The Body in the Clouds (38 page)

‘No,' said Dan, trying to mirror her movement with his own hands, struggling to latch his thumbs together, to re-create the fireworks shape his fingers had made in that thick, white dream. ‘I remember the shadow but I don't remember being scared—and you had the window seat.'

‘You had the window seat. You saw the bridge when we came in past the city.'

He shrugged, wishing his fingers would flap like Charlie's instead of arching like claws. He was sure he'd been sitting in the middle—sure Charlie had always scored the better view.

‘I always thought that was why Gramps gave you his watch,' she said then, ‘because when you saw the bridge that day, you said you always thought of him flying from it—that you thought of him, whenever you saw it, even when it was only in a picture.'

Dan unlocked his thumbs, took the watch from his pocket, and slid it towards her. ‘I don't remember that,' he said again, ‘but I found the watch in my bag when I was coming home. I always meant to give it back to you. Ted Parker's watch.' Aiming for ceremony and forgiveness.

‘Joe Brown's watch, really. Joe's. My other grandfather's,' said Charlie. She rubbed its silver on the leg of her jeans, adjusted the time for Sydney and laid it on the table so its tick reverberated. And she watched it for a moment, her hands tucked up at her mouth as though she'd been caught halfway towards prayer. She looked at the watch, looked at Dan, and began to rub her hands against her jeans. He could hear the purr of her skin against their fabric. Then she reached out and took his hands in hers so he could feel the warmth from the rubbing.

‘The best thing I learned from William Dawes,' she said. ‘There was a word here, when he came:
putuwá
. “I warm my hands by the fire, I press the warmth into yours.” Nothing like it in English,' squeezing the cups his two hands made in hers, ‘but out of all the things he saw and did and found here, and all the things that happened, I reckon that's the pick.' She let go, rubbed her hands warm again, and reached back across the table for his. ‘All the last night with Ted we kept this going—he said Joe and Joy used to do it, but they wouldn't have known there was a word for it, and one from right here, in this place. He remembered one night before the war in particular: they were out looking for a comet and Joe Brown had warmed Joy's hands that way as they stood there in the dark.' Warming and holding. Warming and holding. Then, ‘I'm sorry you came home like this—Gramps, and the other plane, and the old Russian man, even that poor dog.' She was tracing a line on the tabletop that looked like a section of coast, with inlets and streams, coves and capes. A curve in towards the west, an offset stub like a flourish at its end. ‘He turned us into cartographers, Ted Parker, convincing us every story was a point on some map. I stare and stare at all the different points and coordinates until I can see the connection. But it's good you're here now. It's good you're here.'

She smiled, and Dan smiled in reply, rubbing his palms together for warmth, and pressing them onto her smaller, finer hands to soothe their restlessness.

Dawes

R
eaching to support himself as he went below, William Dawes felt the sharp sting of a splinter driving into his palm—winced and cursed, trying to see where it was. The belly of the
Gorgon
was dark and dim as she prepared to leave for England, and the contrast between these shadows and the hard December daylight outside flushed Dawes's eyes of their sight for a second or two, maybe three. Blinded, he paused, right-hand fingers tentatively feeling around his left-hand pain—maybe to relieve it, maybe to pluck the offending spike free—and for the same two seconds, maybe three, the darkness seemed to have swallowed most of the harbour's sound and movement too.

William Dawes, still, alone, and quiet, preparing to sail back into the world. All he could hear was the faintest sprinkling of a piano's notes— softly keyed, halting, and jarringly out of tune. Except the piano had been taken to a house upstream, he thought, so if this sound was a piano, it could only be an echo or a memory.

It was Tench who stumbled against him, coming out of the day himself and blinking against the internal gloom. ‘My last sentence set down,' he said, waving a satchel of papers, ‘and dull it sounds at the moment: on the thirteenth of December 1791, the marine battalion embarked on board His Majesty's ship
Gorgon
, and on the eighteenth sailed for England. I'm hoping for something a bit more—' he paused, and seemed to bite at the air in search of the right word ‘—literary once we get under weigh. I wonder which latitude we'll have reached by the year's end?' He clapped his hand on his friend's shoulder and propelled him back to walking. ‘Come on deck?'

