The Body in the Clouds

by Ashley Hay

  In Sydney, thought Dan, it would be late in the afternoon. The sky would still have all its color, and Charlie would be sitting by a window somewhere, watching the light change, thinking about her grandfather. Tired, thought Dan. I’ve never heard her sound so tired. He rubbed his hair, hard. No—idiot. It was morning in Sydney, already morning. She was ahead of him. Always ahead of him. He pressed at the side of his head with the palm of his hand. He’d think about it all in the morning.

  Still in the darkness, he watched the lights through the window—points of blue, green, orange, and red, and then the yellow-white of ordinary lights in ordinary rooms like his. A floor of lights went off in one building across the river—maybe its cleaners had finished for the night—and a single light went on in another; maybe a phone had rung there too, or an argument had just finished, or someone was just getting home. Dan reached for his phone, got halfway through dialing Caro, and then hung up as the light across the river clicked off again.

  So many lives, he thought. So many stories. Above the lights and the buildings, the flare of the city obscured the stars.

  Dawes

  IN THE darkness, away from the bustle and mess that constituted settlement, William Dawes tipped his head back towards the night so that his silhouette showed a nose pointing straight up, and then one long line—chin, throat, neck, chest—running down towards the ground. His face, spare at the best of times, pared itself back to skin and bone when pulled taut like this, and what little fleshiness did sit around his cheeks, under his chin, disappeared against his skeleton. His hair was clammy with the sweat of a long and busy summer’s day, and the air was so heavy it might itself have been sweating, although the occasional puffs of wind that reached across the water from the south were cooler now, already touched by the smell of rain.

  From the camp, a little way off, came great shouts and screams—he paused, waiting to hear laughter, but there was none—and the gashes of orange and red bonfires threw darker shadows onto the night. Their burning wood crackled a staccato percussion under voices calling, voices singing.

  “And we won’t go home until morning, we won’t go home until morning, we won’t go home until morning—” this last word stretched to a perfectly timed ritard “—until the break of day.”

  But this was home now; here they were, and almost two weeks into it.

  The air above growled with thunder and a new whoop went up from the camp: “Come on, come on.” William Dawes shivered. He could see the lightning in the south, and the storm was on its way.

  He wasn’t sure that he was meant to be out on the point alone, but then he wasn’t sure that he wasn’t meant to be there either, and that idea had propelled his feet away from the tents and the noise and on around the waterline to this sandstone bluff. The last of the convicts had been brought ashore during the day—less attention paid to unloading most of them than to the unloading of stores of food and paintings and books, the piano, the chickens, the hatchets, hoes, and spices. Now, among the fires and before the storm, everyone was getting down to the business of being on land, some of them for the first time in years.

  Two weeks ashore, but the ground was still strangely mobile under Dawes’s feet as if the dirt was pitching and rolling to match remembered waves. He’d watched other sailors, other officers, getting about in other ports, but he’d never picked the ducking and weaving in anyone else’s steps. A week usually, before the length of his stride clicked into regularity and he could begin to walk easily, to pace out accurate measurements. Until that happened he considered his idea of how far it was from one place to another as vague as anyone’s.

  Walking through the dark brush—sneaking through the dark brush—had been even worse; with every twig that snapped, every stone that turned and clattered, every shadow that rose up in front of him, his breath quickened and his throat tightened. This darkness seemed darker than any other darkness he’d moved through. A tree with two branches perpendicular to its trunk loomed up and was a superior officer, ready to question who he was, what he was doing. A rock with round edges was a convict crouched ready to jump and strike at him, to take his red coat and his purpose. He heard breathing from behind one clump of ferns—was that the flash of someone’s eyes?

  There was no moon. A new moon, the thinnest line, had set with the day’s sun. Now clouds, laden with light and sound, raced up the coast towards him to dim the stars as well. The Cross, low and near the horizon, had been swallowed by the storm; so had the opalescent glimmer of the Magellanic Clouds. He tipped his head back further. There was Sirius, his star and his ship, still directly overhead; there was Orion; there were Castor and Pollux, the twins of Gemini, hands joined through one shimmering light.

