The Minor Character by Will Self

Cathy McCluskey came through the glass door and leant against me — she smelt of Arpège and ripe Camembert, in that order.

'Giss a snog, Will,' she slurred, insinuating an oddly chilly hand under and up my shirt

“Giss a snog, Will,” she slurred, insinuating an oddly chilly hand under and up my shirt.

“C’mon, Cathy.” I disengaged myself and holding her by her bare elbows looked down on the crown of her head and the protrusion of her dewy top lip. “You’re just drunk — you love Gerry.”

“Love?” She snorted. “He doesn’t know the meaning of the f***ing word.” Later Rob and Teddy Brookman drove me and Phil Szabo home in their Jaguar. There was the usual I’ll-drive-no-I’ll-drive, then we were all happily sheathed in the cream leather upholstery and humming past discount furniture warehouses.

Teddy took her hands off the wheel at one point — and I remember this quite distinctly — in order to describe the shape of her friends’ sadness, saying: “I’m worried about the pair of them, aren’t you, Will?” And I said: “Oh, I expect they’ll muddle through.”

It was the following winter that Teddy was diagnosed, and after she’d had the double mastectomy she was determined to have a good time.

In May, she and Rob took a couple of boxes at Glyndebourne and invited the whole crowd down to see Werner Herzog’s production of Die Walkure. I remember standing in the rose garden — more than a little bored at the prospect of all that Wagner — and Teddy coming out of the rhododendrons brandishing a spear. She was wearing a winged helmet and a metallic corset equipped with conical breasts.

Dora Vignole laughed so hard she had a coughing fit; Bettina Haussman took photographs while Teddy and Rob — who was similarly attired — struck poses. The McCluskeys were late and looked like they’d been rowing. Phil Szabo went off to find a corkscrew. Johnny Freedman took me to one side and asked whether I had life insurance, but I didn’t let him get to me — it was a magical evening, and we all felt that with chutzpah like that, Teddy must already be in remission.

It must have been a fortnight or so later that Gerry McCluskey called me up in tears.

“Cathy’s left me, Will,” he sobbed.

“Oh, Jesus, Gerry, that’s dreadful.” I mustered the necessary compassion, although I was pre-occupied at the time by the suspicion that the builders who were converting my garage into a studio were ripping me off.

“That’s not the worst of it,” Gerry blubbed on.

“No?”

“No! It’s Johnny she’s gone off with!”

I was surprised — but pleasantly so — when I discovered how grown-up they were all being about it. Cathy and Johnny moved into a mansion block in town, and the kids, who were six and 11, spent weekends with them.

“I didn’t want them uprooted,” Cathy said, when I went round for Sunday lunch three months after the split.

“I must say, it’s quite a view you guys have here,” I said, standing looking out over the bronzed and golden crowns of the autumn trees in the park.

“It was an investment originally,” Johnny said, coming in with Phil Szabo, who had a tray of sherry glasses. “But what with the way the market is, I thought we might as well make use of it. Still, there are opportunities to be had — ”

“Oh, shut up, Johnny,” Cathy said, biting his neck in a way that was at once shockingly carnal and distinctly perverse.

I looked on open-mouthed, but said nothing — then the bell rang and we could hear the McCluskeys’ 11-year-old shriek: “Dad-eee!”

“I think you’ll be amused,” Bettina Haussman husked in my ear, “to see what Gerry’s been up to.”

“Really, why’s that?” I turned to face Bettina and saw that she had a bruise on her neck in exactly the place where Cathy had nipped Johnny.

“He’s come out,” Bettina growled. “A bit.”

It was one of those Sunday lunches that went on and on, then merged with tea. I didn’t leave until it was dark out, carrying with me the image of Gerry McCluskey, stroking his new glossy-brown goatee while clicking his way through a carousel he had loaded with old-fashioned slides of their six-year-old, Reggie, whose birthday it was that week. Much hilarity had greeted the shots of the McCluskeys taking mud baths at Barton on Sea. Everyone was laughing — especially Teddy and Rob; everyone, that is, except Dora Vignole, who was coming out of the bathroom as I opened the front door, an expression at once murderous and frightened on her swarthy, angular face.

I walked across the park with Phil Szabo, but we parted at the main gates — he said he was meeting a friend in a pub nearby.

Gerry said I should come down to the cottage at Barton for New Year’s Eve, and so I arranged to pick Bettina up from her flat in the Barbican and give her a lift. Clearly she’d forgotten, because when I arrived she didn’t answer the door for a long time; then, when it swung open she was in a bathrobe, looking both furtive and hung over.

