The Body in the Clouds (29 page)

The name of the best man he knew, tied up and part of the best story he'd ever told.

‘Have this one on me, Joe Brown,' the barmaid said, pushing the coins back towards him.

There was no work on the planes; not much of it anywhere. In the end, Joe found a postman's round and Ted went to the train yards, watched all the coming and going across their knitted pattern of tracks. Every so often, he hopped onto a carriage and ran down to see his mum; he'd stay for lunch, sometimes for dinner, and if there was a full moon rising at the right time, he'd walk down to the sand and watch it pave its way across the water. Never stayed more than a night—he said he missed home when he was away from it, and his mother didn't seem to mind that he didn't mean this place where she was.

On the way back, he took the underground train through the city, loving the moment when it re-emerged into the sunlight and headed on over the bridge to the north side. It was strange being back on it, and the noise and push made by one engine seemed so small, so insignificant compared to the scores of them he'd watched line up for all those tests. But then the whole thing did seem smaller now—and people did walk across without even noticing where they were. The only stories he heard men telling were about missing the last ferry north and how—miraculously—they could make their way home across the water. That was as much of a miracle as they wanted.

But sometimes, through the train's window, he thought he caught a glimpse of something—maybe fluttering, maybe floating, maybe falling. Sometimes it was a bird, turning with the wind. Sometimes it was the glint of a plane's metal skin, higher up. Sometimes it was less distinct, a shimmer, a curl in the air below. His neck might crane this way, then that, his eyes trying to dodge the angular grey struts and bands of his bridge. And once, with the window open, he was sure he caught the sound of a great splash in the water, sure he felt a spot of its wetness on his cheek. Once, with the window open, he was sure he heard shouts from the quieter shore that now lay below. Once, he was so sure he'd seen something he got off the train as soon as it stopped on the north shore, walked back along the bridge's footpath towards the south, peering down into the quiet calm of the harbour. A boat puttered past, a little girl in the stern, craning her neck to look up at the enormous shadowy thing blocking her sky. She waved at Ted, both arms high above her head, and Ted waved back as her boat disappeared below the deck. Shaking his head at his fancy, he started the long walk back to Joe and Joy, the water dipping in and out of view as he made his way along the river, cresting hills every so often and turning back for glimpses of this bit of the city, to the south, this bit, to the east, or an illusory curve or cross-brace of bridge.

Later, lying in bed, he tried to work out how something like that might work. If Joy was right and Roy Kelly was a miracle, then you'd expect him to leave something of himself behind—but would you expect there to have been hints about the moment before it happened? He supposed these were the sorts of thoughts you could only have when you were half asleep, but if something happened somewhere, if something singular, unexpected, happened in some particularly malleable place, maybe it couldn't help but leave a trace—or alert you to its coming. People sat and waited for miracles, so there had to be signs that they would come. People went back to the spots where extraordinary things had happened, so there had to be evidence.

He thought about the boats' wakes so clearly visible at sunrise. Everyone took them to be evidence of where things had travelled the night before, but what if they were the routes—the curves, the turns, the jibes and tacks—that some flotilla of boats was going to make that day, the next day, whenever? He liked that; it felt like a kind of magic calligraphy, a map coming into focus from an invisible world, the way photographs were said to appear on their blank sheets of paper. All you had to do was work out how to translate its message. And a man falling down into the water—surfacing, alive; really, that could only be the punctuation.

Dawes

W
illiam Dawes flicked through the pages of words and sentences, adjusting a sound here, a dash of punctuation there. There were so many pieces of conversation in these little books now, all woven around a new vocabulary. The laughing suggestion, ‘
kotbarabáng
: he will cut', from one woman as Dawes had carefully shaved her husband's face; the discussions about washing taken to the vicar's wife, about trying to get fleas out of jackets, about drinking tea, bathing in the morning, about the same word being used for ships and islands.

