The Wonders (20 page)

“I think you're remembering days that never happened, ma'am. Fame has always paid a high price.” Hap folded the sheaf of papers into a satchel on the table beside him.

Some of the paper letters were handwritten in thick black jagged pen on pieces of writing paper covered in flowers and curly lime tendrils, as if the writer had stolen the precious notepaper of a young teenage girl or found it in a wardrobe in the family home under layers of old tennis rackets and cracked leather belts and shoe boxes of children's treasures. There were pages from printed books with tiny spiky handwriting filling the margins. There were crude animations made on free software, videos with the Wonders' faces clumsily superimposed on the actors, music tributes recorded in fans' bedrooms, photos of guns and other weapons.

Some missives were simply the ravings of mad people and their purpose could not be ascertained. Some were warm and funny. Proposals of marriage abounded, especially for Kathryn and often from men whose skills in charm and romance demonstrated why they were single themselves. Leon had received plenty of proposals himself, several of which, he remarked as he sorted through the pile one night in the common room, were quite tempting. To which Rhona pointed out that the photos
more often than not belonged to someone other than the person writing the letter.

Kathryn caused the greatest upwelling of anger. Early on, one obscure Christian sect had spent considerable amounts of money promoting the idea that she was an incarnation of Baphomet, a half goat who would appear on earth to herald the imminent arrival of Satan. The barrage of ads and billboards and media interviews with church officials was eventually silenced by a lawsuit.

From the most recent surge of threats, the police had expressed serious concern about a particular letter addressed to Kathryn. They had classed it as a top-level alert. They recommended extreme measures. They had already issued an arrest warrant for the letter writer, whom they believed, from similarities in the cases, to have been involved in another episode of celebrity stalking that had escalated to a violent attack. Hap stood at the side of the room, shaking his head.

“I'll say it again, ma'am, I do not think this particular letter is cause for alarm. This guy has been on my radar for months already. He's crazy, sure, he's obsessed, sure, but is he violent? I don't think so. I'm convinced this is not the guy who attacked the actress. I've been doing this work for twelve years. They have the wrong guy.”

“I know you say that, Hap, but can we take the chance?” Rhona crossed her short legs and the star-shaped spurs she was wearing that day jingled with inappropriate cheeriness. “It might be time for us to finish. Today the police say there is another credible threat against Kathryn. Tomorrow it could be Christos or Leon. Your safety is worth far more than money. Should we shut up shop?”

Leon didn't know what to think. Surely Hap knew what he was doing? Minh, sitting beside Kathryn on the wine-colored
vinyl couch, stared at her hands in her lap. She had kissed him for an hour the night before, at the hotel in the desert. He could still taste her warm mouth, tart and sweet at the same time, and feel the heat of her bare skin under his hand. They had planned dinner for two in her cottage tomorrow night. Vidonia promised something succulent and light and irresistible delivered on a tray with roses and champagne. It could be the night that he dared make love to her. If this was all about to end, she might pull away.

As he relived the sensation of her lips moving across his cheek, his throat and then back to his mouth, Minh spoke. “I know it isn't up to me, but shouldn't safety come first? The shows are only about money. Safety versus money, really? Isn't it obvious?”

“But Hap looks after us! He says we're okay.” Leon had to convince everyone to stay, if only to have his arms around Minh again.

Christos shrugged. “No matter what you all decide, I will continue my work anyway,” he said. “Although I suppose I would have to perform on my own. I haven't acquired enough capital to finance my next project.”

“No,” Kathryn said. She rose from the low couch, pulling her cape tightly around her body. “I won't be bullied by some nutter with a Sharpie pen and bad spelling.” She stamped her foot so the slipper with its fluffy purple pompom and kitten heel rapped like a silver hammer on the parquet floor. “No, no, no. I'm not afraid of some pathetic dickless wonder who scurries around in the dark writing grubby letters.” She laughed before flapping her cape like bat wings and putting on a breathy movie-trailer voice. “The Wonders meet the Dickless Wonder—our archenemy, the Moriarty to our Holmes, the Riddler to our Batman.”

Rhona smiled, looking away to hide it from Kathryn. “We do need to take this seriously, darling.”

Leon went back to his apartment after the decision and celebrated with a small glass of Scotch. His relief wasn't only because he had a date the next night with Minh. He had always wondered why wealthy rock musicians kept playing the same old tunes to audiences around the world year after year, why elderly revered actors made more bad films, why businessmen started up new enterprises when their other companies were already spectacularly successful. Now he was starting to experience the real effect of fame. It was a drug. It made you want more. When the clapping and the cheering had faded, you began to look forward to the next time people stared or screamed in awe. Soon you longed for it. It made you feel alive, wanted, charged with power. Without the screaming fans, the overawed juniors, you had to center yourself, and that was much harder. Celebrity and success, he was discovering, were ferociously addictive.

A week later the lunatic letter writer was in custody and charged with stalking. The Wonders were unstoppable. They would go on: with more security, with more restrictions, with more frequent looks over their shoulders. Each performer had a similar goal—enough money to build a new life, either to disappear into or, in Christos's case, to burst out of. They would continue to expose themselves in order to be able to hide away.

F
ASHIONED BY RHONA
as the male heartthrob of the Wonders, Christos posed for photographs with jeans pulled low and his thick hair flopping sexily across one eye. One shoot, which he had complained about for weeks afterward, involved him kneeling above a prostrate woman in a scanty lingerie arrangement, with his wings extended and his head dropped as if he was about to kiss her throat. “Or rip it out,” he said when he saw the shot. That was an ad for one of the first major merchandise launches, the Seraphiel scent for men. Since then Kathryn had released a range of lanolin skin creams, Leon was the poster boy for a Swiss watch company and they were all models for the Wonders action figures. Leon's doll had a windup ticking heart. Kathryn's was clothed in real wool. Christos's figure had two extra moving limbs. Plus electronic games, posters, storybooks, clothing, trading cards, photos, key rings, coffee mugs.

