The Body in the Clouds (15 page)

For years, when they were little, he and Charlie had daydreamed about cloud-walking, begging Charlie's grandfather again and again for stories about making the bridge up in the air, up in the mist, up in the blue or white sky, for stories of planes flying through clouds, later, during the war. They imagined stringing tightropes between hot-air balloons; they imagined diving into a big tuft of white as if it was the local pool. They imagined being able to sculpt the soft whiteness into statues, mazes, whole cities of buildings. Dan shook his head: crazy-kid things to think of. That cloud he'd seen from the Eye on his birthday, he hadn't even been able to decipher its shape. Yet lying on the grass unravelling the clouds had been part of every weekend, every holiday, every late summer evening after school.
Primary school
, he thought now. Surely they'd outgrown that sort of thing by the time they were in high school and mapping out their lives. ‘All I want,' Charlie would say at the end of every fantasy, ‘is to put my hand out and grab a great big chunk of white.' And then they'd argue about whether it would be wet or dry, hot or cold, until Gramps shut them up with stories about coaxing planes through white banks that loomed solid and cold—‘towering cumulonimbus with spikes of ice at the top,' he said. They were the worst; the coldest and the worst. Dan shivered now; those spikes of ice, and how big were the clouds through the window if a plane, so big itself, felt small against their billows and curves? The floor, the ceiling, jerked up and bounced down again, and he heard Cynthia swear under her breath.

Surely not today
, he thought, but some part of him didn't feel sure enough.

Outside, one of the clouds had taken on the colours of a complete circle of rainbow. Dan smoothed his hand over the page in his journal and tried to draw its shape, marking in the divisions for the seven colours that he remembered from school, red through to violet. He couldn't remember the last time he'd seen a rainbow, let alone flown past one, and he wished he could have made the picture in his journal look nicer than a blobby shape cut by black lines with the colours only written in. A few years ago Charlie had sent him a postcard of a perfect white cloud haloed by a rainbow. He'd read the message three times before he spotted the credit along the bottom. It was one of her photographs.
Where are you?
she'd written.
I'm making more pictures and wishing I could show them to you.
And she'd copied a couple of lines of a poem
by one of the world's other Dans—if you've still got time for that sort of thing with your busy job and your mysterious Caroline.
The lines written carefully in her neat handwriting:

My failing:

To see similes, cloud as something other.

Is all inspiration correspondences?

He wondered if he'd ever replied, ever acknowledged that the card had come. Yes, it was so easy to put off getting in touch with someone when you knew it could be as instant as email, as a phone call. This rush around the world used to take six weeks, six months. Now, he was one hour down; still more than twenty to go.

He flicked through the blank pages of the journal again, thinking about Charlie's cloud photo. The last series of her work he'd seen, she'd placed photographs of old weather records against photographs of the same days in her year—23 October 1789:
At 10, a shower of small rain
. 23 October 2002:
Dust storm on the edge of Sydney.
She was just as delighted when the days' temperatures and tempers were completely different as she was when the weather repeated itself across the centuries.

‘But what do you think it means, if they're the same?' he'd asked her. ‘What do you think it tells you?'

She said, ‘It tells me something nice about time, that sometimes it folds one way and something repeats, and sometimes it folds another and you end up somewhere different, with something new. It's not science, Dan, it's poetry.'

She hadn't sent many pictures after the cloud—the occasional photo printed on a rectangle of glossy white card, announcing an exhibition; the odd one torn out of a magazine. And she always wrote across the middle of the images in thick black pen—
It'd be nice if you were here
, or,
I thought you'd like to see where this ended up
—so that he wanted to tilt them to make the black words slide onto the floor and leave the picture clear. He should have gone home for one of her shows—Caro always said she liked the pictures.

‘Do you know what the weather's been like back in Sydney?' he asked Cynthia, to compensate for his earlier evasiveness, and she shook her head. ‘It was a great day when I left—blue sky without a cloud. Be nice to land back into a day like that.'

