The Liar's Dictionary

‘Did you see it swallow anything?’ he asked. The pelican’s thick feet gave the smallest of kicks.

‘It was walking strangely,’ Sophia said and turned the pelican’s head from side to side in her hands and squinting. ‘It’s clearly not – look, it’s clearly not getting enough air.’ She added, ‘I’m not sure you hitting it will have helped—’

Braver members of the geese contingent made another honking incursion and she shooed them away with her umbrella.

‘I don’t imagine so.’ Winceworth hoisted the pelican up against his chest and slightly to the side, as if a bagpipe. ‘Perhaps – maybe it would be best—’ Fleetingly he imagined taking the bird’s head under his arm and twisting it, the pelican growing limp and the whole business being over. The pelican’s eye met his own one more time. A translucent purple eyelid sluiced sideways across its vision.

‘I have it,’ said Sophia, face shining. ‘Do you have a ribbon? Or – may I remove a shoelace?’ She was not interested in an answer and began plucking at his Oxfords. The geese and the ducks laughed at Winceworth. He pulled the pelican tighter against him. Sophia tsked and tutted. Adrenaline made her fingers awkward. Winceworth felt his shoe loosen and Sophia was there binding the pelican’s beak together with the lace in quick, tight loops. Her face was close to his, just the pelican and the new smell of pelican between them.

‘I can use this?’ Sophia said.

She had reached for the exposed lining of his jacket that was banded across the pelican’s swaddled belly. She plucked at something there – the stem of his hollow metal Swansby House pen that he kept in the pocket there. She slid the pen free and flexed it in her hand. No, she was not flexing it, she was bending it. It snapped with a dull crack.

Sophia grabbed the pelican’s beak and felt down its throat with her hand. She found its collarbone. Pelicans almost certainly do not have collarbones. Sophia pushed the broken pen into the pelican’s throat.

There was a loud hiss of expelled air – the pelican swelled under Winceworth’s grasp and a second later they both heard it take a huge gulping heave of a breath.

The geese cackled and hooted.

The bird, the man and the woman panted.

‘Do you come here often?’ Winceworth asked.

M is for

mendaciloquence

(n.)

‘I’m here to help,’ Pip said, simply.

She drew a tray of index cards towards her from the pile on my desk.

Clarity is her talent and part of the reason I ever fell for her. Pip was often a person of actions. Action is often better than words. I was a person of anxieties rather than anything. ‘How did you get in here?’

‘The door was open, and let me tell you when I see that boss of yours I’m going to give him an earful about security. Aren’t you meant to be under siege or something? Expecting a tankful of homophobes through the door at any moment?’

‘But the café—’

‘Everyone will have to deal with a sign that says C L O S E D on the door,’ Pip said. She looked around my office, eyes searching for the office phone.

‘Is that the one they call you on?’

‘Don’t worry about that,’ I said. ‘You’re really staying?’

‘Try and stop me,’ she said. She hugged me. It meant more than words can say.

‘You should leave.’ I said it with authority, drawing myself up to my full height mid-hug.

We got into a system at my desk, Pip perched up on the windowsill and me on my chair, both looking for the handwriting and distinctive penmanship that crossed the i’s and dotted the t

’s on the definition index cards. Pip had brought me lunch from her café, and for a while we passed the time in busy, bored silence.

An hour later, Pip was flipping through a volume of Swansby’s in tsking fury.

‘I’ve just spent about five minutes staring at the word pat without taking anything in.’

I knew exactly what she meant. My eyes and my brain had severed any meaningful connection and it was tricky to concentrate enough to recognise even the most regular of words. The array of handwriting on the index cards appeared to pulse if I maintained eye contact for too long.

‘I think we can safely discount pat,’ I said.

‘Pat, begone.’ She flicked the index card across my desk to join a growing pile. We had decided to put the ‘found’ fictitious words in an envelope.

‘Words: What Are They Like?’

‘Thanks for helping,’ I said. ‘I have no idea how David expects me to know I’ve found every false word that could possibly have snuck in. But two heads are better than one.’

‘Are you kidding? My pleasure,’ she said.

‘Sure.’

‘Can’t have you doing all this spelling-bee research on your own: what if we ever play Scrabble and you’ve got all this advantage?’

She did not need to say it, and I recognised the deflection. Since I had told her about the threatening phone calls coming in at work, she had told me how worried she was, how helpless she felt. At the time I laughed it off and said it was nothing, but knowing she was nearby somehow made the sight of the office phone immediately less terrifying.