the line from south to north. “Some span next to our huts and our canvas!” And his head tipped back with the exclamation as Dawes followed his gaze, up into the limitless cerulean that arched above Point Maskelyne and then out to the east, to the path their ship would beat.

  Beyond those heads, beyond that blue, lay wars and revolutions, new presidents and constitutions. Inventions had come into being while he’d sat by this harbor that would change how big, or small, the world seemed—the meter, the steamboat, the semaphore machine. He would see Judith Rutter, would tell her of all that he’d found on the other side of the world—“and this word, you see, putuwá, putuwá.” He would marry her and see the birth of their son, another William Dawes, who would have his father’s eyes for the stars, who would become an astronomer known himself for a luminous gaze—no disappointing comets among his son’s scientific record.

  He would be proposed and passed over to return to New South Wales as engineer, as superintendent of schools. He would become, instead, the governor of Sierra Leone, making another journey back to England from there with incantations from another language tucked among his papers: charms for friendship and a divination for recovering from illness. More words, more new words. He would end his life an old man living in the Caribbean, engaged in the last years of a long fight against slavery. Arguing for bridges, for conversations, between different groups of people.

  Across the years, he would hear of this place becoming Australia, another new name. He would hear of those westerly hills—now breached—renamed from Carmathen to the Blue Mountains. And he would hear of his own little point changing its name again and again, the Astronomer Royal well and truly displaced.

  He would hear of Sydney Harbour sprouting big mansions
—there was even an aviary in one, although to augment what shortage of birds, he would never be able to imagine—and of so many ships coming and going from so many parts of the world. A normalcy of food and post and even places of science—a botanic garden, a museum, and a new observatory, upstream, at Rose Hill. He would talk to Patye for the rest of his years, but he would never hear of her again, not in letters, in memoirs, in published reports or official dispatches. And his image of her would fade—as his image of Miss Judith Rutter, of his father, had dimmed in just four years—until he wondered if he might have imagined her, with the alligators, the roses, and the swooping, diving ghosts.

  And yet, at the end, he would ask a young girl who sat with him to remind him again of that beautiful word. “It was for warmth, my dear, and friendship. Patye? What was that word? Is it you?” And the girl would say, “Hush,” and, “I’m here, sir,” and, “Yes, sir, it’s me, Patye.” Pressing his hand with the warmth from her own, saying whatever he wanted to hear.

  And his old observatory, given over—as Tench had predicted—to the settlement’s defenses, would have its ground dug to hold the bones of executed criminals, its ground dug again to quarry stone for buildings that echoed the plans Dawes had drawn and were designed by the man who did indeed propose raising a bridge—Erasmus Darwin’s bridge—from the little observatory in the south across to the north. Imagine that, a great bridge in Sydney, where much was once made of a few logs laid down to ford a diminishing stream. It was there too, of course, in the end, the proud arch, its foundations burrowing down through the ground on which William Dawes had stood, had lived, had watched and waited. Even his comet would blaze across the sky at last—not here, but over England, over the northern countries, and more than two centuries late.

  All this was tucked into the future as William Dawes looked away from the sky to the diminishing size of a rowboat, moored in the shallows and rising and falling on the tide. His own breathing fell in time with its movement, and in its lull, he caught the edge of something solid from the corner of his eye, as if someone had drawn a thin black line across the blue.