Forgetting in the digital age

** SPOILER ALERT **

We all know how hard it is to forget.

Not spiritually, literally. I remember the odd conversation with my mother about kids she went to school with, and until she started going to school reunions in her 60s or so, she might never have seen or remembered their names or faces again.

There have been school reunions with my own classmates every 10 or so years and although I’ve never gone to any of them I’ve seen pictures. I can place some faces and some names, but often I can’t put them together or don’t remember the people they once were at all.

That says more about how old I am, but the fact remains that nowadays I can probably remember the name of one friend or classmate, find them on social media, they’ll be in touch with one or two others and it’ll balloon to a network of everybody I went to school with who’s a) on social media and b) still alive. In fact there’s probably a page dedicated to your school year set up by the most conscientious classmate you had. There is for mine.

All of which is a way of illustrating how hard it is to forget people in the digital age. But that was just the conundrum I faced in Falling when it came to the big reveal about Dale and Vicki’s relationship.

As I’ve written about before, the first draft just had a leading lady for the hero to fall into bed with, an unlikely scenario even in the most ideal world as she was a professional psychiatrist and he was her patient.

Firstly I needed a reason for that to happen, and the answer was Vicki’s own dark history and memories about the Harbour Bridge disaster.

Secondly – and most importantly – when Vicki realises she’s actually the girl Dale’s always talked about that he left on the bridge and whose ultimate fate he never learned, I needed to make it even more plausible that two people in their early 20s on the cusp of an exciting romantic relationship could go through trauma so great they not only lose track of each other after the event but forget about each other almost completely.

But it was even more challenging portraying two people going through that in a digital world where it’s so easy to track someone down you know exists but can’t quite remember.

If Dale (or even Vicki) had been so inclined, there probably would have been a Facebook page for survivors of the disaster – even without one, official commemorations and memorials probably would have bought them all together anyway. In this day and age it’d be nearly impossible for them not to cross paths again, especially if they wanted to.

In Vicki’s case, I had to invent a whole subplot about how her trauma was so all encompassing and consuming she spent years recovering, months of that in such a catatonic state she didn’t even know who she herself was, let alone Dale. Judge for yourself if I succeeded;

“Dale,” Vicki said in a pleading voice as she tore her nails dragging herself along, “I’m so sorry.”

Stephanie and the boyfriend she’d gone to meet were all a lie.

She’d been the one on the bridge. Dale had been the one she’d been in love with. He’d been the one she was on her way to meet. They’d talked on the phone, just like he thought, promising all the things they were going to do to each other that evening.

Her excitement at the idea of sleeping with him was suddenly cut off by feelings of unimaginable fear and threat – you didn’t have to be a psychiatrist to understand how they’d become twisted up together in her psyche.

If ever she felt the old familiar shadow of fear about the bridge she’d download a racy novel or watch some dirty video, barely even acknowledging it was the sexual release that pushed the terror back.

Then Dale came along and with him, the roaring terrors about the bridge came back to the surface. At the same time, being lovers had been the only thing to release her from them, the only salve for emotional injuries that were flaring up in her again.

Why else had she thrown herself at him that night during their session, risking her entire career? Why did being in his arms quash the terror better than anything else did?

Because she already loved him, and being alive and together again was the ultimate deliverance from her fear. Everything from the phone call to the flowers had been for her, and she’d wiped them all out of her mind.

In gales of tears of pain, panic and regret, Vicki asked herself why. Why had she been robbed of so many years?

Then, crawling along the highway, the skin of her leg gushing a scum of dirty blood all over her stockinged leg, she started to see why.

Just across from her was a baby seat, apparently thrown from a car, its backrest cracked in half and a small motionless bundle of white rags nearby, dirty from the dust and with a tiny pink hand sticking out.

A young woman not much older than her screamed at Vicki to help her, her entire pelvis and both her legs shattered to pulp under a concrete slab.

An elderly man was climbing out of the back door of a taxi and hobbling as quickly as he could to the other side, helping a woman Vicki assumed was his wife out. They were both aged, frail and would have had little hope of walking off the bridge at all, let alone in the middle of all this. They were utterly doomed, and the terror in their eyes was as raw and naked as anything Vicki had ever witnessed.

