The Mannequin Makers

by Craig Cliff

  When Sandow’s cigar had halved in size he said, ‘Gentlemen, these are the best boys I have yet seen in Australasia. And the best among them? Him.’

  ‘Him?’ Atkins asked.

  ‘Him.’ Sandow pointed once more at Jesse.

  ‘That’s one of mine,’ said Jarrett, beaming. ‘Jesse Hikuroa. Come forward, Jesse.’

  ‘Excellent chest development,’ Sandow said. ‘You look as if you could run all day.’

  Jesse shrugged and looked at the football.

  Sandow turned to Jarrett. ‘I wonder if I could use him for my demonstration tomorrow afternoon. I understand that several doctors and other prominent citizens will be in attendance.’

  Back at the Criterion’s bar, Jesse’s stomach rumbled and he remembered that he had not responded to Ed Coughlin’s question about breakfast. Coughlin must have heard the rumble, as he gave another almost-wink and called out to Dora to crack a couple of eggs.

  ‘You made the newspaper,’ Coughlin said. He produced a paper from behind the bar and slapped it down in front of Jesse.

  The front page was devoted to advertising for department stores, hotels and passages aboard the New Zealand Shipping Company’s Royal Mail Steamers for London. Jesse opened the paper and was met with the headline stretching across two columns: SANDOW IS HERE, SANDOW IS COMING.

  He was mentioned only in roundabout ways in the article. ‘Sandow’s likeness was delivered to the Marumaru Station on Wednesday morning,’ it said, without saying by whom. Later, there was mention of ‘Rickards’ associates’ and ‘an advance party’, which Jesse took to mean him and him alone. Mostly the article reproduced Rickards’ own press for the company.

  Rickards was due to arrive on the 9.15 train, along with the props and stage hands, at which point Jesse would be put to work.

  His eggs arrived. He continued to leaf through the paper as he ate. On page four, he was surprised to see that he was mentioned by name in the gossip column.

  MISS TATTLE’S WORD OF MOUTH

  Town is abuzz with the arrival of the plaster brute, Eugen Sandow. My contacts in Christchurch inform me the fleshy version is no more engaging . . . What was J—wearing on her head at the station yesterday? The most likely candidate is a dead possum . . . Young Miss M—seemed quite taken with the plaster brute’s companion, a young Maori in possession of perfect health, an acolyte of Herr Sandow no doubt . . . Miss B—was seen down the park eating a whole orange, greedily . . . J—B—’s wife is jolly fed up and beyond wrought with her husband’s affair with the bottle. J—is only getting started . . . Elsewhere in the colony, the “cursed drink” is still sending people to the asylums despite the prohibitionists. One ruined publican is the latest victim . . . Miss M—will do well to note the boy’s name is Jesse, and to keep such affections a better secret from her father . . . Absent from yesterday’s scene was C—K—, which surprised us all. F—was spotted briefly, but we understand she ran away with shame at the state of her dress . . . Those surveyed prior to this edition going to print were eager to see Donaldson’s window in action before attending the Watchnight service . . . A—has been to both the big stores and is still to find a glove that fits . . . Sandow’s feats include bending iron bars, breaking chains and bursting wire ropes. Constable T—will be in a pickle if Sandow starts having his way with the town . . . The Mayor still writes 189–from time to time, and must then cross it out. To the rest of you, welcome to the New Year. May it be prosperous, scandalous and never dull.

  Getting off the train at Marumaru the previous morning had been a mistake and he expected another dressing down from Rickards when he arrived. The extra stop would still turn a profit but the town was small, smaller than any other in which the company had performed since he was asked to join as Sandow’s travelling demonstration assistant. But Marumaru was alive, different from any other place he had experienced.

  His big night came back to him in a sudden wave: the booze, the bright colours, the handshakes, the gratitude, but also his own generosity. The rounds he had shouted. The toast he had announced at last call, ‘To Marumaru, the town that no one wants to visit and no one wants to leave.’ He thought of Julia upstairs. With the size of the tab he’d run up for Rickards, the decision to stay might not be his to make.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  In which Eugen Sandow performs in Marumaru and a seed is planted

  Colton Kemp and Jolly Bannerman sat on the damp sand passing a bottle of peaty home-distilled whisky back and forth as the tide receded.

