The Body in the Clouds (39 page)

And his old observatory, given over—as Tench had predicted—to the settlement's defences, would have its ground dug for the bones of executed criminals, its ground dug again to quarry stone for buildings that echoed the plans Dawes had drawn and were designed by the man who did indeed propose raising a bridge—Erasmus Darwin's bridge— from the little observatory in the south across to the north. Imagine that, a great bridge in Sydney, where much was once made of a few logs laid down to ford a diminishing stream. It was there too, of course, in the end, the proud arch, its foundations burrowing down through the ground on which William Dawes had stood, had lived, had watched and waited. Even his comet would blaze across the sky at last—not here, but over England, over the northern countries, and more than two centuries late.

All this was tucked into the future as William Dawes looked away from the sky to the diminishing size of a row boat, moored in the shallows and rising and falling on the tide. His own breathing fell in time with its movement, and in its lull, he caught the edge of something solid from the corner of his eye, as if someone had drawn a thin black line across the blue.

Creaking and heaving, the
Gorgon
made her way east, the harbour sliding by and punctuated by coves and inlets, beaches and islands.

‘And still there are those,' said Tench, watching the way his friend's eyes ran across every curve and outcrop as though transferring them onto yet another map, ‘who can row around here and not know where they are.'

Dawes shook his head, indicating the names of each place as if nothing could be simpler: ‘Warran, Barawoory, Woganmagule, Walla-–mool, Car-ragin,' and, on the north shore, ‘Booragy and Kuba Kuba and Garángal.'

Glancing back towards the cove, he saw a white bird dive deep and come up sharply, a fish flapping in its beak, and remembered Patye's
molu-molu
and, further back, his band of workers and the bare structure of his observatory. Across the ground, spilling down to the waterline, lay that length of canvas which would be pulled taut across a frame, painted up with a mix of linseed and lead, and fitted to become a roof that he could open to the night. Perfect; just as William Dawes had imagined, and just as his French astronomer had endorsed. The men had reached down, Dawes among them, and taken the sides of the canvas as if it was a vast quilt for a vast bed—they had lifted it, and without any discussion had flicked it up, like laundresses hanging a sheet to dry. The canvas had cracked, arched into a perfect dome with the winter breeze beneath it, and then it had settled, fluttering, just for a moment.
My balloon, my magnificent balloon.

Now, in his mind's eye, the material flicked again and again, with him caught under its big safe bubble of air, rising up—although beneath him, he saw, was not the blue, the gold, the green of water, rock and bush. He was floating over a map inked black on thick creamy parchment, as if he were part of one of his own illustrations.

‘—and on to Burrawarra and Tarralbe,' he finished his recitation for Tench, pointing towards the harbour's southern headland and beyond, as the colour came back into the world.

‘And what will you do with it, your great accumulation of words and numbers?'

Dawes laughed. ‘You could have my vocabulary for your own publication, and everybody wants the maps, and I still have to write up my Report of the Expected Return of the Comet of 1532 and 1661 in the Year 1788.' His eyebrows raised at the ongoing joke of it. ‘I don't know, Lieutenant Tench. There'll be more than enough work to do when we get back there; who knows which stories they'll want us to tell?'

‘I liked the idea of your cyclopaedia, everything from alligators to zoology, with
mawn
and
molu-–molu
in the middle.'

Molu-–molu
and
mawn
: his beautiful shooting stars and his terrible swooping spirits. ‘Thank you, sir,' said William Dawes. ‘Whatever happens, I've got the beginnings of it.' A project for his old age, perhaps, when he was an old man come back to this place and its conversations, his papers stacked in their trunks and ready, at last, to be pieced together.

The thumb of his right hand pressed into the palm of his left, but it wasn't the splinter's itchy scar it sought; it was warmth, it was exchange, it was
putuwá
.

Gliding on, the
Gorgon
turned and tacked towards the heads. It had almost reached the last place from which the settlement was visible, and as Dawes leaned and strained towards the smudge it made on the land, he saw again some sudden streaking movement. A body. A balloon. A bird. He had no idea. He blinked, and the movement, the settlement, had gone, left to other people now, and to all the new stories and maps and discoveries they would make.

