The Liar's Dictionary

One of the figures in the photograph had his whole face blurred there was just a feathered smudge of paleness. His head must have snapped up as the camera’s shutters did their work. Or maybe a fault when it had been developed, a thumb slipping and dredging ink in the darkroom’s developing tray? No, there was still a trace of face there within the distortion, the shape of a head that had turned too soon. This figure was looking up and across, staring somewhere above the camera and off to the left as if in horror at something hitched in the clouds.

‘It must have been taken in the courtyard outside,’ Pip said, lowering the frame. ‘If you imagine it without the bins and the air vents.’

She was right. The ivy lacquering the wall behind the figures still clung to Swansby House. I could crane my neck at my desk and look down at that courtyard, the ivy leaves glossy and bouncing behind them in a light spritz of rain. Those leaves were often the only reason that I could tell one season from the other from my desk, whether they were rustling with raindrops or winter moths or nesting finches. I peered again at the photograph: the ivy was thinner there, with fewer branches splayed across the brickwork.

Pip handed the photograph to me. ‘But it’s good, right? What do you think, do you have a good eye for cheating bastards?’

I rolled my chair back over to my cubicle and to the window. I spun on my chair midway: you have to take your perks when you can get them. I overbalanced slightly by the potted plant.

I extended my arm and tried to best match my view of the yard with the orientation of the photograph. If the alignment was correct, the blurry-faced man must have been looking directly up at my window just as the picture was taken.

As Pip continued looking for fake words, I propped the photograph in the centre of my desk, where usually an employee might have a photograph of their partner.

R is for

rum

(adj.)

Winceworth waved goodbye to the landlord and the cab pulled away from the Barking kerb. He had shaken off most of the dirt from his clothes. He looked down: ink, crumbs, muck, cat-sick, blood. It was an archive of a day that seemed to be from a different life. For years he had kept his head down, worked with words silently and cleanly. As the cab hurtled through unfamiliar streets he felt a strange new energy lodge and jangle in his lungs and heart. It was a reckless energy, manic, tightening and reverberative, rebarbative, verve surge urge, one that felt not so much like something renewed as deranged.

The cab dropped Winceworth by the gates of Swansby House just as Westminster chimed seven o’clock. He muttered thanks to the driver and ducked beneath the steaming horses’ noses. He hauled up to Swansby House and wrenched the gates open. The clunk and rattle of his arrival caused a panic-scattering of Titivilli cats in the halls. At this late hour, it was unlikely that many lexicographers were still at work: the building was the cats’ empire.

Gripping his satchel in his hands, Winceworth took to the stairs and into the Scrivenery hall. Pons pons pons. It was eerily quiet and his footsteps rang with odd shadows of noise and unexpected echoes. When the place was not teeming with people keeping their noses to their respective lexicographical grindstones, it was not so much that the place just felt empty – the air was oddly pressurised, the Scrivenery’s shelves and bookcases impossibly high, filled with an impossible number of books filled with an impossible weight of words. As Winceworth rounded the corner, he spotted one of his colleagues still working, hovering by his desk. Bielefeld looked up from his papers, visibly paled – ‘Dear God, man! What happened?’ – and scrambled over tables and around chairs to reach Winceworth’s side. He took a firm grip of Winceworth’s elbow and steered him through the rows of desks. Bielefeld wanted to position him under one of the lamps fitted between the desks so that he might bear closer inspection.

Winceworth adjusted his jacket as Bielefeld plucked at him. Some cats came and sniffed at his feet. He wondered if they could detect pelican on him under the grime and smoke. ‘Do I look entirely awful?’ he said. ‘People were crossing to the other side of the street.’

‘An absolute state. What on earth have you been up to?’ Before Winceworth had a chance to reply, Bielefeld continued, ‘You’re lucky to catch me – I’m only here so much later because I’ve been chasing a reference to scurryvaig and not making one bit of headway.’

‘Yes?’ said Winceworth. Despite the Barking landlord’s brandy, his throat still felt coated with dirt and ash.