The Liar's Dictionary

And Winceworth, whose veins were full of a nervous fire and who was tired of not finishing his sentences, tired of not being heard or having a chance to speak, wanted to seize the man by the ears and hiss that all he had managed to eat today was cake and that he was impossibly, nonsensibly, intractably, irreducibly, awfully in love for no good purpose and the woman that he loved-with-no-good-reason was, for no good reason, probably right now at this very minute being led around an obscene, beautiful statue by a man with a bright red moustache and perfect posture who had all the time in the world, time Winceworth would never have, with that laugh of his and that laugh of hers, and yet here Winceworth was with his hands shaking, on a road, barking or something ludicrous like that on account of a dictionary where nobody knew he existed and that he loathed because to bottle up language, to package language – he! Who was he to love her and to make passels of words! – to attempt to confine language is impossible and a fantasy and loathsome, it was like trapping butterflies under glass, she was right – and yet yet yet yet yet yet even in loathing it the dictionary had trained him so well; it had trained him so well he was halfway even then itching to reach for his notes, his little Swansby’s headed notepaper, so that he could ask a landlord about his use of sharpener just then, and make sure he took good, neat dictation down for the specific six-by-four index card on which the word would be housed, and in it would slot, in would go an example of an incidental but somehow meaningful aside ready to be consulted when the Sh-words of Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary

were compiled. Congratulations, it’s a verb! they would say. How did everybody manage with this responsibility and complete lack of agency? Was it that no one saw, or nobody cared? Every word investigated, every fact taken into account. Everything anyone said mattered, and the matter at hand was not why they said it, or where they learned it, or the specific pull of their tongue against the palate of their mouth as they said it that is individual only to them – did you know that the palatal rugae pattern on the roof of a mouth is distinct to each and every individual, like a fingerprint, and every word one says has been loosed and polished and buffered and bruised by it in a unique way? Would the dictionary know he’d associate sharpener for ever more with the taste of ash? With wanting to cry? With men with white moustaches and dead moths in a terrible window onto the world?

Winceworth didn’t say any of that. He cleared his throat. ‘I am fine, thank you.’

‘I’ll tell you what,’ said the landlord. ‘My good deed for the day: I’ll call you a cab back to – what did you call it?’

‘Swansby House.’ Winceworth did not know how the man could possibly seem so together. He reached into his pocket absently, but the man waved him back down.

‘No, don’t mention it – it’s the least I can do.’

‘What’s your name?’ asked Winceworth. And the man told him.

‘Thank you,’ said Winceworth simply. An idea had suddenly formed in his mind. ‘And – one last thing – did you see the colour?’

‘The colour?’ the man asked, picking a sliver of wood from Winceworth’s sleeve and crumbling it absently between his fingers. ‘Colour of what?’

‘Of the explosion – did you see it from here, through the window?’ Winceworth sat up. His head felt suddenly clearer. ‘What colour would you call it, the explosion? What exact colour?’

Q is for

queer

(n. and adj. and v.)

We found some more fictitious words. They seemed to be getting more and more obscure but maybe that’s because my tolerance for them was becoming weaker.

Here was one about the ‘guilt of having a false speech impediment’. Here was another noun specific to ‘the dream of retiring and keeping bees’. More usefully, perhaps, Pip was very pleased to find a noun for ‘the hardened callous on your middle finger caused by years of ill-use’: she liked the ambiguity of it, even though I guessed this was a desk-bound lexicographer just complaining about his lot.

Pip left her index cards for half an hour to find some coffee. On her return, she came back panting slightly and holding something in her hands. It was rectangular and framed, and as she swung it in through the office door she peeped over the top of it.

‘I found it in one of the storage cupboards downstairs,’ she said. ‘Tucked behind a yoga ball and some old posters.’

The light through the office’s windows fell at a slant across the picture’s glass and the reflected glare made it difficult to quite work out what it was that I was being shown. Its frame was old and the photograph inside was at an angle on its mountings as if the sun had taken a swing at it on Pip’s behalf.

‘A yoga ball?’ I repeated.