The Body in the Clouds

by Ashley Hay

  Creaking and heaving, the Gorgon made her way east, the harbor sliding by and punctuated by coves and inlets, beaches and islands.

  “And still there are those,” said Tench, watching the way his friend’s eyes ran across every curve and outcrop as though transferring them onto yet another map, “who can row around here and not know where they are.”

  Dawes shook his head, indicating the names of each place as if nothing could be simpler: “Warran, Barawoory, Woganmagule, Walla-mool, Carragin,” and, on the north shore, “Booragy and Kuba Kuba and Garángal.”

  Glancing back towards the cove, he saw a white bird dive deep and come up sharply, a fish flapping in its beak, and remembered Patye’s molu-molu and, further back, his band of workers and the bare structure of his observatory. Across the ground, spilling down to the waterline, lay that length of canvas that would be pulled taut across a frame, painted up with a mix of linseed and lead, and fitted to become a roof that he could open to the night. Perfect; just as William Dawes had imagined, and just as his French astronomer had endorsed. The men had reached down, Dawes among them, and taken the sides of the canvas as if it was a vast quilt for a vast bed—they had lifted it, and without any discussion had flicked it up, like laundresses hanging a sheet to dry. The canvas had cracked, arched into a perfect dome with the winter breeze beneath it, and then it had settled, fluttering, just for a moment. My balloon, my magnificent balloon.

  Now, in his mind’s eye, the material flicked again and again, with him caught under its big safe bubble of air, rising up—although beneath him, he saw, was not the blue, the gold, the green of water, rock, and bush. He was floating over a map inked black on thick creamy parchment, as if he were part of one of his own illustrations.

  “—and on to Burrawarra and Tarralbe,” he finished his recitation for Tench, pointing towards the harbor’s southern headland and beyond, as the color came back into the world.

  “And what will you do with it, your great accumulation of words and numbers?”

  Dawes laughed. “You could have my vocabulary for your own publication, and everybody wants the maps, and I still have to write up my Report of the Expected Return of the Comet of 1532 and 1661 in the Year 1788.” His eyebrows raised at the ongoing joke of it. “I don’t know, Lieutenant Tench. There’ll be more than enough work to do when we get back there; who knows which stories they’ll want us to tell?”

  “I liked the idea of your cyclopedia, everything from alligators to zoology, with mawn and molu-molu in the middle.”

  Molu-molu and mawn: his beautiful shooting stars and his terrible swooping spirits. “Thank you, sir,” said William Dawes. “Whatever happens, I’ve got the beginnings of it.” A project for his old age, perhaps, when he was an old man come back to this place and its conversations, his papers stacked in their trunks and ready, at last, to be pieced together.

  The thumb of his right hand pressed into the palm of his left, but it wasn’t the splinter’s itchy scar it sought; it was warmth, it was exchange, it was putuwá.

  Gliding on, the Gorgon turned and tacked towards the heads. It had almost reached the last place from which the settlement was visible, and as Dawes leaned and strained towards the smudge it made on the land, he saw again some sudden streaking movement. A body. A balloon. A bird. He had no idea. He blinked, and the movement, the settlement, had gone, left to other people now, and to all the new stories and maps and discoveries they would make.

  Whatever was happening here, it would continue after he had gone as it had before he arrived.

  Spinning on his good leg, William Dawes looked out across the opposite rail. Between the heads, north and south, lay a dark blue stripe of water and a lighter one of sky—on and on, all the way to Chile, had he been able to see that far.

  Into the blue, he thought, and on we go, back into the world.

  Out of the Blue

  THEY WALKED down to the bridge after the funeral—unsure what else they should do, where else they should go. In the pub that sat under its bulk, they raised their glasses to Ted Parker and his stories, to Joe Brown and his family, to William Dawes and his little piece of land.

  “And to Caroline,” said Charlie.

  “To Caroline,” said Dan, raising his glass again. “She was right to make me come.”

