Free The Wonders by Paddy O'Reilly

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.
    â€œThey’ll tear me apart again,” she whispered. “They’ll make me out to be a monster.”
    â€œNo, 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?
    â€œIt’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 lowtemperatures 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.
    Kathryn’s other trouble, earlier on, had been that sheep’s wool should be kept in prime condition by the lanolin secreted from the skin. Her skin secreted plenty of lanolin, enough to give her the supple skin of a teenager, but for the first year after her change she was shaving and washing herself constantly. Day after day she continued her obsessive attention to her skin and the wool as if she could make it less conspicuous, less bizarre. She ended up wreathed in scabs and rashes. Her regrowth was brittle. Every time she was caught in the rain she came down with terrible chills because the wool had lost its waterproof quality, and she stayed damp for hours. She was spending everysecond day in the waiting room of her dermatologist. The hospital where she had the treatment that went wrong had provided no aftercare—they spent their time trying to deny culpability and ensure she wouldn’t sue. Which of course she did, or at least her husband did in her name, and he profited bountifully from Kathryn’s affliction.
    Leon had read the articles about her