‘You've been away a long time?' she asked, and as Dan nodded, he realised he had forgotten how Sydney's streets fitted together, forgotten the series of steps and turns you'd need to get from the main railway station down to the bridge. All jumbled now, like London.
I should text Caro
, he thought.
Might make her smile
. Still, he remembered its sky, its big blue sky. He remembered Charlie turning her face up to the warmth of its bright sun—when they were kids, when they were grown up, when he was leaving.

He looked down into the clouds, now far beneath, and his eyes closed against the light. In a backyard on the other side of the world, he and Charlie used to lie and watch the jets draw their trails of vapour high across clear skies: yellow-orange at dawn, white at noon, red sometimes at dusk—maybe that was what had made the sky from the Ferris wheel feel familiar.

‘Imagine if you were living two hundred years ago and you saw something like that in the sky,' Charlie would say. ‘Imagine. You'd think it was God or something, wouldn't you?'

He took a drink from the flight attendant, took too big a mouthful, and turned back to the window. From nowhere, below, he saw the huge silver body of a plane with a dark blue tail—he could see its insignia quite clearly—as it cut at right angles across his plane's trajectory. His mind stammered. How big was a plane? How close must it be if it looked that big, took that long to pass by his window? A hundred feet or so? But that couldn't be right. He could see the colour of the pilot's hair—‘Fuck me.' Should he tell someone? Had anyone noticed? Should it be there? Should he be there?

Cynthia yawned and turned the page of her book. The picture of the clouds below, framed by the window, was clear again.

He finished his drink in three gulps, holding the last mouthful against his teeth, his cheeks, scanning the horizon for anything else that might appear. It was unnerving enough when you saw other planes, made miniature far-off on other flight paths, but this . . . He shivered. The rush in the airport, all the people queuing with bags, their shoes off to be X-rayed, and the screens and screens of departures, the endless abacus of flight numbers. It didn't bear thinking about, how many planes were being kept apart, kept in the illusion of a pristine empty sky, at any one time. How many people were moving so far up above the earth, between somewhere and somewhere else.

He uncapped his pen.
A plane just cut underneath us—close enough for me to see the pilot's head and the name on the tail. No one else seems to have noticed. I wonder where it was heading. I wonder whether we were in the wrong place, or it was. I wonder how long it would take people to realise if we disappeared up here.

I'm going home.

Dawes

I
t was an extraordinary cloud, long and narrow and very straight, as if a stripe of colour had been erased from the blue or a line of longitude, cutting perfectly from north to south, had been drawn onto the sky's curve. William Dawes stared at it for a while, watching as it began to blur, as it faded to let the sky's blue through more and more brightly until, in the end, there was only a sky so clear that he wondered if he had imagined it.

He shook his head and came back to the industry around him, the last tweaks and tightenings of the frame for his roof, the last securing of his rounded timber walls. They seemed so sturdy, but the surgeon said ominously, ‘Just something for them to find ruined when they come looking for us and find our place abandoned like my namesake's Roanoke.'

Shading his eyes now, Dawes held onto optimism. Yes, the Governor had said, his observatory would be built—and yes, it would be built on the point Dawes coveted, the point he had called, with the Governor's permission, Point Maskelyne, in honour of the Astronomer Royal.

The little promontory of land was changed beyond measure, bits hewn out and levelled, and the grasses and coverings pulled back to show more and more gashes in the soil. Here were walls. Here was the break for a door. Here was a snug and solid space. And leaning against the trunk of one tree that rose up further along the ridge was the great white square of canvas that would stretch across the frame for a roof, ready to be rolled back on its casters, ready to open his room to the stars. It was something, in this place, to watch the quickest pencil sketch become an edifice, and in only a few months—particularly when all the other surveys and designs he'd made for the Governor's Albion had so far come to nothing.

‘Lieutenant Dawes, sir?' The voice came from down by the shore. ‘These rocks, sir, very flat—are they the kind of thing you want to fix the clock into place?' The man was kneeling on the ground, his hand smoothing two big regular slabs of stone like a merchant displaying a fine piece of silk.

