The Body in the Clouds (7 page)

It was better than happiness; it was ecstasy.

Around him, the lightning cracked in three dimensions, tracing a secret map of trails that ran out towards the ocean and on from this coast to the Americas, out towards whatever lay between this meagre nest of tents and the continent's far-off westerly limit, and up and down between the sky and the ground. It was a grid of pinpoints, if only he knew how to connect them, and what those connections would reveal.

Another flash, and a tree exploded up near the camp. The cheering stopped, and the sound of pigs squealing and sheep bleating rose above the clamour of the rain and the calls.
More
, he thought,
let there be more.
And another bolt came, the screams timed so precisely to its light that he knew someone had been hit, had been knocked down. Should he put on his shirt and his coat, run up and see who it was, if he could help? A great sheet of lightning opened out across the sky and he crouched down again to take in the full reach of its movement. Nice to be alone.

Through the next hour and the next, the storm surged and tossed, the wind driving the rain hard onto the harbour's surface. Leaning against the trunk of a tall tree, Dawes watched the heavier showers scuttle towards him, pocking the black of the water. There were so many darknesses in this night: the water was a different dark to the cliffs that blocked the harbour from the ocean out to the east, and the sky—with the clouds, and then again as the storm sped north and the stars reappeared— a different dark again. The celebrations he'd escaped had died down a little, but shouts and shrieks still burst out every so often. He hadn't heard or seen a single nocturnal animal this night, but they were probably steering well clear of the ruckus too. Nor were there any other spots of fire around the harbour's edge. A woman's voice cut across the night, her gasp and her curse closer than he expected, and he started, shifting further around to the point's northern face. The breeze had dried his skin; his body's warmth had almost dried his fine trousers, and he wrapped himself back into his shirt, into his coat, and tried to curl against the roughness of the sandstone. The last of the day's warmth was still tucked into it, and his eyes closed.

What could you tell about a place in a week, a fortnight? That the wood from the trees was difficult to manage; that the parrots were beautiful, easily shot and preserved; that there were curious insects crawling around too—some already caught and pinned. That the water carried sound loud and clear to the shore so that Dawes, on the point, had heard Dan Southwell, on the
Sirius
, doubled over with laughter at the sight of the Governor's French cook coming ashore—‘Out of the boat and running clear across the water, look at him, trying to get to the land'—as clearly as if they'd been standing next to each other. That the leaves of the trees, bent to make their thick flesh crack, had a sharp, astringent smell; that burnt skin peeled away under the still-burning sun. And that there were other people somewhere around, people who sometimes said, ‘
Wo-–roo wo-–roo
,' and seemed to mean by that, ‘Leave this place, go away.' People who sometimes couldn't tell if the British were male or female. (‘Drop your trousers, sir,' someone had commanded, and some obliging young marine did.) People who sometimes accepted beads and bits of looking glass; people who sometimes took the hands of the British soldiers and danced with them on the beach.

Watkin Tench had regarded this last development as almost too good to be true. ‘Dancing, of course there should always be dancing, and if I couldn't get you near to it in Portsmouth, Rio or Cape Town, Lieutenant Dawes, then I'm very pleased I shall be able to offer it to you here.'

Interrupting himself with a full, round laugh. ‘Not quite the style I had in mind, sir, but not so challenging that you'll lose your footing and get flustered as I suspect you would otherwise do. Hands together, round and round . . . even you should be able to manage that.' Laughing long and loud again.

In the damp night, the days playing over in his mind with the sound of Tench's laughter and of feet scuffing circles in the sand, Dawes couldn't have said if he was awake or asleep. But he was sure he saw a girl next to him in one last blast of lightning, her face leaning close to his, and she seemed to start and jump away when he stirred and reached out a hand as if to ask her to dance, here, now. Still young, her eyes were bright against the darkness of her skin and the darkness of the night. And he was certain, for no reason, that he was seeing up close the face of the girl who'd watched him arrive.

