The Mannequin Makers

by Craig Cliff

  I began doing odd jobs for the townspeople in return for money. Up here I carved balustrades, newels, table tops, door-knockers, gargoyles and bird baths and carried them into town lashed to Galahad. It got that I was spending two days of every week on horseback, heading down to Marumaru and retreating to New Splinterlands. I no longer needed total solitude—I no longer had it. And so I struck a deal with old man Donaldson. He still owned the draper’s on Regent Street, but had recently left the running of his shop to more ambitious sorts and retired to his farmstead. His legs were failing him. The walking stick I’d carved for him a year earlier, one of my first commissions, was no longer enough. Now he wanted me to carve the mouldings, banisters and curtain rails throughout his house.

  ‘If I’m to spend the rest of my damn life here,’ he said, ‘I might as well have something interesting to look at.’

  On a blank index card I explained to him how much time I was wasting going back and forth from my hut and in payment he offered me a piece of land twenty minutes’ ride from Marumaru. Until I’d built my house I could sleep in his barn.

  ‘I get the impression this is a luxury with which you are acquainted,’ he said with a half-smile.

  And so for a number of weeks old man Donaldson spent his days in an easy chair on the porch, watching me work out there on his lawn.

  ‘You are a fine worker, Mr Doig,’ he told me one day as I sanded a piece of totara I had shaped into a fleur-de-lis. The motif was his suggestion, this particular piece destined for the end of a curtain rail. ‘Every employer dreams of an employee who cannot speak back,’ he said, almost shouting, eager for me to hear him over the sissle of my sandpaper. ‘Even in my business, I’ll bet you could sell twice as many gloves as a pretty young thing who just loves to chat.’

  I smiled, still looking down at my work.

  He called for his daughter, Maggie, to help him down from the porch. She was not in good health herself, a woman well into her spinsterhood, though I suppose she was not much older than I was.

  The fleur-de-lis was ready for staining by the time Donaldson was arranged in his seat on the lawn. The tartan rug over his lap was tucked so tightly there seemed no space for legs beneath. Maggie stood for a moment, waiting for a word of thanks that was not forthcoming. Only once she was back inside the farmstead did Donaldson begin speaking.

  ‘I’m going to give you some advice, Mr Doig. Never explain yourself to anyone. People who explain are always at a disadvantage. Can I see those cue cards you keep in your pockets?’

  I retrieved the set from my left trouser pocket and handed them to him. His reading glasses hung from a cord around his neck and he lifted them to his eyes.

  ‘See this. This is no good.’ He tore the first index card in half. ‘I don’t need to know you’ve lost your voice. I can work that out myself.’

  He let the two halves fall to the ground and took up the next card. ‘Half the men on this island are Scotsmen,’ he said and tore this card as well. ‘It hardly rates a mention. And it is not as if you have to apologise for your accent, is it?’

  The next card he held up and said, ‘Questions are fine. I love a good question. Let the other bastard say too much.’

  He worked his way through my cards, tearing up the answers and leaving the questions. When he’d finished, he asked, ‘And what about the other pocket?’

  I shrugged and handed him my second stash of index cards.

  ‘No,’ he said, as he tore the first of this new set in half. ‘You did think of everything, didn’t you Mr Doig? Well, you should think less. Ah, see this?’ He waved a card. ‘Technically this is a question, but it’s a sap’s question. It is better to ask forgiveness than permission, Mr Doig. That’s my epitaph right there. Though Maggie probably wouldn’t stand for it.’ He looked down at the remaining cards in his hands and ran the tip of his tongue over his top lip. After a long pause his eyes shot up and he gave a weak laugh.

  He rushed through this second lot of cards saying, ‘No, yes, no,’ and littering his rug and the grass around his chair with torn cardboard.

  ‘Last one,’ he said, brandishing the card. ‘It’s an answer, so I suggest you tear it up, but people have such attachments to names. I’ll let you decide if you want to keep this one.’

  He handed me the card. It said: My name is Gabriel Doig.

  Donaldson’s red-rimmed eyes seemed reduced rather than magnified by the lenses of his glasses. They looked like brass buttons. I couldn’t decide if he was the kindest person I’d met on the mainland or the most cold-hearted. It is only now I consider the possibility that he could have been both.

  What did I do with this last card? I tore it up.

  It wasn’t long before people in town were calling me The Carpenter, even those who knew my name. The only person who persisted in calling me Mr Doig was the man in the post office, though there were no longer any letters for me.

  As I spent more time in Marumaru I was able to use timbers that grew in other parts of the country: tawa, silver beech, black maire and of course kauri, which I knew well from the castaway depot. On the land I got from Donaldson I built my own house and workshop from as many sorts of wood I could lay my hands on. I hated the act of building as much as I’d hated the work of a ship’s carpenter. If you ever get to visit, you’ll see the walls are not quite square, which means the roof is oddly shaped and the doors all stick in their jambs, but it has done me well these past twenty years. Never leaked, that’s one thing I can say for it. But you can keep your spirit levels and your planes. I am a carpenter in name only.

