The Body in the Clouds (16 page)

The girl regained her footing first, her feet moving easily through some extension of the dance. But William Dawes tripped on his stiff leg and fell, his weight hitting the shallow water of the shore with what sounded like the most disproportionate crash, almost thunderous. He looked around him, expecting to see the ripples, the bubbles, the white foam of some greater disturbance, but its blue surface was almost perfectly still.

The girl was staring too. He heard her say a word that sounded like
man
, and he wondered if she was trying to say something about him, or perhaps about whatever had happened behind him somewhere on the water. But it was a rounder sound—‘
Mawn
,' she said, ‘
mawn
,' flinching a little even as she offered him her hand and pulled him up from the ground. The whistling, the cheering, the clapping had stopped.
What next?
thought Dawes.
What now?
She let go of his hand.

Her face frowned then, creasing itself first into a question, and then into something like fear or terror. She shivered, as if the warmth had gone out of the day, and Dawes realised that the sun had indeed disappeared behind some large, grey cloud blown in from nowhere. But she shook herself at the end of the shiver, as if she was shaking something out of her fingers, her hands, her wrists, and they stood facing each other, as awkward as any two people after a dance.

‘
Mawn
,' she said again, her right arm reaching towards the sky and its hand, fashioned like a beak, swooping down then and worrying at her throat, her neck. She pointed across the water as if she, too, had expected to see something else breaking through its surface. ‘
Mawn
,' she said. ‘
Mawn
, Mr Dawes'—but it sounded like a question. She stepped back, her thumb rubbing the lines and creases on her palm as if he might have left some trace of himself on there. And then she patted her hands together and smiled, a wide, warm smile.

Behind him, something unsettled moved among the men, and he wondered how to end this, to turn them back to their purpose. Then he saw her raise her hand and realised she was holding it out to shake his. ‘Mr Dawes,' she said again, gripping his fingers and stepping in to pat at his chest. She gestured to her friend and they were gone, darting away over the rocks to the west.

He looked up towards the sun, clear again, wondering what it was that had fallen from the sky and made such a noise in the still water. If this light could trick you, maybe the air played tricks with the sound. But he still had the sense that he'd just missed seeing something, might at least have caught a glimpse of it from the most peripheral corner of his eye.

‘Come on, gentlemen,' called Dawes. ‘Let's get this up.' He scooped up the pale bundle of canvas like a week's worth of the white tablecloths on which the officers still took their meals. And as he gave the word for it to be shaken wide and free, a puff of the harbour's breeze arched his roof into a dome before it settled flat and taut across the struts of its frame.

That new invention the French astronomer had extolled, the day they'd spent talking beside Botany Bay. That exciting new device—‘Created by a Frenchman, of course, Monsieur Dawes'—a balloon, that could take you up into the air and across the sky—‘So thrilling, Monsieur Dawes, to be above the clouds'—and he'd skated on through all the studies of electricity, and of optics, and of the atmosphere itself that such an invention might make possible. ‘All sorts of experiments with falling bodies, not to mention the balloon's great use for topographers and cartographers, Monsieur.' It was here, he had confessed, that he was thinking most of this New South Wales and of William Dawes in it. ‘The space so large, and your capacity to explore it so small. They will want surveys. They will want maps. They will want to know what is here, what is there, and what is in between. Think of all you could do, Monsieur. Think of all you might see.' And the Frenchman had swept his arms out in a great flourish, upsetting a sheaf of papers. ‘
Magnifique
.'

Yes
, thought Dawes, as his balloon settled down into the roof it was supposed to be,
magnificent
. It would be something to be up above this place, to see so easily all the pokes and pinches of the harbour and its tributaries, to see all the way out to the hills that set their high blue line along the western horizon.

But a balloon, of course, was folly. Even having an observatory was unlikely enough given that the vicar could only wonder aloud when someone might begin to talk of making him a church and the higher-ranking officers had started to quibble about the canvas they were living under. He'd do better, Dawes suspected, to wish for his balloon to make an impossible and unexpected appearance like one of the surgeon's alligators, or the Botany Bay rose.

