The Mannequin Makers

by Craig Cliff

  When I was done drinking, he continued to hold me, my shoulders against his chest, my head against his shoulder. ‘And you,’ I said, ‘are not my father.’

  ‘Of course I am.’ His voice was different.

  ‘Sandow,’ I said.

  I felt his laughter shudder through me.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘let’s get you home.’

  I slept on the stretcher bed in the anteroom while he made his preparations. He didn’t return home during this time, as I’d supposed when he first left me. I know because he didn’t fetch the horses, Emily and Charlotte, and the covered wagon. I know because I saw his face when we returned to the barn.

  When he shook me, I didn’t really wake. I felt him dressing me. Even if it had registered that I was being put into a dress—to hide the development of my legs—I wouldn’t have had the strength to resist. A shawl covered my broad shoulders, a hat my short, curly hair. He was lucky, I suppose, that Donaldson’s still hadn’t opened for the day. We made our way to the side door, me leaning heavily on my father’s shoulder, my sandalled feet dragging on the polished wooden floors. When I opened my eyes everything was in soft focus. The longer I kept them open, the blurrier things became.

  In the alleyway we were met by a rumbling motor car. I’d only seen a handful of these contraptions rolling past the window. Noisy, smoky things that seemed no faster than a bicycle. At the wheel sat a tall, lean bloke in a red and black hunting cap with the earflaps down. I would later learn this was my father’s friend, Jolly Bannerman, the ironmonger.

  My father propped me against the side of the car.

  ‘You bring her back from the big smoke, Col?’ Bannerman asked.

  ‘Shut up, Jolly,’ he said and tossed a duffle bag up onto the back seat of the car. He climbed onto the running board and pulled me up and into the back seat.

  ‘She’s blotto,’ Bannerman said. ‘I’d know that look anywhere.’

  ‘Just get us home.’

  I shut my eyes. The car jerked forward.

  ‘It’s a demon that must be fought,’ Bannerman shouted from the driver’s seat. ‘And there’s glory in the victory.’

  In motion, the car was even noisier than I’d expected. Bannerman’s driving was erratic. I kept my head buried in my father’s shoulder.

  ‘Don’t get down,’ he told Bannerman when we stopped. ‘I’ve got her.’

  ‘You sure there, Col?’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘Give my love to Flossie.’

  ‘And mine to Milly.’

  As the car drove off I started feeling better. Halfway up the drive I was able to walk unsupported, though the dress made it difficult. I stopped and looked down. Why was I clothed like this? What had I missed?

  ‘Come on, Eugen,’ my father said.

  He didn’t go to the house, but headed straight for his workshop and waited for me outside the closed door. Did he know what we might find? Did he have an inkling? Is that why he needed me there when he pulled the door open? Perhaps it was just the dramatist in him. Gathering the audience for the big revelation.

  When I reached him he was jangling the unlocked padlock and its chain in his hand. His face said, ‘Fancy that?’ He crouched and lifted the door up to make it easier to pull open. I stepped to the side as he brought the door back and rested it against the side of the barn.

  And there she was, in the gloom, dangling from the joist. The woman who’d raised me as her own child. The sister of my true mother. The accomplice of my father.

  Flossie’s face was grey, her hands limp at her sides. Her slippers had fallen to the floor and the toes of her bare feet pointed to the ground. I stood on the threshold, hoping that my eyes deceived me, but the blurriness had gone. I could see the dust particles spinning in the light from the open door. My father stood one step to the side and one step behind me. We held our poses while Flossie twisted and swayed in the breeze like a pine needle hanging from a strand of busted spider web.

  My father stepped into the barn. He took his hatchet from the tool bench, righted the chair Flossie had kicked away and climbed onto it. He grabbed her around the thighs so that her head lifted and the rope bulged out. He ran the edge of the hatchet across the rope a few times until her upper half was let loose and lurched over his shoulder and down his back in a kind of fireman’s carry. His knees buckled but he kept his balance.

