The Wonders (23 page)

Outside the common-room window, Maisie lifted her trunk and trumpeted. The glass in the windows vibrated with the sound. She and Maximus had been mooning around the house, two gray swaying monoliths in the snow, since the hour when the keeper had let them out of the winter shelter for their morning exercise.

“For god's sake, Minh,” Rhona said, “will you please go out and reassure the elephants before Maisie makes us all go deaf?”

“I don't want to miss anything.”

“Minh, go out there. They can sense something is wrong and they need to get back into the warmth of their pen. In fact all of you can leave except Kyle and Hap. I need to talk about our new security arrangements at Overington and none of you need to be here. Afterward, I think we'll talk again about the possibility of closing down.”

“Come with me, Leon. A walk will settle us both down.” Minh took Leon's hand to lead him out through the garden doors.

“Actually, one quick word before you go, Kathryn,” Rhona said.

As Minh pulled him through the doorway, Leon turned and saw Rhona grasp Kathryn's fingers as she spoke to her. It was as much physical contact as Kathryn would allow. He gripped Minh's hand tighter.

Kyle had let their families know they were all right immediately after the accident, aware that the news would headline across the globe. That night Leon called his mother. She asked if he and Minh wanted to come to Australia and recuperate
there with her. “It has to be safer,” she said. “Nothing happens here.”

When Leon was a teenager, he and his mother would sometimes find themselves standing awkwardly together on the verandah of their weatherboard house. It was the place where she would try to talk to him as if he was a young man, to treat him as a young adult, and he would sigh and roll his eyes like the lumpen adolescent he was. As the conversation stammered hopelessly between them, they both gazed beyond the wooden fence at the bottom of the unkempt garden to the patch of bush behind the house. Leon used to wonder what kind of fool would call that patch of degraded bush outside an Australian country town Canadian Forest, as if it was a magnificent forest on a rugged mountain instead of a series of thin-treed lumpy hills marred by mounds of dumped rubbish and burned-out cars.

With a small portion of his mounting Wonders income, he had bought his mother a new house on the other side of town, next to the lake where the people with money lived, and when the Wonders flew to Australia to dine with a media mogul and his young wife, Leon traveled up to visit his mother in her new place. From her back door, instead of the scrubby wasteland of the Canadian Forest, the view was of a landscaped garden with a sunken arena and a pond full of carp. In the moonlight, the star-jasmine flowers glowed against the russet brick fence. His mother had looped her arm around his waist.

“Thank you, Leon. Your sister and the kids have been to visit. They think you're so kind to have bought this for me.”

“Very sweet. But I hardly need thanking.” He adjusted his weight from one foot to the other.

“Oh god.” She snatched her hand away from his body. “Oh god, did I hurt you?” And she stumbled away, crashing into the
bench behind her. “I'm so sorry, darling. I didn't mean to . . . Did I hurt you?”

“No, Mum. You can touch me.” Leon picked up her hand from her side and guided it to where she had laid it above his left hip.

She'd left her hand resting there for a short time, obviously embarrassed to move it, yet so uncomfortable that her hand was a wooden block pressing against Leon's body. Physical affection had never been their language. He supposed that their physical relationship was written into their bodies and would never change. Their own kind of cellular memory.

In the garden at Overington, Leon pulled Minh to him, careful not to jolt her arm in the sling. “Are you afraid?”

“Of course I am. I'm afraid for Christos, and I'm afraid for all of us.”

“Do you want to go to Australia? We could stay with my mother.”

Minh hugged him with her good arm. “That would be as much fun as moving in with my parents. Anyway, we can't leave Rhona now.”

“Let's go to bed.” He wanted to be inside her, to have the shuddering release of orgasm and the peace that came after. The oneness of his body with its metal heart that he only truly felt in the stillness after sex.

“Later. Maisie needs me more than you right now.” Minh produced a pawpaw from her coat pocket. Maisie's small eyes widened. She snaked her trunk to Minh's hand and lifted the fruit with prehensile agility.

E
ACH DAY RHONA
spoke with staff at the hospital where Christos lay in intensive care. Splinters from his implant had pierced one of his kidneys. Jittery and in pain with her own bruising, she joked uneasily about how Christos was the one who always wanted the attention, how pleased he would be to feature on the front page again.

On the fourth day, Christos's surgeon from the wing project flew in carrying a replacement ceramic join. The original manufacturers had created six of the lilies, three for each side, in case the wet joins failed and the lilies needed replacing. A team came together to work on Christos. They took seven hours to extract the splinters and stop the bleeding from the old join and thought it too dangerous to continue. His heart had stopped twice and his blood pressure had dropped to critically low levels. They sent him back to the ICU.

Leon could imagine the pain receptors in Christos's body electrified at the moment of impact and again, afterward, with each movement Christos made. The sharp, pricking pain of the
A-delta fibers and the burning, throbbing pain of the C fibers shooting through the nerve pathway, up the spinal cord, slamming into the thalamus and, he was certain, causing Christos to cry out.

In the university basement, Leon's ribs had been sawn apart and sections replaced with titanium and hinges and tensile joining fiber. He had become obsessed with understanding pain. The main object of his feverish reverie was his pain homunculus, a collection of nerve cells nestled in the brain that experiences all the body's pain. Leon imagined his own pain homunculus as a small angry monster with huge hands and face. Its skin was hard, thick and dense, its bones and muscles limp and puny in comparison—the places where the nerve cells clustered more densely in the body shaped the sensation of pain felt by the homunculus.

