The Body in the Clouds (24 page)

And then there was the falling man, coming up again through the water, alive, and waving. And waving.

All around the site the men stared and cheered, and it seemed to Ted that he was looking straight across the neck of the harbour and into the fellow's eyes.

‘It's Kelly,' someone called, ‘it's bloody Kelly.' And there he was, looking around as if for the towel that should be there after any dive. From the south side of the shore Ted was certain that Kelly's eyes were bluer now, blue and clear and looking somewhere else altogether.

Above, the clouds parted and the sun flared bright. The dog barked, the foreman called him to heel—and Ted, forgetting his errand, ran down to the shore and looked out towards the barge. He had to rejoin his crew.

Dawes

‘T
wo days he's been rowing himself back and forth,' said the surgeon. ‘Two days in a little boat from one side to the other.' He shaded his eyes from the sun, looked out to the boat as it headed north again, looked out to the other boat, rowing hard to intersect its path. Beside him, William Dawes shaded his own gaze, watched the wake left by the lone rower as it spread wide and blended back into the water's surface. ‘One of your men, too,' said the surgeon. ‘An officer from the
Sirius
. Or a lunatic from the
Sirius
now, I'm afraid. Though I'm surprised there aren't more men reaching the end of their patience and their sanity, after all this time alone.' He sighed, rubbed his eyes. ‘Were you out on the hunt for him yourself, Lieutenant?'

Dawes shook his head. ‘Hadn't heard he was missing.' Down on the point, busy with his tasks, he was blissfully unaware of a lot of what was going on. The news of a fellow officer stealing a boat and rowing himself back and forth across the harbour non-stop hadn't reached him at all; the news that the settlement had just eaten its last provisions of peas—six months before the Governor had anticipated they would run out—had. They'd been more than two years alone on the east coast of this continent; close to three years away from England itself.

‘At least he has the luxury of thinking he's going somewhere, unlike the rest of us,' said the surgeon as the two boats collided and the several officers in one overpowered the lone third lieutenant in the other. ‘Like yourself, sir—on your way somewhere this morning?'

It was a calm autumnal day, quiet and bright, and Dawes had been part way along the seven-mile walk between the settlement and its hopeful lookout on the harbour's cliffs, when he came across John White and his lookout of a different kind.

‘A good clear day for looking out to the horizon,' he said to the surgeon, watching as the subdued officer was planted between two sets of constraining shoulders in their faded red coats.

It was some view from the top of South Head, with the ocean spreading out and running all the way to Valparaiso. Dawes loved it, the size of it, the space against the busy nips and turns and corners of the harbour's shoreline. It was like the night sky, vast and available, although not for stars or disappointing comets, but for the well-stocked ships that must— must—appear soon.

The tricks this settlement was using to pull ships across the oceans: parties of men sent regularly to Botany Bay to check for their arrival, and leave carefully painted signs—we're here, we're up the coast, sail north, turn left, and you'll find us. A marker at the harbour's heads, and letter after letter sent back by any available vessel describing precisely the location of the harbour's opening, the trickiness of seeing it sometimes. A pyre, and a flagstaff, and then a watch had been set.

Dan Southwell was the watch, out on his own with the weight of the settlement's anticipation pressing in behind him. Eyes peeled, eyes staring, for fleets that didn't come—‘Never will,' he'd started saying to himself.

At least Dawes, who'd walked out in all directions and had gone further in most of them than any other white man, looking for rivers that didn't exist, ways through impassable ravines and gorges, anything to get beyond this first plain, thought nothing of a short hike east to the continent's cliffs to take in the breadth of the ocean and bring Southwell whatever passed for news that week. Leaving the surgeon, he pushed on through the bush—picturing himself from above, a single point of red moving along a track that cut the different greens of the bush—and paused as he reached the top of the last rise, breathing the salt of that wide, dark blue, calling his greetings and waving a loaf of bread.

It was enough to earn him Dan Southwell's rating as the kindest man in the colony.

