The Body in the Clouds (8 page)

The young man blushed, Tench coughed, and the surgeon puffed his cheeks full of air and held it there. ‘If it's seeing things properly,' he said, ‘I was coming back from visiting the Governor this afternoon, and a woman stopped me in a state of some distress: said she'd seen an alligator running between the tents, and that it was the second one she'd seen in a fortnight.'

‘An alligator?' Dawes shaded his eyes with his hand, trying to see the surgeon's face more clearly. ‘What kind of an alligator?'

‘A fourteen-foot one,' said John White, ‘as opposed to the eight-foot animal she'd seen the week before last. A very sane woman, I'd say on the whole, but she was adamant about this.'

‘I think it would be quite comforting to see an alligator at the moment,' Tench said carefully. ‘Almost everything we see is so new, at least an alligator would be a thing we might find somewhere else, a thing from some known part of the world.'

‘I'm not sure I'd like to find one getting about in my tent, sir,' said the surgeon. ‘And certainly not one that ran to fourteen feet.'

‘True, but I had one of your birds laugh at me for the entire duration of my shave this morning,' said Tench. ‘And a creature that laughs is a disconcerting thing. I'm still not clear on how kangaroos might be put together, and why they jump, and I don't even want to think about the size of the creatures that make those hisses out in the darkness every night.

At least I know what an alligator looks like. And at least it wouldn't laugh.'

‘I heard Lieutenant Dawes say this would be a place where anything might happen,' someone said, looking to Dawes for confirmation. ‘I heard about that alligator the other week too, but I didn't think it sounded comforting. I just figured it was the next strange thing to turn up here, like the hand and arm.'

A hand and an arm washed ashore; the surgeon had spent hours poring over them, trying to explain whose they were. Ultimately, though, all he could say was that they had belonged to a white person—and he wasn't even sure if it had been male or female. And no one seemed to be missing them that he could see.

As the young sailor said, they were just the next things to appear, as if people had been more or less expecting the unexpected since they'd reached their antipodes. Take the two French ships that had appeared at the heads of Botany Bay precisely as the British fleet made to decamp north to Port Jackson: the extraordinary coincidence of their intersection, and that strange do-si-do of maritime might. It almost belied Dawes's own sense of being out of the world, knowing that the French were just a few miles away, as usual, even closer than the distance they usually kept across the English Channel.

‘A place where anything might happen,' Tench mused. ‘That should keep us all in good conversation for as long as we've only ourselves to talk amongst. Not to mention being rich fodder for all our literary aspirations.' Watkin Tench, like the surgeon, belonged to the band of men who had sailed with publishing contracts in their portmanteaux and hoped to write up the days, the birds and animals, the potentials and disappointments of this place, novel as it was and unrepresented in their catalogues of natural history. ‘You should be writing yourself, Lieutenant Dawes, what with your appointments with comets and stars.'

Dawes smiled. There'd be no shortage of material, he suspected, but perhaps one of time. ‘Maybe a miscellany,' he said, ‘or something along the lines of the French encyclopaedia.'

‘You might be our antipodean Dr Johnson,' the surgeon boomed, slapping his knee at the thought. ‘You could start with alligators, then bits of bodies, comets . . . and with the fertility of imagination that our convicts already display, I warrant you'll have all manner of exciting entries— there'll be gold and dragons claimed in this place before we're six months landed, if that's not what the alligators are already.'

‘The antipodean Dr Johnson.' Dawes smiled again and made to take his leave. ‘As your publishers all know,' he said, shifting the balance of his weight away from his frail leg, ‘it's none of it real until it's written down and read in London.'

Ted

W
hen Ted and his mum, or Ted and his gran, sat down to their tea, the space between them held salt and pepper shakers, a dish of butter, and the clatter of cutlery and plates against a scrubbed wooden table, the wide pages of the day's newspaper. Neither asked the other what they had done during the day, assuming that they already knew, and their quiet rhythms of different chewing tended to fall in time before the meal was halfway through.