  ‘To the New Year,’ Bannerman said for the umpteenth time and held the bottle aloft. The two had spent the afternoon together. Jolly had asked after Louisa several times, but Kemp had not told him she was dead. More than a day had passed and he still had not told anyone. ‘She’s fine,’ was all he’d say.

  ‘And sweet wee Flossie?’

  ‘As sweet as ever.’

  ‘You’re a lucky man, Col.’

  ‘We shall see.’

  He looked at the ironmonger, slouched forward over his knees, his slender height compressed like a heron about to take flight. Bannerman slapped his long, tobacco-stained fingers on the grey sand. ‘Tell me I’m not a good husband, Col? Tell me I don’t deserve a little respect?’

  Kemp kept silent. Small round pebbles scattered across the beach shimmered in the soft light of late afternoon. The waves covered them with a thin film on the way up the beach but the receding water took the easier route, parting either side of each stone, creating hundreds of little arrow heads pointing back to town, back to his house. Arrows that flickered a few times and disappeared until the next wave came to his toes and pulled back.

  ‘The likes of which . . .’ Bannerman returned his head to his knees without finishing his thought.

  Kemp took the bottle from his friend’s loose grip. ‘I’m not ready to be a father. I can’t do it.’ He took a swig.

  The sloshing sound roused Bannerman once more. He held out his hand for the bottle. ‘Hey, are you going to the show tonight?’

  ‘What show?’

  ‘What show? Come on, Col. I know the opposition got one over you with the statue, but you can’t tell me you don’t have a ticket.’

  ‘When were you ever in a state to get a ticket?’

  ‘Milly got ’em. Just the two I’m afraid. You don’t have tickets? Col, my boy.’

  ‘Leave it be.’

  ‘They’ve got plenty besides Sandow. Singers, story-tellers. Louisa and Floss would love it. Perhaps there are still some tickets left.’

  ‘Louisa is in no state to go,’ he said, his lie almost colliding with the truth.

  ‘Right, the baby. Any day I suppose. She looked fit to burst when last I saw her.’

  He dug his hand into the sand and squeezed.

  ‘Don’t be nervous, Col. You’ll be a halfway decent father.’ He handed him the near-empty bottle and stood. ‘I’m off home. Off to get cleaned up and take Milly to the show like a good husband. A good husband.’ He shook his head and patted Kemp on the shoulder. ‘Hope to see you there.’

  Another wave petered out on the beach and pulled back. The landward arrows flickered. Kemp had not been home since the morning, since Flossie had woken him and sent him to run errands. He’d purchased the supplies she had requested from Mr Fricker and Sam Tong, the greengrocer, but he paid the Chase boy to deliver them. The muscles of his stomach clenched whenever he thought about crossing the threshold. He had decisions to make, so many decisions—funeral arrangements, someone to cover for him at Donaldson’s, names for the twins if they could survive on a diet of cow’s milk and Flossie’s attention—but out in the world he continued to preserve his awful secret.

  He looked at the bruised sky, stood and walked up the violet dunes. As he emerged on Regent Street, he saw movement in the window above Bannerman’s workshop. He looked down the road: a spoil of dust had been hoofed up in the distance, perhaps at the corner of Victoria Street. Yes, he could see carriages coming from the wharf’s direction an
d turning up Victoria to reach the Theatre Royal. The show would soon be starting. He continued on, down the slight slope. He passed the hushed Criterion, crossed a vacant Albert Street and stood in front of the lawn of the Methodist Church. Unseen silvereyes sang tweeooh tweeooh in the black-leafed camellia. A fat thrush toddled a few steps across the sad lawn, stopped and cocked its head before skitting into the bushes.

