The Mannequin Makers

by Craig Cliff

  For a long time something had been bothering me about the boy. I had been neglecting him as I focused on the girl’s eyes, but the moment I first saw him I was struck by a sense of familiarity, as if I had seen him before. And then, finally, I remembered.

  It was your final scene: the girl standing on a pedestal, holding a statue’s pose, one hand to her forehead. The boy knelt before her, Pygmalion to her Galatea. But there was another echo. That play I had seen, all those years ago. The Winter’s Tale. While that Hermione had wobbled and blinked her way through the scene, Kemp’s was perfectly still. I looked at the boy once more and saw it. That chest, those biceps, those calf muscles, that posture. It was Sandow. Not the man himself, and not the plaster statue that I was told to place in my window, but another of his followers.

  I would like to say that everything fell into place after this, but I did not have all the answers that afternoon when the curtain did not descend. It was only a few days later, once we were up here, that I made the connection between the time Sandow had visited Marumaru, the ages of you and your brother and the death of Kemp’s wife—always a thing to be whispered about in town. You were his children. He was a monster. But we must be careful of such pronouncements.

  Even now, my dear, we do not have the full story.

  All I knew when I stood there, watching the sun go down in the reflection of the glass and you and your brother valiantly holding your poses, was that these were human beings and that something was terribly wrong.

  I left the window to find answers. I went to Kemp’s property, hoping to find his sister-in-law, but the house was deserted.

  You have asked often about Flossie, but I’m sorry I cannot say. I went into the barn, which was evidently where your father worked, and saw empty pedestals and strange contraptions, but the space was unoccupied. I did, however, find a set of keys hanging conspicuously by the door that I hoped might get me into Donaldson’s and into the window.

  I returned to town with Susan, my current horse—Galahad passed away several years ago, poor beast—and the dray I used to bring in my own mannequins for the window. The curtain was still up at Donaldson’s, the figures still standing. I rifled through Kemp’s keys and finally got inside the store and made my way in the near dark to the window.

  As soon as I touched your skin, I knew you were flesh and blood. And yet you refused to move. For the first time in many years I wished I could speak—to tell you that you could move, that everything would be all right.

  At first I intended to rescue you both. But I am not as strong as I once was. It was difficult to find the exit again and I was unnerved by the way you held your pose even as I clattered you against the racks of clothes. I could feel the heat of the blood coursing beneath your skin, the subterranean muscles hard as steel bobstay cables. When I got you onto the dray, I still hadn’t resolved the mystery of who you were and what spell you were under. Whatever the case, I felt the lad could protect himself. He was strong. He could stand there all night, if necessary. He could evade any captor. And so I left him there in the window.

  I’m sorry for imposing this separation between you and your brother. It must be difficult. But it is wise of you to have stayed with me this long, especially in your condition. I cannot predict what your father will do. Nor what the authorities will say, where you will be taken.

  Now we have both spent time in Splinterlands, trying to adjust to a new world. For my part, I hope you will stay a wee bit longer—that your father does not break down my door now that I’ve reached the end of my story. Until then, you are welcome to stay. Now that you have taught me to cook, it can only get better.

  God bless you, my child. My dear, dear Avis.

  The shining cuckoo.

  Part four

  AUGUST 1974, COLLAROY, NORTHERN SYDNEY

  The Mannequin Speaks

  ‘The last act is bloody, however fine the rest of the play.’

  I.

  Every winter I’m surprised when the wattle blooms. This year even more so for the battering we took in May and June. But somehow the buds clung to their branches as the easterlies clobbered the coast and our waves, shunted on by the king tide, gouged the beach from Collaroy baths to North Narrabeen.

  I arrived in Sydney on the eve of one of these storms. The year was 1920. My first forty-eight hours in the city were spent hunkered in a hotel room until the sun broke through. I wanted to be on the coast. We’d grown up so close to the waves and yet the sight had been denied us. Now that I’d put many miles between myself and Marumaru I wished to see and hear and smell the breakers for the rest of my life.