And it was a kind of heaven to deliver news, new conversation, to tell this eager young man about the troubled officer and the perpetual motion he'd set up across the harbour; about another ship ready to sail out with more messages for the world; about a convict's clothes taken by a native as the convict hunted stingrays—and about the stars he was plotting, the weather he was recording, the words he was learning. Southwell had seen the stacks of paper growing in Dawes's room. He'd seen the books, the tables, the almanacs, the instruments with which Dawes was trying to mark out and understand this place, and he liked that every so often he had some private insight into them. It was like watching the magic of a map being copied with a pantograph, one nib tracing over the completed image, while its copy flowed out from the other, inked nib. This place was being written into being, ‘right before my eyes,' Dan Southwell had said one afternoon as another copy of the harbour's dents and curves—the observatory facing the dark north shore—spilled out across a sheet of paper under Dawes's steady hand.

‘And they brought him back to shore, in the end?' Southwell asked now, referring to the renegade rower, breaking off a chunk of the loaf and holding it out to Dawes with a mug of sweet-leaf tea.

‘They did,' said Dawes, sitting down with his breakfast. He suspected there'd been more concern about getting the boat back than recovering the man.

Chewing on the bread, he gazed out towards the west and the one high line of blue hills that sat there, solid and defensive. Camarthen, they'd been called, nodding to another part of Wales. The only thing anyone knew to exist beyond that was the King's arbitrary line—cutting straight down one hundred and thirty-five degrees to mark the western limit of this colony's claim, some nine hundred miles away—and William Dampier's coast, hundreds and hundreds of miles west again.

‘How far that way have you gone now, Lieutenant Dawes?' Southwell asked him, swinging around to look past the little settlement himself, past the silver line of the river as it disappeared upstream. ‘Will you ever get through those ranges, sir? Will you see what's on the other side?'

‘We'll get through sooner or later,' said Dawes. ‘And who knows what we'll find on the other side?' It was all jags and peaks and impenetrable trees, as far as he'd been able to go—the one place where even as good a reckoner as himself had struggled to keep count of his steps, keep track of where he was, and where he'd found it impossible to drag his gaze up into the air and imagine the land laid out beneath him. Fifty-four miles from the coast they'd managed in all the times they'd walked out; hardly far enough to change your view of anything.

‘You know, Mr Southwell, I might start studying the clouds instead of the weather they make: another new thing to look at.' He lay back on the ground, taking in the sky.

‘There are some mornings I think I see sails in the clouds,' Dan South-well confessed. Too many times his imagination had carved their white shapes into tautly rigged canvas, sure that ships were coming—slowly, so slowly—closer to the land, and then watching as they spread and dissipated against the sky.

‘Another job for my balloon: looking for your ships—and ships must be more reliable than comets, unless we are truly gone out of the world and forgotten,' said Dawes. His head was arched back so that his gaze took in only the blue, the white, the brightness of the morning sun. Land, people—all trace of them were gone.

Dan Southwell had heard about the balloon, and in those long shipless days he confessed to Dawes he'd dreamed about making one himself—the lieutenant hadn't made it sound difficult—and floating over the ocean to find their missing fleet, their missing supplies. Surely that thought must have occurred to the lieutenant, too, wondered Southwell, no matter that he always couched his imaginary voyages in terms of mapping, and weather, and other experiments. ‘But then what's up there, sir—the bodies, you said, from who knows how long . . .'

Listening to the silence of Dan Southwell's hesitation, William Dawes watched a small cluster of clouds drift and adjust while a length of cloth flapped lazily on a line. It billowed to round fullness just as Dawes turned his head down from the sky, so that he thought he saw his balloon again. And he sat up, laughing: the promise of a bit of a breeze, a bit of fabric. How high would he need to go, and how far, to find his comet? Maybe all the way back to Greenwich, where he could land on the lawn and discuss those clearly erroneous calculations with the Astronomer Royal. He could sample some clouds on the way, chart the flight of some birds. He could check the accuracy of any maps against any land below. He could see about those bodies too—maybe that's where the surgeon's mysterious hand and arm had come from, dropped down from the sky in some disruptive storm right back at the beginning of their time in this place.
I've been gone too long
, he thought sharply,
I need to get home
.

