“They’re laying down their short-term memories,” Rhona had told them. “Let them talk about what they’ve seen, turn it over in their minds. They’ll remember you better. If you go out bang bang bang one after another, it’s too much. They’ll only remember one of you.”
“More circus wisdom?” Kathryn asked.
“You might sneer, my girl, but ‘circus wisdom,’ as you call it, is making us all rich.”
After Leon had come offstage, the music dropped to the low Muzak sound track that would enhance the buzz of the audience but not intrude into their excited chatter. Kathryn did some stretches to warm up. She moved with the litheness of a cat, although Leon would never dare say so.
Kathryn had originally wanted a rock-and-roll song as her tune, but Rhona overrode her choice. Pop music was too ephemeral, she said. The song would become unfashionable and Kathryn would seem outdated. Classical, she insisted, or jazz. “It’s us who will determine what these rubes go away thinking, not some cheap ditty from a pop song that’s lodged in their brains. And even though I hate most of that opera wailing, there are some songs that make the tingle start in your tailbone and rise up to your skull, and that’s what we want.”
“Are you ready, Kathryn?” Yuri pulled the door open a fraction. He managed the timing of the show as well as looking after Christos’s wings. None of them wanted too many strangers running around. He signaled to the tech, who used the remote to start up Kathryn’s tune, the aria from La Wally by Catalani. A tune that had graced a hundred television ads yet still made people close their eyes in a wash of pleasure.
During the dinner she had been wearing a scarf on her head that folded down into her cape so only her face showed. As she reached the doorway, the audience could see that the scarf went much further, that her body was wrapped from head to toe in a kind of sari arrangement. She stood silhouetted against a faint flickering candlelight as the orchestra introduced the music. The moment the pure voice of the singer floated into the room, Kathryn stepped through, and the sari began to unwind and fall in folds behind her as she moved, until by the end of the first verse, she stood naked, arms crossed over her breasts, eyes heavenward. There was no gasping from the audience during Kathryn’s piece, only a stunned silence. Women sometimes reached out their hands, as if to take Kathryn, as if to hold her.
In these private shows, if Kathryn’s woolly arm did brush a woman’s outstretched hand, Kathryn smiled. Later, all touching was disallowed, but in these early exclusive shows, the worst anyone did was snicker behind their hands or rear away when one of the performers passed by too close. They were the innocent times. Tonight Leon watched as Kathryn crouched and whispered into Maria Eleven’s ear.
Kathryn tripped offstage, skidding and clattering in her ridiculous high heels and laughing.
“Did you see that woman? That stunning woman, the goddess?”
“I was sitting next to her. Maria. She’s nice.”
“Leon, are you kidding? Nice? She’s out of this world. She’s”—Kathryn looked to the side, searching for one of her rehabilitated words—“utterly ravishing. I told her she was the fourth wonder in the room and she giggled.”
Christos came to stand at the entrance with Yuri following, adjusting the wings as he walked. “She probably thinks the same about you, sexy lady. You’re ravishing.”
Kathryn pulled up as if she had been slapped. She looked down at her body, then up at Christos. She shook her head. “I still can’t believe it. Skanky old me, turned into a sexy thing.”
Yuri made a final adjustment to the wings, signaled the tech to start Christos’s tune, and wiped Christos’s oiled chest with a cloth before slipping into the shadows as the door opened. The wide-angle spotlight snapped on and burned a beam from heaven onto Christos’s body. His signature tune was so clichéd Leon had doubted it would have any effect, but each time he raised his wings to the dramatic notes of “O Fortuna,” the power of the image and the music combined to arouse extraordinary emotions. They had seen women begin to cry, men half stand before sinking into their seats with their mouths drooping open. The fingers on the metal wings spread and folded while people sobbed. Leon was not sure why it was so powerful for them. Perhaps the religion, all the angel mythology. Christos had obviously known exactly what he was doing when he started the wing project.
