Free The Body in the Clouds by Ashley Hay

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.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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