  “I thought it was my billboard that did that.” Charlie smiled. “And to you, Dan Kopek, my friend. Thank you for coming.” A lull fell around Charlie’s words and they sat awhile in its silence, Dan’s eyes staring through the empty air in front of them and Charlie with her grandfather’s watch cupped in her hands like a scoop of water. The edge of her face glanced in and out of its silver as if it were reflected in the smooth surface of a pond or a pool.

  “But I’ve been thinking,” she said, “that you should keep this. Not just”—she put up one hand to stop his objection—“because he gave it to you, but because of the story. You had his dream; coming home, the night he died, you had his dream. I never have. I can take a picture that might have the memory of that fall in it, but it’s you who sees it there—you and Ted Parker. I only see it when someone points it out. I went looking for new versions of it—making pictures for the journals; finding stories about bodies in clouds. You’ve got the original.”

  “But you’re always part of the story, Charlie.” The watch sat between them on the table. “And you wanted the watch—it’s yours, please. You always wanted it. And it belongs here.”

  She shook her head, placing the smooth silver circle into his hands and closing her own around them. “It’s yours. It’s your story now.”

  The last conversation she had with her grandfather, a gossipy show on the television above their heads and him railing against the way everyone wanted these stories about people they didn’t know, instead of paying attention to their own. “Work out what your story is,” he had said, clutching her hand. “Don’t get distracted by all these others. You and Dan, you know some good stories—make sure you both tell them.”

  Squeezing Ted Parker’s hand, warm and gentle, one last time, Charlie let the silence sit. The next time he spoke, his hand still in hers, it was Joy Brown he asked for. And Charlie, her eyes closed, had said, “Shh,” and, “Don’t worry.”

  Said, “Shh, it’s all right.”

  Said, “I’m here, I’m here; of course I’m here.”

  “Will you come back again soon?” asked Charlie as Dan cradled the watch, uncertain, in his palm. “All this,” waving her glass towards the harbor, “and your mum, and, you know, the rest of us—will you bring Caro to meet us at last?”

  He had a strange flash: him and Caro tucked into Gulliver’s canoe and making for the New Holland coast through a thick white sea mist. “Of course,” he said, coming out of his reverie. “She always wanted to come, but you know me. Disorganized—or careless, as Gramps would say.”

  “Useless.” Charlie brushed at the side of his head, but gently, so that the end of the gesture cushioned his cheek for a moment. She held his gaze. “It’s right, what you’re doing, going back—you know that.”

  He smiled, tilted his head in the slightest nod. Work out what your story is, that’s what Gramps had said. And Gramps was his story. Charlie was his story. Caro, now, was his story. And Gramps was right—those stories held you together, gave your skin shape, like muscles and bones. He’d willed them together, just as Joy Brown had willed him into her family after the war. You could always do it, if you had some stories, some places and memories, to glue you together. No matter how you came by them.

  Dan took a mouthful of beer. “Anyway, tell me, what happened to William Dawes, sitting out there, writing down words and waiting for his comet?” He pointed towards the grass beneath the bridge.

  “Died in Antigua, in the 1830s, with a trunkful of stories—piles of journals and letters and reports and notebooks, I guess. Most of it was destroyed by a hurricane, and then one of his relatives got rid of the rest.”

  Dan said, “He needed his own Ted Parker�
��or his own Joe Brown—to keep telling the stories, even if it meant things got borrowed now and then.”

  “He got them, Joe and Ted,” said Charlie. “They all found each other in the end. But I don’t know if he ever saw his comet—no one did till 2002, and then it was over Japan, over England, not down here.”

  “They’re not much, comets, compared to meteor showers,” said Dan. “You expect them to streak across the sky but they just hang there, really—like still photos, not movies.” He hoped Charlie wouldn’t take that the wrong way. “I mean, I saw one, one weekend in England, a few years ago now . . .” He heard the words come out before he knew what they were going to be. “The night I met Caro—we were camping in Kent; it was spring and there was a comet, this silver streak.” And as he said it, he could see it, a silver streak glowing against a dark night sky. It was beautiful, beautiful. All this time, he thought, and just saying it was enough.

  “Of course you saw it, Dan,” Charlie laughed. “Of course you did. That’s a story worthy of Gramps.”

