The Liar's Dictionary

He tried his more familiar daydreams and to think about a whitewashed cottage with a bare table, a window overlooking a bright, clear stretch of sand. He had mentioned the Sennen Cove fantasy to Sophia in a moment of madness. It was a silly thing, a flippant cipher for the idea of being left alone and clearheaded. He would be at no one’s beck and call with no responsibility other than for himself. It felt an unambitious fantasy but an honest one. What would he do with all the money in the world? His immediate thought: disappear. The train shifted a little, and with it his mind changed tack. Would anyone miss him? A scruffy lexicographer, who left no real mark on the world? He reeled back to the idea of a cottage, and the sound of bees in a garden.

As he daydreamed, or tried to force himself to daydream, Winceworth leaned his head against his seat and watched a moth make its way up and down the window of the swaying carriage. He had read somewhere when researching for a Swansby article that some species of moth had no mouthparts. Mothparts. At the time of reading he had been overcome with sadness at this fact. A case of too much information not always being a good thing. He never realised that he needed to believe a moth could shout in rage, for example, or find comfort in eating its favourite moth-snacks or even have a chance to yawn. Winceworth yawned now and regarded his mouthless companion with sympathy.

A thought intruded: Frasham leaning in and his red moustache close to Sophia’s neck.

Of course, when Frasham left the office it was with full fanfare and pomp, and he got to gallivant around Siberia as language’s knight errant, its swain and suitor with his damned hollow Swansby House regulation pen and headed notepaper. While I am sent thirteen miles to Barking, Winceworth thought, with my regulation pen irregularly lodged in a pelican’s throat. Winceworth’s gifted, new silver pen would have to do. The stationer had filled its cartridge in the shop. He used it now to doodle on the cover of the attaché case – barkBarkBARK K

– and as he ran the pen across his lap and the train gave little skips, his writing jumped with jolts and shimmies on the page.

Winceworth returned to the moth at the train window and brushed absently at some pelican blood on his shirt. He wondered whether the moth had ever been beyond the confines of this train. Like the mice and rats he sometimes spotted on the underground sections of the Metropolitan Railway, perhaps this moth was born here and would die here, had no moth-memories of tree-bark or woollen jumpers or moonlight to fall back on. Winceworth imagined a moth-eaten volume of Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary.

Every time that the moth reached the wooden lip at the top of the windowsill where escape was possible and the world appeared in a brighter strip, it missed its opportunity and slowly headbutted its way back down the windowpane. Up and then down, up and then down, taking in the view as the train cut a journey through London. Tattered clouds, black brick and gutters. Winceworth thought of all the moths that he had trapped beneath tumblers and deposited outside over the years. The moth reached the top of the window and again turned on its heels and began its descent. Winceworth slid an eye to the passenger sitting opposite him – a mixed metaphor of an older man, tamarin-moustache jutting a few good white inches beyond his cheeks with liver spots like giraffe skin and the surface of Jupiter on his hands. The man was watching the moth too, apparently unperturbed.

Winceworth got to his feet, unsteady with the pitch and roll of the carriage, and opened the window by pulling on the leather strap.

‘Come on, old thing.’ He tried chivvying the moth out with his document folder. The moth refused to take this advantage. Up and then down, up and then down again as cold air snapped around Winceworth’s ears.

‘Close that, won’t you?’ said the other passenger, and Winceworth acquiesced at once.

Winceworth’s later recollection of this train journey would be hazy. The train ran through East Ham with its glue factories and sad-faced, easily led horses. The marine paint factories disgorged columns of steam and a smell that you first sensed in your stomach before any flavour hit your nose. The moth made its way up and down, up and down the window. He knew that bombilating was the verb for bees – what of moths? His human carriagemate leaned forward and produced a newspaper. The page facing Winceworth featured an advertisement in bold italics: Don’t Mutilate Your Papers with Pins or Fasteners, but Use the Gem Paper Clip. A nap curdled in Winceworth’s mind and did its thing to senses of time, place and space. January beyond his window had made the sky above the city paperclip-coloured. The moth continued to rumble up and down the window, up and down.