Pip looked at me, then at David Swansby.
‘We’re flatmates,’ she said.
I nodded.
Before she got ready for work that morning, Pip had pointed at various bits of me for no reason whatsoever and listed their names. ‘Lunule,’ she said at my fingertips. She moved along, ‘Purlicue,’ then she listed across and up the bed until, ‘Glabella,’ was said between my eyes. Then a pause. ‘Thingamabob.’
‘Philtrum,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that one.’
‘All present and correct.’
‘The whole kit and caboodle,’ she said, and we carried on carrying on.
I believe you don’t always have to explain everything to everyone. Pip disagrees, or rather expresses it differently. I was not out at work. She did not call this cowardice on my part. I probably would.
I remember at school the test of a good dictionary would be whether it included specific parts of anatomy or swear words. Four-letter words. Usually these were the only dog-eared pages in the whole thing – if I had applied that standard to Swansby’s drafts I could have learned that dick was another word for a workman’s apron and that jizz might be defined as ‘the total combination of characteristics that serve to identify a particular species of bird or plant’. A waste of an education. The thrill of seeing a bad word there was palpable – at school, you could stick your nose between cunopic and cup or between penintime and penitence and find there, nestling in the columns, something you’d grown up knowing was obscene or to be blushed at or spoken only in hushed tones. You felt the lexicographer had been depraved, and imagined them typing the word up with faux po-faced ribaldry, or smuggling the terms into the pages purely for your classroom titillation in public and charged thrill in private.
This use of the school dictionary was a kind of panning for immature gross-out gold, and had us plunging right in. It was only alone in the form room once everyone had gone home that I dared to look up other words. I told myself it was curiosity spurring me on. I didn’t realise that a dictionary might be like reading a map or looking in a mirror.
butch (v. transitive), to slaughter (an animal), to kill for market. Also: to cut up, to hack
dyke (n.), senses relating to a ditch or hollowed-out section
gay (v. intransitive), to be merry, cheerful, or light-hearted. Obsolete
lesbian rule (n.), a flexible (usually lead) ruler which can be bent to fit what is being measured
Figurative, pertaining to something, esp. a legal principle, which adapts to fit the circumstances
queer (adj.), strange, odd, peculiar, eccentric. Also: of questionable character; suspicious, dubious. Of coins or banknotes: counterfeit, forged
queer (v. intransitive), to ask, enquire; to question. To put out of order; to spoil. Also: to spoil the reputation or chances of (a person); to put (a person) out of favour (with another)
Even at school I remember wondering about closets, whether there was a subtle difference between someone being in the closet and a skeleton being in the closet. I checked the dictionary for clarification, but found none. I turned the pages, hot with a growing sense of shame.
Pip was out at the café where she worked. Of course she was – she was out to her family, she was out at work, out and about, out-and-out out. I suspected she emerged from the womb with little badges on her lapel reading Lavender Menace and 10% Is Not Enough! Recruit! Recruit! Recruit!
‘David Swansby wouldn’t bat an eyelid if you told him,’ she once said to me. She had brought the topic up. ‘And if he does bat an eyelid, you can tell him where to get off.’
She was right, of course. And wrong, of course.
‘Where to get off,’ I repeated.
‘Or,’ she said, ‘you could tell him that your big bad butch will come and sort him out.’ She tuff-pranced across the bedroom, growling.
‘You can be brave enough for the both of us,’ I said. I meant it as a joke but it sounded melodramatic, or maudlin. Pip didn’t say anything.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be out, I told myself. I admired people who were, I envied them, I thought them brave and wonderful. I just didn’t have the words in the way they all seemed to. It was the most prosaic, unflaming, snuffed, tamped-down kind of fear. I watched a documentary once about abattoirs and I remember there was an on-camera discussion about the biological effects suffered by livestock prior to slaughter. Apparently the taste of the meat can be altered by the build-up of lactic acid and adrenaline if the animals are distressed. The phrase fear degrades the meat and its flavour flashed up in the subtitles. I stopped watching documentaries about abattoirs.
Offhand, while washing the dishes, I told Pip about the phone calls coming in at work. She had surprised me by bursting into tears and bringing me in close.
Outside Swansby House and surrounded by police, a pigeon took this moment to scrump ice-cream-cone crumbs from around my boss’s ankles.
‘Ah!’ said David. ‘Mallory’s flatmate, I think she’s mentioned you.’
‘Is that right?’ Pip said.
‘A pleasure, a pleasure.’ David shook her hand and immediately I resented their closeness and wanted to divert them away from one another. They were two circles on a Venn diagram that should not have intersected or bounced up against one another. London was surely big enough that this should never happen.
‘Bit of a ruckus here,’ David continued shyly to Pip’s concerned upturned face. ‘Bit of nothing.’
‘Can it be both? Ruckus and a bit of nothing?’ Pip turned to me. ‘Your text—’
‘It’s nothing,’ I said.
‘It looks like something,’ she said, gesturing at the police van and officers.
‘Just a silly hoax. They’re just making sure everything is safe. The fire alarms didn’t go off, so I had to—’
‘You could have been torched where you sat!’ Pip looked David up and down. Given his height, this took some time. ‘That’s incredibly illegal!’
‘It can’t be incredibly one or the other,’ David said. He couldn’t help himself. ‘Something’s either illegal or not illegal.’
Mansplain (v.) was unlikely to ever enter any version of Swansby’s Encyclopaedic Dictionary.
‘I guess that makes you incredible,’ Pip said, and she reared up as really only she can do, but David was not concentrating, he was inspecting something at his feet—
A man, apparently unmoved by the presence of police officers and blithely attempting to keep to the pavement and enjoy their normal route unimpeded, strayed between us. I had to commute every day through Westminster, and some people there just refused to recognise that not every path was available to them. In this instance, this person also had a small dog. Horrified that a bomb threat was distracting any possible attention from it, this passer-by’s dog chose that moment to slowly and theatrically defecate at my boss’s feet.
‘Ah!’ said David.
‘Oh!’ said Pip.
‘I’m so sorry,’ said the passer-by. ‘She’s never done this before.’
The ice-cream police officer asked his companion, ‘Isn’t that against a by-law?’
‘Not if it’s picked up,’ David said.
Pip patted her pockets, making a pantomime of looking for a carrier bag.
I put the whole choc-ice into my mouth, bent down and used the cheap plastic wrapper to scoop the day’s simpler mess into my hand. I thought, maybe this is what I was put on earth to do. I was never going to be brave or proud but I know about timings and small interventions.