He fiddled with his glasses, still groggy from his nap. ‘I really have no idea who—’
‘She must be mad!’ interrupted the mother and pulled her son closer to her side. The boy struggled and in turning his head, caught sight of his broken boat on the path. He let out a screech and Winceworth found he was all at once caught between two quiet, ludicrous brawls. His mind turned to how best to slip away.
‘Do something!’ The mother clearly had decided that Winceworth was the one who should take charge of the situation. She looked at him with stern expectation as her scarlet child jigged up and down.
Winceworth stepped forward. There was no etiquette for this. He tried a small, ‘I say—’ but the pelican-woman was too engrossed in combat to notice. Half-heartedly Winceworth hefted the small remaining nugget of birthday cake at the fighting pair. The piece bounced off the woman’s elbow and had no effect whatsoever. Mother and child gave him a long look. The pelican’s pupil – round, human-like and panic-widened – fixed upon Winceworth for a split second at his voice, and its body appeared to stiffen. Taking full advantage of this momentary pause, the woman attacking it either had a change of strategy or a sudden surge of courage – she lifted the pelican bodily off its feet and seized it in a kind of chokehold. The faint sunlight behind them made the bird’s pouch glow a soft rose, branched veins swelling dark and angry within the membrane.
The boy, the mother and Winceworth goggled.
This tableau lasted for less than a second and the pelican’s neck suddenly flexed and darted like a serpent – it struck upwards, catching the woman across the chin with its beak. She shrank back but kept her hold about the pelican’s throat.
‘Let it be, can’t you?’ cried the mother. ‘Don’t look, Gerald. She means to kill it!’
At this, the woman turned her head to look at them. There was a small cut above her eye and some of her hair had come loose and was sticking weirdly to her forehead, and—
Sophia from the party?
Winceworth didn’t know how he vaulted over the bench so quickly nor how he covered so much ground in apparently one step but all at once he was face to face with the pelican on the ground and hitting it and hitting it and hitting it, pinning it between his knees and landing punches against its large white body. It was scrambling beneath his weight while behind him the mother and the child were screaming but all he could think of was the small cut above Sophia’s eye, bleeding; a thin line of blood ran down the side of her face so that its symmetry was thrown completely off, and the bird had not been bleeding at all as he had thought but was in fact covered in her blood, and he hit it in the chest over and over and over—
K is for kelemenopy (n.)
When a cartoon character is represented swearing or cursing, there is a word for the series of hashtags and exclamation marks and toxicity symbols in their speech bubbles: grawlix. @#$%&! It is a growling grunting irk of a work of a word. That’s what my brain felt like on days like this one, with tasks like reading through index cards. Asterisks lodged in my thoughts, upside-down question marks grapplehooking and winching the sides of my brain. My head as grawlax, grawlixed. Plural grawlixes or grawlix or nitpicked obscene grawlices.
I could feel myself growing bored. I doodled a small drawing of me screaming on top of one of the index cards. We all have that at our fingertips, don’t we: an image or design to which we unconsciously return and use to fill stray bits of paper. I used to draw thousands of boxes and little cartoon cats over my university notes. I wondered whether they ever doodled, the errant lexicographer or lexicographers who had gone so off-piste in the index cards of Swansby House. There might have been a better way to assuage their boredom, rather than making up fake words for me to hunt down.
There is a kind of snow blindness that descends during repetitive tasks. Pip described it happening at her work too – coffee orders no longer make any damn sense and you have to trust muscle memory to get the task done.
I started picking index cards at random from the pile. I checked the definition and if I didn’t recognise the word I cross-checked it on my phone.
I held one up to my window and read the beautiful looped handwriting.
crinkling (n.), a small precocious apple. Notes: Compare with other crinkles. Compare also crumpling in widespread English regional use. Compare also with craunchling in the same sense
I double-checked this word, sure that it must be an error and I had found another false word but damn damn damn it did bear some scrutiny.
