Sex and violence

** SPOILER WARNING **

Even though I’m extremely interested in psychology and neurology and have had the rare opportunity to delve into them in my day job as a reporter, I’m nobody’s idea of a qualified or established psychologist.

But in developing a character thread for the rewrites that came after the first few drafts of Falling, I hit upon something that worked narratively, even though I admit now I have to somewhat apologise for it culturally.

The hero, Dale, gets a love interest in Vicki. She’s the psychiatrist he’s referred to when he starts to hallucinate and the dreams get worse after he crosses the Harbour Bridge for a job interview, his first crossing since the accident that provides the inciting incident to the whole story.

The pair go to bed (or, more accurately, end up across the desk in her surgery) because he’s a man, she’s a woman and I was a wannabe author in my very early 20s.

The aspect of the character development I feel I have to apologise for is because I was still in thrall to a cyclone of hormones and automatically saw any woman of child-bearing age as a potential sexual object, including the female lead in my own novel. They ended up in bed together because that’s what the hero and heroine do in popular fiction.

Subsequent reworking of the story made me realise how unlikely and frankly insulting such a scenario was, not just to Vicki but the thousands of doctors like her who manage to stay professional.

We all know the stories of thirtysomething Florida schoolteachers having affairs with their 17 year old students, but I wanted not only for Vicki to be smarter and more mature than that but the story to be more realistic. I’m sure very few psychiatrists, no matter how attracted they found themselves to patients, are missing the sense of agency, self-determination and – lets be honest – brains not to sleep with patients mid-treatment.

But I needed Vicki to go to bed with Dale for his sake, for the plot, not because he was a subconscious stand in for me and because the picture of Vicki in my head was of a page 3 girl I was in love with (as I keep telling you, I started writing Falling a long time ago).

So one of the biggest challenges was giving her a reason compelling enough to overcome all the reasons she’d never do anything so dumb and unprofessional, and it came in the shape of past sexual trauma as well as the lightbulb moment where I hit upon the idea of Vicki being the girl Dale was crossing the bridge to meet years back when it collapses with him on it.

Now, I know that makes me sound like a grindhouse film director, taking subconscious revenge on all the girls who laughed at me at school or rejected me in the pub by depicting them being sexually abused or tortured. I swear it’s not like that.

It was a way of humanising Vicki, making her more than just Dale’s casual bang. The reason she gives into her desire is because she has her own trauma about the bridge, just like the tens of thousands who witnessed it (probably hundreds of millions, owing to it happening in the late 2010s).

If you’ve read the story you know Dale is distracted by the beginning of the disaster because he’s on the phone to the girl he’s dating that he’s on his way to meet, listening to her tell him how horny she is and all the spicy things they’re going to do together at her place later.

That girl, as we learn much later in the story, is Vicki, and the breakneck pivot of her sexual desire into the horror when she realises what’s happening does something in her mind.

Of course, it’s revealed later still in story that her connection to the trauma goes even deeper than just witnessing it, but I won’t blow that surprise here.

That means that any thought or memory about the disaster is accompanied by feelings of sexual desire in a kind of Pavlovian response. I know that sounds needlessly and unrealistically salacious, but I did the research and it’s an accepted phenomenon in trauma psychology.

When those awful thoughts and fears arise in her again, the encouragement and release of sexual desire dispels them in her. Hence her sometime after-work practice of downloading porn or reading a sexy romance novel.

Over the years she’s learned to ignore or tamp down those dark thoughts as many of us do – either through the necessary psychotherapy or simply from time healing all wounds – so she doesn’t have them much any more.

But when a survivor of the disaster presents at her office with his own (far worse) trauma about it, those dark feelings bubble and fizz upwards at an alarming rate.

The concurrent desire to bring her sexual desire to fruition in the face of them becomes similarly overwhelming, and Vicki gives into her attraction to Dale in a desperate attempt to stave off the madness they threaten, or maybe takes temporary leave of her senses, depending on your point of view.

I still feel slightly guilty because it makes the sole female character partly defined by sex and her sexuality, but in my defence I worked quite hard to make it all psychologically plausible as well as narratively compelling.

Did I succeed?