The Body in the Clouds Read online

  He looked at his fingers, paler beneath the harbor’s blue; he watched the surface of the water rise and roll a little just ahead of the boat’s movement. From all around came a full buzz like summertime crickets, so loud that he thought for a moment it might be a different kind of silence, not insects at all, and he brought his gaze back down from its practiced bird’s-eye view.

  The line of foreshore he’d been studying was so still, so empty, that he wondered if the girl had been there at all.

  Perspective was always tricky when you crossed water towards land. As a small boy, making his first flailing, splashing stabs at swimming with his father, Dawes had realized that the smaller the vessel in which you headed for shore—your body was the smallest, then up through rowboats and dinghies to the grandeur of ships with multiple masts—the larger and more looming the shoreline would look. This shoreline, though, had seemed as big from the deck of the ship as it looked now from his squashed spot in the boat, and he suspected that if he had been scooping his way through the water himself, swimming in towards its flats, it would have looked just the same. There was some trick here, whether it was to do with the thick-set trees, the dazzling vastness of the sky that made everything beneath it sit forward like a prop on a stage, or some other proportion of light and space at work, like the innards of a telescope. There was no question that the trees were thick; from between them the pale canvas of one or two tents glinted like a chandelier’s light, or a jewel in a buttonhole. And there was no question that the sky was huge.

  His frown deepened. He had the strangest sense he’d seen this place—or at least a place like this—before. Behind closed eyes, he tried transposing the topography of other ports he’d visited, the lip of the coast where he’d grown up, onto the shape he’d just traced. He shook his head a little, as if that might loosen a memory. The mystics would say he’d dreamed of coming here, and maybe they were right. Waiting through the long slow sail, waiting before that for the order to leave: in all that time a man could conjure up a lot of ideas of where he might be going. As he opened his eyes he caught the edge of a bird’s dive down into the water, but by the time he’d turned to see it emerge, even the rings made in the water by its plunge had settled completely. He’d need more time to work out the perspective of this place.

  “You’re for the maps, Lieutenant?” he heard behind him, and he twisted around towards the question. “They’re after starting on the harbor’s chart as soon as possible.” It was Watkin Tench, lieutenant from the Charlotte, his face flushed above his red coat. “I think there’s a suspicion that some of those little inlets and promontories might start shifting around if they’re not immediately pinned down onto paper.”

  The two men smiled; they’d struck up a conversation before the fleet had sailed from Portsmouth, had eaten together with Dawes’s father once or twice, had hailed each other in Madeira, in Rio, on the Cape as they could. They’d exchanged books. Dawes to Tench, the Original Astronomic Observations made by the astronomer on Cook’s second voyage. (“Not much of a narrative,” Tench had grumbled, flicking past the briefest of introductions to its pages of measurements. “At least you’ll know what I’m trying to do out there,” Dawes had said to excuse his choice.) Tench to Dawes, Gulliver’s Travels, which Dawes had opened below decks as the first swells of the voyage broke against his ship’s wooden walls. Having thought long and hard, Tench had written on the flyleaf, he considered this the one book you must have by you as you travel to the antipodes—and he’d slid a marker into the pages that told of Gulliver’s own last, brief trip to New Holland. Dawes had smiled—a ridiculous thing. And on deck that first night out of port, the first pages of Gulliver fresh in his mind, he had looked up to catch the edge of a single shooting star.

  All the astronomy in the world, and a thing like that could still look magical.

  “Like Gulliver’s floating island of Laputa,” said Dawes now, looking again at the harbor, at its islands and beaches, pleased to already have one arm of cove etched—however lightly—across the surface of his mind. He’d been particularly taken by the book’s flying island, its course determined by a band of governmental astronomers who turned it this way and that by adjusting a lodestone buried deep within its observatory. “It does have a chimerical feel,” he conceded, “although this light is so clear, so bright; everything should be well and truly fixed by that.” The men at the oars smirked at each other as they pulled—pair of loons, in their scarlet.

