The Mannequin Makers

by Craig Cliff

  The main characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  © Craig Cliff, 2013

  First published by Random House New Zealand. This edition published by arrangement with Penguin Random House New Zealand Ltd.

  Craig Cliff has asserted his moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Milkweed Editions, 1011 Washington Avenue South, Suite 300, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55415.

  (800) 520-6455

  milkweed.org

  Published 2017 by Milkweed Editions

  Cover design by Mary Austin Speaker

  Author photo by Darren Cliff

  Interior design by Carla Sy

  Interior illustrations by J. G. Keulemans

  The text of this book is set in Wilke

  17 18 19 20 215 4 3 2 1

  First US Edition

  Milkweed Editions, an independent nonprofit publisher, gratefully acknowledges sustaining support from the Jerome Foundation; the Lindquist & Vennum Foundation; the McKnight Foundation; the National Endowment for the Arts; the Target Foundation; and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. Also, this activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and a grant from Wells Fargo. For a full listing of Milkweed Editions supporters, please visit milkweed.org.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Cliff, Craig, 1983- author.

  Title: The mannequin makers: a novel / Craig Cliff.

  Description: First U.S. edition. | Minneapolis, Minnesota: Milkweed Editions, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017000247 (print) | LCCN 2017006031 (ebook) | ISBN 9781571319661 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: City and town life--New Zealand--Fiction. | Interpersonal relations--Fiction. | New Zealand fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR9639.4.C55 M37 2017 (print) | LCC PR9639.4.C55 (ebook) | DDC 823/.92--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017000247

  Milkweed Editions is committed to ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book production practices with this principle, and to reduce the impact of our operations in the environment. We are a member of the Green Press Initiative, a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the world’s endangered forests and conserve natural resources. The Mannequin Makers was printed on acid-free 100% postconsumer-waste paper by Thomson-Shore.

  For Margaret Cliff

  1925–2013

  Notre nature est dans le mouvement; le repos entier est la mort . . . Rien n’est si insupportable à l’homme que d’être dans un plein repos, sans passions, sans affaire, sans divertissement, sans application. Il sent alors son néant, son abandon, son insuffisance, sa dépendance, son impuissance, son vide. Incontinent il sortira du fond de son âme l’ennui, la noirceur, la tristesse, le chagrin, le dépit, le désespoir.

  Our nature lies in movement; complete calm is death . . . Nothing is so insufferable to man as to be completely at rest, without passions, without business, without diversions, without study. He then feels his nothingness, his abandonment, his insufficiency, his dependence, his impotence, his emptiness. There will immediately arise from the depth of his heart weariness, gloom, sadness, grief, anger, despair.

  — Blaise Pascal

  Contents

  Part one: Welcome to Marumaru

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Part two: A Mannequin’s Tale

  26 December 1918

  27 December

  28 December

  29 December

  30 December

  31 December

  1 January 1919

  2 January

  3 January

  4 January

  5 January

  6 January

  7 January

  10 January

  Part three: The Carpenter’s Tale

  8 November 1890

  Beginnings

  9 November 1890

  A Family Complaint

  23 November 1890

  A Sailor’s Life

  14 March 1891

  The Second Leg

  15 March 1891

  Adventures in Solitude

  Arrivals

  The Carpenter

  Part four: The Mannequin Speaks

  I.

  II.

  III.

  IV.

  V.

  VI.

  VII.

  VIII.

  IX.

  X.

  XI.

  XII.

  Acknowledgments

  The black-billed gull.

  Part one

  31 DECEMBER 1902 – 1 JANUARY 1903

  Welcome to Marumaru

  ‘We run carelessly to the precipice after we have put something before us to prevent us from seeing it.’

  CHAPTER ONE

  In which Colton Kemp’s wife dies mid-morning, surrounded by misshapen mannequins

  Another wayward gouge stroke, another chunk of skin from his forefinger. This was always the way once the head had been roughed out, and three-quarter-inch gouge and carver’s mallet were exchanged for palm tools. Colton Kemp lifted the damaged digit to his mouth before the blood could surface, and held it there, stemming the flow and delaying the curses he’d hurl at his latest model. He’d named her Ursula but, like all his mannequins, even the men and children, she was modelled on his wife, Louisa. It had taken an hour to sculpt the preparatory clay maquette, but Louisa did not complain, did not move too much, despite being heavily pregnant. He looked at the maquette now, his finger still in his mouth, and could see the impressions of his thumbs in the miniature’s features.

  He had been at work since first light in the small two-cow barn he’d converted into a workshop three years ago. Despite the sun parading outside it was a gloomy place. A lamp hung from an exposed joist, casting unsteady light on Ursula’s unformed face. Friends from Christchurch and Dunedin told him the heads, if a mannequin had a head at all, were usually cast in wax. But this was Marumaru: different rules applied. In any case, he was yet to find the right consistency of wax that would hold up beneath the glare of the gas lamps in the street-front display windows of Donaldson’s department store. He’d also tried papier-mâché and plaster of Paris but could not achieve the look of flesh with either. So it was wood—heavy, stubborn wood—and gouges, parting tools, veiners, fluters, sandpaper, nicks, cuts and frustration.

