The Mannequin Makers

by Craig Cliff

  The penguin showed no fear of me and after a few moments of contemplation, turned back to the sea and waddled forward, its black flippers held out to maintain its dainty balance. I thought about giving chase, but my feet were already warming up and had started to ache. I could hear more birds nearby and spotted a few penguins on ledges protruding from the cliffs. If these little, awkward creatures could ascend the steep face, I must also be able.

  I walked swiftly along the bottom of the cliff looking for the rock fall or terraces that the penguins must have used. I rounded a small promontory that required me getting my boots wet. On the other side I found not just the imagined rock fall but a small, brown stream of fresh water. I fell to my knees and brought cupped hand after cupped hand to my mouth. If I had stopped to taste the water, it might have been the foulest thing to have ever passed my lips, stained with peat and penguin effluent as it was, but it made my body sing. It was only once I’d had my fill that I stilled my hands and saw the reflection in the shallow water. Sunken eyes, blotchy skin, rust-red beard.

  My father’s reflection.

  A Family Complaint

  I was eighteen and my father forty when it happened, though not all at once. The first sign was him complaining daily of a wammlin stomach and pounding head. He was forever running out into the close to relieve himself.

  My mother began to spend more time in the workshop fretting over her husband than in the office minding the books and trading gossip.

  ‘It’s nae good, Duncan,’ she’d tell him. ‘Tis your father’s affliction.’

  ‘Blether. There’s no similarity. The old man was a drunkard. I never touched a drop since he met his end.’

  ‘Aye, but I never saw your father touch a drop neither.’

  ‘Ach, away with you, woman. It’s just me wammlin stomach. A wee dram would probably do me good.’

  Soon after this exchange his hands began to tremble and he found it difficult to work a gouge.

  Then his ankle went. It was as if, unbeknownst to him, he had been a marionette his whole life and suddenly the great puppeteer in the sky had snipped the string attached to the end of his left foot. He would lift his leg and the foot would hang down like the head of a dead duck, the toes dragging along the ground. Unlike the aches in his stomach and head, my father did not voice any complaints about his ankle, though his distress was plain enough to see. He walked by moving his left foot out in a semicircle to avoid lifting the leg and having the toes drop. To see him coggling towards you on the street you’d swear he was drunk, but I never did see him have that dram of whisky.

  He descended into a deep depression, armed with the knowledge of what became of his father and the injustice that the affliction had set in ten years sooner this time, cutting him down at the peak of his powers. Unsteady on his feet and easily distracted, he was little use in the workshop and spent most of his time shut away in the upstairs quarters, leaving me to finish his commissions and keep Doig & Son afloat.

  I had become a proficient ship’s carver without ever developing a passion for the craft. My antagonism towards my father had spurred me on, the desire to prove his equal, his better, but I still dreamt of leaving the Clyde, setting sail on a ship bound for the Pacific, making my fortune capturing exotic birds for sultans and zoological societies or absconding to become the chief of some scantily clad tribe. But I didn’t run away. With my father consigned to bed, I knew I couldn’t leave my mother. Not yet. So I picked up my tools and tackled my new responsibilities with the confidence of youth. I’d show my father. I’d show everyone. But each figurehead presented a new challenge. How to produce a valkyrie’s spear that wouldn’t snap in the first gale. What colours to mix to produce the flesh tone of an Indian maharaja. Finding the right blend of symmetrical swirls and natural chaos for Neptune’s beard.

  When I went upstairs at the end of the day I found circuitous ways of asking my father’s advice.

  ‘Och, I’m nae use to anybody,’ was his only response. ‘And it’ll happen to you in time, mark that. It’ll happen to you.’

  The family physician, Doctor Stanley, who’d overseen the demise of my grandfather, was equally baffled by my father’s illness. After the first few visits and the abuse my father hurled at him, the doctor refused to return.

