The Liar's Dictionary

by Eley Williams

  He remembered the dampness of ink against his chest, that there was broken glass in his hair and that, at the time of the explosion, the colour that he had seen through the zoetropic train carriage window was one he simply could not name.

  The facts are these: in the hour after the blast, Winceworth came-to in the middle of a line of firemen and bystanders, coughing with smoke and rheumy eyes. He was on his feet and did not think he had fainted but he had no idea where he was or how he had got there. That was how shock was supposed to work, wasn’t it? In his hand was a pail of water. He looked behind him and saw frightened, drawn or soot-blackened faces. He was so close to the centre of the blast that Winceworth could feel the warmth of fire beat against his cheek. He helped pass buckets of water into the heart of the heat. Above them, as it coiled away into the dusky pink-sliced sky, the smoke was a purple tinged with the red of the flames.

  Winceworth’s knees were unsteady and for some reason, even as he watched the bucket of water leave his hands and pass on down the line, he had no sensation in his fingers. All of a sudden he was watching a reflection of his face distend and warp in some kind of gold flux in front of him. He accepted that the world had entirely changed and that natural processes and dimensions no longer applied. He concentrated and shook his head as if dislodging something. His reflection in the fireman’s helmet shook back at him. He looked dismayed. The fireman was leaning down and shouting something at him, pointing, but Winceworth did not understand the words.

  ‘He says we should leave,’ another voice then said, calmly, in his ear. It was the man with the impressive moustachios with whom he had shared a train carriage – he too must have climbed down to the site of the newly ruined factory to help. He was also caked in debris and ash. All of the people around him were panting and one was being silently, violently sick by a sweetshop’s storefront.

  Winceworth let himself be led away by the group. He murmured agreements to their No more we can dos and Gave it our best shots. He allowed his face and hands to be towelled clean by a bystander. Despite this kindness, more dust fell. He felt the grit in his face stiffen as he grimaced. The world came to him muted and muffled – he hoped this was due to dust plugging his ears, or else his hearing must have suffered in the blast.

  Fragments of masonry lined the streets: spars and splinters of wood. The group he joined milled for a while, communicating by nodding and catching each other’s eyes. They walked aimlessly down side streets with no destination in mind other than trying to be away, at times doubling back on themselves. Some seemed to join the party, others to leave it, until eventually they stopped outside a public house where people were taking an early supper. Patrons put down their papers and their pies as the group entered, all grey-faced and caked in cinders and soot. The landlord either must have known what happened or recognised a look in their eyes, for immediately Winceworth had a drink in his hand and found himself pushed into a wing-backed chair by the fire.

  Distantly, the sound of a fire engine: whistles and hooves.

  A dimpled glass mug was lowered in front of him.

  ‘Sharpener – get the blood going,’ said the landlord, and Winceworth drank it all in one pull.

  ‘Where are you meant to be, lad?’ the landlord asked.

  Winceworth did not have a good answer. He felt for his new pen in his loose jacket pocket and saw that its nib was, miraculously, unbroken.

  ‘Volume S. Back in Westminster,’ Winceworth said. He patted his pockets for his train ticket. ‘Sorry, I don’t know what’s come over me. I’ll walk.’

  ‘To Westminster?’ said the man. He looked at the sky through the window, which was turning apricot and black. ‘Don’t be daft, you’ll keel over by the time you reach Plaistow.’

  ‘I don’t know where that is.’

  The man gave him a long look. ‘I say, you really don’t look well at all.’

  And Winceworth, whose veins were full of a nervous fire and who was tired of not finishing his sentences, tired of not being heard or having a chance to speak, wanted to seize the man by the ears and hiss that all he had managed to eat today was cake and that he was impossibly, nonsensibly, intractably, irreducibly, awfully in love for no good purpose and the woman that he loved-with-no-good-reason was, for no good reason, probably right now at this very minute being led around an obscene, beautiful statue by a man with a bright red moustache and perfect posture who had all the time in the world, time Winceworth would never have, with that laugh of his and that laugh of hers, and yet here Winceworth was with his hands shaking, on a road, barking or something ludicrous like that on account of a dictionary where nobody knew he existed and that he loathed because to bottle up language, to package language – he! Who was he to love her and to make passels of words! – to attempt to confine language is impossible and a fantasy and loathsome, it was like trapping butterflies under glass, she was right – and yet yet yet yet yet yet even in loathing it the dictionary had trained him so well; it had trained him so well he was halfway even then itching to reach for his notes, his little Swansby’s headed notepaper, so that he could ask a landlord about his use of sharpener just then, and make sure he took good, neat dictation down for the specific six-by-four index card on which the word would be housed, and in it would slot, in would go an example of an incidental but somehow meaningful aside ready to be consulted when the Sh-words of Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary were compiled. Congratulations, it’s a verb! they would say. How did everybody manage with this responsibility and complete lack of agency? Was it that no one saw, or nobody cared? Every word investigated, every fact taken into account. Everything anyone said mattered, and the matter at hand was not why they said it, or where they learned it, or the specific pull of their tongue against the palate of their mouth as they said it that is individual only to them – did you know that the palatal rugae pattern on the roof of a mouth is distinct to each and every individual, like a fingerprint, and every word one says has been loosed and polished and buffered and bruised by it in a unique way? Would the dictionary know he’d associate sharpener for ever more with the taste of ash? With wanting to cry? With men with white moustaches and dead moths in a terrible window onto the world?

