The Body in the Clouds

by Ashley Hay

  He shifted the roses in the crook of his elbow and felt one of the thorns drive hard into his flesh. As he looked down from the big blue picture to see if his finger was bleeding, he saw something fall through his peripheral vision, so fast it threw him off balance.

  He looked up. There was nothing there. He looked down and the roses glistened, pale and smooth.

  Truth and innocence, that’s what white roses meant, Gramps always said. But what had the old man’s voice sounded like? Dan tilted his head to one side, to the other, as if the lost sound might shake itself loose and roll into his ears, but nothing came and he felt his eyes drawn back to the blues in the billboard. They were hypnotic, their brilliance distracting his gaze from the ad’s words, bright and white, over the top. Something about tourism, he supposed. He stepped closer to the blue, not noticing the nothingness beyond the tips of his shoes, the edge of the platform, until he felt a tug on the back of his coat, heard a woman’s voice, sharp—“Hey, what are you doing?”—and he felt the red rise up in his face. She thought he was going to jump.

  “No, no, it was the picture, I wanted to see if—”

  And the woman stepped back, blushing herself—it was the mother with the bunch of roses. They stared at each other uncertainly.

  “I just thought, how awful,” she said, “to be holding such beautiful flowers and then . . .”

  There was a rush of noise from the tunnel and they both turned towards the train. Dan felt the surge of air it pushed before it, cool on his face. The bridge, the sky, the water disappeared behind the line of carriages, and the doors clattered open. He stepped aside, his head down as the platform began to clear. He was last onto the train, and his heart was pounding as he sat down.

  Leaning back against the window as the doors shut, he caught the radiance of the photograph’s blue again. That was it: it was an old one of Charlie’s—he’d been with her the day she’d found the place on the shore where the angle between her lens and the bridge reduced its famous curve to almost nothing. “Airy thinness,” her grandad had said when he saw it. “Like gold to airy thinness beat.” And there was Gramps’s voice at last.

  It was funny that he’d never walked far enough along the platform to see that picture before. “Never been in the right place at the right time, then, have you, boy?” Gramps would have said. He wondered how long it had been there, waiting for him.

  He’d ring Charlie when he got to work, and then he’d book a flight. He needed to see Gramps. And Caro was right. He needed to go home.

  He was at work half an hour before he realized he’d left the roses on the tube.

  Dawes

  CERTAIN STORIES were important to tell—certain things were important to do—when you were establishing yourselves in a new piece of the world. And if it was important for the Governor to confirm the impossibility of miracles, particularly in the matter of bread and wine turning into the literal body and blood of Christ, then it was also important for him to transplant some sense of the recognizable, the known, through the bestowal of rather grand names. The town they were making, he had proposed, could be Albion, in Cumberland County: an old name for England and the name of a far-off English county, stuck directly onto somewhere unknown, unexplored.

  Their faces lit by irregular firelight beyond the canvas hospital, Dawes, Tench, and White tried to think of some reason that earlier Albion, that earlier Cumberland, might have influenced their Governor. “A hankering for sausages,” suggested White. “A hidden idea of Utopia,” suggested Dawes.

  Watkin Tench dismissed the two of them as men of appetite and ideology respectively.

  “I like the poetic jab of Albion—Francis Drake gave the west coast of America New Albion; you can even see it on Gulliver’s maps,” he said, smiling at Dawes, “but Sydney Cove, New South Wales, that’s more workaday, more like it. I reckon they’re the names that will go back around the world—although I’m favoring Port Jackson at the moment in my version.”

  “And mine,” said John White, another man with a publisher. “Albion reminds me of Milton,” he went on, “and I wouldn’t want to give him too much credence until we work out if we’re paradise lost, or paradise regained. I’d wager lost—another batch staggered in this morning.” A ship, sent northeast for turtle meat, had arrived back turtle-less, and some of the convicts were failing so fast that their punishments had been deferred until they were hale enough to bear them. That was hunger.