Later, his instruments ashore and unpacked—one quadrant, three clocks, one sextant, one barometer, two thermometers, a protractor and the precious pocket watch with sweeping second hand that had belonged to the Astronomer Royal himself—William Dawes felt completely arrived.

Inside his snug new room, he let out a long breath. Waiting to get here, waiting to find a space for his observatory, waiting to raise its canvas. And now, here he was, the man put forward for this expedition for having
several languages and a good knowledge of natural history
. A man charged with supervising the skies. And a man with his own room built in the perfect spot for watching, for observing, for recording what might happen in this new part of the world.

Settling himself outside, the dark harbour before him, the dark sky above, Dawes jostled his head, his body so it rested straight and firm. Eyes open, just a little more than usual, a little wider. This was his first night of watching, and he was back in the exact spot from which he'd watched the high-summer storm. Six months ago now, that cataclysmic arrival.

The night was still, cold; it was winter, and the crispness of the air seemed to make the stars glisten and pulse a little more. Everything was where he now expected it to be: the Cross moving up to the centre of the sky from the south-west, big bright Vega out to the north-east, and Jupiter almost directly overhead. How amazing it would be if his comet came on this first night. How amazing; how miraculous. He pulled a sheet of paper and a pencil towards him, ready for whatever might transpire. Here he was, the night and the sky and a column of calculations that said this much-anticipated comet might be near—start scanning, start looking.

A star fell towards the east, and something shrieked from a tree nearby. His right hand fiddled with the pencil; he scratched at the ground with his left. The pencil's casing was smooth, the leaves his left hand found were smooth too, but neither were close to the velvet of holding the girl's hand and dancing around. He could still see the shape her mouth had made as she smiled and took her leave; it was so long since he'd had anyone new to look at.

Strange, the new stories that were surging around the camp. It wasn't daytime alligators people believed they'd seen darting between their tents now; it was dark people, sneaking in at night, creeping between rows of sleeping bodies and—who knew?—stopping to stare, patiently and for a frighteningly long time, at those closed and unaware eyes. Now it wasn't only Dawes who thought he heard their footsteps: his theory about those noises—which he'd never spoken about—had spread like contagion through the settlement. It was as if the sleepers feared their dreams might be sucked out and violated, as if some part of their soul had been made off with like a precious piece of clothing, a hoarded mouthful of food.

The Governor had received the reports of these nocturnal visits, listened to them, noted them among his papers, and declared that they were
only the effect of imagination.

The sky above him still and settled, Dawes let his own thoughts wander a little.

Dear Miss Rutter, I imagine you sitting with my father, taking a cup of tea in one of my mother's cups. I imagine the rosy brown liquid being poured, its smell as you bring it up to sip it—its heat, its sweetness—and the sound, like a bell, of your spoon set down against your saucer.

Dear Miss Rutter, We often think of tea over here. There's a local leaf that we pretend will do, but the colour, the flavour, the scent is wrong. Snakes and lizards are regular dinner stuffs now. And more ships have gone; only three remain from the eleven that were our world, that could take us away as reliably as they brought us. The ships have discharged one cargo—our settlement— and sailed north to collect the next one—sweet Chinese tea—to carry back to you. And we are left here, brewing new leaves in kettles and trying not to notice the harbour's emptiness.

Dear Miss Rutter, In the sky above is a set of stars that might be a teapot. The surgeon says some of the women are coming close to mutiny for want of a cup of this beverage. A native girl came to my observatory and I danced a little with her, down on the shore, around and around. There was a great crash in the water at the end and she gave it a name, like ‘man' or ‘mawn', although I have no idea what it might have been.

Dear Miss Rutter, I cannot imagine with what words they talk about us, what words and names and stories
.

