The Body in the Clouds (10 page)

Fuck, I must be getting old
. One hand pushed into his pocket, the other clutching the roses, he rocked a little more and thought about Gramps, wondered how he was doing. Ninety-four, ninety-five . . .
He might even be ninety-six this year
. All the things he'd thought about since Charlie rang, but now as Dan closed his eyes and tried to remember the old man's voice, the space inside his head was silent, empty, and he stared at nothing, trying to rake up the memory.

Somewhere in the flat, in a drawer or a cupboard or a coat pocket, he had the old man's watch—huge and silver, a pocket watch, for heaven's sake, rather than anything as modern as a wristwatch. Gramps had given it to him when he came away overseas, and he could still remember how furious Charlie had been; it was the only time they'd fought.

‘He's my grandfather, Dan,' she'd snarled. ‘My bloody grandfather, not yours, no matter how much he wants to think we're all just one family.' But, ‘You just take bloody good care of it,' she'd said at last. ‘Maybe you'll feel like returning it to its rightful owner one day.' He should have sent it back to her, he thought now, even if she'd forgotten about it. He let out half a laugh. Not Charlie. Charlie wasn't one to forget things. Even if she made jokes about her lousy memory turning her into a photographer, ‘so I can pin things down'.

He shifted the flowers to his other arm, registering a single drop of water as it hit his shoe. Maybe he should start buying his paper from the supermarket instead of the hut. He watched another drop hit his shoe. That was an extra half a block's walk, and he knew he'd never do it. He'd be back at the hut tomorrow, handing over his change. It was always easier to keep doing what you were doing, like it was always easier to stay at a party than think of the next place to go—even if that next place was home.

It had never occurred to him before that this might mean he ended up staying too long. Whatever Caro would make of that.

The wall he was staring at, he realised then, was almost completely blue, a huge reproduction of a photograph, all sky and water, on which was traced, with the lightest black line, the famous and familiar frame of the bridge in Sydney. The bridge that Gramps had put at the centre of so many of his stories—all the boys coming in to work on it, to beat it into being, and the danger and the daring of it all. Dan and Charlie curled up next to him on the sofa, one either side, staring at the pictures of the men so brave, so delicate up in the air, with nothing to hang onto and the water a long way below. Dan and Charlie laughing at the formality of the ones in suit coats, in hats. Gramps coaxed into telling the best story of all: of the day he'd found himself falling from the thing; how he'd flipped in the air to enter the water, elegant and purposeful; how he'd emerged, the only one to manage it, ‘marvellously alive, my dears, marvellously alive'. He could remember how carefully he'd listened to that story when he was young, and even not so young, so caught up in its telling that he felt sometimes he must have seen it himself.

It was a strange feeling, now, seeing something so familiar in such an incongruous place. He looked at the poster more closely, wondering how long it had been there, opposite this unfamiliar part of his platform. He'd never found a piece of London's skyline that made him breathe out and smile a little, like he was doing now—not even its bridges could do that for him, no matter how nice it was to mooch around them, watching the water, the light, under their vast shadows.

Maybe this is homesickness
, he thought suddenly. Maybe Caro was right and it was time to decide where he wanted to be. Maybe Gramps was the excuse he needed to go home, to see what was there now.
And of course I have to see Gramps, if Gramps is going to . . . if anything is going to happen.

He shifted the roses in the crook of his elbow and felt one of the thorns drive hard into his flesh; as he looked down from the big blue picture to see if his finger was bleeding, he saw something fall through his peripheral vision, so fast it threw him off balance.

He looked up. There was nothing there. He looked down and the roses glistened, pale and smooth.

Truth and innocence, that's what white roses meant, Gramps always said. But what had the old man's voice sounded like? He tilted his head to one side, to the other, as if the lost sound might shake itself loose and roll into his ears, but nothing came and he felt his eyes drawn back to the blues in the billboard. They were hypnotic, their brilliance distracting his gaze from the ad's words, bright and white, over the top. Something about tourism, he supposed. He stepped closer to the blue, not noticing the nothingness beyond the tips of his shoes, the edge of the platform, until he felt a tug on the back of his coat, heard a woman's voice, sharp—‘Hey, what are you doing?'—and he felt the red rise up in his face. She thought he was going to jump.

