Read by Lionel Laurent
I once dated a girl who kept a dirty dictionary. When I say she kept it, I mean she was the one who made the entries. When I say dirty, I mean she was writing down all the words she thought were dirty. Not in an unclean, grimy sense, but in a naughty, kinky sense. This book was loaded, so I thought I’d hit the jackpot. I found it accidentally when I was looking for my watch. There, underneath her pillow was a small, pink notebook labelled ‘Dirty Words’.
Instead of finding words like ‘arsehole’, ‘motherfucker’, ‘cock’, ‘knob’ or ‘cunt’ there were entries like ‘ripe’, ‘swallow’ and ‘juicy’. I thought it was some sort of a joke or set up. These weren’t really dirty words—only vaguely, faintly bad, sometimes, in certain contexts. But then I noticed after each word she had a description rather than a definition. Some words had stars or plusses after them for extra points. For ‘juicy’ it said, ‘Makes your lips pucker and sounds wet like sex’. Next to ‘swallow’ she’d written, ‘Leaves the mouth open and ready to receive.’ I wasn’t sure what she was on about, so I tried it. I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and said ‘juicy’. Then I said ‘swallow.’ She was right. Her descriptions were spot on. I even felt a faint stirring from below when I said those words. It was like a book of word porn, but softcore (another naughty word) and sexy. It was something for the thinking man or woman. I had to hand it to her, she really was dedicated to words.
I’d known she’d had a thing about words. I liked that about her, how I’d be in the middle of a thought, the middle of a sentence, the middle of an argument and she’d say, ‘Wait a minute. Say that again. I want to see your mouth.’ And everything would go on hold while I repeated what I said and she watched. Then she’d make some sort of mental note and say, ‘Ok, you can go back to what you were saying.’ But I rarely remembered. I hadn’t really understood what she was doing. She’d never told me about this project. I thought it was just a technique for changing the subject or stopping an argument. Or that maybe she was a little bit deaf and was trying to lip read. I knew she had a notebook that she used it to write down interesting thoughts that came to her. Now I realise some of these notes she was making were for the dirty dictionary. I thought it was just another one of her quirks, something that writers do. She’d told me she was writing a book. I never asked her what her book was about. I wish I had.
We’d met by chance at a café. She was sitting outside and had all these papers about her. It was the first warm day of spring and everyone was out enjoying the sun. A gust of wind came by and blew her papers off the table. She hadn’t really noticed, she’d been furiously scribbling away in a notebook. I’d been people watching at table nearby. Truth be told, I’d been watching her--she was attractive. And a bit odd. I liked watching odd people. I had her pegged as a writer. She seemed to be listening to the conversations around her and noting what she heard, then murmuring the words back to herself. Murmur, by the way, is one of the dirtiest words in her book: ‘A husky breath oozing out over open lips.’
So I took the opportunity to round up her papers and introduced myself. Told her I was an editor for a literary magazine. Her face didn’t change when I said that so then I thought I was wrong about her being a writer. But then she said she was a dedicated wordsmith. I didn’t know then, but ‘wordsmith’ is a moderately dirty word: ‘lips open and round to make the ‘o’ like porn star whores.’
She thanked me for returning her papers, saying it was part of a project she was working on. We talked easily about literature and books and as she didn’t seem to have anywhere to be, I took a chance and challenged her to a game of Scrabble right then and there. ‘But how?’ she said. ‘This café has games,’ I told her, ‘so we’ll play with a proper board and tiles.’ She smiled. ‘I’m good,’ I told her--because I was. ‘I’m better,’ she said. She was right.
I enjoyed being beaten by her. I lost by thirty points and was really trying at the end. No, really, I didn’t let her beat me. She won fair and square. Nobody laid a word on a red triple score like she did. I’d like to think I challenged her at least a little. In any case, it got me an official date with her. So I figured I was the winner after all.
We fell into a relationship quite easily. At least that’s how it seemed to me. I liked sharp women and she was one of the sharpest. She didn’t put up with nonsense. She’d call you out when you were inconsistent, tell you if you were rambling or repetitive. And always corrected your grammar and punctuation—even in texts. All the things a good editor does. So I got used to her conversational halts, little head tilts and concentrated face while she studied my mouth as I repeated words or phrases.
