The Liar's Dictionary

The rooms we used were sandwiched between the prospectus-ready, glossy and celebratory eventeering of downstairs and these ghost-rat, deserted upper floors. Our offices had been reupholstered in a drab, blank, modern fashion: my room was the first one that any lost visitor might come across if they made their way up the stairs. It was next door to a dingy photocopying room, then there was the stationery cupboard, and finally David Swansby’s office at the end of the passage. It was the largest, but still felt cramped with books, filing cabinets and document folders.

These rooms were all that was left of the vast Swansby scope and ambition. I counted myself lucky that I had an office of my own, however tiny. The sole employee in such a large, formidable house. I should have felt glad to have the run of a place, even one that was state-of-the-art and now slipping into disrepair.

You may know the expression weasel words – deliberately ambiguous statements used in order to mislead, performing a little bait and switch of language. I think about weasel words whenever I hear the phrase state-of-the-art. Which art, and what state? For example, ‘my office has state-of-the-art air conditioning’ as a phrase does not specify that disrepair is technically a ‘state’ and that the art in question might refer to ‘weird humming from a box above your head that drips rigid yellow sap into the printer every two weeks’.

The idiom weasel words apparently comes from the folklore that weasels are able to slurp the contents of an egg while leaving the shell intact. Teaching your weasel how to suck eggs. Weasel words are empty, hollow, meaningless claims. My reference and CV for this internship contained some weasel words concerning focus and attention to detail, as well as a misspelling of passionate.

It was my job to answer phone calls that came every day. They were all from one person, and all threatened to blow the building up.

I suspected the calls were the reason for my internship: it was not as though Swansby’s had any money to spare to lavish on ‘experience-hungry’ (citation needed) twenty-somethings. My last job had paid £1.50 less per hour and involved standing by a conveyor belt and turning un-iced gingerbread men by 30 degrees. I did not mention this fact in my interview with David nor on my CV – at least being at Swansby’s meant no more dreams of faceless, brittle bodies.

To stop me going mad, I passed the time between calls by reading the dictionary, skipping through an open volume on my worktop. Diplome (n.), I read, ‘a document issued by some greater esteemed authority’; diplopia (n.), ‘an affection of vision whereupon objects are seen in double’; diplopia (n.), ‘an affection of vision whereupon objects are seen in double’; diplostemonous (adj., Botany), ‘having the stamens in two series, or twice as many stamens as petals’.

Use those three words in a sentence now, I thought. And then the phone would ring again.

‘Good morning, Swansby House, how may I help you?’

‘I hope you burn in hell.’

The nature of my duties had not been mentioned in my interview. I can appreciate why. On my first day in the office, answering the phone with no idea what was to come, I cleared my throat and said brightly, too brightly, ‘Good morning, Swansby House, Mallory speaking, how may I help you?’

I remember that the voice newly lodged on my shoulder sighed. In discussion later, David and I decided that its speech was disguised by some mechanical device or app so it sounded like a cartoon robot. I did not know that at the time. It was a tinny noise, like something unhinging.

‘Sorry?’ I said. Looking back, I don’t know whether it was instinct or first-day nerves. ‘I didn’t catch that, could I ask you to repeat—’

‘I want you all dead,’ said the voice. Then they hung up.

On some days the voice sounded male, other times female, sometimes like a cartoon lamb. You might think that answering these calls would become commonplace after the first couple of weeks, as formulaic as sneezing or opening the morning post, but it was not long before I found this was my routine every morning: the moment the phone began to ring, my body cycled through all the physical shorthands for involuntary terror. Blood drained from my face and curdled thick in whomping knots along my temples and in my ears. My legs became weak and my vision became narrower, more focused. If you were to look at me, the most obvious effect was that every morning as I reached for the phone, gooseflesh and goosepimples and goosebumps stippled all across the length of my arm.

In our close-quarter cupboard that lunchtime, David kept his eyes on some shelving. ‘The call?’ he said. ‘Did I hear it come through at ten o’clock?’

I nodded.

David unfolded an arm and, awkwardly, hugged me.

I muttered thanks into his shoulder. He stood back and re-realigned the label dispenser on the shelf.