  Winceworth didn’t say any of that. He cleared his throat. ‘I am fine, thank you.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what,’ said the landlord. ‘My good deed for the day: I’ll call you a cab back to – what did you call it?’

  ‘Swansby House.’ Winceworth did not know how the man could possibly seem so together. He reached into his pocket absently, but the man waved him back down.

  ‘No, don’t mention it – it’s the least I can do.’

  ‘What’s your name?’ asked Winceworth. And the man told him.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Winceworth simply. An idea had suddenly formed in his mind. ‘And – one last thing – did you see the colour?’

  ‘The colour?’ the man asked, picking a sliver of wood from Winceworth’s sleeve and crumbling it absently between his fingers. ‘Colour of what?’

  ‘Of the explosion – did you see it from here, through the window?’ Winceworth sat up. His head felt suddenly clearer. ‘What colour would you call it, the explosion? What exact colour?’

  Q is for queer (n. and adj. and v.)

  We found some more fictitious words. They seemed to be getting more and more obscure but maybe that’s because my tolerance for them was becoming weaker.

  Here was one about the ‘guilt of having a false speech impediment’. Here was another noun specific to ‘the dream of retiring and keeping bees’. More usefully, perhaps, Pip was very pleased to find a noun for ‘the hardened callous on your middle finger caused by years of ill-use’: she liked the ambiguity of it, even though I guessed this was a desk-bound lexicographer just complaining about his lot.

  Pip left her index cards for half an hour to find some coffee. On her return, she came back panting slightly and holding something in her hands. It was rectangular and framed, and as she
swung it in through the office door she peeped over the top of it.

  ‘I found it in one of the storage cupboards downstairs,’ she said. ‘Tucked behind a yoga ball and some old posters.’

  The light through the office’s windows fell at a slant across the picture’s glass and the reflected glare made it difficult to quite work out what it was that I was being shown. Its frame was old and the photograph inside was at an angle on its mountings as if the sun had taken a swing at it on Pip’s behalf.

  ‘A yoga ball?’ I repeated.

  ‘It was purple. I know, who knew David Swansby had it in him. But never mind that, look at this – a proper line-up for you,’ Pip said. ‘A real rogues’ gallery.’ She brought the photograph closer to me and crouched slightly behind it. ‘Take a look! The Usual Suspects 1899: This Time It’s “Personnel”.’

  I rolled closer. ‘You think he’s in there somewhere?’

  ‘“Personnel”,’ Pip said again. She lowered the picture and looked at me expectantly.

  ‘That’s really good,’ I said.

  ‘I thought so. Go on then – get a load of these potential culprits, detective ma’am.’

  A caption was printed under the picture on a ribbon of yellow paper: Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary Staff, S–Z – 1899.

  The photograph featured three rows of crossed arms and unrelaxed faces. Two figures at the bottom were lying propped on their elbows in a stiff attempt at a sprawl. It’s an unlikely posture that’s usually relegated to commemorative photos of sports teams or lion-slumped big-game hunters, one that only ever really suits drunk Romans handling grapes in frescoes or walruses sunning themselves on ice floes and tundras. The men’s suits, ties and taper-straight moustaches all implied that striking such choreographed floppage came rather less than entirely naturally.

  Presumably for the photograph’s benefit, a number of posh-looking carpets or rugs had been dragged out onto the floor as a stage for the ensemble and they lay there overlapping and runkled on the ground just above the caption. I was actively suspending the moment of looking at the staff members’ faces, taking in every detail of a carpet instead, its tassels and bunched-up wrinkles. I wondered where these carpets had come from, whether they were the photographer’s own and, more particularly, where they had got to by now, or which storage cupboard was affording some moths the best meal of their soft-bodied lives. Nowadays, the Scrivenery was all about scratchy purple, nylon-pile, tiled modern flooring: thick enough to trip over but thin enough to allow an office chair to wheel over with a few extra leg pumps. Too thin to absorb coffee stains particularly well, as I knew to my cost. These carpet tiles ran at waist height along the walls throughout the building too. I imagine that the same carpet lines flimsy cubicle partitions in offices across the capital. I imagine people across the city pinning family photos into the pile of these fake walls, to help keep their work space a weird approximation of home.

  ‘Are you holding your breath?’ Pip asked from behind the photograph. ‘I can tell from here.’

  ‘No,’ I said. I exhaled.

  Every person captured in the photograph was looking in a slightly different direction and nobody seemed to know or have been told what to do with their hands. Some had gone for a just-bagged-a-brace-of-pheasant dip at the hip but, for the most part, all the members of the Swansby staff had arms pressed firmly across their chests, not wanting to give the photographer anything of themselves. They also all looked quite daunted as if ill at ease with being outdoors, or as if they could sense Pip’s hands, giant and white at the untattooed knuckle around their frame.