  “Well,” said Tench, ignoring the grimaces, “it will be nice to see you ashore, sir. A quiet week, I hear, before they get the women landed; we should toast this beginning sometime in between, and find you the best place for your instruments.” The crates holding William Dawes’s purpose—instruments for an observatory, for sighting and measuring, quantifying and calculating—were somewhere deep in a hold; he didn’t like to think about what might have been piled in on top of them. “All this sky and land to measure,” said Tench. “Got your eye out for a baseline? Your feet ready to stride?”

  Watkin Tench, whose father had been a dancing master, found it slightly comical that a man might count his steps—one, two, three—to measure and map a piece of ground. “If you’re counting your steps, you should be dancing,” he’d said, threatening the studious and careful Dawes with a turn about a dance hall first in Portsmouth, then in Rio, then in Cape Town. He’d failed to persuade him each time. Still, he was adamant, he would see William Dawes dance yet.

  Dawes shook his head; his feet took days to settle to steadiness when he came off a ship. Like Tench, he’d seen action against the French off the coast of America, but he’d taken a hit, and the injury had left him with the limp he blamed for his awkward transitions between sea and land. A limp was one reason he’d avoided Tench’s dancing; a solemn way of working another; a complete inability to dance the third. “Baseline to run straight past the Governor’s house, I’d have thought,” he said. “Wherever they decide to put that.”

  “Very wise, Lieutenant. And what do you make of our new home?”

  But Dawes could only repeat the shake of his head; the brilliance of the sun, the impossibility of arriving after a voyage of some eight months, and that heightened sense he’d had that they were off the maps, beyond finding, at least for the moment.

  “We are out of the world, sir, as the sailors would say. Well and truly somewhere new now.”

  Their four hands braced against the boat’s sides as its bottom scraped the mud, Tench quickly on his feet and onto the sand to turn and steady the boat for Dawes.

  From beyond the beach came the noise of ax-heads against wood, of arguments and complaints, of orders and reproaches, and a glossy black bird sailed overhead, the ends of its wings stretched taut and pointed against the sky and its call clear and melancholy. Dawes followed its path. I know of nothing that sounds like that, he thought—nothing in the world. He turned a little further, his hand grabbing for something stable: whatever the trees were, whatever the birds were, whatever these waters were. I don’t know where I am. But it was exhilarating, not disorienting. Not even frightening.

  He balanced himself carefully, feeling the usual resistance of his stiff left leg against the eagerness of his right one. It was his habit now to keep his balance on his good leg and step out with the awkward other one. But as he put his hand on Watkin Tench’s shoulder and steadied himself again, he felt his good leg move forward instead and plant itself, his first footprint, on wherever, whatever, this place turned out to be.

  Ted

  IT WAS not how his mother had wanted it to turn out—the mines, she’d hoped, would keep him close to home—but Ted Parker had dreamed of working this job since he was a kid and the newspapers started writing about what it might look like, when it might start. From his bedroom window, at night, he’d watched the moon lay down a thick, bright bridge of light across the ocean, and when he closed his eyes he’d seen that bridge translated, luminous and elegant, to the middle of the city up the coast. H
e dreamed of all the shapes it might take, all the noise its creation might generate. He dreamed of working on its deck, its beams, on its foundations, anywhere. In the best dreams, though, he was soaring above it, silent like a bird, or, later, with the purring engines of an aviator’s plane. To be on it would be one thing, but to be up above it again—there was a thrill in that, an anticipation, that the boy could hardly put into words. If he could get to the city, if he could be part of it, who knew what might be possible?

  By the time the tenders were awarded and the project was fixed—a baseline designated to ensure that the two perilously suspended halves would meet; a particular arch chosen to be beaten out across the air for a particular amount of money—by the time the land had been blasted and reshaped to take its weight and its spread, his mother had given up trying to talk him out of going. She’d worry about him, she said, if he ended up hung out over the water with next to nothing to hang on to, and if his father had been alive he’d surely have put a stop to it. But she’d sat through enough breakfast recitations—maybe steel, maybe concrete, maybe stanchions, maybe suspension—that she stopped suggesting the pits, the trains, the delivery job on offer from the local grocer.

