The Liar's Dictionary

by Eley Williams

  On waking, Winceworth forgot every aspect of his dreams, but for the record they all featured a mad kind of aviary and a desperate urgent need to escape – tiny orange birds in cages and pelicans on stilts, the air around his dreamhead filled with nonsense songs and the clattering of wings. It was the first night for years that he did not dream about a dictionary. His immediate thought was of Prof. Gerolf. He pictured the professor turning over the day’s filed powder-blue index cards, and thought of each of his false words lying there in amongst the real entries, each one nodded at, appreciated as if valid and sound, and then filed away in the hush of the professor’s study above the Scrivenery at the top of Swansby House.

  Winceworth did not know whether he had expected to feel relief or guilt or anticipation upon waking – one of these emotions, at least, and possibly a combination of all three. Should it feel like he had pulled a prank? Should it feel like revenge? Devilment? Instead, all Winceworth felt was a new kind of numbness. The world had not changed and dawn was living up to most accepted definitions. He gave himself a moment longer beneath the covers before rising. Lying hidden, there, his eyelashes brushed the underside of a blanket. He concentrated on that small inconsequential pressure. He tried again to access how he felt. He was less exhausted, but it was not a kind of restfulness. He did not feel anything like at peace.

  He fetched his book of matches from his jacket on the floor and attended to the lamp and enjoyed the rasp of the match strike and the sudden heat. A daydream came briefly and unbidden, of the Scrivenery on fire. He imagined flames passing from desk to desk. He imagined the stink of ink peeling across pages as a fire made its way up the folders and pigeonholes, crawling brightly across to create a fretted, heavy ceiling. Winceworth moved away from his grate and there was no tune in his head nor any stray word ricocheting in his mind as he set about the practicalities of a working day. Ties still needed to be straightened and bluing chins still required fresh shaving.

  He remembered it was the day of the Swansby House staff photograph. His grey face loomed in the mirror above the washstand, and he saw for the first time that the wire bridge of his spectacles had collected silt from yesterday’s explosion: a tiny stripe of warpaint across his nose. There was a corresponding mark stamped against his pillow. He rubbed the stain, absently, then sluiced his face and underarms with water. Every action felt deliberate and slow as he worked the small nub of pink soap between his hands until it was thick and fat-bubbled. He rubbed away, closing his eyes against the shock of water, until the world smelled of suds and fresh skin. He shaved and, as was his habit, he nicked his jaw. Always in the same place. Not concentrating, he chided himself. Prone to error.

  It had rained in the night and the window had a slight frost on the outside and inside of the pane. He felt the chill of it in his hair and against his face.

  The morning at Swansby House was spent in the usual way, with all the clerks and lexicographers quietly chasing their various entries and wrangling definitions. Bielefeld went on humming under his breath and Appleton kept up his campaign of sniffing while Winceworth picked over the bones of S-words and kept his head low at his desk. Some members of Swansby House’s staff had heard about the events at Barking and visited his desk to express sympathy, curiosity or intrigue. He was not a good raconteur and these conversations were brief. He told everyone who disturbed his work that, honestly, he could remember very little of what had taken place out in Barking. They expressed surprise, regret and boredom and then moved on and let him be. Winceworth shot occasional looks at Frasham and the white-haired Miss Cottingham whenever he spotted them across the hall or their work took them anywhere near his desk. When the boy with the post-barrow came to take the index cards from his desk, Winceworth did not show a flicker of emotion.

  Prof. Gerolf emerged from his study at exactly one o’clock and addressed them from the gallery above the Scrivenery hall. He stood directly above the clock, beard cascading over the balcony as he announced in a headmasterly tone that the photographer was ready in the courtyard. No need for the gentlemen to wear hats, he declared, let the brains cool off. The Cottingham sisters exchanged glances and kept their headgear secured in their white and black hair. Pons pons pons. There followed a stutter of chairs scraping back across the floorboards and the dull tinkle of many inkpot lids being replaced: everyone began shooting their cuffs and smoothing their hair and emptied the Scrivenery in an orderly fashion, column by column.

