‘You know Frasham’s father was friends with Coleridge?’ came a hiss from the other Miss Cottingham behind them. Winceworth, Bielefeld and Appleton whirled in their seats once more, orbiting with the intractable tug of gossip.
‘You are pulling my other leg,’ said Appleton.
‘Well, there’s a thing!’
Looking Appleton directly in the face, Winceworth said, ‘You look just like a cafetière; I’ve often thought so.’ Again this went completely unnoticed.
‘Or was it Wordsworth?’ said Pepper-Cottingham. ‘One of the two. No, I’m sure it was Coleridge.’
‘I’ve just been writing up one of his – where is it—?’ Bielefeld flapped his papers along his desk, scrabbling and adding a frantic new pace of rustle to the Scrivenery’s hall. ‘Yes! Here! One of Coleridge’s first coinages—’ Bielefeld held up one of his blue index cards, face flushed with triumph. ‘Soul-mate, noun!’ His cry caused a flush of Shhh!s to ripple across the room. Correspondingly, the group’s voices sank. ‘“You must have a Soul-mate as well as a House-or a Yoke-mate,”’ he quoted. ‘You see: there! First used in Coleridge’s letters.’ Bielefeld had the smile of a Master of the Hunt, Winceworth observed.
‘I caught an early use of supersensuous in one of his articles just yesterday,’ said Salt-Cottingham. A competitive edge crept into her voice.
‘How wonderful.’ Appleton paused, then added with the flourish of an Ace across baize, ‘Of course, it was in Coleridge’s papers that I netted – now, what was it – ah, yes, astrognosy and mysticism some months ago. And I was rather pleased to catch his deployment of romanticise over the summer.’
‘Don’t forget narcissism,’ Winceworth said. ‘Noun.’
Three faces turned to him.
‘I’m sorry, Winceworth,’ Miss Cottingham said, ‘did you say something?’
‘Only—’ Appleton looked at his pewter cup of pencils, then at the ceiling, then at Miss Cottingham and Bielefeld for camaraderie before settling back on Winceworth. ‘Well, you know, the old lisp, ah! It’s sometimes difficult to—’
‘I’ve often said,’ Bielefeld spoke up, ‘that if Coleridge’s maxim holds true, and poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, lexicographers are doubly so, hidden in plain sight.’
‘Oh, very good!’ Appleton said, and Miss Cottingham gave an abrupt clap of her hands.
‘That was – that was Shelley, I think—’ Winceworth said, but at that point one of the innumerable Scrivenery cats jumped up onto his desk.
‘Oops!’ said Appleton.
‘To what do we owe the pleasure!’ said Bielefeld.
‘Steady there!’ said Miss Cottingham.
The cat looked at Winceworth, right into the heart of him. He extended a hand. Without breaking eye contact, the cat reversed a couple of steps, paused and then, protractedly and calmly, coughed something hairy and pelleted and faintly damp over Winceworth’s paperwork and into his lap.
Appleton and Bielefeld’s chairs squealed against the floor in their haste to push away and Shhhhh!s filled the air of the Scrivenery once more.
E is for esquivalience (n.)
I had not received any training regarding specific bomb threats. I had not received any particular training at all, so I stared at the phone receiver for a good minute. I picked up my mobile and texted Pip in the café where she worked, I’m sorry this might be it, I love you, goodbye, x. I switched off my computer without saving, I watched the ivy outside my window bounce and waggle in a light breeze, then I smashed my fist into the red BREAK GLASS TO ACTIVATE fire alarm just by my desk. I did this with all the zeal of an employee who has fantasised about doing so since their first day on the job.
It was then I learned that the fire alarms in the building were not functional, the result of another cost-cutting decision. Unsure what to do next, I remembered that there was a laminated Health and Safety sheet of guidelines in the stationery cupboard, spotted with damp beneath the plastic. It had little pared-down ideograms of men falling over triangles and red POW! explosion shapes over pictures of bent knees. I walked to the cupboard, picked this sheet up and held it tight to my chest. I knocked on David’s door. He sat stooped over his computer, typing with his two index fingers.