  On the night before he left at last to try his luck with Sydney’s big bridge, Ted woke suddenly from the darkest part of his sleep, his fingers working at the edges of his bedclothes and his heart racing. He lay still, found the layer of silence that held the sound of the ocean as it folded itself against the sand, and tried to find his way back into his dream. There’d been noises, shouting, the usual busyness, and then something had grabbed at his throat, taken his breath away, cut off his own shout. All he could recover was a sensation of shock, of escape; he didn’t want to think about what it might mean.

  “Bet there’s only a few will have come as far as you for it, love,” his mum said at breakfast, folding paper around a packet of sandwiches.

  But of course men had come from everywhere for it, nothing unusual in Ted’s coming at all—although nobody else he met admitted to dreaming about it, or mentioned the alchemy that seemed necessary to ensure that the two halves, inching out into open space high above the water, would meet up one day, solid and sure, sometime in the future.

  He was young then, just fourteen—though “fifteen,” he’d said, off the train and with sandwich crumbs sticking to his sweater. They told him he needed to be twenty-one to work on the arch, so he took whatever bits and pieces of jobs he could to keep himself nearby: days carting bricks away from houses that had been demolished, days down in the deep cavities that would hold the bridge’s southern footprints, days on the ramp that would become its approach. But always he was some way away from the bigness of being on the thing itself. He didn’t really mind; near enough, he reckoned, was good enough, and he got to see it creeping and creeping, a little farther every day. He got to see its routines and rhythms, to hear the percussion of it coming together. And some days, when the light was right, he thought he could see fragments of it sketched against the sky, like a blueprint sitting beyond the busy movement of the men up in the air.

  The first time he’d come to the city, at seven years old, he’d followed his mum through quiet, dark offices. It was about the war, that Great War, about his dad, and it was the first time too that Ted had understood his dad wasn’t coming home. After hours of sitting on a hard-backed chair in a hallway, his mum had grabbed his hand and walked him fast out of the building and into the light, up this street and down that one, so jerky and erratic that he wasn’t sure she knew where she was going. She’d stopped at last by the water, sitting herself down on its very edge with her feet dangling, like she was seven years old herself. She’d talked to him about the war, about its ending, about the men waiting to come home, about a great wave of sickness—she’d said “flu” but he heard “flew” and had an image of lines and lines of men flying against the clouds, trying to get themselves home. “Because he’s so far away,” she’d been sobbing by then, “and there’s no chance they’ll bring them back to bury them.” He’d lain back on the wharf, patting at the hem of her coat now and then, looking at the shapes the clouds made against the sky. There was a ship in one. There was an alligator in another. There was a tall man running with his coat flared out behind him—and Ted could remember thinking that maybe it was his dad, trying to run around the world and fly home.

  That old wharf had been eaten up by the site’s comings and goings, but Ted wondered if that was why he loved that particular spot, the place that would take the bridge’s southeastern weight; if that was why he still sat there, whenever he had the chance, and looked up into the sky; if that was why he loved the bridge itself: for the idea that he might be able to get higher, or that his dad, still running, might find it and be able to climb right back down to earth.

  Really fifteen, then sixteen, seventeen, Ted took the shifts he could get and slept on a cot on his gran’s veranda. It was not too bad, out on the coast, and not so different from the place he’d grown up in a hundred miles south. He could keep an eye on the sea, on the gulls and the waves and the other things he liked about the land’s shore. The sound the water made, and the nights when the moon rose clear and huge up over its horizon, the light glowing and so thick that he had no doubt he could step onto it and walk out forever. He’d thought about it, stepping off the boardwalk, pushing into the water and out through the surf, fully dressed, all the way beyond the breakers. A daft thing to do, he knew, shaking his head at himself, and he stayed on the shore, leaning back to pick out the few stars his dad had taught him, the Cross, of course, and Sirius, the Dog Star. He always hoped for a meteor before he got too cold and had to head home.