  Kemp’s shaky hands and rough temperament were ill suited to life as a carver, but it is curious the paths a life can take, the dead ends to which ambition and rivalry can lead a man.

  Every new mannequin represented several weeks’ work and even then he might uncover a knot or vicious grain when he peeled back the layers of the face. Or, just as likely, he would chip and sand away too much and, no matter how perfect the final expression, the head would be too small for the body he had constructed. His workshop was littered with such failures. Headless Hans holding a heavy canvas sheet in his uneven arms. Eager Mavis, with her lopsided breasts and overlarge mouth, would never don a ball gown. It was best not to think about them as he worked. Instead he held out hope that one day the face he revealed would be Louisa’s. Those thin, fair eyebrows that moved with every word, every thought. The cleft in her c
hin that disappeared upon closer inspection. Those big eyes, green giving way to blue and grey as she passed through the world. But how can you render the kindness of such a face, frozen in a single moment?

  It was maddening how her face eluded him in wood, but he had the consolation of finding it in the house whenever he laid down his tools.

  He grabbed Ursula’s broad wooden jaw between the pincers of his thumb and forefinger. Somewhere, he thought, still sucking the injured finger on his other hand. Somewhere in there is the strong-willed woman who doesn’t mind a spot of rain.

  At that moment he heard someone shout, ‘Rain!’, or something very like it. He swung to face the door of his workshop and considered it much as he had the mannequin’s face, the puzzlement giving way to discomfort, anxiety, panic—only then did he release the sliced finger from his mouth and set to heaving open the heavy, warped door.

  It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the sunlight.

  There, beneath the bare wire clothesline, slumped over a load of washing, was . . . well, it was either Louisa, or her younger sister, Flossie. When Miss Florence had fled the kindness and condolences of Christchurch society and moved south to live with them six months ago, she had taken possession of three or four of Louisa’s older dresses. Kemp, despite plying his trade in window dressing, had trouble remembering which outfits were now the younger sister’s. He whispered, ‘Please be Flossie,’ as he took his first step toward the clothesline. That one step was enough, however, to see the larger bulk and know it was Louisa.

  He ran to her, raised her gently. A patch of dark blood on the front of her dress had already soaked through to the freshly laundered sheets. The air smelt of soda and iron filings.

  ‘I just wanted to get these on the line,’ she said, breathless, wincing.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Lou. Where’s Flossie? Flossie!’ he called and felt hoarse, as if he’d been yelling all morning. He looked back down at his wife. ‘You shouldn’t have to hang out the damn washing.’

  She winced once more. Her lids came down over her eyes. Her brows lifted and became fixed in place.

  ‘Lou,’ he said. ‘Lou, stay with me.’

  The old lighthouse keeper’s dog chose this moment to crawl through the manuka thicket and cross the Kemps’ property. She stopped, considered the man and woman sitting on the lawn, before continuing on her way, three feet of rusted chain trailing between her legs.

  Kemp felt Louisa’s forehead, then stood and hauled his wife into the barn, onto the comfort of a pile of loose hay, wood shavings and sawdust several inches thick. He knelt behind her, propped her up against his own thighs. He mopped her brow with his sleeve, rocking back and forth.

  Louisa was silent.

  He watched the sawdust turn red between her legs.

  ‘No,’ he said, softly, as if afraid of waking her. ‘No, you can’t take her from me.’

  He rocked back violently and knocked one of his abandoned mannequins, which sent a shiver through the ring of limbless, ill-proportioned, inanimate freaks watching over them in what he would later recall, in his bitter, driven future, as a pathetic travesty of the nativity scene.

  But in that moment Colton Kemp was lost, oblivious, blubbering. He placed a finger between his teeth to stop the tears and tasted blood.

  CHAPTER TWO

  In which Sandow arrives in Marumaru, in a manner of speaking

  That same morning the train from the north deposited on the narrow platform a dark-skinned youth in shirtsleeves and a plaster statue wrapped in a dirty drop cloth. At Marumaru Station, this was enough to bring a crowd. Within two minutes the platform was thronged with townspeople eager to see what the youth had brought and for whom.

  ‘It has the height of a man,’ said Fred Empson, the station-master.

  ‘Perhaps it’s an Egyptian mummy,’ said the mayor, Big Jim Raymond.

  ‘It must be returned to wherever it came from,’ said Mrs Harry Wisdom. ‘There’s no place for heathenism in this town.’

  ‘It is not a mummy,’ said the youth, whose name was Jesse. He was not yet disconcerted by the way that time had sped since leaving Timaru, or the sight of green pastures from the station platform, or the lack of chimney stacks beyond the first few rows of houses. His first impression was instead reserved for the bold colours of the women’s dresses and the mayor’s hat, which looked as if it were covered with felt from a billiard table.

  In his newly acquired performing voice, Jesse announced, ‘It is a statue of the perfect human form.’ He slipped a knot at the statue’s hip. ‘It is—’

  ‘Sandow!’ shouted Big Jim Raymond.

