The Mannequin Makers

by Craig Cliff

  ‘No,’ I whispered.

  ‘Do you want me to stop?’

  ‘No.’

  She toyed with my penis and balls for a long, blissful time, though she never worked up enough rhythm or force to make me come. (At the time I didn’t know such a thing was possible.) I kept my arms at my sides. Eventually her hand rose from my crotch, this time tracing a line up the centre of my body until she pressed down on my chest and lifted her head and shoulder. ‘Goodnight, Eugen,’ she said and kissed me on the forehead.

  She returned to my bed the next night and my hand found a breast, small and soft, and its captivating nipple. When she wrapped her fingers around my penis I placed my other hand down there, around her hand, squeezing tighter.

  ‘Do you like that?’ she asked.

  I groaned and began to move her hand.

  The next night she guided my hand between her legs.

  So our education progressed by degrees. By day we stared at each other like lovers, our father watching for any movement, reviewing our postures. By night we were alone and continued our play-acting.

  One night I took the initiative and crawled into her bed.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Why not.’

  ‘Because Mother is on the other side of this wall.’ My bed, however, was next to an external wall. ‘Goodnight, Eugen,’ she said coldly and waited for me to go. She didn’t visit me that night, though the hope of it kept me awake and vigilant.

  It seemed she wouldn’t come across the next night either, but eventually I heard her peel back her bedclothes and the soft sticking and unsticking of her feet on the floorboards.

  A few nights later the time came. She rolled onto her back and whispered, ‘Put it in me.’ I obliged. We had to remain quiet with Flossie in the next room and our father down the hall. I felt a torrent surging within my chest. I wanted to become a snarling beast, but I knew that would put an end to everything. We’d started leaving a small gap in the curtains so that any moonlight would help illuminate the room. As I began to thrust, slowly, I saw Avis bite her bottom lip and close her eyes. I worried that I was hurting her, that we were doing something wrong, that I was doing her irreparable damage, but I couldn’t hold back the raging waters.

  We didn’t speak afterwards. I worried that our nightly sessions were over now. At morning routine the next day she wouldn’t meet my eye. She broke pose twice in two hours under the electric light, which brought our father’s wrath.

  But that night she came back to my bed.

  We’d always felt a connection bordering on the physical. Sometimes it was as if we could read each other’s minds. I didn’t learn to read in part because she’d learnt. She didn’t play the piano because I could play. This new connection we’d discovered felt natural and yet we knew to guard it from the two people who claimed to be our parents. Perhaps it was because we’d never seen any affection pass between them. Perhaps it was something that had been drummed into us as small children, not to play with ourselves, not to play with each other. But our days and nights were charged with adrenaline. Our time in the window was hurtling toward us, we were doing everything we could to ensure we caused a sensation and, on top of this, we had a secret.

  By this time we knew all about how the window worked, how we were destined to be married to other people and live separate lives. But somehow this didn’t bother me. It was as if I believed I could have both fates: a successful season in the window leading to a marriage with the most eligible girl in the land and my sister always in the bed next to mine when I snuffed out the candle.

  But Avis could see. Avis knew.

  ‘We have to stop,’ she told me one day as I fed Juniper a handful of chickweed. We were at the far corner of the property. I could smell bread baking in the kitchen and hear the clanging sound of my father hammering metal in his workshop. I looked up at Avis and the goat nipped my fingers. I pulled my hand away and stuck it under my armpit.

  ‘Here,’ she said, ‘let me look.’

  I turned to face the hedge.

  ‘Eugen.’ She placed her hand on my shoulder. ‘You know it can’t go on forever. You will have a wife soon. I’m sure she will make you very happy.’

  ‘I don’t want a wife,’ I said. Juniper began to nudge my hip, eager for something else to eat. ‘All right, Juney,’ I said and patted her side. ‘No more biting my fingers, though.’

  ‘Eugen?’ Avis placed the backs of her fingers on my cheek but I brushed her hand away.

  ‘Leave me alone.’

