The Body in the Clouds (25 page)

This time, when his hands reached for some useful sapling, some well-placed branch, he found he was scrabbling with grass and grazing the stubble of sandstone. Opening his mouth to call to Southwell, he saw his friend's face working in rapid grimaces and already too far above him. The sea surged and roiled against the cliff below.
Not this
, he thought,
not here
. And,
I want to see what made that tower of water.
His right hand got some purchase on a low shrub; his left foot twisted its toes between two close rock ledges.

‘Can you throw something down?' he called up the cliff, and Southwell was back in an instant with the great white sheet that his mind had turned into a balloon not five minutes before. Dawes had an image of himself grabbing at its four corners, its dome swelling with wind and drifting him up, up and gently up to the top of the cliff. Except, of course, that he'd keep going, keep hanging on, and head west, fast along the harbour to reach the last fine mist of that waterspout.

One heave, another, and he was back on the bluff, his hands stinging and another rip in his uniform's fabric.

‘Thank you.' He nodded to Dan Southwell, made formal by awkwardness.

The young man nodded back carefully. ‘You're all right, sir? Your foot?

Your leg?'

Patting his shin with more heartiness than he felt, Dawes smiled. ‘All fine, all here,' swinging back around to look at a harbour that lay clear and calm again under the sun. ‘When you called to me,' he said at last, ‘what was it you wanted to draw my attention to?'

‘Your attention, Lieutenant Dawes?' Southwell frowned. ‘I only called when you began to stumble; your feet were falling so fast towards the cliff, and I called to try to turn you from the steps you were taking.'

‘So there was nothing—' He paused. ‘You didn't see—' Another silence, and he eased himself carefully back down onto the ground, the solidity of the flagstaff against his back.

Southwell seated himself opposite, studying the lieutenant's face. Dawes's eyes had shifted to that middle distance again, and he began to speak, slowly and quietly, as if he was feeling his way through sentences for which he didn't quite know the words.

‘I think sometimes,' he said, ‘that I spend so much time drawing this place from above, or staring up into its heavens, that some part of me has become stuck up there permanently, trying to put all its pieces together, and I lose myself on the land. That's all this is. That's all this is.' And as he laughed, he heard Southwell joining in, kind and friendly.

‘Well you gave me a scare, sir, and I'm glad I could bring your attention back to your feet and the ground.' From any other man but Dawes, such talk would sound alarming. But Southwell smiled again at the lieutenant, and proposed another helping before he began his walk back along the ridges to the observatory. And although Dawes nodded, and smiled, and took the dish with some relish, he sat gazing, between mouthfuls, back towards the settlement, and forgetting for minutes at a time to chew, to swallow, perhaps even to breathe.

The way his eyes glistened, Dan Southwell said later, they looked almost luminous.

*

‘Still waiting?' Watkin Tench asked that night as he sat with Dawes outside the observatory's quiet space. And until he jerked his thumb up towards the comet-less night sky, Dawes wondered how his friend knew of his midday apparition.

‘No,' he said, ‘I don't think so. There must have been something wrong with the calculations—nothing I brought from London made sense of it. And of course I'm still waiting for the papers the French astronomer promised me—caught up on our missing ships, I suppose.' He drained his mug, hoped the comment sounded wry rather than desperate, and rubbed the map his thumbnail had etched on his trousers back into smoothness. ‘I expect it's up there somewhere,' he said, making a show of standing to end the night, ‘or something is. But perhaps I'm not the man to see it.'

And as he walked towards his room, his blanket, his tiredness made his feet feel impossibly light, as though he really was rising up off the ground, up towards the vantage point of all those maps. Under what word could he describe what he thought he'd seen for his dictionary, he wondered as he settled to sleep—water or spirit?
Badu
or
mawn
?

Perhaps he should row out across the water tomorrow to see if his splash had left any trace of itself or of its cause. How many passes of the harbour would he need to make, he wondered, before he found any evidence of whatever it had been—or before the surgeon came to haul him quietly home.