ONLY FIVE REMAINING circus animals were living at Overington with the Wonders. Two elephants, a chimpanzee, an old brown bear and a miniature pony. The elephants, the chimpanzee and the pony roamed the grounds, and the chimpanzee, Rosa, also had the run of the house. She never urinated inside, but sometimes Leon would notice a puckered turd in a corner of a room or a banana peel or fruit rind under a table. Still, she was good company, and her screeches sounded uncannily reminiscent of Rhona’s laughter. Rosa had arrived after the chimpanzee kidnap and assault incidents. She had only known hard work in Hollywood and this new life of leisure.
August, the brown bear, had his own enclosure on the south side of the house, a large wilderness of trees, vines, bushes and artificial caves surrounded by a double fence. In winter, he slept long hours in a cave dug into the side of a slope in the enclosure. During the rest of the year, his food was thrown in at different points along the fence to simulate, according to Rhona, a life in the wild where he would have to hunt. Not that the food was alive—he was fed meat with shreds of fur and bone, whole fishes, buckets of fruit—but he did have to find it. Leon couldn’t see the point since August had been trained to dance and walk on a rolling barrel, probably in captivity from when he was a cub. The keeper put his age between thirty and thirty-five years old. Six years earlier, he had attacked and mauled his trainer. He was destined for the needle before the animal rights group contacted Rhona to give him a home. “He’s not dangerous, I’m sure,” Rhona had told Leon. “But the keeper says he’s happy in there alone. Bears are solitary animals.”
Leon had ventured into August’s enclosure a couple of times, wielding a Taser for safety. He glimpsed a gray snout poking from the shadows of the trees and that was enough of a thrill for him. Christos liked to enter the enclosure and spend time with the bear. He said that it was because he believed the bear must be lonely, having been brought up in the company of humans.
“In the wild they are alone, but he is no wild bear. Plus, we performers,” he said to Leon once, and as usual Leon couldn’t tell whether he was joking, “need to perform. I go in there and I let August perform for me. He shuffles a few steps, takes a bow, makes a fake roar. It is the only thing he knows how to do. For other bears, hunting is their work. For August it is performing. The same as us. We are made to hunt and gather, so now we create other work for ourselves.”
Kathryn’s familiar was the pony. When she went for a stroll in the fresh air, usually with her scarlet outdoor cloak draped across her shoulders, Agnes the pony cantered up and nuzzled her, trying to get under her cloak to the hidden pockets in its lining. She fed the stumpy pony apples and hay and carrots, and they ambled together through the different habitats that had originally been set up for the lions and tigers, the donkeys, the zebras, the camels.
Leon had not bonded with any of the animals in particular, but if he had free time, like today, he walked around the grounds. Walking alone, he found the empty enclosures eerie. Tall trees with lanky trunks that resembled the legs of the former giraffe occupants gave way to the arid sands of the old camel enclosure, which led to a vine-looped jungle area that once belonged to the chimps. The walls had been removed so that they were no longer technically enclosures, yet the contrast in vegetation and topography and even soil in the purpose-built sections made it seem as though in fifty paces he had crossed continents and oceans, strayed into the domain of creatures from other worlds. Invisible creatures also, for most of them had long since died, and all that remained of them were scraps of fur caught on twigs, gray patches of dirt worn into the grass or pasture where the animal used to sleep, the ripe odor of certain spots where it may have sprayed or r
utted or simply rubbed its scent over a tree trunk or a boulder.
“One day the whole earth might be empty. No animals left.”
He hadn’t noticed Christos and Yuri behind him. It was Yuri who had spoken. From things he had said here and there, his veganism, his cotton clothes and hemp sandals, and the way he took care with everything he used, it was clear that Yuri, alone among the residents at Overington, believed this way of life could not last forever. He was afraid humans may have gone too far, that they had poisoned the planet beyond redemption, that they should be showing greater respect to the animals and plants of the earth.
“Do you really think so?” Leon was glad to hear Yuri speak. He wanted to have a long conversation with him one day, but so far Yuri had always found a reason to slip away after a few moments. At twenty-two, his unlined Russian face shone with boyish innocence. Leon had the peculiar impression it was a face recently released from having a great big hand pressed against it—the expression was consequently a mixture of surprise and relief looking out at the big world. Or perhaps that was his true expression, the expression of a young man unshackled from poverty and aimlessness in Russia by an accidental meeting outside a gallery.
