Читать книгу The Mannequin Makers - Craig Cliff - Страница 12
ОглавлениеIn 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 became 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.’
‘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.
‘I can see the ropes,’ Josephine said. He had almost forgotten she was beside him. ‘I can picture exactly what will happen, but I want to see it anyway.’
‘And you can,’ he said, ‘tomorrow.’
It was only a short block back to Hercus & Barling. Looking over Josephine’s head he could see a small crowd of eight or ten people outside its window. There was no such crowd for Donaldson’s.
‘Why don’t you go look at The Carpenter’s window?’ he suggested.
‘The curtain’s still down,’ she replied.
Ten people are willing to stare at his blank curtain, he thought, rather than my display. He could feel his skin flush once more.
From the first, the two department stores had not just affected the sole traders—the widow dressmaker, the dealer in golden rings and small trinkets—but had also fed upon each other, undercutting prices, paying exorbitant amounts for shipping to ensure stock was the first to arrive, offering more generous credit terms. Each store had a man dressed as Santa Claus in the week before Christmas and the town delighted in judging whose St Nick was fatter, whose white beard looked the more authentic. But the battle was most evident, and most crucial, in the window. It was not a competition between two stores but between Colton Kemp and The Carpenter, ever since the day the silent sod strolled into town. Kemp had never heard him talk, though Big Jim Raymond swore The Carpenter congratulated him upon his re-election in September. What sort of affectation was it not to speak when spoken to? To always wear the same loud suit with its large houndstooth check and to nod and wave and point before trotting up Pukehine Hill at the end of the day?
But damn the man, his mannequins were a wonder. The story went that The Carpenter walked down from his shack on the hill carrying a wooden mannequin, placed it in front of the entrance to Hercus & Barling two days before their grand opening, and Hercus offered him a job on the spot. Kemp’s curiosity got the better of him at the opening and he saw the window display first-hand: dozens of electric lights powered by the store’s own generator (Donaldson’s, like the town itself, was still to make the leap to electricity), thirteen headless mannequins of the sort imported from Europe (though he suspected they were, like Emile Hercus, second-hand from Sydney) and, at the centre, The Carpenter’s serene lady, dressed in a red moirette dress with a blue shawl draped over her left shoulder and arm, the soft hand protruding, palm up. The skin was smooth and bright as porcelain, but looked as if it would give to the touch. What manner of wood had he used? What tools to exact such detail? What paints, tints or stains to flush her with life? What beast had he shorn to create her mane of brown hair, curling as it passed the hint of her ears and tumbled down her shoulders?
The Carpenter’s first mannequin was a revelation for Kemp and a sensation for the town. Over the following months The Carpenter produced more figures. The appearance of each was an event that surpassed the excitement of a new window at Donaldson’s, no matter how intricate Kemp’s mechanics, how timely the scene or artistically it was laid out. The Marumaru Mail began speculating about the gender, age, hair and eye colour of The Carpenter’s next model weeks before it appeared. No one seemed to care about the masses of blank space in his window displays, the utter stasis of his arrangements, the lack of theme or connection to the town in which the store sat: The Carpenter’s window was another world, one on the cusp of coming to life.
Little by little this world began to spill into Marumaru. The ladies of the town, who had conformed to the modest colonial fashion for dark skirts and white blouses, began to step out in the reds and blues and greens of The Carpenter’s window. The men stuck with subdued tones for their suits and waistcoats but stuffed silk handkerchiefs of turquoise or magenta into their breast pockets and emerald felt bowlers on their heads. Visitors from the north and from the south often remarked upon the deluge of colour in the town, the women’s resemblance to parakeets, the men’s to mallard drakes. Perhaps most tellingly, when a visiting photographer set up his equipment at Hercus & Barling the townsfolk chose to be immortalised performing the poses of The Carpenter’s models.
Kemp had already thrown himself into the making of his own mannequins before The Carpenter’s arrival but he could not breathe life into them in the same way. They remained wooden forms, collections of limbs and blank spaces for covering with cloth and millinery.
An open carriage drawn by two old Clydesdales passed Kemp and Josephine. It was heading toward the wharf, or perhaps out of town. For a moment he considered jumping on the back of the carriage, stowing himself beneath the dirty green tarpaulin and leaving Marumaru forever, but Josephine was sure to give him away.
‘Kemp!’
He looked back at Donaldson’s and there was Charlie Begg, ruddy with rage, clutching a ledger book with both hands.
‘Where the blazes have you been?’
He didn’t want to cross the road. He looked down at Josephine, who seemed happy enough to sit on the church fence, dangle her legs and watch the unfolding drama.
Begg slammed the ledger book against an imaginary counter and stomped across Regent Street. ‘Where’ve you been?’ he repeated.
‘Wednesday is my workshop day,’ Kemp replied. ‘The window is all set for this evening.’
‘Sandow is here. Well, not here,’ Begg gestured back to the store, ‘but worse, there.’ He pointed toward Hercus & Barling.