There were prefixes and suffixes that changed a tense from past to future, that changed the number of people you were talking about, that changed the outcome of the action you were about to undertake. Because how you talked about rowing somewhere was different if you intended returning alone or with someone else in your canoe. And how you talked about being beaten differed if two of you had been hit by someone, or three.

The intricacies were extraordinary; so many things still to learn. Yet here were pages and pages of words: winds, constellations, fish, trees, plants and body parts. And beneath them all, on some pages, he could make out fragments of this coastline, that inlet, sketched in faint pencil.

This collection of knowledge for his laughingly proposed compendium, and he had made a start on a dictionary. No alligators or comets, but twenty-odd pages of new words—Eora words; Kamarigal words; Darug words—although its alphabet was jumbled so that ‘L' came after ‘W' and then the whole notebook gave way to more lists. Names of people. Names of colours. Names of fruit. Still, ‘Mr Dawes
búdyeri káraga
,' they said.

‘Mr Dawes pronounces well.'

Taking up his pencil to add another phrase—‘here we are, talking'—he mulled over the best way of transcribing its sounds, its syllables. ‘
Galu piyala
,' he tried; ‘
ngalu piyala
.' The different weights and inflections of moving a single sound to a slightly different part of your mouth; he loved trying to pitch the letters perfectly, place them perfectly, catch their smallest intonation or their subtlest emphasis. ‘
Galu
?
Ngalu
? We two are talking to each other. We are talking.
Ngalu piyala
.'

Almost eighteen months lay between this day and the stumble he'd made at South Head, eighteen months since that sensation of the world falling away, that sight of a great jet of water streaming up. The longed-for ships had come—their ratio of ailing convicts to supplies all the wrong way round at first, so that the harbour seemed awash again with dead bodies, but white this time, not black. News of the world had come—wars and illnesses and political revolutions. And then more ships, and more people, and more stories, and a summer so hot that bats and birds had fallen from their perches, unable to hang on. Another infernal image.

A whale had come too, frolicking and spouting off the observatory and making Dawes wonder if it was a whale he'd seen, all that time ago—a whale that, somehow, no one else had noticed.

Through all of which, Dawes kept talking to his native neighbours, through the convivial times—one woman insisting on delivering her child as close as possible to the Governor's house, as close as possible to the house of the man some of them called ‘Father'—and the conflicted ones—when the Governor had demanded revenge for the murder of his gamekeeper: two natives to be taken prisoner, the heads of ten others brought in bags to be displayed, as admonition, as deterrent.

The strange negotiations Watkin Tench had undertaken, talking the total down to six prisoners, of which, he suggested, some might be ‘set aside for retaliation', while the rest, ‘at a proper time, might be liberated'. Very well, the Governor had agreed, although if six prisoners could not be taken, ‘they should be shot'.

That strange expedition, Dawes among its men, wishing he'd refused to go, and saying so, first to the vicar and later to anyone who would listen—irrespective of the dangerous insubordination of the statement. He'd needed this new phrase then: ‘
Ngalu piyala
. We are talking to each other.' Surely we don't decapitate the people with whom we have these conversations? They're living with us; their children are living with us; they are having their children among us. He'd needed more of the light, vital words that he knew now:
badaya
for laughter,
gíttee gíttee
for tickle, ‘
poerbungána
: take my hand and help me up', or the particular song to be sung when a flock of pelicans passed by.

Tench had shaken his head over his friend's stance. ‘There will be more to this,' he'd said. ‘It will send you home, whatever you've said about staying, whatever you've told the Governor, the Astronomer Royal, about all the work that still needs to be done and you being the only person who might do it. It will turn this point of yours over entirely from science to gunpowder.'

And whatever warm words he listed, whatever jokes and friendships he made, there were other questions Dawes could ask now, in his new language.

‘
Mínyin gulara eóra
? Why are the black men angry?'