  The crowd cheered and the deflated boy unwrapped the statue to reveal the figure they all expected, the one they’d seen in newspaper advertisements and on the cover of his very own magazine. There were his tight curls and Kaiser Wilhelm moustache, the abdominal muscles like coiled dock line. There the fig leaf covering his manhood, the Roman sandals, the head turned to admire his own bulging biceps. And, if there was any doubt, the pedestal proclaimed in patrician script that this was SANDOW. As in Eugen Sandow, Sandow the Strongman, Sandow’s Spring-Grip Dumb-bells, Sandow’s Combined Developer, the Sandow Season that had swept through the nation’s newspapers, if not all of its drawing rooms, since the muscular Teuton had disembarked in Auckland among survivors of the wrecked Elingamite. Indeed, the commencement of his New Zealand tour had not been altogether auspicious. There was a general election in a week’s time, meaning there were no politicians to welcome him. Eugen Sandow, the strongest man on Earth, had had to push his way through the shattered survivors, their relieved and boisterous relatives and the silent bereaved to find his promoter, Harry Rickards, who had left Sydney a week before to make final arrangements in the new colony. Sandow would later admit to Jesse that he had expected New Zealand to be nothing more than a collection of wooden huts hastily erected by castaways from the world’s four corners, men with wild beards and women perpetually with child who cared not for news from the next hut over, let alone the heart of civilisation. ‘But I have been pleasantly surprised,’ Sandow had said, ‘by the people of your country, the development of their bodies and the commerce evident on every street corner. And of course, they know who I am, which cannot help but make me favourably disposed.’

  Sandow was the big draw for Rickards’ Vaudeville Company, which went on to fill town halls and opera houses in Auckland, New Plymouth, Stratford, Wanganui, Palmerston North, Masterton, Napier, Wellington, Christchurch, Ashburton and Timaru. Before each show a life-sized plaster replica of Sandow was sent ahead to heighten anticipation.

  But Eugen Sandow was never meant to come to Marumaru.

  Sure, the turn of the century had seen the inauguration of the town’s first full-time mayor, Jim Raymond, who was rumoured to have shot a man on the goldfields in his youth and now lived and died by the word of the town’s first daily newspaper, the Marumaru Mail. And it was true that the arrival of a certain strongman signalled one year since the opening of Marumaru’s second—repeat: second—department store. But Marumaru was no metropolis: the post office would not bother to distinguish it from the town of the same name in the Hawke’s Bay for another twenty years. Rickards’ company was not due to perform another show until a matinee at His Majesty’s Theatre in Dunedin on the third of January.

  It slowly began to sink in for poor Jesse, who had joined Rickards’ company in Wanganui, that this was not Dunedin.

  ‘Sandow’s shorter than I imagined,’ he heard a young woman say to her two friends.

  ‘Why, he’s just a man,’ said another.

  ‘More than that, he’s just a statue!’ said the third.

  A short man waving his hands and trying to make it to the front of the crowd caught Jesse’s attention. He wore an accordion-pleated ascot tie and as he approached he said, in an elevated voice, ‘Dear boy, you are bound for the fine establishment of Hercus & Barling, are you not?’

  ‘I—’

  ‘For I a
m the eponymous Hercus, Emile Hercus, proprietor of the newest, largest and best patronised department store in a twenty-five-mile radius.’

  ‘This is—?’

  ‘Oh no you don’t, Emile,’ said an older man in a brown suit that may have once been dignified but now looked merely comfortable. ‘You’re coming to Donaldson’s, aren’t you?’

  ‘Donaldson’s?’ Hercus said. ‘The Great Sandow would not be seen dead in that moth-ridden closet.’

  The man in the brown suit placed a hand on the plaster Sandow’s shoulder. ‘It’s a good thing Mr Sandow is inanimate then, isn’t it?’

  ‘Please don’t touch the statue, sir,’ Jesse said. ‘You’ll leave a mark.’

  ‘Quite right,’ the man said, removing his hand and wiping it on his lapel. ‘Charles Begg,’ he said and held out this same overworked hand and Jesse shook it. ‘We have a very good window dresser—that term doesn’t really do the man justice. He’ll rig something up so that you’d swear it was Sandow himself in the window. Where is Kemp, anyway?’ Begg asked the crowd of townspeople, who swayed like windblown toetoe, looking for Colton Kemp among their number. He was so often prominent in any scandal, ruckus or commotion. But there was no sign of him.

  ‘I’m sure my man is here,’ said Hercus, who perched on tip-toe to little effect. ‘Has anyone seen The Carpenter?’

  A hand went up from the middle of the crowd and they parted. A compact man in a heavy brown checked suit stood there, his large, square hand held out in front of him as if anointing someone or something.

  ‘Over here, my good man,’ said Hercus.

  ‘Kemp?’ Begg called. ‘Where the blazes is Colton Kemp?’

  ‘We stock all of Sandow’s physical culture paraphernalia, of course,’ Hercus said to Jesse, who was not used to being spoken to with any sort of respect or reverence. ‘Quickly, man.’ Hercus hurried The Carpenter, whose approach looked laboured. Jesse wondered if it was due to the heavy woollen suit he wore on this warm summer’s morning, or simply age. ‘I’m afraid he’s rather taciturn,’ Hercus added.