Whatever was happening here, it would continue after he had gone as it had before he arrived.

Spinning on his good leg, William Dawes looked out across the opposite rail. Between the heads, north and south, lay a dark blue stripe of water and a lighter one of sky—on and on, all the way to Chile, had he been able to see that far.

Into the blue
, he thought,
and on we go, back into the world.

Out of the Blue

T
hey walked down to the bridge after the funeral—unsure what else they should do, where else they should go. In the pub that sat under its bulk, they raised their glasses to Ted Parker and his stories, to Joe Brown and his family, to William Dawes and his little piece of land.

‘And to Caroline,' said Charlie.

‘To Caroline,' said Dan, raising his glass again. ‘She was right to make me come.'

‘I thought it was my billboard that did that.' Charlie smiled. ‘And to you, Dan Kopek, my friend. Thank you for coming.' A lull fell around Charlie's words and they sat awhile in its silence, Dan's eyes staring through the empty air in front of them and Charlie with her grandfather's watch cupped in her hands like a scoop of water. The edge of her face glanced in and out of its silver as if it were reflected in the smooth surface of a pond or a pool. ‘But I've been thinking,' she said, ‘that you should keep this. Not just—' she put up one hand to stop his objection ‘—because he gave it to you, but because of the story. You had his dream; coming home, the night he died, you had his dream. I never have. I take a picture that might have the memory of that fall in it, but it's you who sees it there—you and Ted Parker. I only see it when someone points it out. I went looking for new versions of it—making pictures for the journals; finding stories about bodies in clouds. You've got the original.'

‘But you're always part of the story, Charlie.' The watch sat between them on the table. ‘And you wanted the watch—it's yours, please. You always wanted it. And it belongs here.'

She shook her head, placing the smooth silver circle into his hands and closing her own around them. ‘It's yours. It's your story now.'

The last conversation she had with her grandfather, a gossipy show on the television above their heads and him railing against the way everyone wanted these stories about people they didn't know, instead of paying attention to their own. ‘Work out what your story is,' he had said, clutching her hand. ‘Don't get distracted by all these others. You and Dan, you know some good stories—make sure you both tell them.'

Squeezing Ted Parker's hand, warm and gentle, one last time, Charlie let the silence sit. The next time he spoke, his hand still in hers, it was Joy Brown he asked for. And Charlie, her eyes closed, had said, ‘Shh,' and, ‘Don't worry.'

Said, ‘Shh, it's all right.'

Said, ‘I'm here, I'm here; of course I'm here.'

‘Will you come back again soon?' asked Charlie as Dan cradled the watch, uncertain, in his palm. ‘All this,' waving her glass towards the harbour, ‘and your mum, and, you know, the rest of us—will you bring Caro to meet us at last?'

He had a strange flash: him and Caro tucked into Gulliver's canoe and making for the New Holland coast through a thick white sea mist. ‘Of course,' he said, coming out of his reverie. ‘She always wanted to come, but you know me. Disorganised—or careless, as Gramps would say.'

‘Useless.' Charlie brushed at the side of his head, but gently, so that the end of the gesture cushioned his cheek for a moment. She held his gaze. ‘It's right, what you're doing, going back—you know that.'

He smiled, tilted his head in the slightest nod.
Work out what your story is
, that's what Gramps had said. And Gramps was his story. Charlie was his story. Caro, now, was his story. And Gramps was right—those stories held you together, gave your skin shape, like muscles and bones. He'd willed them together, just as Joy Brown had willed him into her family after the war. You could always do it, if you had some stories, some places and memories, to glue you together. No matter how you came by them.

Dan took a mouthful of beer. ‘Anyway, tell me, what happened to William Dawes, sitting out there, writing down words and waiting for his comet?' He pointed towards the grass beneath the bridge.

‘Died in Antigua, in the 1830s, with a trunkful of stories—piles of journals and letters and reports and notebooks, I guess. Most of it was destroyed by a hurricane, and then one of his relatives got rid of the rest.'

