The Liar's Dictionary

Oh, my God! shut up! you are too! interesting! and! too! much! was precisely how I fell for Pip because I was intimidated and I loved her.

Where did that thought come from?

I held up two of the index cards. I squinted.

All of the cards that contained made-up words were written in a quite different type of fountain pen. All the rest were in different handwriting, sure: the work of hundreds of hands filling in thousands of index cards. But they all had the same uniform scratchiness, the same kind of line and flourish. On these false entries, however, it was as if the person writing them had used a completely different type of nib.

There was a knock on the office wall.

Like the sun or like a shock or the least agrupt thing in the world, Pip’s head craned around the door.

L is for

legerdemain

(n. and adj.)

Sophia’s umbrella smacked Winceworth across an ear. He rolled to the side, released the pelican and lay on his back, panting slightly.

‘It’s choking on something,’ Sophia said. She was panting too and kneeling beside him in the grass, eyes fixed on the bird lying prone to his left. All three were winded like wrestlers, Sophia moving one hand against the bird’s cheek and another feeling along its neck.

Winceworth scrambled to sit up on his haunches.

‘Look—’ Sophia said. Winceworth watched something beneath the skin of the pelican’s throat buck unmistakably out of time with its pulse. This close to the bird, he could see its eyes were also starting from their sockets.

‘I was trying to open—’ Sophia panted, ‘open the beak – put my arm down and dislodge—’

The pelican lurched forward suddenly and its foot-long bill swung across like a jib. Winceworth and Sophia only just leapt out of its path in time.

The spectating mother and child were nowhere to be seen.

‘It looked as though you were trying to throttle it,’ Winceworth said. ‘I thought it was attacking you.’

‘Trained in bartitsu,’ Sophia said, as if that explained anything. She pushed her hair from her eyes with her wrist. Either she had not realised or did not care that she was bleeding. ‘Are you strong enough to hold it down?’

‘Of course,’ Winceworth said, lying.

‘I still think,’ she said, gnawing her lip and calculating, ‘I could prise whatever it is blocking the passage – if only it wouldn’t move about like this—’

‘Of course,’ Winceworth repeated, with even less certainty. The waist-high bulk of the pelican baulked and lowered its head, weaving from side to side. Winceworth removed his jacket and approached with the inner fabric facing him, stretched tight.

‘Like a – like a matador—’ he said for no good reason whatsoever.

‘“The light-limb’d Matadore,”’ quoted Sophia, apparently for her own amusement. She was smiling, madly, and Winceworth’s heart became a nonsense.

The pelican grasped this opportunity and gave a rollicking, panicked feint and ran past him, gaining speed as if in order to make an attempt at flight. Winceworth leapt just at the moment that the bird leapt – on instinct, he clamped the fabric of his jacket about its shoulders and together they rolled headlong along the grass.

‘I have it!’ he shouted.

He hoicked the sleeves of his jacket in tight as the pelican gamely batted and jabbed at him. The pouch under its beak was soft and warm against his hands. Winceworth sat up, tussled more firmly with the bird until it was jammed beneath his knees and swaddled in his jacket, neck extended like a hobby horse. It seemed a lot quieter, weaker. Quelled, it met his eye again, and he looked away.

Coughing to mask his hard breathing as Sophia came closer, ‘It’s still too – I wouldn’t go near its beak,’ he warned. ‘It’s a – nervy, I think – bit of a brute and I’m not sure it won’t have your eye out.’

By now a number of geese had appeared from another part of the park and were honking and hissing their own disapproval at the uproar. One of the geese came close enough to punch Winceworth on the arm with its head and, more by accident than design, he raised his elbow and slapped this goose full across the face with the pelican’s beak. The goose retreated, wailing and showing its tongue.

‘Where is everyone? This park is usually a damn thoroughfare—’

Sophia approached with her yellow umbrella extended. ‘I daresay that if you are able to keep the bird just there—’

The pelican gave a muffled irregular gagging sound. It swung back and its beak gaped open. Its pouch folded back and, head lolling, it sagged inside out against the bird’s spine at an obtuse angle. It looked impossible, imploded. A bloody tuft of feathers pushed against Winceworth’s neck. There was something tender to this brief touch. He felt dreadful.

Sophia took the pelican’s beak in her hands and, finding no resistance, pushed the two mandibles apart. She stared down the bird’s throat.

‘I can’t – I can’t see anything,’ she said. ‘But it is hard – to tell—’

The pelican was inert but still breathing, shallow and rumbling next to Winceworth’s chest.