  He managed to step down from the chair and gently lay Flossie on the floor of the barn. He turned to me and ran his hand from his forehead down over his eyes, his nose, his mouth, pulling his chin down and exposing his lower teeth, his tongue.

  ‘So,’ the old bastard said, pretending he wasn’t as shaken as I was, ‘that answers where Flossie was. Now, what about Avis?’

  ‘The old man,’ I said.

  ‘The Carpenter?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘He came into the window,’ I said. ‘He took Avis.’

  III.

  Gabriel Doig lied to my sister. Near the end of his account he describes how, before he took Avis from the window, he went to our property in search of Flossie. He even says he checked the barn and found it deserted. ‘Empty pedestals and strange contraptions,’ he says, clearly having peered inside, ‘but the space was unoccupied.’ By the time my father cut Flossie down, she was stiff and colourless. My guess is that she hadn’t lowered the curtain at five o’clock the previous day because she was already dead. When Doig went to the barn after nightfall, he’d have seen her. He must have.

  This really got under my skin when I was first able to read his story. If he’d lied here, what other lies had he told? What use was everything that went before if he was a liar? Was it all a kind of elaborate seduction?

  But I’ve read his final pages many times since then. Each time, his words seem more and more deliberate. ‘You have asked often about Flossie,’ he writes, ‘but I’m sorry I cannot say.’ Not that he doesn’t know what happened to her, only that he can’t say. Is it that he doesn’t want to cause my sister sadness? Or that he doesn’t want to ruin their cosy time together?

  And the phrase ‘The space was unoccupied’ strikes me as odd. Does a dead body occupy a room? I’ve thought about this question more than I care to admit.

  It’s strange to think that I am now a decade older than Doig was when he took my sister into the hills and wrote his tale of figureheads and castaways. In my mind he’s always been an old codger dabbing the edges of his mouth with a handkerchief. To think of what he and Avis got up to in that hut—even if it was just writing notes to one another—it seemed unnatural. A sin and a waste, according to my father’s morality. Beauty, strength and character deserve beauty, strength and character in return. But he was only fifty-nine. What I wouldn’t give to be only fifty-nine! I’d sleep with as many beautiful girls as I could. (That’s the difference between Doig and me, I guess.) Even now, my looks are hanging in there, my shape is holding. But no, what am I thinking?

  It would be nice, though, to spend some time with a pretty girl. A schoolgirl. We could talk about swimming and sunbathing, about her HSCs, the books she has read for English and the books she reads for herself. She could ask me questions and I would tell her anything, anything. Wouldn’t that be something? An old bloke and a young girl, talking. They’d lock me up. I wouldn’t need to touch her. They’d only need to see my eyes, wide and unblinking. My years of service at the surf club would be brought against me. What’s in it for him? What’s he really checking out when he scans the beach? Oh yes, it’d be an open and shut case. But you know what? It might all be worth it.

  To my father’s credit, if credit can be extended to one so far gone, he didn’t delay reporting Flossie’s death as he did my real mother’s. Over the years he’d become an expert liar and knew that it wasn’t the size of the lie but how many lies you were juggling that led to your downfall.

  The complete truth, of course, was not possible.

  The Carpenter had take
n Avis, thwarting my father’s hopes of taking us to Christchurch and leaving their twenty-year rivalry in his dust.

  My father didn’t strike me or even raise his voice, though he seemed always on the verge of lashing out. He sat me down and told me what I was to say before he took Flossie into town in the covered wagon and brought the constable back to inspect the barn, the rope, the joist, the chair.

  ‘And this, constable,’ he said, ushering me forward and into the barn, ‘is John, the other witness I mentioned.’

  In his absence I’d changed into my own clothes, drunk four gallons of water, eaten a loaf of bread and rested. The officer eyed me up and down. He was somewhere in age between me and my father. It was hard to tell what sort of muscles he had beneath his stiff uniform. It wasn’t clear if he recognised me from the window. I didn’t even know if Marumaru had its own police station.

