I had been on this internship for three years. On my first day, I was given a rundown of the company’s history on my tour of the building. I was shown the portraits of its initial sub-editors and funders who had vied to keep the business going both before and after the wars. It all began with Prof. Gerolf Swansby, a wealthy man who seemed to attract unctuous funding for his lexicographical enterprise. By the late nineteenth century, he had accumulated enough for building works to commence at an address overlooking St. James’s Park. The property was built for purpose, and for its time was state-of-the-art, designed by architect Basil Slade and fitted with features such as a telephone, electric lift and synchronome master clock which used electrical impulses to ensure that all clocks in the building kept uniform time. Prof. Gerolf Swansby named the building after himself. The “state-of-the-art” lift was designed in order to go down to the basements of the building which housed huge metal steam presses, bought and installed from the outset by David Swansby’s be-whiskered great-grandfather to sit in readiness for the dictionary to be completed A–Z and go to print. From the beginning, the enterprise haemorrhaged money.
Before a single edition of the Dictionary was printed, before they had even reached the words beginning with Z, work came to an abrupt halt. All this early, costly industry on Swansby’s Encyclopaedic Dictionary was interrupted when its lexicographers were called up and killed en masse in the First World War. Every day I walked past a stone memorial to these young men on the side of Swansby House, their names chiselled alphabetically into its marble index.
The unfinished dictionary, its grand hopes for a newly ordered world truncated, potential never fully realised, was considered an appropriate memorial to a generation cut short.
I get that. It makes me feel deeply uncomfortable, for various reasons, but I get it. The dictionary exists in an incomplete published form as a sad, hollow, joyless joke.
The original presses were melted down to make munitions for the World War. On my tour of the premises, I just nodded at this detail. My mind was solely on the fact that I would finally be making a living wage.
David and I worked in shabby offices on the second floor of Swansby House. Given its prime location close to St. James’s Park and Whitehall and its wonderful period details and space, the lower floors and large hall of the building were leased out as venues for launches and conferences and weddings. It was all kept pretty plush and impressive for visitors, and David employed various freelance events managers to add marquees and banners and floristry according to various clients’ various tastes. The uppermost storey was not open for events—while downstairs was kept spick and span, its brass fittings polished daily and dust kept at bay, the abandoned higher floors above our offices were untouched and unused. I imagined there must be enough dustsheets up there to keep a village of ghosts in silhouettes, with cobwebs hanging from the rafters as thick as candyfloss. Occasionally I heard the scuttle of rats or squirrels or unthinkable somethings running above my office ceiling. Sometimes this caused plaster to drift down onto my desk. I did not mention it to David. He never mentioned it to me.
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.