  I visited Donaldson once a week, long after he’d run out of things for me to carve. We’d sit in his drawing room and Maggie would bring us milky tea and dense sponge cakes. Whenever she entered it was as if the sun had gone behind a cloud. On one of these visits Donaldson told me about the new department store that was opening in town.

  ‘I shouldn’t tell you, since they’ll be my competition, but I reckon there’s a lot of work going in a place like that for a man like you. Besides, what do I care what happens to my shop? It’s not as if I have a grandchild to pass it on to.’

  In came poor Maggie at this very moment, bringing her gloom. She banged the china plate down on the table and left.

  ‘I wish she’d take to the drink, poor girl,’ he said.

  I, of course, said nothing, but I thought I understood.

  When Donaldson died not long after, I wrote Maggie a short letter about the respect I had had for her father and how, to an outsider, it had been clear that he cared for her, though he had a strange way of showing it. I handed this to her at the funeral. The look on her face! I’d broken her father’s commandments. Never explain. Never expose yourself to weakness. In her eyes I had betrayed him. Only she was worthy. I imagine Maggie tore my letter in two when she got home. My only hope is this act gave her some satisfaction.

  I began working for Hercus & Barling, the new department store. At first they wanted me to assist with the cabinetry, but I knew such work wasn’t for me. Ever since that headless mannequin in Bernstone’s tailor shop I’d been thinking about these figures. In Dunedin they had been little more than clothes hangers or dressmaker’s dummies, nothing resembling a ship’s figurehead. But in the window of Donaldson’s, the mannequins began to look more human. I’m not sure if your father knows this, but he’s partly to blame for me starting to make mannequins. I didn’t tell Hercus that I was making a mannequin in my workshop, didn’t ask permission. I knew that once he saw it, that would be enough. And it was.

  I haven’t said a lot about Vengeance. I left her here in New Splinterlands when I moved nearer the town, but I wasn’t abandoning her.

  I’d still come up here when I needed to clear my head. The last time was two or three years ago, when the war was still going on. The town, like every other town, was sending its lads to the other side of the world and all we got in return was bad news. It seemed madness to me: all the time and effort spent raising these boys, feedin
g them, educating them, just to fritter them away like coins.

  Vengeance was still here, this last time. The worse for wear, but her expression remained fierce.

  When we arrived here last month, however, she was gone, along with the sign for New Splinterlands. Where is she? I’ve looked around this bowl, in all the nooks and crooks along the way to the stream, but I haven’t found her. I trust she’s been taken by someone who will appreciate her. Or perhaps she finally gathered the courage to leave of her own volition.

  Time will tell.

  When I first wrote down my history for John Bollons I learnt that you are seldom the best person to tell your own stories. Especially not so soon after the event, when it is as difficult to put a name to the wild herb you ate as to the emotion it conjured inside you. Better to leave all the evidence and let someone else piece things together without me imposing my own blind spots and prejudices on the tale. But I’m sure you’re still wondering, after all this time, why I brought you here. I owe you an explanation, Avis, however garbled it might come out.

  I was there in the crowd on New Year’s Eve when you were first unveiled. Your father had been talking up his latest works for some time. An evolutionary leap in artistry, he called it. The future of window displays—and a hundred other highfalutin’ things.

  I’ve never said a word to your father, I’ve written him no letters, shown him no index cards. For his part, he’s said nothing to me. I have, however, looked into his eyes. I saw from the first that I was his rival. I understood this, accepted it. After all, I was the newcomer. And I was better than him—a better carver, anyway. It may sound immodest but I had spent my life—barring a few short intervals—working with wood. While your father relied on engines and gizmos to create movement and a sense of drama, I knew that all you needed to do was hint at it.

  It’s curious that the one figurehead to follow me around the world was Vengeance, my first piece, full of imperfections and daft ideas, but even then I understood how to create drama. The turned cheek, the hidden arm, the ambiguous expression. Your father’s figures improved with practice, but he was still fighting the wood. You could see it. He was imposing his own geometry on the block, rather than letting the block find its form. But that is neither here nor there.

  At some point, several years ago, he seemed to have given up. Instead of a new figure every one or two months, he only produced one or two a year, then none at all. His displays changed with the seasons, but rehashed old themes. He reused the same mechanical gimmicks. I had been making mannequins at a prolific rate, but I slowed as well. There was no demand. And then the war began and everyone went into their shells.

  So it was strange when half of the windows at Donaldson’s went black and signs were put up promoting a new display. Perhaps this was all part of your father’s plan, to lull the town, to lull me, before revealing his masterpieces.

  And what masterpieces you were.

  I stood looking at these two figures of perfection—both beautiful and lifelike; the two don’t necessarily go together—from the moment the curtain came up until the moment it dropped that first night. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Here were two mannequins from the hand of Colton Kemp full of drama and movement and life.

  Two young lovers—let us pretend, Avis, that I am still as ignorant about your true identity as I was that day—were strolling along the street, sharing their own New Year’s Eve. I was on the edges of the crowd to begin with, so my first thoughts were about the overall arrangement. In earlier days your father might have been tempted to run the street in his window parallel with the street beyond it. But here he had it running perpendicular to Regent Street. These two figures were about to intersect with the real world. They faced forward, but their expressions suggested they were lost in their own happiness, absorbed. It seemed at any moment they would walk straight into the glass.