  Let it rain, he thought simply; to be wet, to be washed, to be cool and clean—that would be happiness. He shook the stiffness out of his neck, his shoulders, and lay back on the ground, ready now for nights and nights of stargazing from this place. Mr. Halley, Mr. Herschel, Mr. Dawes, famed for their observations of the night skies, famed for their acquaintance with comets; that was how it would be. He would see planets from this place; he would see transits and meteor showers and all manner of amazing things. He would set up his clocks and his instruments and he would make his name incorporating this place into the knowledge of the world, the knowledge of the heavens.

  A great crack of thunder, and the camp cheered and applauded. Nice to be away; nice to be set apart a little; nice to be alone. He would propose this spot for his observatory in the morning; he was just above the sandstone ledge where he’d seen that girl sitting—watching him, he thought—as he came ashore. No sign of her since, but then there’d been not much sign of anyone apart from the increasingly familiar faces of the thousand-odd available British. And this was a perfect place for watching, a perfect place for waiting—unseen from what was becoming the main body of the camp.

  This new place was settling, onto the land and onto its maps. Already the shallows between land and water had been converted into fine black lines on white paper, names suggested here and there—Sydney Harbour, Port Jackson—and these sketches had been replicated, spilling out from the magic nib of Dawes’s favorite instrument, the pantograph. He loved the way the pantograph’s point ran across a map painstakingly measured and deduced—all the chains and baselines and steps and angles worried into the unique single-line signature of somewhere—to create a copy of it, perfect, under the instrument’s other leaded point. It was as easy and as fluid as if some new version of the place was making itself then and there. It was like being up with the birds, watching the land appear below with another turn, another curve, another rise, another river; the invisible becoming visible. Straining towards the darkness, Dawes rubbed his eyes hard until sparks flared behind their lids. He’d been staring at those fine black lines too long.

  His eyes closed, their sparks dulling and fading, and he breathed in time to the sound of the wind pushing through the tall trees on the ridge behind him. Whether it was the months at sea, whether it was the newness, the difference of these trees, the sound was different here—softer, and differently shaped somehow, but as if the wind was something solid that could be glimpsed as it moved and not just when it disturbed branches and leaves. He squeezed his eyes tight for a moment, opened them wide, and the sky had been swallowed by layers of thick velvet that turned a bruised purple-green against pure white sheets and lines of lightning. The brilliance was almost directly on top of him when the rain came at last, its smell sweet and its drops heavy and round. He opened his mouth and felt the water against his tongue, his lips, his forehead as he pulled at his coat, his shirt, stuffing them underneath the dry ledge of a rock.

  More thunder, more lightning, and the rain pelted down, flicking so hard against his bare white skin that it almost stung. He rubbed the wetness across his arms, his chest, his face as if he was in a tub of hot water with a great cake of soap. The first lick he took across the back of his hand tasted like the ocean’s salt and the weeks a
t sea; on the fourth, the fifth, the salt was gone and he was sure the water was sweeter than anything he’d tasted before. He cupped his hands and their hollow filled in a moment. He drank in the rain, puffing his cheeks out and swishing the liquid from one side of his mouth to the other before he swallowed. So sweet, he thought again, laughing at the memory of the last water he’d taken unexpectedly. Climbing the mountain behind Cape Town with John White, the surgeon, they’d carried no water and found themselves licking the only available dampness out of a brackish muddy pool.

  “Piquant,” Mr. White had said, as if he’d just been offered the finest wine. Dawes could still taste its dirt in his mouth every so often, even these three or four months later.

  “Piquant,” he said now into the night.

  As he stood, his trousers, soaked through, clung fast to his shape and little pockets of air tickled his legs, his ankles as he eased their material away from his skin. Too late to take them off, but it would have felt so good. His body stretched and arched, anticipating the next burst of light, the next crash of sound, and then his arms were reaching as high as they could above his head and he was shouting nothingness under the weight of the thunder.