Sitting up to look at her, he woke himself properly. But there was nothing there, no one. The wind had dropped so completely that he held his breath for a moment, waiting for even a single leaf to move. Away in the north, the thunder mumbled. He had no idea how long he'd been lying down, but his legs were stiff and his guts cold from the last lingering damp of his trousers. Standing awkwardly, he heard something splash out in the water, and a man's snore closer still. And there, a dozen paces away or so, was a fellow in a red coat—or rather a fellow with a red coat, the red coat pulled across the huddled body of a young woman. Her pale hair was pushed back from her face and she looked as comfortable as if she'd been tucked into a feather bed.
What are you dreaming? Where have you gone?
wondered Dawes, and was sure he saw the girl smile in reply.

The strange intimacy of watching somebody sleep—he'd watched over his father one winter, the older man coughing and shaking. Sometimes sleep looked like happiness, and sometimes it looked so much like death that you wanted to ruffle the covers, drop the pitcher and wake the person back up into life. But no matter how well you knew them, sleeping minds were even less penetrable than waking ones, pressed into pure dark stillness or off adventuring in a thousand unimaginable places. The girl turned a little, her face glancing against the sleeping man's shoulder, and he flinched and turned away from her; it was a mean movement, even if it was unconscious.
Let her wake first and leave
, thought Dawes. There were so few places to avoid that uninterested shrug among so few people.

Moving along the track then he realised he was counting for the first time since he'd arrived—a dozen paces: forty-two feet. His land legs back at last, he strode towards the tents, all intent and certainty compared to his furtive dash to the point earlier. The tree that had been an officer was just a tree; the rock that had been an ill-intentioned convict was just a rock. He was in control, on the job, and ready to quantify everything that presented itself. Half a mile from the point to the settlement, almost on the nose.

William Dawes turned and looked out across the rough-hewn clearing; snores from tents here, snickers there, and unmistakably quick and carnal breathing still pulsing and pushing from others again. The men and women had found each other then—he could smell the stickiness of sex against the wake of the storm and the messy mash of mud and muck around his feet. And there was the tree that had been hit by lightning, splintered and fractured with the disaster of a stock pen that had been staked out underneath it.
Our first night here
, he thought,
and we're losing animals and gaining people
, and he froze as one of the youngest boys from his ship dashed out of a tent and across the grass, whooping.

Later, under his blanket, Dawes remembered the toast Tench had wanted to propose to these new places, these new acquaintances. How tiny and civil against the night's bodies, the night's abandon. Closing his eyes, he saw the face of the girl on the point, the girl he'd seen or dreamed. He couldn't tell if it was lightning or daylight, but she seemed surrounded by brightness, almost luminous, with a great curve of black above her where the sky should have been. And behind her—he heard himself snore as he tried to turn his head to see it better—something like a bird began to swoop and dive, down towards the harbour's deep black-blue.

There were things that it was important to say—things it was important to do—when you were making up a new piece of empire on the underside of the world.

Weddings were a good start. Seven couples lined up and much was made of fine examples and healthy morality, particularly in the wake of the storm and the physical melee that had taken place under cover of its noise and confusion. But it was also important for the Governor to stand, at the end of the spate of marriages, and make clear the colony's position on bread and wine. In this place, he announced, there was no such thing as transubstantiation; the bread and the wine of religious communion were always just bread and just wine, at no point turned into the literal body and blood of Christ. There would be no such magic, no such miracles. This had to be stated, and stated publicly; there was still some rancour among the Catholic convicts that they'd been transported without a priest and confessor, and it would do no good if they fell to practising their superstitious and transformative beliefs while no one was paying attention. Things like that could undermine a place as it tried to find its feet. Things like that could be perilous to order and advancement. The Governor's voice whistled a little on words like ‘transubstantiation'—he was missing a front tooth—but everyone stood still enough, and looked at their feet and the dirt beneath them, and the sanctity of the moment was preserved.