Nodding and stepping, Dawes pulled the splinter free, rolling it back and forth between his fingers. ‘I do wonder if I'll ever see this place again,' he said, knowing how unthinkable that would sound to almost every other man on board, all happy to be heading home. ‘It feels a little more fixed now, a little more permanent. It feels like it's here to stay.'

Tench leaned back against the wall. ‘I don't know if I'd go that far,' he said, ‘although it has defied the presence of John White and the weight of Albion.' He'd spent the previous week looking at grazing fields here, vegetable patches there, declaring this maize crop successful, that tobacco promising, that wheat problematic. And always the want of water, the ongoing want of water.

Back in the light, the two men leaned against the ship's roll and gazed across to Sydney. From offshore, from some angles, it looked as if William Dawes's old daydreams of the whole place unravelling back to nothing might have started to come into effect, whatever his sense of its fixedness.

‘Four years, give or take,' said Tench, his eyes moving from the shadow of his own shape on the surface of the water to the town beyond. ‘And look at it—a few old huts scattered around, and the dried-up squares of some abandoned gardens. Your observatory, with its magazine and battery, still looks the most substantial thing we've got. Although now, of course, the instruments sail home with you, and your place is left to its guns.'

‘A different sort of watching and waiting for it now,' said Dawes. And
gwara buráwa
: the wind has fallen. How long would he be able to think in this other language?

Leaning out from the ship's rail, he nodded towards his point, his little white building, the line of trees still standing along its ridge, the water turning slowly against its rocky shore. ‘We've seen some seasons,' he said, straightening up, ‘years in and out, the stars, the nights, the aurora.' Through the glare, he could make out some movement against the white walls of the observatory, like letters trying to settle onto a page. Squinting, leaning out further again, he smiled: they'd come to watch him in farewell. He wondered who would teach them now, and who they would teach—the surgeon, the vicar, the other officers and office-bearers, whoever would listen. He hoped the conversations would keep going; he would send them more books when he reached England.

When I reach home—
and there was Miss Rutter, smiling, a white rose dropping from her fingers. It had been so long since he'd seen her.

Raising one arm in a wave, he saw them gesture in return and smiled again. ‘They have this word, Lieutenant,' he said to Tench. ‘
Buduwa
—
putuwá
. It means passing the warmth of your own hand, your own skin, into somebody else's. A pretty word, don't you think? It makes me feel the paucity of English.'

Tench shook his head. ‘Your idealism and your optimism, sir.' But— ‘
Pu-tu-wá
'—he sounded the syllables out to himself. ‘Where will that sit in your great project?'

Fashioning his hands to mark out a block, Dawes said quietly, ‘My keystone, sir, my keystone,' and his friend followed his gaze back onto the land and up to the white wall and its busy figures.

‘Of all of us,' said Tench at last, ‘I suspect you're most likely to come back here, to see how it turns out.' He could feel the pull, the turn of the water—was ready to be off and away.

But Dawes shook his head. ‘There'll be something waiting for us in the world that changes all the things we think we'll do,' he said. From inside this harbour, as he knew so well, there was no sign of open ocean or clear horizon, let alone what was happening somewhere else and how that might press in against you. At first that had felt isolating; now he wondered if it had been protective.

Either way, such thoughts weighed heavily on some men and not at all on others—such as the captain who'd arrived with his load of convicts just four or five months before, who'd brought not a single letter, newspaper, journal or report from the world. Desperate for some information, a story, an inkling of anything happening elsewhere, Tench had rowed six miles out to sea to greet the ship, only to discover its ignorance.

‘I never thought about the matter,' the captain had said, as he stood a moment, rubbing at his head, suggesting that perhaps Britain was at war with Spain. Tench leaned forward for his every word. Had he heard that? Was it Spain? And if so when, and where, and why? The captain had rubbed his head again. He couldn't honestly remember, he'd confessed, and couldn't remember what the trouble was about—if, indeed, there was trouble at all.