I would’ve continued, were it not for the sight of Cathy McCluskey, naked save for a flesh-coloured bra, and sprawled across the bed

She was reluctant to let me come in while she got ready, but I barged past her, crying: “For Christ’s sake, Bettina, I’ve known you for 20 years — how many times have I crashed out on the bloody carpet?”

And I would’ve continued, were it not for the sight of Cathy McCluskey, naked save for a flesh-coloured bra, and sprawled across the double divan bed under the venetian blinds, her feline body striped dark with shadows and clawed white with stretch marks.

“Okay,” Bettina drawled, leaning against the taupe-painted wall, her arms crossed. “Had your fill have you, Will?”

Cathy groaned and levered herself up by one elbow. “Who is it?” she asked.

“Only peeping Will,” Bettina said, then, picking up the duvet from the floor she tossed it over Cathy, so that for a split second it hung in the air above her like a soft and amorphous ravager.

I was much less embarrassed than they thought I was — and much less intrigued as well. Nevertheless, the drive was spent mostly in silence. I’d never been to the McCluskeys’ “cottage” before — and it turned out to be something of an ironic ascription, given that it was in fact a Victorian rectory with nine bedrooms.

I suppose Gerry had long since absorbed the blow, and he seemed genuinely pleased when Cathy pecked him on the cheek and then ambled off through the rather gloomy, damp-carpet-smelling rooms in search of their kids. There was a platoon of champagne bottles standing to attention on the scullery table, and Bettina picked one up and rolled it across her broad, freckled forehead, leaving behind a smear of watered-down foundation.

Upstairs I found the Brookmans had the bedroom next to mine, and that we would be sharing a bathroom. Teddy already had a glass of champagne, and Rob was recumbent on the bed with the half-empty bottle beside him.

“Shit, I know all about that,” Teddy said when I told her about Cathy and Bettina. “It’s been going on for an age. Honestly, Will, sometimes I think you must be blind. Speaking of which, d’you wanna see my scars?”

I looked over at Rob, but he only raised his eyebrows with an expression somewhere between resigned, exasperated, and amused.

“I can hardly accuse you of ogling my wife’s tits, can I?,” he said. “Not now that she hasn’t got any.”

Teddy had shrugged off the top half of her dress and her chest was a smooth as a young boy’s, the tan nipples almost recessed. “Look,” she said, “that devilishly clever surgeon hid the scar tissue under my rib bone.” She took my finger in her hand and ran it along the hard rind of the scar, and somehow, in my mind, this was linked with Cathy’s splayed form on the bed at the Barbican — as if this were the foreplay that should, logically, have preceded it.

Installed in the linoleum drear of the rectory’s kitchen, Gerry’s boyfriend, Miguel, had conjured up enough tapas for 20 — even though we were only half that number. The dishes kept coming: chicken livers wrapped in bacon, squid soused in vinegar, potato croquettes, mini paellas, boquerones. Everyone ate too much — everyone drank too much. It wasn’t until it was nearing midnight that we noticed Phil Szabo hadn’t arrived — and then he called: he was stranded in Christchurch, but unfortunately nobody was sober enough to go and get him, so he had to walk the seven miles to the house, and arrived, cold but exhilarated, at about 3am. “I passed Dora and Johnny down on the beach,” he said as he came in to the drawing room. “I do believe they were stripping off for a swim!”

That summer I went out early each morning with Derek Vignole, who kept a double scull at a boathouse on the riverside at Putney. The first time I tipped up Derek laughed at my blue canvas deck shoes.

“You won’t be needing them, sport,” he chuckled. “It’s much better if you row barefoot, that way you get to feel the heft of her.”

I discovered what he meant soon enough: the scull sat as lightly on the river as a water boatman, and our four sweeps sent it scudding forward with scarcely a ripple. It felt as if the surface tension of the water was brushing against the bare soles of my feet.

I’d always been more friendly with Dora than Derek, and hadn’t spent much time alone with him in the past, yet it turned out that his superficially bluff — even prosaic — manner hid a keen intellect and a poetic sensibility. He was one of those men who’d read a great deal, yet wore his erudition extremely lightly. Most mornings we left Putney at 6.30 and were rounding Eel Pie Island an hour or so later. I wasn’t fit enough to row and talk; Derek, however, kept up a steady stream of observations, anecdotes, and even lengthy quotations from the great poets, his words coming from behind me, as if fed through invisible earphones.

