‘What about a word for not being out?’ Pip said.
We never fight, not really. Not about the expected stuff: not about ambitions, not about our future, not about exes. Ex is included as verb in Swansby’s – it is defined as ‘to obliterate character by typing x over it; to cross out in this way’ – and as a noun: a mark made in lieu (of a signature). Often witnessed.
In three years the closest we had come to a row really came down to one of us wanting the other to take definitive action.
‘Where did that come from?’ I said.
‘Forget it,’ she said.
‘I’m out enough,’ I said.
‘Are you?’ Pip asked. This face is left intentionally blank, her tone seemed to say to me.
I get on-the-tip-of-my-tonguish when it comes to being out. For a start, the tenses go all wrong and my thoughts all come disjointed and panicked, disarrayed like an upturned box of index cards. I’ve been gay since I can care to remember but haven’t been able to tell other people. I say it’s because I haven’t got around to it, and maybe one day this will be true. I hadn’t told my parents even though I don’t think they would mind. They would care, I think, but I don’t know if they’d mind. Compared with so many places in the world etc. etc. it is a good time to be out. I know that. It’s nice out. That’s what I know to be true and yet and yet.
Pip has been out her whole life and can’t understand why I would be uneasy or unable to. My brain loops round and through and in and in and in on itself if I try to put it into words. It’s not interesting. It is interesting. It shouldn’t define me. It definitely should. I wish I had an easy way to remember how to spell mnemonic. I wish I could remember how to use ‘surely’ and ‘definitely’ when it came to finding words for myself.
‘Just tell me what’s wrong,’ Pip would ask at home. ‘I’m here, I’m listening.’
You’re unbelievable, a voice in my head whispers.
I can never quite get the thoughts and words in order. ‘Maybe I’m not ready yet’ feels like cowardice, or strangely prissy, I am a special rare bud or fruit.
The word closet is flimsier than cupboard or wardrobe, right? No one would miss a closet and its unstable walls. No one cares about a closet. I hate that it matters. I hate that I matter, sometimes. I haven’t got the right words for me.
Swansby’s defines closet, amongst many things, in terms of a ‘closet of ease (n.), a toilet, a privy’ and a ‘closet of the heart (n.), the pericardium, which encloses the heart; a chamber within the heart, the left atrium or ventricle. Obsolete.’
‘It’s not lying to not be out,’ I said, slowly.
‘I never called you a liar,’ Pip said.
‘I don’t know why you’re crying,’ I said.
‘No,’ she said. She wiped the corner of her eye with her sleeve, not-angry but not-not-angry, and then she squared her shoulders. ‘The sooner we can get this done, you know, the sooner you can leave this job. I don’t feel comfortable with you working somewhere where you’re being threatened.’
‘Is this about the phone calls? I’ve told you, it’s just some idiot.’
She stared at me. ‘Just is doing a lot of work there. Look, forget I ever said anything.’
‘I don’t want to fight,’ I said.
Pip hugged me again. I wished there was a word for marshalling a loved one to safety. I wish that I could be the one to coin it.
‘I’m sorry.’ She perched again on the windowsill and patted my seat. ‘I’m tired, I love you, and I’m feeling on edge. Come on: we can do another hour or so. Let’s find what else is up the garden path.’
P is for
phantom
(n. and adj. and v.)
On the train to Barking, if he concentrated, Winceworth believed that he could almost hear the genteel roll of the dessert trolley and the squeak of waiters’ feet in the rock and rumble of the carriage. He used to only ever daydream about the picture of the cottage in Cornwall. The salt on the breeze in his hair, the soft hum of bees. It seems that this dream had been ousted and replaced.
Perhaps he should think of it as a badge of honour that Frasham felt compelled to send him on such an obviously made-up errand. It was absurd, of course – imagine anyone being jealous of me. But there was some comfort that Frasham had noticed Sophia’s interest in him, or friendship, or tenderness. It clearly was significant enough to cause him to intervene.
Barking. Honestly.
He tried his more familiar daydreams and to think about a whitewashed cottage with a bare table, a window overlooking a bright, clear stretch of sand. He had mentioned the Sennen Cove fantasy to Sophia in a moment of madness. It was a silly thing, a flippant cipher for the idea of being left alone and clearheaded. He would be at no one’s beck and call with no responsibility other than for himself. It felt an unambitious fantasy but an honest one. What would he do with all the money in the world? His immediate thought: disappear. The train shifted a little, and with it his mind changed tack. Would anyone miss him? A scruffy lexicographer, who left no real mark on the world? He reeled back to the idea of a cottage, and the sound of bees in a garden.
As he daydreamed, or tried to force himself to daydream, Winceworth leaned his head against his seat and watched a moth make its way up and down the window of the swaying carriage. He had read somewhere when researching for a Swansby article that some species of moth had no mouthparts. Mothparts. At the time of reading he had been overcome with sadness at this fact. A case of too much information not always being a good thing. He never realised that he needed to believe a moth could shout in rage, for example, or find comfort in eating its favourite moth-snacks or even have a chance to yawn. Winceworth yawned now and regarded his mouthless companion with sympathy.
A thought intruded: Frasham leaning in and his red moustache close to Sophia’s neck.
Of course, when Frasham left the office it was with full fanfare and pomp, and he got to gallivant around Siberia as language’s knight errant, its swain and suitor with his damned hollow Swansby House regulation pen and headed notepaper. While I am sent thirteen miles to Barking, Winceworth thought, with my regulation pen irregularly lodged in a pelican’s throat. Winceworth’s gifted, new silver pen would have to do. The stationer had filled its cartridge in the shop. He used it now to doodle on the cover of the attaché case – barkBarkBARK K – and as he ran the pen across his lap and the train gave little skips, his writing jumped with jolts and shimmies on the page.
Winceworth returned to the moth at the train window and brushed absently at some pelican blood on his shirt. He wondered whether the moth had ever been beyond the confines of this train. Like the mice and rats he sometimes spotted on the underground sections of the Metropolitan Railway, perhaps this moth was born here and would die here, had no moth-memories of tree-bark or woollen jumpers or moonlight to fall back on. Winceworth imagined a moth-eaten volume of Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary.