The Liar's Dictionary

In the corner of the photograph one could just make out Glossop, the other Swansby House employee sent on the trip. While his companion was tall and strapping, Ronald Glossop was unprepossessing. Perhaps it was testament to Frasham being quite so particularly good-looking but standing next to him – and Glossop was invariably somewhere close to Frasham whether in the Westminster offices or on the coast of the Bering Sea, forever scampering at the latter’s elbow with pen and paper – it was difficult to remember any real defining features for the man. Winceworth could not even recollect what his voice was like or even if he had ever heard him speak. One thing he could recall of Glossop was the lime-green handkerchief carried in his waistcoat’s jetted pocket – it was a bright enough colour that everyone grew used to catching sight of it flashing like St Elmo’s fire across the wide central hall of the Scrivenery. Glossop was very much treated as Frasham’s assistant, although they actually held the same role at Swansby House and Glossop’s faculty for languages and philology was far more advanced. Winceworth suspected Glossop did most of the actual lexicographical work during their year-long Siberian trip together as well as any heavy lifting (other than for theatrical effect, cf. walruses).

In the walrus photograph Glossop stood almost out of frame. He was in the background, blurred and obscure, using a hatchet to saw a flipper from one of the put-upon walrus’s floe-mates.

Frasham’s photographs were accompanied by letters, often elaborate with metaphor and regularly ill-spelt. The progress of Frasham’s etymological investigations was never really emphasised.

At their desks in Swansby House, Bielefeld once noticed Winceworth glancing with particular dolefulness at the walrus photograph and said in passing, cheerfully, ‘The valour of the field versus the elbow grease of the desk!’

Winceworth smiled in answer and gripped his Swansby House pen too hard. He looked down to find his notes on solecism (n.) spattered with ink.

G is for

ghost

(v.)

Once the police let us back into the building, guaranteeing that the call was just a hoax or prank, David and I returned to our second floor. David twiddled with something in a box of electrics under the stairs, assuring me that the fire alarm would work in the future. I left him to it. After about an hour David rang the internal phone line – making me jump circa 400 feet in the air – and requested that I come into his office.

I knew it couldn’t be because he had met Pip. That was a mad idea. Wrong wrong wrong, and yet there the idea lay, flat and flattening, at the base of my throat.

David rose from his seat as I knocked and entered, starting a little as if shocked. Unfortunately, David’s sudden movement set off a chain of reactions that caused a flurry to intensify into a chaos. While some seventy-year-olds grow stooped with every passing year, David Swansby had unfurled: he was the tallest man I had ever met. This quick unwinding of his body from sitting to standing knocked a cup of coffee skidding and rolling across his desk. This startled the office cat, who ran headlong into the printer which spontaneously powered up and began shrieking something like the word ‘Paroxysm!’ over and over and over and over and over again. The spilt coffee scribbled a fresh, hot, organic ‘WELL, WHOOPS!’ flourish across the length of the editorial desk; I could tell the coffee was fresh because it steamed even as it spread across the paperwork and filing.

A few minutes later, when calm was restored, the cat Sphinxed on the armrest of a chair with its eyes closed. I gave its spine a nudge with my knuckles. Its body rumbled something about solidarity against my hand.

‘Sit sit sit,’ David said.

‘Thank you.’ I noticed the game of online chess open on David’s computer screen.

‘Tits Tits Tits,’ said David Swansby.

I had first met Tits during the interview for my current role. He was a rangy, yellow-eyed duffer-moggy with a coat the colour of old toast. His presence as co-interviewer (‘Ignore the cat at your feet! Please, do sit down!’) was not unwelcome: this explained the shallow ceramic bowl on the desk in front of me, placed next to the Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary-branded mug and the block of Post-It notes. At first I had thought that the bowl might be an ashtray, and if not an ashtray then a horrible version of a hotel reception’s Mint Imperials, half-filled with little dusty brown pellets. Not quite powder, nowhere near meat: kibble is the name, isn’t it, for that kind of catfood. I’ve only ever heard that word thanks to American sitcoms. Satisfyingly apt combination of sounds and letters, and carries the overtones of kitten + nibble + rubble, as well as the vague sense of onomatopoeia as it is shaken out of the bag.