The catalog of merchandise was twelve pages long. A collectable set of figures hand-produced in a limited edition of ten thousand could be had for a mere thousand dollars each.
A range of tiny designer stilettos gave Kathryn's action figure “a whole new look” as she rode in a Lady Convertible or sat in the Lady Suite with the Lady Cocktail Set. Children could construct an oversized working metal heart to learn about cogs, wheels, valves and pumps using the Valentino Mechanics Kit. Naturally it was not a replica of Leon's heart, whose inner workings were still unexplored, but a clockwork machine that ticked and pumped. Christos's pages in the catalog included a soldering iron and metal rods to make facsimile wings.

Kathryn had said they should market a toy art gallery for Christos. “All the kiddies can learn to curate.”

Even Christos laughed.

They were easier with each other these days. Their family-style petty spats and fireworks flared and faded, and Leon had gained enough confidence to ask Christos why he used his body for art.

“Kathryn and I had no choice. We would have died without medical intervention. But sometimes the agony of what I went through during my recovery was so dreadful that I wished I could die. It must have felt the same for you. Why would you choose pain like that?”

“Leon,” Christos said in a voice that belonged in a theater, “the body as our beast of burden is over. The body is an outdated piece of flesh that in its original form inhibits our true expression as human beings, as artists. All human beings can be artists. Every child is an artist. The trouble is that we lose the ability to imagine and create when we are schooled and when we are punished for being children.

“But the body. The body should be the vehicle for the creativity. The mind-body-mind is a canvas for our tattoos, our ornaments, our piercings, our scars, our implants, our replants, our transplants. What is the point of paper and canvas when
we have skin, when we have flesh, when we have a form of self-expression that we carry around as a part of our identity, wedded mindbody, the slippery blood and tissue that holds our consciousness intact? You yourself must understand, Leon, with that heart of yours, that the flow of blood to the extremities of the body must not be taken for granted. The flow of blood to the outer reaches of the body is the only art that has meaning.”

He told Leon how his first work out of art school used the body as a surface for the application of art. An experiment in the body as a palimpsest of the artist's work. Miniature replicas of famous European and Asian paintings were stenciled on his skin in semipermanent ink that would fade as his body aged.

“So the works gained a mortality that is usually denied art,” he explained, “which museums and collectors love to preserve and restore and hide away in grand buildings so that it will not be lost to us. But, Leon, mortality is what makes humans great. Knowing that we will come to an end gives passion, urgency, horror to our desires and drives. So I made mortal art on my mortal body, and we mapped the disintegration, the degradation of the art together with the physical aging of my body over one year. The shedding of skin, nails and hair growing and coarsening, wiry wrinkles etching themselves into the body's contours. With each documentation, the stenciled art had faded and drifted in minute measures across the skin like a tectonic plate. Until one day the images could no longer be identified. And further, further down the track, all that remained were faint blooms of color. That piece, I called
Palliative Art Care
.”

After Leon's first heart transplant failed, his mother's idea of palliative care had been to serve up the dishes he had loved as a child. One morning, she even surprised him with a bowl of crackling Coco Pops in chocolate milk.

What Christos was doing with the wings he still called art,
but when sales of his Seraphiel scent passed five million units, he stopped complaining about being exploited for money and started asking whether it was fair that profits from his scent should be shared among everyone. Was it not his image that sold the product? And his trade name? His sex appeal?

“And didn't I make up your name? And didn't I commission the perfume company and didn't I set up the marketing campaign and, actually, Mr. Seraphiel, didn't I have the goddamn idea in the first place?”

Leon settled back into the couch to enjoy Rhona sending off sparks.

“So if you want me to deduct my fees for all of that, plus the massive penalties for breaking your contract, and then hand over the remaining profits to you, sure. And the others and I will share our ninety-two percent of the great fat trunk of money we're making and you can go fuck yourself. Sound okay, Christos?”

He sniffed and wobbled his head as if he couldn't decide whether to walk off in a huff or stand up to her. After a few seconds he stalked, head held high, out of the room.

That evening he claimed to be too exhausted to perform at the Board of Plastic Surgeons' dinner. Yuri carried out his stage-managing duties with his head bowed, as though he was to blame for Christos's absence. Rhona breathed through her nose all night, short sharp out-breaths punctuated by long loud intakes.

Back at Overington the day after the show Leon and Minh felt the shouting through the walls. Christos's deep voice vibrated through the plaster and timber, followed by Rhona's nasal delivery cutting a track through the air. The following morning, Christos was back on the team, back sharing the income, back doing exactly the same job as before, feigning nonchalance but snapping at Yuri for any tiny misstep.

Minh lay in bed the next night and rested her hand on Leon's arm. She told him that listening to Christos, a man she had respected for his difficult art and his dedication to it, try to justify why he deserved more money than the others had made her ashamed. She had been aware of the maid waiting behind the doorway to clear the plates, Vidonia the cook sweating over the massive stove, after which she would drive home to kiss her kids good night before turning up again at lunchtime the next day. Minh's parents still kept their calls to her short—habit after a lifetime of economy on phone bills and heating and food and everything else so that their children could go to college and enter the adult world buttressed by financial and social capital.