The Mannequin Makers

by Craig Cliff

  ‘Sorry, sir—’ Jesse began.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry. The Carpenter is the most able man in the field of displays. Just one look at our present window should allay any fears you may have. But why would you have fears? You’ve come to deposit Mr Sandow’s likeness at Hercus & Barling and you’re very much in the right spot.’

  ‘A sack of rats for Kemp,’ said Begg. ‘That’s what awaits him, a sack of rats.’

  ‘Come,’ Hercus said, placing his arm across Jesse’s shoulders, ‘let us repair to my store.’ He turned to The Carpenter. ‘I trust you can transport the precious cargo?’

  The man nodded.

  ‘Never a peep, that fellow,’ Hercus said. ‘Now tell me, boy, what is your name and how long have you been associated with Mr Sandow?’

  CHAPTER THREE

  In which Colton Kemp keeps mum

  The lighthouse, vacant since the death of its first and only keeper, stood at the head of a nameless crag. From the handful of times Kemp had gone fishing with his father he could recall the way the bluff and the land sloping down and away resembled the severed tail of a lizard. For twelve years the gas-powered light had acted as a beacon for ships—Mayor Raymond was still agitating for another townsperson to take up the mantle of lighthouse keeper—but for now the tall white tower and the rocks below attracted only would-be suicides.

  Kemp was now a widower and a father of twins—all in the space of a morning. Two lives in exchange for one. But he did not care about those small, squirming things just now. He had left Flossie to deal with the aftermath, hadn’t told her where he was going. She was seventeen but had a good head on her shoulders. She had dealt with the sudden death of her parents quietly and had adjusted to life in slower, less accomplished circles. He knew she’d do a good job this time, that she feared and respected him.

  The town of Marumaru was further down the lizard’s tail, where the cliffs ended and the short beach began. The walk to town was a dry dirt path bisecting a field of sheep-shorn grass that resembled a cricket pitch or, though he tried not to see it, a fairway. Before Kemp’s birth, his father had been the greenkeeper of a golf links north of Dunedin. He spoke of it only once: the pride he’d taken in turning scrub into emerald carpets of grass, the thought that went into the placement of each sand trap, the wickedness of a sou’wester on the thirteenth, the difficulties players faced in coming north—the boggy roads, slips and skittish horses—and the slow exodus of members to the Balmacewen course closer to home. The links had been abandoned in the end. In all likelihood it had now been divided into rectangles and was patrolled by Corriedale and cattle beast, though Kemp preferred to think of it overgrown: a shimmering straw-coloured fairway flanked by wild fennel gone to seed and gnarled macrocarpa leading the eye to a perfect circle of Scotch thistle where his father’s green had once shone. Kemp senior had been nearly sixty when he moved north to Marumaru and met his wife. His death concluded a roving, eventful life, but left his son with only a handful of memories. Single moments of grace or anger or despair from which Colton was expected to reconstruct a father.

  He has been dead so long. Now Louisa has joined him.

  This time he had a thousand memories. He had the raw materials to reconstruct his wife. It was impossible to avoid. But it was not enough. He thought of his failure to carve the likeness of her face and knew she was gone.

  He stood on the edge of the crag, staring out to the horizon. Looking due east he was faced with over five thousand miles of uninterrupted ocean. All but six of those miles, however, were hidden by the curvature of the Earth. This thought, the concealed distance, the massive isolation, was more fearsome to him than the thought of the rocks thirty feet below. He looked down. The cliff face was vertical for the first half of its descent, then the moss started and the rock stretched out, eager to meet the water. It would take an almighty leap to make the creamy waves.

  He did not leap. Instead, he unbuttoned his trousers and pissed out over the edge, the wind breaking up his stream after a few feet and beating it back into the rock face.

  As he headed back down the slope he encountered a black-faced sheep, still heavy with winter wool, standing squarely on the path.

  ‘Hyah!’ he said and threw out his hand.

  The sheep tilted its head to one side.

  ‘Hyah!’ he said again and thrust his shoulder forward in a mock charge.