Arching his neck, Dawes tried to ease his shoulders, his arms, out of their cramped position. Overhead, the stars flickered and pulsed. They looked nothing like a teapot—he knew that—but it was a thing to think. Of course there was no letter to Miss Rutter either. Perhaps there was no longer even a Miss Rutter. There was no sign of his comet, even though some part of him had believed that it would appear on the first clear night he had an observatory. He would look up, and there it would be. Still, it was a glorious sky, and more familiar now, too; he knew where to look for what, a whole piece of the world's night etched onto his brain. This point, too, was familiar, and the dips and turns of the harbour's coves. Things became what you expected to see so quickly, in the end.

Inside, preparing to sleep, he picked up a pile of pages, tapped them into alignment, and found himself checking again the different workings of where his observatory actually sat on the face of the earth: 33°52'30"S 151°20'E according to one calculation, about a mile out from that according to another, and perhaps as far off as 33°51'10"S by another reckoning.

Perhaps
, he thought, yawning,
it's actually floating around somehow, unmoored and mobile like Gulliver's island of Laputa or one of the Frenchman's balloons.

Ted

H
e came up to the front of the house, his head full of the swirling couples he'd just seen at the pictures, and for a moment the turn of her movement matched the turn of some remembered dance as it whirled through his mind. The two doorways between them framed her—the mottled greens of her dress, the woolly green of her cardigan, against the greens of her grass, her flowerbeds—like a painting. He paused, looking and listening, but there was no sound in the house. A kookaburra chortled from the streetlamp above him.

Stepping onto the front veranda, Ted's feet landed on the boards that would not creak and he felt some different sense of belonging. Another step, then he eased open the fly-screen door and paused again. Along the hall and out in the yard, Joy was bending down for something and for a second he couldn't separate the green of her clothes from the green of the garden—it was as if she'd disappeared. The screen door snapped shut behind him, and she stood up at the noise, seeing his shape in the hallway. One hand waving, the other full of flowers, she called something that he couldn't hear. But he smiled, waved back, and pointed towards the bathroom, the water, the soap.

She was arranging the flowers—white roses—in a bowl when he came out, and she held them up for him to admire. ‘I said, we've got our chance,' she said—no hello, nothing small about the day. ‘Joe's gone to help someone with a move; won't be back till tomorrow. Smell these.' She took a deep breath, her nose close to the petals. ‘Aren't they beautiful? We had these at our wedding; they always make me smile.'

Ted leaned forward, breathed in. There was something like vanilla in the fragrance, something almost smoky, and something that felt like satin in his nostrils. He touched one of the blooms, and a petal came away in his fingers—it was like velvet, and so soft it felt wet somehow.

‘The crunch if you bit into one—would it be more like an apple or a pear, do you think?' asked Joy, pulling a petal from another bud and rubbing it between her own thumb and forefinger. ‘Terrible if they didn't taste as good as they smell.' She set the vase down in the middle of the table, brushed her hands against her skirt, and smiled at him. ‘So we'll go to the bridge tonight?'

He felt his guts twinge and tighten, and he grabbed at the back of a kitchen chair. ‘Back tomorrow,' he heard himself say, ‘of course—and the move. I should've offered to help.' Joy was smiling, almost laughing. He'd never felt more terrified in his life. Imagine ever saying he wanted to sneak off and do such a thing, let alone that they would go together. His mind skittered through a thousand things that might happen, that might not happen, that might go wrong, to pull up against one solid fact: he wasn't even sure he knew how to get onto it. His fingers worked at the softness of the rose petal; it was creamy, comforting. ‘Well then,' he said at last, ‘I suppose we'll go after tea.'

‘It'll be magical,' she said. ‘It will be perfect.' She looked as if she might clap her hands. ‘Really, it will be the most amazing thing to do. Standing up there, up in the air: I can't tell you how many times I've thought about it.'

Up we go
, thought Ted.
Top of the world.
He closed his eyes as she ran through her plans: they could catch the ferry in, walk through the Rocks, climb up from the south.