On day ten, the surgeons woke Christos and told him that replacing the join was too risky. The best option was to extract the other join and close Christos up to allow him to recover. He would lose the wings and the damaged kidney, but he would have a much better chance of survival.

He refused. He wanted the broken join replaced even though he would still lose the kidney. Art was everything and his project was unfinished. When Leon heard Christos was willing to take that risk, he pictured Christos's pain homunculus: it was completely different from the one Leon had imagined for himself. Christos's homunculus was a miniature superman, a hero, a devourer of pain who would grow stronger with each jolt, who would grimace and bear it and flex his tiny muscles until he was oblivious and riding the pain waves. If anyone could survive such a surgery, it was Christos.

In the Overington house fear dampened the air, made it chilly and difficult to breathe. Christos's and Yuri's empty chairs
in the common room drove the others away. They congregated in the dining room or walked in pairs or threes through rooms that seemed too large.

One morning Kathryn came inside from the garden with leaves and twigs caught in her coat.

“Where have you been?” Leon asked. “Minh was expecting you for coffee.”

“I went to find August, the bear. When I found him, he led me to a clearing. He had a baton buried in there and he dug it up while I watched, then twirled it in his claws. His head was bobbing as if he could hear some music that I couldn't hear. At the end, he curtsied. A great big bear curtsying like a ballerina. Christos was right, it is his life's work. He needs to perform. They both do.”

T
HEY WAITED TEN
weeks for Christos to come home from the hospital. By the third week he had been out of danger but the healing and rehabilitation of the muscles around his replacement implant were taking longer than expected: his forty-three-year-old body had lost its youthful resilience. Rhona wondered aloud whether he was foolish for trying to continue with a career in body-techno art.

“What else could he do? Imagine Christos as a waiter!” Kathryn cackled like an old crone at the thought. “Christos as a clerk! A clown!”

That idea was so unimaginable that Minh laughed until she spilled her tea and squealed as the hot liquid soaked through her skirt.

“They'll be home next week.” Rhona pulled her phone from her pocket. “That reminds me, I'd better get the apartment cleaned. And let Vidonia and security know.”

While the others recovered from their bruises and cracked bones and waited for Christos to recuperate, Rhona fretted
around the house, refitting the rehearsal room, decking out the library with more books for Kathryn, planning new performance pieces for the three Wonders.

“Rhona, for the love of Mary, sit down and relax for a minute,” Kathryn said after Rhona had brought in three fitness consultants to be interviewed about creating new individual programs. “Can't you learn how to be still? I am tired and sore. I want this time off, not to have a full-body makeover. Leave us alone for one fecking minute, will you?”

It was Rhona who didn't want to be alone. In the years between evicting her greedy friends and when the Wonders moved in, she told Leon, she had kept an eye on her shows that were still touring, even though she had sold them off to other producers. “I'd fly in, make a few suggestions to freshen up the show, catch up with old buddies and maybe invest in a new production. Semiretired, you might call it. But it didn't suit me,” she'd said. “I need people around, a bit of noise and life.”

These days friends from the trade came to visit every so often. They stayed a few nights, told stories of the old days, left Rhona buoyant with laughter and nostalgia when they had gone. Leon had met a couple of retired promoters and a multi-millionaire who had made his fortune from bingo. No family ever visited.

“You never talk about your mother,” Leon dared to say to Rhona as they sat on the verandah watching Agnes, the mare, canter in a circle on the end of Kathryn's lunge rope as if she was a feisty untamed Thoroughbred rather than a solid placid pony.

“No, I don't.”

He had mothers on his mind. Real mothers, that is—the one he had left behind in Australia, who had seemed old, so old when he spoke to her after the Dubai accident, and his surrogate mother during the year of pain, Susan. After Minh had stopped helping
with the project, Leon kept making his methodical way through the databases and phone listings until one day he calculated it would take him another three years simply to cover the USA and Canada. He hired an agency, gave them a budget and told them to hurry. And they had found her. Yesterday the agent had called with the news. Now Leon had to decide whether to contact her. The question twisted around every moment of the day.

Rhona had no brothers or sisters. If her mother had any other family, they had never been in contact. When Leon had gone looking for information about Rhona's mother, it took him months to find anything. He had to hire a student over the Internet to do the last part of the work because the training schedule was too tight for him to take the trip to see newspaper records in Denver, where the circus had caught fire in 1955.

Rhona's mother had died in her van. She perished in bed. After the fire Rhona had been taken in by the local girls' boarding school. What had initially mystified Leon was how Rhona had escaped from the van while her mother burned in her bed. Rhona was ten at the time. Old enough to find someone to help. Old enough to drag her mother out. Or so he had presumed.

The story Rhona had told him of following her father around the circus may have been true, but her real name was not Rhona Burke. She took Samuel Burke's name in her twenties, after she started her career as a promoter. Before that, when she was a child in the circus and later the despised orphan at the boarding school, she had been Rhona Overington, sole offspring of Alisha Overington, the fat lady of the circus, sideshow exhibit, four hundred pounds in weight, able to move only with great effort from her bed in the specially designed and reinforced trailer to the sideshow tent for her show once a day. Too fat to run in a fire. Too fat even to get off the bed in time to escape. Impregnated by the ringmaster who came to her trailer in the dark and buried
himself in the forgiving pillows of her flesh. Never acknowledging her or his child until he disappeared and became Rhona's mysterious benefactor, paying for her upbringing in the boarding school and leaving her a fortune in untouched tax-haven accounts on his death.