  Through the pub’s window, the light was dropping from sunshine through shadow to the thick velvet of a storm. A group of tourists, ranged against the harbor’s backdrop for someone’s camera, split apart under the first drops of rain, darting towards the awning the bridge provided as the thunder began to growl. The sound of the traffic fell away—a bird called; another answered. And the old man Charlie and Dan had seen sitting by the bridge’s shadow the first morning Dan was home shuffled past, bundles of plastic bags in each hand. Draining his glass, Dan nodded towards him. “Heading somewhere before it rains.”

  It took two minutes, maybe three, for the rain to reach its full intensity, and by then it was coming down so heavily that the air was thick with silver.

  “Well,” said Charlie, “wherever he ended up, I reckon William Dawes must always have dreamed of here: four years in a place like this, and it must have been beautiful too. I always imagined him leaving Sydney, trying to hang on to all the new words he’d learned, the new things he’d seen. I always imagined him at the end of his life, thinking about his observatory, and this point, the color of the sky, the color of the water. It’s the perfect place to see things from, don’t you think?”

  Sitting quietly with Ted Parker, pressing a cool cloth to his forehead, warmth into his hands, coaxing small sips of water into his throat, she’d kept up a stream of stories for him. All she’d wanted was for him to know that she didn’t mind—didn’t really mind—about the stories he’d borrowed and refashioned and made his own. “I was thinking about the day Nipper Anderson went off the bridge,” she’d say. Or, “I was thinking about how far Russian George walked to end up here.” Or, “I was thinking about William Dawes, counting his steps from Sydney Cove to the coast, seeing new birds and spiders and shooting stars. Hearing a new language for the first time—that nice word,” pressing her grandfather’s hand, “that one he must have liked best, buduwa.” She talked all the way through her own childhood, through as much as she knew of her mother’s, through all the things she remembered—or imagined—about Gramps’s own early life, Ted’s, Joe’s, whichever. She saw a tall ship sailing through the mist in the harbor one morning, and she made that a story for him, as if it had slipped through time. She saw the splashes made by fish jumping in the harbor and took sentences about them to him too, as close as she could get to that impossibly high splash he’d been seeing all his life.

  “Do you remember that day,” said Dan, breaking her train of thought, “that day he brought us down here with sandwiches and a picnic, and he told us about those great big safety nets they had strung up when they made the Golden Gate Bridge?”

  “And he said if they’d had those things here he’d never have gotten to fly.”

  In some corner of Dan’s mind, a stagnant pool of jet lag still lingered; he had moments of feeling he was still caught up in the air somewhere, his feet straddling tiredness and turbulence. Between the dislocation, beyond the vivid dreams from the flight, and beneath the constant line that Ted Parker’s story of flying off the bridge had drawn on his imagination, there was some shuffle of movement—a moment, a color. He couldn’t quite shake it free from wherever it had lodged.

  “That day,” he said slowly, “that day we came when we were kids, the first time, with a picnic: did we see . . . did we think we saw . . . ?”

  Across the table, Charlie began to frown. “I can’t remember—there was a bird, wasn’t there? Something about a bird?” She was rubbing her finger around the rim of her glass, teasing out fragments of its clear ringing sound. And then the noise firmed and thickened, rising and falling so that it seemed sometimes to fill the room, sometimes to fall away, and sometimes to spread out across the wet afternoon’s air. “Listen,” said Charlie, but her finger was poised above the glass as the harmonic went on, swelling and rising. “It’s coming from out there. It’s the bridge.”

  They were almost skipping when they left the pub, on the edge of running as they crossed the road and headed for the grass, hand in hand, six years old again. Above them, odd drops of water found chinks between the pieces of steel, rounder, larger than the rain that fell easily, uninterrupted, from the sky. They stood with their faces up, trying to catch the isolated drops and listening to the long, strange chime that suspended itself between the steel, the wind, the water.

  “Gramps always said she could sing,” said Charlie, both hands up towards the bridge as she blinked in the wet, “said he heard it the night he climbed up with Joy, the day the arches joined, the day Kelly fell, the day he met my mother and took her up in the air.”