  ‘Where do you fit in?’ he asked.

  ‘He is a performer of tableaux vivants,’ my father said, stepping between me and the constable.

  ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘Still lifes. Like a painting, but with real figures. You’ve seen my window displays of late, surely?’

  The constable said nothing. He looked down at his notepad.

  ‘There was another performer,’ my father said. ‘A girl. She’s been kidnapped.’

  ‘Kidnapped, you say?’ The constable tapped his pencil against the spine of his notepad. ‘Busy day for you lot, isn’t it? Does he speak?’ he asked, prodding the chewed end of his pencil at me.

  ‘I speak,’ I said.

  ‘What is your relationship to this man?’

  ‘He is not my father,’ I said.

  ‘Oh? And why would he be your father?’

  ‘What he means to say—’ my father began.

  ‘Let the boy speak.’

  ‘It’s as he said. I am a performer of tableaux. He runs the window where I perform.’

  My father was pleased by this response, but I wasn’t trying to make him happy. I was trying to twist the knife by asserting that he was not my father. I still believed that I was the son of Eugen Sandow, the only man I knew of who matched my physique. I saw this as my opportunity to break from the man who’d raised me in this poky town, trained me for its paltry window, when I deserved better. I didn’t care that my season in the window had come to a premature end. I wanted to find Sandow and reclaim my position as the heir to his empire, to take his place on the covers of magazines and tins of powdered milk.

  ‘The man they call The Carpenter tampered with my display,’ my father said. ‘He is the kidnapper.’

  ‘Do you have a name?’

  My father looked away. ‘No.’

  The constable smiled for the first time. ‘Come on, Kemp. He’s been your rival for how many years and you don’t even know his name?’

  I looked at the rope that was draped over the back of the chair in the centre of the barn. Was Flossie so soon forgotten?

  ‘Well, what is his name then?’ my father asked.

  It was the constable’s turn to look away.

  To my knowledge, Flossie didn’t leave a note. My father told me to stay at home while he helped the police track down Avis and The Carpenter, leaving me plenty of time to fossick for one. I couldn’t even find her diary. Though I wasn’t able to read a word, it seemed important that someone was still thinking about her.

  It didn’t help that neither Avis nor I had ever set eyes on her diary. But I knew the difference between type and handwriting. I searched every room, between every volume on the bookshelf, rifled through the woodpile, the workshop, the laundry, the hedges—everywhere. I found nothing. Perhaps, I decided, she destroyed her diary before taking her life. There was nothing in the range but ashes. Or perhaps my father had found the diary before I could.

  I believe Flossie agreed to act as a mother to Avis and me because she had a kind heart and thought highly of my father, too highly. She was only seventeen when her sister died so suddenly. She was a relative newcomer to Marumaru and had no other family to speak of. She must have been bemused by Colton’s request that she mustn’t speak of the children in town, but probably thought it was temporary. I suspect she thought that once the grief at Louisa’s passing subsided, he would let her into his heart and they would marry. He may well have promised this much. When his strange behaviour continued, she found herself in a bind. He couldn’t raise Avis and me alone. She was needed to counteract his growing obsession with physical training, to nurture us, show us love and teach us a little of the world beyond the hedges. As the years passed and she came to understand my father’s plan, it was too late to stop him. She was culpable. Seeing us in the window—and cooped up in the anteroom—still disconnected from the world, from reality, was the final straw.

  This is my version of events at least. At times my thoughts have gone to darker places. I’ve made more sinister connections that reach back before Louisa’s death, but no good ever comes of such thinking. Better to return to the affection I felt for Flossie as a young boy and let that wash over everything.

  IV.

  Every day that my father returned home no closer to finding Avis was a day closer to violence. He left long pauses between his words, during which I could see the muscles in his neck twitching. As I got ready for bed I could hear him down the hall, exhaling through his nose in short bursts like an impatient horse. I could easily overpower him if the need arose, but I didn’t want him to remove the stopper from his rage.

