The Wonders

Praise for

THE FINE COLOR OF RUST

“Delightful, laugh-out-loud funny, and unforgettable. I love this book.”

—Toni Jordan, author of
Addition

“I adored
The Fine Color of Rust
. It's funny, irreverent and highly entertaining. I was sad to finish it, and I still miss Loretta!”

—Liane Moriarty, author of
The Husband's Secret

“Loretta is one entertaining, compelling narrator, funny and self-deprecating, with an acerbic wit and occasional histrionics that belie a deep love of the people around her, whether she likes them or not. . . . A truly moving surprise at the end reveals O'Reilly's point all along, that there is value in things that don't cost anything and true beauty in a pile of junk.”

—
Booklist
(starred review)

“O'Reilly's tale of a backwater Australian town seen through the eyes of Loretta Boskovic, who struggles to make ends meet and do good for her community, is hilarious and tenderly moving.”

—
Publishers Weekly
(starred review)

“A story about love: where we look for it, what we do with it, and how it shows up in the most unexpected packages.”

—
The Big Issue
(Australia)

“Can anyone write the story of a whirligig single mother gamely and hilariously fighting development of her small town better than Paddy O'Reilly? No, and nor should they try.”

—
The Weekend Australian

“A delight . . . The author has a wryly humorous touch and, once I started reading, I found it hard to put down. It's peopled with characters who are quirky but credible, and universally recognizable.”

—
Newbooks

“O'Reilly is funny and touching by turns and her style has a spare intelligence that reminded me of another of my favorite authors, the great Laurie Graham.”

—
Daily Mail
(UK)

The soul is still the same, the figure only lost;

And as the soften'd wax new seals receives

This face assumes, and that impression leaves;

Now call'd by one, now by another name;

The form is only chang'd, the wax is still the same . . .

Ovid,
Metamorphoses
, book 15

tr. John Dryden et al. (1717)

Who has not asked himself at some time or other:

am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?

Clarice Lispector,
The Hour of the Star

L
EON WAS TWENTY-SIX
when the true fragility of his body revealed itself. He died for the first time. There was no flying, no tunnel. He didn't see a light. He died, and a few minutes later he regained consciousness on a gritty carpeted floor under a pair of small hands pounding his breast as a female voice counted aloud. He opened his eyes. A male face loomed over him, so close that all he could see were stubby black mustache hairs sprouting from the pores of an upper lip and the rose-pink flesh of the mouth. The man was pinching Leon's nostrils shut, about to give him the kiss of life.

Leon felt a grunt of exhaust wheeze from him as if a knee had pressed into his rib cage. He sucked desperately to get breath into his chest. Every cell right out to his skin lit up, an instantaneous electric surge through flesh and bone.

The owner of the rosy lips fell backward onto the floor, muttering, “Jesus fucking Christ.”

The firm's first-aid officer, the woman who had been pumping his chest, shot out a laugh.

“My god, he's back.” The armpits of her green cotton blouse were dark with damp. Clear snot trailed from her nose to her lip. “Leon? Leon?”

He moaned and rolled his eyes toward her, still unable to speak, and she laughed harder, as though the laughing was an expulsion of something trapped inside. She wiped her nose on her sleeve, rubbed her hands down her skirt and rocked back on her heels, staring at the ceiling, laughing that seesaw braying laugh Leon had never heard from her before. His head lolled to the other side, and he saw his work colleague, the one who had been breathing spent air into his body, kneeling with head bowed as if in prayer.

He had died and been brought back to life in an office. He remembered a phrase:
Death be not proud, though some have called thee mighty and dreadful.

“The ambulance is on its way, mate.” Leon's colleague punched himself in the chest, a frantic gesture of relief. “Jesus, you gave us a fright. Fuck.”

The next month he died again. Seven months later, again. Each time less mighty, less dreadful: his deaths were becoming modern and mean. Life tethered to the medical industry had begun. In a year's time, when his ailing heart muscle had given out, they transplanted a new heart inside him, a heart removed from a healthy young woman whose brain had been unwired by a fall onto concrete. After an uneasy truce, his recalcitrant body began its assault on the invading organ. No quantity of immunosuppressants would convince his body to make peace with the muscular pump that could save it. His body and the heart battled on together in their bad marriage until he could barely walk.

