The Body in the Clouds (6 page)

Charlie, his mother and Gramps: his tiny pool of people. Caroline's family ran away in all directions—siblings, second cousins, great aunts. They were like London; you could disappear into their numbers, and Dan liked that.

‘Of course we can go home,' he said at last. ‘We can go this Christmas, if you want to. I didn't know it was such a big thing for you.'

‘It's not.' Caroline was standing now, but awkward. ‘It's not really anything to do with it. The point is where
you
want to be. Here or there. Not just for some little piece of time like Christmas.'

Her skin was almost luminous in the darkness. She was beautiful, he thought. It still astonished him sometimes.

‘I don't know,' he said. ‘And it's not that I'm indifferent. It's easy to be here because I am here, but—' He shrugged, adding too quickly, ‘And you're here, Caro, of course.' She frowned. ‘Sorry,' he said, ‘I didn't mean—'

She shook her head. ‘It's all right. It's just . . .' She took a deep breath and sat down again, close enough that their arms were touching. After a moment she took his hand, lacing her fingers between his. ‘Tell me a story now,' she said. ‘Tell me the story about the man who could fly.'

‘I don't think—it's late, Caro. We should get some sleep.'

And then she was standing, her shoes on, feeling for her coat, her bag, almost before he'd had time to regret his refusal.

‘I'll get a cab,' she said as he began to apologise, to protest. ‘And you should get some sleep, you're right. See which side of the world you dream about. I bet I can tell you that even before you close your eyes.' But she leaned down, kissed him gently on the top of his head. ‘I'd like to be able to think about what happens next in this story,' she said, and her voice now was wistful.

He stood up then, followed her to the door. ‘Stay here,' he said. ‘Don't go off and get a cab—it's too . . .'

‘It's too late,' she said, but she smiled. ‘Don't worry, this isn't the end of the world. I've just had enough for tonight. I'll talk to you tomorrow.' And she was gone, pulling the door shut quietly behind her.

What did he want? Not this, he thought, not going off in the middle of the night. He knew he should go after her. He remembered Gramps, the last time he'd seen the old man before he came to London, saying, ‘You're a good boy, Dan, but don't be careless,' and nodding towards Charlie. Dan had smiled, and hugged him. Him and Charlie together somehow, that wasn't the story—he knew that. Nor was it what Gramps had meant.

As he turned away from the door at last, his phone began to ring.

‘Caro?'

‘Hey? No, Dan, it's Charlie.'

‘Charlie! Did you ring earlier? Caro said she thought she heard a message.'

‘She did—I did.'

‘You know it's after midnight here—what are you doing calling?' Charlie could operate in four time zones in her head; she was not a person who accidentally rang in the middle of the night.

‘I—well, it's your birthday, and . . .' The line went so quiet Dan thought it might have dropped out until Charlie said, ‘It's Gramps. When I rang before I was at the hospital with him. They're saying it doesn't look hopeful, Dan . . .'

‘Charlie, I'm sorry—I didn't . . . I wish I could . . . what about Mum?' A sudden fear, new and shocking, that one day Charlie would ring to tell him there was something wrong with his mother; the possibility had never occurred to him before.

‘Your mum's been with us all day—she's worried about him too. I mean, he's such a good age, you have to . . . But he just looks sort of small, and he's not talking very much which, you know . . . Anyway, I said I'd ring and tell you.'

And for the first time, the world felt big: the shrunken version of phones and email and fast flights ballooning back to its thousands of kilometres of vastness.

‘Do you want me to come home? Does Mum want me to come?'

‘Your mother always wants you to come home, Dan. It's been ten years, mate, and you're terrible at even calling. But look, it's a long way.' She was back to her pragmatic self.

‘I'll see what I can do about work, about coming. But Gramps'll be all right, Charlie. He'll be fine. You know, he's the man who can fly.' And he laughed into the line's silence before he heard Charlie take a deep breath.