I wondered how long she’d been keeping the diary and why she hadn’t mentioned it to me. Should I tell her that I’d found it? We were still fairly early in our relationship. Instinctively I felt this was something secret. Telling her I'd found it was the sort of thing that could either bring us closer together or muck things up. I guess it was also the kind of thing that could make some guys decide it was a bit further out on the weirdness scale than they was willing to go for a fuck. But not me.
(‘Fuck’, by the way, isn’t in the dictionary. It doesn’t really do anything for the mouth. The jaw lowers, but only momentarily. It’s hard and clipped. Your mouth barely needs to open to say it. ‘Making love’ leaves the mouth in a much dirtier position. But that’s just my opinion.
So I liked her quirks even when I couldn’t understand her logic: ‘whores’ was in her dictionary-- ‘round mouth open for sex’--but horses wasn’t. And I happily went along with her notebook jottings and repeating various random phrases while she watched my mouth, every so often muttered, ‘Hmmm, good one, babe,’ when I said ‘purple’ or ‘pucker’. I haven’t really talked about our sex life. I won’t go into detail, it’s ungentlemanly, but there were no complaints from me. She might have some about me because at first when she whispered, ‘Talk dirty to me’, I’d say things like, ‘Yeah, baby, that feels so good. Keep going. You look so hot.’ But I could sense that wasn’t right and asked her what she wanted me to say.
It felt a little weird to whisper ‘hose’ in her ear, but who am I argue with a woman on the verge of giving me a blow job-- an obvious entry in the dictionary. ‘Hose’ by the way, is ‘heavy panting though a round, ready mouth.’ I wouldn’t have been able to come up with words for her on my own, but after reading the dictionary, I had a whole new set of tools at my disposal. I could feel her body spasm and the sharp intake of air when I said in her ear ‘periwinkle blue’ knowing she felt that was one of the dirtiest colours in the crayon box. Apparently ‘winkle’ just sounds naughty and ‘blue’ is ‘a slutty word that sounds like the end of a climax.’
I admit I used the information in the dictionary to my advantage. I told her my childhood pet was named Lola. She swooned (that’s in the dictionary) and could hardly get me into bed fast enough. According to her dictionary, Lola is ‘one of the filthiest names on the planet, a mouth and tongue exercise in preparation for oral sex.’ She’d told me later if she could change her name, it’d be to Lola.
It was hard to know what to make of her dirty dictionary. Was it a turn on tool or a book of judgement? Or both? She seemed tuned in to dirty words, ‘tho her definition of ‘dirty’ was a bit different. But after a while, I got into it. She’s into erotic sounds. Maybe that’s what she should have called her dictionary, but then this was her book, not mine. Which I guess was why she freaked out when I told her I'd discovered it. She said she felt violated and that I was a fake, manipulating her, mocking her and her love of words and sounds, and was laughing at her behind her back. Of course I told her that wasn’t true, that I thought her book was cool and I was happy to say anything she liked for her collection. But she just shut down. She wouldn’t talk to me or listen to me. She wouldn’t look at my mouth. So then I knew it was serious. At the time I was an idiot, thinking I don’t need such a high maintenance woman, that it’s not worth it and there are plenty of other fish in the sea. So I walked away.
But I was wrong. Really wrong. I miss her ways. I miss her listening to my words, looking at my mouth and loving words enough to keep her own book of erotic sounds. I want her back. I tried ringing and texting, but I got nowhere. So I wrote a letter, this letter, to be read out here, tonight. It has all her favourite words in it, the ones she starred and gave extra plusses to. I‘m also adding a word: sorry. It’s not dirty. But I mean it. Sincerely--which is a moderately dirty word. Here’s a word I think is better: apologies--the mouth lingers open for the beginning of the word and ends on ‘s’, which she likes so much. Apologies, apologies, apologies to the always lovely Lola.
I know she’s here tonight, my Lola. Sitting in the crowd, listening to all these words. So hear this: I won’t betray your trust, I give you my word. All of them actually, to write down, to file, to annotate, to use in whatever way you wish. So come back to me Lola. Let’s start again. What do you say?
(c) Sherry Morris, 2016
Sherry Morris is from Missouri, but moved to London 16 years ago. She’s a university administrator dreaming of early retirement. Her story about Ukraine appears in A Small Key Opens Big Doors. She writes with the support of friends, family and Bella the cat, who always has the final say.
Paris-born, London-raised Lionel Laurent stepped back onto the stage recently for two runs of These Shining Lives at the Pleasance Theatre and the Lion & Unicorn. He can usually be found writing news stories, drawing cartoons or arguing about obscure music.
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