  The female figure wore a dramatic green dress. The sort of dress that was new to Marumaru but instantly desirable, as if the window of Donaldson’s were a window to the Champs Élysées. Your father had always been a better window dresser, in the most literal sense, than I was. He wisely chose the clothes his mannequins would wear. He understood that the primary purpose of the window was to sell garments. On the other hand I’d come from carving the clothes directly onto figureheads. Real fabric was difficult to work with. It was harder to hint at a navel beneath a real tunic. Impossible to create the sense of rapid movement with a heavy dress that hung straight down. I was always looking for new fabrics that would fit the image in my head, rather than starting with a garment and working from there.

  As that first evening progressed I managed to get closer to the glass and was struck anew by the magnificence of the scene. The way her hand rested in his, the slight flattening of the flesh between the first and second knuckle on her index finger. The hair, my goodness. It was real hair, human hair. I’m sure the rest of the townsfolk were transfixed by the golden locks that tumbled over the girl’s shoulders and down her back, but I was more amazed by the boy’s curls. The work it must have taken to arrange each hair. It was the controlled chaos I’d fought to create with wood and yet here it was being achieved with hair.

  And, of course, there was the breathtaking, heart-stopping beauty of both figures. His strength and her poise. The way the electric light did not blanch the life from their cheeks. They seemed to radiate light themselves. Light, youth, confidence, excitement, beauty. Och, I thought, if my poor father could see these figures.

  How had Kemp done it? I went home that night and considered everything. Had he been honing his skills in secret all these years? Had he paid someone else to carve these figures? Was it carving at all? Perhaps he’d cast the figures in Bakelite or some other new substance. Perhaps it was an optical illusion, something to do with the window pane: a photograph in three dimensions, if such a thing was possible. Or perhaps they were living models. This last thought seemed at once the most obvious and the most implausible. I had stood there from nine until midnight and never saw these figures blink or twitch or sway. Admittedly I stood in a jostling crowd, craning on my tippertoes for the most part, but still, it seemed impossible. Impossible.

  I returned the next day and the next. When the curtain rose on a new scene, not only had the background and the costumes changed, but the mannequins held new poses, their faces new expressions. And yet these were the same figures. The girl had the same golden mane, the same delicate nose, the same kauri-sparkled irises. The boy had the same broad chest, the same network of veins on his forearms, the same curly hair. Had Kemp carved dozens of interchangeable parts? That these were living creatures seemed the only explanation but their chests never rose or fell, their eyes never fluttered. But why else would the curtain need to come down every three or four hours?

  The longer the display went on the more disturbed I became. I wondered why no one else was worried about what Kemp had done. I can only guess that they did not know how impossible it was to achieve this scene with any other material known to man but flesh itself. It was the first great thing to happen in Marumaru for many years. Donaldson’s window transported the townsfolk back to a time when the rivalry between your father and me was at its peak and the streets were filled with colour. Why would they want to pick and prod at this sweet illusion in the window?

  I continued my vigil, trying to work out how human beings could be made into such perfect mannequins.

  Were they cadavers? There seemed to be no putrefaction as the days went by and no makeup could have replicated the flush of life I saw on those cheeks.

  Were they in a kind of trance? Had they taken some sort of drug that freezes a person in place? When the curtain was down I researched mesmerism and spoke with Fricker, the pharmacist. Both options seemed unlikely.

  And then, on the fifth day, the man from Ballantynes arrived. Your father made much of his presence, but the man spent the morning on the edge of the crowd, his head tilted to one side. Here was someone else, I thought, wh
o could see the things I saw, who would know something was awry. Here was someone who could say something, get to the bottom of the mystery, put a stop to it.

  After the curtain rose on the afternoon display, Kemp fetched the man, and a few minutes later they were standing in the window. I saw him weighing the girl’s hair in his hand, lifting the boy’s coat, prodding their flesh. He seemed unperturbed. Whatever Kemp had said to him, he had been convincing.

  It is said a magician’s sleight of hand is nothing without a persuasive tongue. Was I the only one who had not fallen under his spell?

  I decided that it was up to me to catch out these models. I considered trying to surprise them, to trigger an involuntary movement that would give them away. But I worried Kemp would intercede and bar me from the window. I decided instead to focus on the girl’s eyes. She must blink if she was alive. And if she was conscious, her eyes would give her away.

  We make such resolutions when lying in our beds, but it is quite another thing in the light of day. I could swear I saw the girl’s eyes move, but I know how easy it is to fool people into believing that the eyes of a statue or a painting are following them around a room. The longer I stared into her eyes, the more I felt I was slipping back into the kind of delirium in which Vengeance had spoken to me. It was as if a spirit inhabited this figure. A member of the Seelie Court who could only scratch her nose or pull the hair from her eyes when no one was looking.

  Kemp announced that he was heading north to Christchurch to prepare a window for Ballantynes. He did not say that he would use his newest figures in this display—this might cause Marumaru to revolt—but I knew that he had to. If I was to uncover his secret, I had only a few days.