‘You should get some sleep,' she said. ‘I'm sorry I called so late—I did it without thinking.' He heard her swallow, and swallow hard again. ‘And I guess I'll ring you when I know . . . when I know what's happening.' She said goodbye then, and the line clicked.

In Sydney, thought Dan, it would be four in the afternoon. The sky would still have all its colour, and Charlie would be sitting by a window somewhere, watching the light change, thinking about her grandfather.
Tired
, thought Dan.
I've never heard her sound so tired
. He rubbed his hair, hard. He'd think about it all in the morning.

Still in the darkness, he watched the lights through the window— points of blue, green, orange and red, and then the yellow-white of ordinary lights in ordinary rooms like his. A floor of lights went off in one building across the river—maybe its cleaners had finished for the night— and a single light went on in another; maybe a phone had rung there, too, or an argument had just finished, or someone was just getting home. Dan reached for his phone, got halfway through dialling Caro, and then hung up as the light across the river clicked off again.

So many lives
, he thought.
So many stories
. Above the lights and the buildings, the flare of the city obscured the stars.

Dawes

I
n the darkness, away from the bustle and mess that constituted settlement, William Dawes tipped his head back towards the night so that his silhouette showed a nose pointing straight up, and then one long line—chin, throat, neck, chest—running down towards the ground. His face, spare at the best of times, pared itself back to skin and bone when pulled taut like this, and what little fleshiness did sit around his cheeks, under his chin, disappeared against his skeleton. His hair was clammy with the sweat of a long and busy summer's day, and the air was so heavy it might itself have been sweating, although the occasional puffs of wind that reached across the water from the south were cooler now, already touched by the smell of rain.

From the camp, a little way off, came great shouts and screams—he paused, waiting to hear laughter, but there was none—and the gashes of orange and red bonfires threw darker shadows onto the night. Their burning wood crackled a staccato percussion under voices calling, voices singing.

‘And we won't go home until morning, we won't go home until morning, we won't go home until morning—' this last word stretched to a perfectly timed ritard ‘—until the break of day.'

But this was home now; here they were, and almost two weeks into it.

The air above growled with thunder and a new whoop went up from the camp: ‘Come on, come on.' William Dawes shivered: he could see the lightning in the south, and the storm was on its way.

He wasn't sure that he was meant to be out on the point alone, but then he wasn't sure that he wasn't meant to be there either, and that had propelled his feet away from the tents and the noise and on around the waterline to this sandstone bluff. The last of the convicts had been brought ashore during the day—less attention paid to unloading most of them than to the unloading of stores of food and paintings and books, the piano, the chickens, the hatchets, hoes and spices. Now, among the fires and before the storm, everyone was getting down to the business of being on land, some of them for the first time in years.

Two weeks ashore, but the ground was still strangely mobile under Dawes's feet as if the dirt was pitching and rolling to match remembered waves. He'd watched other sailors, other officers, getting about in other ports, but he'd never picked the ducking and weaving in anyone else's steps. A week usually, before the length of his stride clicked into regularity and he could begin to walk easily, to pace out accurate measurements. Until that happened he considered his idea of how far it was from one place to another as vague as anyone's.

Walking through the dark brush—sneaking through the dark brush— had been even worse; with every twig that snapped, every stone that turned and clattered, every shadow that rose up in front of him, his breath quickened and his throat tightened. This darkness seemed darker than any other darkness he'd moved through. A tree with two branches perpendicular to its trunk loomed up and was a superior officer, ready to question who he was, what he was doing. A rock with round edges was a convict crouched ready to jump and strike at him, to take his red coat and his purpose. He heard breathing from behind one clump of ferns—was that the flash of someone's eyes?

There was no moon. A new moon, the thinnest line, had set with the day's sun. Now clouds, laden with light and sound, raced up the coast towards him to dim the stars as well. The Cross, low and near the horizon, had been swallowed by the storm; so had the opalescent glimmer of the Magellanic Clouds. He tipped his head back further. There was Sirius, his star and his ship, still directly overhead; there was Orion; there were Castor and Pollux, the twins of Gemini, hands joined through one shimmering light.