  In an effort to keep warm, the Swansby staff jogged up and down on their toes in the courtyard. Winceworth noticed that Appleton had bought a new watch chain for the occasion and Bielefeld had shined his shoes and parted his hair in a different way. Everybody was absorbed in neatening their moustaches and putting their shoulders back, standing slimmer and taller than they ever did in the Scrivenery. The lexicographers’ shoulders were used to stooping over desks. They arranged into height order and positioned themselves in front of the camera against the Swansby House wall. Winceworth noticed that despite Gerolf’s instructions, Frasham kept creeping into the centre of the photograph with the assurance of one compelled to do so by some ineluctable force – Frasham’s expression did not waver and he did not say a word but his colleagues parted to let him through. Less seamless a negotiation of elbows belonged to Glossop beetling in Frasham’s wake so that they might stand together.

  ‘Excuse me!’ The photographer was having none of it. ‘Little man! Yes, you, green handkerchief! Back to the front, if you please!’

  The photographer had a stentorious, magisterial tone Glossop could not help but obey. Winceworth was jealous that one could possess such a voice. The photographer busied himself behind the camera with fabric and tripods. He looked at the amassed lexicographers with clear disdain. Martinet-lunged and growing red in the face, he explained that he had come from another appointment earlier that day with a particularly boisterous football team from Kennington and he was simply not in the mood for any blithering or messing about. All the Swansby staff looked at their feet and tugged at their collars.

  Prof. Swansby, a sensitive man, tried to clear the air by enquiring about the names for the different parts and processes required by the camera (‘Potassium chlorate, my goodness!’). This had a conciliatory effect and the tension between photographer and subjects lifted. The Swansby staff shuffled and the photographer lowered his head beneath his dark cloth. Behind the camera tripod, he was transformed into a new, slouch-shouldered creature, a glassy Cyclops with a concertina snout.

  ‘When you’re quite ready …’

  Winceworth’s neck stiffened and his mouth ran dry. He never coped particularly well when attention was trained upon him and this was almost as bad as his appointments with Dr Rochfort-Smith. He allowed his gaze to shift slightly towards Frasham. He saw the sharp clean lines of Frasham’s suit, the brightness of his shirt collar, his tennis player’s shoulders and imagined his face carrying a winning, winning, winning smile.

  ‘Watch the birdie!’ the photographer said. The flash powder flared hot and bright off the brick wall of the courtyard, a brief, indescribable, terrible and familiar colour.

  There was a movement from above them – tiny, inconsequential, but enough to catch Winceworth’s attention. A rustling in the ivy, perhaps, or someone opening a window? Winceworth looked up at the Swansby House windows. He blinked.

  Clear and white against the dark beyond, Sophia Slivkovna’s face was framed in the window, staring down at the group. She looked calm, regal, as relaxed as an audience member glancing down from their box at the opera.

  It was not fancy on his part: even at this distance, Winceworth could tell she was looking directly at him, her finger to her lips.

  W is for wile (n.)

  The fire alarm was so loud it made my teeth hurt – the kind of sound that makes every neuron sit up and beg, and forces shock to fizz along your gums.

  ‘Pip?’

  I dropped the telephone receiver, grabbed the fake-words envelope and sprang for
the office door. I made it into the hallway before the surface of my eye began to itch. Out in the passage my vision became milky as if the walls and balustrades and skirting boards were in a state of flux, unsteady in my eyeline. I tried to focus and a familiar shape dashed past my ankles. Tits the cat, faster than I had ever seen, striped down the stairs and out of sight.

  Smoke was filling the hall.

  My heart dopplered. There was a muffled clatter from above as if something falling to the floor, and then the sound of wood or metal or stone lurching. I covered the ground in record speed up to the stairs, their banisters smoothed by the wear of century’s past lexicographers’ hands, and ran up to the forbidden upper storeys. A door was open some way down the corridor and I charged towards it. When I think back about this moment, there was the smell of something chemical burning in the air – but that might just be the mind playing tricks. I raced to the door, saw smoke pluming in creamy hurtles around its frame, and I lurched inside.