  The only two women in the photograph stood together in the middle, fussy collars and satellite-dish hats; one had black hair and the other entirely white. The photograph itself was that mottled kind of sepia that is not quite grey and not quite brown, ash and moth-coloured. It is a colour that leads you to believe that if you were ever moved to lick the photograph it would taste of toffee and bourbon and bookshop dust.

  The beaming man on the far left-hand side of the picture sported a huge beard: the focus in the picture was sharp, so much so that even the crinkles around the man’s eyes and the links of his pocket chain were distinguishable, but for whatever reason his marvellous beard sat beneath the glass as heavy and matt as a gravestone appended to his chin. I recognised the first Prof. Swansby from the portrait in the lobby downstairs. I could almost see something of Swansby’s current editor David in this man’s posture or in his wide eyes. The beard was quite a distraction. Also, the current editor was about three feet taller; clearly some non-Swansby, more dominant genes had blossomed along the line.

  Spurred on by the familiarity of Prof. Swansby’s face, I found myself trying to recognise the features of people that I knew replicated beneath the glass, and to think of period actors who best resembled them and could step into their roles.

  One of the figures in the photograph had his whole face blurred there was just a feathered smudge of paleness. His head must have snapped up as the camera’s shutters did their work. Or maybe a fault when it had been developed, a thumb slipping and dredging ink in the darkroom’s developing tray? No, there was still a trace of face there within the distortion, the shape of a head that had turned too soon. This figure was looking up and across, staring somewhere above the camera and off to the left as if in horror at something hitched in the clouds.

  ‘It must have been taken in the courtyard outside,’ Pip said, lowering the frame. ‘If you imagine it without the bins and the air vents.’

  She was right. The ivy lacquering the wall behind the figures still clung to Swansby House. I could crane my neck at my desk and look down at that courtyard, the ivy leaves glossy and bouncing behind them in a light spritz of rain. Those leaves were often the only reason that I could tell one season from the other from my desk, whether they were rustling with raindrops or winter moths or nesting finches. I peered again at the photograph: the ivy was thinner there, with fewer branches splayed across the brickwork.

  Pip handed the photograph to me. ‘But it’s good, right? What do you think, do you have a good eye for cheating bastards?’

  I rolled my chair back over to my cubicle and to the window. I spun on my chair midway: you have to take your perks when you can get them. I overbalanced slightly by the potted plant.

  I extended my arm and tried to best match my view of the yard with the orientation of the photograph. If the alignment was correct, the blurry-faced man must have been looking directly up at my window just as the picture was taken.

  As Pip continued looking for fake words, I propped the photograph in the centre of my desk, where usually an employee might have a photograph of their partner.

  R is for rum (adj.)

  Winceworth waved goodbye to the landlord and the cab pulled away from the Barking kerb. He had shaken off most of the dirt from his clothes. He looked down: ink, crumbs, muck, cat-sick, blood. It was an archive of a day that seemed to be from a different life. For years he had kept his head down, worked with words silently and cleanly. As the cab hurtled through unfamiliar streets he felt a strange new energy lodge and jangle in his lungs and heart. It was a reckless energy, manic, tightening and reverberative, rebarbative, verve surge urge, one that felt not so much like something renewed as deranged.

  The cab dropped Winceworth by the gates of Swansby House just as Westminster chimed seven o’clock. He muttered thanks to the driver and ducked beneath the steaming horses’ noses. He hauled up to Swansby House and wrenched the gates open. The clunk and rattle of his arrival caused a panic-scattering of Titivilli cats in the halls. At this late hour, it was unlikely that many lexicographers were still at work: the building was the cats’ empire.

  Gripping his satchel in his hands, Winceworth took to the stairs and into the Scrivenery hall. Pons pons pons. It was eerily quiet and his footsteps rang with odd shadows of noise and unexpected echoes. When the place was not teeming with people keeping their noses to their respective lexicographical gr
indstones, it was not so much that the place just felt empty – the air was oddly pressurised, the Scrivenery’s shelves and bookcases impossibly high, filled with an impossible number of books filled with an impossible weight of words. As Winceworth rounded the corner, he spotted one of his colleagues still working, hovering by his desk. Bielefeld looked up from his papers, visibly paled – ‘Dear God, man! What happened?’ – and scrambled over tables and around chairs to reach Winceworth’s side. He took a firm grip of Winceworth’s elbow and steered him through the rows of desks. Bielefeld wanted to position him under one of the lamps fitted between the desks so that he might bear closer inspection.

  Winceworth adjusted his jacket as Bielefeld plucked at him. Some cats came and sniffed at his feet. He wondered if they could detect pelican on him under the grime and smoke. ‘Do I look entirely awful?’ he said. ‘People were crossing to the other side of the street.’

  ‘An absolute state. What on earth have you been up to?’ Before Winceworth had a chance to reply, Bielefeld continued, ‘You’re lucky to catch me – I’m only here so much later because I’ve been chasing a reference to scurryvaig and not making one bit of headway.’

  ‘Yes?’ said Winceworth. Despite the Barking landlord’s brandy, his throat still felt coated with dirt and ash.