  The sheep turned slowly and began to leave the path, its undocked tail bouncing in clownish defiance. This slow retreat was no longer enough and Kemp ran up behind as if to kick the sheep. No, he truly meant to kick that woollen arse. The beast picked up its pace and rambled down the slope toward a clutch of cabbage trees. He pursued. In his escalating temper he wanted to do the sheep some harm, to feel its neck between his arm and torso, to wrench its head clean off, but the slope was greater than he had first anticipated. His fast wheeling feet hardly seemed to touch the ground. The wool-heavy sheep stopped behind the stout trunk of the leftmost tree, turned to see the man hurtling toward it and, at the last moment, set off in the direction of the town. But Kemp—spirit possessed and momentum unchecked—leapt forward to tackle his quarry. The tips of his fingers brushed wool, but caught nothing.

  He lay on the ground, winded, thwarted, miserable.

  ‘Excuse me,’ a young voice called from near the path.

  He rolled onto his side, wiped his eyes with the meat of his hands and looked back up the hill. It was Josephine Strachan, youngest daughter of the schoolmaster. How old was she? Seven, eight, nine? He was no good at this sort of thing, but he knew her by sight. Flossie had been helping Mr Strachan at the school several days a week. Josephine, most likely starved of attention, had taken a special liking to his sister-in-law. He remembered something about the girl visiting his house unannounced one evening while he laboured in his workshop.

  ‘Why were you trying to tackle that sheep, Mr Kemp?’

  The beast, standing further down the slope, let out a tremulous bleat.

  He got to his feet and dusted off his trousers. The rush of foolishness made his knees waver.

  ‘I was practising,’ he said.

  The girl walked gingerly down the hill toward him. ‘But it’s not football season,’ she said and came to a stop a few feet from him. The slope meant that her eyes were level with his. ‘And aren’t you too old to play?’

  ‘That’s rather impertinent of you, Miss Strachan,’ he said, hoping to scold her, make her turn and run away crying. But all she said was, ‘I beg your pardon,’ and continued to stare into his eyes.

  He looked away. The sheep, finally bored, turned its head and trotted off, its tail rigid and unmoving this time, as if it were a ferret fresh from the taxidermist.

  Kemp grunted and started to climb back up to the path. The girl followed. ‘How long have you been up here at the lighthouse?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ll have you know,’ he said without turning, ‘I’m not too old for rugby. It may not seem it to you, but I’m still to reach my prime.’

  Josephine had raced up beside him. He saw her shrug her shoulders, his vitality beyond her ken.

  ‘You missed it, didn’t you?’

  ‘Missed what?’ he asked.

  ‘The excitement in town. The statue.’

  He had no idea what she was talking about and had little interest in finding out. The two of them rejoined the dirt path and followed it wordlessly back down to the wicket gate.

  ‘Are you going to follow me the entire way?’ he asked.

  ‘How is Louisa?’

  ‘She is . . .’ he began, intending to say that she was fine, but was unable to continue. He stopped, opened the gate and let the girl walk through. He followed.

  ‘I saw Flossie in town this morning,’ Josephine said. ‘She said she would teach me piano.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  The slope had begun to level out. Soon the dirt path would widen into a dirt road dotted with letterboxes and long, stony driveways until it eventually be
came Regent Street.

  ‘Father says I am not allowed to go promenading on New Year’s Eve until I am ten,’ Josephine said, unable to hide her puffing as she tried to match his pace.

  He did not respond.

  ‘I wish I could see your new display being switched on.’

  ‘It will be there in the morning.’

  ‘Yes, but that’s not the same, is it? Not when it’s New Year’s Eve tonight.’

  The properties and paddocks to their left fell away and were replaced with dark green explosions of flax and beyond them a thin strip of sand the colour of camel’s hair that stretched to the rocky breakwater of the small harbour. A lone black-billed gull circled the beach in silence. To their right, the first business. Kemp feigned interest in the metalwork gate that read ‘J. C. Bannerman, Ironmonger’. It had just gone four in the afternoon and Bannerman had closed his shop for the day, no doubt preparing for a night of revelry.

