The Liar's Dictionary

by Eley Williams

  I agreed, but felt I owed the place some benefit of the doubt. ‘David has a line he likes to trot out about mistakes. Tell you what: I wrote it in my phone so I could quote it back at him if I made an error when helping him with the digitisation.’ I scrolled to find it. ‘Right. From Sohnson. That’s a typo. Here we go. Johnson: “Every other author may aspire to praise; the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach, and even this negative recompense has been yet granted to very few.”’

  ‘Snappy,’ Pip said, barely listening. ‘But that doesn’t excuse him putting you in the line of fire with those phone calls.’

  ‘There will always be someone looking to ruin everything,’ I said.

  ‘Not good enough,’ she countered. And I believed her I believed her I believed her.

  I found another false definition about idling, dreaming:

  alnascharaze (v.), to force oneself to fantasise

  and then another, a touch more cynical:

  Mammonsomniate (v.), to dream that money might make anything possible

  Small little extracts revealed a state or state of mind. Briefer than an anecdote, more overworked than a passing thought.

  ‘What do you think about when you think about a dictionary?’ I had asked Pip on our first proper date. It was a clunky sentence. It was an evening of shynesses and clunky hopeful approaches.

  I remember that she had rubbed her ear and I thought it was kind she took time to answer such a dumb question. It’s not like I had a good answer for it either. And she cleared her throat, raised a fist in mock mic-stance and in her terrible singing voice warbled an impression of Sinatra’s hit ‘Too Marvelous for Words’ and I remember she winked and twelve glaciers’ worth of tension melted beneath my throat and some new desire beneath that developed its own Brinell scale over the pub garden table, and yes, every flower in the Red Lion’s hanging baskets might as well have swapped their stigmas for bugles and their petals for clappers in that moment, and it was fine, it was fine, to be here with her, thinking about the difference between ‘being out’ and ‘going out’ and she was still singing in that moment and my mind was getting ahead of itself and I remember that I knew I should be concentrating, should stop staring at her mouth for anything other than listening very precisely or definitely, and then a wink could have been a mistake or a tic, and I smiled as she sang off-key.

  I probably said, ‘That’s nice.’

  ‘You use that word too much,’ Pip said. And she ground her teeth a little, very very.

  Five years later, helping me sort through index cards for God-knows-what because that is what love sometimes had to be, ‘There’s no noun pornography in here,’ Pip said abruptly, fanning a spread of blue definitions across the desk. ‘Do you think that’s significant?’

  ‘Why on earth are you looking that word up?’

  ‘No reason,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sorry you’re bored,’ I said, tetchily. ‘This is what my job is. Boring.’

  ‘I’m having a whale of a time,’ Pip declared. She pelicanned. ‘A prodigious time.’

  ‘I’m pretty sure that’s not what prodigious—’

  ‘It can’t be that they didn’t have pornography,’ Pip mused on, regardless. ‘Perhaps they just didn’t have the word for it.’

  ‘Or they did and Swansby’s just didn’t include it.’

  ‘Jesus Christ, never mind that: did you know pip refers to various respiratory diseases of birds—’

  I had looked up pip (n.) and (v.) very early in what once might have been called our courtship. Our stepping-out or not-out out-going outings. ‘Various respiratory diseases of birds, esp. poultry, when accompanied by a horny patch on the tip of the tongue.’ I decided to keep this definition out of the three years’ worth of Valentine’s cards.

  I preferred pip (v. transitive) of a chick: to crack (most likely the shell of the egg) when hatching.

  It felt good to watch Pip discover this pipfact for herself, pip me to the post before I could tell her.

  Love is often using words like maybe or most likely to soften a blow, or using words like like when really you mean indefinitely and using the word definitely to imply anything can ever be anything other than a suggestion or an impression.

  I often had cause to remember this line while working in Swansby’s: ‘Too precise a meaning erases the mystery of your literature.’ I think I first came across it in one of my pointless essays for a pointless degree for a pointless internship at an end-of-the-line encyclopaedic dictionary. I had underlined the – what, axiom? motto? – on my essay notes.

