Connecting with the real world

One of the most fun parts of writing a book like Falling is establishing a character by placing them in the context of events and places from the real world.

I couldn’t tell you why it’s appropriate to do for some characters and not others. Dale gets a perfunctory introduction early in the story simply because at that point he’s the only one in it. And by ‘perfunctory’ I don’t necessarily mean short, I just mean slightly mechanical, simply because it has to be there by necessity so you know what happened to him 20 years before.

I never had an extended introduction for Vicki, and it was only in later rewrites that I introduced aspects of her character that pertained to her role in the story (like the scar on her shin and her perpetually troubled tailbone). Even when I did so, they were character elements depicted in relation to what’s happening to her at the time rather than stuff about her past.

Donald, the metallurgist Dale’s doctor recruits to investigate the bridge engineering and architecture, was a little bit the same; I had to give him a past involving the horror movie that scared him as a kid and the bridge collapse where he lost his mother to make the phenomena he witnessed personal to him (as supernatural occurrences are to everyone in the story).

Out of everyone in the cast, I gave extended character introductions to Barry Paul, Dale’s orthopaedic specialist, and Tim Hacker, the parapsychologist Vicki hires who ends up not just pivotal to the story but one of the closest allies Dale has.

Why? I couldn’t tell you. Just something the muse breathes in your ear when you’re in the thick of it.

It might be an unconscious reaction to what’s come immediately before. Looking back over the text, the extended sequence that introduces us to Tim is preceded by the intensive scene of Barry testing Dale’s computerised spinal implant with specialised equipment. It’s a sequence full of bold text and heavy technical jargon, and maybe as the writer I wanted a complete change of pace in the next chapter, even before I realised the reader might.

The story of Tim’s corrupt and thoroughly nasty industrialist father and his former model mother wasn’t really anchored to specific events, and I invented several large, national-level businesses to give it context, but I really enjoyed going back through the past to detail his rise through the corporate world, how it was based on extortion and blackmail, how he had a long history of sexual harassment and possibly even murder, and how Tim’s mother managed to escape him with her son against all odds before it was too late.

A similar scene about Barry’s background isn’t even his introduction. We’ve already met him and he’s been in plenty thus far, so that might lend even more credence to the theory that doing so was for a change of dramatic pace as much as any other reason. The set piece that precedes it is where Vicki drives across the bridge with Dale to test his reactions in real time – with disastrous consequences.

It’s the story of Barry’s grandfather, a British Army deserter during the Korean War who bribes and hides his way on various merchant and military ships to Japan and then Melbourne, fleeing to inland NSW to hide from the authorities he knows will be looking for him.

It’s a sordid story of teen pregnancy, itinerant life, the Jewish diaspora, small town love and even the 9/11 attacks, situating Barry where we meet him in the present day story.

In fact I enjoyed constructing it so much I thought I’d share it with you right here because I think it makes an affective short story in itself;

Barry Paul was a second generation Australian. His parents had met in the southern New South Wales town of Cooma, his mother’s family – Romanian Jews – having fled there to escape the Nazi advance in 1944 before she was born.

Barry’s paternal grandfather Francis was a British soldier stationed with the UN forces in Japan in 1951. The fighting across the Japan Sea in Korea had become entrenched with Macarthur bombarding the whole region mercilessly, and there were murmurs of joining the front any day.

When his regiment got their orders to ship out, he offered an entire week’s pay to an old man transporting grain on a donkey-drawn wagon to escort him to the ports at Kagoshima. Once there he bribed his way onto a huge fishing ketch bound for Tokyo, where he knew an American navy ship was leaving to carry damaged munitions to Melbourne for repair in a few weeks.

He spent four days belowdecks sleeping on crates and eating scraps from the rubbish hold, the stench of fish guts, rotting wood, soppy rags and his own stale excrement his only company.

Once in Tokyo harbour, Francis dived off the ship before it berthed and swam half a mile through 6ºC water to the USS Minnesota, stowing away by climbing up the algae-slimed anchor chain.

The craft was covered with servicemen and as it wasn’t under combat alert life was pretty casual, so Francis didn’t need to take a lot of care moving around. He ate on his own in the ship’s mess area and slept on deck or in a lifeboat, staying mostly out of sight.