  An approaching buggy forced them out of the middle of the road.

  ‘Are you going to look at the window of Hercus & Barling?’ Josephine asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh, you should. You really should.’

  They continued on past Bertie Bush’s hardware store, which was desperately in need of a new coat of paint, Padget the watchmaker’s narrow shop and the Criterion Hotel, standing proud on the corner of Regent and Albert streets.

  ‘Won’t your father be wondering where you are?’ Kemp asked as he looked left and right, preparing to cross the street to avoid the window of Hercus & Barling and the lesser evils of Mrs Alves’ sweet shop, Mr Borrie’s toys and games and the meat pies and coffee of McWatter’s cafe.

  ‘No, sir,’ Josephine replied.

  Emboldened by the girl’s sudden bout of manners, he said, ‘If you don’t leave me alone, I’ll tell your father you’ve been larking about at the lighthouse.’ He stepped off the footpath.

  ‘Oh, he won’t care.’ She ran a few steps to catch him up and jumped over the ridge of horse leavings that had been swept into the centre of the road.

  ‘Well,’ Kemp said, ‘I’ll forbid Flossie to give you piano lessons.’

  ‘You wouldn’t!’

  ‘Do you have a piano in your house?’

  Josephine turned back toward the lighthouse.

  ‘I didn’t think so,’ he continued. ‘I don’t intend to let annoying little girls into my home to use my piano.’

  ‘Flossie says it’s Louisa’s,’ she said, nearly shouting. They stood on the beach side of Regent Street now, both watching the still-circling gull.

  ‘You’re horrible,’ the girl said after some time. ‘I’m going to tell Louisa what a horrible husband she has and what a terrible father he will make.’

  She made as if to leave. He grabbed her shoulder and crouched down.

  ‘Listen to me, Josephine. You must not step foot on my property. You will not step foot on my property. Do you understand me?’

  He looked down at his hand, still clamped to her shoulder, then back at the girl’s face: her eyes downcast and blinking rapidly. He released her shoulder and continued down Regent Street, his head inclined a notch too high to seem natural.

  Beyond the Albert Street intersection, shops reappeared on the left of the high street, though they too had closed for the day. He turned to look behind him. Josephine was a dozen paces behind, keeping her distance but still following. He stood with his hands on his hips and eventually she drew level with him again.

  ‘What do you think of these windows, Mr Kemp? Aren’t they dreary compared with the big stores?’

  ‘Dreary?’ he said. ‘That’s one word for it.’

  They walked on, past Professor Healey’s store of smoker’s requisites and Mr Kriss’s bakery, which emitted the heavy tar smell of the black bread that he baked for holidays—his mother’s recipe—though no one else in town could stomach it.

  ‘Look at this,’ Kemp said, pointing at Sandy Chase’s window, stocked with ales, porters, wines and spirits. ‘The bottles are still wreathed in tinsel from Christmas. And the McNeils’ window . . . Well, a fine coat of dust hardly entices the potential buyer of a pair of boots, does it?’

  Josephine thought hard before responding, ‘No.’

  ‘Now Mr Ikin, on the other hand,’ he said and turned square to the bookseller’s window, ‘I suspect he wears his dust with pride.’

  He looked around and found Josephine in front of the bright white display of the next store over, which belonged to the town’s purveyor of pills and sundries, Mr Fricker.

  ‘Have any of these stores ever asked you to rig up a display for them, Mr Kemp?’

  ‘They’re above that sort of thing, or so they say. But let’s see how long they can hold out, eh? Let’s see how long till they’re boarding up their windows like the shops on Stirling Road and queuing for a job selling perfume or minding the books at Donaldson’s or that other store.’

  ‘You mean Hercus & Barling?’

  ‘I know what it’s called.’

  The commerce on the beach side came to a halt once more at the grounds of St Paul’s, the tallest of the town’s three churches. He could smell the fishmonger’s shop on the other side of grounds. The reek seemed the final word on religion, no matter how much the vestments, stained glass and ceremony might appeal to the aesthete inside any window dresser.