‘Did he call again?’ he asked, not looking up.
I explained the situation, miming hitting the fire alarm with particular vigour, and he rolled his eyes.
‘I think that means we should –’ I consulted the Health and Safety poster for the right wording – ‘vacate the premises?’
‘Lest we evacuate ourselves,’ David said, and he looked pleased. I smiled because it seemed expected of me.
‘Should I take the cat, do you think?’ he went on, looking vaguely around his feet under his desk, then, ‘No, no, not a priority, come along—’ and we made our way down the stairs past the central hall, beneath the portrait of smiling Prof. Gerolf Swansby and out into the street, our shoes skittering against the stone one-hundred-and-twenty-years-of-bustle-polished steps.
‘Have you rung emergency services?’ David asked as we descended. I nodded, then behind my back thumbed the numbers into my phone.
The police came quickly and appeared to take the bomb threat seriously. Swansby House was so close to Buckingham Palace that they had all the right gear and were presumably ready to spring into onto unto action. One of the officers wore camouflage and a high-vis tabard, which seemed perhaps a mixed approach. Special officers with a whole index of particular equipment barrelled through the building’s doors, presumably in order to sweep the building. This was a phrase I had heard on crime dramas. We watched from the sidelines, a little overwhelmed. I mean, I was overwhelmed: David seemed more concerned that the officers not scratch the paintwork on the doors.
‘A good thing the building was not booked today,’ David said, a little absently, as we watched them swarm in. ‘Just the two of us rattling around – imagine if there had been a wedding.’
We were told to wait. I described the disguised voice on the phone as best I could, as well as the frequency of the calls. An officer took down all these details and asked if I was all right, and wrote down my answer to that too. She asked my name and checked the correct spelling, ‘Like the mountaineer?’
David listened intently to my response and I wondered whether he harboured theories about my first name, its provenance or meaning. He seemed like the kind of person to have opinions about names. If I was descended from someone called Gerolf, I would too. In the past I’ve been asked whether I was named after the vain character who doesn’t kiss Michael J. Fox in the TV series Family Ties (1982–89). I’ve been asked whether I was named after the psychotic wife who does kiss Woody Harrelson in Natural Born Killers (1994). People’s minds run, misspellingly, to those Enid Blyton books with their Towers and jolly hockey sticks (1946–51) or further back to writers of Arthurian legend. Handsome male lieutenant lost on mountainside (1924) was a new one, however. What these people must think of my parents, I don’t know.
Some books say that Mallory comes from the Old French, meaning the unlucky one.
If that’s the case: what I think of my parents, I don’t know.
When David spoke to the officer, he waved his hands and arms around a lot as if that might hurry the conversation and process along. ‘Just some nut,’ he said, spreading his considerable wingspan. ‘Completely crackers. A fruitcake. One sandwich short of a picnic.’
‘Those aren’t the appropriate words to use,’ the police officer said.
‘No, quite right. Barking?’
Telling us that his colleagues might be in there for some time, another officer went to get us unseasonal ice creams from a kiosk in St James’s Park. He bought David a 99 Flake, a Calippo for himself, and a choc-ice for me. I tried not to think how he had profiled us as a group to choose these ice creams. He handed them out and we all leaned against an advertising hoarding, the flashing blue of the police car’s lights making David’s ice cream bruise an occa
sional neon. Some tourists took pictures of us standing looking up at Swansby House with our arms crossed.
A voice from across the road.
‘Mallory?’
Here’s a thing – you carve out a code and mode for yourself at work. The job is not demanding and some of us, many of us, choose to switch off parts of our character, all of our character, just to get through the day. But then the pattern of the day shifts because of a threat on your life, say, and let’s say that across the street, there, right there, suddenly, it’s the person you love most in the world. But they appear just so. They might as well have risen from a manhole or a Vegas platform or been pulled from a hat, descended from on high fretted with golden fire, etc. You know their voice better than your own name, you want that voice to be the first thing you hear in the morning and the last thing at night, you want to know them long enough that you have heard every word in their accent and with every possible inflection. You fall in love every time you see them, you fall in love with the idea of falling in love purely because they exist, and they define what good can be in a day for you. They define good to you.
