The Mannequin Makers

by Craig Cliff

  ‘I can see the ropes,’ Josephine said. He had almost forgotten she was beside him. ‘I can picture exactly what will happen, but I want to see it anyway.’

  ‘And you can,’ he said, ‘tomorrow.’

  It was only a short block back to Hercus & Barling. Looking over Josephine’s head he could see a small crowd of eight or ten people outside its window. There was no such crowd for Donaldson’s.

  ‘Why don’t you go look at The Carpenter’s window?’ he suggested.

  ‘The curtain’s still down,’ she replied.

  Ten people are willing to stare at his blank curtain, he thought, rather than my display. He could feel his skin flush once more.

  From the first, the two department stores had not just affected the sole traders—the widow dressmaker, the dealer in golden rings and small trinkets—but had also fed upon each other, undercutting prices, paying exorbitant amounts for shipping to ensure stock was the first to arrive, offering more generous credit terms. Each store had a man dressed as Santa Claus in the week before Christmas and the town delighted in judging whose St Nick was fatter, whose white beard looked the more authentic. But the battle was most evident, and most crucial, in the window. It was not a competition between two stores but between Colton Kemp and The Carpenter, ever since the day the silent sod strolled into town. Kemp had never heard him talk, though Big Jim Raymond swore The Carpenter congratulated him upon his re-election in September. What sort of affectation was it not to speak when spoken to? To always wear the same loud suit with its large houndstooth check and to nod and wave and point before trotting up Pukehine Hill at the end of the day?

  But damn the man, his mannequins were a wonder. The story went that The Carpenter walked down from his shack on the hill carrying a wooden mannequin, placed it in front of the entrance to Hercus & Barling two days before their grand opening, and Hercus offered him a job on the spot. Kemp’s curiosity got the better of him at the opening and he saw the window display first-hand: dozens of electric lights powered by the store’s own generator (Donaldson’s, like the town itself, was still to make the leap to electricity), thirteen headless mannequins of the sort imported from Europe (though he suspected they were, like Emile Hercus, second-hand from Sydney) and, at the centre, The Carpenter’s serene lady, dressed in a red moirette dress with a blue shawl draped over her left shoulder and arm, the soft hand protruding, palm up. The skin was smooth and bright as porcelain, but looked as if it would give to the touch. What manner of wood had he used? What tools to exact such detail? What paints, tints or stains to flush her with life? What beast had he shorn to create her mane of brown hair, curling as it passed the hint of her ears and tumbled down her shoulders?

  The Carpenter’s first mannequin was a revelation for Kemp and a sensation for the town. Over the following months The Carpenter produced more figures. The appearance of each was an event that surpassed the excitement of a new window at Donaldson’s, no matter how intricate Kemp’s mechanics, how timely the scene or artistically it was laid out. The Marumaru Mail began speculating about the gender, age, hair and eye colour of The Carpenter’s next model weeks before it appeared. No one seemed to care about the masses of blank space in his window displays, the utter stasis of his arrangements, the lack of theme or connection to the town in which the store sat: The Carpenter’s window was another world, one on the cusp of coming to life.

  Little by little this world began to spill into Marumaru. The ladies of the town, who had conformed to the modest colonial fashion for dark skirts and white blouses, began to step out in the reds and blues and greens of The Carpenter’s window. The men stuck with subdued tones for their suits and waistcoats but stuffed silk handkerchiefs of turquoise or magenta into their breast pockets and emerald felt bowlers on their heads. Visitors from the north and from the south often remarked upon the deluge of colour in the town, the women’s resemblance to parakeets, the men’s to mallard drakes. Perhaps most tellingly, when a visiting photographer set up his equipment at Hercus & Barling the townsfolk chose to be immortalised performing the poses of The Carpenter’s models.

  Kemp had already thrown himself into the making of his own mannequins before The Carpenter’s arrival but he could not breathe life into them in the same way. They remained wooden forms, collections of limbs and blank spaces for covering with cloth and millinery.

  An open carriage drawn by two old Clydesdales passed Kemp and Josephine. It was heading toward the wharf, or perhaps out of town. For a moment he considered jumping on the back of the carriage, stowing himself beneath the dirty green tarpaulin and leaving Marumaru forever, but Josephine was sure to give him away.