Yet at the base of his own quietly religious soul, it seemed to Dawes that if ever there was a venue for transformations, this might be it. Another week on, and the place itself stood so remarkably altered. There were more tents between the trees, the Governor's portable canvas house sat larger and more sturdy, and the new leaves of the British-born plants were trying to make their way in newly regulated rectangular beds where everything had grown unchecked and untrammelled before. Coffee, indigo, the cactus that would deliver bright red cochineal from its bugs—these were the things expected to thrive. And now the year itself was turning towards what should be its autumn, while local leaves still sat greenly on their trees and only Dawes's thermometer gave any indication of the seasonal transformation that must have been happening, in some other, less obvious way, all around them.

‘Should we cheer for the newlyweds?' asked Tench mischievously after the vicar had given the final benediction.

‘We should cheer as much as possible,' said John White, ‘or it'll be groans of God give us strength.' He'd have had more time for discussing the intricacies of bread and wine if he could have made anyone talk to him about where he might find some fresh vegetables, now that he had more than a thousand bodies ashore to care for. Yes, those vegetable beds were pressed with seeds and new green had sprung up here and there. Early sprouts looked promising, but even in the short time since ‘taking this place on for the empire,' as the surgeon, an eyebrow raised, liked to put it, so many of those little leaves and buds had withered and failed, peas one week, cabbages the next.

‘Anyway, marriage is as beneficial for the body as it is for the heart—do them all a power of good,' the surgeon added. ‘I should have doled out a measure of lime juice for their wedding breakfast.'

‘A delightful memory for them,' said Tench. ‘A lovely thing to think of through their years together.' Here they were, this group of men, learning each other's tempers and humours, learning the footfall of one from the footfall of another, learning each other's stories. It was less cosy to think that this would be the size of their company for who knew how long— just these men, just each other, and whatever the dimensions of this place proved to be. William Dawes had already calculated that the indigo-blue hills to the west were at least forty miles distant, if not fifty, and that distance had begun to feel as far as it was possible to imagine to men who only weeks before had managed always to keep in mind the thousands of miles that lay between the wake of their ships and England.

‘To the newlyweds, then,' said White. And the men cheered, almost seriously, each one with a wedding day to remember cast straight back to it. ‘And how's your locket, Lieutenant?' The surgeon turned to one of the younger men, who might not have wanted the entire company to know that he carried a portrait of his wife on a necklace of ribbon, that he kissed it every night, and so fervently that he was afraid of wearing the image away altogether. But there seemed no use denying it, and he ignored the snickering to announce that it would be his own wedding anniversary in a month or so, and he hoped they would all toast the happiness of his marriage then.

White slapped him on the knee. ‘That's it, sir—don't let them mock you,' as if he himself would have been the last person ever to mention the matter in public.

‘I'm sure most of us have a locket, one way or another,' said Tench, but gently. ‘Some keepsake to hold as a little piece of the rest of the world.' He had his own memento of his father, dead four years ago, almost to the day, and he nodded his head to acknowledge him under this vast new sky.

‘I dream less of her now,' the young man with the locket confessed, as if there was some relief in saying anything aloud about his wife. ‘And sometimes I'm afraid when she turns to look at me she'll be one of those intemperate hussies we brought out here.'

‘That's the way of it,' said the surgeon. ‘That or these tales I already hear of convicts taking up with the Indians, however many beads and mirrors that might be worth.' He took a deep breath. ‘Although I suspect such encounters are taken more than exchanged.' He turned back to the young man. ‘But not to worry, you've got your little picture to remind you of the right face, whoever you wake up with'—and a great ‘ho' of merriment surged over the young man's outrage that anyone could suggest such a thing.

A little apart from the group, William Dawes smiled sympathetically. ‘When I woke this morning, just for a moment, I couldn't remember my father's face—it was only a moment, but . . .' He raked his fingers through his thin hair; the moment had been breathtakingly unnerving. ‘Be thankful for your locket, Lieutenant. I'm sure you will see her properly a while yet.'