Christos gestured around the dusty landscape they had entered. “This reminds me of our island in the hot summer.” His need to dominate the conversation may have been one reason Yuri was so quiet. “Except for our land. We had a vegetable patch, always green.” Christos smiled with the memory. “My mother sent me out to harvest olives from the trees that grew wild on the hills. She kept a couple of goats and fermented the milk to make cheese.”
Yuri shook his head in wonder. “Paradise.”
“Hard work.”
Leon tried to imagine it. “Goats! In the country town where I grew up, we had bottlebrush and geraniums in our garden. You couldn’t kill them if you tried. My parents preferred playing sport to gardening. Or to reading. Or to anything, really.”
They reached the mound in the former lions’ enclosure. It had been designed so the big cats could sleep high up, alert for intruders, which, during their lives as captives and performing animals, would have been human beings, the ultimate predators. The mound was a series of small hills undulating into occasional hollows filled with the seeds and dried grass of earlier generations of spring weeds. Together the three men climbed the rise and stood on the highest mound, about twenty feet above the terrain around it, admiring the grand vision of the house and its stately timber louvers.
“I want to see this place where you grew up, Leon.” When Christos announced such desires in his sonorous voice they could have been commands. “I want to visit your hometown. And I want to see the council flat where Kathryn grew up in Dublin, the slum. And Yuri’s family house in Kashin, and then you must all come to my village on Chios.”
“What about Rhona? Should we visit her home as well?” Yuri, always the diplomat.
“We live in her home.”
“But this is not where she was born.”
“Then we should ask her. We are family now.”
Even though Christos was prone to grandiloquent statements, sometimes he said things that Leon knew to be true. This was one of them. They were family now. Leon’s blood relatives were distant in space and distant in consciousness. The year of silence, when Susan had forbidden him to contact anyone, even family, had only shown him how little he missed his family, and probably they him. There was no bad feeling, only an emptiness, and that had begun to be filled by the people he spent each day with at Overington.
The two elephants still living at Rhona’s, Maisie and Maximus, were free to roam, but sections of the grounds were cordoned off so that the vegetation had time to recover from their grazing. Both Maisie and Maximus seemed docile enough. Rhona said they were probably in their forties or fifties. Older than the Wonders.
Yuri said he had seen Maisie standing on her two front legs, then her two back legs, a trick she must have been taught in the circus. If you wore a hat outside and didn’t keep your eyes peeled, Maximus would lift it from your head and blow it to the top of a tree. You might have to wait for a windy day to recover your headgear. If the breeze blew from the south, something to do with the orientation of the trees, a bandanna or ladies’ broad-brimmed hat or beret from Rhona’s parties of old had been known to fly into the air and swoop incongruously onto the lawn or a flower bed.
“Oh, I used to love that hat!” Rhona exclaimed one time as she and Leon stood at the window watching a big creamy chiffon and straw concoction flip across the lawn. “I wore that to my cousin’s second wedding in 2009.”
It was because of these pitiful remnants of the elephants’ working life that the residents of Overington forgot the elephants were wild animals. Even when Maximus trumpeted right behind them and they shrieked at being startled, they didn’t consider, or at least Leon didn’t consider, that Maximus was actually speaking to them, trying to tell them something.
So when Maisie trampled the groundskeeper’s car, Leon presumed there had been some mistake, or that Maisie had stumbled and fallen on the car, or that it was a practical joke and Rhona would produce a new car for the groundskeeper, who sat on the outside stairs of the house shocked and speechless at the sight of the steering wheel protruding from the windshield.
By the time Kathryn discovered the car and the groundskeeper, Maisie and Maximus had wandered off again. Kathryn shouted for someone to come. Leon ran out first, followed by Yuri and Christos. Rhona was on a call. When she emerged, she gasped at the scene of destruction. She stood staring at it for some time, lips pressed together. The groundskeeper had left the scene by then. He’d crab-walked over to Leon and Kathryn while Rhona was still inside, and he’d dropped his voice and muttered to them that he didn’t want to have to sue but, really, who could put up with this. He’d seen that female one, the lady elephant, look straight at him as she punched a hole in the hood with her foot. It was terrifying. It was traumatic and he’d need time off and he wasn’t sure if he’d ever recover and . . .
