She reached out her hand to pat him on the cheek. ‘There’s a good boy,’ she said, motherly once more, and it set his cock throbbing.
Down the hall, he walked several circuits around his room, laughing to himself and throwing his hands in the air as a maniac might, before stripping to his underwear and settling down to his exercises. He began with the Sandow Spring-Grip Dumb-bell, slowly clenching and unclenching his fist and curling the small weight up to his chin. Ten with the left, ten with the right, thinking all the time about his breathing, his new expanded lungs, the muscles of the chest, the biceps, the triceps, the wrist. He then brought his arm to his chest and extended it in an arc, as if opening a casement window. Ten with the left, ten with the right. On he worked through Sandow’s routine, slowly, never taxing a muscle too greatly, never expending excessive energy, focusing his brain in a way that had become second nature to him. He rigged his Sandow Developer to the door and began working his back. He kept noticing muscles he might not normally feel, ones he had employed with Julia. The thrusting fibres in his buttocks. The lower calf that had held him on his tiptoes as long as he wanted and needed. The toes that had grasped for traction on the wooden floor.
After his exercises, he took his sponge to the communal bathroom. He did not fill the heavy grey tub with cold water and fully immerse as Sandow’s gospel dictated. He never followed this step at home or when working out with Jarrett. Instead he stepped out of his underpants and soaked the sponge in cool water and proceeded to dab his warm, twitching body with the vital substance.
He dressed once more in his only outfit—short-sleeved shirt, brown waistcoat and thick canvas trousers—donned his cap and headed downstairs. It had just gone seven o’clock and the dining room was empty. The dark carpet of the hall smelt of spilt ale and sawdust. He took a seat at the bar and was happy enough to sit there and read the names on the liquor bottles.
‘After the hair of the dog that bit you, eh?’ said a voice from behind him. He turned and saw the publican, Ed Coughlin, who slowly made his way around the bar.
‘Sorry?’
‘You after a drink, sir?’
Jesse smiled. He was still a sir the morning after, though Coughlin forever looked on the verge of winking. ‘No thank you.’
‘Had your share last night.’ It wasn’t a question or a jibe, just barman’s conversation. ‘Dora’s in the kitchen,’ he said, ‘if you’re after breakfast?’
Jesse thought of the account the hotel had been happy enough to run up on Mr Rickards’ behalf last night. The drinks he had been shouted right there in the Criterion after his second telephone call with Rickards, when he could announce to the gathered crowd that the company would perform in Marumaru the next night.
All of sixteen, a month ago he’d been a schoolboy in Kai Iwi, a two-hour carriage ride from Wanganui, trying to convince his mother that another year of school would not be a waste of time. She had wanted him to find a farm-hand position, bring in some money, put those muscles to use. He did not enjoy school but knew that taking a job would leave no time for training with the troop of boys Mr Jarrett was instructing in the ways of Sandow’s System. Jarrett’s School of Physical Culture (otherwise known as the Kai Iwi school hall) was the only place where Jesse felt a sense of camaraderie and pride.
When word came that the strongman would stop in Wanganui, Jarrett made a wager with Mr Atkins at the rich boys’ school about whose cadets would impress Sandow more. Jarrett picked his six best boys and off to town they went. Jesse and the other Kai Iwi boys were spread among the Collegiate ‘Number One Squad’, who stood on the football field, topless and flexed as if under inspection by a team of pretty girls. Atkins, their instructor, wasn’t even there yet, as he was off meeting Sandow at the station. Even if the Kai Iwi boys had taken off their shirts and vests then and there, it would still have been simple to spot them among the whities.
Jesse had seen plenty of pictures of Sandow in his magazine and on posters beneath the slogans—Breathe more air and have richer blood; Deep breathing is internal exercise—that Jarrett pinned to the walls of the hall, but the strongman looked much shorter in person. Perhaps it was the three-piece suit, the starched collar, the shiny black shoes that almost came to a point.
‘Hello my boys,’ Sandow had said, claiming them as his own from the first. ‘What an impressive array of young men.’ His German accent was strong but did not obstruct his meaning.
Once Atkins and Jarrett had run the boys through a series of dumb-bell and breathing exercises, it was left to Sandow to pick out the best physical specimen. The Prussian had pulled a cigar from the internal pocket of his coat. While Atkins and Jarrett fought over who would have the pleasure of lighting it, he said to the boys, ‘I do not endorse cigars for young lungs such as yours. One or two cigarettes is perhaps all right, but none is always better. For me, one small pleasure a day is sufficient.’ He sucked as the triumphant Atkins held a match to the end of the cigar. Once the flame had caught, Sandow held the cigar aloft as if inspecting the fidelity of a gun’s barrel and said to his two disciples, ‘I find it helps me to think.’
Atkins began to shout poses for the boys to perform—The Dying Gaul, Farnese Hercules, Discobolus—and Sandow strolled among their ranks, puffing his cigar, pausing from time to time to look a boy up and down, squinting. Sometimes he would nod, sometimes tilt his head and purse his lips. After five minutes, the boys’ posing had become ragged—the Kai Iwi contingent had been making it up as they went along since the first few poses—and Atkins stopped calling out. The Collegiate boys stood at a weary kind of attention. Jesse and his friends each looked down at the circle of trodden dry grass their posing had produced and itched to move. The bet between Jarrett and Atkins meant nothing to them. A perfectly round leather football lay in the distance against a fence.
When Sandow’s cigar had halved in size he said, ‘Gentlemen, these are the best boys I have yet seen in Australasia. And the best among them? Him.’
‘Him?’ Atkins asked.
‘Him.’ Sandow pointed once more at Jesse.
‘That’s one of mine,’ said Jarrett, beaming. ‘Jesse Hikuroa. Come forward, Jesse.’
‘Excellent chest development,’ Sandow said. ‘You look as if you could run all day.’
Jesse shrugged and looked at the football.
Sandow turned to Jarrett. ‘I wonder if I could use him for my demonstration tomorrow afternoon. I understand that several doctors and other prominent citizens will be in attendance.’
Back at the Criterion’s bar, Jesse’s stomach rumbled and he remembered that he had not responded to Ed Coughlin’s question about breakfast. Coughlin must have heard the rumble, as he gave another almost-wink and called out to Dora to crack a couple of eggs.
‘You made the newspaper,’ Coughlin said. He produced a paper from behind the bar and slapped it down in front of Jesse.
The front page was devoted to advertising for department stores, hotels and passages aboard the New Zealand Shipping Company’s Royal Mail Steamers for London. Jesse opened the paper and was met with the headline stretching across two columns: SANDOW IS HERE, SANDOW IS COMING.
He was mentioned only in roundabout ways in the article. ‘Sandow’s likeness was delivered to the Marumaru Station on Wednesday morning,’ it said, without saying by whom. Later, there was mention of ‘Rickards’ associates’ and ‘an advance party’, which Jesse took to mean him and him alone. Mostly the article reproduced Rickards’ own press for the company.
Rickards was due to arrive on the 9.15 train, along with the props and stage hands, at which point Jesse would be put to work.
His eggs arrived. He continued to leaf through the paper as he ate. On page four, he was surprised to see that he was mentioned by name in the gossip column.
MISS TATTLE’S WORD OF MOUTH
Town