The Body in the Clouds (40 page)

Across the table, Charlie began to frown. ‘I can't remember—there was a bird, wasn't there? Something about a bird?' She was rubbing her finger around the rim of her glass, teasing out fragments of its clear ringing sound. ‘Isn't there some superstition about this—when a glass rings, a sailor dies?' The noise firmed and thickened, rising and falling so that it seemed sometimes to fill the room, sometimes to fall away, and sometimes to spread out across the wet afternoon's air. ‘Listen,' said Charlie, but her finger was poised above the glass as the harmonic went on, swelling and rising. ‘It's coming from out there. It's the bridge.'

They were almost skipping when they left the pub, on the edge of running as they crossed the road and headed for the grass, hand in hand, six years old again. Above them, odd drops of water found chinks between the pieces of steel, rounder, larger than the rain that fell easily, uninterrupted, from the sky. They stood with their faces up, trying to catch the isolated drops and listening to the long, strange chime that suspended itself between the steel, the wind, the water.

‘Gramps always said she could sing,' said Charlie, both hands up towards the bridge as she blinked in the wet, ‘said he heard it the night he climbed up with Joy, the day the arches joined, the day Kelly fell, the day he met my mother and took her up in the air.'

Lightning, a blanket of it, spread wide and white across the sky, and out towards the east a single fork speared down to the horizon. Dan heard Charlie catch her breath, and thought,
It's something to be here— and it's beautiful.
If he went away now, he knew he would always need to come back.

And then he saw it, just below the bridge's deck and beginning to float, to fall. Count to three, and it would be gone.

He grabbed Charlie's hand again, spun her around. From above, from some angles, this looked like a dance.

‘Look,' he said. ‘
Look.
'

It's happening. It's happening. It's always happening.

Acknowledgements

C
ertain parts of this book were inspired by real moments and real people. Some of its incidents, some of its conversations, derive from incidents and conversations that someone took the time to record. There was a man called William Dawes who came to Sydney with the First Fleet to look for a comet. And there was a man called Vincent ‘Roy' Kelly who fell from the Sydney Harbour Bridge and survived. But this book and its people and its coincidences are the stuff of imagination.

The epigraph lines taken from W.H. Auden's poem ‘Musée des Beaux Arts' from
Collected Poems
by W.H. Auden are reprinted with the permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

The epigraph reference to the body in the clouds—and the book's title—comes from Governor Arthur Phillip's letter to Lord Sydney on 13 February 1790 as reproduced in the
Historical Records of New South Wales
, vol. I, part 2 (1978).

Most of the indigenous words used in the text come from William Dawes's notebooks, held by the Special Collections of the library at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and reprinted here with their permission. The call number for this material is MS 41645.

A small number of words and phrases collected by other early British visitors and used here are drawn from Jakelin Troy's
The Sydney Language
(1993).

Dawes's journals are now available online at
www.williamdawes.org
and the spellings and accents used in the novel are based on these transcriptions. However, the letter . has been transcribed where it appears in the novel's text as ‘ng', as in Jakelin Troy.

The words collected by William Dawes—and by other officers and settlers—come from a number of language groups and dialects, including Dharawal, Darug and Gundungurra. Thanks to Frances Bodkin for talking to me about this, and about the ways the different accents of the British influenced their transcriptions of these words.

The extant correspondence between Dawes and his Astronomer Royal, Nevil Maskelyne, is part of the Board of Longitude papers in the Royal Greenwich Observatory's archive held by the University Library, Cambridge. Dawes's weather journals, rediscovered in 1977, are held by the Royal Society in London.

The poem referred to by Watkin Tench (p. 295) is Erasmus Darwin's ‘Visit of Hope to Sydney Cove, Near Botany Bay'.

The lines from the song ‘I'm Sitting on Top of the World' by Ray Henderson, Samuel Lewis and Joseph Young are © Redwood Music Ltd administered by J. Albert & Son Pty Ltd. All print rights for Australia and New Zealand administered by Sasha Music Publishing, a division of All Music Publishing & Distribution Pty Ltd
www.ampd.com.au
. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Text attributed to the Reverend Frank Cash (p. 87 forward) is taken from his
Parables of the Sydney Harbour Bridge: Setting Forth the Preparation for and Progressive Growth of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, to April 1930
(1930).

The newspaper article regarding Roy Kelly's survival of a fall from the road deck of the Sydney Harbour Bridge (p. 207 forward) was published in the
Sydney Morning Herald
on 24 October 1930.

Conversations between the bridge builders—and anecdotes told by them—were in some cases inspired by Richard Raxworthy's incomparable oral history,
Sydney Harbour Bridge Builders
(1982), and by
The Construction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge
, a video released by the Institution of Engineers, Australia, that combined a 1969 interview with one of the bridge's supervising engineers, Frank Litchfield, with footage shot by Henri Mallard in 1930 as the bridge was completed.

Thanks to Maria Richardson who talked to me about the Mater Mis-ericordiae Hospital in North Sydney where Kelly was taken after his fall. And to Paul Cave, the founder of Bridgeclimb, in whose collection of memorabilia the medal presented to Vincent Kelly ‘to celebrate his preservation from serious harm' is now housed. I had the chance to see it during an interview for a story published by
The Monthly
in August 2006, and that moment, like the story of Kelly, did prove to be ‘something that lodges deep in the imagination'.

The line ‘like gold from airy thinness beat' as remembered by Dan (p. 71), and by Ted (p. 91), is from John Donne's ‘A Valediction Forbidding Mourning'.

The quote on page 109 is from Dannie Abse's poem ‘Watching a Cloud'.

In terms of artworks, the sketch of the bridge under construction (p. 90) is inspired by Grace Cossington Smith's
Study for The Bridge in-curve
(1930), held in the National Gallery of Australia. Antony Gormley's stunning
Blind Light
(2007)—an installation the artist describes as comprising ‘a chamber 11 metres by 9.5 metres by 3.5 metres high, filled at 1.5 atmospheres of pressure with 7000 lux of light and a density of purified water vapour such that if you hold your hand out in front of you, you can't see it'—was on show at London's Hayward Gallery between May and August 2007, and inspired some of the ideas of what it might be like to find yourself standing in a cloud (p. 153 ff). The postcard on Ted's lowboy (p. 152) is inspired by the painting that also inspired the Auden poem quoted in the epigraph: Pieter Bruegel's
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
, held in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels. And the postcard Charlie gives Dan as he leaves Sydney (p. 211) is inspired by David Moore's image
Sydney at 16,000 Feet
(1966), held in the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

The compendium of information drawn from First Fleet journals which refers to days of ‘no extant record' (pp. 276–7) is John Cobley's
Sydney Cove 1788
(1962).

Thanks also to Steve Offner, Gail MacCallum, Hannah Westland, Ali Lavau, Clara Finlay, Angela Handley and Jane Palfreyman. And to Nigel Beebe.