  His thoughts centred on Avis. He needed to find her. I wanted her to be found too. After all, this was the first time we’d ever been apart. But I’d been preparing myself for our separation at the end of our season in the window. The way in which it happened was a surprise, but she was a tough girl. She could have fought off The Carpenter. She was smart, too. Smarter than me, that’s for sure.

  These are the things I told myself.

  When I look back upon our childhood together, the changes that came as we prepared for the window, I feel as if I’m standing on the edge of a storm scarp, that my memories are a ledge of unsupported sand that might give way at any moment. The only static thing from this time is Avis’s diary, though I feel just as precarious when I enter its world.

  Early on she writes about how she longs for a day when she might have an exciting life that contains events to conceal from her family. We must remember she was giving these entries to Flossie to read and that our father had taught us the art of misdirection.

  We’d always been curious about each other’s bodies as we sponged down outside the washhouse before starting our exercises each morning. We were trained to monitor every muscle, to target our development to ensure there were no weaknesses, no imbalance. It seemed natural to monitor my sister’s progress, not just my own, and for her to take an interest in mine.

  Avis was the first to enter puberty. It was no secret. Our father had warned us about the changes in store and how to work with them, how they were necessary, but the budding breasts and the shock of springy, rust-coloured hair that appeared between her legs seemed like glaring imperfections. Gone was the uniform smoothness of her skin. Gone, the definition of her chest.

  Avis, wise soul that she was, bore her changes with pride.

  ‘I am becoming a woman, Eugen,’ she told me once after I’d said something snide about her new body. ‘One day, if you are lucky, you will become a man.’

  I know now, of course, that it is odd for a brother and sister, even twins, to spend so much time in each other’s presence, naked, but we knew no other way. Our property was a kind of Eden. Long after our morning routine, I would walk around the garden in the nude. We didn’t know shame. Instead, we took pride in our bodies. We took charge of their development. If it had stopped at this, perhaps I would feel no shame, even now.

  I had to wait until I was almost fourteen for my skin to grow oily and my voice to judder. I began to get erections for no apparent reason. I didn’t know about masturbation and had litt
le time alone to experiment. Instead, I tried to focus this strange new drive on my exercises with dumb-bell and developer and, by night, on the piano keys. For the most part I was successful.

  Avis assumed the role of older sibling during this time, observing the changes to my body without comment.

  By the time I turned fifteen, the worst of the changes were over. I was taller, stronger. My cheeks had tautened and my face took on a harder edge. I was fortunate that my pimply skin didn’t last long and left no permanent marks. Each night our father gave us both an ointment that smelt of cut grass and this, combined with the religious bathing, day and night, probably helped.

  This was around the time he began to teach us the poses for our first few tableaux, which meant we spent a lot of time staring into each other’s eyes, pretending to be lovers. It was less than a year until our season in the window and my excitement was growing. Avis seemed excited too, as if she’d woken from a long slumber. She began to pay my body extra attention as we bathed. I’d learnt the best way to avoid an embarrassing erection was to concentrate on my own body, the work I had ahead of me that day, the improvement that would result. But she had a way of catching my eye with her movements or her own protracted stare.

  One night she crawled into my bed.

  ‘I can always tell when you’re not asleep,’ she whispered. ‘You don’t make a sound.’ I was lying on my back. She was on her side, perched on the edge of the mattress. Her hand reached across my chest and took hold of my shoulder. ‘I wonder how quiet you can be.’ She ran her hand down my arm to the wrist, then across to my hip and, soon enough, to my pubic hair. She took hold of my penis. ‘How did I know it would be like this?’ she whispered, pouring her words into my ear. Her fingers were cold and I let out a little groan. It was better than a wet sponge after a hard workout on a hot afternoon. She tightened her grip, then loosened it. Tightened and loosened. ‘I’m just playing,’ she said. ‘Do you mind?’