Sneaking off the ship in Melbourne, he used his remaining cash (American dollars, which everyone was accepting in the big Australian ports owing to the number of yank sailors around) to get a seedy room in Flinders Lane and patronise the services of a young prostitute named Dolly.

He won enough for a train fare to Brisbane by betting his wristwatch in a game of backgammon, getting off in Sydney and boarding an inland train to further hide his tracks, aware that by then the British Army would have a court martial waiting for him.

He eventually found his way to a small town named Cooma and obtained work doing odd jobs at a local farm under a false name.

It didn’t take Francis long to seduce his employer’s 15 year old daughter, who’d been taking his lunch into the fields for him every day. Barry’s father was conceived in a hay pile in the farm’s small supply barn. In October 1951 the terrified young girl told him she was pregnant and that night he disappeared, travelling further west and out of the Paul family history.

Francis actually spent the rest of his life between Alice Springs and Kalgoorlie making money droving, farming or whatever living he could scrape off the harsh central landscape.

At around Christmas 2000 the Kalgoorlie Herald ran a feature story on him, calling the secret war deserter a ‘local icon’. The young female reporter sent to his home to do the interview had gushed enthusiastically – it had been her first job away from the copy desk – until he’d propositioned her. That part didn’t make it into the article.

Francis died quietly of heart failure on September 12, 2001 watching the endless replays of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington DC on TV, nobody ever knowing the United Kingdom still had a 50 year old warrant for his arrest.

Barry’s grandmother, having just turned 16, died during childbirth. Her parents reared the baby as their own, giving it their adopted western name of Paul rather than their Romanian surname of Pavel and the first name Christof, after his mother’s teddy bear and favourite toy as a girl.

Christof worked on the farm until he was seventeen, when he began courting the daughter of the Australian family who owned the tobacco shop. They fell in love, married in November 1969 and moved to Sydney, giving birth to four children. The last child, born in 1978, was named after the father who’d raised Christof – Barry.

Barry had decided before he was even in his teens that he wanted to be a doctor. He graduated from high school in 1996 and completed his first degree in 2001, just days after his unknown grandfather died a few thousand kilometres to the west of him.

After working as a GP for five years he went back to school to get his masters in orthopaedic medicine and made a good living as a specialist. He worked with several partners over the next decade and a half before establishing his own clinic in 2019, barely months before the Harbour Bridge collapse.

The experience of working with other doctors had given Barry the idea of putting together his own speciality practice covering all aspects of back and spinal care. He’d toyed with the idea for nearly ten years, simply too busy with patients to do much about it, until he’d finally written his article over the course of the last half of 2036. It detailed a business model he’d figured out with his accountant for setting the business up around the various rebates and labyrinthine financial apparatus of the private health funds and government health authorities.

Barry was more or less happy with his career. It at least proved a respite from his marriage. His beard and hair were greyer and he knew he’d aged too much for his wife to be interested in him any more, which suited him fine – she was always more interested in her highbrow friends and dinner parties than him.

The turning point had come over ten years before at one of his wife’s pretentious charity events. She’d introduced him to a nervous young man, a merchant banker or some bloody thing and later that evening he’d chanced to look out the kitchen window and had seen the young man sitting undressed on the edge of the spa beside the pool. The mans’ back was turned but Barry could plainly see his wife’s head moving up and down in the man’s lap while he played with her hair lovingly.

Barry had spent the next few days trying to be infuriated but found he didn’t really care. He had no doubt she’d been fucking half her yuppie clique for years. Driving home from work one night soon after he’d pulled into the rear car park of a brothel in Blakehurst, gone inside and had the best goddamned screw of his life.

So now, like millions of other middle aged men in the western world, there was nothing in his life but his work. He had a house a stone’s throw from the water in Coora Road, Yowie Bay, decorated by a wife he hardly spoke to except to fight with. She’d been a beautiful young woman once, a charity co-ordinator in the health sector. They’d met at a medical conference on the Gold Coast, where he’d spent half the night getting her drunk and the other half banging her for all he was worth in his hotel room.

They’d loved each other once, then just lived together, and now… it was just too late to change their ways and do anything about it.