‘Watch it,’ I warned him. ‘You’re getting seriously close to the limit.’
‘Fuck the limit,’ he screamed, and I saw the expletive bounce along in a fury of sparking green before it rolled under the spindly chair that housed so many of its relatives. We’d come to think of it as the fuck chair.
I couldn’t face the consequences of continuing. ‘I’m going to leave,’ I mouthed – the last syllable was too exaggerated and the little letters hopped out, spread to the far corners of the room and then swarmed together, some kind of hokey cokey nonsense.
He looked at me as if to say, nice one. But mercifully he didn’t say it. Maybe even he recognises that we have enough sarcasm in this house, sometimes.
Marry an academic and you get a bigger quota. Well, they get a bigger quota and they can share some of that with you, their non-academic wife. This is supposed to be a privilege, and it was certainly part of the draw when I decided to marry Mike. But now, of course, I’ve come to realise that a bigger quota by itself is a curse. It’s like saying hey you, you’ve got style. You’re now state sanctioned to spend more money on clothes than other less stylish people. Unworthy, ill-dressed people. What they don’t add is: and we will give you more money, or we will build you an extra-large wardrobe or whatever.
So it is with the extra words. Say your extra words, you deserve them, Mr Clever Clogs – and then what? Do we get a bigger house to keep them in? Do we get, I don’t know, therapy or something? Not a fucking thing. We just have to deal with them, spilling out all over the place, straining so hard at the windows that all our glass is convex. And another thing they don’t warn you about is the very high correlation (ugh correlation, a four syllable stinker that really lingers) between academics and sleep talking. Too many ideas for one little human head perhaps. Sometimes they pour out of him any way they can, snorted through a nose, expelled like steam from an ear, or growled via the lower duodenum (never say that one out loud if you can possibly avoid it).
I tried once or twice to have a quiet conversation about it, aware of the futility of verbal communication. Every time, Mike would lose it and lash out, filling up the kitchen with absolutely unnecessary speech bubbles. And he’d use longer words too, to put me in my place. He knew lots of Latinate ones from his fossils. Once he called me caecilians – which I understand now is a wormlike, almost blind, tropical amphibian. I looked it up, but I needn’t have because that’s exactly how the word crawled out. Sometimes I see it poking about under the fridge still. It’s disgusting. The kitchen is particularly full of horrifying letter chains.
And so I say less. I’ve had no choice. But inevitably, arguments happen. Lately Mike has been provoking them. Sometimes the hostile alphabet we live in creates the tiff. No kids thank god, or we’d have no space at all now, every ga ga goo goo from birth crystallised into crawling space-fillers, with their scent of nappy and talcum powder. I’d seen them in the houses of others, back when we were younger and people had the space in their houses to invite us round for dinner. Back when it wasn’t dangerous to drive our road-rage filled cars and the trains weren’t static with the tunes of strikers. Did you hear about the poor woman who was blinded by a picket attack before they finally decommissioned them?
A dinner of words, as I say, made no difference in those early days – the words were small, harmless. Ah god, there was still so much space! How I miss those days of no consequence. My friend Beth’s house is still, she texts me, like that. She signs the same to me when we meet. She’s not trying to rub it in, at least I don’t think so, but she can’t risk having me and Mike over. She lives alone. She only ever thinks happy thoughts, so that if one happens to spill out in her sleep in the night it will be a cosy word like fireplace or lover. Beth never reads the news and spends most of her time doing yoga or meditating. She only ever sees people outside the house, in a public space. I envy her. She’s done everything right. And she has a pristine home. When I look in through the window, I see no paleontological lurkers and crawlers. Just everything in its place. Space to move.
Space to breathe! I increasingly worry about that. Only last week I woke up with a word stuck in my windpipe. I squawked as best I could and Mike woke up, did the Heimlich on me. It was one of his (obviously): a coccolithophore down the throat again. Not as microscopic as he’d have you believe, not in word form anyway.