  He leant on the church’s wrought iron gate, another of Jolly Bannerman’s pieces, and looked across at Donaldson’s, square and tall, its black verandah of corrugated iron stretching out to the street. The masonry facade sought to announce quality, class, permanence. The tall windows of the upper floors were bound by Roman arches, each capped with a keystone bearing a white rosette. But he knew it was all for nought without a decent display in his windows, the only windows that counted.

  He had started as a stock boy seven years earlier, back when it was Donaldson’s Drapers two doors further down Regent Street and old man Donaldson still ran the roost. As the store had grown, expanding the range of goods offered—millinery, gardening tools, sheet music—so too had Kemp’s role. He was responsible for all elements of display inside the store and had two stock boys beneath him when Charlie Begg came out from Nottingham in ’99 to oversee the move to the new premises. Four storeys, replete with Lamson tube system and twenty feet of plate glass either side of the main entrance. A proper department store, one to rival any in the South Island.

  ‘You say you’re responsible for display,’ Begg had said at their first meeting. ‘What exactly does this encompass?’

  ‘Putting the wares out and making them look nice, sir.’

  ‘Well, we can’t have those front windows bare for the grand reopening, can we? Sketch a few ideas and show them to me tomorrow morning.’

  Until then, Kemp’s idea of window dressing had been to cram as much merchandise as possible into the old store’s small dark window and send a boy in there with a feather duster every three months. There hadn’t been the space for mannequins. Instead the few that Donaldson’s possessed were dotted inside the store. Now he was to come up with ideas to fill the expanse of plate glass and provide sketches? He couldn’t wield a pencil for any purpose beyond words and numbers.

  At home that evening he’d shared his predicament with Louisa.

  ‘But you must have ideas, Col. You’re around the goods all day. Just put them together to make a scene. Tell a story.’

  ‘But half our dummies are missing arms. They look as if they’ve just come back from fighting the Boers.’

  ‘What about a battle scene?’ she asked mischievously.

  ‘That may be in poor taste.’

  ‘If there was some way of hiding the missing parts,’ Louisa said and looked down at the threadbare tablecloth. ‘Flossie cannot for the life of her draw hands, so her damsels are always holding mufflers, her dashing knights crossing their arms. Perhaps you could hide the missing parts? Prepare a forest scene. The trees could hide the shortcomings of the dummies.’
r />   ‘A forest? That sounds like a fair amount of work.’

  ‘Not if you’re smart,’ said Louisa and reached for her sketchbook.

  The next morning he’d shown Louisa’s drawing to Begg, acting as if it were his own.

  ‘And how much will you need for incidentals?’

  ‘Perhaps one and sixpence?’ he’d offered. He planned to cut actual saplings from his own property and install them in the display.

  ‘A miser? My estimation of you grows by the minute, Mr Kemp.’

  With time he and Louisa became expert at recognising stories from the newspaper or details from their own lives that could form the basis of a new display. A jail break. A night at the theatre. Bringing home the latest addition to the family—all the while trying to start their own.

  Though he no longer had to show Begg his idea before producing a display, he still had Louisa prepare a sketch on a piece of foolscap, which he then replicated in the windows of Donaldson’s.

  It was Louisa who suggested he carve his own mannequins, sick of his continual complaints about the state of the store’s dummies and the cost of ordering new ones from overseas. Louisa who urged him on. Louisa who bandaged his damaged fingers.

  He looked across the street at his latest window and saw too much of Louisa in it. The ghost of her face in the four mannequins. The echo of her voice, the shade of her pencil in the layout. The numerals ‘1902’ cut from large shards of broken looking-glass (quite how ladies broke mirrors in the confines of a dressing room was still a mystery to him). The black ropes against the black background, invisible to the casual onlooker, which would hoist the ‘2’ up into the false ceiling and replace it with a ‘3’. His best mannequins forming happy couples either side of the sparkling numbers, dressed in their finest theatre clothes, who would turn to each other as the ‘3’ descended and almost clink their champagne flutes, thanks to individual turntables concealed in the false floor. All the movement rigged up to the same gas engine that powered the pneumatic Lamson tubes that sent money and receipts around the store.