‘No, no, it was the picture, I wanted to see if—'

And the woman stepped back, blushing herself—it was the mother with the bunch of roses. They stared at each other uncertainly.

‘I just thought, how awful,' she said, ‘to be holding such beautiful flowers and then . . .'

There was a rush of noise from the tunnel and they both turned towards the train. Dan felt the surge of air it pushed before it, cool on his face. The bridge, the sky, the water disappeared behind the line of carriages, and the doors clattered open. He stepped aside, his head down as the platform began to clear. He was last onto the train, and his heart was pounding as he sat down.

Leaning back against the window as the doors shut, he caught the radiance of the photograph's blue again. That was it: it was an old one of Charlie's—he'd been with her the day she'd found the place on the shore where the angle between her lens and the bridge reduced its famous curve to almost nothing. ‘Airy thinness,' her grandad had said when he saw it. ‘Like gold to airy thinness beat.' And there was Gramps's voice at last.

It was funny that he'd never walked far enough along the platform to see that picture before. ‘Never been in the right place at the right time, then, have you, boy?' Gramps would have said. He wondered how long it had been there, waiting for him.

He'd ring Charlie when he got to work, then book a flight. He needed to see Gramps. And Caro was right. He needed to go home.

He was at work half an hour before he remembered he'd left the roses on the tube.

Dawes

C
ertain stories were important to tell—certain things were important to do—when you were establishing yourselves in a new piece of the world. And if it was important for the Governor to confirm the impossibility of miracles, particularly in the matter of bread and wine turning into the literal body and blood of Christ, then it was also important for him to transplant some sense of the recognisable, the known, through the bestowal of rather grand names. The town they were making, he had proposed, could be Albion, in Cumberland County: an old name for England and the name of a far-off English county, stuck directly onto somewhere unknown, unexplored.

Their faces lit by irregular firelight beyond the canvas hospital, Dawes, Tench and White tried to think of some reason that earlier Albion, that earlier Cumberland, might have influenced their Governor. ‘A hankering for sausages,' suggested White. ‘A hidden idea of Utopia,' suggested Dawes.

Watkin Tench dismissed the two of them as men of appetite and ideology respectively.

‘I like the poetic jab of Albion—Francis Drake gave the west coast of America New Albion; you can even see it in Gulliver's maps,' he said, smiling at Dawes, ‘but Sydney Cove, New South Wales, that's more workaday, more like it. I reckon they're the names that will go back around the world—although I'm favouring Port Jackson at the moment in my version.'

‘And mine,' said John White, another man with a publisher. ‘Albion reminds me of Milton,' he went on, ‘and I wouldn't want to give him too much credence until we work out if we're paradise lost, or paradise regained. I'd wager lost—another batch staggered in this morning.' A ship, sent north-east for turtle meat, had arrived back turtle-less, and some of the convicts were failing so fast that their punishments had been deferred until they were hale enough to bear them. That was hunger.

William Dawes could mostly distract himself from the emptiness of his own stomach with the busyness of his days. But there was a lean, scruffy look to most people now—someone had even suggested joining the natives in their nakedness for want of tailors and drapers. You couldn't let yourself think it would be that bad, thought Dawes, not after less than six months, not yet.

‘It's a fine night out there on the harbour,' he said, in an attempt to steer the conversation into calmer waters. Beyond the shoreline, the moon nipped at the dark harbour's movement.

‘Finest and most extensive harbour in the universe,' commented White.

‘That's how you've put it?' Tench brushed a bug from the back of his hand. ‘I've given it “superior in extent and excellency” to anywhere else we've been—but the universe is a big claim to make.'

Three sets of eyes looking out to the cove, the thin mark of light across its surface. Three ships had sailed for China, too, off to fulfil their tea contracts, and the calculations running around the settlement in their wake had been palpable. Fewer ships meant more people who'd need to be left behind if a decision was taken to give up, to sail away. Or more people dead in the meantime and fewer to make the voyage.