  As I expected she didn’t climb into my bed that night. I stayed in mine. There were two months left until we turned sixteen and took to the window. If we were going to be wrenched apart, I told myself, it was best to start now. The next morning I turned away from her as we bathed. The only time I’d look into her eyes was while posing. I spent more time in the garden talking to Juniper. I only played the piano when she wasn’t in the room.

  During those final weeks, we barely spoke.

  V.

  One week after I left the window, I found myself standing at the end of our driveway with nothing to stop me taking another step. The police had questioned everyone in town about Avis’s kidnapping—or so they claimed—and had no leads. My father continued to set out every morning in search of answers, though I knew answers alone wouldn’t be enough. I feared what would happen when he finally found Avis and The Carpenter. I hadn’t found Flossie’s diary, but another quest had presented itself: finding my true father.

  I couldn’t see any sign of the town from the end of our driveway, just paddocks and trees. I thought back to the night we were taken to the window, lying on our backs with a blanket over our heads: that first turn had been to the right.

  The road I found myself walking along was dry and narrow and lined with blackberry tangles, thorny matagouri and dog daisies—pests that never lasted long on our property. Soon I saw a spire. Then another. The town of Marumaru came into view. I had seen it before, of course, through the window, but it was like being shown a photograph when you’ve asked for a map. Only now could I see how far Regent Street stretched in either direction. Most interesting to me was what I saw beyond the buildings: the blue-black line of the horizon, the green-grey water sliding toward the land. I walked into town and found myself one street back from the main road and a few hundred yards from the beach. The houses I passed were on tiny plots of land and further cramped by their ragged gardens. Cottages covered in jasmine and honeysuckle, overshadowed by oaks and birches. I felt sorry for the children raised on these properties. I would have gone mad waiting for the window if confined to such a small space. And with the world so near!

  When buildings weren’t hidden by hedges, when they fronted the street, their windows were boarded up. Why would these people shut themselves away, I wondered, when the world was so wide, so open? Then I realised fathers were probably preparing these windows for their children’s sixteenth birthdays.

  Further down the road I saw a row of bicycles—contraptions I’d become accustomed to seeing through my own window—outside a store. I could see the value a bicycle may have in working the quadriceps, calf muscles and, of course, the gluteus, but the static handlebars seemed a lost opportunity. I had no concept of money so didn’t feel its lack as I walked quickly toward the bicycles, eager to try one out—how hard could it be?—but my path was blocked by an elderly couple. The plait of hair looped across the woman’s head made me think if I pulled it I could lift her like a bucket.

  ‘Bill, look who it is,’ she said.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said the man. His short-brimmed hat looked as if it might be on backwards.

  ‘It’s the boy from the window.’

  ‘Is it now?’

  ‘You are, aren’t you?’

  I leant to one side to look at the row of bicycles and remembered my true purpose. ‘I’m looking for Eugen Sandow,’ I said.

  The woman grabbed my upper arm. ‘Feel that, Bill. Firm as cast iron.’

&
nbsp; ‘Is it?’ The man pulled a yellowed handkerchief from the pocket of his single-breasted coat. He went to blow his nose and I took a step back.

  ‘Where’s the girlie?’ the woman asked.

  ‘Where is Sandow?’ I said.

  ‘Is he foreign?’ the man asked.

  ‘You’re a Yank,’ the woman said, ‘aren’t you? That’s what the paper said. Off to Christchurch soon, I expect.’

  It was as if their brains were as deficient as their bodies. I stepped around them and started on down the road.

  ‘Fancy that,’ I heard the woman say. ‘Without as much as a nod farewell.’

  ‘That’s Yanks for you.’

  ‘He wasn’t even wearing a hat.’

  I walked up and down the row of bicycles, inspecting each machine in order to select the one that best matched my height and physique.

  ‘I’ve seen you.’ A skinny man came out of the shop. ‘You’d best move along. I’ve seen you eyeing them bicycles.’ He flicked his hand out as if shooing a fly.

  ‘I’d like to try one,’ I said.

