E is for
esquivalience
(n.)
I had not received any training regarding specific bomb threats. I had not received any particular training at all, so I stared at the phone receiver for a good minute. I picked up my mobile and texted Pip in the café where she worked, I’m sorry this might be it, I love you, goodbye, x. I switched off my computer without saving, I watched the ivy outside my window bounce and waggle in a light breeze, then I smashed my fist into the red BREAK GLASS TO ACTIVATE fire alarm just by my desk. I did this with all the zeal of an employee who has fantasised about doing so since their first day on the job.
It was then I learned that the fire alarms in the building were not functional, the result of another cost-cutting decision. Unsure what to do next, I remembered that there was a laminated Health and Safety sheet of guidelines in the stationery cupboard, spotted with damp beneath the plastic. It had little pared-down ideograms of men falling over triangles and red POW! explosion shapes over pictures of bent knees. I walked to the cupboard, picked this sheet up and held it tight to my chest. I knocked on David’s door. He sat stooped over his computer, typing with his two index fingers.
‘Did he call again?’ he asked, not looking up.
I explained the situation, miming hitting the fire alarm with particular vigour, and he rolled his eyes.
‘I think that means we should –’ I consulted the Health and Safety poster for the right wording – ‘vacate the premises?’
‘Lest we evacuate ourselves,’ David said, and he looked pleased. I smiled because it seemed expected of me.
‘Should I take the cat, do you think?’ he went on, looking vaguely around his feet under his desk, then, ‘No, no, not a priority, come along—’ and we made our way down the stairs past the central hall, beneath the portrait of smiling Prof. Gerolf Swansby and out into the street, our shoes skittering against the stone one-hundred-and-twenty-years-of-bustle-polished steps.
‘Have you rung emergency services?’ David asked as we descended. I nodded, then behind my back thumbed the numbers into my phone.
The police came quickly and appeared to take the bomb threat seriously. Swansby House was so close to Buckingham Palace that they had all the right gear and were presumably ready to spring into onto unto action. One of the officers wore camouflage and a high-vis tabard, which seemed perhaps a mixed approach. Special officers with a whole index of particular equipment barrelled through the building’s doors, presumably in order to sweep the building. This was a phrase I had heard on crime dramas. We watched from the sidelines, a little overwhelmed. I mean, I was overwhelmed: David seemed more concerned that the officers not scratch the paintwork on the doors.
‘A good thing the building was not booked today,’ David said, a little absently, as we watched them swarm in. ‘Just the two of us rattling around – imagine if there had been a wedding.’
We were told to wait. I described the disguised voice on the phone as best I could, as well as the frequency of the calls. An officer took down all these details and asked if I was all right, and wrote down my answer to that too. She asked my name and checked the correct spelling, ‘Like the mountaineer?’
David listened intently to my response and I wondered whether he harboured theories about my first name, its provenance or meaning. He seemed like the kind of person to have opinions about names. If I was descended from someone called Gerolf, I would too. In the past I’ve been asked whether I was named after the vain character who doesn’t kiss Michael J. Fox in the TV series Family Ties (1982–89). I’ve been asked whether I was named after the psychotic wife who does kiss Woody Harrelson in Natural Born Killers (1994). People’s minds run, misspellingly, to those Enid Blyton books with their Towers and jolly hockey sticks (1946–51) or further back to writers of Arthurian legend. Handsome male lieutenant lost on mountainside (1924) was a new one, however. What these people must think of my parents, I don’t know.
Some books say that Mallory comes from the Old French, meaning the unlucky one.
If that’s the case: what I think of my parents, I don’t know.
When David spoke to the officer, he waved his hands and arms around a lot as if that might hurry the conversation and process along. ‘Just some nut,’ he said, spreading his considerable wingspan. ‘Completely crackers. A fruitcake. One sandwich short of a picnic.’
‘Those aren’t the appropriate words to use,’ the police officer said.
‘No, quite right. Barking?’
Telling us that his colleagues might be in there for some time, another officer went to get us unseasonal ice creams from a kiosk in St James’s Park. He bought David a 99 Flake, a Calippo for himself, and a choc-ice for me. I tried not to think how he had profiled us as a group to choose these ice creams. He handed them out and we all leaned against an advertising hoarding, the flashing blue of the police car’s lights making David’s ice cream bruise an occasional neon. Some tourists took pictures of us standing looking up at Swansby House with our arms crossed.
A voice from across the road.
‘Mallory?’
Here’s a thing – you carve out a code and mode for yourself at work. The job is not demanding and some of us, many of us, choose to switch off parts of our character, all of our character, just to get through the day. But then the pattern of the day shifts because of a threat on your life, say, and let’s say that across the street, there, right there, suddenly, it’s the person you love most in the world. But they appear just so. They might as well have risen from a manhole or a Vegas platform or been pulled from a hat, descended from on high fretted with golden fire, etc. You know their voice better than your own name, you want that voice to be the first thing you hear in the morning and the last thing at night, you want to know them long enough that you have heard every word in their accent and with every possible inflection. You fall in love every time you see them, you fall in love with the idea of falling in love purely because they exist, and they define what good can be in a day for you. They define good to you.
Love’s a lot of wonderful nonsense like that, isn’t it? Poppycock, codswallop, folderol, balderdash, piffle, hugger-mugger, fiddlesticks, silly slush, tosh, horsefeathers, etc. All of that, and all at once. Other things like fear are more concise, but in its own way love gets straight to the point.
‘Mallory!’ Pip shouted. She tried to run across the street, but an officer stopped her before she could reach us. ‘You’re OK? Are you OK?’
‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Your text, you complete—’ She bit back her sentence. ‘I’m – I’m sorry it’s taken me so long—’
David sank his teeth into his ice cream and regarded the two of us politely. The Calippo’d police officer had an arm on Pip’s shoulder so that the two of us were separated. This was dreadful but also, somehow, a good thing because my idiot mind was already trying to conjure a context for Pip’s familiarity. This is a friend. This is my cousin. This person just guessed my name right off the bat, what’s that about, what are the chances—
‘Excuse me,’ the police officer was saying. Pip stood back. ‘Do you know this young lady?’