  ‘What would be in your personal dictionary?’ Pip asked me. It was January so the light had vanished from my window, and we were working as long a day in Swansby House as I could ever remember.

  I stretched my arms and pinched the bridge of my nose. ‘I don’t know if there’s anything new to say.’

  ‘That’s the ambition of the woman I love,’ Pip said, and came around the back of my chair to wrap an arm gently about my shoulders.

  What things in the world do I want to define for other people that might otherwise be overlooked? Coming up with words is a particular kind of weird creative peristalsis: memory is involved, and self-awareness and absorption. The image is of someone tapping your brain as one might tap a trunk for syrup.

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ I said.

  I thought: a word for how I always mistype warm as walm. Silly things. A word for knowing when the pasta is perfectly cooked just by looking at it. Crucial-silly things. A word for when you’re head-over-heels in love with someone and you’re both just burbling nonsense at each other, forgivably. A word for mispronouncing words that you had only ever seen written down. A word for your favourite songs that can never be over-listened to. A word for the great kindness of people who, unseen, take care to release insects that are trapped in rooms. A word for being surprised by an aspect of your physicality. A word for the way that sometimes thoughts can sit unpenetrable but snug like an avocado stone in your brain. A word for the strange particular bluish sheen of skin rolled between the fingers.

  ‘What about a word for not being out?’ Pip said.

  We never fight, not really. Not about the expected stuff: not about ambitions, not about our future, not about exes. Ex is included as verb in Swansby’s – it is defined as ‘to obliterate character by typing x over it; to cross out in this way’ – and as a noun: a mark made in lieu (of a signature). Often witnessed.

  In three years the closest we had come to a row really came down to one of us wanting the other to take definitive action.

  ‘Where did that come from?’ I said.

  ‘Forget it,’ she said.

  ‘I’m out enough,’ I said.

  ‘Are you?’ Pip asked. This face is left intentionally blank, her tone seemed to say to me.

  I get on-the-tip-of-my-tonguish when it comes to being out. For a start, the tenses go all wrong and my thoughts all come disjointed and panicked, disarrayed like an upturned box of index cards. I’ve been gay since I can care to remember but haven’t been able to tell other people. I say it’s because I haven’t got around to it, and maybe one day this will be true. I hadn’t told my parents even though I don’t think they would mind. They would care, I think, but I don’t know if they’d mind. Compared with so many places in the world etc. etc. it is a good time to be out. I know that. It’s nice out. That’s what I know to be true and yet and yet.

  Pip has been out her whole life and can’t understand why I would be uneasy or unable to. My brain loops round and through and in and in and in on itself if I try to put it into words. It’s not interesting. It is interesting. It shouldn’t define me. It definitely should. I wish I had an easy way to remember how to spell mnemonic. I wish I could remember how to use ‘surely’ and ‘definitely’ when it came to finding words for myself.

  ‘Just tell me what’s wrong,’ Pip would ask at home. ‘I’m here, I’m listening.’

  You’re unbelievable, a voice in my he
ad whispers.

  I can never quite get the thoughts and words in order. ‘Maybe I’m not ready yet’ feels like cowardice, or strangely prissy, I am a special rare bud or fruit.

  The word closet is flimsier than cupboard or wardrobe, right? No one would miss a closet and its unstable walls. No one cares about a closet. I hate that it matters. I hate that I matter, sometimes. I haven’t got the right words for me.

  Swansby’s defines closet, amongst many things, in terms of a ‘closet of ease (n.), a toilet, a privy’ and a ‘closet of the heart (n.), the pericardium, which encloses the heart; a chamber within the heart, the left atrium or ventricle. Obsolete.’

  ‘It’s not lying to not be out,’ I said, slowly.

  ‘I never called you a liar,’ Pip said.

  ‘I don’t know why you’re crying,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ she said. She wiped the corner of her eye with her sleeve, not-angry but not-not-angry, and then she squared her shoulders. ‘The sooner we can get this done, you know, the sooner you can leave this job. I don’t feel comfortable with you working somewhere where you’re being threatened.’

  ‘Is this about the phone calls? I’ve told you, it’s just some idiot.’

  She stared at me. ‘Just is doing a lot of work there. Look, forget I ever said anything.’