Love’s a lot of wonderful nonsense like that, isn’t it? Poppycock, codswallop, folderol, balderdash, piffle, hugger-mugger, fiddlesticks, silly slush, tosh, horsefeathers, etc. All of that, and all at once. Other things like fear are more concise, but in its own way love gets straight to the point.
‘Mallory!’ Pip shouted. She tried to run across the street, but an officer stopped her before she could reach us. ‘You’re OK? Are you OK?’
‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Your text, you complete—’ She bit back her sentence. ‘I’m – I’m sorry it’s taken me so long—’
David sank his teeth into his ice cream and regarded the two of us politely. The Calippo’d police officer had an arm on Pip’s shoulder so that the two of us were separated. This was dreadful but also, somehow, a good thing because my idiot mind was already trying to conjure a context for Pip’s familiarity. This is a friend. This is my cousin. This person just guessed my name right off the bat, what’s that about, what are the chances—
‘Excuse me,’ the police officer was saying. Pip stood back. ‘Do you know this young lady?’
Pip looked at me, then at David Swansby.
‘We’re flatmates,’ she said.
I nodded.
Before she got ready for work that morning, Pip had pointed at various bits of me for no reason whatsoever and listed their names. ‘Lunule,’ she said at my fingertips. She moved along, ‘Purlicue,’ then she listed across and up the bed until, ‘Glabella,’ was said between my eyes. Then a pause. ‘Thingamabob.’
‘Philtrum,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that one.’
‘All present and correct.’
‘The whole kit and caboodle,’ she said, and we carried on carrying on.
I believe you don’t always have to explain everything to everyone. Pip disagrees, or rather expresses it differently. I was not out at work. She did not call this cowardice on my part. I probably would.
I remember at school the test of a good dictionary would be whether it included specific parts of anatomy or swear words. Four-letter words. Usually these were the only dog-eared pages in the whole thing – if I had applied that standard to Swansby’s drafts I could have learned that dick was another word for a workman’s apron and that jizz might be defined as ‘the total combination of characteristics that serve to identify a particular species of bird or plant’. A waste of an education. The thrill of seeing a bad word there was palpable – at school, you could stick your nose between cunopic and cup or between penintime and penitence and find there, nestling in the columns, something you’d grown up knowing was obscene or to be blushed at or spoken only in hushed tones. You felt the lexicographer had been depraved, and imagined them typing the word up with faux po-faced ribaldry, or smuggling the terms into the pages purely for your classroom titillation in public and charged thrill in private.
This use of the school dictionary was a kind of panning for immature gross-out gold, and had us plunging right in. It was only alone in the form room once everyone had gone home that I dared to look up other words. I told myself it was curiosity spurring me on. I didn’t realise that a dictionary might be like reading a map or looking in a mirror.
butch (v. transitive), to slaughter (an animal), to kill for market. Also: to cut up, to hack
dyke (n.), senses relating to a ditch or hollowed-out section
gay (v. intransitive), to be merry, cheerful, or light-hearted. Obsolete
lesbian rule (n.), a flexible (usually lead) ruler which can be bent to fit what is being measured
Figurative, pertaining to something, esp. a legal principle, which adapts to fit the circumstances
queer (adj.), strange, odd, peculiar, eccentric. Also: of questionable character; suspicious, dubious. Of coins or banknotes: counterfeit, forged
queer (v. intransitive), to ask, enquire; to question. To put out of order; to spoil. Also: to spoil the reputation or chances of (a person); to put (a person) out of favour (with another)
Even at school I remember wondering about closets, whether there was a subtle difference between someone being in the closet and a skeleton being in the closet. I checked the dictionary for clarification, but found none. I turned the pages, hot with a growing sense of shame.
