The Wonders

by Paddy O’Reilly

  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)

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  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

  LEON 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 w
as 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.

  When his original prescriptions finally ran out, he was forced to visit a local doctor for more immunosuppressants and antibiotics.

  “I can’t just prescribe these medications for you, Mr. Hyland,” she said to Leon, who sat hunched in a question mark on a straight-backed chair beside her desk. “I need to refer you to a specialist, and to do that, I have to examine you.”

  He had no choice. He swore her to secrecy. The moment he left the surgery she called her husband. They kept silent for a week, until one of them, or someone they had told, got on to the local paper. Then bedlam. There was no more hiding away: his secret was out, and life was forcing its way in.

  Reporters chased him down the street as if he was a slum landlord or a dodgy car dealer. He locked himself in his apartment for two weeks before hurriedly relocating to a cheap flat on the outskirts of town and changing his phone number. But he was tracked down again. The rumors spread further. Celebrity agents appeared. They courted him, treated him to lavish dinners, teased him and winked at him and tried to be friends, all so he would open his shirt. So this is how a woman feels, Leon thought wryly one night after the gaze of his dining companion, a mustached promoter with a big gut and a fat wallet, kept dipping to Leon’s chest.

  His suitors name-dropped about their other clients. They promised wealth, fame, a sensational new life. One of the agents offered so much money Leon was close to signing, but when he was told what kind of appearances and events he’d be asked to do—live talk shows, interviews with journalists, parades through the marquees at horse races and fashion shows and movie premieres—he balked.

  “What will I talk about?”

  “Yourself, of course. How you got that magnificent heart. The medical process. The emotional journey. Your favorite food. Whatever you like. We’ll train you to be media savvy.”

  It sounded to Leon like those excruciating school speeches where you had to talk about your hobby or your most exciting vacation. Stammering red-kneed boys with spittle in the corner of their mouth, girls crossing their legs and twirling their hair as they ummed and gazed vacantly at the ceiling, the teacher tapping a pen on the desk in exasperation.

  This particular agent had traveled to Leon’s town on the high plain northwest of Melbourne. The two of them sat in a small dark café with rows of CDs behind the tables and jazz music playing softly. Leon used his fork to push a cube of luminous white sheep’s cheese around his plate. He had always been a careful thinker, one who needed to disguise his long deliberations with sleight of hand. He lifted some oiled rocket leaves and decorated the cheese with them.

  “I haven’t got that much to say.”

  “Mate.” The agent put his knife and fork down on his plate of pasta ragout and leaned forward. He had the lined handsome face of a retired movie star, and he wore a tan jacket of leather so fine it creased with the softness of cotton when he moved. “Mate, they all say that. Once you get started you won’t be able to stop.” He put on a mock falsetto. “Oh, I couldn’t possibly talk about myself all the time! Then you can’t shut them up. Trust me, you’ll love it.”

  It was the sneering imitation of his own clients that put Leon off. Would the agent end up talking about Leon like that?

  Rhona Burke, American entrepreneur and touring agent, called the next day.

  “I’m not asking you to say yes or no until I give you an idea of my show.”

  Everyone else had been talking strategies, coverage, media saturation. Rhona began with advice.

  “Don’t tell anyone the story of how you got that heart. I don’t know how many people were involved or who has seen the heart already—don’t spread it any further. Have you told the story to anyone else who wanted to book you?”

  “Not really. No details.”

  “Don’t. No matter who you end up with. It’s worth much more than you realize. You need to hold on to it until the crowd can’t stand the wait any longer. Then you make them wait a little more.”

  “A tease?”

  “Not a tease. A performance. I can explain better in person.”

  He would meet her. If nothing else, it would mean a trip out of the small town that had so abruptly become known in the media as “the home of the man with the metal heart.”

  THE TRAIN TO Melbourne traveled through a series of worn mountains with flat tops called the Pentland Hills. They looked to Leon as if some giant had taken to them with a sword and sliced off their peaks, leaving them as dining tables for his guests. They stretched to the horizon, floating in the sky, and the train swayed on the track across them like a chariot above the clouds. Humming to the rhythm of the train and tapping his fingers against the glass, Leon felt bubbly and shy, like a kid on the way to his first job interview.

  Once the train had passed through the Pentland Hills, it started to travel downhill toward Melbourne. It stopped at Bacchus Marsh, then moved into the bleak uniform plain of Melton, where plastic bags fringed the wire fences and piles of boulders marked the sites of failed enterprises and building projects. In the distance, a yellowish dome of smog enclosed the city of Melbourne. As the train approached the city, the dreamy optimism that had lifted Leon through the hills sank into a flat pragmatism.

  He had begun to think that this Rhona Burke person was most likely a swindler, an American hustler come to exploit him and make him into the Elephant Man of the modern world. Leon was no performer. He couldn’t sing or dance or even make a decent speech without turning to jelly. What else could this woman mean but to put him in a sideshow?

  If the train had stopped at that moment, Leon probably would have jumped off. Instead he sat smoldering with humiliation, picturing himself being jeered at by teenage thugs, pitied by women.

  “Oh, the poor, poor fellow,” he imagined one sideshow visitor whispering in her English upper-class accent. In Leon’s vision everyone was wea
ring Victorian clothes and carrying canes and umbrellas. Ladies caught their horrified gasps in gloved hands and looked away delicately.

  What a shock, then, to meet Rhona at the station in Melbourne. She was waiting to greet him when he got off the train, wearing cowboy boots and rhinestone jewelry. Titian-red hair. A big white handbag studded with fake rubies. Leon had been stewing in indignation about how he was to be displayed as a monster, gawked at by strangers, until he stepped onto the platform and found himself staring at Rhona as if she was the exhibit. Around him the other travelers were staring too.

  “Mr. Hyland, a pleasure to meet you,” she said in her big American voice, stretching her hand out to shake. “Geez, honey, they told me that Aussies always shut their lips tight to keep out the flies.”

  Only then did Leon close his mouth. He shook the short woman’s hand and observed her more closely. Under the glitter of the gold and rhinestones, and behind the jeans and cowgirl attitude, Rhona Burke was older than she first seemed. He guessed from the downy skin and the softened jawline that she was in her sixties. She was clearly manic, though, he could already tell: one of those people who hurry through each day not to get it over with but to make sure that every morsel of everything good is sucked out of it and savored.

  “Come with me, hon. We’ll have lunch. Or just a coffee if you want.” She took Leon’s arm and urged him along the cold busy road to a taxi. They bent into the warmth. Once they were settled in the backseat, she handed Leon her card.

  The business card sported her name in raised red lettering, shining like nail polish dripped onto the white surface. Her trade name, The Penny Queen, was spot-varnished copper underneath a stylized stroke of the brush that evoked a big-top tent. Leon stared at the card, leaning his cheek against the cool glass of the taxi window. So this was what she wanted. In the space of this single morning he had been thrilled at the idea of working, furious that he might become a sideshow freak, charmed by Rhona’s sassy style, now flung into despair again by the idea that she wanted him for a circus.