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CHRISTOS
TSIOLKAS
THE
WONDER
LOV E R
MALCOLM
KNOX
FICTION
16/03/2015 10:37 am
THE
WONDER
LOVER
MALCOLM
KNOX
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products
of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual
events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
First published in 2015
Copyright Malcolm Knox 2015
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in
any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior
permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968
(the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever
is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational
purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has
given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.
Allen & Unwin
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Email: info@allenandunwin.com
Web: www.allenandunwin.com
Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available
from the National Library of Australia
www.trove.nla.gov.au
ISBN 978 1 76011 250 9
Text design by Design by Committee
Set in 13/19 pt Bulmer by Bookhouse, Sydney
Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
C009448
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ONE
First Love
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1
When we were very young, our father sat on the end of our
bed to unload his sack of stories.
He clicked out our light. He would not begin until we
had shut our eyes. The darkness confirmed his lack of scent,
either animal or cosmetic, an absence that seems odder to
us now than then. Being unable to smell him in the dark
never struck us as unusual. Fathers had no aroma.
I am waiting, he said.
Scent was not all he lacked. He had no outstanding
peculiarity of voice or appearance, no distinguishing timbre
or taste, no feel that might embed him, like a splinter, in a
strangers memory. Neither coarse nor smooth, bitter nor
honeyed, ugly nor handsome, a golden mean of averageness,
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MALCOLM KNOX
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And then a third other might have been able to track him
down, sniff him out.
Now we are not so young, we are inclined to look at it his
way. In his phantomness, there was no lack, no deprivation.
Nature had set him free. By giving him nothing, it had
granted him his licence.
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MALCOLM KNOX
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It was not every night that this visitation happened, only every
night he was with us. When we were babies, our mother told
us, he had been with us every night, every week, and he had
talked us into sleep with his stories. But we couldnt have
been able to understand him then, nor can we remember
such a time. Telling his stories to babies, he must have felt
he was talking to himself. Every night! We only remember
him being an occasional visitor, like the man who comes to
leave money for teeth. To have had him every night seems,
like infancy itself, a marvel.
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By daybreak, he was not the man we remembered from the
night before. He was still the kindest and sweetest father a
child could hope for, but he sat at breakfast with a stillness
and such silence that sometimes we couldnt help wondering
if we had done something wrong. He wore his ironed white
shirt, a grey tie, suit trousers and polished black shoes. His
hair, so blond it was grey or so grey it was blond, lost in a
house-painters colour chart between warm and cool whites,
was combed and lacquered across his freckled pate. He
was leaving.
Desperately, as if to hold him on a faint telephone line
before it cut out, we tried to reach back to the magic from
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the night before. I heard the last story, Adam said. The boy
of my age who walked to the South Pole.
No, said Evie, I heard that one, but there was another
one after it, the hot-air balloonist who flew to the sun.
The truth was that neither of us had heard these stories;
instead we were pretending to have been the one who had
stayed awake the longer. But these stories of ours were not
false either, because even if they had not been spoken they
grew from the truths he had sown and watered with his
voice as we fell into a sleep that was not a blankness or an
oblivion but a kind of fecundity.
He knew this, so he would not correct us or tell us we
were making things up. He nodded along and spooned his
Cornflakes from his bowl (servings of one hundred grams,
levelled to the higher of two painted cornflower-blue circles
at the rim of the bowl, milk poured precisely to the level
of the lower circle). Thirty-three spoonsful per sitting. But
while he accepted our enthusiasm for prolonging the game
of the previous night, he wouldnt indulge fiction-making.
He felt a responsibility to reel us back to the real. Bound by
facts, married to truth, he said, What do you know about
Cornflakes?
Invented in 1898, Adam said.
No! said Evie. The current recipe, with sugar, was
invented in 1903. The sugar was to reduce spoilage! She
beamed at our father, who issued a single nod.
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like this, our parents, it filled us with a warm joy that burst
and flooded us from inside.
He waved us a general goodbye. While we stayed in the
kitchen and fixed our breakfast, our mother escorted our
father through the living room to the front door. We heard
their brief murmur of conversation and the loud smack of lips.
He kissed our mother on the mouth if she was not wearing
lipstick, considerately on the cheek if she was. We would
memorise their kisses. She would come out of them with
her mouth slack, the shape of an inverted kidney bean, and
her eyes momentarily dazzled, as if zapped by an electrical
charge and transported to another time. Sometimes, when
she was wearing lipstick, he would give her a fairy kiss on her
lips, light as a brush and so tender it kept us going, like fuel.