  It was better than happiness; it was ecstasy.

  Around him, the lightning cracked in three dimensions, tracing a secret map of trails that ran out east towards the ocean and on from this coast to the Americas, out west towards whatever lay between this meager nest of tents and this continent’s own far-off westerly limit, and up and down between the sky and the ground. It was a grid of pinpoints, if only he knew how to connect them, and what those connections would reveal.

  Another flash, and a tree exploded up near the camp. The cheering stopped, and the sound of pigs squealing and sheep bleating rose above the clamor of the rain and the calls. More, he thought, let there be more. And another bolt came, the screams timed so precisely to its light that he knew someone had been hit, had been knocked down. Should he put on his shirt and his coat, run up and see who it was, if he could help? A great sheet of lightning opened out across the sky and he crouched down again to take in the full reach of its movement. Nice to be alone.

  Through the next hour and the next, the storm surged and tossed, the wind driving the rain hard onto the harbor’s surface. Leaning against the trunk of a tall tree, Dawes watched the heavier showers scuttle towards him, pocking the black of the water. There were so many darknesses in this night: the water was a different dark to the cliffs that blocked the harbor from the ocean out to the east, and the sky—with the clouds, and then again as the storm sped north and the stars reappeared—was a different dark again. The celebrations he’d escaped had died down a little, but shouts and shrieks still burst out every so often. He hadn’t heard or seen a single nocturnal animal this night, but they were probably steering well clear of the ruckus too. Nor were there any other spots of fire around the harbor’s edge. A woman’s voice cut across the night, her gasp and her curse closer than he expected, and he started, shifting further around to the point’s northern face. The breeze had dried his skin; his body’s warmth had almost dried his fine trousers, and he wrapped himself back into his shirt, into his coat, and tried to curl against the roughness of the sandstone. The last of the day’s warmth was still tucked into it, and his eyes closed.

  What could you tell about a place in a week, a fortnight? That the wood from the trees was difficult to manage; that the parrots were beautiful, easily shot and preserved; that there were curious insects crawling around too—some already caught and pinned. That the water carried sound loud and clear to the shore so that Dawes, on the point, had heard Dan Southwell, on the Sirius, doubled over with laughter at the sight of the Governor’s French cook coming ashore—“Out of the boat and running clear across the water, look at him, trying to get to the land”—as clearly as if they’d been standing next to each other. That the leaves of the trees, bent to make their thick flesh crack, had a sharp, astringent smell; that burnt skin peeled away under the still-burning sun. And that there were other people somewhere around, people who sometimes said, “Wo-roo wo-roo,” and seemed to mean by that, “Leave this place, go away.” People who sometimes couldn’t tell if the British were male or female. (“Drop your trousers, sir,” someone had commanded, and some obliging young marine did.) People who sometimes accepted beads and bits of looking glass; people who sometimes took the hands of the British soldiers and danced with them on the beach.

  Watkin Tench had regarded this last development as almost too good to be true. “Dancing, of course there should always be dancing, and if I couldn’t get you near to it in Portsmouth, Rio or Cape Town, Lieutenant Dawes, then I’m very pleased I shall be able to offer it to you here.” Interrupting himself with a full, round laugh. “Not quite the style I had in mind, sir, but not so challenging that you’ll lose your footing and get flustered as I suspect you would otherwise do. Hands together, round and round . . . even you should be able to manage that.” Laughing long and loud again.

  In the damp night, the days playing over in his mind with the sound of Tench’s laughter and of feet scuffing circles in the sand, Dawes couldn’t have said if he was awake or asleep. But he was sure he saw a girl next to him in one last blast of lightning, her face leaning close to his, and she seemed to start and jump away when he stirred and reached out a hand as if to ask her to dance, here, now. Still young, her eyes were bright against the darkness of her skin and the darkness of the night. And he was certain, for no reason, that he was seeing up close the face of the girl who’d watched him arrive.

