The next day Rhona paid the groundskeeper for the car, gave him a substantial bonus and let him go. In the local tabloid the following week, the headline read FREAK FARM HAS ROGUE ELEPHANT TOO. WHAT NEXT?
“Good,” Rhona said. “All the more mystique for us. We’ve got the permits, there’s nothing anyone can do. Bring them on. And we’ll find a good groundskeeper. I need staff we can love and who’ll love us, all of us, human and animal. There’s too much awfulness in the world without bringing it inside the house.”
Days like that, when she was their protective tiger, Leon felt safer than he had ever felt in his life. He had never been a confident man, but with part of his body replaced by a mechanical device, with a hole bored through his chest and arteries of transparent tubing, he had become aware of his vulnerability, his proximity to death every minute of every day. He had hidden in his dark apartment during the year of recovery, cautious about everything from sudden heart-shaking movement to the off chance someone might glimpse his altered body through a window. But now, thanks to Rhona, thanks to Overington and its loopy circus, he had entered a world where difference was celebrated rather than scorned.
LEON WOKE TO shouts and door slams strafing the settled air of the main Overington building. It was five thirty in the afternoon. He had been napping before dinner. He crept toward the common room and peeked around the corner. Minh, the doctor, was doing the same at the doorway of the opposite corridor. Christos materialized from his apartment. He strode straight to the middle of the room to confront Rhona and Kathryn.
“What is going on? I am trying to concentrate.”
“None of your fecking business!” Kathryn shouted. She started to walk toward her apartment but Rhona caught hold of her oversized overcoat and pulled her back to the fireplace.
“Don’t you dare walk out on me like that, girl. I haven’t finished. You are not slinking off until you apologize to him.”
“Fine. I’ll do it in the morning.”
“No, you won’t, because he won’t be here. He’s been fired.”
The sudden silence was broken by Christos. “Who has been fired?”
Ignoring him, Rhona picked up the department store bag from the couch and thrust it at Kathryn. “Here you are. Take it. Was this worth a man’s livelihood?”
“I didn’t fire him—you did. It’s your responsibility.” Kathryn took the bag and bundled it under her arm.
“No, the security firm fired him because he called them in a panic when he lost you. When you slipped away and hid from him. Childish behavior!”
“I need some feckin’ time on my own. I can’t bear always being followed around by these guards. I don’t even want this stupid hat.” She lifted the bag and emptied its contents of mauve tissue paper and crimson wool and ribbon onto the floor.
“Then come to me and I’ll set it up.” Rhona stooped to gather the paper and hat and stuff them back into the bag. “Just don’t run away. That man was terrified, and so was I when the security firm called me. Give me another heart attack and the whole circus will be over because I’ll be in a goddamn coffin.”
Later that night, unable to sleep, Leon wandered out to the common room, where he found Rhona and Christos and Yuri curled up on chairs around a tray with a bottle of whiskey and a barrel of ice. Rhona looked exhausted. She poured another finger of whiskey and rattled the ice cubes around the glass before taking a sip.
“She was silly, sneaking away from her bodyguard like that, but I have to forgive her. The life she’s had . . .”
She told them stories she had heard from Kathryn of growing up on a council estate—a public housing project—in Dublin, running with the local gang that supplied speed to the schools of the area. She was the youngest in the gang, a scrawny girl with the knowledge of every vacant flat, every lane and getaway route, the plate numbers of every unmarked district police car. Her mother worked two jobs: one for the council cleaning flats for the elderly and disabled, the other serving drinks at the local pub. She was trying to get Kathryn and her brother out of there, to save the down payment for a flat or a house over on the other side of Dublin where they could start again without the influence of the gangs that ruled her children’s lives.
