Christos Tsiolkas is a 57-year-old Greek woman whose face was classically beautiful in her youth (high cheekbones, strong nose, pale brown eyes) but time has gently exploded her, not unkindly, but she goes by Nonna and a massive shrapnel-like mole has exploded off her nose and no-one is quite sure when it appeared but now that it’s there, it’s there.
Her work has been well received under her male pseudonym, leading to his (her) 2008 watershed novel of bourgeoisie adultery, ‘The Slap’. The author’s secret is known only to a few, but her (“his”) unique writing habits have been kept in total secrecy until now.
Christos Tsiolkas writes her novels in protracted, consecutive sessions, quite literally donning her writing cap, the snug, sweat-smooth lining flattening her curly white hair. The cap’s brim is about a foot and a half long, like an oversized shoehorn or Malibu surfboard. Beside her groomed, silvering eyebrows (and above one eye milky with cataracts, the left tiger-eye bright) dangle wine corks on lengths of twine. When she enters her writing trance, she will not leave her typewriter, the crisp, intermittent schlacking of the Underwood mingling with the far-off clattering of trams.
Left to her private world of fucking and sucking, smoking, stroking and coking, Tsiolkas will not budge from behind the manual keys, the long brim of her remarkable cap acting like a horse’s blinders. But from atop the cap, from a strange, verdant terracotta bowl, amidst a Chia-pet-like crop of alfalfa, water runs down the cotton cupola and soaks into the wine-corks, dew-drops glistening on the crusty red edge of the used stoppers.
It is from this that Tsiolkas takes her nourishment, and can subsist in this mesmerised state for months. To some this might seem far-fetched, but the conclusion to our anecdote is stranger still. Somewhere between the idle refillings of her water bowl, and the hurried handfuls of alfalfa, a remarkable moss begins to spread across her hands, perhaps seeded by the hat, perhaps intrinsic to Tsiolkas him(her)self, and spreads dim, steady and metallic, coating the author’s broad knuckles.
Somewhere between the last sentence of a novel and the deep sleep into which this shrouded author slips, two red flowers will form within their diadems of moss, a perfect oval of MDMA clasped within her sleeping palms, dusted like a doughnut with pollen.
the foaming stars crash above 