  The smoke was thick in the room and the struggling figures I found there appeared as if through fog: I was able to first make out the darkened angles of their elbows and their knees. Both figures were coughing. I could recognise Pip’s cough from over 1,000 metres – another way perhaps of defining love – and I made my way towards it, repeating her name. It sounded like bleating. The proportions of the contents of this room were unclear and impossible, transformed into bitter clouds and shadows, its details all completely lost. I knocked into a desk or a table or a ghost with my hip as I stumbled forward, calling Pip’s name.

  ‘Here!’ Pip said. ‘I’ve got him!’

  And I was by her side and coughing in time with her, pushing my hands out in front of me and scrabbling at her shoulder, at some unknown fabric, at another’s shoulder within it, within the smoke. All was greys and heats and angles, at our feet a shattered spray of glass. I rubbed my eyes again, focused on the floor and saw the remnants of a small flaming parcel of wiring. It stank and popped and gushed more smoke, and a man – David, I recognised his height and his movements now at such close quarters – stamped and stamped and tried to shake Pip from his elbow while bringing his foot down upon the package.

  He was saying, hissing, desperate, ‘Shit-shit-shit—’

  That voice without the robo-disguiser: I’d be able to pick it out of a million.

  There was a roaring, zipping sound above our heads and we all twisted to stare through the fog above us. The smoke was thickest there and running up the corner of the room and to the ceiling tiles, we saw a terrible line of flame. Yellow and red and amber, apricot, auburn, aurelian, brass, cantaloupe, carrot, cinnabar, citric, coccinate, copper, coral, embered, flammid, fulvous, gilt, ginger, hennaed, hessonite, honeyed, laharacish, marigold, marmaladled, mimolette, ochraceous, orang-utan, paprikash, pumpkin, rubedinous, ruddy, rufulous, russet, rusty, saffron, sandy, sanguine, spessartite, tangerine, tawny, tigrine, Titian, topazine, vermilion, Votyak, xanthosiderite—

  ‘Shit shit shit.’ David’s voice again right by my ear. It was in time with the peal of the fire alarm. I tripped on the smoke-spuming package as he spoke, seizing Pip’s arm to steady myself.

  The roar of orange above us took on a sudden new gulping intensity, and all three of us blundered backwards. The whole of the ceiling was suddenly sheeting with a ripple of flame and the heat of it glanced across my scalp.

  Pip’s hand was on my collar and she was shouting and pulling at David’s sleeve. Who knows the instinct that was flushing through her, dictating her movements and willing her onwards, but she heaved both of us spluttering Swansbyites out of the smoke-filled, fire-filling room, threw us down the stairs just as a beam or bressummer or architrave fell to the ground in a hiss and bang of masonry.

  We rolled down the steps and staggered to our feet. A wordless choking heap, we grabbed each other’s lapels and ran headlong for the front door and out into the evening air.

  X is for x (v.)

  As the photographer dismantled his camera and the lexicographers congratulated one another for standing quite so still for so long in such a good order, Winceworth made his excuses and slipped back inside. Nobody noticed his departure. He took the stairs two at a time, surprising Tits-cats left and right so that flights of them had to dash out of his way. He hastened up the steps and looped around the corners of landings. Panting slightly, he made a mental calculation of the layout of the building, trying to match its structure onto the snatched glimpse of Sophia’s face at the upper-storey window. Would it mean turning left or right? When he reached the second floor, he hovered for a moment and leaned against the banisters, catching his breath.

  ‘Helloa?’

  Sophia stood in the middle of a corridor, a brightness of orange skirts and a white shirtwaist. Winceworth approached, checking his step so he did not seem too eager. Bookshelves ran the length of the passage on both sides thick and stodgy with monographs by linguists and dons; these passages seemed far darker than the Scrivenery below. She was standing with one gloved hand resting upon one of the books’ spines. She smiled at him as he stepped forward. A small toque hat was pushed back amongst her hair. Its design featured snapdragon embroidery and a feather on a pin.