  ‘I don’t want to fight,’ I said.

  Pip hugged me again. I wished there was a word for marshalling a loved one to safety. I wish that I could be the one to coin it.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ She perched again on the windowsill and patted my seat. ‘I’m tired, I love you, and I’m feeling on edge. Come on: we can do another hour or so. Let’s find what else is up the garden path.’

  P is for phantom (n. and adj. and v.)

  On the train to Barking, if he concentrated, Winceworth believed that he could almost hear the genteel roll of the dessert trolley and the squeak of waiters’ feet in the rock and rumble of the carriage. He used to only ever daydream about the picture of the cottage in Cornwall. The salt on the breeze in his hair, the soft hum of bees. It seems that this dream had been ousted and replaced.

  Perhaps he should think of it as a badge of honour that Frasham felt compelled to send him on such an obviously made-up errand. It was absurd, of course – imagine anyone being jealous of me. But there was some comfort that Frasham had noticed Sophia’s interest in him, or friendship, or tenderness. It clearly was significant enough to cause him to intervene.

  Barking. Honestly.

  He tried his more familiar daydreams and to think about a whitewashed cottage with a bare table, a window overlooking a bright, clear stretch of sand. He had mentioned the Sennen Cove fantasy to Sophia in a moment of madness. It was a silly thing, a flippant cipher for the idea of being left alone and clearheaded. He would be at no one’s beck and call with no responsibility other than for himself. It felt an unambitious fantasy but an honest one. What would he do with all the money in the world? His immediate thought: disappear. The train shifted a little, and with it his mind changed tack. Would anyone miss him? A scruffy lexicographer, who left no real mark on the world? He reeled back to the idea of a cottage, and the sound of bees in a garden.

  As he daydreamed, or tried to force himself to daydream, Winceworth leaned his head against his seat and watched a moth make its way up and down the window of the swaying carriage. He had read somewhere when researching for a Swansby article that some species of moth had no mouthparts. Mothparts. At the time of reading he had been overcome with sadness at this fact. A case of too much information not always being a good thing. He never realised that he needed to believe a moth could shout in rage, for example, or find comfort in eating its favourite moth-snacks or even have a chance to yawn. Winceworth yawned now and regarded his mouthless companion with sympathy.

  A thought intruded: Frasham leaning in and his red moustache close to Sophia’s neck.

  Of course, when Frasham left the office it was with full fanfare and pomp, and he got to gallivant around Siberia as language’s knight errant, its swain and suitor with his damned hollow Swansby House regulation pen and headed notepaper. While I am sent thirteen miles to Barking, Winceworth thought, with my regulation pen irregularly lodged in a pelican’s throat. Winceworth’s gifted, new silver pen would have to do. The stationer had filled its cartridge in the shop. He used it now to doodle on the cover of the attaché case – barkBarkBARK K – and as he ran the pen across his lap and the train gave little skips, his writing jumped with jolts and shimmies on the page.

  Winceworth returned to the moth at the train window and brushed absently at some pelican blood on his shirt. He wondered whether the moth had ever been beyond the confines of this train. Like the mice and rats he sometimes spotted on the underground sections of the Metropolitan Railway, perhaps this moth was born here and would die here, had no moth-memories of tree-bark or woollen jumpers or moonlight to fall back on. Winceworth imagined a moth-eaten volume of Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary.

  Every time that the moth reached the wooden lip at the top of the windowsill where escape was possible and the world appeared in a brighter strip, it missed its opportunity and slowly headbutted its way back down the windowpane. Up and then down, up and then down, taking in the view as the train cut a journey through London. Tattered clouds, black brick and gutters. Winceworth thought of all the moths that he had trapped beneath tumblers and deposited outside over the years. The moth reached the top of the window and again turned on its heels and began its descent. Winceworth slid an eye to the passenger sitting opposite him – a mixed metaphor of an older man, tamarin-moustache jutting a few good white inches beyond his cheeks with liver spots like giraffe skin and the surface of Jupiter on his hands. The man was watching the moth too, apparently unperturbed.

  Winceworth got to his feet, unsteady with the pitch and roll of the carriage, and opened the window by pulling on the leather strap.