A hundred more sights like it – of suffering, terror and death the likes of which hardened war veterans wait their whole careers to see, simply wiped her mind away in a flaring white sheet.

And now every memory that crushing terror had contained for all those years was here. She’d pressed them all down where she couldn’t see them any more and here they were, spewing back out.

Hers was just another miraculous anonymous escape amid dozens of others. She’d simply kept scrambling and crawling, dragging her shattered leg behind her all the way and reaching the northern end minutes before the whole roadway fell into the harbour.

No, she now remembered, she hadn’t made it all the way. Emergency crews had already gathered around the northern pylons, desperately dashing in and out of the carnage to try and pluck the injured out of the bedlam and drag them to safety.

Minutes later, many of them would fall to their deaths along with hundreds of other victims when the highway supports gave way and a thousand tonnes of asphalt and metal crashed into the harbour.

Two ambulance medics had somehow spotted her and rushed in to pick her up. The larger one, a man, had gripped her under the arms and lifted her up while his female partner carried Vicki’s legs, pressing a white cloth gently against her smashed shin to stop the bleeding.

Vicki looked at the woman’s face, one she’d dreamed a million times since. “You’ll be okay,” she’d kept repeating as they hobbled through the wreckage carrying Vicki in their arms, “you’re safe.”

Vicki looked from the woman’s face do
wn to the name badge bouncing against the navy blue of her dusty medic uniform, the royal blue of a deep, clear spring sky.

Her name was Stephanie.

****

Vicki never knew she’d been on the fatalities list for the entire year that followed.

Nobody could say whether she had a purse or handbag carrying anything to identify her. During the desperate moments of rescue before so many more were lost when the road gave way, the emergency services were more concerned with getting the injured out of harm’s way than asking for everyone’s name. Had they asked, Vicki wouldn’t have been able to answer – she hadn’t been able to speak for a fortnight or more and she hadn’t remembered her own name for close to a month – the diagnosis of psychogenic retrograde amnesia had been textbook.

By the time the health authorities had made the connection with her father, who’d come to collect her, work colleagues had enquired desperately and hopefully after her safety with the police and hospitals. No Vicki Holt had been registered, so like thousands of other distraught families and friends they’d accepted she hadn’t made it.

Despite the advances in medical record keeping, the urgency of treatment that followed for so many people was more important that updating official casualty lists, and the error went uncorrected until she was registered into public psychiatric care almost a year later.

She spent the next year in and out of hospitals, the trauma having reduced her to near-catatonia, and suddenly she could see the white walls of the crazy home where she’d spent six months, sitting in a chair and rocking.

She mustn’t have been dangerous. Someone must have said it was okay for her to have a glass vase on the small cabinet against the wall, because on some family visit or other, someone had bought a bunch of flowers she’d left at work the day the bridge fell.

They sat in the vase until they died a few days later, and when they did she kept the small plastic loveheart with the elastic band on the back. She still had it.

Over the long months that followed, barely 22 years old and already a mental patient with a crippling post-traumatic disorder, she gradually crawled out of the place she’d fallen into after what she’d seen on the bridge.

Memories reformed with painstaking slowness. Dale had been one of the ones that never came back in its entirety, leaving only the fragments that drew her to him so strongly they overruled her better judgement.

One that did come back was a woman, a work friend. The woman had died, a stand-in for the memories Vicki’s mind itself had wanted to kill. It packed them up and buried them too deep for her conscious mind to reach, and she started to feel better.

In April 2020 they released her back into her father’s care. As she battled agoraphobia and social anxiety disorder she wondered who was in the pictures on her computer, including ones that had synched from her long-gone mobile and online services. One showed a group of girls with her at a bar, one woman holding a baby. One was of a boy about her age, sitting in a restaurant and smiling wryly as he looked out the window.

For a year the very thought of leaving the house crippled her with terror, let alone trying to discover who the people in the pictures were. Years later, by the time she started her Bachelor of Medicine at Macquarie University, they’d just become faces in pictures and she had a new group of casual friends. But years of blackness and depression dogged her and it wasn’t until she graduated she felt stable enough to have anyone very close – friend or lover.