Let it rain
, he thought simply; to be wet, to be washed, to be cool and clean—that would be happiness. He shook the stiffness out of his neck, his shoulders, and lay back on the ground, ready now for nights and nights of stargazing from this place. Mr Halley, Mr Herschel, Mr Dawes, famed for their observations of the night skies, famed for their acquaintance with comets; that was how it would be. He would see planets from this place; he would see transits and meteor showers and all manner of amazing things. He would set up his clocks and his instruments and he would make his name incorporating this place into the knowledge of the world, the knowledge of the heavens.

A great crack of thunder, and the camp cheered and applauded. Nice to be away; nice to be set apart a little; nice to be alone. He would propose this spot for his observatory in the morning; he was just above the sandstone ledge where he'd seen that girl sitting—watching him, he thought—as he came ashore. No sign of her since, but then there'd been not much sign of anyone apart from the increasingly familiar faces of the thousand-odd available British. And this was a perfect place for watching, a perfect place for waiting—unseen from what was becoming the main body of the camp.

This new place was settling, onto its land and onto its maps. Already the shallows between land and water had been converted into fine black lines on white paper, names suggested here and there—Sydney Harbour, Port Jackson—and these sketches had been replicated, spilling out from the magic nib of Dawes's favourite instrument, the pantograph. He loved the way the pantograph's point ran across a map painstakingly measured and deduced—all the chains and baselines and steps and angles worried into the unique single-line signature of somewhere—to create a copy of it, perfect, under the instrument's other leaded point. It was as easy and as fluid as if some new version of the place was making itself then and there. It was like being up with the birds, watching the land appear below with another turn, another curve, another rise, another river; the invisible becoming visible. Straining towards the darkness, Dawes rubbed his eyes hard until sparks flared behind their lids. He'd been staring at those fine black lines too long.

His eyes closed, their sparks dulling and fading, and he breathed in time to the sound of the wind pushing through the tall trees on the ridge behind him. Whether it was the months at sea, whether it was the newness, the difference of these trees, the sound was different here—softer, and differently shaped somehow, but as if the wind was something solid that could be glimpsed as it moved and not just when it disturbed branches and leaves. He squeezed his eyes tight for a moment, opened them wide, and the sky had been swallowed by layers of thick velvet that turned a bruised purple-green against pure white sheets and lines of lightning. The brilliance was almost directly on top of him when the rain came at last, its smell sweet and its drops heavy and round. He opened his mouth and felt the water against his tongue, his lips, his forehead as he pulled at his coat, his shirt, stuffing them underneath the dry ledge of a rock.

More thunder, more lightning, and the rain pelted down, flicking so hard against his bare white skin that it almost stung. He rubbed the wetness across his arms, his chest, his face as if he was in a tub of hot water with a great cake of soap. The first lick he took across the back of his hand tasted like the ocean's salt and the weeks at sea; on the fourth, the fifth, the salt was gone and he was sure the water was sweeter than anything he'd tasted before. He cupped his hands and their hollow filled in a moment. He drank in the rain, puffing his cheeks out and swishing the liquid from one side of his mouth to the other before he swallowed.

So sweet
, he thought again, laughing at the memory of the last water he'd taken unexpectedly. Climbing the mountain behind Cape Town with John White, the surgeon, they'd carried no water and found themselves licking the only available dampness out of a brackish muddy pool.

‘Piquant,' Mr White had said, as if he'd just been offered the finest wine. Dawes still tasted its dirt in his mouth every so often, even these three or four months later.

‘Piquant,' he said now into the night.

As he stood, his trousers, soaked through, clung fast to his shape and little pockets of air tickled his legs, his ankles as he eased their material away from his skin. Too late to take them off, but it would have felt so good. His body stretched and arched, anticipating the next burst of light, the next crash of sound, and then his arms were reaching as high as they could above his head and he was shouting nothingness under the weight of the thunder.