Dan

A
s the image of thick white mist swirled and faded, Dan's head lolled against the window, hovering just above sleep. He had some sense of his breathing, in and out, slow and gentle, like the rocking of a little boat on shallow water. Now, behind his closed eyes, he was seven again and sitting cross-legged with Charlie on her back stairs, her grandfather above them on the veranda in an old cane chair. It was summer—he could hear cicadas, and he could smell the wet earth in the vegie patches where Gramps had poured buckets of water onto lettuces, tomatoes, radishes. Charlie was picking at a scab on her knee—Dan remembered too, or knew in some part of his memory, that she'd fallen over on the rollerskates she'd got for Christmas—and wheedling a story out of her grandfather: ‘Just one more, just one more before bedtime.' It was evening, and the light was starting to fade, draining the colour out of the end of the day like some shadowy bleaching so that anything real, anything in the landscape, looked like it was only an idea, a monochrome suggestion.

‘When I first knew your grandmother,' Charlie's grandfather began, ‘I wanted to fly. The way those planes used to loop and curve over the harbour, as if they were writing a message in the clouds—if you could be quick enough about reading it. Took me years to find out about Ica-rus; all that time I could've been collecting cockatoo feathers and getting my wings together. Because I reckon if Icarus could get a good enough updraught from a tower in some old palace, I'd've been right as rain and up through the clouds if I'd scampered up to the top of the bridge and launched myself off there. And we were still putting it together then—I could've climbed up bold as brass and gone off the top of it.

‘Anyhow, you both know about Icarus—I've told you about him before. And a mate of mine, in the war, got himself to Greece and saw the place where Icarus flew. A strange spot, he said, in a valley but raised up somehow, so you could always feel a breeze passing; probably Icarus thought you could trust it to be there when you needed it. He wrote me a letter about it, this mate of mine—silly bugger got himself shot before he could get back home, but it meant a lot to me that he'd gone after the flying boy for me and checked out how he'd done it. A frame of feathers, a high enough spot, and a great big leap into the blue with all your trust and confidence in it. And don't get too close to the sun. That's all—you just had to step off, you know, you just had to step off.'

‘Like the day you went off the bridge, Gramps.' There was a plea, small and singsong, in Charlie's little voice, as if she might trick an extra story out of her grandfather.

‘That was a day—late spring, and the water so blue, and that dog barking over on the south. They say I pirouetted like a dancer in the air before I went down through the blue. And all those other blokes diving in and cheering and shouting. Seventh to go in, kids, and the first to survive.' Leaning forward to ruffle Charlie's hair. ‘That did me for flying for a while, of course.'

In the dream, the backyard, the vegie beds with their sweet wet soil, fell away to the harbour's blue, and Dan felt himself falling suddenly, falling down through the air towards the water, a man's voice yelling from below, ‘Get yourself straight, get yourself straight, lad.'

He felt something at his belt—a spanner—felt his hand moving up to free it, and felt himself brace for the change of his own weight as the spanner dropped towards the harbour below, the harbour that was rushing up to meet him.

‘Tuck your head in, tuck your head in,' but instead he turned and twisted, looked up and there was the whole bridge—the slabs of deck that had already been hung, the arch that had met so perfectly in the middle, the pylons, the rivets, the struts, the girders—the whole thing unravelling as if it were a half-knitted jumper pulled free from its needles. Faster and faster until there was just one first section of arch reaching out from Dawes Point, and then that was gone too, and houses were popping up like parsley plants, a ferry terminal rearing up on the north shore opposite.

The whole city was winding itself back. The wharves at the quay went. The tram terminus went. The pale sandstone of the customs house went and all the stores around the shoreline. Trees were shooting up as if they were just righting themselves after an accidental stumble, and straight below, a man in a red coat rowed out from Dawes Point in a tiny boat. There were tents, ships with huge white squares of sails rolled into their beams, and masts as tall as tree trunks. And behind that, a great wide silence, the occasional shout, the occasional gunshot, the occasional squeak of a pig or a dog. The water around the boat was the most beautiful sunlit blue.