I was tired, and the page on my phone listed in my vision. I had enjoyed-endured interesting, transformative and very boring discussions since sixth form about the instability of language but this task felt different – looking at the columns of online and pretty much infinite definitions, I was no longer sure which words were real nor why anyone had ever bothered trying to contain them. This was a failure of the imagination on my part. This was giving up. But surely compiling a dictionary or an encyclopaedia, even one as ramshackle as Swansby’s, was like conceiving of a sieve for stars. I was daydreaming about audiobooks for dictionaries. I was daydreaming about literally browsing and pulling my lips over the words and routling or rootling or etymolojostling and chewing the cud of these index cards littered across my desk just to see what stuck in my teeth and could be removed. Cud and other ruminations.
I held up the index card. Crinkling, I read, a type of small apple. A precocious apple. What did that mean? What the hell. I associated crinkling as a verb or adjective with the corners of eyes, or Mr Blobby, or the unseen recesses of a wastepaper basket. How dare crinkling apples have unseen roots. This meant that someone once held a fruit in their hands and rather than say whatchamacallit or thingy or, indeed, ‘small apple’ to describe it, they had announced crinkling. And someone else had written that down. Adam and Eve naming the beasts of the field and the birds of the sky and the tricky precocious crinklings.
Not for the first time at that desk, I looked up ‘Symptoms of adult ADHD’ on my phone and flicked through the first few results. I then tried searching ‘What is an adult?’ The first link on the search page showed up purple, so clearly I had looked that up before.
I glanced at the cards strewn across my desk. Oh, my God, shut up, you are too interesting and too much, I wanted to tell them. That’s what people say to belittle women in workplaces, isn’t it? Or women in general. I wanted to say it to the materials of a dictionary. It was because I was intimidated and I hated it.
Oh, my God! shut up! you are too! interesting! and! too! much! was precisely how I fell for Pip because I was intimidated and I loved her.
Where did that thought come from?
I held up two of the index cards. I squinted.
All of the cards that contained made-up words were written in a quite different type of fountain pen. All the rest were in different handwriting, sure: the work of hundreds of hands filling in thousands of index cards. But they all had the same uniform scratchiness, the same kind of line and flourish. On these false entries, however, it was as if the person writing them had used a completely different type of nib.
There was a knock on the office wall.
Like the sun or like a shock or the least agrupt thing in the world, Pip’s head craned around the door.
L is for legerdemain (n. and adj.)
Sophia’s umbrella smacked Winceworth across an ear. He rolled to the side, released the pelican and lay on his back, panting slightly.
‘It’s choking on something,’ Sophia said. She was panting too and kneeling beside him in the grass, eyes fixed on the bird lying prone to his left. All three were winded like wrestlers, Sophia moving one hand against the bird’s cheek and another feeling along its neck.
Winceworth scrambled to sit up on his haunches.
‘Look—’ Sophia said. Winceworth watched something beneath the skin of the pelican’s throat buck unmistakably out of time with its pulse. This close to the bird, he could see its eyes were also starting from their socke
ts.
‘I was trying to open—’ Sophia panted, ‘open the beak – put my arm down and dislodge—’
The pelican lurched forward suddenly and its foot-long bill swung across like a jib. Winceworth and Sophia only just leapt out of its path in time.
The spectating mother and child were nowhere to be seen.
‘It looked as though you were trying to throttle it,’ Winceworth said. ‘I thought it was attacking you.’
‘Trained in bartitsu,’ Sophia said, as if that explained anything. She pushed her hair from her eyes with her wrist. Either she had not realised or did not care that she was bleeding. ‘Are you strong enough to hold it down?’
‘Of course,’ Winceworth said, lying.
‘I still think,’ she said, gnawing her lip and calculating, ‘I could prise whatever it is blocking the passage – if only it wouldn’t move about like this—’
‘Of course,’ Winceworth repeated, with even less certainty. The waist-high bulk of the pelican baulked and lowered its head, weaving from side to side. Winceworth removed his jacket and approached with the inner fabric facing him, stretched tight.