It was already too late for Kathryn’s brother. He was two years older than Kathryn, dealing speed and coke to the boys in a private school four suburbs away. He had three warrants out for his arrest by the time he was sixteen. When one of the private-school boys was caught snorting speed by his father, he apologized by informing on Kathryn’s brother, setting up a buy. Two years in juvenile detention, the thinning of his body into something hard and long-muscled, then out and dealing again. Another arrest. Two more years. The lawyer who had been his best customer for cocaine saw him waiting on a bench outside the court for his trial, gave him a pat on the back and hurried off, gown flapping, shiny five-hundred-quid shoes tapping on the stone floor.
The few times Leon had heard mention of Kathryn’s brother from her own mouth, she was heaping scorn on one of his moneymaking schemes.
“Where is your big brother now? Why haven’t we met him?” Christos demanded once. He had introduced nine of his family members as guests to Overington so far. Two bulky shopkeeper brothers and their wives during an uncomfortable week that had Leon hiding in his room reading books, three cousins, a teenage niece. The oldest, his grandmother Yiayia Nina, arrived with a bagful of dolmades that leaked oil from her suitcase in a trail down the driveway. She stayed for three weeks in Christos and Yuri’s apartment, cooking every day, wandering the garden every morning at dawn rubbing rosary beads through her wrinkled fingers and muttering her prayers. When she left, Christos sobbed on the doorstep, waving at the blunt back of the limousine driving her away. He was always telling stories about himself and his family, everything down to the uncle who used to fondle Christos’s penis when he was a boy. “I liked it,” Christos said. “It felt good, no one was hurt. He paid me in chocolate.”
Kathryn shrugged. “I don’t see my brother anymore. He was a friend of my husband.”
Silence. Another of the topics that would never bloom into conversation, at least while Kathryn was around. The crew had discussed the husband when Kathryn wasn’t there. Rhona had dealings with him because he was trying to sue her for a percentage of Kathryn’s income, which Kathryn didn’t know and had no need to know. But the husband’s actions before she escaped him had all been recorded online in media reports and interviews, and the words of friends who wrote about him.
Kathryn’s husband took photos of her skin as the wool emerged. He posed her naked on the floor to document every new growth of wool with a cheap camera and a blinding flash. He filed a lawsuit against the hospital where she had her treatment. They settled out of court for a sum that was never published. Yet when Kathryn arrived at Overington she was penniless. He had taken all the money and lost it in bad investments and partnerships with con men who recognized him for the fool he was. After Kathryn had gone he sold the remaining photos and his story, complete with invented details of her raging sexual appetites and bizarre antics, which he claimed were brought on by the change.
“I didn’t know whether we could rescue her from that humiliation,” Rhona told Leon and Christos and Yuri. The staff had gone to bed, and a soft powder of sadness had fallen in the room, sadness for their old lives and for their new ones. “Everyone had seen everything. Her body was public property. She was shrunken and crushed and barely able to speak. It’s an odd word to use, but she was dishonored. Others had dishonored her and she had no honor left for herself. She made me cry. I decided that even if she could not recover enough to perform, I would have her here with whatever she needed. It took months of quiet and rest, and she’d already worn out two shrinks at the sanatorium before she even got here.”
The Kathryn who shared their life was unrecognizable as that cowed woman in the obscene photos smeared across the media when her change first began. Her husband had snapped her stretched out, curled up, be
nt over in positions a porn star might use. In some he posed her like a fashion model, for reasons Leon couldn’t fathom. Or perhaps those two extremes were the only images of women the husband understood. The early photos showed the wool as a shadow, a dirty smudge appearing on her legs and back. Later it covered most of her body, but angry pink bald patches still shone through on her belly and her shoulders. In the last photos, the wool had grown long and was matted, greasy and ropy. She wore no makeup or shoes. She could have been an escapee from an ancient alien swamp. Leon hated to think about her life with her husband, how it could have turned Kathryn, blindsided by the treatment that caused the wool to grow, into the cringing, dirty, ugly creature who had been exposed to the world in those parodies of glamour portraits.