The man in the red coat looked up, reaching his hand towards Dan as he floated—it seemed—in the air. But instead of pulling Dan down he seemed to rise up to meet him, and then they were both inside some bubble of blue, the bridge was above them again and an ambulance siren—a sharp, modern sound—was cutting over everything, out of place.

Dan turned, a swimmer's tumble turn, although the blueness seemed like air, not water. Straightening, he saw the man in the red coat float gently back to the ground, saw him pointing up, higher. Twisting his head, Dan saw a man with a short grey coat flapping out around him like a cape, like wings, falling towards him, towards him, through him, and away. There were rows of men on the side of the harbour, lined up to the top of the arch where they stood, like weekend divers, waiting their turn for pikes and plummets down into the harbour. But the next movement he saw was the bright tail of a shooting star, not a man, down to the east, down towards the horizon and the ocean. It sizzled and spat a little as it hit the surface, and the silence around it rang—the precise bell of the seatbelt sign being turned off.

Dan's head hit the window and his eyes jerked open.

‘Something to drink, sir?' The flight attendant was leaning over Cynthia, a packet of pretzels on her outstretched hand. Dan worked his mouth open and shut, bewildered, parched and aching.

‘A gin—no, some tonic, thanks. And a lemonade . . . and a water.'

Cynthia passed the miniature cans and bottles across to him. He'd never felt so thirsty.

‘Bad dream?' She was holding out her own bag of pretzels. ‘I don't like these, if you want them.'

‘Thanks,' said Dan, ignoring the dream, ignoring her question. He wasn't sure how he would have answered anyway. All he could think of was the air above the water, and the thickness of the blue. At least he'd found Gramps's face again, no matter how disorienting it was to dream of falling through one of the old man's stories. Perhaps it was an appropriate homecoming, he thought, being scooped back into the stories he'd thought he was flying away from all those years ago.

He clicked open the can of tonic, nodding towards its fizz, its metallic smell. ‘This'll be good,' he said, raising the glass towards Cynthia. She raised her glass in return, and opened her book again.

Surrounded by white noise, his mouth full of wet, round bubbles, Dan stared at his watch awhile. His moment of panic about Charlie's grandfather had drained out a little through the dream, through the drink. Now he supposed it was all just tiredness, and dislocation, and some strange glitch from making this long and long-overdue trip home.

He thought about Caro's ultimatum—the
here
or
there
that she'd put so politely. Everyone pretended the world was shrivelled to the size of a pea with planes and phones and emails and the rest of it, but you still had to choose if you were going to be here, or there. And the distance between the two choices was irrelevant—no one had yet worked out how to be in two places at the one time.

Caro would have had an answer for that: he could hear her voice over the buzz of the plane. ‘What's the thing where time happens all at once, past, present and future mashed together? Maybe that would help . . .' He could hear her laugh. No, he needed the eighteenth century, when time and space were different things and people accepted distances, delays. Maybe there'd been a measure of grace in that.

He yawned.

Working his fingers into random pages of
Gulliver
, Dan's eyes kept straying towards the window, towards the night and the clouds, and towards the partial reflection of the two Russians who sat in front of him. Gulliver was leaving Blefescu, Gulliver was showing off his diminutive sheep and cattle to astonished Englishmen at home, but the Russian woman was singing softly, her head bent in towards her father's, and somehow the softness of the notes cut through the mighty noise of the plane's movement and filled the space inside Dan's head that had been pushed empty by the dream. The song was low and sweet; it sounded like a lullaby. His eyes were heavy again, and then
Gulliver
was on the spare seat next to him, closed.

He could feel pressure under his arms, and hands grasping at his shoulders, then he was lifted clear of the water and laid out on a barge, coughing, hacking, with bits of him beginning to hurt. Pain around the top of his legs as if bands of iron had been fitted there. And shards of metal, it seemed, sticking into his body at all angles.

‘Strike me,' said someone behind him, ‘it's bloody Kelly. You're a lucky bloke, mate, a bloody lucky bloke. Seven in, one out.'