Standing by your character's shoulder

I enjoy writing from a close third person viewpoint. If I am only inside the head of one character, the narrative may have to sacrifice opportunities for enrichment: small shifts the main character instigates in the lives of others, bystander reactions, nuanced foreshadowing or implied warnings.

My narrator’s ideal position is to stand close to the character, so tight to their shoulder as to be aware of them breathing, sighing, thinking. Inside, but also beside, them.

Here is a made-up example:

Loose change clattered in Clive’s pocket as he hurried into A&E, unaware of the weary faces waiting, looking up at the hiss of his anorak, the tap of his shoes, the stone lodged in one heel that rattled with every step.

A nurse ushered him into an empty waiting-room.

Let this door stay shut.

He wanted to draw his legs up underneath him on the chair with the torn seat and screw himself up tight. Stay here with the thin curtains wafting in the cold breeze and the pile of tired magazines waiting for the next person who sat here praying the door would never open. Once it opened, once the nurse came in, his life would swerve so far off-course he would remember the room as a safe place, a halfway house.

The coppery-green stripes on the curtains would become a pattern that appeared in nightmares. The exhausted stuffed toys in their cardboard box would always stare at him.

A nurse’s footsteps tapped along the corridor. The room stiffened, protecting Clive. When the sound receded, the room breathed out and continued to wait.

A woman’s sewing magazine dated 1968 lay on the top of the pile. Clive stared at the model’s clear-skinned face, at her white smile, at the child beside her in a mauve quilted dressing-gown. He opened the magazine and held it to his face. It smelt of cigarette smoke and cough sweets and other people’s hands, the paper softened by a thousand thumbs, the pull-out pattern for the dressing-gown long since pulled out.

Susan’s was yellow with a satin edge. It hung from a hook Clive had stuck to the back of her door. The adhesive was wearing away. Soon the hook would give up its struggle. One morning, he would run upstairs to open the door and tell Susan it was time for school and discover he couldn’t reach her, the dressing-gown bundled on the floor where it had fallen, jamming the door’s progress. He would have to shout through the gap.

‘Not anymore,’ the smooth-haired model said. ‘You will go into your Susan’s room many times, but you will never rouse her.’

Clive turned the magazine over to an advertisement on the back for marmalade, hundreds of breakfast moments jammed in the jar, every golden shred a paring from his past that didn’t belong to him now.

“Mr Saunders?” said the nurse at the door, her face betraying nothing.

She swished across the room. It took years to reach him. She laid her fingers on his arm. And the touch, from one stranger to another, told him what he had waited to know.

As he rushes into A&E, Clive doesn’t notice the ‘weary faces’ or hear the hiss, tap and rattle of his anorak and shoes. In the waiting room, he doesn’t know his life is about to ‘swerve so far off-course.’ He is unaware that the contents of the room are embedding in his memory. He is not conscious of creating the analogy of the room stiffening, then breathing out. The close narrator is in a position to observe all this for the reader.

Then we move inside Clive’s mind. He can smell the magazine and feel the tired pages in his hands. He anticipates Susan’s dressing-gown falling from the inadequate hook and imagines the smooth-haired model speaking to him. He looks at the marmalade jar and watches his past disintegrate.

In the final paragraph, the reader looks up at the nurse in the doorway at the same moment as Clive. We are at his shoulder now, waiting to hear the news with him.