The Liar's Dictionary

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?’

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.’