When Joe and Joy sat down to their tea, there was a white cloth across the table and the space around the chewing was filled with the busy darts of their conversation. The butter dish was exactly the same as his mum's— and this was the first and, Ted was afraid, perhaps the only thing he could think of to say.

‘It must be strange being underneath when everyone thinks of being up,' said Joy. ‘If I worked there, I'd want to be up—up as high as I could.'

‘It's Joy's heart's desire,' said Joe, ‘that I'll sneak her up there one night, show her the city from up in the sky.' But he shook his head, pushing potatoes onto his fork with his knife. ‘My grandad, another Joe, he was always superstitious about women getting in to where he worked.'

‘He was in the mines, love,' said Joy—the exchange had the feel of something repeated over and over—‘and if women going
under
the ground is bad luck, then women going so far
over
the ground should be . . .'

‘Positively beneficial?' suggested Ted. It was one of his gran's favourite phrases, although she usually attached it to hot milk if you couldn't sleep, or a flannel tied around your throat if you had a cold coming on, rather than the idea of climbing a great metal ladder up towards the clouds.

‘Positively beneficial,' said Joy, smiling, and she reached over and patted his arm so that he flinched a little, the red rushing up from under his shirt—back in school, asking the teacher where Gulliver's flying island was in the atlas. ‘A fellow two streets over snuck his wife up the other week; he said there was another fellow who took a girl up there and convinced her to marry him while she was looking at the lights and the view. You see, Joe, you could get me to agree to anything if I was up in the air.'

Joe shook his head. ‘I don't need to change your mind about anything, love,' he said peaceably.

His cutlery suspended over his plate, Ted looked from one new face to the other: it seemed impossible that this time last week he hadn't even known they existed. Joy's hand was on Joe's arm now, her knife laid down, her fork poised in mid-air too. They were both tall, like Ted—‘a bit stringy,' his gran called it—but the light made their heads shine blond where Ted's usually blond hair seemed darker and all bristle. And their eyes, their brown skin, their slender arms and fingers looked like they might have come from the one person, not two different people. He shifted the fork in his hand so his grip matched Joe's, matched Joy's. The way she was looking at him, her eyes bright, her face expectant.

‘You'll have all new stories for me, with that whole different perspective on it to him'—nodding towards her husband—‘won't you, Ted? Down there on the water, while he's up in the clouds.'

Swallowing hard, wondering what to say, Ted caught the smallest movement of one of Joe's fingers underneath his wife's arm, soothing, stilling. Somewhere, a long time ago, he'd seen his dad do that with a dog that was turning itself inside out with barking. But in the instant of remembering, he couldn't recall his father's face at all, and put his knife down to feel for the wallet in his trousers. His dad's picture was in it and he could rebuild the bones, the glance of that face, for himself. His fingers made out the leather rectangle, and his body relaxed a little, registering a new ache in his legs from learning to stand on top of the harbour's turning tides. The beginning of the day felt as far back as history. This was a whole new world.

‘Just a blur at the moment,' he said at last, self-conscious in the face of her enthusiasm and wishing he had some better story to tell. He'd leave the talking to Joe tonight; he'd concentrate tomorrow, bring her something then.

‘Have you got a sweetheart then, Ted?' Joy pushed the potatoes towards him, the gravy jug in its wake.

‘Well . . .' He scooped a potato onto the plate, measured a dollop of gravy. ‘You know.' Looking at Joe but nodding towards Joy, the way he'd seen men do when there were secrets to be kept, things best left unsaid. ‘I suppose, with the moon and everything, and if you'd been dancing . . . sometimes walking home you might see a shooting star.'

‘You can't get a better end to a night than a shooting star,' said Joy. ‘We used to walk down to the water every night when we first came here, in case we saw one. We should go again, love. Ted could come with us. I was always happy with a star, but Joe's one for comets—a much bigger ask.' She smiled at her husband. ‘Although one's bound to turn up some day. For you and your old astronomers.' Her fingers linked through her husband's without either of them seeming to notice.