  ‘Come on, old thing.’ He tried chivvying the moth out with his document folder. The moth refused to take this advantage. Up and then down, up and then down again as cold air snapped around Winceworth’s ears.

  ‘Close that, won’t you?’ said the other passenger, and Winceworth acquiesced at once.

  Winceworth’s later recollection of this train journey would be hazy. The train ran through East Ham with its glue factories and sad-faced, easily led horses. The marine paint factories disgorged columns of steam and a smell that you first sensed in your stomach before any flavour hit your nose. The moth made its way up and down, up and down the window. He knew that bombilating was the verb for bees – what of moths? His human carriagemate leaned forward and produced a newspaper. The page facing Winceworth featured an advertisement in bold italics: Don’t Mutilate Your Papers with Pins or Fasteners, but Use the Gem Paper Clip. A nap curdled in Winceworth’s mind and did its thing to senses of time, place and space. January beyond his window had made the sky above the city paperclip-coloured. The moth continued to rumble up and down the window, up and down.

  Later, Winceworth would not be able to recall the scene very clearly.

  The train carriage bucked and swayed a little and Winceworth would recall that he had been quite cold and his crumpled jacket was thin. He would remember closing his eyes, and that briefly there was nothing but the swaying of the train, the smell of the leather seats, previous travellers’ cigarettes and the paint factories outside. The moth’s coat at the window was attracting dust and cobwebs, growing infinitesimally heavier, up and down, up and down. The train worked out its shunting solfeggio as it coursed along, the telegraph posts and buildings flicked past the window and caused weak afternoon sun to the-opposite-of-flash through Winceworth’s eyelids. The undersides of his eyelids shifted from a deadened ruddy colour to bursts of red light as each post passed by. There was a false sense of depth to the shapes that he began to see forming there and he experienced an instant, pleasantly terrifying giddiness. The silver of his new pen flashed in the sun. He added Barking as a ti
tle to the notepad page, and he underlined the word twice, with a flourish.

  The moth humming its way up the windowpane – that detail he would remember. He would remember coming out of his nap just as the tamarin-faced, Jupiter-giraffe-skin man opposite made a noise, rolled up his newspaper, and smacked it against the glass, against the moth, and at that very moment that the world went

  whumppp

  A number of Winceworth’s colleagues cut out and kept some of the headlines from the following day’s papers: TERRIBLE EXPLOSION, MANY KILLED AND INJURED – GREAT DESTRUCTION OF PROPERTY. Later articles listed the injuries and the damage: ‘parts of the body were found 60 yards distant’, ‘the dome of the boiler is lying in an adjoining field’. The lexicographers who kept these papers would stress that they collected the snippets not out of some new-found desire to chase souvenirs of awful events, but to help account for Winceworth’s movements and assist in putting the narrative together. He had no memory of alighting from the train, nor of how he might have made it to the site of the explosion. Bielefeld found one photograph in the press that featured a figure that if you squinted might well have been Winceworth at the scene of the disaster. At least, the man in the photograph had glasses and was pictured carrying a slim paper folder. There was certainly a corresponding stain over his chest where, say, a new and unopened bottle of Pelikan ink had smashed in a breast pocket of his jacket. Everybody else in the photograph either looked infinitely more capable than this figure or was lying under a sheet on a stretcher.

  Winceworth could only remember a batch of moments out of sequence. He could remember every detail of a moth at a window, but not how he got down from the train to the site of the explosion. From the snapshots he could remember, he might construe that the afternoon was spent with his sleeves rolled up in dust and masonry and wood and steam, being shouted at by a fireman. He remembered kneeling in order to throw up, and finding a man’s face next to his. He had been holding a man’s jaw in his hand. The man was trapped under some sort of girder or column or beam: it was a very straight line made of very black metal that was too hot to touch. The man’s jaw was not where it should have been on his face. The angles were all wrong and at odds with conventional perspective. Winceworth might remember that he had got a small stone in his shoe and that somehow dust had got behind his back teeth. He remembered thinking that the firemen’s brass all looked remarkably clean amongst so much soot. Everyone except for the firemen had been entirely silent. He would not remember seeing the fire engine.