  The Carpenter’s window was next. If he had any gratitude for the show, it was that it had cleared the crowd from the front of Hercus & Barling so he could observe the window in solitude. The electric lights that usually ran until nine had been switched off, which meant that he had to press his head to the glass to see the details of the display. At the centre stood the plaster statue of Eugen Sandow, a white spectre clutching one fist close to his forehead and the other down by his hip at the end of a straightened arm. His curly hair and undulating torso were stippled with daylight. Kemp looked at the statue’s splayed feet, no doubt a pose struck by Sandow to show off the development of his thighs and calves, and wondered about the weight of the small, square pedestal that managed to keep the likeness from falling over.

  Sandow was ringed by seven admirers, all female. Each mannequin was familiar to him: the three blonde nymphs, the dignified dame with the operatic build, the pig-tailed schoolgirl on the cusp of adulthood, the black-haired evil stepmother from a fairy story and the serene lady in the red moirette, though, like the other figures, most of her outfit had been changed to show off the season’s latest fashions. The Carpenter’s mannequins did not have articulated limbs—his creations were fixed in the one pose as Sandow was—but they were arranged carefully to disguise their odd gestures and give the impression of a crowd clustering around the town’s new arrival. To Kemp they were admiring a mere statue rather than a man. It was more than just the difference in materials, the full palette The Carpenter employed against the scuffed white of the Sandow replica. The breath of life granted to his figures had been withheld from the plaster Sandow. He considered the crescent of real onlookers that had occupied the footpath since the display was unveiled and saw how The Carpenter’s figures would close this circle. Had he intended this? Was he suggesting that for every person looking through the window there was a better dressed doppelgänger on the other side?

  He looked again at Sandow and even in the dimness he could perceive rough edges where he would have made them smooth, blank patches where small but important details—the grain of the moustache, the slight protrusion of a nail beyond the toe, the point at which the earlobe meets the flesh of the face—had been glossed over. He had learnt the importance of such things in the course of his mannequin making, though his hands often muffed these master strokes.

  It was clear that this Sandow was a second pressing. A plaster version of a bronze statue from a cast of a showman made to hold the same pose beyond the limits of boredom and pain: a copy of a copy of a charade.

  Even now, he thought, I am losing Louisa. Her image is becoming fixed in my head. Those thousand memories, that ever-changing face. All is being sanded down to one, and that will be sanded further until there is no life left.

  His forehead pressed against the glass of The Carpenter’s window, Colton Kemp felt his desire to see the real Sandow, the living Sandow, grow.

  After a long while he left the window and came to Victoria Street, congested with hitched horses, donkeys, drays, buggies and bicycles, but almost devoid of people. On the near corner a boy tossed a silver coin over and over. Even the town’s few coach drivers must have had tickets to the show. As he approached the Theatre Royal he saw the ‘Sold Out’ banner plastered across the placard outside the box office window. The office itself appeared deserted at first, but he made out the rounded form of Burt Tompkins holding his ear to the wall that backed onto the auditorium. Kemp rapped the glass with his knuckles, giving the old man a start that caused him to drop the small metal cylinder he’d been using to listen to the entertainment.

  Once Tompkins had regathered himself he said, ‘Sorry Col, the house is full.’

  ‘Do us a favour, Burt. Can’t I stand up the back?’

  ‘Back’s already full of folks standing. The old girl wasn’t built to fit the whole town.’

  ‘There must be room for one more.’

  ‘If you had a ticket, perhaps.’

  ‘You know I don’t have a ticket, Burt.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Col.’

  ‘Jesus, Burt.’

  Tompkins removed his round spectacles and rubbed the lenses with his checked handkerchief.

  ‘I meant to get a ticket,’ Kemp said, ‘but with Lou—,’ the name caught in his throat but he pushed it out with a second effort, ‘with Louisa expecting . . .’

  Tompkins returned his specs to the bridge of his nose and leant in to the pane of glass that separated them. ‘I didn’t tell you, but you might be able to get in by the stage door around back. Plenty of hubbub back there, but if you look as if you belong . . .’

  ‘Thanks, Burt.’

  ‘Give my love to Louisa.’