  Collaroy Beach was no postcard that first day. Houses and sheds teetered on the edge of the storm scarp. What was left of the beach was littered with sandbags and timber. I felt I’d missed something. A catastrophe. A spectacle. Two young ladies wheeled their bicycles around obstacles and through puddles, not looking at all devastated. Beyond them, men were pushing barrows, shovelling sand and shoring up the supports of one of these wooden buildings. It was the surf club.

  People talk these days about the service I have given the club, beginning that day after the storm, but I think of it another way: all those years of service the club has given me. The mateship, the sense of purpose, the routine. That’s another thing the young guns like to go on about: old Sandy’s routines. Though hardly anyone has ever seen me climbing to McLean’s Lookout in the dark—good luck getting the ratbags up before nine—even the nippers know I go there to limber up of a morning. I do my exercises to the cawing of the crows and watch the orange band of daylight break over the sea, the waves, the sand, the pines, the shops, the tarsealed streets, the phoenix palms and banksias, the bungalows and unit blocks—until it finally reaches me, up there on Collaroy Plateau. Daylight brings the people out of doors, perfect miniatures walking with purpose. No one dawdles in the early hours. I watch them walk their dogs, duck into cars, paddle their longboards out for a few waves before work while I do my exercises. These days I’m mostly just stretching, checking every muscle is still there, that none have buggered off in the night.

  The old body’s hanging in there. I reckon I could still win the odd flag race, but I don’t want to embarrass the younger blokes. Let them think they’re untouchable—it only lasts so long. Besides, those few times I’ve gone out into the surf for a rescue in recent years, it’s been all the members can talk about for weeks afterward.

  ‘How do you keep in such good shape, Sandy?’ they ask.

  ‘This is my shape,’ I say. I hold out my arms, resigned, before adding, ‘And I don’t intend losing it.’

  About this time last year I found myself talking to the television. I’d never had much time for the idiot box. I was either training, on patrol or at the surf club. I used to go weeks without spending a single evening in my flat, with all the committees and balls and what have you. But they don’t have balls any more and I’ve filled every committee post three times over. ‘You’ve done enough,’ they all tell me, but what they mean is, ‘You’ve done your dash, old man.’

  And so the television got called for duty more and more to fill the silence.

  One day I started answering Tony Barber’s questions on The Great Temptation, my own voice drowning out the answers of the contestants. Soon I was complimenting Barbie Rogers on her dresses.

  Brian Henderson would read the nightly news and in the pauses between stories I’d add my two cents.

  The Australian Embassy Platoon has withdrawn from Vietnam: ‘About bloody time.’

  The government has spent big bikkies on a paint-splattered canvas: ‘You call that art?’

  Another doom and gloom update on the oil crisis: ‘Let them keep their oil, eh Hendo? Walking never hurt anyone.’

  ‘I never owned a car in my life,’ I found myself saying into the mirror as I brushed my teeth. ‘Never saw the need.’

  I began to yarn with the walls, regale the ceiling tiles. I didn’t need the TV to drown the silence any more.


  ‘I met June Hervey at the championships at Manly, many moons ago . . .’

  ‘The first time I saw Collaroy Beach, the surf club was nearly falling into the sea . . .’

  ‘There was once a man who talked to a figurehead . . .’

  I forget about the wattles when they’re not in bloom. They’re just like other trees. But when they wake in the middle of winter and fill the front yards with yellow they seem to be saying, ‘You’ve forgotten I was here. But I’m here. I’m here.’

  The time has come for me to wake. To speak for myself.

  My name is Eugen Kemp. The world may have forgotten me. But I’m here. I’m here.

  I left New Zealand with Avis’s diary and The Carpenter’s tale, not knowing quite what I carried. Back then, I could only read sheet music. I was curious, but also terrified by the prospect of those pages. I didn’t want to know what had been going on in that hut in the weeks it took to find them, didn’t want to relive what happened once we finally tracked them down.