‘Like a – like a matador—’ he said for no good reason whatsoever.
‘“The light-limb’d Matadore,”’ quoted Sophia, apparently for her own amusement. She was smiling, madly, and Winceworth’s heart became a nonsense.
The pelican grasped this opportunity and gave a rollicking, panicked feint and ran past him, gaining speed as if in order to make an attempt at flight. Winceworth leapt just at the moment that the bird leapt – on instinct, he clamped the fabric of his jacket about its shoulders and together they rolled headlong along the grass.
‘I have it!’ he shouted.
He hoicked the sleeves of his jacket in tight as the pelican gamely batted and jabbed at him. The pouch under its beak was soft and warm against his hands. Winceworth sat up, tussled more firmly with the bird until it was jammed beneath his knees and swaddled in his jacket, neck extended like a hobby horse. It seemed a lot quieter, weaker. Quelled, it met his eye again, and he looked away.
Coughing to mask his hard breathing as Sophia came closer, ‘It’s still too – I wouldn’t go near its beak,’ he warned. ‘It’s a – nervy, I think – bit of a brute and I’m not sure it won’t have your eye out.’
By now a number of geese had appeared from another part of the park and were honking and hissing their own disapproval at the uproar. One of the geese came close enough to punch Winceworth on the arm with its head and, more by accident than design, he raised his elbow and slapped this goose full across the face with the pelican’s beak. The goose retreated, wailing and showing its tongue.
‘Where is everyone? This park is usually a damn thoroughfare—’
Sophia approached with her yellow umbrella extended. ‘I daresay that if you are able to keep the bird just there—’
The pelican gave a muffled irregular gagging sound. It swung back and its beak gaped open. Its pouch folded back and, head lolling, it sagged inside out against the bird’s spine at an obtuse angle. It looked impossible, imploded. A bloody tuft of feathers pushed against Winceworth’s neck. There was something tender to this brief touch. He felt dreadful.
Sophia took the pelican’s beak in her hands and, finding no resistance, pushed the two mandibles apart. She stared down the bird’s throat.
‘I can’t – I can’t see anything,’ she said. ‘But it is hard – to tell—’
The pelican was inert but still breathing, shallow and rumbling next to Winceworth’s chest.
‘Did you see it swallow anything?’ he asked. The pelican’s thick feet gave the smallest of kicks.
‘It was walking strangely,’ Sophia said and turned the pelican’s head from side to side in her hands and squinting. ‘It’s clearly not – look, it’s clearly not getting enough air.’ She added, ‘I’m not sure you hitting it will have helped—’
Braver members of the geese contingent made another honking incursion and she shooed them away with her umbrella.
‘I don’t imagine so.’ Winceworth hoisted the pelican up against his chest and slightly to the side, as if a bagpipe. ‘Perhaps – maybe it would be best—’ Fleetingly he imagined taking the bird’s head under his arm and twisting it, the pelican growing limp and the whole business being over. The pelican’s eye met his own one more time. A translucent purple eyelid sluiced sideways across its vision.
‘I have it,’ said Sophia, face shining. ‘Do you have a ribbon? Or – may I remove a shoelace?’ She was not interested in an answer and began plucking at his Oxfords. The geese and the ducks laughed at Winceworth. He pulled the pelican tighter against him. Sophia tsked and tutted. Adrenaline made her fingers awkward. Winceworth felt his shoe loosen and Sophia was there binding the pelican’s beak together with the lace in quick, tight loops. Her face was close to his, just the pelican and the new smell of pelican between them.
‘I can use this?’ Sophia said.
She had reached for the exposed lining of his jacket that was banded across the pelican’s swaddled belly. She plucked at something there – the stem of his hollow metal Swansby House pen that he kept in the pocket there. She slid the pen free and flexed it in her hand. No, she was not flexing it, she was bending it. It snapped with a dull crack.
Sophia grabbed the pelican’s beak and felt down its throat with her hand. She found its collarbone. Pelicans almost certainly do not have collarbones. Sophia pushed the broken pen into the pelican’s throat.
