The Body in the Clouds (11 page)

‘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 harbour 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, organised 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 enquiry, 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 practised 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 harbour 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 colours in the bark of our trees. A yellow paroqueet, 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 paroqueets. 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

‘W
hat 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.

‘What I liked best,' said Ted, his hand on the gate's catch, ‘was a trick he did with a great big horseshoe magnet, the way things flew in towards it. He let me have a hold of it afterwards—I was running around the hall trying to pick up anything I could.' He cupped his hands together, a rough approximation of a horseshoe—a rough approximation of an arch. ‘That's what it is, magnetic: pulling us all in to itself and keeping us close by.'

Joy smiled. ‘I like that,' she said. ‘I like that story best.' She was leaning back against Joe now, his arms around her like the sleeves of an extra jumper while his hands rubbed together and then rubbed their warmth into hers. Her breath hovered in the air after her words—Ted imagined its little mist taking on the shape of letters. Then, ‘Let's get in out of this chill,' she said, stepping out of the embrace. ‘There's some cake.'

If the bridge was like a giant magnet, charged up and pulling its workers and other devotees in from all over the city, then it was pulling in a great band of chroniclers too. Artists—photographers and painters in the main—were relinquishing every other subject for this one, even before it reached its whole, perfect shape. Which comforted Ted: he wasn't the only one who found the process so attractive.

‘Even the clergy are seduced,' said Joe the next morning as they went in for their shift. ‘One fellow, a vicar from the north side, takes a picture of its progress from his window every morning. You'll see him around sometimes—our mascot padre, some of the blokes call him. Seems a nice enough chap, although he does seem to confuse rivets with God in terms of what's holding the thing up.' He paused a moment, seemed to hesitate a little. ‘He's made a book out of some of his pictures. I was thinking of getting it for Joy, but I don't know. She makes—you know, like Nipper, she makes a bit too much of things sometimes, takes stories on a bit too hard, and I don't know whether it would keep her mind off getting down to the bridge itself, to have all these pictures of it, or if it would just make her think about it even more.' He lit himself a smoke, drew a breath. ‘Anyway, anyway,' his voice bustled on, ‘if I don't get this one for her, there's bound to be another one later.'

A buzz, high in the air, interrupted him, the two men stopping to stare up towards the plane, thin against the brightness of the sky. ‘There's photographers talking their way onto those too,' said Joe, ‘coming at us from all angles, and we're not even done yet. And then there are the government blokes, and the magazine blokes, all crawling around it and over it and nearby and snapping away. And women—I heard there are women setting themselves up with paints and what-have-you around its edges. Of course I can't tell Joy that, or that'll be her next plan, suddenly taking up drawing.'

They stood a moment, Ted, at least, imagining Joy with a blank pad of paper and a handful of pencils, striding through the mess of the site and up, straight up and onto the arch. He wondered what she'd see, what she'd draw.

From above the bridge came the purr of another plane's engine, and they watched it make its way towards the city from the west.

‘And after I get up there,' said Ted, watching as the plane cut precisely through the narrow gap still waiting to be filled in the bridge's arch, ‘the next thing'll be a ride in a plane. That'd be something, Joe, up there, under the clouds. Even the bridge'd look small from up there.' He'd dreamed of its shape from high up in the blue, dreamed of the line it would make across the water and how high you'd have to be to make that line no more substantial than the thin mark of a pen.

‘Up in the clouds, eh?' said Joe, cuffing him, but gently. ‘Lots of blokes got their chance for that in the war, and it got a lot of them killed too.' He shook his head. ‘Get this job done and I'm happy to stay on the ground forever. You can keep your loop-the-loops.' But Ted heard, as he walked away, that his friend was whistling his song:
I'm sitting on top of the world.

Rolling along
, he hummed quietly,
just rolling along
.

‘You're lucky to have found yourself such good friends,' Ted's mother said when he went down to see her the next weekend, bursting with talk about Joe and Joy, about their house, their backyard full of stories. ‘I thought you'd be all full of your barge and your nice new job, but you haven't stopped about your lodgings since you got here. Nice to be closer than you were at your gran's, I guess, and nice for a change.' She pushed a plate of biscuits and a cup of tea towards him, poured some tea into her own saucer to let it cool. ‘And what about your bridge?' she said. ‘Will it hold up long when they're done?'

There was a critical moment with biscuits. The moment when they were so perfectly soft they squashed warm and soggy against the roof of your mouth had to be balanced against the moment later when they folded and melted into a sludge at the bottom of your cup. Ted concentrated on the science of it, thinking about the size of the bridge compared to the smallness of everything in his mother's house.

‘It's funny,' he said slowly. ‘It looks really big from far away sometimes, and really small up close. Then other times I'm right underneath it and it's the biggest thing in the world. Sometimes it looks heavy, and then sometimes it looks like all the bits of it are very fine somehow, like they might snap away in the wind. Joy says it's the light—I don't know. But it's tricky.'

‘Tricky like you wouldn't trust it to take your weight?' His mother, not a small lady, had a fear of weak wooden veranda slats, of rickety chairs, of stepping or sitting on something and feeling it fall away underneath her. ‘Or tricky like newfangled?'

‘Tricky like you might catch it changing, from thin to thick, big to small, if you could just look at the right time.' He stirred another spoonful of sugar into his half-drunk tea. Joy had talked about watching shifts end, watching the men come down out of the sky, watching the bridge's frame settle into stillness, ‘as if it had given itself a shake and got rid of all these things that had been clambering about, hanging on'. Just this past week, the bridge had tried to shake itself free at the wrong time; one of the men working with the rivets, high up and straight over the place where Ted's barge was parked, had lost his grip and made to follow Nipper Anderson down through air and water into that thick, banking mud. But the hose of his air gun caught somewhere and held him on, like a harness—which wasn't a story, thought Ted, his mum needed to know. He'd spent days wondering what the man had felt, had seen, in the instant of falling before he was jerked back up like one of those new American yoyos. He'd spent days wondering if it was a sensation like this that woke him up, startled, from his uncaught dream. Joy had spent days imagining it was Joe, even Ted—‘either of my boys'—curled up and anxious in the face of what hadn't happened.