  Four years I laboured in the workshop alone, joined only by my mother at the end of the day to sweep the floors. In quieter moments, the occasional groan from my father might sound through the workshop ceiling. The figureheads that filled the workshop were no longer my friends—I needed to sell them too much to form any sort of attachment—but I used them as standins for my father when rehearsing the blazing rows that always seemed to end with me turning his own words back on him: ‘Och, you are nae use to anybody.’ But the sight of my father’s twitching, writhing, waxy form whenever I ventured upstairs sapped whatever spite or courage I needed to attack the man and he expired without that knot of bitterness in my gut ever getting untied.

  The year was 1881. New sailing ships were no longer being built along the banks of the Clyde. The Suez Canal had been open a dozen years, providing a faster route to China and undercutting the chief appeal of the fast but unpredictable tea clipper. The screw propeller and triple expansion engine meant steamships could do everything a sailing craft could without being at the mercy of the winds. I was only twenty-two—younger than my grandfather when he had come down from his croft—and could easily change trades, change towns, change countries, but I worried about what my mother would do away from her office and its window.

  Commissions were harder and harder to come by. The projects I carved for stock, though of the highest craftsmanship and refinement, found no buyers. I had no friends my own age and, unless the old fantasy of a bolt of lightning bringing one of my figures to life came true, there was little chance of me finding a woman to share my bed and give me a son. The ratio of wooden breasts to flesh ones I had seen since I was a child must have been several hundred to two (both of these belonged to Claire, to whom I paid a single visit out of a sense of obligation, hoping it would kickstart my entry into manhood—but I found myself comparing her unfavourably to my figureheads and was unable to bring myself to touch her uneven, overworked chest). Perhaps it was for the best, I thought, given the curse that afflicted the men in my family. How many years would it be until I too was struck down with the wammlin stomach and wayward ankles? No, I would not go out of my way to bring an heir into the world.

  And so time passed. I was waiting for that one decisive incident that would let me lay down my father’s tools and start my own life. I berated myself for my cowardice. Dick Turpin or Odysseus didn’t let their mothers hold them back.

  Of course, I now see the virtue, however minor, in my inaction.

  A trickle of commissions kept me afloat over the next decade, most for replacement figureheads. Having affixed dozens, first with my father and then in sole charge, I wondered how the originals had been lost. I would always ask the shipping company clerks who placed the orders but they knew as little about life at sea as I did. The figures inevitably met their end in ‘a storm’ or ‘a collision’. With the luxury of time to lavish upon each piece I went to great lengths to replicate the old figurehead, if that’s what the owner was after, and then exceed it, thanks to the small measures I’d learnt from my father or improvised myself.

  Late in the autumn of 1889 my mother caught cold while sitting in the office with nothing to do. For years I had been telling her to leave the books to me. It was enough that she cooked and cleaned for us. We had made an art of living frugally: no salmon or kippers or apples for these Doigs. I could go a day on a single potato; my mother only needed a half. But Agnes Doig was not about to retire to the upstairs quarters she claimed still rang with the moans of my forebears.

  ‘I prefer me window,’ she said.

  ‘But there’s a window up the stairs.’

  ‘Aye, but I dinnae fancy staring down on hats and umbrellas. It’s the faces, Gabriel.
They dinnae stop in as they used to, but I still keep an eye on them all.’

  Doctor Stanley, however, ordered my mother to bed when she became ill. She didn’t last out the week.

  At the age of thirty I was alone in the world, free of filial responsibilities, and yet I still did not shut the doors of Doig & Son. I was, deep down, that same boy who was afraid of going into the closes. The longer I delayed my entry into the Byzantine world beyond Dalrymple Street, and the wee stretch of the River Clyde I knew, the harder it became to make that plunge.

  I was not much use in the kitchen, nor could I afford to pay someone to cook for me. Those first nine months without my mother I ate a lot of oats.

  ‘You sure keep that horse of yours well fed,’ Mrs McLaren told me one fateful morning in 1890 when I purchased another twelve-pound sack from her stall out the front of the bottle works. I will forever remember the date: it was the second of August.

  ‘Aye,’ I said, breaking into a smile. ‘Aye, that’s right. My horse.’ I began to laugh and removed my cap. ‘My horse.’