Dawes crouched down, almost tipped off balance by the sudden movement of the man spitting at a fly that brushed near his lips.

‘Fish?' said the man, and smelled his fingers. ‘These rocks smell like fish, sir.'

‘Maybe they were used for cooking,' suggested Dawes, running his own fingers across the rock's grain, bringing them up to his nose. It was definitely fish. He corrected himself. ‘Maybe they are used for cooking,' he said. ‘We should leave them, I think.'

The man shrugged; if it meant he was going to have to chip away at another couple of lumps of stone, he wasn't happy. But as he stood up, his shrug froze, and his eyes narrowed. At the water's edge stood two girls, their dark skin shiny and their eyes wide and clear. The man tensed, cursed, and spat again. There was no fly near his mouth this time, but a convict had been speared the previous week, and had died, and Dawes saw the reckoning in the man's eyes; there was no use in pointing out that another native had been killed by the settlers as well.

‘Gentlemen,' he said, ‘we have some visitors.'

‘Probably them that went after a catch of our fish—probably cooked it down here right under your nose, sir.' The spitting man tucked a snarl around that short final word.

‘They're starving,' said Dawes quietly. ‘They're hungry, like us. Now please, we need to . . .' He took a step towards his visitors, and wished he knew some of their language, but his only options—
wo-–roo wo-–roo
, meaning ‘go away', or
kangaroo
, for that strange hopping beast—seemed unhelpful. He tried ‘Good morning' and ‘Thank you for coming,' but the words hung unacknowledged in the air. The girls stood, still and quiet.

If only he could convince them to accompany him up to the camp, to meet the Governor, to see the smallness of what they were doing. And of course it was small—a barren patch rubbed here and there, the line for a roadway nothing more than a paced-out suggestion between two points. If England summoned them home tomorrow, Dawes thought sometimes, the land would swallow any trace of them in no time, leaving only strange come-and-gone shadows in the stories these natives told. If he could tell these girls anything, he'd tell them this. ‘The size we look,' he'd say, ‘we're nothing really, even with the noise and the mess we make. We're incidental.'

He took another step forward, patting his chest. ‘Mr Dawes.' The girls patted their own chests and said, ‘Mr Dawe,' swallowing the last letter. Dawes smiled. He tried ‘Welcome,' his hands spread wide in greeting, and again they repeated it. He tried ‘Good morning' again, with the same result.

‘What about a tune, sir?' called someone else, pushing in front of the man who'd cursed and spat. ‘They like a tune, I heard.' And he started to whistle. The girls smiled, pursed their lips, and began to whistle the tune in his wake, out by a bar or two, and out a note or two from each other, like some discordant round or a persistent echo. And then more of the men followed them into the beginning so that the point filled with whistles, chasing each other through phrase after phrase of the song ‘until the break of day'. A cheer, and a whoop, and Dawes was clapping too.

Stepping towards them, he held out his hand—‘Good morning,' he said again—and one of the girls, the younger, stepped forward, took his hand and held it as they stood, their eyes, their faces, their bodies so close together that each could see the breath in the other's chest.

‘Good morning,' she repeated, and she held out her other hand. They made a cross now, like the makeshift stretcher that might carry a wounded man—left hand holding left hand, right hand holding right. He could feel her skin underneath his thumb, and it was as soft as his fragile rose petals had been long ago. It took all his concentration not to stroke the skin a little, to investigate its texture. A moment longer in the still silence, and then the whistling started up again and the girl, smiling, began to turn in a slow, careful circle. She was dancing with him, turning him around and around in time to the whistling.

Dawes laughed—dancing at last, and where was Tench?—and held his visitor's hands more tightly. Around they circled, around they went, all the men whistling and stamping, and the landscape spinning by in more and more of a blur as the song quickened, her steps followed it, and his steps followed hers. He heard the tune pull up grandly for its climax, and smiled. The water, the sky, the blocks of brick for his walls, the trees across the harbour; around they went in a loop. And as the whistling stopped at last, as the two dancers stepped back and broke their grasp, both stumbled a little.