The Liar's Dictionary

Winceworth shook the sleepiness from his head and stared back. The child was looking through Winceworth. He had finally become invisible. His colleagues might overlook him or hardly ever notice that he was there, but since leaving Swansby House something had obviously changed in him, had gone further or had clarified – Winceworth had finally, somehow, been tempered into nothingness, thin air with no more traction than a breath. The child’s mother drew up beside her staring charge, and as she came level with Winceworth her face too registered the same look of shock. He must just be a suit and clump of birthday cake suspended in the air on a bench in the park.

Winceworth trialled a gentle, spectral wave.

Both faces’ expressions changed to one of distracted displeasure. It then occurred to Winceworth that perhaps he was not the object of the boy and mother’s attention, and he pivoted in his seat to follow their eyeline.

Some feet beyond his bench, one of the Royal Park’s huge white pelicans was rearing up and silently hissing. Not only that – it appeared to be covered in blood, and a woman was strangling it.

The pelican was huffing, straining, its absurd head bent upwards and pale eyes rolling back and forth. Both bird and attacker were making grim little growls and burbles with effort as they circled across the lawn. The woman’s hat had been knocked off and sat trampled between them.

The woman had her hands about the bird’s neck and her fingers were tucked under its wagging pink dewlap pouch – she had to keep rocking on her feet and ducking to avoid the panicked beating of bloody wings hitting her face.

Winceworth heard the mother say behind him, ‘They can break a man’s arm!’

‘You are thinking of swans,’ corrected her staring son in a high voice.

Both woman and bird were strangely matched in appearance and there was something ridiculously ballroom about their skirmish – the bird’s plumage was stained red, its bill a hot yellow, while the woman’s skirt was made of some candy-stripe coloured stuff and she carried a yellow umbrella wedged beneath her arm. They waltzed, irregularly, tugging and gasping, moving closer towards Winceworth and his companions.

The pelican made an obscene, wheezing call.

‘Ought we to call—’ said the mother, pulling closer to Winceworth’s bench.

He fiddled with his glasses, still groggy from his nap. ‘I really have no idea who—’

‘She must be mad!’ interrupted the mother and pulled her son closer to her side. The boy struggled and in turning his head, caught sight of his broken boat on the path. He let out a screech and Winceworth found he was all at once caught between two quiet, ludicrous brawls. His mind turned to how best to slip away.

‘Do something!’ The mother clearly had decided that Winceworth was the one who should take charge of the situation. She looked at him with stern expectation as her scarlet child jigged up and down.

Winceworth stepped forward. There was no etiquette for this. He tried a small, ‘I say—’ but the pelican-woman was too engrossed in combat to notice. Half-heartedly Winceworth hefted the small remaining nugget of birthday cake at the fighting pair. The piece bounced off the woman’s elbow and had no effect whatsoever. Mother and child gave him a long look. The pelican’s pupil – round, human-like and panic-widened – fixed upon Winceworth for a split second at his voice, and its body appeared to stiffen. Taking full advantage of this momentary pause, the woman attacking it either had a change of strategy or a sudden surge of courage – she lifted the pelican bodily off its feet and seized it in a kind of chokehold. The faint sunlight behind them made the bird’s pouch glow a soft rose, branched veins swelling dark and angry within the membrane.

The boy, the mother and Winceworth goggled.

This tableau lasted for less than a second and the pelican’s neck suddenly flexed and darted like a serpent – it struck upwards, catching the woman across the chin with its beak. She shrank back but kept her hold about the pelican’s throat.

‘Let it be, can’t you?’ cried the mother. ‘Don’t look, Gerald. She means to kill it!’

At this, the woman turned her head to look at them. There was a small cut above her eye and some of her hair had come loose and was sticking weirdly to her forehead, and—

Sophia from the party?