  The other stallkeepers began to stare, but I couldn’t help myself. I gave a wee wave to Mrs Guigan, who made a living teasing oakum from ropes salvaged from ships that were to be broken up, and young Fanny Balfour, who was selling the whelks she’d collected at low tide. I understood for the first time the enjoyment my mother might have found in the faces of others. No one really has any idea what anyone else is thinking, I decided. It’s one of life’s great jokes, don’t you think, Avis?

  I returned my cap to my head, hoisted the bag of oats onto my shoulder and set off towards the pier, paying little heed to the ships at port or their rigging, concentrating instead on the faces I passed, treating each to the manic grin I could not remove from my face. As I approached the custom house the run of familiar faces was replaced by strange ones. A man with dark skin, wearing a thick canvas shirt that looked as though it had once had sleeves, who screwed up his nose as if the land itself carried a stench. A lady of the country, in full bustle, who thought herself unobserved, stretching her legs between the carriage ride to the coast and the steamer journey that would take her to her destination. A team of wee boys and a single, red-cheeked lass calling ‘Barley, barley’. Two of these lads were so enraptured in their pursuit that they failed to part and both collided with me, making me drop my sack of oats. The lads rose to their feet, brushed themselves off and exchanged gap-toothed smiles before sprinting to catch up with the pack, only for one of them to run square into a large bollard, collapse onto his back like a stricken beetle and bawl until his comrades quit their game and gathered around him silently.

  I lifted my sack once more, dusted it off and continued my passage along the quay. Near the custom house, two sweating men were standing with their hands on their hips, looking with pleasure at the row of barrels, stacked two high, that was kept from rolling off the pier by a single wooden stock. A woman in a grey dress and black bonnet passed me a handbill with the heading ‘The Lips That Touch Liquor Shall Never Touch Mine’. I flashed my manic grin and she shrank away.

  Further on, I came across two men having an argument beside a docked sailing ship that looked liable to sink into the Clyde at any moment.

  ‘I know I said I’m not comin’ bag on that rattlebones,’ shouted one of the men drunkenly, ‘but I left somethin’ aboard.’

  ‘Get away, hound.’

  ‘I ain’t no hound, convict. You convict, you soulless,’ he paused and his shoulders wobbled as if his feet were planted on a tightrope, ‘convict hound.’

  The sober man stood with his arms crossed and his back to the vessel. It looked as if its wooden hull had seen its last coat of green paint several voyages ago. His fair brown hair was pulled behind his head in an old-fashioned sailor’s queue and he wore an unbuttoned leather waistcoat with a clean-looking white shirt beneath.

  ‘If it’s grog you want,’ he said, ‘buy it like any other man. I won’t let you come back aboard and steal my ration.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be your ration, hound.’ The drunk gave a half-hearted howl at the invisible moon. ‘We’re pals, ain’t we?’

  ‘What am I, a hound or a pal?’

  ‘You’re a man’s best friend, in’t ya?’

  The other man gave him a firm push in the chest, starting him on a backward tumble that seemed to gather momentum, bringing him closer and closer to me, his feet tracing wide circles to avoid each other. There was time enough for me to move out of the way, but I had forgotten myself and was involved in my second collision in a matter of minutes.

  The drunken man clasped his hands on my shoulders. ‘Beggin’ your pardon,’ he said, then added in a lower tone, ‘you dirty hound.’ His teeth were flecked with what might have been wheat husks, his breath heady and pungent.

  ‘Leave that boy alone, Ruskin,’ the other man cried before I could respond.

  It had been some time since I had been called a boy and it conjured up the ire that I used to feel towards my debilitated father.

  I dropped my sack of oats.

  ‘You will do well, sir,’ I said, adopting the firm cordiality of a highwayman, ‘to remove your hands from my shoulders and crawl under the nearest bench until you have recovered yourself.’

  The man appeared frozen so I took it upon myself to knock his hands from my shoulders, turn and walk back up the quay. I was met, however, by a scene much changed. Of the barrels that had been stacked with such care, only one remained, held by one of the sweaty men. The other man was grabbing his head and peering down to the waters below. The woman with the handbills was nowhere to be seen.

