The Body in the Clouds (2 page)

It was midday, and in the captain's quarters at the back of the ship, he paused in the middle of winding the clock. A fine-featured young man, his eyes bright and his brow almost always dinted by a frown of concentration, he was especially charged with the care of this expedition's astronomical instruments, like this beautiful silver-backed timepiece. Which accounted not only for the frown, but also for an occasional straightness of the back, and an occasional pleased smile.

Through the wrinkled glass of the cabin's windows, he watched another of the fleet turn and settle, and he squinted against the flash of her sails, the rush of white movement as they were hauled in. The hard sun made it dazzling. Outside the door, the sentry scuffed his feet and coughed, waiting for the task to be done: when the clock was wound, the watch could change. Clearing his own throat in return, Dawes looked down at the instrument in its cushioned box, his sight dull in the dim cabin after the shine of the world outside. He blinked, recovering its shape, its white face snowier, cleaner than any sail and ringed with elegantly black Roman numerals that marked minutes, hours, days. It was a beautiful thing, this clock, and it had made its own momentous voyages. Sometimes Dawes, daydreaming, wished it had been able to record what happened in those seconds, not just count them out. Then he could have seen its long and far travels with that great mariner, James Cook. ‘My never failing guide,' Cook had called it, and it had even marked off the last hour, last minute, last second of the great man's life—was said to have stopped at that moment. Imagine a clock that could show you what had happened in that then, that there, as clearly as its casing showed you the edge of your face, as its numbers showed you the when and where of your position.

It was midday, and probably the first time any kind of ‘midday' had been marked here, thought Dawes. There it was, so simply done: another place, fixed into the world's twenty-four hours of time, fixed into its web of longitudes. He rubbed at the clock's silver, bits of himself reflected in its surface: the hair, the face, the deep bright eyes, and the dint pressed above them. He smiled. Here they were then, after all this time. There was a shout and a splash outside; one of the sailors must have gone out of the rigging. He gave the clock an extra rub with his sleeve, and set it back into its box.

‘Here we are, then.' His voice echoed a little in the room.

On the deck, under the sun, Dawes took his bearings—the coast four or five miles out to the east; the harbour's water heading west along some unknown course. All around the cove tall trees jostled for space, some with subdued green leaves hanging straight against the colours of their bark, others with wide shiny leaves spreading from wide, dark branches to make canopies of damp-looking shade. Below these, the different greens of ferns, grasses, heaths, low brush mixed among themselves, offset here and there by the bright feathers—scarlet, green, blue—of some quick bird surveying the British arrival.

Twenty-four hours
, thought Dawes,
and the first of you will be shot for our collectors.

Below the birds' movement, a shuttle of luggage and people was making messy, busy progress, oars hauling weight through the water and landing one thing on top of another, random and haphazard.
It must have been so quiet here this morning
. The Governor's dogs and the parson's cats made their contesting calls above shouts of instructions and misunderstandings, questions and decisions. Things would be determined today, in a hurry and for half a reason, and that was how they would be fixed and set. At least time had arrived, pinning the ship and the clock and this new port back to the faraway reference of England with lines of maths and measurements, as certain as if the two pieces of land were floating safely together in a bathtub of water.

Dawes took a deep breath in and held it, his shoulders back and his body straight as he heard his name called—‘Lieutenant Dawes, I need you here'—and made for one of the jolly-boats and the short trip to land.

‘What do you think, sir? What'll happen here?' one of the ship's mates called down to him as the little boat began to pull away.

Dawes waved at him, smiling. ‘Anything you like, Mr Southwell,' he called. ‘Anything at all.' It was one thing to come into port somewhere, to struggle with new words, to find your way among new streets, to bow at ladies with different hairstyles, different dresses to any you'd seen, to worry down a dinner of some meat you couldn't quite place. It was another to come into an anchorage like this—no buildings, no systems and, on the few people who had been seen, no clothes. There were already complaints about what little headway Britain's implements could make against this forest, yet trunks were beginning to fall, gashes of space were beginning to appear among the branches, and the beginnings of a camp, a settlement were being made. Dawes could feel the look of the place, the way it had been until now, dropping away like the edge of a precipice while all that it might turn into rushed in at him. He grabbed the dinghy's edge to steady himself against it.

He saw her then, a young girl sitting cross-legged on the cove's western shore: still, dark, watching, and he raised a hand to her, repeating the wave he'd given a moment before. It was hard to tell, beneath that brilliant sun, if she saw him, let alone if she waved back.

His ambitious imaginings of the settlement's progress, its future state, folded in on themselves like an umbrella and he trailed his fingers through the water, its cool wetness shutting up his fancies and dropping him back into somewhere practical, somewhere useful. Looking around, he began to visualise the line of the cove from east to west as it would be drawn for a map. From above, the headland where the girl sat was held firm by a ridge along its spine, set here and there with tall red-–trunked trees and squat grey undergrowth. Below this, the cove's western edge ran almost precisely south to north, one indent like a semicircle and then on to its end, a snubby stub, almost square, and set as perfectly north to east as the edge ran south–north.
A nice finish to a drawing
, thought Dawes,
like a flourish at the end of a signature
.

He looked at his fingers, paler beneath the harbour'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 practised 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 realised 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 in the water its plunge had made 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 harbour'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 harbour, 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 axeheads 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.