  Out of sheer habit the lisp wormed its way between his lips. ‘Miss Slivkovna,’ Winceworth said. He took her hand and gave a little bow in what must have seemed like a frenzied jolt. ‘Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary is not worthy.’

  Sophia looked glowing, radiant, whatever the most beautiful synonym for flushed might be.

  ‘You are here to see Frasham,’ Winceworth continued, apparently not able to bear a silence between them. The statement cooled in the air as clutter.

  ‘No, no.’ Her tone was light, vague, a touch vacant despite the warmth in her smile. As Winceworth drew closer there was a faint sting of alcohol in the inches between them. This was unexpected – for a wild second he wondered whether he might be smelling it upon himself.

  She turned shining eyes upon him and blinked a little as if waking up. ‘A delight to see you again! How is the new pen?’ She flicked invisible dust from his shoulder, admiring him. He was pleased at the change of her manner and at her attentiveness. ‘My sincere apologies to disturb you from your podium down there,’ she went on. ‘Didn’t you look smart? You are quite the picture when you are not waylaying pelicans.’

  ‘I take that as a compliment from one who stabs them in the neck.’

  ‘For surgical purposes.’

  ‘Just so.’ He cocked a thumb downstairs. ‘And I was glad to get away. Have you been here all morning?’ The idea seemed absurd, like not knowing God or the Devil was keenly watching you oblivious at work.

  ‘I arrived some ten minutes ago – everyone seemed occupied so I thought I’d sate my curiosity about the place.’ She gestured to the corridor. ‘Terence told me about the cats, but I had not imagined quite so many herds of them.’

  ‘Clowder. A clowder of cats.’

  ‘But you do herd them, do you not?’

  ‘That is not yet my job and I am not the expert. I am sorry if no one was there to meet you at the door—’ But Sophia was not listening, instead making her way down the bookshelves and inattentively touching the books. She trailed her finger along the spines as she went. She did not notice, but as she passed she caught one of the dustjackets at a slight angle and the paper tore.

  Winceworth caught up and fell into step with her. He did not know these hallways on the second storey of Swansby House. He presumed they were used by Prof. Swansby for the business side of the dictionary – reference books and source material swapped for ledgers and accounting, the professor’s desks used for drafting appeals for the public to submit words and definitions for the greater good.

  Sophia said, ‘I do hope no one will mind that I took myself on a small tour while you were all down there.’

  ‘May I ask what you made of the place?’

  ‘That central hall is really very extraordinary. I was quite taken aback! Quite the
factory.’

  Winceworth felt a fleeting twinge of jealousy that he could not have fresh eyes for the place. He imagined Sophia walking between the desks – by his desk! – in the abandoned hall as if a tourist, required neither to be busy nor to appear to be busy as a worker might with the pressure of a job. He imagined walking through that room and being occupied only by leisure and delight. For him, the hall was now too strongly associated with the work done within it, synonymous with a cricked neck and hardened callouses on his middle finger from years of writing. No pons pons pons headaches from double-checking references seemed to crowd Sophia’s mind as she walked through the heart of Swansby House, and no attendant thoughts of paper cuts, Appleton sniffs. She could walk as she pleased and treat the Scrivenery as if she had entered a cloister or a gallery depending on her mood, a grotto or an ossuary rather than hard-won glossary. He imagined Sophia reaching out a finger to one of the pigeonholed shelves on the Scrivenery wall, touching their pale blue index cards, impressed by their enterprise and prowess.

  Even in the daydream this could not work as an image – he imagined her withdrawing her hand as if scalded.

  Sophia said, ‘Terence and I took a turn around a museum yesterday after our recuperative tête-à-tête in the café. He felt awful sending you away like that, you know. Terence cares so much about the blessed dictionary, and I do think it makes him a little inhumane. But he also said that he happened upon you back in the Scrivenery in the evening and I do hope he apologised – they have you working all hours of the day here, I must say.’