  Lightning, a blanket of it, spread wide and white across the sky, and out towards the east a single fork speared down to the horizon. Dan heard Charlie catch her breath, and thought, It’s something to be here—and it’s beautiful. If he went away now, he knew he would always need to come back.

  And then he saw it, just below the bridge’s deck and beginning to float, to fall. Count to three, and it would be gone.

  He grabbed Charlie’s hand again, spun her around. From above, from some angles, this looked like a dance.

  “Look,” he said. “Look.”

  It’s happening. It’s happening. It’s always happening.

  Acknowledgments

  Certain parts of this book were inspired by real moments and real people. Some of its incidents, some of its conversations, derive from incidents and conversations that someone took the time to record. There was a man called William Dawes who came to Sydney with the First Fleet to look for a comet. And there was a man called Vincent “Roy” Kelly who fell from the Sydney Harbour Bridge and survived. But this book and its people and its coincidences are the stuff of imagination.

  The first epigraph lines are taken from “Musée des Beaux Arts” copyright © 1940 and renewed 1968 by W. H. Auden; from W. H. Auden Collected Poems by W. H. Auden. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, and Curtis Brown, Ltd. All rights reserved.

  The epigraph reference to the body in the clouds—and the book’s title—comes from Governor Arthur Phillip’s letter to Lord Sydney on 13 February 1790 as reproduced in the Historical Records of New South Wales, vol. I, part 2 (1978).

  Most of the indigenous words used in the text come from William Dawes’s notebooks, held by the Archives & Special Collections of the library at SOAS, University of London, and reprinted here with their permission. The call number for this material is MS 41645.

  A small number of words and phrases collected by other early British visitors and used here are drawn from Jakelin Troy’s The Sydney Language (1993).

  Dawes’s journals are now available online at www.williamdawes.org and the spellings and accents used in the novel are based on these transcriptions. However, the letter has been transcribed where it appears in the novel’s text as “ng,” as in Jakelin Troy.

  The words collected by William Dawes—and by other officers and settlers—come from a number of la
nguage groups and dialects, including Dharawal, Darug, and Gundungurra. Thanks to Frances Bodkin for talking to me about this, and about the ways the different accents of the British influenced their transcriptions of these words.

  The extant correspondence between Dawes and his Astronomer Royal, Nevil Maskelyne, is part of the Board of Longitude papers in the Royal Greenwich Observatory’s archive held by the University Library, Cambridge, and recently made available via the Cambridge Digital Library. Dawes’s weather journals, rediscovered in 1977, are held by the Royal Society in London.

  The poem referred to by Watkin Tench (p. 293) is Erasmus Darwin’s “Visit of Hope to Sydney Cove, Near Botany Bay.”

  Text attributed to the Reverend Frank Cash (p. 85 forward) is taken from his Parables of the Sydney Harbour Bridge: Setting Forth the Preparation for and Progressive Growth of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, to April 1930 (1930).

  The newspaper article regarding Roy Kelly’s survival of a fall from the road deck of the Sydney Harbour Bridge (p. 205 forward) was published in the Sydney Morning Herald on 24 October 1930.

  Conversations between the bridge builders—and anecdotes told by them—were in some cases inspired by Richard Raxworthy’s incomparable oral history, Sydney Harbour Bridge Builders (1982), and by The Construction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, a video released by the Institution of Engineers, Australia, that combined a 1969 interview with one of the bridge’s supervising engineers, Frank Litchfield, with footage shot by Henri Mallard in 1930 as the bridge was completed.

  Thanks to Maria Richardson who talked to me about the Mater Misericordiae Hospital in North Sydney where Kelly was taken after his fall. And to Paul Cave, the founder of BridgeClimb, in whose collection of memorabilia the medal presented to Vincent Kelly “to celebrate his preservation from serious harm” is now housed. I had the chance to see it during an interview for a story published by The Monthly in August 2006, and that moment, like the story of Kelly, did prove to be “something that lodges deep in the imagination.”