The Liar's Dictionary

Later, Winceworth would not be able to recall the scene very clearly.

The train carriage bucked and swayed a little and Winceworth would recall that he had been quite cold and his crumpled jacket was thin. He would remember closing his eyes, and that briefly there was nothing but the swaying of the train, the smell of the leather seats, previous travellers’ cigarettes and the paint factories outside. The moth’s coat at the window was attracting dust and cobwebs, growing infinitesimally heavier, up and down, up and down. The train worked out its shunting solfeggio as it coursed along, the telegraph posts and buildings flicked past the window and caused weak afternoon sun to the-opposite-of-flash through Winceworth’s eyelids. The undersides of his eyelids shifted from a deadened ruddy colour to bursts of red light as each post passed by. There was a false sense of depth to the shapes that he began to see forming there and he experienced an instant, pleasantly terrifying giddiness. The silver of his new pen flashed in the sun. He added Barking

as a title to the notepad page, and he underlined the word twice, with a flourish.

The moth humming its way up the windowpane – that detail he would remember. He would remember coming out of his nap just as the tamarin-faced, Jupiter-giraffe-skin man opposite made a noise, rolled up his newspaper, and smacked it against the glass, against the moth, and at that very moment that the world went

whumppp

A number of Winceworth’s colleagues cut out and kept some of the headlines from the following day’s papers: TERRIBLE EXPLOSION, MANY KILLED AND INJURED – GREAT DESTRUCTION OF PROPERTY. Later articles listed the injuries and the damage: ‘parts of the body were found 60 yards distant’, ‘the dome of the boiler is lying in an adjoining field’. The lexicographers who kept these papers would stress that they collected the snippets not out of some new-found desire to chase souvenirs of awful events, but to help account for Winceworth’s movements and assist in putting the narrative together. He had no memory of alighting from the train, nor of how he might have made it to the site of the explosion. Bielefeld found one photograph in the press that featured a figure that if you squinted might well have been Winceworth at the scene of the disaster. At least, the man in the photograph had glasses and was pictured carrying a slim paper folder. There was certainly a corresponding stain over his chest where, say, a new and unopened bottle of Pelikan ink had smashed in a breast pocket of his jacket. Everybody else in the photograph either looked infinitely more capable than this figure or was lying under a sheet on a stretcher.

Winceworth could only remember a batch of moments out of sequence. He could remember every detail of a moth at a window, but not how he got down from the train to the site of the explosion. From the snapshots he could remember, he might construe that the afternoon was spent with his sleeves rolled up in dust and masonry and wood and steam, being shouted at by a fireman. He remembered kneeling in order to throw up, and finding a man’s face next to his. He had been holding a man’s jaw in his hand. The man was trapped under some sort of girder or column or beam: it was a very straight line made of very black metal that was too hot to touch. The man’s jaw was not where it should have been on his face. The angles were all wrong and at odds with conventional perspective. Winceworth might remember that he had got a small stone in his shoe and that somehow dust had got behind his back teeth. He remembered thinking that the firemen’s brass all looked remarkably clean amongst so much soot. Everyone except for the firemen had been entirely silent. He would not remember seeing the fire engine.

He remembered the dampness of ink against his chest, that there was broken glass in his hair and that, at the time of the explosion, the colour that he had seen through the zoetropic train carriage window was one he simply could not name.

The facts are these: in the hour after the blast, Winceworth came-to in the middle of a line of firemen and bystanders, coughing with smoke and rheumy eyes. He was on his feet and did not think he had fainted but he had no idea where he was or how he had got there. That was how shock was supposed to work, wasn’t it? In his hand was a pail of water. He looked behind him and saw frightened, drawn or soot-blackened faces. He was so close to the centre of the blast that Winceworth could feel the warmth of fire beat against his cheek. He helped pass buckets of water into the heart of the heat. Above them, as it coiled away into the dusky pink-sliced sky, the smoke was a purple tinged with the red of the flames.