He was wondering what he might have said aloud when Southwell said again, ‘But those bodies, Lieutenant Dawes? And those fearsome ghosts that swoop down for your throat? Wouldn't you be scared of all that, up in your balloon?' Sometimes, when they spoke, Southwell saw that his friend's attention had slipped away somewhere, somewhere else. Once, he'd asked him about it, and Dawes had laughed and said he was just up in the air, checking the dent that this south head made between the ocean and the harbour. Now, the birds fell silent and the air felt heavy—
like the roar in your ears when you yawn
, thought Dawes, his mind still far from his friend.

‘Lieutenant Dawes, sir,' Southwell persisted. ‘Wouldn't you be scared?'

‘The things we believe might be just as frightening to them,' said Dawes. ‘We have our own resurrection. And they have very beautiful words for other things—for dreams, for make-believe, for flying through the air like a bird, like a spear:
nángami
,
búnama, wómera
. Their word for clusters of shooting stars is beautiful—
molu-molu
—although they fear them as terrible portents. And book, they have a word for book now too.' The conversations, the lists of words and meanings each knew from the other, continued to grow.

‘For book?'

‘For book, for telescope, for compass, for reading glasses, for window, for biscuit, for jacket,' said Dawes. ‘For so many things they may never have thought to see. And for us—they call us after somewhere a great way off:
berewal
. They call us
be-re-–wal-gal
. We make our way, naming plants and birds and spiders. And the natives walk around us, and name us and our possessions, make it all part of the things they can talk about.'

He'd felt better once he knew that the black people had given the white people their own name, their own classification. He couldn't have put it entirely into words, but he'd had moments of fear, before he knew they were tagged as
be-re-–wal-gal
, when he'd wondered if the soldiers, the settlement, this little spike of empire might all have been a product of some native imagination, some night-time dream, like his conversations with the now-faded Judith Rutter. That they were
be-re-–wal-gal
made them real, and really here, and for William Dawes at least there came with that a surprising kind of certainty, or comfort.

Turning his head again, he took in the wide blue sweep of the ocean, and sat up a little to watch the sunlight bouncing on the facets and surfaces of the water. There was something transfixing, tranquil about it, and while he listened to Dan Southwell talking—about a couple of whales that had passed, heading north, the possible return of the aurora, the shine of a moonrise he'd seen coming up out of the ocean the previous week—he stood, rubbed vaguely at his throat, and felt himself stepping closer and closer to the light on the water, closer and closer to the edge of the high sandstone cliff where the country began.

It was his name, and shouted, that made him turn back towards the land; the other man must have seen some bird or beetle he wanted to know about, and Dawes felt his face compose itself into what he hoped was a learned look. But it was what was behind his friend, away to the west—it must be in the harbour just down from his own rooms—that caught Dawes's eye: a great spout of water surging up, up a hundred feet into the air, maybe more. He took a step back to steady himself and felt his good leg plant itself so firmly that the land seemed to shudder and tilt—as if he was just newly ashore again and still coping with his sea legs. He took a second step to right his frail, stiff leg and the world tilted again: the shocking gasp, the shocking rush of air when you took a step and realised there was nothing for you in the space where your foot had hoped to stand.

Once before, on that long hike as far west as anyone had gone, he'd bent his head so intently to the task of counting his paces, tracking his own location, that he'd lagged behind and taken one step too far and felt that same sickening lurch of unexpectedly empty air.
If I tripped here; if I fell here; if I died here
—he'd paused, his hands grabbing at a sapling so that he righted himself too quickly and almost toppled in the other direction.
If I died here half the settlement would think I was just the latest to try to walk home.
And he'd sat breathing deep and holding onto the number of paces he'd reached so that he could stand up, walk on as if nothing had happened, and catch up with the rest of the party.