  Sitting up to look at her, he woke himself properly. But there was nothing there, no one. The wind had dropped so completely that he held his breath for a moment, waiting for even a single leaf to move. Away in the north, the thunder mumbled. He had no idea how long he’d been lying down, but his legs were stiff and his guts cold from the last lingering damp of his trousers. Standing awkwardly, he heard something splash out in the water, and a man’s snore closer still. And there, a dozen paces away or so, was a fellow in a red coat—or rather a fellow with a red coat, the red coat pulled across the huddled body of a young woman. Her pale hair was pushed back from her face and she looked as comfortable as if she’d been tucked into a feather bed. What are you dreaming? Where have you gone? wondered Dawes, and was sure he saw the girl smile in reply.

  The strange intimacy of watching somebody sleep—he’d watched over his father one winter, the older man coughing and shaking. Sometimes sleep looked like happiness, and sometimes it looked so much like death that you wanted to ruffle the covers, drop the pitcher and wake the person back up into life. But no matter how well you knew them, sleeping minds were even less penetrable than waking ones, pressed into pure dark stillness or off adventuring in a thousand unimaginable places. The girl turned a little, her face glancing against the sleeping man’s shoulder, and he flinched and turned away from her; it was a mean movement, even if it was unconscious. Let her wake first and leave, thought Dawes. There were so few places to avoid that uninterested shrug among so few people.

  Moving along the track then he realized he was counting for the first time since he’d arrived—a dozen paces: forty-two feet. His land legs back at last, he strode towards the tents, all intent and certainty compared to his furtive dash to the point earlier. The tree that had been an officer was just a tree; the rock that had been an ill-intentioned convict was just a rock. He was in control, on the job, and ready to quantify everything that presented itself. Half a mile from the point to the settlement, almost on the nose.

  William Dawes turned and looked out across the rough-hewn clearing; snores from tents here, snickers there, and unmistakably quick and carnal breathing still pulsing and pushing from others again. The men and women had found each other then—he could smell the stickiness of sex against the wake of the storm and the messy mash of mud and muck around his feet. And there was the tree that had been hit by lightning, splintered and fractured with the disaster of a stock p
en that had been staked out underneath it. Our first night all together here, he thought, and we’re losing animals and gaining people, and he froze as one of the youngest boys from his ship dashed out of a tent and across the grass, whooping.

  Later, under his blanket, Dawes remembered the toast Tench had wanted to propose to these new places, these new acquaintances. How tiny and civil that would have been against the last night’s bodies, its abandon. Closing his eyes, he saw the face of the girl on the point, the girl he’d seen or dreamed. He couldn’t tell if it was lightning or daylight, but she seemed surrounded by brightness, almost luminous, with a great curve of black above her where the sky should have been. And behind her—he heard himself snore as he tried to turn his head to see it better—something like a bird began to swoop and dive, down towards the harbor’s deep black-blue.

  There were things that it was important to say—things it was important to do—when you were making up a new piece of empire on the underside of the world.

  Weddings were a good start. Seven couples lined up and much was made of fine examples and healthy morality, particularly in the wake of the storm and the physical melee that had taken place under cover of its noise and confusion. But it was also important for the Governor to stand, at the end of the spate of marriages, and make clear the colony’s position on bread and wine. In this place, he announced, there was no such thing as transubstantiation; the bread and the wine of religious communion were always just bread and just wine, at no point turned into the literal body and blood of Christ. There would be no such magic, no such miracles. This had to be stated, and stated publicly; there was still some rancor among the Catholic convicts that they’d been transported without a priest and confessor, and it would do no good if they fell to practicing their superstitious and transformative beliefs while no one was paying attention. Things like that could undermine a place as it tried to find its feet. Things like that could be perilous to order and advancement. The Governor’s voice whistled a little on words like “transubstantiation”—he was missing a front tooth—but everyone stood still enough, and looked at their feet and the dirt beneath them, and the sanctity of the moment was preserved.