Desperately Seeking Dalton: from monsters to Madonna, the characters you need to know (and the real stories behind them)
Predators and corruption face off against love, courage and desperation in Trent Dalton’s new book – and today he reveals how much of it is based on real events and people in his life.
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Sometimes it’s a surprise to me where a fictional character springs from in my mind.
Sometimes it’s as obvious and natural to me as the tattooed bloke who was sleeping off a bender in the room down the hall of my childhood. The best characters in my first novel Boy Swallows Universe sprang from the dozen or so people in this world whom I love best.
Greta Maze, the razor-tongued blonde bombshell actress from All Our Shimmering Skies, came from a thought I had about Madonna living in the Northern Territory, circa World War II. Yukio Miki, the brave fallen Japanese fighter pilot from that same book, came from a lifelong fascination I’ve had with the story of Sgt Hajime Toyoshima, whose Zero aircraft was damaged in the catastrophic Bombing of Darwin and crash-landed on Melville Island where the pilot was disarmed and captured by a First Nations man named Matthias Ulungura.
The people of Love Stories, of course, were all the wondrous real-world souls who were kind enough to stop and tell me a love story during the two months I spent sitting with a typewriter on a Brisbane street corner.
Love Stories, in fact, became a research project for my latest novel, Lola in the Mirror. I’d sit on that corner all day, studying the people of my city, and from all that meditative thinking slowly sprang the fictional heroes and the villains of Lola in the Mirror, some of whom I’m thrilled to introduce today.
I’m not going to declare here which characters are “good” and which are “bad”, or even worse than bad. In my book worlds, as in my real life, the good can always turn bad and the bad can always come good. I always prefer to leave all final character assessments up to the most important person in the writing process: you, the reader.
THE GIRL IN THE VAN BY THE RIVER
The nameless 17-year-old girl at the heart of the story. She’s been raised on the run without a name because her mum always believed that real names were dangerous for real little girls on the lam. I sometimes think of her looking like a teenage, skate-punk sister of Madonna’s character in Desperately Seeking Susan. She processes the mysterious traumas of her past through increasingly unsettling ink sketches. Some call her “Liv Bytheriver”. Some call her “Di Bytheriver”. She would prefer it if you called her “The Artist”.
LOLA IN THE MIRROR
She’s the beautiful woman in the red dress who the girl by the river can see in the magic mirror she found in a council kerbside collection. She’s well-travelled and wise and nothing she says is a lie because, for better or worse, mirrors can only give us the truth.
CHARLIE MOULD
The best friend a girl could ever have in a world of angels and demons. He makes a living delivering drugs to the elderly across the suburbs of Brisbane on behalf of his boss, Flora Box. He’s a 19-year-old alcoholic whose sunken chest and Christmas candy cane arms and legs were formed by a strict diet of Ritz crackers, Laughing Cow cheese triangles, Riverstone roll-your-own tobacco and McWilliam’s Royal Reserve Dry Sherry – two litres for $15 flat. He’s got a drinker’s rash creeping across his forehead and neck. That head of Charlie’s might just have worked for old Hollywood: bouncing and full brown hair, dark green eyes and a lawsuit smile. The rest of him is pure Brisbane river rat.
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ROSLYN
Toothless matriarch of the scrapyard called Oz – there’s no place like home – where our nameless hero has found a family amid Brisbane’s homeless community. Roslyn is 72 years old and battling a lifelong sugar addiction. She lives in a blue 2002 Honda Jazz. ‘She’s a bit of a fixer-upper,’ Ros always says when she’s giving new friends a tour of her four-wheeled home. She has six shirts in her boot, two head torches in her glovebox, eight teeth in her mouth and one forty-seven-year-old daughter in Manly, Sydney.
FLORA BOX
Sometimes known as “Lady Flo”, Flora Box runs the Ebb n’ Flo seafood wholesalers shed on Canoe Street, a short walk from the scrapyard our hero calls home. She loves her son, Brandon, as much as she loves Christmas. And there’s no better Christmas gift for Lady Flo than the contraband treasures concealed in the iced Malaysian yellowtail stored in the back of her seafood shed.
DANNY COLLINS
The boy in the photograph inside the room inside the mansion inside the impossibly bright city of our hero’s wildest dreams. (Breaking my own rule here: I think you’ll like Danny).
PABLO PICASSO
Our hero finds the Spanish genius painting a human heart beneath the William Jolly Bridge. Our girl asks the innovative painter how she might ever achieve her dream of exhibiting her drawings in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. “First, you must weep,” the great artist replies.
DETECTIVE GEOFF TOPPING
Dedicated cop. Husband and father of two girls. She doesn’t know it yet, but Detective Topping’s more than likely going to represent the only hope our hero has of ever leaving her home by the river alive.
EVELYN BRAGG
She’s the tireless manager of the West End drop-in centre, The Well. This fictional shelter was inspired by the very much real and iconic Brisbane drop-in centre in Fortitude Valley, 3rd Space. For almost 50 years, 3rd Space has been serving 3500 meals a month to Brisbane’s homeless and at-risk. I’ve been journalistically documenting 3rd Space for 15 years in various newspaper articles, music and film projects and a book of short nonfiction stories called Detours, in which I interviewed 20 regular 3rd Space clients about the single moment – the detour – that set them on the path to chronic homelessness. So many of those detour moments were not related to drugs and drink, as common opinion often suggests. More often than not these moments centred around tragic misfortune and irrecoverable childhood trauma. These interviews very much inspired characters and events in Lola in the Mirror.
BRANDON BOX
Muscle for his mum, Flora Box. Not to be messed with and not to be trusted. He and the girl in the van have history. All of it gross.
FR JOSEPH KIKELOMO
The Nigerian priest who runs the St Peter the Apostle Church. He gave away his favourite green cardigan to wrap it around a junkie who needed it more than him. “This cardigan will be your armour,” Father Joe said. “Your armour of light. When you wear this armour, you will feel strong. Maybe even strong enough to forget about that final fix.”
THE PRIEST
Glenn Ash got the nickname, “The Priest”, inside the Sir David Longland Correctional Centre, Wacol, after he unsuccessfully tried to hang himself at the age of nineteen on a stretch of razor wire. The wire left jagged pink scars that, at the age of twenty-one, he had a prison tattooist cover with a black band with a white square at his Adam’s apple, which made it look like he was wearing a priest’s clerical collar. This was a wry prison gag, based on the widespread knowledge in the jail that Glenn Ash would be the last man on earth to live a life free from sin.
ESTHER INTHEHOLE
She of the Kangaroo Point “Intheholes”. Esther lives in a concrete hole beneath the St Peter the Apostle Church. She’s a recluse who only comes out at night to scavenge the night-time streets of West End, Brisbane. Her dreams and her nightmares have a way of coming true.
Lola In The Mirror by Trent Dalton will be published by Fourth Estate on October 4. As the book everyone will be talking about soon, it is only fitting that it is our new Book Of The Month; and you can get it for an incredible 47% off the RRP at Booktopia.
Come tell us what you think and check out video from Trent at the Sunday Book Club group on Facebook. And catch Trent’s tour around Australia, starting next week harpercollins.com.au/trentdalton/
Originally published as Desperately Seeking Dalton: from monsters to Madonna, the characters you need to know (and the real stories behind them)
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