‘I cannot wait,' said Tench now in a voice that strained itself through clenched teeth, ‘to be completely consumed by news and gossip and the events of as many people and places and happenings as possible.' And Dawes saw him disappearing under pages and pages of paper, so hungry for every detail they held.

Below the observatory, a king's fisher began the low and guttural gargle of its laugh, pushing up into its vowels, its
aaa
s, its
eee
s, its
ooo
s.

And will I hear you again?
Dawes ducked his head, trying to catch a glimpse of its creamy feathers and seeing, instead, the gentle and continual rearrangement of the audience outside his old quarters. Already his old quarters—already the place where he no longer lived.

I saw a girl on the shore, the day we sailed in
, he thought,
and now she— or her sister, or her friend—stands up a little higher, with her own sisters, her own friends, and we can hail each other in words we all understand. They named us
be-re-–wal-gal
; we come from
berewal
. And now—
he raised both his hands high as the order came for the ship to make sail—
now we head back to that great way off.
He waved. The group by the observatory waved their reply.

Beside him he heard Tench's laugh and turned to see him also waving and grinning towards the shore. ‘Mr Darwin,' he said. ‘I was thinking of Erasmus Darwin and his poem about the “Visit of Hope” to our lost little place. Art and Industry. All those “broad streets” he imagined—that you'd surveyed. All those “tall spires” he dreamed—that you'd laid onto the Governor's plans. All those “dome-capped towers” and “bright canals”, and his “proud arch, colossus-like”, binding the “chasing tide”—ha! Imagine the size a bridge would need to be, to close that gap.' His finger etched the line from south to north. ‘Some span next to our huts and our canvas!' And his head tipped back with the exclamation as Dawes followed his gaze, up into the limitless cerulean that arched above Point Maskelyne and then out to the east, to the path their ship would beat.

Beyond those heads, beyond that blue, lay wars and revolutions, new presidents and constitutions. Inventions had come into being while he sat by this harbour that would change how big, or small, the world seemed— the metre, the steamboat, the semaphore machine. He would see Judith Rutter, would tell her of all that he'd found on the other side of the world—‘and this word, you see,
putuwá
,
putuwá
'. He would marry her and see the birth of their son, another William Dawes, who would have his father's eyes for the stars, who would become an astronomer known himself for a luminous gaze—no disappointing comets among his son's scientific record.

He would be proposed and passed over to return to New South Wales as engineer, as superintendent of schools. He would become, instead, the governor of Sierra Leone, making another journey back to England with incantations from another language tucked among his papers: charms for friendship and a divination for recovering from illness. More words, more new words. He would end his life an old man living in the Caribbean, engaged in the last years of a long fight against slavery. Arguing for bridges, for conversations, between different groups of people.

Across the years, he would hear of this place becoming Australia, another new name. He would hear of those westerly hills—now breached—renamed from Carmathen to the Blue Mountains. And he would hear of his own little point changing its name again and again, the Astronomer Royal well and truly displaced.

He would hear of Sydney Harbour sprouting big mansions—there was even an aviary in one, although to augment what shortage of birds, he would never be able to imagine—and of so many ships coming and going from so many parts of the world. A normalcy of food and post and even places of science—a botanic garden, a museum, and a new observatory, upstream, at Rose Hill. He would talk to Patye for the rest of his years, but he would never hear of her again, not in letters, in memoirs, in published reports or official dispatches. And his image of her would fade—as his image of Miss Judith Rutter, of his father, had dimmed in just four years—until he wondered if he might have imagined her, with the alligators, the roses, and the swooping, diving ghosts.

And yet, at the end, he would ask a young girl who sat with him to remind him again of that beautiful word. ‘It was for warmth, my dear, and friendship. Patye? What was that word? Is it you?' And the girl would say, ‘Hush,' and, ‘I'm here, sir,' and, ‘Yes, sir, it's me, Patye.' Pressing his hand with the warmth from her own, saying whatever he wanted to hear.