The Liar's Dictionary

by Eley Williams

  He really was quite quite drunk.

  ‘Are you feeling all right?’ Sophia asked.

  Helloa, pronounced like cocoa, from an emphatic imperative of halôn, holôn, to fetch, used especially in hailing a ferryman, a distant or occupied person, or said with surprise at an unexpected meeting, such as within the shadow of an expensive potted palm. Hallow, as in the ground, cf. demonstratively splendid. To shout ‘halloo’ at dogs in order to urge them on. Lo! Hullabaloo, from bas, là le loup! (down there, the wolf!), hallelujah! Ah, etymologies, the speculative pedigree of a word. What do you think of me as a lexicographer, Sophia? Winceworth wondered as she doubled once in his vision. What would that knowledge prompt you to ask? What is my favourite word? Or, more particular still, my favourite letter? Allow these private fictions to a boring lexicographer. Ask me something, Sophia, Winceworth thought.

  Terence Clovis Frasham was again by their side. ‘Of course,’ he was saying, pulling his arm about Sophia’s shoulders, ‘there was one particularly fine acquisition I made on my travels.’

  Winceworth noticed the two small details of Sophia and Frasham’s matching rings and something tightened just beneath his Adam’s apple.

  Winceworth made his apologies and stumbled down the stairs out of the society.

  In a phrase of which Dr Rochfort-Smith would no doubt be proud, January sun had long since sought solace, silently, amongst some small scudding cirrus clouds. Winceworth ran – prestissimo; he shambled – lento; he trudged – andante moderato.

  With some birthday cake shoved deep into his pocket, Peter Winceworth wove his way across the road and began his journey home.

  I is for inventiveness (adj.)

  ‘And that’s the moment when you should have quit,’ Pip said emphatically down the phone. ‘Threat of hellfire is one thing, but an actual threat? Are you kidding me?’

  I thumbed through the index cards in front of me. ‘Leaving David in the lurch doesn’t feel quite right,’ I said. ‘Do you know, I’ve found another one already? Listen to this, I came across it almost by accident: “agrupt (n. and adj.), irritation caused by having a dénouement ruined.”’

  After a pause, ‘Sounds like a real word,’ Pip said.

  ‘That’s what I thought, but I looked up agrupt on my phone to see whether it existed. The results took no time at all. That’s not true: 694 results appeared in 0.41 seconds. And it said, “Did you mean: abrupt, agrupate, agrup, agrupe?”’

  ‘Phoney as a three-dollar bill,’ said Pip.

  ‘Right?’

  ‘Nice catch. How did no one see any of these?’

  ‘Overlooked, I suppose. They are just nestled in random places.’ Down the phone there was the hiss of foamed milk and a close-distant clink of teacups from Pip’s café. ‘Everything OK at work?’ I asked.

  ‘Who the hell cares. What word are you up to?’

  ‘I’m starting from the top,’ I said.

  ‘Aardvark strikes again?’ Pip said.

  ‘Currently up to –’ I glanced down – ‘apparently abbozzo (n.)’

  ‘Definitely fake,’ Pip said. ‘Or a kind of pasta. A head monk, but also a bozo. A funny way of pronunciating the first three letters of the alphabet.’

  ‘Pretty sure pronunciating is not a word.’

  ‘Touché. Touchy.’

  I adjusted my mobile against my ear. ‘According to this,’ I said, ‘it means “an outline or draft of a speech or piece of writing. Obsolete. Rare”.’

  ‘No shit,’ said Pip. ‘And you’re checking each one individually? Every word?’

  ‘’Fraid so.’

  ‘Have you eaten your lunch?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Cupboard egg?’

  ‘’Fraid so,’ I said again.

  ‘I admonish, verb,’ Pip said. ‘I abdicate all responsibility.’

  We had met three years ago in the coffee shop: her working behind the counter and me a customer having just started at Swansby House. At that time I was still dazed by the city and tired from drafting CVs for any job I could get, imagining my internship there would not last out the year. How long could digitising a dictionary possibly take? Sweet innocence.