The rotary cough of his car starting, the whine backing up
the driveway. The intake of breath as his car paused on the
streethas he changed his mind? is he coming back?but
no, just trouble with the gear stick as he wrenched it from
reverse to go forth, to the world.
He would be gone for weeks, to his offices in other cities
and other countries. This was what his work required. This
was its ironclad magnetism. He was a man of significance
to people in the four corners of the earth. He was needed in
so many places, for such important duties, that we counted
ourselves fortunate to have our slice of his life. Our mother
never demurred about the extent of his travels, and we
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3
At his office in the second city, the city which was his next
stop after ours, a city thousands of miles away, he was just
as important and respected and essential as he was in his
office in our city. Some features of his work needed to follow
a ruthless standardisation: everything in each office and in
the application of his duties had to be reproducible elsewhere.
Otherwise, the whole enterprise would have no meaning.
Every last detail was regulated. Apples, he liked to say, must
always be measured against apples. Laxtons Superbs must
never be compared with Blenheim Oranges! (What other
children could boast of a father who could not only name
the seven thousand five hundred cultivars of the apple, but
make jokes with them?) As the Authenticator-in-Chief for
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The two men who walked on the moon for seven hours
and thirty-seven minutes.
The fifty-five elephants who danced together on a stage.
The train that ran as straight as a beam of light for nearly
five hundred kilometres.
And in this other home he also had two children, a boy
and a girl. They had our names, Adam and Evie. Adam
Wonder and Evie Wonder. They attended, as we did, the
free government school nearest the house. Our father and
our mothers could not afford to be choosy. These children,
Adam and Evie Wonder, are also us and we are they.
The morning he left, he ate his breakfast: Cornflakes
levelled at one hundred grams, milk poured to where it was
just visible beneath the float of the lowest Cornflake, thirtythree spoonsful. He kissed them, us, goodbye, and kissed
his wife, her, the mother, our mother, goodbye, because
his work demanded that he go off, as he must always go, to
another city.
In this third base, he had an office that mirrored in
every respect, down to the carpet and the wall paint and
the furnishings, his offices in the first two cities. Apples
with apples: he was the Authenticator-in-Chief. Once one
detail varies, he liked to say to his staff, no matter how
trivial-seeming, the whole edifice will fall. The enterprise
is, he said, a house of cards. The principle of identicality is
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had the same names as the two children in the second city.
They, we, are Adam and Evie Wonder.
But they were not quite we. This third Adam had been
born with a cleft in his palate and a bifurcation in his upper
lip; this Adam needed doctors. And the third Evie, the baby,
was unable to hear. Evie could hear none of his stories. Evie
needed more doctors.
But still, at night, he sat at the end of Adams bed while
Evie squirmed in a cot. Our father waited until our eyes
were closed so he could unload the sack of stories he brought
home from his work.
And because we could not ask questions, he indulged
himself, and talked us to sleep with the superlatives that he
himself enjoyed the most.
The tallest mountain measured from its base in the
bottom of the sea.
The planets largest liquid body.
The largest subglacial lake.
The oldest continuous ice core.
The highest clouds, the longest lightning flash, the
thickest density of crabs, the fastest fish, the rarest primate,
the smallest burrower, the most dangerous pinniped. The
superlatives that lived whether humans were here to measure
them or not: his favourites.
Evie could not hear him. Adam could not understand
him. But we went to sleep to the sound of his stories.
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And so, this was how he went. This is the portrait of our
father: it is easy to draw because it is perfectly (ruthlessly!)
standardised. No matter what the city, the same perimeters
surrounded him. That was how he built it. We are we. With
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4
He was trusted around women: by women, by their husbands
and fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers, by their
sons and daughters and nieces and nephews, by the process
of authentication itself. He had had to dismiss a junior
Authenticator for an impropriety involving a female claimant,
a moment of weakness during the measurement of an attempt
to break the world record for the worlds longest kiss; three
hours short of the record, this Authenticator had suffered an
epiphany: after scrutinising the womans lips for twenty-seven
hours, he had fallen for them. Or not her lips as such, for
they were invisible; he became besotted by the space he could
not see, the gap between the womans lips and her partners
(a friend, not a boyfriend; no passionate relationship could
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Knox explores the inner life of men with both surgical insight and
heartfelt compassion . . .
Michael McGirr, The Age
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. . . there are not many men who can write like this, so poetically
and with such immense complexity, about friendship, jealousy,
insecurity, middle age and death wishes.
Weekend Australian
Knoxs great strength is his ability to get beneath the surface of his
characters, into the dark, private recesses of their minds.
Liam Davidson, Weekend Australian
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