  William Dawes could mostly distract himself from the emptiness of his own stomach with the busyness of his days. But there was a lean, scruffy look to most people now—someone had even suggested joining the natives in their nakedness for want of tailors and drapers. You couldn’t let yourself think it would be that bad, thought Dawes, not after less than six months; not yet.

  “It’s a fine night out there on the harbor,” he said, in an attempt to steer the conversation into calmer waters. Beyond the shoreline, the moon nipped at the dark harbor’s movement.

  “Finest and most extensive harbor in the universe,” commented White.

  “That’s how you’ve put it?” Tench brushed a bug from the back of his hand. “I’ve given it ‘superior in extent and excellency’ to anywhere else we’ve been—but the universe is a big claim to make.”

  Three sets of eyes looking out to the cove, the thin mark of light across its surface. Three ships had sailed for China too, off to fulfill their tea contracts, and the calculations running around the settlement in their wake had been palpable. Fewer ships meant more people who’d need to be left behind if a decision was taken to give up, to sail away. Or more people dead in the meantime and fewer to make the voyage.

  The French had already sailed on, but not before Dawes had gone down to visit them, spending a strange day discussing scientific matters with their astronomer.

  “A slightly discomfiting thing,” he had said to Tench on his return, “to find yourself discussing experiments on gravity and the latest calculations of the moonrise with a Fellow of the Parisian Academy beside a barren bay in the antipodes.”

  Stranger still, although Dawes had not told Tench of this, that the French astronomer claimed to have found a rosebush, a white rosebush, growing back from Botany Bay’s shoreline among a nest of banksias and gum trees. A creamy English rose: it had to be a fantasy, or a mistake.

  “It’s a year ago they gave me instructions for the clock,” said Dawes now, pouring another nip of rum for Tench, for White. “A year ago we stood in the cabin with the Governor in Portsmouth and took our lessons on when to wind it and how many of us must pay attention to ensure it was done.” The noise of it, its tick, its tock, and the opulence of silver case, white face, in the middle of this hasty nest of canvas and bobbing ships and uncertainty; this was soothing to think about sometimes.

  “You know a batch of men walked over to Botany Bay the other day in case any British ships had come in, thinking to find us there. Can you imagine? A flotilla of storeships seven miles away, us with no idea they were there and them with no idea where we were. Thinking us lost, disappeared, like those early Virginians.”

  A joke between them, when they’d met. John White, the surgeon, so concerned with keeping together the bodies and souls of as many as possible, and not doing too badly given the lack of almost everything he might have thought necessary for the task, such as malt, blankets, vegetables, tea. It was Tench who’d first wondered if White knew he shared his name with a settler from two hundred years before, who’d taken a hundred folk across the Atlantic from England to settle Roanoke, a New World place. Realizing too late how much their supplies were wanting, he’d sailed back to England, thinking to replenish and return. He’d left a granddaughter in Roanoke, just days old, England’s first American-born child. But there was a war, and his ship was commandeered when he reached home, and it was three years before he returned. It was the day that should have been his granddaughter’s third birthday, but he’d found no one, not a soul, not a body, not a sign, not then or l
ater—just intermittent rumors of Indians with pale blue eyes; Indians who could read the Bible.

  “And of course, Francis Drake’s supposed settlement at Albion disappeared from the face of the earth as well,” said Tench now in a morbid tone, kicking at the embers of the fire. “We really are laying the worst omens on this place.”

  It was all about waiting, thought Dawes, and at least he could enjoy the happier anticipation of seeing one of the comets predicted by the great Mr. Halley streaking gloriously across the sky, while everyone else focused on the slightly less predictable arrival of the British storeships that would come, should come, might come, must come, answering their wants and shortages and anchoring them firmly back into the world. Still floating, thought Dawes, like Laputa. We can’t think of ourselves fixed here until our presence, our activity, our needs are acknowledged.