  When I got to Collaroy I was seventeen, dumb, strong and handsome. It was easy enough to find young women willing to spend time with me. Easy enough to admit I didn’t know my letters and to let them school me. I never told them where I’d come from, not exactly, or what I might read when I was able.

  ‘What’s your name?’ one of the blokes asked me when I offered to help clean up the surf club that day in 1920.

  ‘Sandow,’ I said. ‘John Sandow.’

  I was handed a shovel and I stripped down to my waist. I began clearing sand and soon realised the others were leaning on their tools, watching me.

  ‘You sure have a lot of muscles there, Sandy,’ one joker said. I’ve been Sandy ever since.

  ‘They come in handy,’ I said.

  Though none of the blokes at the club quite matched my physique, they weren’t the pale weaklings I’d seen in Marumaru. We had the surf club shipshape in no time.

  I’d never swum before, but I soon learnt.

  After a couple of months in Collaroy, I was the first choice to run out into the surf with the lifebelt. We routed North Narrabeen and Manly in the reel, line and belt rescue at that year’s championships and I was assured my pick of freckled tutors.

  I have known love. I have known happiness. They may not have been constants in my life, but I have known them. Don’t think the events I must return to have consigned me to a life of misery. However devastating the storm, the flotsam is always cleared, the beach returns, the swimmers venture back into the water. When someone gets into strife, a lifeguard trundles out to rescue them.

  II.

  There I was, down on one knee, looking up at my masterpiece long after the sun went down. I didn’t move when The Carpenter came, lifted Avis from her pedestal and carried her from the window. I’d let her go, but my expression didn’t change. I kept my eyes trained to the spot where her head had been. I thought: if I hold this pose until the morning, perhaps the early risers will think this disappearing act is the next tableau. That’s what I told my father when he returned later that morning, but the truth is I didn’t care what they thought on the other side of the window. Not since I’d seen them out there: gangly, stooped, gaunt, fat, grey, reddened by eczema and acne, shrunken by age or malnutrition. At least on New Year’s Eve their clothes had been crisp and well tailored. In the following days they’d exchanged their finest dresses and suits for duller, more frayed versions, better matches for the neglect they’d shown their bodies.

  As with Avis, I’d been disturbed by the number of children, but also the lack of young men. There seemed no place for me on the other side of the glass.

  I’d moped for days until my father raised the possibility of Christchurch.

  We’d been raised to believe that beauty must go hand in hand with fortitude, perseverance, grace—things that can’t be proven in an instant. Physical perfection came first—the people of Marumaru had already failed on this count—but character was the real test. I believed I was better than Marumaru, but if I broke pose I’d be letting myself down. It didn’t matter that it was the middle of the night, The Carpenter had raided the window and the street was most likely deserted: I held my pose. I thought about all the other sixteen-year-old boys at that moment—in Christchurch, Wellington, Auckland—who were midway though their seasons in the window. But they were asleep in their anterooms, dreaming of Sandow Developers that stretch and stretch and stretch without ever pinging back. They couldn’t have lasted this long in the window. Even if I had no witness, I’d know what I’d done.

  And so I held my pose.

  The pain in my knee ebbed and flowed. It felt as if the floor were moving. A haze descended but I kept my eyes open and unmoving.

  Avis describes in her diary how we managed to stand so still—the way we learnt to rearrange ourselves, our muscles, in tiny, imperceptible ways. One thing she neglects to explain, however, is blinking.

  One of my earliest memories is of my father’s face hard up against mine. His eyes drilling into my eyes. If I blinked, he’d slap my cheek. He would alternate cheeks—he was a slave to symmetry—and I remember feeling the burn of the last slap on one side of my face and the burn of anticipation on the other.