Her father and those around her knew well enough not to talk about the bridge, about her friend. They knew she didn’t remember any of it, and there didn’t need to be any conspiracy to support her fabricated past because for all Vicki knew, she hadn’t said anything to anyone about Stephanie until she’d told Dale just weeks before.

If she had, nobody had any reason to believe Stephanie hadn’t existed. Not even the psychiatrists who’d treated her. Or maybe the doctors had known Stephanie was a lie and they’d left well enough alone, deciding Vicki would come out of it when she was ready.

Maybe they’d decided she was better off going through life living a fantasy about a dead friend simply so she could function rather than grow old in a padded cell.

Or maybe she’d come up with the story in the years since, filling in the blanks after she was done with doctors and studying.

When it comes to Dale not remembering Vicki, he went through his own healing after his body was broken in the fall that gives the novel its title.

We learn early on that whenever the nightmares get too much he brings out an old scrapbook full of news clippings and other printed memorabilia from the bridge disaster, and that looking through it prompts a memory in his head. It’s the girl he was seeing at the time the bridge collapsed, at some party or work function, wearing a beautiful blue dress and turning to blow a kiss at him.

Despite the memory he still has no idea who she is. He can’t remember a name, and her face isn’t even very clear in the image in his head, so after so many years he’s not sure if the image ever actually happened or if it’s some amalgam of a memory, a scene from a movie or an image from a dream.

But in his curiosity about who she is, Dale would also have had a pretty easy time tracking her down if he really wanted. I couldn’t give him the same trauma-induced memory loss Vicki suffers (cosmic and convenient coincidence much?), so I had to come up with a reason for him not wanting to find whoever she was that’s just as plausible as the one I had for Vicki not finding him. Here’s how;

Under other circumstances he might still have access to pictures of her – it wasn’t exactly the 19th century where you had to dig through paper archives for old daguerreotypes. He’d had plenty on his phone, but that was nothing more than a few rustproof components, probably still strewn across the floor of Sydney Harbour 20 years later along with thousands of others.

He’d also had a couple of pictures in personal folders on the work server, but six months after it was obvious he wasn’t returning to his job, they’d sought his mothers’ permission to remove his account.

Former colleagues had offered to forward the personal data he’d left there, but Dale – more concerned at that point with trying to lift a glass of water without screaming – said no, assuming it would only be old bookmarks, movie files of cats doing funny things and calendar notes.

He might have been able to get pictures of her from her family, but he’d never contacted them. Back when the scrapbook had started to remind him of her he thought of seeking them out, but it was already years later, and as more time passed it became harder and harder to imagine trying to find them. Asking for pictures hardly warranted showing up out of the blue after nearly half a decade.

Except that the scrapbook made him remember how much they were starti
ng to like each other. In the couple of weeks they’d been seeing each other, they’d gone as far as they’d dared in empty train carriages and their own bedrooms. The very day the bridge decided to change the lives of everyone around it, she’d teased him with promise of consummating their desire that night.

Anyway, what if he contacted a family who was still doubtlessly healing and they asked him the same questions he asked himself every time; when she didn’t answer her phone did you run forward to try to reach her? Or did you leave her there to die, all alone?

At some point he admitted he’d probably never try, papering over the shame by convincing himself it was because he had no idea how to track them down. Hadn’t she said her mother had died when she was little? Had she mentioned a brother at some point? He didn’t try too hard to remember.

Some time after that, he just stopped thinking about it. It was when he started to put the scrapbook together that he realised how much of her he’d lost, and the last times he’d looked at the official fatality list none of the female names on it were the least bit familiar.

In writing (and especially rewriting) Falling I came up against several concepts and ideas that tripped me up just as much, about how easy it is to do things in the internet age (or how hard it is not to do things, like find people you once knew).

There’s a movement among screenwriters that acknowledges how much the advent of the mobile phone has changed the horror or thriller movie – when you can just call 000 or 911, either your troubles are over or your movie will only last about six minutes until the cops arrive.

So writers in movies and TV need to come up with ever-more believable reasons why the characters can’t use mobile phones – someone holding their phone up to the sky in desperation and saying ‘I got no bars’ is itself beyond cliche at this point.

It was the same in Falling with Dale, Vicki, their history and how hard it is to forget someone today.