  The oats. I had left them in front of the ship. I turned back towards the bedraggled vessel and noticed for the first time the familiar figure on its bow.

  Vengeance. My Vengeance.

  Like the rest of the ship, she was in a poor condition. The deep blue of her garment had been slaked. Long vertical cracks traversed her form. The arm clutching the imagined knife was reduced to a splintered wound at her collarbone. Her face was turned away from me, as if she were embarrassed by her wretched state, her once burning cheek now bare and grey. But I also noticed deficiencies I could not attribute to fifteen years of squalls and neglect. The inadequate distance between the indentation of her navel, visible through her dress, and her breasts. The limp, lifeless way her hair sat upon her remaining shoulder. No hint of an ear beneath the locks that covered the side of her face. It had taken me more than one or two figures to perfect my craft, but I now stood before Vengeance a man with the ability to do her justice. I could return to my workshop that minute and turn my last, untouched block of yellow pine into the figure of Vengeance that I’d seen in my mind as a boy but did not have the hands to execute. And then what? Even if the carving was flawless, it was unlikely to sell. I could not afford to buy any more timber. Doig & Son would be finished. I would be finished. At last, at last, at last.

  I walked back towards the gangway. There was no sign of the drunkard. The sober man stood with his arms crossed once more.

  ‘I’d like to repair your figurehead,’ I said, forgetting my highwayman voice and sounding like an eager boy.

  ‘That thing?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘There’s no money in it. Besides, this old girl’s days are numbered.’

  ‘The ship is to be broken up?’

  ‘Not exactly. The owner wouldn’t benefit from that. But she’s bound for the Horn.’

  ‘In this condition?’

  The man nodded.

  ‘But that’s suicide.’

  ‘Perhaps. But a well-paid suicide.’ The man’s voice rang with what I thought might be courage.

  ‘But the owner—’ I began, then remembered Agathos Rennie, his long fingers and stooped shoulders, his theatrical pince-nez.

  ‘The owner would like nothing more than a wreck and the insurance monies that’d flow in its wake. He’s all for steam, is Mr Rennie.’

  ‘Is he here?’

  ‘No.
Rennie’s based in London. Do you know the firm?’

  ‘Aye. Their office used to be along this very quay.’

  ‘Is that so?’ The man turned to look at the ship. ‘The old girl limped back here after meeting a hurricane off the Azores. Snapped the foremast. She’s been in the graving dock these past two weeks getting enough repairs to send her to her doom.’ He gave a laugh. ‘We’re setting sail on the morrow if we’ve crew enough by then.’

  ‘You might struggle on that account.’

  ‘One trip around the Horn will net you the same as three trips in a fitter ship.’

  ‘Aye, if you survive.’

  ‘It’s mostly looks. She’s still a fine craft. Sleek and fast. Ah, she’s fast. It is a good life to see the seven seas on a clipper. Better to die aboard such a vessel than in a puttering tin can that your mother could tend.’

  ‘Why did that man call you a convict?’

  ‘Oh that. I’m from Australia.’

  ‘You’re not—?’ I began.

  ‘I’m a free man, if that’s what you’re asking.’

  ‘Of course. I’m sure you are. I’ve never met an Australian before, that’s all. My name’s Gabriel Doig.’ I offered my hand.

  ‘Basil Porter.’

  ‘What would you say, Mr Porter, if I came back this afternoon to touch up the lass out front? Gratis, of course.’

  Porter let out a light, high-pitched ha-ha. ‘You can touch her up, all right, but it may be me who should be charging.’

  I returned to the Agathos with a barrow of tools, paints, resins, copper nails and small blocks of new timber from my workshop. Porter, evidently the ship’s first mate, led me across the gangway and onto the deck. I surveyed the timbers I had trodden half a life ago. The decrepit impression cast by the exterior of the ship proved misleading. The boards were firm and freshly swabbed. A new coat of paint would liven things up no end. Porter laid a long plank of wood down as a ramp so that I could take my barrow up to the fo’c’sle deck.