  ‘Kemp!’

  He looked back at Donaldson’s and there was Charlie Begg, ruddy with rage, clutching a ledger book with both hands.

  ‘Where the blazes have you been?’

  He didn’t want to cross the road. He looked down at Josephine, who seemed happy enough to sit on the church fence, dangle her legs and watch the unfolding drama.

  Begg slammed the ledger book against an imaginary counter and stomped across Regent Street. ‘Where’ve you been?’ he repeated.

  ‘Wednesday is my workshop day,’ Kemp replied. ‘The window is all set for this evening.’

  ‘Sandow is here. Well, not here,’ Begg gestured back to the store, ‘but worse, there.’ He pointed toward Hercus & Barling.

  ‘Sandow? In Marumaru?’

  ‘I told you,’ Josephine added, though both men ignored the girl.

  ‘Well,’ Begg said, ‘just his statue at the moment, but you know how they send that ahead of the company.’

  ‘But Sandow isn’t supposed to perform here. The theatre’s hardly big enough for that pony show.’

  ‘I know. The boy must have got off at the wrong station. Nevertheless,’ Begg said slowly, spelling out the source of his ill-temper, ‘there is a plaster replica of Sandow the Magnificent in Hercus’s window right now and they’re selling Sandow Developers as if they were loaves of bread.’

  Kemp looked back in the direction of Kriss’s bakery. ‘Probably outselling bread today.’

  Begg hit him on the arm with the ledger book.

  Josephine put her hand to her mouth but stayed perched on the fence.

  Kemp looked at the ground, trying to keep his anger, lately focused on The Carpenter, from jumping the tracks and ploughing down his boss.

  ‘I get the impression, sir,’ he said, mirroring Begg’s deliberate pace, ‘that you think I am to blame for our misfortune, though I cannot see how.’

  ‘Because The Carpenter was at the train station this morning to carry Sandow off. We could have had him. Donaldson’s could have had him. The whole town was there, Kemp. The whole town but you. What, pray tell, was so important that you did not bless us with your presence?’

  He couldn’t do it. Couldn’t say the words that would kill Louisa once again. Even now it seemed that she would be in the kitchen, struggling to cut a pumpkin, when he returned home.

  ‘I didn’t know,’ he said. True enough, though he’d later learn that Flossie had seen the commotion at the station and run home to tell Louisa and him of the statue, arriving instead to find her sister limp in his arms in the workshop.

  Begg narrowed his eyes. ‘One-upped again, eh?’ He patted Kemp on the shoulder, causing the flames to rise once more in the window dresser’s chest.

  Two young women dressed to the nines for a night promenading Regent Street approached from the direction of the wharf. By force of habit, he appraised their outfits and knew an instant later that they were not Donaldson’s ladies. He turned to Begg and saw that he had come to the same conclusion. Soon the streets would be crawling with men and women in their finest clothes, sporting parasols and the latest Brazilian and Panama hats. He had delegated to one of his stock boys the task of flicking the switch at midnight to power his New Year’s display. If he left now, if he could shake Josephine Strachan, he could avoid the crowds, the tally-keeping, the lies of omissio
n, the revelry of people looking forward without a single fear in their hearts.

  ‘I suppose there’s little point in holding a grudge,’ Begg said.

  Colton Kemp said nothing. He turned his back on his boss and began to walk the mile and a half back to his secluded property, hauling his earthly form as if it were an engine coupled to a dozen freight carriages, every step a fresh battle with inertia. Josephine followed a few yards behind, in silence this time. He would later wonder why she clung to him. What was it she detected?

  Eventually she left him, taking the path that ran beside the swamp back to the schoolhouse.

  He worried what she would tell her parents when she got home. Not that he had grabbed her by the shoulder, threatened her, but that he had been walking around the town that afternoon as his wife lay dead. Because the news would have to come out. Tomorrow, if he could face it.

  Flossie spied him as he walked up their long gravel driveway and ran out to meet him.

  ‘Oh, Col,’ she said, ‘I’m so glad you came back.’

