These felt like spellwords: Latinate, finickity and florid. There was a coltish joy to not feeling limited to using the letter S, which for so long had been the start of everything for him at this Swansby desk. He remembered his past couple of days: the shames of them, the leadenness of boredoms and required etiquettes, the spritz of energy and shocks. He felt them form as puns or logical morphing of semantic units. He felt that impulse fall away. He felt the new words bloom, sag, scratch.
agrupt (adj.), irritation caused by having a dénouement ruined
zchumpen (adj.), the gait of a moth
Winceworth imagined once more the person who might discover his false entries, his surreptitious fictions. Perhaps readers would no longer need dictionaries or any reference books in the future: print and writing might be impossible in the future’s steam and smog, spoken language inaudible over the sound of engines. Maybe in the future people would communicate through touch and smell and taste alone. Maybe there would be dictionaries for that. All this learning of vocabulary for a world he would never see and sensations he would never know, Winceworth thought, patting the index cards on his desk so their edges aligned.
He veered from imagining the mischief he would cause with this non-thing, this practical joke, this overlookable nonsensing, to accepting that his hoax entries were the one act that he would ever be (not) known for and his only chance of leaving a trace on the world. He regretted he could not share a wink or something more permanent with the person who might find them.
He turned back to his work and added a final full stop to the entry he had been writing. He let the ink dry. It flashed a lively blue sheen for a moment in the light, and then the words set into the fibres of the card. The ink bled only a little; if one raised the index card to one’s eye, it was possible to see the microscopic wisps and flicks seep out from the intended lines and curves out into the paper’s grain.
New words came to him easier than breath. He had only to set them neatly down in the official way and then jimmy them into the appropriate pigeonhole in the hall. It was that simple.
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’.
At home, we considered where to put this book on our shelves. We told each other that one day we would get around to arranging the shelf alphabetically or by spine height or colour but somehow we never did. It ended up next to a Greek cookery book and a translation of Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary (1979) by Monique Wittig and Sande Zeig. Pip found this book in a flea market or a thrift store or a jumble sale. She had riffled or rifled through it, laughed like a drain or a spout or a gargoyle and right there and then began texting me morsels from its pages. I had to hide my phone from David whenever he popped his head around the door in case he thought I was slacking off at my desk.
I had heard of Wittig during my degree. Zeig was Wittig’s partner and formerly – and, I hope, both throughout and latterly – her martial arts instructor. The book is a playful, speculative, excoriative almanac for a fabled island populated by lesbians. It’s a send-up, silly and amazing all at once, a manifesto and a flipglib thumb to the nose. Deep in its pages, the book features the neologism cyprine. What does it mean? A translator of the book rather tentatively explained the word as ‘the juice’. In the French, cyprine is defined as ‘le liquide sécrété à l’entrée du vagin de la femme lorsqu’elle est en état d’excitation sexuelle’.