The Wonders (8 page)

During their stay the two women spoke in awkwardly formal voices with everyone. They tried to help the staff because
they were unused to being cooked for and having a housekeeper make their beds. While Leon's nephew spent all day outdoors following the gamekeeper around, his niece had stared openmouthed at Kathryn for the entire first day, then started asking her question after question, then turned her attention to Christos and Yuri, then to Rhona. On the last day of the visit, as they exchanged their relieved good-byes, the girl threw her arms around Kathryn's waist, pushing her face between the folds of Kathryn's cloak and into the warm woolly belly. Kathryn went still. She had made it clear that she was not to be touched, ever, not to be hugged or to have a hand held or even to be tapped on the shoulder.

“Oh dear,” Rhona said softly. “Oh, sweetheart, you shouldn't . . .”

They watched, amazed, as Kathryn bent her head and drew the girl in tight, kissing her swiftly on her crown before pushing her away and offering a polite spoken good-bye to Leon's mother and sister. She was shaking. The moment Leon's family turned to gather the suitcases, she melted from the room.

While the Wonders trained, Kyle had been doing groundwork for the launch. A filmed four-second clip of Christos opening his wings in a darkened room was set free on the net. For a couple of weeks Kathryn flew around the world in a chartered jet. She turned up at a club in Tokyo, a film premiere in Paris, a restaurant in Shanghai, the after-party of a location wrap in Berlin, the opera in New York. She was fully swathed, the image of a wealthy fashionable woman. At each venue, her instructions from Kyle were to go to the ladies' room and, while she was there, stand in front of the mirror. She was to shrug off her head and shoulder covering and give herself a quick finger massage of the neck or adjust her makeup. If anyone stared or spoke, she would yawn and make an innocuous remark, such as: “It's exhausting, isn't it?” or “These events really wear me out.” Then
she was to smile, pull her scarf up over her head and shoulders, and leave the venue. Kyle would escort her to a waiting car to hurry her away. He would have given her the go-ahead to perform as soon as the bathroom was populated with three or four of the important people he had targeted who had enough influence and talking power to become vectors.

For Leon, he commissioned a comic animated game called Clockwork Man in which the player had thirty different ways to assemble a mechanical heart and get it into the character before any number of silly disasters happened. It was addictive, and within a week it was the top-selling app on handheld devices.

Once that was all in place, and the buzz was happening, the Wonders were to appear together on the world's most famous TV talk show and launch with a bang.

Finally the day came. Training had begun in March and now, in July, they would be tested. They'd driven out of Overington, with the sun flaring over its flower-dotted gardens, down to a fetid New York and into a cool dry TV studio.

The cameraman came toward Leon, lens aimed at his breast as if he was about to pin a victor's ribbon on the chest of a race winner.
I am a winner!
Leon kept smiling as he tried to follow the mantras of the media trainer.
Think positive! A winning smile! Everyone loves you!
His self-help books had said the same things with the same exclamation marks.
Fake it till you make it! I say YES to life!

When the close-up of the hole in his chest flashed up on the large screen behind the host, the studio audience screamed as one. Even Leon, catching a glimpse from the corner of his eye, was aghast at the woody topography of his scarred flesh with its new “healthy” tan magnified five hundred times. It could have been a gnarly medieval forest or the carved relief of an Egyptian battle. Only when the shot pulled away to reveal firstly his
heart, tiny, snug and gleaming in its place, then his human torso, and lastly his strained face, did any of it seem real.

His heart, steady as it was, no longer told him he was afraid. It kept pushing through blood at the same regular pace without regard to his emotional state. Other parts of his body made up for the heart's equanimity. The adrenaline zinging through his bloodstream stung his fingertips and face in prickles of fear. He was dizzy and disoriented. His eyes watered, and his eyelids fluttered under the glare of white light.

“Settle down, ladies and gentlemen.” Matt Karvos, the show's host, gestured for Leon to join Kathryn and Christos, who had already endured their own scream reaction, on a couch facing the audience.

As rehearsed earlier, Leon pulled on a loose shirt that a hand passed to him from behind the curtain. At last he could sit down. He stumbled across the studio floor snaked with gaffer-taped cables and leads, and sat down beside Christos and Kathryn on the couch. At the far end Kathryn lounged on the fat cushions with her legs crossed and her cape wrapped loosely around her body. She appeared relaxed, nonchalant, but Leon could feel the vibrations of the couch caused by her left foot, under the cape, jigging madly against the floor.

Medical examinations had been documented to validate the Wonders' authenticity before they were invited on the show, so the producers were happy. Rhona was happy because she had managed to keep tight control over the whole appearance. Hap was handling security. Kyle had negotiated the deal and coached them and checked and confirmed every detail until he was convinced nothing could go wrong. Kathryn and Leon were still wary. It was Leon's first time on television. Kathryn had appeared on television before, but only in guerrilla footage shot as she tried to run away or push shut the front door while a burly
cameraman thrust a lens at her and a reporter tried to muscle his way inside. Christos was the only one with real camera experience. He had appeared on various shows in the past talking about his art. He had warned the others to be aware that the camera might shift focus to any one of them at any time.

“You think you are finished because someone else is talking and you let your face relax? Pow, they turn the lens on you and you come across to millions of people as a miserable party pooper.”

“Thanks for the advice, Christos. I feel so much better now. Absolutely spiffing.”

“No, Kathryn, I am not joking. It happened to me on the most important art show in New York. I watched the recording and there I am, thinking my part is over, rolling my eyes at something stupid I had said. But no one realized that. They believed I was rolling my eyes at what someone else had said. They never asked me back.”

The regular guests of this program, a comedian and a “crazy news” reporter who entertained with offbeat anecdotes from the news or interjected sexual innuendo into others' stories, were relegated to a couch at the far side of the stage for this special Wonders edition of the show. Leon had met them in the greenroom, where they smiled like hyenas. “Do you do anything?” the comedian asked through his handlebar mustache. “Or are you just for looking at?”

Once the three were seated, Rhona appeared at the curtain where Leon had stood seconds before, on the mark where guests posed momentarily in the spotlight before bounding down the stairs to greet the host. Rhona may have been short and old and not particularly beautiful, but she soaked up that spotlight and reflected it ten times brighter. Even Leon and Kathryn and Christos began to clap as she raised one arm
in a gesture of acknowledgment. She was back where she belonged—at the center of a three-ring circus.

“Rhona Burke, the Penny Queen,” Matt Karvos announced, and the band struck up “Entry of the Gladiators,” the circus clown music.

Rhona stepped carefully down the stairs on her high-heeled cowgirl boots and walked to the host. He kissed her on both cheeks, knocking against the felt brim of her hat. As the music came to an end, he held out his hand to escort her to her seat between the Wonders on the couch and him at the desk.

“Here.” She pulled off the ten-gallon hat and gave it to him. “You can have this. It's a genuine Penny King hat from the Enchanted Circus of 1955. Only six left in the world.”

“Miss Burke, I'm honored.”

With lights flashing
Applause
and a man running up and down the studio floor in front of the audience waving his arms to make them shout louder, the cheering escalated to screams again. Kathryn gave Leon a look that said, “Get me out of here.” Christos yawned a tight cat yawn of anxiety, which he hid with a hand gesture of smoothing his hair into place. Beyond the cameras on the stage floor Kyle was dictating notes, his head bobbing as he muttered into his recorder. When he caught Leon looking his way, he gave an awkward thumbs-up, like a parent on the sideline of his son's losing soccer team.

“Now tell us all about the Wonders, Miss Burke. Where did they come from? Are we looking at the future of the human race?”