Kathryn hadn’t bothered listening any further. She’d walked away to talk to Yuri while Leon had to endure the man complaining for another five minutes about his pay and the responsibilities and no one warning him it would be a fucking zoo in here, he was a gardener and handyman, not an animal lover. Glad that Kathryn had missed that comment, Leon watched the man’s mean hunched back as he shouldered into his cottage and slammed the door behind him. Once he had gone, Kathryn and Yuri returned to Leon’s side.
Maximus and Maisie were still somewhere out on the grounds. It was the one day of the week that the elephant keeper had off.
“I’m worried she might have cut her foot on the glass.” Rhona peered at the ground, searching for traces of blood.
“Do we need an elephant therapist?” Christos took Rhona’s hand and held it tight between his own hands. He knew, they all knew, how devoted she was to caring for the animals on the property. “What happened, do you think? Will she hurt us?”
Rhona sighed. “When I was a very small girl, one of the elephants at my father’s circus went mad. Completely crazy. It trampled its trainer to death, tore down tents, pushed over vans and concession stands and afterward tried to throw itself repeatedly into a mass of barbed wire that the site occupier before us had left on the ground behind where we set up the big top. The elephant was trying to kill itself. The next day it did have to be put down because it had killed a man, so luckily those injuries from the barbed wire didn’t cause it pain for too long.” Rhona was speaking slowly. “The thing is, everyone knew that the trainer was one of the cruelest men in the circus. He used an electric prod and a sharp pointed hook to beat the beast into doing what he wanted. It had huge scabs under its forelegs that the audience never saw but that must have caused it agony. He never fed it anything but subsistence food because he wanted more money for himself. He wouldn’t get another elephant, even though that one was nearly dying of loneliness. If you have ever heard a lonely elephant c
ry, you have heard the saddest sound in the world.”
“Oh,” Kathryn said. She turned and ran up the stairs into the main house. Rhona went on.
“Elephants are very like us, you know. The keeper tells a story about when there were only four hundred elephants left in Uganda. They were all young, their parents killed for their ivory. Teenage elephants had to become matriarchs. There were no bull elephants left, no male role models. So the young male elephants turned into juvenile delinquents, aggressive, attacking each other and other animals for no reason. Doesn’t that remind you of human beings?”
“But Maisie, she is not a wild elephant,” Yuri said.
“No, and she and Maximus came from a good trainer, a man who was the son of a friend of my father’s. From a different type of circus, not the Enchanted Circus kind. More . . . contemporary.” Rhona paused, but no one spoke. Leon knew what she meant—he’d read about the careless brutality of the Enchanted Circus.
Rhona continued. “Maisie’s trainer, Frankie, adored his elephants, and he trained her and Maximus with rewards, not punishment. That’s why they are such loving elephants. They grieved terribly when Frankie died. And they have a sense of humor because Frankie was a joker, and he made them laugh. Elephants can laugh, you know.”
“So why would she do this?”
Rhona looked at the cottage into which the groundskeeper had vanished. “You know that saying, an elephant never forgets. It’s true. They don’t forget people and what they’ve done. I’d trust Maisie every time over a human. I guess she can’t tell us why she hates this man enough to destroy his car, so we’ll have to take this as her sign.”
The shattered pieces of the windshield lay scattered in icy blue chips at their feet. Leon picked up a thick fragment of glass. He held it up and angled it to catch the sunshine. When he first arrived at Overington and Rhona led him out to meet the animals she’d told him to hold his hand near Maximus’s right ear. He was amazed to feel intense heat radiating from the great leathery muscular flap. For cooling, she’d explained. When he offered the elephants a handful of peanuts, Maisie’s trunk reached to his palm and picked up the peanuts one by one with delicate precision, depositing a bubble of snot in the process. Her small eye framed by its stiff brush eyelashes gazed into him with the sympathy of an old wise woman. He couldn’t imagine anyone but a sadist doing anything to hurt these animals.
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