  The thought felt weightier, more ominous, as the surgeon said, “I wonder if we’re getting closer every day to those pale-eyed Indians here,” and stared gloomily at the fire awhile. “But then,” after a mouthful of rum, “we’re a thousand bodies to that hundred, sir, and the world is a more possible place than it was two hundred years ago. And rocks were painted to our south, I’m told, giving clear directions of where we are and how to find us, should anyone come looking. Should anyone come.”

  “Painting the rocks, us and them,” said Tench, gesturing out towards the darkness that held their still-elusive neighbors and the figures they made—animals, men—around the rocky foreshore of the harbor. Dawes had found some below the point where his new observatory was growing.

  “Painting the rocks, I like,” said the surgeon. He’d spent the morning with the body of a convict whose forehead had been fatally split by a rock—a different attack to the handful of spearing injuries he’d already inspected. “That’s a dozen convicts run off into the wild to try to find their way somewhere, and another run off with a spear in him. One I’m still trying to piece together and another two to be buried—and all this,” he scratched at his forehead, “while I write shopping lists for currants and spices and the Governor thinks of the grand town he’ll build.”

  “Perhaps you have to admire a man who can think of boulevards and fancy names in the face of spears, and hunger, and finding oneself out of the world,” said Tench.

  “Out of the world,” said Dawes. His head tilted back, a reflex: even in the middle of the day he found he tipped his head back to check, to see, just in case his comet had come. Still early yet of course, but you never knew. “Out of the world,” he murmured, and drained his glass as if it was a toast. “Two plans to finish before morning, gentlemen, so . . .” He stood up, excusing himself, and left them staring at the orange of the fire’s flames, the white of the moon.

  Because if the Governor had fancy names in mind, he had topographies in mind now too, and it fell to William Dawes to create this future on land and on paper for him. It fell to Dawes to survey the ground on which the Governor’s vision would come into being, and to lay out the place that the Governor imagined.

  In the mornings he paced out narrow tracks that carved through the bush and wide reaches of ground for putative buildings. In the afternoons, he drafted their shapes and curves into the roadways, the blocks, the Governor wanted, marking out their land as if these constructions might begin at any moment. (“Never mind,” as Tench observed, “that our more cynical residents reckon a population ten times the size we’ve got couldn’t get the place he wants built with ten years to do it in.”) Dawes paced and pegged, counted and sketched, heading in from the harbor over tussocks and hummocks and running slopes and steep climbs, feeling the shape of the land beneath his feet, and counting out his paces—three and a half feet, then another three and a half feet. The Governor envisaged a wide square, like a piazza, leading down to a quay in the cove, its space offset by the tall importance of a cathedral. The Governor envisaged boulevards two hundred feet wide, and generous space around the buildings that would abut them. The Governor envisaged permanence, elegance, organized success.

  He was about the only person who did.

  But in some chill mornings, Dawes could stand a minute, his eyes following a tiny track, felling trees here and there, shifting boulders, smoothing bumps and inclines, pulling up grass, and laying down wide grey flagstones. If it was quiet, he could think, Yes, and see his new road running away into the future. If the morning was harsh, if he could hear only shrieking and crying, if there was the sound of someone being struck, someone being forced, then he would blink hard, try again and think, No, not here. I can’t see how that would happen.

  Mostly, though, he wiped his hand across his eyes, looked at the mess of scrub and scar in front of him, and thought, Maybe. I suppose some of this might come to be here. Maybe. He’d expected it to feel more glorious than this, the settlement and establishment of a new place. But it was only activity: lists and maps and tasks.

  “Extent of empire,” Watkin Tench had commented sarcastically, tracing a finger along one of the Governor’s desired streets, “demands grandeur of design.”

  Now, his candle burning late, Dawes drew up the Governor’s dreams of a quay here, a plaza there, the cathedral shifted and expanded to become even more prominent (the vicar claimed to be going deaf from preaching out of doors). Later, among the snores, he pulled out a clean sheet of paper to copy down the few meteorological observations he’d managed to make in between the plazas and promenades—of cloud cover, of the winds; his instruments were still boxed up. Then it was another fragment of shoreline for one of the many maps prepared for sending, with the longitude and latitude marked so clearly and carefully on each: here we are, if you’re coming, if you’re looking.

