grabbed Ursula’s broad wooden jaw between the pincers of his thumb and forefinger. Somewhere, he thought, still sucking the injured finger on his other hand. Somewhere in there is the strong-willed woman who doesn’t mind a spot of rain.
At that moment he heard someone shout, ‘Rain!’, or something very like it. He swung to face the door of his workshop and considered it much as he had the mannequin’s face, the puzzlement giving way to discomfort, anxiety, panic—only then did he release the sliced finger from his mouth and set to heaving open the heavy, warped door.
It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the sunlight.
There, beneath the bare wire clothesline, slumped over a load of washing, was . . . well, it was either Louisa, or her younger sister, Flossie. When Miss Florence had fled the kindness and condolences of Christchurch society and moved south to live with them six months ago, she had taken possession of three or four of Louisa’s older dresses. Kemp, despite plying his trade in window dressing, had trouble remembering which outfits were now the younger sister’s. He whispered, ‘Please be Flossie,’ as he took his first step toward the clothesline. That one step was enough, however, to see the larger bulk and know it was Louisa.
He ran to her, raised her gently. A patch of dark blood on the front of her dress had already soaked through to the freshly laundered sheets. The air smelt of soda and iron filings.
‘I just wanted to get these on the line,’ she said, breathless, wincing.
‘For Christ’s sake, Lou. Where’s Flossie? Flossie!’ he called and felt hoarse, as if he’d been yelling all morning. He looked back down at his wife. ‘You shouldn’t have to hang out the damn washing.’
She winced once more. Her lids came down over her eyes. Her brows lifted and became fixed in place.
‘Lou,’ he said. ‘Lou, stay with me.’
The old lighthouse keeper’s dog chose this moment to crawl through the manuka thicket and cross the Kemps’ property. She stopped, considered the man and woman sitting on the lawn, before continuing on her way, three feet of rusted chain trailing between her legs.
Kemp felt Louisa’s forehead, then stood and hauled his wife into the barn, onto the comfort of a pile of loose hay, wood shavings and sawdust several inches thick. He knelt behind her, propped her up against his own thighs. He mopped her brow with his sleeve, rocking back and forth.
Louisa was silent.
He watched the sawdust turn red between her legs.
‘No,’ he said, softly, as if afraid of waking her. ‘No, you can’t take her from me.’
He rocked back violently and knocked one of his abandoned mannequins, which sent a shiver through the ring of limbless, ill-proportioned, inanimate freaks watching over them in what he would later recall, in his bitter, driven future, as a pathetic travesty of the nativity scene.
But in that moment Colton Kemp was lost, oblivious, blubbering. He placed a finger between his teeth to stop the tears and tasted blood.
In which Sandow arrives in Marumaru, in a manner of speaking
That same morning the train from the north deposited on the narrow platform a dark-skinned youth in shirtsleeves and a plaster statue wrapped in a dirty drop cloth. At Marumaru Station, this was enough to bring a crowd. Within two minutes the platform was thronged with townspeople eager to see what the youth had brought and for whom.
‘It has the height of a man,’ said Fred Empson, the station-master.
‘Perhaps it’s an Egyptian mummy,’ said the mayor, Big Jim Raymond.
‘It must be returned to wherever it came from,’ said Mrs Harry Wisdom. ‘There’s no place for heathenism in this town.’
‘It is not a mummy,’ said the youth, whose name was Jesse. He was not yet disconcerted by the way that time had sped since leaving Timaru, or the sight of green pastures from the station platform, or the lack of chimney stacks beyond the first few rows of houses. His first impression was instead reserved for the bold colours of the women’s dresses and the mayor’s hat, which looked as if it were covered with felt from a billiard table.
In his newly acquired performing voice, Jesse announced, ‘It is a statue of the perfect human form.’ He slipped a knot at the statue’s hip. ‘It is—’
‘Sandow!’ shouted Big Jim Raymond.
The crowd cheered and the deflated boy unwrapped the statue to reveal the figure they all expected, the one they’d seen in newspaper advertisements and on the cover of his very own magazine. There were his tight curls and Kaiser Wilhelm moustache, the abdominal muscles like coiled dock line. There the fig leaf covering his manhood, the Roman sandals, the head turned to admire his own bulging biceps. And, if there was any doubt, the pedestal proclaimed in patrician script that this was SANDOW. As in Eugen Sandow, Sandow the Strongman, Sandow’s Spring-Grip Dumb-bells, Sandow’s Combined Developer, the Sandow Season that had swept through the nation’s newspapers, if not all of its drawing rooms, since the muscular Teuton had disembarked in Auckland among survivors of the wrecked Elingamite. Indeed, the commencement of his New Zealand tour had not been altogether auspicious. There was a general election in a week’s time, meaning there were no politicians to welcome him. Eugen Sandow, the strongest man on Earth, had had to push his way through the shattered survivors, their relieved and boisterous relatives and the silent bereaved to find his promoter, Harry Rickards, who had left Sydney a week before to make final arrangements in the new colony. Sandow would later admit to Jesse that he had expected New Zealand to be nothing more than a collection of wooden huts hastily erected by castaways from the world’s four corners, men with wild beards and women perpetually with child who cared not for news from the next hut over, let alone the heart of civilisation. ‘But I have been pleasantly surprised,’ Sandow had said, ‘by the people of your country, the development of their bodies and the commerce evident on every street corner. And of course, they know who I am, which cannot help but make me favourably disposed.’
Sandow was the big draw for Rickards’ Vaudeville Company, which went on to fill town halls and opera houses in Auckland, New Plymouth, Stratford, Wanganui, Palmerston North, Masterton, Napier, Wellington, Christchurch, Ashburton and Timaru. Before each show a life-sized plaster replica of Sandow was sent ahead to heighten anticipation.
But Eugen Sandow was never meant to come to Marumaru.
Sure, the turn of the century had seen the inauguration of the town’s first full-time mayor, Jim Raymond, who was rumoured to have shot a man on the goldfields in his youth and now lived and died by the word of the town’s first daily newspaper, the Marumaru Mail. And it was true that the arrival of a certain strongman signalled one year since the opening of Marumaru’s second—repeat: second—department store. But Marumaru was no metropolis: the post office would not bother to distinguish it from the town of the same name in the Hawke’s Bay for another twenty years. Rickards’ company was not due to perform another show until a matinee at His Majesty’s Theatre in Dunedin on the third of January.
It slowly began to sink in for poor Jesse, who had joined Rickards’ company in Wanganui, that this was not Dunedin.