The French had already sailed on, but not before Dawes had gone down to visit them, spending a strange day discussing scientific matters with their astronomer.

‘A slightly discomfitting thing,' he had said to Tench on his return, ‘to find yourself discussing experiments on gravity and the latest calculations of the moonrise with a Fellow of the Parisian Academy beside a barren bay in the antipodes.'

Stranger still, although Dawes had not told Tench of this, that the French astronomer claimed to have found a rosebush, a white rosebush, growing back from Botany Bay's shoreline among a nest of banksias and gum trees. A creamy English rose: it had to be a fantasy, or a mistake.

‘It's a year ago they gave me instructions for the clock,' said Dawes now, pouring another nip of rum for Tench, for White. ‘A year ago we stood in the cabin with the Governor in Portsmouth and took our lessons on when to wind it and how many of us must pay attention to ensure it was done.' The noise of it, its tick, its tock, and the opulence of silver case, white face, in the middle of this hasty nest of canvas and bobbing ships and uncertainty; this was soothing to think about sometimes.

‘You know a batch of men walked over to Botany Bay the other day in case any British ships had come in, thinking to find us there. Can you imagine? A flotilla of storeships seven miles away, us with no idea they were there and them with no idea where we were. Thinking us lost, disappeared, like those early Virginians.'

A joke between them, when they'd met. John White, the surgeon, so concerned with keeping together the bodies and souls of as many as possible, and not doing too badly given the lack of almost everything he might have thought necessary for the task, such as malt, blankets, vegetables, tea. It was Tench who'd first wondered if White knew he shared his name with a settler from two hundred years before, who'd taken a hundred folk across the Atlantic from England to settle Roanoke, a new-world place. Realising too late how much their supplies were wanting, he'd sailed back to England, thinking to replenish and return. He'd left a granddaughter in Roanoke, just days old, England's first American-born child. But there was a war, and his ship was commandeered when he reached home, and it was three years before he returned. It was the day that should have been his granddaughter's third birthday, but he'd found no one, not a soul, not a body, not a sign, not then or later—just intermittent rumours of Indians with pale blue eyes; Indians who could read the Bible.

‘And of course, Francis Drake's supposed settlement at Albion disappeared from the face of the earth as well,' said Tench now in a morbid tone, kicking at the embers of the fire. ‘We really are laying the worst omens on this place.'

It was all about waiting, thought Dawes, and at least he could enjoy the happier anticipation of seeing one of the comets predicted by the great Mr Halley streaking gloriously across the sky, while everyone else focused on the slightly less predictable arrival of the British storeships that would come, should come, might come, must come, answering their wants and shortages and anchoring them firmly back into the world.
Still floating
, thought Dawes,
like Laputa. We can't think of ourselves fixed here until our presence, our activity, our needs are acknowledged
.

The thought felt weightier, more ominous, as the surgeon said, ‘I wonder if we're getting closer every day to those pale-eyed Indians here,' and stared gloomily at the fire awhile. ‘But then,' taking a mouthful of rum, ‘we're a thousand bodies to that hundred, sir, and the world is a more possible place than it was two hundred years ago. And rocks were painted to our south, I'm told, giving clear directions of where we are and how to find us, should anyone come looking. Should anyone come.'

‘Painting the rocks, us and them,' said Tench, gesturing out towards the darkness that held their still-elusive neighbours and the figures they made—animals, men—around the rocky foreshore of the harbour. Dawes had found some below the point where his new observatory was growing.

‘Painting the rocks, I like,' said the surgeon. He'd spent the morning with the body of a convict whose forehead had been fatally split by a rock—a different attack to the handful of spearing injuries he'd already inspected. ‘That's a dozen convicts run off into the wild to try to find their way somewhere, and another run off with a spear in him. One I'm still trying to piece together and another two to be buried—and all this,' he scratched at his forehead, ‘while I write shopping lists for currants and spices and the Governor thinks of the grand town he'll build.'