The Liar's Dictionary

Winceworth was unsure of the type of songbird. He researched potential candidates after his first consultation in an attempt to better know his enemy. Winceworth was employed by an encyclopaedic dictionary and was well placed to know who to ask and which books to trust on the matter. Identifying this bird from memory and through spite became an obsession for a week, conducted to the detriment of any actual work he was meant to be doing. He pored over zoological catalogues and pawed through illustrated guides but for all he was able to glean about various small birds’ feeding habits, migratory patterns, taxonomies, use of ants to clean their feathers, use and misuse in mythology and folklore, prominence on menus and milliners’ manifests, &c., &c., its species remained a mystery. Basically, it was a sparrow with access to theatrical costumiers. No encyclopaedic dictionary will tell you this, but Winceworth would want it to be known that if ever a songbird was designed to glare, Dr Rochfort-Smith’s specimen was that bird. If ever a bird was designed to spit, this was the species that would relish such an advantage. It always had an air of biding its time.

‘“A roseate blush with soft suffusion”,’ Dr Rochfort-Smith said, ‘“divulged her gentle mind’s confusion.”’

The songbird was an absurd orange colour. Much of Dr Rochfort-Smith’s consulting room was orange, to the extent that Winceworth might compile a list:

Dr Rochfort-Smith’s Consulting Room

(the orange complexities thereof):

amber, apricot, auburn, aurelian, brass, cantaloupe, carrot, cinnabar, citric, coccinate, copper, coral, embered, flammid, fulvous, gilt, ginger, Glenlivet-dear-god, hennaed, hessonite, honeyed, laharacish, marigold, marmaladled, mimolette, ochraceous, orang-utan, oriele, paprikash, pumpkin, rubedinous, ruddy, rufulous, russet, rusty, saffron, sandy, sanguine, spessartite, tangerine, tawny, tigrine, Titian, topazine, vermilion, Votyak, xanthosiderite—

Orange wall-hangings, orange satin throws, the array of bright orange walnut sapwood pieces of furniture, the orange songbird. In contrast to all this, Rochfort-Smith always wore a particularly lichenous cut of tweed. Perhaps it was the headache, but in this fourth elocution session Winceworth thought this suit clashed against the room’s decor with a new and particular energetic violence.

When Winceworth had first entered the room, the bird trialled some chirrups and then progressed to a trilling burr. As the clock hiccupped something about the passage of time and Dr Rochfort-Smith began his solemn incantation about soft suffusion, the bird decided its talents would be better spent in the percussive arts rather than just simple arietta and began slamming its body against the wire of its cage.

The doctor inclined his head and waited. Winceworth closed his eyes, marshalled his resolve and repeated the phrase back to the room. Every syllable took the effort of a poorly thought-through lie.

‘“A ro—”’

CLANG, went the birdcage.

‘“—with—”’

CLANG

‘“—divulged?—”’

tingINGting

TING TING-TLINGting

tingTLINGtlllingling

The slamming, the screeching, yesterday’s whisky excesses: the headache bit across the length of Winceworth’s skull and rocked him back, defeated, into the recesses of his chair.

Winceworth’s lisp was the official reason for his time with Dr Rochfort-Smith. He had not booked these sessions and was quite opposed to the idea of them for the very good reason that his lisp was completely manufactured. Since childhood and throughout his youth and certainly for the five years that he had been working at Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary, Peter Winceworth had concocted, affected and perfected a fake speech impediment.

He was not sure that he had developed the lisp for any reason other than sheer boredom. There was perhaps a childish, childlike idea that it made him endearing, and from an early age the act of altering his speech in this way made people respond to him with a greater gentleness. As far as he knew, which is as far as he cared, the deceit hurt nobody. Simple pleasures, small comforts.

Occasionally in private Winceworth repeated his name in his shaving mirror just to check that the lisping habit had not become ingrained.

‘“Roseate”!’ urged the doctor.

‘“Roseate”,’ Winceworth said. His tongue flicked the back of his teeth.