  ‘You’d like to try one? That’s rich,’ the man said. He reached inside the door for a broom. ‘Go on now,’ he said, waving it near my head, ‘move along. No trouble here today.’

  My knuckles clenched but I decided it best to walk away.

  ‘Sandow,’ I told myself. ‘I’m after Sandow.’

  I turned right onto a street that led to the ocean and was stopped by a red-haired bloke in an open waistcoat, its turquoise lining flashing as he swung his arm forward to shake my hand. I was worried about skin diseases, but I had little choice than to follow this custom I’d seen through the window.

  ‘Do you know Eugen Sandow?’ I asked.

  The man chuckled and ran the back of his wrist beneath his nose while sniffing deeply. ‘Good one,’ he said. ‘Will I see you down the Criterion this afternoon?’

  Next it was a group of young women, probably not much older than I was. The first had deeply sunken eyes, the second a slight palsy of the face, the third was blessed with enormous breasts and an equally large behind that ensured she didn’t topple over. They bowed their heads and tittered and found it difficult to address me directly. When I asked about Sandow, they shook their heads. How superior Avis was to these creatures!

  Sandow always said that his system could improve the weakest man, woman or child. When my father read the strongman’s gospel to Avis and me, he and Flossie were our only comparisons. I’d always considered my father a weakling, but compared with the people of Marumaru he was a beacon of vitality.

  I continued down the street, expecting at any moment to see another boy or girl my age performing in the window, but these windows were packed with junk – bottles, balls of wool, pieces of furniture.

  Outside a large stone building with a prominent verandah I came across a man about my father’s age holding a watering can and humming to himself. I suspected he was mentally retarded, even more so than the others I’d met, and decided to keep walking. As I passed, however, he stopped humming and dinged the watering can with his knuckles. ‘You’re the fella from the window,’ he said.

  I turned. ‘I’m looking for Eugen Sandow.’

  The man looked up at the front of the verandah. I guessed that he was reading the words across the building’s facade. The characters meant nothing to me. ‘You’d best talk to Jesse,’ he said.

  ‘Jesse?’

  He nodded. ‘He knows your man Sandow. He’d be keen to talk to you too, I suspect. Never been shy of a conversation and now he’s got it into his head to run for mayor . . .’ The man put his free hand on his hip and shook his head. ‘You wouldn’t know it to look at Jesse now, but he was almost your match when he arrived in town. A duskier shade, mind, but plenty strong. Would you mind holding this for a moment?’ He handed me his watering can, which turned out to be empty. He pulled a handkerchief from his trouser pocket and blew his nose before I even had a chance to step back.

  ‘Hayfever,’ he said. ‘Any day the sun is shining.’

  I resisted quoting Sandow on the link between physical strength and resistance to disease and asked instead, ‘Where can I find him?’

  He pointed toward Regent Street and the sea beyond. ‘The old signwriter’s shop. Go to the end of this street and turn right. It’s just past the bank. You’ll see it.’

  ‘Thank you.’ I handed the man his watering can.

  The sick and feeble continued to step in my path as I walked down the street, but I sidestepped them now. I couldn’t read and had never seen a bank before—I was imagining the base of some hill—but at least I knew my right from left. When I reached the junction I was so intent on finding the signwriter’s shop that I almost didn’t recognise the church on the far side.

  I stopped dead.

  I’ve been here before.

  Another step and I’ll enter the frame.

  Part of me believed I was still in the window. That, while posing for so long the night Avis was stolen, my consciousness had separated and I’d been living out the last week as a kind of fantasy. Without looking to my right I crossed the road to the churchyard. Only then did I gaze upon the window.

  How small it was!

  There were, in fact, two windows of equal size, either side of double glass doors, all beneath a black awning. The window to the right of the doors must have been our window because there was nowhere for the anteroom on the other side. The curtain was down, showing the plush red velvet we never got to see.

  There was, however, a scene in the second window. Two shoddy figures stood draped in heavy gowns. I could tell they were wooden from across the street. What would possess anyone to place these things in a perfectly good window? Were there no other sixteen-year-olds in this town?