  She lured him inside, fed him, hardly spoke. She had coped well enough. As well as could be expected. Still, the house rang with cries and he found that he couldn’t sleep in his bed that night, that it was rendered incomplete without a counterbalance, his counterbalance. He soon gave in to his restlessness and stalked to his workshop, lit the lamp and saw the bloody comet trail leading from the base of Ursula, stolid and incomplete, to the heavy barn door. From the muddle of his tool bench, he selected the hatchet he used to chip away large amounts of wood at the start of a new project. Clenching the haft in his right hand, he realised this is how he had felt since the morning: tense beyond all reason but with none of the release of a sweetly placed stroke. Faster than thought, he drove the hatchet into Ursula’s unfinished head, braining her as if it were a tomahawk. He had to place his free hand on the figure’s right shoulder to free the bit from the wood before swinging again. This next stroke knocked a wedge free from Ursula’s head and the heavy wooden form toppled back, coming to rest awkwardly with a trestle against its rump. He turned, eyeing each of the misshapen forms that remained upright before hurling the hatchet end over end into the head of Mavis and her overlarge mouth.

  He left the barn, forgetting it would be dark out, and fumbled around the lean-to where he stacked his firewood, searching for his father’s heavy, cumbrous axe.

  By sunrise he had reduced the mannequins in his workshop to lengths of firewood for the range.

  The occasional hand or foot sticking out of the woodpile would unnerve poor Flossie in the coming weeks, but that next morning she bit her bottom lip and placed a firm hand on his shoulder to rouse him. He uncurled from beneath his tool bench, still clasping his father’s axe. She looked into his red-rimmed eyes.

  ‘Col, I need you to get some things from town. For the babies.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  In which the acolyte makes himself at home

  Jesse lay awake as the sun cut through the thin bed sheets that were hung as curtains in his room at the Criterion Hotel. His chest felt expanded and he pumped it like a bellows, lying on his back and watching his breastbone rise and fall. He had hardly slept but his head felt clear. He knew that next to him lay Julia—dear, plump, motherly Julia—that she was a prostitute and that he was no longer a virgin. These facts became soft at the edges and crumbled when he tried to set the night’s events in order. Had one of his new friends paid for Julia or had she too been placed on his account (which of course was Mr Rickards’ account)? Ah, he didn’t care. To Rickards he was a delivery boy, a tagalong. To the people of Marumaru he was a herald, a saviour.

  Julia lifted herself onto an elbow and said, ‘You know, love, it’s not every man I let kip beside me.’

  ‘Was I making too much noise?’

  ‘Not half,’ she said.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘You’ve got your own room for huffin’ and puffin’.’

  ‘My—?’ So this wasn’t his room. He was unaccustomed to the liberties the drink had taken with his memory. All the same, he found it hard to muster any regret that he’d strayed from Sandow’s path of moderation.

  Julia sat up completely now, making no attempt to shield her large pink breasts with the white sheet. He felt himself get hard again, though there was a dead ache that had not been there last night, an ache he revelled in, the way his muscles used to ache when he started following Sandow’s System.

  She reached out her hand to pat him on the cheek. ‘There’s a good boy,’ she said, motherly once more, and it set his cock throbbing.

  Down the hall, he walked several circuits around his room, laughing to himself and throwing his hands in the air as a maniac might, before stripping to his underwear and settling down to his exercises. He began with the Sandow Spring-Grip Dumb-bell, slowly clenching and unclenching his fist and curling the small weight up to his chin. Ten with the left, ten with the right, thinking all the time about his breathing, his new expanded lungs, the muscles of the chest, the biceps, the triceps, the wrist. He then brought his arm to his chest and extended it in an arc, as if opening a casement window. Ten with the left, ten with the right. On he worked through Sandow’s routine, slowly, never taxing a muscle too greatly, never expending excessive energy, focusing his brain in a way that had become second nature to him. He rigged his Sandow Developer to the door and began working his back. He kept noticing muscles he might not normally feel, ones he had employed with Julia. The thrusting fibres in his buttocks. The lower calf that had held him on his tiptoes as long as he wanted and needed. The toes that had grasped for traction on the wooden floor.

  After his exercises, he took his sponge to the communal bathroom. He did not fill the heavy grey tub with cold water and fully immerse as Sandow’s gospel dictated. He never followed this step at home or when working out with Jarrett. Instead he stepped out of his underpants and soaked the sponge in cool water and proceeded to dab his warm, twitching body with the vital substance.