  Kemp placed his palm on the glass and nodded.

  The rear of the theatre on Market Street was indeed a hive of activity. The backstage area must not have been large enough to house Rickards’ entire company and the overflow went about their business in the open air under the glow of several large lanterns. A small-waisted woman with a powdered face sang scales, holding the hem of her blue dress and her many petticoats up from the reach of the dust and dirt. A man in a black tuxedo handed an accordion to a boy standing inside a covered wagon, before inspecting the teeth of two well-fed ponies with jewel-encrusted bridles.

  Kemp looked around for an excuse to enter the theatre. Wooden crates were scattered here and there, stalks of hay sprouting from the openings. He placed the lid back on one of these crates, lifted it and made for the stage door.

  ‘Who’s that for, then?’

  Kemp turned and saw an old man standing near the ponies, a body brush in one hand and his eyebrows raised.

  ‘Fresh chains for Mr Sandow,’ he replied.

  ‘Well then,’ the man said, ‘schnell, schnell.’

  Kemp put the empty crate down inside the corridor and took the stairs two at a time, turning right, away from the sound of a contralto on stage, who was singing what sounded like ‘Love’s Old Sweet Song’, and merged into a crowd of men in the wings. The contralto was joined by the woman in the blue dress he had seen warming up outside. They performed a duet of ‘Life’s Dream is O’er’ which, though sung in perfect harmony, made him grit his teeth. He pressed his back to the wall of the auditorium and tried not to listen to the lyrics. Standing on his toes he could see the twenty-piece orchestra crammed into the theatre’s tiny pit and believed he could hear the discomfort in their performance. He scanned the audience, every face familiar, until he spotted Milly Bannerman seated at the end of the very last row of the stalls. Jolly was standing immediately behind, his hands clamped on his wife’s shoulders, his eyes closed, head swaying with the music.

  The master of ceremonies came forth and shook the hands of both singers. ‘Miss Nita Leete and Miss Ray Jones!’ he said and clapped theatrically as they skipped off the stage like May queens. The man, dressed in a crimson topcoat, now gestured for the audience to quieten down. Kemp wondered if this was Harry Rickards himself or just another paid performer. It was the kind of question he would lean across and whisper to Louisa. She would know no more than him, but she would find some detail—the frayed hem of the man’s coat, the knot of his bootlace—to support a theory either way.

  ‘The penultimate act this evening,’ the master of ceremonies was saying, ‘is another taste of fine culture. The finest theatre from Mother England’s finest poet. A superb vignette from The Bard’s great pastoral play, The Winter’s Tale. A story for the fireside on a chilly January eve—January in the Northern Hemisphere, of course. A tale of jealousy, rage, loss, deception, but also, as we shall witness, magic, transformation and re
union. The perfect apéritif before another statue comes to life.’ He raised his hand to his lips. ‘But I have said too much. Ladies, gentlemen, I give to you the Gates Family Players and the concluding scene of The Winter’s Tale.’

  The crowd clapped politely as the master of ceremonies backed away from the front of the stage and passed a shuffling figure who, despite being robed in white cloth and sporting a long grey beard, clearly counterfeit, could not have been past twenty years of age. There were a few hoots of recognition from the crowd and someone shouted, ‘Atta boy, Jesse!’, though this meant nothing to Kemp.

  In one hand this figure carried a large hourglass hung from a chain and in the other a book.

  Young Father Time stopped at the centre of the stage and began to read off a sheet of paper stuck to the cover of the book:

  ‘I, that please some, try all, both joy and terror

  Of good and bad, that makes and unfolds error,

  Now take upon me, in the name of Time,

  To use my wings. Impute it not a crime

  To me or my swift passage, that I slide

  O’er sixteen years and leave the growth untried

  Of that wide gap, since it is in my power

  To o’erthrow law and in one self-born hour

  O’erwhelm custom. Your patience this allowing,

  I turn my glass —’

  He paused to upend the hourglass.

  ‘and give my scene such growing

  As you had slept between: Leontes leaving,