‘But!’ said Frasham, rolling back on his heels, ‘I see I have been remiss!’ He brought his face so close that Winceworth could have kissed him, their legs planted one against the other. Frasham smelt lightly drunk, his chest slick and cooling. Winceworth felt grimier than he ever had before. ‘But you simply must be part of our merrie bande, I think. Shake something loose, my good man – you always look so vexed. It was good to see you with a drink inside you at the 1,500 Mile Society – what do you say? Do you fancy it? Find something there for you? My uncle can lay on quite a festival when he puts his mind to it.’
Of course, Frasham was not a week back in London before he was organising orgies in a museum. Of course, he would be standing there half-naked, caught with his trousers not only down but way across the room, yet still have the upper hand!
The colour of the explosion scorched the backs of Winceworth’s eyes.
It would be good for his career to accept this ridiculous invitation. The thought disgusted him, but it was invariably true. If he could be in Frasham’s inner, trusted circle, who knows what new futures his life could hold: what escapes, what wished-for possibilities?
‘That’s kind of you,’ he said.
‘Then that’s settled! Come by the museum after midnight – we’ll show you how a relaxing evening progresses.’
Miss Cottingham laughed again, and Frasham held Winceworth’s gaze for many seconds more than was at all necessary. The lamp sputtered once more and made the shadows waver across the scene – Swansby House’s desk-man and the field-man, one covered in dried blood and soot and the other hot with lust for life, momentarily arm in arm in their Westminster basement.
U is for
unimpeachable
(adj.)
‘Mallory’s not here right now.’ Pip’s tone sounded bright and businesslike on the phone. I strained to hear the robo-voice of the hoax caller, its rasp and tininess and tinniness. I tried to sidle closer but she moved the phone cord over her shoulder and swivelled away from me on her chair, out of reach.
‘Who am I?’ Pip echoed. I made cut-it-out gestures near my carotid artery but she dismissived them with a wave. She was grinding her teeth and I wondered if the caller could hear it down the phone.
Another flake of plaster fell from the ceiling. I watched the blister of it settle its pace in the air and land on my shoulder.
‘No, yes, I’ve heard all about you,’ Pip said. ‘And do you know what – sticks and stones, mate. You’re worried that a dictionary is going to change the definition of a word? You know that we laugh about you, right? Your little squeaky vowels and your threats. You know Mallory goes home and thinks about you every day? And I’m not a violent person, but I ask her what is wrong and when she tells me, I imagine you sat in your little house and I imagine feeding your hair into a lawnmower. You know what other words have changed over time? Wash your mouth out. What else has changed? Words like girl. Sanguine. Spinster. No, don’t ask me how or why, I have no interest whatsoever: frankly I’ve not the slightest interest. Mallory explained it once over a delicious dinner and I was concentrating on not tripping over my own tongue – look it up yourself if you’re so invested. You clearly have the time. Who else do you ring up and bully? Weather forecasters? Tide-tablers? Whoever tables the tide. I bet you resent that we’re not still speaking Latin. No, actually, I bet you resent Latin’s influence on the language and wish we could just be speaking in good old whatever came before. Anglo-Saxon. Jute. I’ve no idea, please don’t try and correct me on this, I haven’t the foggiest. You’re just a gross little troll who likes freaking people out, like something from the Grimm brothers. They wrote a dictionary too, didn’t they, Mallory? Did you tell me that once?’
‘I—’
‘So you listen here,’ Pip said to the caller, and she stabbed the air in front of her with a finger. Colour flushed beneath her collar and across her neck. ‘You silly little man. No, don’t apologise to me. I didn’t call sick off work to have you, what, snivelling on speed-dial. I’m not sure what your deal is – homophobia? Fear of change, or language, or gays, or both, or is it you feel like you’re left out or behind and there might not be a place and time for you in a book that no one reads, that you can’t abide – got me using words like abide – the smallest thing that makes no bit of difference to you? I learned a new word for wood pigeon today – that’s so much more important than you. You know who you’re speaking to? This may as well be the dictionary, right. You want to tell me that there’s a bomb in the building because you don’t want a word’s meaning to change and get with the times? Well, I’m the dictionary today and I am telling you in the strongest possible terms to get bent.’
She slammed the receiver back down into its cradle.
‘He hung up ages ago, didn’t he,’ I said.
‘The second he realised that it wasn’t you on the phone,’ Pip said.
I came around and hugged her, burying my face in that yard of closeness between the top of her head and her shoulder. ‘Into a lawnmower—?’
‘Felt good to say,’ Pip said. She hugged me back. ‘Oh!’ she said into my hairline, ‘I think I found another one.’ She pointed at a place in the index cards, finger grazing the paper.
The phone began to ring again.
There was a noise above us, a creak or stamp or thuddery. We stared at the ceiling tile above us.
paracmasticon (adj.), one who seeks out truth through guile in a time of crisis
‘I’ll take a look,’ Pip said. ‘Don’t pick up that phone, OK?’
‘OK,’ I said.
And Pip swing-swang-swung from the room. The phone kept on insisting. I waited until I could hear her feet on the stairs and then picked up the receiver.
‘I’m a man of my word,’ the digitised voice said. The voice disguiser meant that I could not tell whether the tone or pitch of it had heightened. It might have been my imagination, but the words seemed to be tumbling out more quickly. ‘I hope you enjoy yourself.’
‘Enjoy?’ I asked.
‘Enjoy,’ the voice echoed.
‘Enjoy,’ I repeated.
‘Hello?’ said the person down the phone line. Then, ‘Oh – hold on a second—’ and then there was that obscure sound of a phone being dropped from a small height and a sad, robotic, flatted autotune string of shit-shit-shit.
There was a corresponding thump from above. Then there came the shriek of a fire alarm, blaring at such a volume you could feel it in your blood.
V is for
vilify
(v. transitive)
As the cab pulled up outside his lodgings, an exhausted Winceworth tipped the driver far too much because the idea of weighing out or counting coins suddenly seemed an impossibly intellectual and physical undertaking. He race-dragged up the stairs to his front door, fell inside and slammed the door behind him with as much energy as he could muster.
Before undressing for bed Winceworth threw his Swansby House attaché case across his bedroom. He withered onto his bed so that his shoes came away from his feet. The very essence of him became simple and synonymous with drooping, flagging – he sagged on the counterpane and as his clothes slid to the floor puffs of masonry and grit leapt into the air. Between the birthday-cake-icing-sugared pockets of the morning, the cat vomit, tiny pieces of dandelion clock, the pelican blood mixed with ink and Barking’s brick dust, his clothes were ruined with documentation of the day. He compared his own pale forgettable body, already goosepimpling in the cold of his bedroom, with Frasham’s easy half-nakedness in the dark beneath the Scrivenery. He dwelled on this for some moments – too many moments – before pulling his bedsheet over his face. Bedsheets, he thought, negate the need for time. He burrowed deeper and he tried some of the breathing exercises Dr Rochfort-Smith recommended to him. He exhaled and inhaled, inspired and aspired according to his pulse, and within seconds he fell asleep in his socks. There should be a word for how horrible this will make him feel upon waking.