  I remember the day we first spoke. I was desperate for caffeine after a morning staring at my terrible computer hourglass. I was first in line. However, a man behind me in the queue chipped ahead of me before I had delivered my order. ‘Three cappuccino – sorry, cappuccini,’ he said. He made a fingersnapping motion. He was a busy man, clearly. The busiest.

  ‘Coming up. Any food?’ asked the girl behind the counter. I remember looking at her, thinking, This is someone who knows how to keep her cool. Here is someone who is unflappable.

  ‘Yeah,’ said my queue-jumper. ‘Three croissants.’

  ‘Three crrrrrroisseaux on their way. Crayz-onts. Three quwahsurnte,’ she said. She caught my eye. ‘And that was one coffee for you. We only have takeaway cups today, is that OK?’ and she asked this charitably, as if the customer could ever do anything about this. The napkins by the sugar sachets and milk jug had Geography Is A Flavour printed across them and a drawing of some coffee beans.

  ‘That’s amazing,’ I said. Why? Shut up, shut up.

  ‘And what’s your name?’ she continued. She tapped a pen to a Styrofoam cup in her hand and I lost four years off my life.

  ‘Adam,’ said the queue-jumper.

  ‘And yet not always the first dude, dude,’ Pip said, quick as you like, and it didn’t really work as a joke but the thinking was there, and I was watching her forearms in a way I didn’t understand. It didn’t feel right. It felt too right. I read the homily on the napkins again.

  ‘And you?’ she said to me, Sharpie poised. ‘I need it for the cup.’

  ‘Mallory,’ I said. She nodded, yawned and covered her mouth. She had knuckle tattoos. Did she? It looked like they spelt TUFF TEAK, but her hands were upside down and I couldn’t crane my neck in time to read them properly, and she had turned away and started roughing up the coffee machine before I could work it quite out.

  It couldn’t be TUFF TEAK, I thought. Unless that’s some hot carpentry slang that I’m not queer enough to understand. Probably that. Stop staring. I tried to break down the scene into words that could be carried around on one’s hands.

  TRIC / KY!!

  CAFÉ / GIRL

  MANY / TIPS

  POLY / DACTYL

  ‘And I was literally dying,’ said Adam into his wireless headpiece.

  ‘I just drew them on this morning.’

  The girl had come around the bar area to give me my drinks. She presented her knuckles to me.

  ‘Ah,’ I said. The girl in the café stretched out her hands and placed them in mine, turning them to show me. Which was preposterous, but she did. They weren’t tattoos at all, not even letters: just meaningless scribbles in pen, the same pen that had been used to write my name on the Styrofoam cups.

  ‘You were staring hard enough to rub the ink off,’ she said. And it was not a good line but it was meant to be an almost-good line, which in a way is kinder. She turned away to pass me the coffee.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  ‘And what time do you clock off?’ the girl behind the café counter asked me. And ‘the girl behind the café counter’ became, more usefully, the pronoun you in the same way that many small details are not necessary but can become everything.

  ‘And are you going to be bringing the index cards back home?’ Pip asked down the phone. ‘Am I going to have to shore up our bookshelves and just accept that you won’t be able to raise your head from the pages for the next fifteen years or so?’

  ‘Thems the breaks,’ I said.

  Aberglaube (n.), aberr (v.), aberuncate (v.) ‘And you’re OK?’ Pip asked. ‘For real, though. Really.’

  ‘A little over my head,’ I said. ‘Maybe. Long day to go.’

  ‘I just like the idea of some guy in a … I don’t know, what do Victorians have?’ Pip said, and I imagined her throwing
her hands in the air. ‘Top hats and deerstalkers and cholera. Hansom cab chases. Steam trains and telegrams. And then him sitting down and having the brass gall to make your life a misery by fabricating words for a dictionary.’

  I said, ‘That’s very helpful, thank you.’

  ‘Here’s a spoiler: the zebra (n.) did it.’

  ‘Neat,’ I said. ‘Nice.’

  ‘See you later,’ Pip said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you’re OK?’ she said again. ‘After the morning?’

  ‘Hmm,’ I said, not listening.

  ‘I love you,’ Pip said, and I ended the call and picked up the index card in front of me.