It sounds oppressive, put like that, but it was actually something of a revelation, and I realised towards the end of July that in his funny, gruff way, Derek had targeted me as someone in need of a little late re-parenting — and for that I was grateful. He was going to La Spezia with Dora for all of August, to stay with Bettina Haussman. And although I knew the Brookmans, the McCluskeys, and Phil Szabo were going as well, for some reason Bettina hadn’t invited me.

I tried not to feel put out, and made arrangements to go on a watercolour-painting trip with Miguel. Then, on our last morning sculling together, Derek angled the prow towards Eel Pie Island and said: “I’ve got a little surprise for you. I didn’t say anything before, but I’ve a share in a business Johnny Freedman runs out of an old boathouse here, and I thought you might like to take a look-see.”

“Really?” I was nonplussed. “I wouldn’t’ve thought you and Johnny would get on… in a business sense.”

“There’s more to Johnny than meets the eye — or ear,” Derek said — and then I heard the tinkle of laughter from the veranda of the boathouse, and Cathy McCluskey cried, “Surprise!” while Phil Szabo popped the cork of a bottle of prosecco.

“It’s a little early in the day, isn’t it?” I said to Derek, and he laughed.

“It’s always too early, sport, then it’s too late.”

They were all there — even Bettina, who apologised for her behaviour in a heartfelt way. “It’s stupid,” she said, when, hours later, we were draped over the balustrade watching snags being carried downstream by the ebb tide. “But that day when you surprised me and Cathy at the Barbican, I sort of… well, it sounds crazy, but I blamed you for a lot of things that’ve gone wrong in my life.”

“It doesn’t sound crazy to me,” I replied — although of course it did.

I was hanging one of Miguel’s watercolours of Helvellyn in the studio when the phone rang. It was Dora Vignole wanting to gossip about the Spezia trip. While she talked, I stared out the window. The dustmen were coming along my street chucking splitting black plastic bags into the filthy anus of their grunting truck. Perhaps sensing my disinterest, Dora said, “Are you coming to Rob’s 50th in October? Phil Szabo’s putting on an ’80s disco.” And when I admitted that I was, she took this as a cue to say her prolonged goodbyes.

I’d always thought of Phil as a sort of minor character, merely there to make up the numbers

It must have been in the early spring of the following year that Cathy McCluskey sent me a text message: “Phil Szabo has been found dead in his flat.” And when I called her back she was in tears. “It’s dreadful,” she cried. “Apparently he’d had a stroke and been lying there for more than a fortnight — he’d started to r-r-r-”

“Putrefy?”

“No, rot. Honestly, Will, you seem quite disengaged about this — it turns out that Phil didn’t have any family.”

“Well, I certainly never heard him talk about one — had you been friends for long?”

“Us? Friends?” She sounded confused. “I mean, I s’pose he was a friend, but I rather thought you were closer to him — I mean, didn’t you introduce him to us?”

After I’d noted down the information about Phil’s funeral and hung up, I sat there thinking. It had seemed as if Phil Szabo had been around for ever, yet when I cast my mind back I couldn’t recall him being one of our crowd before the dinner party at the McCluskeys’ a couple of years before — the one when I first realised Cathy was being unfaithful to Gerry. Anyway, I’d always thought of Phil as a sort of minor character, not of any real significance, merely there to make up the numbers.

It would’ve been better not to pursue this uncomfortable thought, yet I couldn’t prevent myself, for when I considered Cathy and Gerry McCluskey, Dora and Derek Vignole, Johnny Freedman, Teddy and Rob Brookman, Bettina Haussman — and even Miguel, who I’d developed a fast and firm friendship with — they were all minor characters as well. As for me, although ostensibly the narrator, and so omniscient within this tale — I was undoubtedly the most minor of all. After all, what did anyone know about me, besides the fact that I painted in watercolours, had a studio conversion, and consorted with these ciphers?

At the crematorium, standing in front of Phil Szabo’s utilitarian coffin as the conveyor belt carried it into the flames, I looked from one of my fellow mourner’s indistinct faces to the next, and resolved never to see any of them ever again — not even Bettina or Cathy, who, as I think I mentioned, I had known for years. And now you’ll never see me again either, while I have had all the mirrors removed from my house, for fear of inadvertently peeking into the void.

Writer's Rituals: Will Self reveals how he writes on the Fast Fiction blog

About this author

Will Self is a prolific novelist, journalist and broadcaster known for his mordant social commentary and wit. He lives in south London with his wife, the journalist Deborah Orr, and their two sons

Will Self is featured in this week’s Writers’ Rituals and goes head-to-head with Melvyn Bragg on what makes good writing. Visit: thesundaytimes.co.uk/fastfiction