The Liar's Dictionary

‘A pleasure, a pleasure.’ David shook her hand and immediately I resented their closeness and wanted to divert them away from one another. They were two circles on a Venn diagram that should not have intersected or bounced up against one another. London was surely big enough that this should never happen.

‘Bit of a ruckus here,’ David continued shyly to Pip’s concerned upturned face. ‘Bit of nothing.’

‘Can it be both? Ruckus and a bit of nothing?’ Pip turned to me. ‘Your text—’

‘It’s nothing,’ I said.

‘It looks like something,’ she said, gesturing at the police van and officers.

‘Just a silly hoax. They’re just making sure everything is safe. The fire alarms didn’t go off, so I had to—’

‘You could have been torched where you sat!’ Pip looked David up and down. Given his height, this took some time. ‘That’s incredibly illegal!’

‘It can’t be incredibly one or the other,’ David said. He couldn’t help himself. ‘Something’s either illegal or not illegal.’

Mansplain (v.) was unlikely to ever enter any version of Swansby’s Encyclopaedic Dictionary

.

‘I guess that makes you incredible,’ Pip said, and she reared up as really only she can do, but David was not concentrating, he was inspecting something at his feet—

A man, apparently unmoved by the presence of police officers and blithely attempting to keep to the pavement and enjoy their normal route unimpeded, strayed between us. I had to commute every day through Westminster, and some people there just refused to recognise that not every path was available to them. In this instance, this person also had a small dog. Horrified that a bomb threat was distracting any possible attention from it, this passer-by’s dog chose that moment to slowly and theatrically defecate at my boss’s feet.

‘Ah!’ said David.

‘Oh!’ said Pip.

‘I’m so sorry,’ said the passer-by. ‘She’s never done this before.’

The ice-cream police officer asked his companion, ‘Isn’t that against a by-law?’

‘Not if it’s picked up,’ David said.

Pip patted her pockets, making a pantomime of looking for a carrier bag.

I put the whole choc-ice into my mouth, bent down and used the cheap plastic wrapper to scoop the day’s simpler mess into my hand. I thought, maybe this is what I was put on earth to do. I was never going to be brave or proud but I know about timings and small interventions.

‘Chivalry,’ Pip said. I straightened for everyone.

The ice cream hurt my teeth.

‘Are we done here?’ David said to the police officer. She spoke into a radio.

No rest for the wicked, said the dog’s face, and she tugged at her leash, pleased by her efforts to communicate efficiently and without formality.

‘Nice meeting you,’ said Pip. I’m not sure to whom she addressed this. She took the choc-ice wrapper from my hand and left the scene without looking back.

F is for

fabrication

(n.)

Winceworth opened his regulation Swansby House leather attaché case, making sure no one was looking over his work. For some years now, just to pass the time and for his own amusement, he had been making up some words and definitions. He sketched these idle thoughts on borrowed notepaper whenever the mood took him: sometimes inspired by interactions with his colleagues in the Scrivenery – bielefoldian (n.), an annoying fellow; titpalcat (n.), a welcome distraction. Sometimes he just improvised little fictions in the style of an encylopaedic entry. To this end, he made up some fourteenth-century dignitaries from Constantinople and a small religious sect living in the volcanic Japanese Alps. More often than not, however, these false entries allowed him to plug a lexical gap, create a word for a sensation or a reality where no other word in current circulation seemed to fit the bill. This ranged from waxing poetical about a disappointing meal – susposset (n.), the suspicion that chalk has been added to ice cream to bulk out the serving – to ruminations concerning everyday events – coofugual (v.), the waking of pigeons; relectoblivious (adj.), accidentally rereading a phrase or line due to lack of focus or desire to finish; larch (v.), to allot time to daydreaming.

Winceworth flexed his hands. He meant no harm by this, he told himself, and he was allowed these small private amusements. He considered the much-discussed, absent Frasham and gnawed the end of his rediscovered Swansby pen. It was cheap and hollow, and infrequently he was worried he would chew right through it. Winceworth selected a new blank index card and wrote

frashopric (n.), the office or position of a dullard, acquired by money