‘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.’
In which the acolyte makes himself at home
Jesse lay awake as the sun cut through the thin bed sheets that were hung as curtains in his room at the Criterion Hotel. His chest felt expanded and he pumped it like a bellows, lying on his back and watching his breastbone rise and fall. He had hardly slept but his head felt clear. He knew that next to him lay Julia—dear, plump, motherly Julia—that she was a prostitute and that he was no longer a virgin. These facts became soft at the edges and crumbled when he tried to set the night’s events in order. Had one of his new friends paid for Julia or had she too been placed on his account (which of course was Mr Rickards’ account)? Ah, he didn’t care. To Rickards he was a delivery boy, a tagalong. To the people of Marumaru he was a herald, a saviour.
Julia lifted herself onto an elbow and said, ‘You know, love, it’s not every man I let kip beside me.’
‘Was I making too much noise?’
‘Not half,’ she said.
‘Sorry.’
‘You’ve got your own room for huffin’ and puffin’.’
‘My—?’ So this wasn’t his room. He was unaccustomed to the liberties the drink had taken with his memory. All the same, he found it hard to muster any regret that he’d strayed from Sandow’s path of moderation.
Julia sat