By then he was living with his mother in the country. His sister traveled up from the city with her two children. The boy, his nephew, barreled out to the backyard and began tearing
around the garden. The cat had bolted as soon as he arrived. Leon's five-year-old niece came and sat next to him while his sister perched on the arm of the couch, her legs twined, hands resting in her lap.

“So how are you, Leon? Mum says you're improving a little.”

He stared at her, amazed. “I'm dying, Sue.”

“Oh, Leon, always the pessimist. Let me get a cup of tea first, then we can chat.”

Once she had gone into the kitchen, his niece lifted her wide eyes to him.

“Are you really dying?”

He nodded.

“Where will you go when you die?”

He guessed it must be time to think about that. He didn't believe in heaven and choirs of angels, or a sulfurous hell with eternal punishment. He didn't believe he would be reborn into another body. He was perfectly confident in what he did not believe and unable to fill the resulting void with any positive belief. Which left nothing.

“I think I stop being. I won't be here anymore but I'm not sure I go anywhere.”

She lowered her gaze and played with the hem of her dress. He was sorry to disappoint her.

“Maybe I'll go to heaven.” That was what people did to children. They told comforting lies. His mother had told him the same thing, except he had never believed her. She had described it in the same singsong voice the third-grade teacher used to recite the times tables, as if something repeated enough times must surely be true.

“It's okay if you don't go anywhere,” she said. “It's only that I wanted to visit you.”

Two weeks later he was bedridden, unable to eat, breathing with the labored effort of an aged man. The hospital still had no suitable donor. They rushed him in, implanted a pump beside his failing heart to keep him alive and sent him home again to wait and hope for a new heart.

It seemed there was an epidemic of heart disease. The waiting list was longer than ever. Leon had drifted to the bottom because this was to be his second heart. His body had already rejected one. New kinds of hearts were being grown in laboratories and artificial hearts that could last thirty years were at trial stage but not close enough. Preparing to die was his most logical course of action.

Until the call came.

He had to choose. One choice was risk, it was illegal, it was madness. His other choice was waiting for an impossible donation while he was being eaten up with fear and rage. And then dying anyway.

A
YEAR LATER, LEON
returned to a town near his childhood home in the old goldfields. He rented a flat with high ceilings and arched windows facing a grassed courtyard. From the window he could watch the weather taking shape in the morning sky and magpies stalking the lawn after rain. His benefactors had deposited enough money in his bank account for a year's rent and expenses, saying he would need that much time to recover well enough to return to normal life.

As he convalesced, his life cemented into a routine. Cereal and tea for breakfast, an apple and coffee for morning tea. He walked laps of the sports field every day, surrounded by yapping dogs, groups of tracksuit-clad women pumping their arms and chattering breathlessly, fathers urging pairs of chubby children to greater effort. He couldn't help picturing them as the blood cells and platelets that swim the channels of the circulatory system, repelling invaders and carrying oxygen and nutrition. A year of studying the body to understand what was being done to him
had painted the whole world in the lurid imagery of illustrated medical texts.

In the evenings he prepared a meal and ate it while watching the news. After dinner he read a book or watched television or a film or sat at the computer, learning about the healing process of the body. He'd joined the bridge club but quit when the members' time spent on bitter disputes about club politics overtook the playing. No one visited. The people at the local supermarket recognized him, nodded, moved on.

Heroic efforts by a surgeon and an engineer had resurrected him but one year on, to his shame, Leon was less alive than when he had collapsed to the floor of the office with no heartbeat at all. Physically he had healed. The pain around his cavity was gone. He had stopped hurrying to the mirror first thing each morning to stare at his metal heart as if that would ensure it kept pumping. But something else inside him had changed. He was dispirited, a monk who emerges from his solitary cell to find that over the years not only has he lost the knack of being in the world but his faith, the core of his being, has withered.