  He dressed once more in his only outfit—short-sleeved shirt, brown waistcoat and thick canvas trousers—donned his cap and headed downstairs. It had just gone seven o’clock and the dining room was empty. The dark carpet of the hall smelt of spilt ale and sawdust. He took a seat at the bar and was happy enough to sit there and read the names on the liquor bottles.

  ‘After the hair of the dog that bit you, eh?’ said a voice from behind him. He turned and saw the publican, Ed Coughlin, who slowly made his way around the bar.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You after a drink, sir?’

  Jesse smiled. He was still a sir the morning after, though Coughlin forever looked on the verge of winking. ‘No thank you.’

  ‘Had your share last night.’ It wasn’t a question or a jibe, just barman’s conversation. ‘Dora’s in the kitchen,’ he said, ‘if you’re after breakfast?’

  Jesse thought of the account the hotel had been happy enough to run up on Mr Rickards’ behalf last night. The drinks he had been shouted right there in the Criterion after his second telephone call with Rickards, when he could announce to the gathered crowd that the company would perform in Marumaru the next night.

  All of sixteen, a month ago he’d been a schoolboy in Kai Iwi, a two-hour carriage ride from Wanganui, trying to convince his mother that another year of school would not be a waste of time. She had wanted him to find a farm-hand position, bring in some money, put those muscles to use. He did not enjoy school but knew that taking a job would leave no time for training with the troop of boys Mr Jarrett was instructing in the ways of Sandow’s System. Jarrett’s School of Physical Culture (otherwise known as the Kai Iwi school hall) was the only place where Jesse felt a sense of camaraderie and pride.

  When word came that the strongman would stop in Wanganui, Jarrett made a wager with Mr Atkins at the rich boys’ school about whose cadets would impress Sandow more. Jarrett picked his six best boys and off to town they went. Jesse and the other Kai Iwi boys were spread among the
Collegiate ‘Number One Squad’, who stood on the football field, topless and flexed as if under inspection by a team of pretty girls. Atkins, their instructor, wasn’t even there yet, as he was off meeting Sandow at the station. Even if the Kai Iwi boys had taken off their shirts and vests then and there, it would still have been simple to spot them among the whities.

  Jesse had seen plenty of pictures of Sandow in his magazine and on posters beneath the slogans—Breathe more air and have richer blood; Deep breathing is internal exercise—that Jarrett pinned to the walls of the hall, but the strongman looked much shorter in person. Perhaps it was the three-piece suit, the starched collar, the shiny black shoes that almost came to a point.

  ‘Hello my boys,’ Sandow had said, claiming them as his own from the first. ‘What an impressive array of young men.’ His German accent was strong but did not obstruct his meaning.

  Once Atkins and Jarrett had run the boys through a series of dumb-bell and breathing exercises, it was left to Sandow to pick out the best physical specimen. The Prussian had pulled a cigar from the internal pocket of his coat. While Atkins and Jarrett fought over who would have the pleasure of lighting it, he said to the boys, ‘I do not endorse cigars for young lungs such as yours. One or two cigarettes is perhaps all right, but none is always better. For me, one small pleasure a day is sufficient.’ He sucked as the triumphant Atkins held a match to the end of the cigar. Once the flame had caught, Sandow held the cigar aloft as if inspecting the fidelity of a gun’s barrel and said to his two disciples, ‘I find it helps me to think.’

  Atkins began to shout poses for the boys to perform—The Dying Gaul, Farnese Hercules, Discobolus—and Sandow strolled among their ranks, puffing his cigar, pausing from time to time to look a boy up and down, squinting. Sometimes he would nod, sometimes tilt his head and purse his lips. After five minutes, the boys’ posing had become ragged—the Kai Iwi contingent had been making it up as they went along since the first few poses—and Atkins stopped calling out. The Collegiate boys stood at a weary kind of attention. Jesse and his friends each looked down at the circle of trodden dry grass their posing had produced and itched to move. The bet between Jarrett and Atkins meant nothing to them. A perfectly round leather football lay in the distance against a fence.