The Liar's Dictionary

Winceworth closed his eyes. The colour of the explosion blazed behind his eyelids and, just for a moment, he was gasping, an instant fizz of sweat across his back. The colour pinch-stung his vision in a bolt exactly as it had through the train window earlier that afternoon. And it was not a memory of the colour’s intensity nor its sudden blast across his vision that had him passing his hand across his face and loosening his tie: it was the colour itself that terrified him. It flared with all the oranges of Dr Rochfort-Smith’s rooms and all the mottled yellows of the Swansby cats’ coats; it had the January greens of St James’s Park somehow within it too, the blush of a pelican’s blooded feathers, the blue of Café l’Amphigouri’s twist-leafed Limoges china. It was a colour that made no sense. It sneered like red, milk-mild and lemon-brash and tart and tangy on the eye, singing with white-hot curves and slick, abrasive purple licks.

There was a scraping sound, distant but also somehow close, followed by a self-censoring hushed curse. Winceworth started – he must have fallen asleep at his desk. He glanced at the Scrivenery’s clock and clutched his attaché case to his chest in one movement, expecting that its chime had woken him and that at any moment his colleagues would come filing through the door for their morning work. It was still evening.

He realised the sound that had made him stir was some kind of rhythmic thumping coming from the floor below.

‘Hello?’ he called into the silence of the Scrivenery.

The thumping ceased. And then, softly, there was a laugh from the corner. There were stairs there that led down into the cellar. The sound was floating up the lift shaft.

Winceworth looked at the thick stacks of blue index cards. There were hundreds, thousands there – each identical when shuffled together, his words amongst all words.

That is that, he thought. That that is, is. That that is not, is not. Is that it? It is.

There was another laugh and Winceworth felt no triumph whatsoever. He staggered to his feet and made his way towards the noise.

S is for

sham

(n. and adj.)

‘There’s something pressed on this one,’ Pip said, and she tilted a card in her hand towards the light. I wheeled my chair closer to get a better look. This action was not quite as fluid as I would have liked: the threshold was just across a small stretch of carpet but it still took about six heel-punts to get there.

‘It’s probably just dust,’ I said.

‘Victorian dust.’

‘Probably Tits’s fur,’ I said.

We had been looking for words for hours, were questioning the authenticity of every single entry. Once-familiar and expected words became uncanny and absurd, impossibly newfangled: quack and quad and quiddity all looked stupid. Why would a monarch be called a queen, a word so squeaky and keening? It was as exotic and unlikely to see quick as Quetzalcoatl.

‘I think it’s a dandelion seed,’ Pip continued, holding a remnant of something between her fingers and futzing with it. She blew.

In our second year of dating and once we had moved in together, Pip bought a book called The Language of Flowers

(1857). Arranged alphabetically and with whimsical illustrations, it outlined the ‘meaning’ of certain blooms, floriography (n.), and what might be intended by their inclusion in a bouquet. Some I remember: an azalea means ‘temperance’, white clover means ‘think of me’. Less sweet, but memorably, cardamine means ‘paternal error’ and Fuller’s teasel means ‘misanthropy’. We laughed about these last two and then spent quite a lot of money at our next anniversary ordering armfuls of cardamine and Fuller’s teasel as a private awful joke. They did not arrange well together and the teasel pricked our thumbs.

The first two in the book’s list were the flowers called ‘abatina’ (meaning ‘fickleness’) and ‘abecedary’ (‘volubility’). I’ve never found a florist or nursery that stocks them or admits to knowing what they might look like.

Pip let the old maybe-dandelion maybe-nothing remnant fall from her hand to the floor and returned to her index cards.

‘I see queer gets a look-in,’ she said after a while.

‘That’s one of the first words I looked up when I got the job.’

‘That’s the gay agenda for you. Find your people,’ Pip said. Then, ‘Oh!’

‘What?’ I tensed, pen poised and ready.

‘Did you know queest is a word for wood pigeon?’

Another entry from The Language of Flowers: cedar leaves meant ‘strength’.