  These weren’t proper staring contests: I couldn’t slap him if he blinked. He blinked often. More often than he thought he did. It was bloody distracting.

  I was told that, as babies, Avis and I had blinked once every couple of minutes. I guess it has something to do with the moistness of an infant’s eyes, the lack of exertion. As we grew, we disappointed our father by blinking more frequently. Sandow had suggested that the eyelids could be trained. If anyone knew muscles it was him. And yet there I was, two or three years old, struggling to go a minute without blinking, even with the threat of another slap across the cheek.

  According to Sandow’s System, the mind is the most important muscle. Exercise, he preached, is of little value without the judicious use of willpower (I still hear people say the same thing, all these years later, though they use different words). Is it any surprise, then, that a toddler can’t control his eyelids with a half-developed brain?

  My father eventually realised this and focused our training elsewhere for the next few years. When his attention returned to our eyelids, we improved rapidly, able to stare without blinking—without any eye movement whatsoever—for two minutes, sometimes three. But we’d always blink in the end.

  The truth is, you can’t deny your eyelids for longer than three minutes. The tension builds in the lids, they become heavier and heavier. You might be able to hold it for another thirty seconds, but by this point you’re swaying, your chest is pumping, the illusion is ruined—and you’re still going to blink. It’s inevitable. The key is to control your blinking so that it cannot be detected. Just as we learnt to breathe shallow, unseen breaths, we trained ourselves to blink so fast, so efficiently, that our father, an inch away, couldn’t be sure our lids had moved. Stretch that distance out to six feet and add a sheet of plate glass and you have your illusion. But even then, it wouldn’t work if we were blinking every few seconds. The secret is the rhythm. We learnt to blink once every forty seconds and staggered our rhythms so we weren’t blinking at the same time. Forty seconds is regular enough to keep the eyes moist and relieve tension in the lids but infrequent enough that the onlooker is never sure what they’ve seen. Perhaps they see a flutter of the lashes. But did they really? They focus hard for another thirty seconds, their certainty fading all the while, their own eyelids clapping like castanets.

  Long after I left the window, left New Zealand, I was still blinking faster than the shutter of a camera, still stuck to the same forty-second rhythm while at rest. It helped me with my tutors. When it was time to put away my books and look into their eyes, they felt as if they had my full attention. My father may have raised us to be mannequins—with no thought about what would happen after the window—but he had inadvertently trained me in the art of seduction.

 
My father returned from Christchurch on the morning train to find a crowd of people gathered around the window of Donaldson’s. His window. It was before nine, too early for the curtain to be raised. He pushed his way through the crowd and saw me, kneeling before the empty pedestal. He came right up to the glass and slapped his palms upon it. I couldn’t see him, of course, but I was startled by the sound. I don’t think he meant to get my attention. He didn’t want me to turn.

  He left the street, made his way to the anteroom and lowered the curtain. I felt his hand on my shoulder and let myself fall onto my side. I’d been posing for nearly twenty hours without a drop of water, without a hiccup or a yawn.

  ‘Eugen, what are you doing?’ He shook me.

  I couldn’t answer.

  ‘Why are you in the window this early? Where’s Avis? Where’s,’ he paused, ‘your mother?’

  I managed to shake my head.

  He lifted me by the open collar of my sculptor’s shirt. I opened my eyes. His face was clean shaven.

  ‘What is it, boy?’

  ‘She’s not my mother,’ I said. It felt as if my throat were full of sand.

  ‘Where’s Avis?’ he repeated. ‘What are you doing in the window?’

  ‘The curtain. It never fell.’

  His frown deepened as he tried to make sense of my words.

  ‘You’ve been here all night? Posing?’

  I closed my eyes again—a long, luxurious, never-ending blink. He let go of my shirt and I dropped back to the floor. I heard his footsteps as he went to the anteroom. After some time he returned and stood over me. My eyes remained closed and he stomped off once more. He came back with a glass of water, lifted me up and held it to my lips.