“But she did recover,” Leon said. “She’s incredible now, so gutsy and beautiful. And a bit scary when she starts with that smart mouth.” Two nights before, she had called him Tin Man and threatened to leave a magnet in his bed. On a bad day she could wither him with a glance.
Rhona patted Leon’s arm, partly to reassure him, partly to correct him. “Underneath, Leon, she is still as flimsy as tissue. Outside—spunky and tough. Inside—still terribly scarred.”
That night as he lay in bed he imagined, as he had in the first days of arriving at Overington, how it would feel to have wool under his fingers. To sense the swell of a breast under soft curly fleece. To reach between warm woolly thighs to find moisture. To rub his cheek along the shorn black ripples of wool and push his tongue into the hollow of her throat where the wool ended and silky skin emerged. But it was a fantasy, not something he wanted to become real. He could imagine her afterward in a rage, unsatisfied, battering him with words, her possibility for pleasure bound tight by the punishing past written into her body. His fantasies were for late at night, for a quick uncomplicated release before sleep.
In the six months he had known her, Kathryn had not been with a man or a woman, had not shown any interest in romance or sex. While Rhona and Christos teased Leon about getting a girlfriend, they never pressed Kathryn. Despite being named as the sexiest woman who had ever lived by a salacious men’s magazine that couldn’t let a week go by without a mention of her, it was as if she had turned her own sexuality off.
Only once did Christos bring up the idea of her meeting someone. “When are you going to find yourself a playboy?” he asked.
Kathryn smiled even as she kept her gaze focused on the book in her lap. “Didn’t you guess? I’m waiting for Pan.”
TODAY MINH LAY on a chaise longue in a finger of afternoon sun beside the elephant house, ankles crossed, face tipped back to catch the sun. She was talking on a phone, and from her lighthearted laugh, Leon guessed she was on the line with Kathryn, who was in Los Angeles talking to producers about a biopic.
The arrival of Minh at Overington had soothed its small fraught world. Leon found it difficult to define exactly what her presence had done, but for one thing he felt healthier, even though she had done nothing but represcribe his medications and run tests and assays. Even Kathryn had relaxed since Minh’s appearance. She and Minh could often be found chatting with their heads bent together, Minh’s black hair glossy and smooth beside Kathryn’s tight woolen curls, or lying on opposite couches reading quietly, or teasing Christos while Yuri fussed around cleaning the wings or working on specifications for the design of Christos’s next project.
Sometimes Leon caught sight of Minh sitting on her camp stool in the grounds, concentrating on a sketch or staring dreamily at something in the distance. In the short time she had been here, her skin had become tawny and fresh as she rambled and sketched the artificial wildernesses of the Overington grounds. Much as Leon wished he could pass by and comment casually on her artwork or on the scenery or even the weather, he had never been comfortable about approaching women, even for an innocent chat. He was sure they would be polite while wishing he’d leave them alone, or talk with him out of pity, or worse, give him a brusque response that left no doubt about their wish to be rid of this annoying bug. “Sad Leon” he used to be called in high school. With his forlorn face, he looked older than his physical age. Sad old Leon. He was brimming with the same wishes and hopes as everyone else, but all that was hidden behind his mournful visage. The women who took the initiative with him were often disappointed too. They had made their move presuming that face reflected a melancholy soul, a tortured poet, but what they discovered was a man of longing, eager to please yet unable to find the right tone or note or pitch to satisfy their expectations.
So, at Overington, Leon skirted around the luminous presence of Minh. He would wave from a distance, bowing with a Prussian gentleman’s dip of the head, then stroll off, hands clasped behind his back, a socially inept idiot.
Seeing Minh today, he performed his stupid nod and pivoted on his heel, ready to head off in the other direction and silently berate himself for his gracelessness, but she called to him.
“That was Kathryn on the phone. She says she’s never going to be a star. They want her to play herself in the early scene of when the wool starts to grow. They can’t understand why she won’t do it.”