  It was so unremarkable. All of it. Most people walked past without stopping. Some pushed their way through the glass doors and entered, I guessed, the giant wardrobe. I looked up at the square building, its tall windows in three rows above the awning.

  I realised my abdominal muscles were tensing. Was this the arrival of Avis’s worm? I felt behind me and leant upon the wrought-iron church gate, my head tilted to the clouds.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  I looked down and saw an orphan boy. His cheeks were freckled and fat. Perhaps his parents had only died recently.

  ‘What is that place?’ I asked.

  ‘That place?’ he asked, pointing at the window, the giant wardrobe. ‘That’s Donaldson’s.’

  I slumped down so that I was now sitting on the footpath, my back pressed against the gate.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked again. ‘My mother’s just in Donaldson’s. The department store. I can get her if you feel sick.’

  ‘Your mother?’

  The boy nodded.

  ‘No,’ I said quickly and shook my head. I hadn’t expected the town to be like this. To be baffled at every turn. Nothing made sense except that I’d been lied to. The world was nothing like what my father had led me to believe.

  I stood up and took a large breath so that my chest reached its full expansion. ‘I’m fine. I don’t need your mother. I’m looking for the signwriter’s shop.’

  ‘It’s next to the bank.’

  ‘Where’s the bank?’

  The boy cocked his head. ‘Right there.’ He pointed to the building with stone pillars next to Donaldson’s.

  ‘So that,’ I said, pointing at the next building along, ‘is the signwriter’s?’

  The store’s window was covered in elaborate squiggles that were meaningless to me. Once across the street I noticed the white paint was beginning to flake toward the bottom of the glass, suggesting these letters had been painted some time ago.

  Before I could enter, the door opened and a familiar face emerged. Or, should I say, a familiar belly. It was the fat, well-dressed man we’d seen so often through the window.

  ‘It moves,’ the man said and chuckled. Up close,
I realised he wasn’t nearly as old as I’d imagined. The skin of his face was smooth, untouched by wrinkles or pockmarks, and the warm colour of honey. His thick moustache ran out to the vertical creases that appeared in his face when he smiled, which was often. ‘I read about you two in the paper,’ he said, ‘but I scarcely believed it. But here you are, eh?’ He stepped forward and his hand found its way into mine, his other hand gripping my triceps while he pumped up and down and looked into my eyes.

  ‘Jesse Hikuroa, the next mayor of Marumaru,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t I think I caught your name.’

  ‘John,’ I said, looking down at his hand, still pumping mine. His belly, straining the buttons of his waistcoat and the gold chain of his pocket watch, was nearly touching mine. I squeezed his hand tighter until he let go.

  ‘Strong grip you have there,’ he said, but didn’t nurse his hand, just laid it to rest on his belly.

  ‘I’m looking for Eugen Sandow.’

  ‘Sandow? You might just give him a run for his money, though he’s getting on in years now, eh?’ He placed a hand in the small of my back and led me inside the store. He walked with a kind of wobble, not a limp so much as an exaggerated swaying of the upper half of his body. No wonder I’d thought he was an old bugger. ‘The number of men that used to challenge him.’ He shook his head. We passed the counter and entered the back room, which contained a large wooden desk covered in papers, two chairs and little else. ‘He always refused. The first few times I thought it a bit cowardly.’ He pointed at one of the chairs. ‘Sit down.’ He removed his hat and sat on the other side of the desk. ‘But he couldn’t possibly arm wrestle every joker who’d bought one of his dumb-bells. He’d never get anywhere that way.’

  The air smelt of suet and recently snuffed candles. There were a number of framed photographs on the walls.

  ‘It will be nice to move into the council chambers in May. All things going to plan. Ah,’ he said and hoisted himself to his feet. He walked over to a photo and lifted it from the wall. ‘Here’s me and Sandow.’ He huffed on the glass, wiped it with the triangle of shirt that had come untucked from his trousers and handed it to me.