The clock on the mantelpiece chimed, and she pushed her chair back from the table. ‘Some of the men come round,' she said. ‘Did Joe tell you?

A few beers and a few stories—maybe we can see about the stars another evening.'

In the backyard, on the steps, on the grass, the men settled like a tableau from an old painting, fragments of sentences sitting against the click and fizz of opening beer bottles, as if no one could get beyond the shortest comment or observation until they'd taken a good few mouthfuls. A line from the newspaper; a joke from the radio; they jostled and settled and took their first sips with the first flight over the South Pole (‘And I reckon that's better than Kingsford Smith,' Ted heard one man mutter to Joy as if it was a treacherous suggestion), some calculation that proved the earth was billions of years old—‘more than 1.8 billion,' specified another voice—and news of a meteor that had slammed into South America like millions of tons of dynamite. This last made Joe pay particular attention. ‘Blood-red sun and a sound like artillery shells,' said someone.

Where Ted grew up, a phrase like that would loop the conversation straight back into the war, but in this new world someone said instead, ‘The size that sound must've been, when you think about how far away you could hear them blowing up the north shore's cliffs for the bridge.'

Here, it always came back to the bridge, always came back to the work—and how grateful they were for it against the price of butter, the price of steak, and the lines and lines of hopeful workers that Ted had stood in for years, turning out earlier and earlier to see if there was a chance of a shift for the day. It was something, he thought, to lean back against some permanence. But underneath the drinking and the banter sat other topics—things about the scale of the job, how impossible it was, its danger. Like the danger in trusting that two metal arms would meet high over the water thanks to the columns of sums done half a world away in London and a spider's web of surveyed lines and angles held on a separate sheet of paper. Like the dangerous sparks of those smaller bits of riveting, red hot and shooting through the air from cooker to boilermaker like shrunken stars. Like the way the two halves of the arch swayed and swung from their pivots to the south, to the north, when the wind came in hard from the east, from the west, closing down work for fear the men would all be brushed off, shaken free. But as close as anyone got to poetry was some mention of the trails left by boats overnight and in early mornings, still visible on the harbour when the first men went up for the day.

Do they dream about it?
thought Ted.
Do they dream about climbing high above it, about how it will look the day it's done? Do they ever dream things that leave them panicked and breathless?

He was starting to think his dream must be about falling. He was starting to feel a little less afraid of it, now he knew he'd stay down at the water's level, safe on his barge. Because these blokes were all walking in the sky, in the clouds, in the air.
No wonder
, thought Ted,
they tell so many stories about getting to work rather than being there
. Feet on the ground, they were holding onto the idea of their feet on the ground—the idea that they'd been there, that they'd be there again.

‘You could hear it from ours and we're an hour's walk away, as I well know,' said someone, ‘although I heard some chap in the shop say he was walking two hours in and two home.'

‘I used to walk in from my gran's some mornings,' said Ted. ‘Two hours that was, to queue for a shift.' And suddenly it was a competition: who'd come furthest, been highest, or pissed the greatest distance (with an apologetic mumble to Joy), or run the fastest on the steel.

One bloke thought to tell a good story about riding all the way up from Gippsland to Sydney, which was thousands of miles, he was sure, and probably would have been thousands more again if he'd told it later in the night with a few more beers. But then another bloke had walked clear across Russia from somewhere near Moscow to the oriental coast. That was half the world, he said, and here he was.

‘But you didn't walk all that way specifically to be here,' protested the boy from Gippsland, wanting the primacy of his ride established. ‘You walked all that way, sure, and found a boat, and sailed down to Sydney, and got yourself this work, but you didn't make the trip for it, did you?'

‘I would've,' said the man, who had a heavy accent. ‘This is the sort of place a man would come half the world for.' And he took a big swig of beer, to cover up almost saying something about beauty.