Leon stood stiffly to attention on the spot where he had begun to turn away. Should he walk toward Minh? Should he reply and continue on his way? Should he be frank—say that Kathryn deserved more than a hammy biopic? He thrust his fists into his pockets and clenched them for courage before he spoke.
“I think she’s doing the right thing. She shouldn’t have to live through that again.”
“That’s what I said, Leon. I don’t know why she’s even considering this Hollywood film. It must be Rhona’s idea.”
“Or Kyle’s.” Kyle had accompanied Kathryn to Los Angeles. Leon wondered if the whole thing was a ploy for Kyle to spend time alone with her.
Minh cleared her throat. “Would you like to sit down?”
He hadn’t noticed the second chaise longue on the other side of Minh. Of course, she and Kathryn sometimes lay here in the early morning. Soaking up their weekly dose of vitamin D, they said. He walked around behind Minh and eased himself onto the low cedar chaise with its padded cushions. His thighs were tense, a sure sign he was feeling anxious.
He adjusted his buttocks further onto the cushion pad. “It’s comfortable.”
“You sound surprised.” Minh picked up a pair of sunglasses from a basket beside her and handed them to Leon. “You could put these on and lie down. I promise you’ll be relaxed in no time. It works for Kathryn and me. This sheer autumn sunshine—it’s therapy without the talking.”
Thirty minutes later Leon woke with a start. The strip of sun had moved down his body and now lit a stripe across his calves. Minh was sitting up, sketching Maisie and Maximus grazing in a copse of trees to the south, her long legs braced either side of the chaise longue, the sketchbook balanced on the flat of the seat.
“Feel better?” she asked without shifting her gaze from the elephants. Her hand made rapid strokes on the paper as if it were working alone, without her conscious mind.
“Mm.”
“I watched your breathing while you were asleep. I could see you’ve lost some lung capacity.”
Leon yawned and stretched, feeling the shift of tendon and muscle along bone. He was looser than he had been in months.
“Leon, I know you’re not supposed to talk about how you got the heart implanted, but I have to ask. It’s so incredible. Could you maybe tell me about where it was done? I know it wasn’t a hospital. No hospital could have kept you a secret.”
Although Leon had lived in the basement under the university engineering department for a year while Susan and Howard operated on him, the memory of his physical pain had begun to fade as soon as he emerged into the sunlight and caught the train to his hometown. Susan and Howard often appeared in his dreams—after all, theirs were the faces he had watched the way a baby watches its mother’s face, trying to read and understand the language they used and what it might mean for him. But
he pushed the images away. He would never encounter that kind of pain again and he wanted to numb himself against the memory of it. As he became famous and the questions became more persistent about who had made his heart, who had implanted it, where the operation had been performed, he practiced the tricks of detachment he had used early on to avoid reminders of what he had been through. Rhona had told him not to speak to anyone about it, and in truth, he hadn’t wanted to.
But now that Minh had asked, Leon was bursting to tell her how it had been. Something had changed in him. He wanted Minh to know. He wanted her to know how he had changed, even though she had never met Leon before his heart failed, the man who spent his time reading books about how to live and barely doing the living. Minh, with her different way of being in the world, would understand that everything had changed not only for him but in him. He wanted to be known by her.
Still lying on his back on the cushions, with his arm bent across his face, he started to speak and the words rolled out as if they had been prepared for this moment.
“We were in a basement under a university building. A secret basement that had been blocked off, that people had forgotten was there. No natural light, no view, no other people. Just the three of us underground. It was madness. The intensity, the paranoia, the claustrophobia turned us reckless. We were children trapped inside on a rainy day. We played made-up games with rules that changed as we went along. We repeated phrases thousands of times to make each other laugh. The phrase or word had struck us as funny once, so why not stretch that out, spin it fine, twist it, repeat it, upend it. I put together twenty-four elaborate jigsaw puzzles. I learned to do cryptic crosswords. Susan brought me games and toys as if I was a child in hospital.”
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