‘Sandow? In Marumaru?’
‘I told you,’ Josephine added, though both men ignored the girl.
‘Well,’ Begg said, ‘just his statue at the moment, but you know how they send that ahead of the company.’
‘But Sandow isn’t supposed to perform here. The theatre’s hardly big enough for that pony show.’
‘I know. The boy must have got off at the wrong station. Nevertheless,’ Begg said slowly, spelling out the source of his ill-temper, ‘there is a plaster replica of Sandow the Magnificent in Hercus’s window right now and they’re selling Sandow Developers as if they were loaves of bread.’
Kemp looked back in the direction of Kriss’s bakery. ‘Probably outselling bread today.’
Begg hit him on the arm with the ledger book.
Josephine put her hand to her mouth but stayed perched on the fence.
Kemp looked at the ground, trying to keep his anger, lately focused on The Carpenter, from jumping the tracks and ploughing down his boss.
‘I get the impression, sir,’ he said, mirroring Begg’s deliberate pace, ‘that you think I am to blame for our misfortune, though I cannot see how.’
‘Because The Carpenter was at the train station this morning to carry Sandow off. We could have had him. Donaldson’s could have had him. The whole town was there, Kemp. The whole town but you. What, pray tell, was so important that you did not bless us with your presence?’
He couldn’t do it. Couldn’t say the words that would kill Louisa once again. Even now it seemed that she would be in the kitchen, struggling to cut a pumpkin, when he returned home.
‘I didn’t know,’ he said. True enough, though he’d later learn that Flossie had seen the commotion at the station and run home to tell Louisa and him of the statue, arriving instead to find her sister limp in his arms in the workshop.
Begg narrowed his eyes. ‘One-upped again, eh?’ He patted Kemp on the shoulder, causing the flames to rise once more in the window dresser’s chest.
Two young women dressed to the nines for a night promenading Regent Street approached from the direction of the wharf. By force of habit, he appraised their outfits and knew an instant later that they were not Donaldson’s ladies. He turned to Begg and saw that he had come to the same conclusion. Soon the streets would be crawling with men and women in their finest clothes, sporting parasols and the latest Brazilian and Panama hats. He had delegated to one of his stock boys the task of flicking the switch at midnight to power his New Year’s display. If he left now, if he could shake Josephine Strachan, he could avoid the crowds, the tally-keeping, the lies of omission, the revelry of people looking forward without a single fear in their hearts.
‘I suppose there’s little point in holding a grudge,’ Begg said.
Colton Kemp said nothing. He turned his back on his boss and began to walk the mile and a half back to his secluded property, hauling his earthly form as if it were an engine coupled to a dozen freight carriages, every step a fresh battle with inertia. Josephine followed a few yards behind, in silence this time. He would later wonder why she clung to him. What was it she detected?
Eventually she left him, taking the path that ran beside the swamp back to the schoolhouse.
He worried what she would tell her parents when she got home. Not that he had grabbed her by the shoulder, threatened her, but that he had been walking around the town that afternoon as his wife lay dead. Because the news would have to come out. Tomorrow, if he could face it.
Flossie spied him as he walked up their long gravel driveway and ran out to meet him.
‘Oh, Col,’ she said, ‘I’m so glad you came back.’
She lured him inside, fed him, hardly spoke. She had coped well enough. As well as could be expected. Still, the house rang with cries and he found that he couldn’t sleep in his bed that night, that it was rendered incomplete without a counterbalance, his counterbalance. He soon gave in to his restlessness and stalked to his workshop, lit the lamp and saw the bloody comet trail leading from the base of Ursula, stolid and incomplete, to the heavy barn door. From the muddle of his tool bench, he selected the hatchet he used to chip away large amounts of wood at the start of a new project. Clenching the haft in his right hand, he realised this is how he had felt since the morning: tense beyond all reason but with none of the release of a sweetly placed stroke. Faster than thought, he drove the hatchet into Ursula’s unfinished head, braining her as if it were a tomahawk. He had to place his free hand on the figure’s right shoulder to free the bit from the wood before swinging again. This next stroke knocked a wedge free from Ursula’s head and the heavy wooden form toppled back, coming to rest awkwardly with a trestle against its rump. He turned, eyeing each of the misshapen forms that remained upright before hurling the hatchet end over end into the head of Mavis and her overlarge mouth.
He left the barn, forgetting it would be dark out, and fumbled around the lean-to where he stacked his firewood, searching for his father’s heavy, cumbrous axe.
By sunrise he had reduced the mannequins in his workshop to lengths of firewood for the range.
The occasional hand or foot sticking out of the woodpile would unnerve poor Flossie in the coming weeks, but that next morning she bit her bottom lip and placed a firm hand on his shoulder to rouse him. He uncurled from beneath his tool bench, still clasping his father’s axe. She looked into his red-rimmed eyes.
‘Col, I need you to get some things from town. For the babies.’