Pip was out at the café where she worked. Of course she was – she was out to her family, she was out at work, out and about, out-and-out out. I suspected she emerged from the womb with little badges on her lapel reading Lavender Menace and 10% Is Not Enough! Recruit! Recruit! Recruit!
‘David Swansby wouldn’t bat an eyelid if you told him,’ she once said to me. She had brought the topic up. ‘And if he does bat an eyelid, you can tell him where to get off.’
She was right, of course. And wrong, of course.
‘Where to get off,’ I repeated.
‘Or,’ she said, ‘you could tell him that your big bad butch will come and sort him out.’ She tuff-pranced across the bedroom, growling.
‘You can be brave enough for the both of us,’ I said. I meant it as a joke but it sounded melodramatic, or maudlin. Pip didn’t say anything.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be out, I told myself. I admired people who were, I envied them, I thought them brave and wonderful. I just didn’t have the words in the way they all seemed to. It was the most prosaic, unflaming, snuffed, tamped-down kind of fear. I watched a documentary once about abattoirs and I remember there was an on-camera discussion about the biological effects suffered by livestock prior to slaughter. Apparently the taste of the meat can be altered by the build-up of lactic acid and adrenaline if the animals are distressed. The phrase fear degrades the meat and its flavour flashed up in the subtitles. I stopped watching documentaries about abattoirs.
Offhand, while washing the dishes, I told Pip about the phone calls coming in at work. She had surprised me by bursting into tears and bringing me in close.
Outside Swansby House and surrounded by police, a pigeon took this moment to scrump ice-cream-cone crumbs from around my boss’s ankles.
‘Ah!’ said David. ‘Mallory’s flatmate, I think she’s mentioned you.’
‘Is that right?’ Pip said.
‘A pleasure, a pleasure.’ David shook her hand and immediately I resented their closeness and wanted to divert them away from one another. They were two circles on a Venn diagram that should not have intersected or bounced up against one another. London was surely big enough that this should never happen.
‘Bit of a ruckus here,’ David continued shyly to Pip’s concerned upturned face. ‘Bit of nothing.’
‘Can it be both? Ruckus and a bit of nothing?’ Pip turned to me. ‘Your text—’
‘It’s nothing,’ I said.
‘It looks like something,’ she said, gesturing at the police van and officers.
‘Just a silly hoax.
They’re just making sure everything is safe. The fire alarms didn’t go off, so I had to—’
‘You could have been torched where you sat!’ Pip looked David up and down. Given his height, this took some time. ‘That’s incredibly illegal!’
‘It can’t be incredibly one or the other,’ David said. He couldn’t help himself. ‘Something’s either illegal or not illegal.’
Mansplain (v.) was unlikely to ever enter any version of Swansby’s Encyclopaedic Dictionary.
‘I guess that makes you incredible,’ Pip said, and she reared up as really only she can do, but David was not concentrating, he was inspecting something at his feet—
A man, apparently unmoved by the presence of police officers and blithely attempting to keep to the pavement and enjoy their normal route unimpeded, strayed between us. I had to commute every day through Westminster, and some people there just refused to recognise that not every path was available to them. In this instance, this person also had a small dog. Horrified that a bomb threat was distracting any possible attention from it, this passer-by’s dog chose that moment to slowly and theatrically defecate at my boss’s feet.
‘Ah!’ said David.
‘Oh!’ said Pip.
‘I’m so sorry,’ said the passer-by. ‘She’s never done this before.’
The ice-cream police officer asked his companion, ‘Isn’t that against a by-law?’
‘Not if it’s picked up,’ David said.
Pip patted her pockets, making a pantomime of looking for a carrier bag.
I put the whole choc-ice into my mouth, bent down and used the cheap plastic wrapper to scoop the day’s simpler mess into my hand. I thought, maybe this is what I was put on earth to do. I was never going to be brave or proud but I know about timings and small interventions.
‘Chivalry,’ Pip said. I straightened for everyone.
The ice cream hurt my teeth.
‘Are we done here?’ David said to the police officer. She spoke into a radio.
The Liar's Dictionary Page 6