‘
Inyam ngalwi
white men.
Tyérun kamarigal
. Because the white men are settled here. The
kamarigal
are afraid.'

‘
Mínyin tyérun kamarigal
? Why are they afraid?'

‘
Gúnin
.' The guns.

The guns
, thought Dawes now, pulling free the pages that held the last month's weather and the list of the girls who were teaching him their language. His hand hardly paused as it passed over that still-blank sheet that he'd headed up so optimistically—
Report of the Expected Return of the Comet of 1532 and 1661 in the Year 1788
—more than three years before. He still looked, every night, so committed to scanning the heavens that Sydney's newer residents—who knew him less, who found the distance he let his many occupations create between himself and the rest of the settlement inexplicable—made their own jokes about his tasks, his passions, and laughed that this busyness rendered him invisible to mortal eyes.

Then let the immortal ones see me
, he'd thought sacrilegiously when someone told him of this. All that time he'd spent imagining himself—his eyes, his gaze, his comprehension—up in the air; better up there than embroiled in a mess on the ground.

He straightened his records and inventories again. Sometimes he wondered if there was a way of arranging their points to make not a dictionary but a different sort of map, one with more layers, more dimensions, than foreshores, tracks and river courses. A different picture of this place, and underneath it all the accompaniment of that sound, that rushing of air, of wind, of water, of something, and the constant sense that if he'd been able to turn, just once, a little sooner, or later, or further, he'd have caught sight of something extraordinary—even if it was only from the corner of his eye.

His dreams of comets—the one he still sought, and the apocalyptic one from Laputa with which he confused it sometimes in the dead of night—intermingled with what he knew now of
goo-me-–dah
, dead bodies, the nasty diving
mawn
, or that local belief, learned so long ago now, about bones in the ground, bodies soaring to the sky. And these dreams collided with his memories of stumbles and falls, like the day on the harbour's south head.

‘
Mikoarsbi
: his foot slipped.'

At least now he dreamed in two languages, his and theirs—patiently plodding dreams of consonants and labelling; fast interlocutory dreams about who was saying what, in which language, and what it meant, and who might understand. While Watkin Tench dreamed that his manuscript proved word-for-word the same as the manuscript delivered by John White. While John White dreamed of the terrible omen of his name in a fledgling settlement: ‘More Indians with blue eyes,' he'd confess quietly to Dawes when he'd spent another night watching another settlement fail, another batch of white men disappear.

‘
Mímadyimi
?' Dawes would say cheerfully against their night-time fears. ‘What's the matter with you?' No wonder the newcomers muttered that they wondered where he was sometimes.

This place had always been a place of imagination: the remnant of the idea of a Great Southern Land presumed to exist to balance out the globe; the remnant of the idea of verdant grass and cool water promised by Captain Cook, by Sir Joseph Banks. People were still imagining it from the other side of the world, even now when real things had been claimed and named and classified and published. One optimist dreamed for it a vast and bounteous future, complete with Art and Industry and a mighty bridge spanning the harbour—which would have sounded as fanciful to the people who lived in its shabby settlement as the gossamer bridge Dawes had proposed years before to the surgeon.

At least he'd leave a bridge of words between the new people and the old, thought Dawes, and everyone could keep talking if he was sent home. Some part of him trusted he would stay, simply because he knew how to say a long time:
tarími
. ‘
Tarimíba inyam ngalawaba
. I will live here a long time; I will stay a long time.' And he knew the native name for this place—Warran. But if they did send him home, the words would stay, like the tracks left by those curled vessels that carried his interpreters to the observatory's point and back, little stripes laid onto the harbour. Because perhaps he never would find his way back again, if this really was a place of lost tracks and indistinguishable coves that could shift and move like Laputa. All those officers who still got lost in the coves closest to the settlement— still unable, after almost four years, to tell which was which, or where they were. And now there were convicts who believed that China was a scant one-hundred-and-fifty-mile walk to the north; some had set off for its promise.