‘Just open the window, for christ’s sake it’s not the end of the world. I—’
I held up a shushing finger. Opening the window, ha! Oh I hadn’t thought of that, my features attempted to convey. Yeah it was true that you could shake off one or two through an open window, particularly if you used the big standing fan too. In the kitchen, the extractor hood was another evergreen tool. But they were clingers, most of the words. Felt they belonged here. They just did not want to go.
‘They’re part of you,’ Beth had whispered once. She always whispered, believing that the words would be softer, kinder, nicer to have around. Like singing to your child in the womb, hoping that what comes out will be happier, more loved. More loving.
Mike’s words were particularly clingsome: sludgy and stagnant. They stank up the air, filled it with the unspeakable. The sarky ones that had once been nice were the bitterest. They climbed inside your mouth and turned it acrid. Burnt bonfire apples exploding, shards in your gums and the toffee in your teeth.
And of course it’s a problem outside the home now too. Yes, the university can keep expanding but what about everyone else? All those homeless words! You can smell them on the sea breeze. In the streets words multiply on the tongues of others. You have to duck and dive to get to the shops. So many happy clappy street performers trying to spread beautiful words. They’re all words, you want to yell at them! They’ll all get us in the end. We should be signing, like Beth.
I haven’t left our town in years thanks to the transport issues, but you can tell from the pics that other places have the same problem. Unlike Beth I do watch the news, I do read the internet. I see the young popstars up in London persecuted by their own lyrics, like clouds of bees. Madonna was one of the first to undergo the experimental dewording treatment that killed her. It doesn’t work. Nothing works.
Everyone on the internet has a theory about how this happened to us. Where we’re headed. It’s just human nature to try to find meaning in words, I suppose, but you have to agree with Beth: it’s quite depressing. Sometimes I like to listen to an audiobook and pretend we’re in the before times. They’re illegal – the old government missing the point again – but a harmless treat really: those words can’t manifest and plague you forever. I tried to get Mike to record his angry speeches, his descriptions of a long day at the university, and play them back to me. ‘Then they’ll be contained in the device,’ I murmured.
‘You’re forgetting, my adorable little ostracoderm, that, although the words will not spread when the device is triggered – no matter how many times it—’. I was doing the wind it up signal. ‘Very well.’ He even had the good grace to lower his voice: ‘Wherever I record it, there the words will seep out.’
‘So, darling, don’t record it in the house,’ I wanted to snarl at him but instead wrote down on one of the little notepads I had positioned everywhere for just such occasions. I had to reach through a slew of writhing terms just to pick this one up. He laughed at me, thinks I’m quaint. He, who is educated, loves his own words, the sound of his own voice, the look of his knowledge laid bare across the floors, the chairs, every surface there is. I didn’t go to university. I do not understand.
The thing is, I know him by his words now. Or at least, I know his words, his glossary of terms, the style of his limited emotions upon them – the grey-blue tone of smugness, the lifting bursts of testosterone, the occasional glee woven into such terms as dinoflagellate and Valanginian. I’m the one who had to tidy the buggers up, wade through them to have a bath, be divebombed by them as I tried to roast a chicken. Naturally, I started to notice when the new words began to creep in.
They were inseparable groups of words. Phrases, I suppose, but not ones I recognised. They weren’t university speak. Not Mike’s usual fossil chat, not his balls-out confrontational style. There was a dancing feminine aspect to the new words that I’d come to associate with my own, and yet they were not mine. I didn’t know what they meant strung together like that. There was a softness to them. I pinned one down: boil the ocean – and the phrase wriggled seductively before heading off to entwine itself in an old foraminifer. Phrases didn’t tend to hang together in this house. Mike said they were lazy.
I have resolved to become a detective. I realise that I have just about had the known vocab under control – Mike under control, I mean, despite his outbursts. This is something else. Every Thursday I find them: Jump the shark, low-hanging fruit, thought shower. I always go to Silent Book Club (companiable reading, you could call it) with Beth on Thursdays - which we like to follow up with an outdoor lunch, picnic-style on the beach, no matter the weather, and then a lengthy stroll. When I came home this Thursday, though no one had been there, the words were slithering about all hot air and tongue: Open the kimono, bleeding edge, trim the fat.
What did they mean! How had they got there?
I am determined to find out.