There was a loud hiss of expelled air – the pelican swelled under Winceworth’s grasp and a second later they both heard it take a huge gulping heave of a breath.
The geese cackled and hooted.
The bird, the man and the woman panted.
‘Do you come here often?’ Winceworth asked.
M is for mendaciloquence (n.)
‘I’m here to help,’ Pip said, simply.
She drew a tray of index cards towards her from the pile on my desk.
Clarity is her talent and part of the reason I ever fell for her. Pip was often a person of actions. Action is often better than words. I was a person of anxieties rather than anything. ‘How did you get in here?’
‘The door was open, and let me tell you when I see that boss of yours I’m going to give him an earful about security. Aren’t you meant to be under siege or something? Expecting a tankful of homophobes through the door at any moment?’
‘But the café—’
‘Everyone will have to deal with a sign that says C L O S E D on the door,’ Pip said. She looked around my office, eyes searching for the office phone.
‘Is that the one they call you on?’
‘Don’t worry about that,’ I said. ‘You’re really staying?’
‘Try and stop me,’ she said. She hugged me. It meant more than words can say.
‘You should leave.’ I said it with authority, drawing myself up to my full height mid-hug.
We got into a system at my desk, Pip perched up on the windowsill and me on my chair, both looking for the handwriting and distinctive penmanship that crossed the i’s and dotted the t’s on the definition index cards. Pip had brought me lunch from her café, and for a while we passed the time in busy, bored silence.
An hour later, Pip was flipping through a volume of Swansby’s in tsking fury.
‘I’ve just spent about five minutes staring at the word pat without taking anything in.’
I knew exactly what she meant. My eyes and my brain had severed any meaningful connection and it was tricky to concentrate enough to recognise even the most regular of words. The array of handwriting on the index cards appeared to pulse if I maintained eye contact for too long.
‘I think we can safely discount pat,’ I said.
‘Pat, begone.’ She flicked the index card across my desk to join a growing pile. We had decided to put the ‘found’ fictitious words in an envelope.
‘Words: What Are They Like?’
‘
Thanks for helping,’ I said. ‘I have no idea how David expects me to know I’ve found every false word that could possibly have snuck in. But two heads are better than one.’
‘Are you kidding? My pleasure,’ she said.
‘Sure.’
‘Can’t have you doing all this spelling-bee research on your own: what if we ever play Scrabble and you’ve got all this advantage?’
She did not need to say it, and I recognised the deflection. Since I had told her about the threatening phone calls coming in at work, she had told me how worried she was, how helpless she felt. At the time I laughed it off and said it was nothing, but knowing she was nearby somehow made the sight of the office phone immediately less terrifying.
‘I don’t think we’ve ever played Scrabble,’ I said. A vision of a future Pip – same unpiplike figure bent only a little with age, a tartan blanket over her knees and sitting across from me, squinting at board game tiles. The same smile and the same haircut, a little greyer. What words might we have for each other then, with all the possibilities of where that then and that might be?
‘A girl can dream, can’t she,’ Pip said. She picked up another sheaf of index notes and a groan escaped her lips. ‘Dear God in heaven, I’ve found a whole flock of pelicans. No language needs so many different meanings for the word pelican. Listen to this—’ Pip read from the cards, slapping them down on the desk as she went through them. ‘We’ve got pelican (n.) as you’d expect – although this is a bloody detailed entry about them, not sure we need to know they have human-like pupils. And which is not great editing by the way: I assume they mean human-eye-like.’
‘Swansby’s isn’t famous for being the best at that type of thing,’ I reminded her.
‘Fine, right, but anyway, then, then!, we have pelican as a verb too, to be like a pelican.’ Pip pelicanned to underline her point. ‘And I’ll accept that, I suppose I kind of see the need, but, BAM, we’ve got pelican (n.), second meaning, “an alembic with curved tubes on opposing sides of the vessel, used in distillation.”’
The Liar's Dictionary Page 11