Dan said, ‘He needed his own Ted Parker—or his own Joe Brown—to keep telling the stories, even if it meant things got borrowed now and then.'

‘He got them, Joe and Ted,' said Charlie. ‘They all found each other in the end. But I don't know if he ever saw his comet—no one did till 2002, and then it was over Japan, over England, not down here.'

‘They're not much, comets, compared to meteor showers,' said Dan. ‘You expect them to streak across the sky but they just hang there, really— like still photos, not movies.' He hoped Charlie wouldn't take that the wrong way. ‘I mean, I saw one, one weekend in England, a few years ago now . . .' He heard the words come out before he knew what they were going to be. ‘The night I met Caro—we were camping in Kent; it was spring and there was a comet, this silver streak.' And as he said it, he could see it, a silver streak glowing against a dark night sky. It was beautiful, beautiful.
All this time
, he thought,
and just saying it was enough
.

‘Of course you saw it, Dan,' Charlie laughed. ‘Of course you did. That's a story worthy of Gramps.'

Through the pub's window, the light was dropping from sunshine through shadow to the thick velvet of a storm. A group of tourists, ranged against the harbour's backdrop for someone's camera, split apart under the first drops of rain, darting towards the awning the bridge provided as the thunder began to growl. The sound of the traffic fell away—a bird called; another answered. And the old man Charlie and Dan had seen sitting by the bridge's shadow the first morning Dan was home shuffled past, bundles of plastic bags in each hand. Draining his glass, Dan nodded towards him. ‘Heading somewhere before it rains.'

It took two minutes, maybe three, for the rain to reach its full intensity, and by then it was coming down so heavily that the air was thick with silver.

‘Well,' said Charlie, ‘wherever he ended up, I reckon William Dawes must always have dreamed of here: four years in a place like this, and it must have been beautiful too. I always imagined him leaving Sydney, trying to hang onto all the new words he'd learned, the new things he'd seen. I always imagined him at the end of his life, thinking about his observatory, and this point, the colour of the sky, the colour of the water. It's the perfect place to see things from, don't you think?'

Sitting quietly with Ted Parker, pressing a cool cloth to his forehead, warmth into his hands, coaxing small sips of water into his throat, she'd kept up a stream of stories for him. All she'd wanted was for him to know that she didn't mind—didn't really mind—about the stories he'd borrowed and refashioned and made his own. ‘I was thinking about the day Nipper Anderson went off the bridge,' she'd say. Or, ‘I was thinking about how far Russian George walked to end up here.' Or, ‘I was thinking about William Dawes, counting his steps from Sydney Cove to the coast, seeing new birds and spiders and shooting stars. Hearing a new language for the first time—that nice word,' pressing her grandfather's hand, ‘that one he must have liked best,
buduwa
.' She talked all the way through her own childhood, through as much as she knew of her mother's, through all the things she remembered—or imagined—about Gramps's own early life, Ted's, Joe's, whichever. She saw a tall ship sailing through the mist in the harbour one morning, and she made that a story for him, as if it had slipped through time. She saw the splashes made by fish jumping in the harbour and took sentences about them to him too, as close as she could get to that impossibly high splash he'd been seeing all his life.

‘Do you remember that day,' said Dan, breaking her train of thought, ‘that day he brought us down here with sandwiches and a picnic, and he told us about those great big safety nets they had strung up when they made the Golden Gate Bridge?'

‘And he said if they'd had those things here he'd never have got to fly.'

In some corner of Dan's mind, a stagnant pool of jetlag still lingered; he had moments of feeling he was still caught up in the air somewhere, his feet straddling tiredness and turbulence. Between the dislocation, beyond the vivid dreams from the flight, and beneath the constant line that Ted Parker's story of flying off the bridge had drawn on his imagination, there was some shuffle of movement—a moment, a colour. He couldn't quite shake it free from wherever it had lodged.

‘That day,' he said slowly, ‘that day we came when we were kids, the first time, with a picnic: did we see . . . did we think we saw . . . ?'