When my twelfth birthday card from Ditte arrived, it contained a slip of paper. A word that Ditte said was superfluous to need.
‘What does superfluous mean?’ I asked Da as he put on his hat.
‘Unnecessary,’ he said. ‘Not wanted or needed.’
I looked at the slip. It was a B word: Brown. Bland and boring, I thought. Not lost or neglected or forgotten, just superfluous. Da must have told Ditte I’d taken a word. I put hers in my pocket.
I thought about it all day at school. I let my fingers play with the slip’s edges and imagined it a more interesting word. I considered throwing it away, but couldn’t. Superfluous, Ditte had said. Maybe I could add that to the list of rules Lizzie had insisted on.
When I arrived at Sunnyside in the afternoon, I went straight up to Lizzie’s room. She wasn’t there, but she wouldn’t mind me waiting. I pulled the trunk from under her bed and opened it.
She arrived just as I was getting the slip out of my pocket.
‘It’s from Ditte,’ I said quickly, to stop her frown from deepening. ‘She sent it for my birthday.’
Lizzie’s frown began to fall away, but then something caught her eye. Her face froze. I followed her gaze and saw the rough letters scratched inside the lid of the trunk. I remembered my anger, blind and selfish. When I turned back to Lizzie, a tear was sliding down her cheek.
It felt like a gas balloon was expanding in my chest, squashing all the bits I needed to breathe and speak. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I thought, but nothing came out. She went to her bedside table and picked up the pin.
‘Why?’ she asked.
Still, no words. Nothing that would make sense.
‘What does it even say?’ Her voice teetered between rage and disappointment. I hoped for rage. Harsh words against bad behaviour. A storm then calm.
‘The Dictionary of Lost Words,’ I mumbled, not raising my eyes from a knot in one of the floorboards.
‘The dictionary of stolen words, more like.’
My head snapped up. Lizzie was looking at the pin as if she might see something in it that she hadn’t seen before. Her lower lip quivered, like a child’s. When our eyes met, her face collapsed. It was the same look that Da had the day I was caught, as if she’d learned something new about me and didn’t like it. Not rage, then. Disappointment.
‘They’s just words, Esme.’ Lizzie held out her hand to pull me up off the floor. She made me sit on the bed beside her. I sat rigid.
‘All I had of me mother was that photograph,’ she said. ‘She’s not smiling, and I reckoned that life always weighed heavy on her, even before all us children came along. But then you found the pin.’ She twirled it and the beads became a blur of colour. ‘I don’t know much about her for sure, but it helps me to imagine her happy, knowing something beautiful came to her.’
I thought of the photographs of Lily all around my house, the clothes that still hung in Da’s wardrobe, the blue envelopes. I thought of the story Ditte told me every birthday. My mother was like a word with a thousand slips. Lizzie’s mother was like a word with only two, barely enough to be counted. And I had treated one as if it were superfluous to need.
The trunk was still open, and I looked at the words carved into it. Then I looked at the pin, so fine against Lizzie’s rough hand, despite its bandy leg. We both needed proof of who we were.
‘I’ll fix it,’ I said, and I reached out, thinking I could straighten it by sheer force of will. Lizzie let me take it and watched as I tried.
‘Good enough,’ she said, when I finally gave up. ‘And the sharpening stone might work on the point.’
The balloon in my chest burst, and a flood of emotion escaped. Tears and sniffling and a fractured apology: ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.’
‘I know you are, me little cabbage.’ Lizzie held me until the blubbering stopped, stroked my hair and rocked me, as she had when I was small, though I had almost outgrown her. When it was over, she returned the pin to its place in front of the picture of her mother. I kneeled on the hard floor to close the trunk. My fingers brushed the lettering, rough and untidy. But permanent. The Dictionary of Lost Words.
Mr Crane was leaving early. When he saw me sitting under the ash, he gave neither a word nor a smile. I watched him stride towards his bicycle, shove his satchel around to his back and swing one leg over the saddle. He didn’t notice when a bundle of slips fell to the ground behind him. I didn’t call out.
There were ten slips pinned together. I put them between the pages of the book I’d been reading and returned to the ash.
Distrustful was written on the top-slip in Mr Crane’s untidy hand. He had defined it as Full of or marked by distrust in oneself or others; wanting in confidence, diffident; doubtful, suspicious, incredulous. I didn’t know what incredulous meant and shuffled through the slips for a sense of it. My discomfort grew with each quotation. Distrustfull miscreants fight till the last gaspe, wrote Shakespeare.
But I had rescued them, from the evening wind and morning dew. I had rescued them from Mr Crane’s negligence. It was he who could not be trusted.
I separated one of the slips from the others. A quotation but no author, no book title or date. It would be discarded. I folded it and put it in my shoe.
The rest of the slips went back inside my book, and when the bells of Oxford rang out five o’clock I went to join Da in the Scriptorium.
He was alone at the sorting table, a proof in front of him, slips and books spread