  “He’s a funny thing,” said his gran to his mum, “down the beach at all hours for the moon and whatnot.”

  She suspected there was a girl, but Ted hardly knew how to talk to any he met in daylight, let alone in the dark of an evening and waiting for a moonrise. He didn’t mind dances, and the city ones were better than the ones back home—more girls to choose from so they were less likely to remember you and chase you down the next week. But he liked the pictures better, and sang their songs under his breath whenever he did find himself walking some girl home, for want of anything to say. There was an Al Jolson one he loved: “I’m sitting on top of the world.” He hummed it almost daily to himself. He never dreamed of the girls, although he dreamed of the dancing sometimes, the bridge almost always, and whatever it was that had woken him so sharply, so shockingly, the night before he came up to the city still came to him, some nights, and shook him out of his sleep. He could pick the where of it now, if not the what: in the dream—in the nightmare—he was standing near the harbor’s edge where his mum had taken him after the war; standing near the harbor’s edge where one of the bridge’s four huge feet now pushed up from deep inside the ground. On some weekends, or after a shift if the light was still good, he’d wander down there, thinking about his dad, wondering what it was he saw in that instant before he was awake.

  It was there, one day after work, that he met Joe, both of them crouched down and staring out towards the water, just a few feet away from each other in the dusk. Joe saw him, called out, getting his question in first, “What you doing here, mate?”

  In the fading light, Ted started at the voice and thought, for a moment, that he was looking across at some vision of his father: the man’s hair, the man’s bearing, even the sound of his voice was somehow familiar. He made up a line about waiting for someone who obviously wasn’t coming, standing up and stretching as if he ought really to be giving up, heading home. But, “How ’bout you, then?” he heard himself ask instead.

  “First site I worked on down here,” said Joe, stepping towards him with his hand out. “Joe Brown. I’ve seen you here sometimes. You always waiting for someone who doesn’t come?” His smile was friendly, not teasing or accusatory, and Ted smiled back. “No, no,” said Joe, “I like it here too when there’s not so many people around. It’s a good
spot to sit and watch.”

  Ted nodded. “My mum brought me down here when I was a nipper and we sat for hours.” It felt like enough of an explanation to get him around the lie of the friend who never arrived, and Joe smiled again, acknowledging that.

  “What about a drink then?” he asked, turning away from the water and up towards the city. Ted paused, taking one last look at how much the two halves of the arch had grown that day, before he turned as well and followed Joe up the hill and around to the pub.

  His glass cold between his fingers, Ted studied the other man in the pub’s light. Joe was taller than him, and older, but had the same bright grey eyes as Ted’s, the same fine blond-brown hair, the same slender frame, the same wide, friendly smile. Not his dad, exactly, but maybe like the reflection in a mirror that could show him what his dad might have looked like in a different world. Joe was talking about his own first day working on the bridge, back when the earliest excavations were being made, the earliest gashes hewn into the rocky ground.

  “They used to bring dignitaries’ wives down to look at the holes we were digging,” he said, laughing. “Very polite about it, they were, but you had to wonder what excitement they thought they were going to see.” He drained his beer, inclined the empty glass towards Ted. “Although we did dig up some fine stuff, old buildings and bricks, back from the convicts—made you realize how busy that place’s been the past hundred and something years, with soldiers and ships and coming and going. You know they had astronomers down there, years ago, on the lookout for comets. What a job that would’ve been, eh, Ted?” He paused then, lost in some middle distance for a moment. “The missus,” he said, blinking at last, “says I spend too much time looking back there—looking in the wrong direction.” He took the full, frosty glass Ted held out, and raised it in a cheer. “But you work on it too, don’t you?” Nodding back towards the site.