Excerpt from The Mannequin Makers by Craig Cliff, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The Carpenter's window was next. If he had any gratitude for the show, it was that it had cleared the crowd from the front of Hercus & Barling so he could observe the window in solitude. The electric lights that usually ran until nine had been switched off, which meant that he had to press his head to the glass to see the details of the display. At the centre stood the plaster statue of Eugen Sandow, a white spectre clutching one fist close to his forehead and the other down by his hip at the end of a straightened arm. His curly hair and undulating torso were stippled with daylight. Kemp looked at the statue's splayed feet, no doubt a pose struck by Sandow to show off the development of his thighs and calves, and wondered about the weight of the small, square pedestal that managed to keep the likeness from falling over.

Sandow was ringed by seven admirers, all female. Each mannequin was familiar to him: the three blonde nymphs, the dignified dame with the operatic build, the pig-tailed schoolgirl on the cusp of adulthood, the black-haired evil stepmother from a fairy story and the serene lady in the red moirette, though, like the other figures, most of her outfit had been changed to show off the season's latest fashions. The Carpenter's mannequins did not have articulated limbs — his creations were fixed in the one pose as Sandow was — but they were arranged carefully to disguise their odd gestures and give the impression of a crowd clustering around the town's new arrival. To Kemp they were admiring a mere statue rather than a man. It was more than just the difference in materials, the full palette The Carpenter employed against the scuffed white of the Sandow replica. The breath of life granted to his figures had been withheld from the plaster Sandow. He considered the crescent of real onlookers that had occupied the footpath since the display was unveiled and saw how The Carpenter's figures would close this circle. Had he intended this? Was he suggesting that for every person looking through the window there was a better dressed doppelgänger on the other side? He looked again at Sandow and even in the dimness he could perceive rough edges where he would have made them smooth, blank patches where small but important details — the grain of the moustache, the slight protrusion of a nail beyond the toe, the point at which the earlobe meets the flesh of the face — had been glossed over. He had learnt the importance of such things in the course of his mannequin making, though his hands often muffed these master strokes.

It was clear that this Sandow was a second pressing. A plaster version of a bronze statue from a cast of a showman made to hold the same pose beyond the limits of boredom and pain: a copy of a copy of a charade.

Even now, he thought, I am losing Louisa. Her image is becoming fixed in my head. Those thousand memories, that everchanging face. All is being sanded down to one, and that will be sanded further until there is no life left.

His forehead pressed against the glass of The Carpenter's window, Colton Kemp felt his desire to see the real Sandow, the living Sandow, grow.

After a long while he left the window and came to Victoria Street, congested with hitched horses, donkeys, drays, buggies and bicycles, but almost devoid of people. On the near corner a boy tossed a silver coin over and over. Even the town's few coach drivers must have had tickets to the show. As he approached the Theatre Royal he saw the 'Sold Out' banner plastered across the placard outside the box office window. The office itself appeared deserted at first, but he made out the rounded form of Burt Tompkins holding his ear to the wall that backed onto the auditorium. Kemp rapped the glass with his knuckles, giving the old man a start that caused him to drop the small metal cylinder he'd been using to listen to the entertainment.

From The Mannequin Makersby Craig Cliff (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2017). Copyright © 2013 by Craig Cliff. Reprinted with permission from Milkweed Editions. milkweed.org