  J is for jerque (v.)

  After some hours at his desk and beneath his headache, Winceworth slipped away from Swansby House to get some air. He took his satchel filled with made-up sketches for unusual words slung across his shoulder. He did not wander far and soon settled on a bench in St James’s Park, his shirt still slightly damp thanks to the cat and its eruptions. He stared at his knees. He stared at his hands. In his rush to reach Dr Rochfort-Smith’s appointment he had forgotten his gloves and his fingers chapped slightly in the cold.

  Winceworth drew some remnants of birthday cake from his trouser pocket and turned it over. The slice was flatter and more compressed than any baker would appreciate, and sheened over with a kind of post-party next-day sweat. With a pang of fellow feeling, he inspected the slice of cake, cupping stray crumbs and brushing them from his knees. The first letter of Frasham’s name was iced onto the surface of the cake. Keeping his eyes trained on the fricative, Winceworth brought the slice up to his face and bit down hard. At the pressure, an almost imperceptible spiderweb-fracture made a mosaic of the icing.

  St James’s Park was the closest green space to Swansby House, and idling members of the staff often spent time there, depending on the season, gazing into flowerbeds or feeding the ducks. The correct placement of St James’s Park’s apostrophe on the boards and fences was a bane or boon to the members of Swansby’s editorial team. In Winceworth’s first year at Swansby House there had been a war of attrition between some younger members of staff and the park-keepers concerning this apostrophe. During this time apparently many of the park’s signs dotted around the lawns and grounds were defaced (and consequently re-faced) in line with whether one or many St James’s ownerships were being asserted.

  Never a dull moment.

  Winceworth’s chosen bench sat tucked in a bend of a path with no good view of the lake nor any interesting sweeps and vistas. He would not be disturbed by colleagues and it was less likely to be on the route of winter-hardy courting couples or wandering tourists. The time of year also meant many of the planted beds were unremarkable, russeted-over and presenting a manicured kind of dreary. In fact the only flowers he could see near him were some early puff-faced dandelions at the feet of his bench. They had survived the rain and the cold – he would have to ask someone at Swansby House whose studies covered botany to know whether these were freaks of the season or to be expected. A freakish weed is just a flower that has not asked permission. Winceworth kicked one of the dandelions appreciatively with his heel and its head exploded.

  Away from the Scrivenery, Winceworth felt the muscles in his shoulders loosen and he was able to take deeper breaths. The air of the park helped clear his head and of course with this came a certain new confidence and l’esprit de l’escalier. He imagined potential, missed ripostes: Look here, Appleton, you ridiculous bore, Coleridge probably died before Frasham’s father was even born. Bielefeld, you daft-necked carafe of a man, don’t peacock about romanticise (v.) to impress Miss Cottingham; Coleridge also came up with bisexual, bathetic, intensify and fister if you thought you had an interesting weekend.

  The birthday cake made his back teeth sing with sweetness and he closed his eyes against the pain. His day had already taken its toll on him. Pons pons pons. Toothache would have to wait its turn.

  Somewhere across the way an unseen bird was trilling. Weak sun fooled something light across his face, and he felt a yawn slip electric beneath his tongue – he shook his head, dog-like, to summon alertness, but then drew out his watch for nap calculations. Waning nausea and exhaustion had caught up with him. All he wanted right now was to sleep, to curl up like the cat in corners of the Scrivenery without a care for anything.

