by Will Self
Installed in the linoleum drear of the rectory’s kitchen, Gerry’s boyfriend, Miguel, had conjured up enough tapas for twenty – 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 no one 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 3.00 a.m.
‘I passed Dora and Johnny down on the beach,’ he said as he came into 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 brown 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 a.m. 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 water-colour-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 – and 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 water colours 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 fiftieth in October? Phil Szabo’s putting on an eighties disco.’ And when I admitted that I was, she took this as a cue to say her goodbyes.
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 forever, 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 water colours, 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 mourners’ 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.
A Note on the Author
Will Self is the acclaimed author of numerous books, both fiction and nonfiction. He has written for newspapers and magazines and appears regularly on television and radio. Self lives in London. His Web site is will-self.com.
By the same author
Fiction
Liver
The Butt
The Book of Dave
Dr. Mukti and Other Tales of Woe
Dorian
How the Dead Live
Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys
Great Apes
The Sweet Smell of Psychosis (with Martin Rowson)
Grey Area
My Idea of Fun
Cock & Bull
The Quantity Theory of Insanity
Non-fiction
Psycho Too (with Ralph Steadman)
Psychogeography (with Ralph Steadman)
Feeding Frenzy
Sore Sites
Perfidious Man (with David Gamble)
Junk Mail
Collection copyright © 2010 by Will Self
Introduction copyright © 2010 by Rick Moody
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York
All stories copyright © by Will Self
“Conversations with Ord” and “The Five- Swing Walk” originally appeared in Dr. Mukti and Other Tales of Woe, published by Bloomsbury, copyright © 2004.
“Scale,” “Chest,” and “Grey Area” originally appeard in Grey Area, published by Atlantic Monthly Press, copyright © 1993, 1994.
“The North London Book of the Dead,” “Ward 9,” “Understanding the Ur- Bororo,” and “The Quantity Theory of Insanity” originally appeared in The Quantity Theory of Insanity, published by Atlantic Monthly Press, copyright © 1995.
“Birdy Num Num” originally appeared in Liver, published by Bloomsbury USA, copyright © 2008. “The Minor Character,” copyright © 2010.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Self, Will.
The undivided self : selected stories / will self ; introduction by Rick Moody—1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-1-59691-297-7 (hardcover)
I. Title.
PR6069.E3654U53 2010
823’.914—dc22
2010017365
First published by Bloomsbury USA in 2010
This e-book edition published in 2010
E-book ISBN: 978-1-60819-457-5
www.bloomsburyusa.com
Table of Contents
Introduction: On Will Self, by Rick Moody
The Rock of Crack as Big as the Ritz
Flytopia
Caring, Sharing
Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys
Design Faults in the Volvo 760 Turbo: A Manual
The Nonce Prize
Conversations with Ord
The Five-Swing Walk
Scale
Chest
Grey Area
The North London Book of the Dead
Ward 9
Understanding the Ur-Bororo
The Quantity Theory of Insanity
Birdy Num Num
The Minor Character