It would seem logical that the host would be interviewing Leon or Kathryn or Christos. After all, they were the “talent,” as they had been called backstage. A young runner with a clipboard had leaned in through the doorway of the greenroom. “Are you the talent?” he'd said hurriedly before pushing farther into the room and catching sight of Kathryn. “Oh yeah. You're
the talent.” He pulled his blunt head with its headphone and mic out of the doorway and raced off down the corridor, rubber shoes squeaking on the linoleum floor, his muttering voice a fading sound track.

“By ‘the talent,' he means the guests,” Kyle said, and patted Kathryn's shoulder.

“I said before I didn't like to be touched.”

Kyle shrugged and raised his hands in surrender. “Sorry.”

“No offense, Kyle. I didn't mean to be rude. But I don't like it.”

“Got it.” Kyle had crossed the room, lifted his recorder and spoken quietly into it as though he was noting this important instruction.

At that moment clipboard boy had come to collect the performers and guide them to the live-broadcast studio. Kyle followed slowly, watching Kathryn from behind as she strode along the carpeted corridor, her cloak wrapped tight around her.

Onstage Rhona was telling the anecdotes the group had agreed could be released at this point. She had decided Leon and Kathryn would be too nervous at the first gig and that she would set the scene at the launch herself. She was enjoying herself, chatting with the host, swapping repartee with the cohosts, who were trying to attract attention from their couch at the far end of the studio. She even posed a question to the studio audience.

“Aren't you glad I found these amazing people?” She nodded as she spoke.

The audience cheered a yes. Leon's innards were performing slow acrobatics somewhere around the region of his lower intestine. Christos was steady but tense, a professional, alert and focused. Kathryn sat immobile save for her hidden foot pile-driving into the floor, a rigid smile on her face.

Last night from inside his hotel room, he had heard Kathryn and Rhona in the corridor. Kathryn told Rhona she was afraid.

“They'll tear me apart again,” she whispered. “They'll make me out to be a monster.”

“No, darling, that's exactly what they won't do. I've made sure of it. This is why we're here.”

T
HREE WEEKS AFTER
their first TV appearance, Kathryn described to Leon how she'd woken that morning from a nightmare. She had dreamed herself a victim of fly-strike, an infestation of maggots in live sheep flesh. Her voice rat-a-tatted out the words as if to shoot down the whole ghastly picture.

Although fly-strike was not a possibility in Kathryn's world, Leon knew from experience that fear is more often about the unlikely than the likely. If only he could reassure her in some way—but how can you reassure someone that their fears are foolish when they already know it?

“It's crazy, I know,” she said, draining her glass of straw-colored wine. “Stupid, monumentally dumb to even imagine it. But I'm still aching with terror at that moment in the dream when I caught sight in the mirror behind me of the writhing mass of maggots, devouring me alive.”

His fears were more prosaic: catching a cold or flu and sneezing violently or eating something bad and suffering convulsive vomiting that might shake loose the tubes to his heart. Even low
temperatures bringing on a chilled shiver were enough to make him hurry to the closet and strap himself into the restrictive brace designed to maintain the stability of the heart during exercise. For Kathryn, the climate was irrelevant. Her wool kept her at an even temperature no matter what the ambient weather. Kathryn saved her terror for the diseases and parasites that belonged to the family to which she had become an unwilling relation: maggots, sheep lice, bluetongue, foot and mouth, pinkeye.

Before she married she was a lazy housekeeper, she had told him. She described the bathroom of her singles flat crusted in a rind of steam-baked dust. Her living room carpet sucked at the soles of her shoes with the same gluey squelch as the carpet at the local band venue. She lifted her cleaning game a little after moving in with her husband. But by the time Leon met Kathryn, she had become a hygiene obsessive. When she disappeared into the bathroom with a kit bag of wipes and disinfectants, no one said a thing. If a buzzing blowfly entered a room she sat immobile until someone smacked it down. Leon found it discomfiting to see tough Kathryn blanching at the sight of a harmless insect. She, like he, clearly lived in fear of the day when her body would betray her yet again.