  But falling asleep now would muddy the rest of the day and spoil any chance of rest this evening. Finish the cake, he told himself, take one more turn about the park to get the blood going and face the day renewed. He dug his glasses into the bridge of his nose and winched his face to the sky, willing himself into wakefulness. Two birds veered overhead, chatting and braiding the air. It might have been his imagination, but a dandelion seed seemed to drift through his line of sight and join them. He wondered whether anyone would miss him if he just stayed put amongst the weeds, kicking the clocks of dandelions until facelessness and spending the afternoon not amongst paper and letters and words but instead here, head to and in and of the clouds counting birds until the numbers ran out. There were funny, oily little wild birds in the park, some of which he recognised. Surely too early for starlings. Starlings with feathers star-spangled and glittersome. One brave bird hopped about his feet for cake crumbs while still more were flitting above his head with the dandelion seeds, blown wishes finding a smeuse in the air. The best benchside exoticisms January could offer were all on show – the starling, the dandelion, the blown seeds and the birds skeining against the grey clouds, hazing it and mazing it, a featherlight kaleidoscope noon-damp and knowing the sky was never truly grey, just filled with a thousand years of birds’ paths, and wishful seeds, a bird-seed sky as something meddled and ripe and wish-hot, the breeze bird-breath soft like a – what – heart stopped in a lobby above one’s lungs as well it might, as might it will – seeds take a shape too soft to be called a burr, like falling asleep on a bench with the sun on your face, seeds in a shape too soft to be called a globe, too breakable to be a constellation, too tough to not be worth wishing upon, the crowd of birds, an unheard murmuration (pl. n.) not led by one bird but a cloud-folly of seeds, blasted by one of countless breaths escaping from blasted wished-upon clock as a breath, providing a clockwork with no regard to time nor hands, flocking with no purpose other than the clotting and thrilling and thrumming, a flock as gathered ellipses rather than lines of wing and bone and beak, falling asleep grey-headed rather than young and dazzling – more puff than flower – collecting the ellipses of empty speech bubbles, the words never said or sayable, former pauses in speech as busy as leaderless birds, twisting, blown apart softly, to warm and colour even the widest of skies.

  Winceworth awoke with his head slumped to one side, rumpled and oblique on the park bench. A boy was standing in front of him, holding a toy boat and staring. Presumably the boy had been staring for quite a while, for as Winceworth shivered himself more upright and an involuntary harrumph left his body, the little spectator started. The wooden boat fell from his arms onto the path and its mast snapped the moment it hit the gravel. Winceworth’s apology knotted in the air with the boy’s yelp of surprise.

  Dropping the boat and howling, however, did not break the child’s staring. His eyes were wide, mouth slack and he looked as if he had seen a ghost – the wail carried an edge to it, a cry not borne of anger nor shock at the self-scuttling of his boat, but a shriek of real horror.

  Winceworth shook the sleepiness from his head and stared back. The child was looking through Winceworth. He had finally become invisible. His colleagues might overlook him or hardly ever notice that he was there, but since leaving Swansby House something had obviously changed in him, had gone further or had clarified – Winceworth had finally, somehow, been tempered into nothingness, thin air with no more traction than a breath. The child’s mother drew up beside her staring charge, and as she came level with Winceworth her face too registered the same look of shock. He must just be a suit and clump of birthday cak
e suspended in the air on a bench in the park.

  Winceworth trialled a gentle, spectral wave.

  Both faces’ expressions changed to one of distracted displeasure. It then occurred to Winceworth that perhaps he was not the object of the boy and mother’s attention, and he pivoted in his seat to follow their eyeline.

  Some feet beyond his bench, one of the Royal Park’s huge white pelicans was rearing up and silently hissing. Not only that – it appeared to be covered in blood, and a woman was strangling it.

  The pelican was huffing, straining, its absurd head bent upwards and pale eyes rolling back and forth. Both bird and attacker were making grim little growls and burbles with effort as they circled across the lawn. The woman’s hat had been knocked off and sat trampled between them.

  The woman had her hands about the bird’s neck and her fingers were tucked under its wagging pink dewlap pouch – she had to keep rocking on her feet and ducking to avoid the panicked beating of bloody wings hitting her face.

  Winceworth heard the mother say behind him, ‘They can break a man’s arm!’

  ‘You are thinking of swans,’ corrected her staring son in a high voice.

  Both woman and bird were strangely matched in appearance and there was something ridiculously ballroom about their skirmish – the bird’s plumage was stained red, its bill a hot yellow, while the woman’s skirt was made of some candy-stripe coloured stuff and she carried a yellow umbrella wedged beneath her arm. They waltzed, irregularly, tugging and gasping, moving closer towards Winceworth and his companions.

  The pelican made an obscene, wheezing call.

  ‘Ought we to call—’ said the mother, pulling closer to Winceworth’s bench.