  Never enough hours; never enough light. And when the candle began to sputter, he reached for a chipped metal canister tucked at the back of all his books and papers. Twisting its lid free, he shook it gently and watched as the browned and wizened petals of a white rose sprinkled across a possible street map of Sydney-town, and a column about clouds.

  A rose dropped by a lady in Portsmouth more than a year ago now—a lady who had wished him well and said she’d wait to hear from him. Miss Judith Rutter. The petals his secret keepsake, his secret souvenir. And if it was easy at three in the morning to be assured of a lady’s interest, to be still awake at four made it simple to think of walking those seven miles overland to Botany Bay to pick a bloom from the improbable rosebush the French astronomer insisted he’d seen. Once or twice Dawes had even stepped into the night, intending to set off, before some thought—or sound: a sentry’s call, a nocturnal hiss—sent him back. Once he thought that, purely in the spirit of botanical inquiry, he might ask that party of men going over to the bay to check for British ships if they would bring him some specimens. He imagined his voice at its most authoritative: he’d need them to bring him something complete, “a flower, stem and leaves.” But he’d said nothing, and they’d mentioned nothing—and at four in the morning that only made him more certain that the plant was there, within his reach, with sweet new roses ready for his collection. However familiar he now found this branch, that voice, a beard, this was still a place where impossibility became the very thing you expected. An alligator, a human hand, a rosebush among the gum trees.

  Dear Miss Rutter, he practiced in the depths of the darkness, I write to you from a place where cats have pouches and jump, where birds laugh and shriek, where it’s as reasonable to see alligators running between tents as it is to see a human hand in the water—even as we call for our tablecloths to be removed before we’re served fruit. He stared at the darkness, picturing the constellations above him here, and above Judith Rutter’s roof in Portsmouth. Outside, the sentry’s step; the sentry’s call.

  Dear Miss Rutter, I have calculated the position of this harbor to be 33°52'30"S 151°20'E. It is a fine wide place—it is safe, snug, say some, and best in the universe, say others. On a clear day its water is a rich, deep blue and its sky is high, clear, and bright,
another shade again. We are hungry, and we wonder what is happening in the world and when we will be part of it again.

  Somewhere nearby, an owl made its doubly round call, and Dawes turned on his side, sounding its syllables: oo-ooo, oo-ooo. There were consonants tucked in there too, but he’d have to hear them again to decipher them.

  Dear Miss Rutter, If I could describe to you the bits of beauty of this place, among our mess and our hunger and our arguments and our terrors. The blue of the water, the blue of the sky, the warmth of the rocks when the sun hits them and the same warm rich colors in the bark of our trees. A yellow parakeet, a red one, fly past and call—brilliant. I am measuring time and space and can already see every turn and tuck of some of this land in my mind’s eye, as if I was up there with the parakeets. Yet some people even now wish this place might be given up and we might sail that long way home. Nothing grows. We are waiting.

  Conjuring up one of the Governor’s grand avenues, he could picture a house to one side, a room or two, and a garden—roses—some time off when the place was firm and sure. He could picture a school; perhaps he could come back, could teach here, could bring with him Miss Rutter. Mrs. Dawes. He closed his eyes, slept at last, so close to the sunrise whose moment he wanted to record—time, weather, wind. Another set of facts securely pinned down. Another piece of this place clarified and caught by the reliable words of science.

  Ted

  “WHAT WORD would you use to describe it then?” Joy was opening the front gate, leading them in from another night’s unsuccessful search for her shooting star, Joe’s comet. “If you could only give your bridge one word, what would it be?”

  Once, when Ted was little, a magic show had stopped a night in the local hall, surprising his mother with balls conjured from behind her ears, and a flower from the sleeve of the man who lived four doors down.