The Name Game
Humphrey Dumphy had long suspected that certain indignities were woven into the fabric of existence: death, tax returns, damp socks, and the nursery rhyme which had pursued him from his short-trousered school days with the persistence of a small, tuneless bailiff. It was the sort of British comic misfortune that time alteration, had such a thing been available on the high street, might reasonably be asked to fix.
At thirty-two, he had mastered many adult skills. He could change a tyre, pretend to understand wine, and say “No worries” when there were, in fact, several worries. Yet he still approached coffee counters with the dread of a man stepping before a firing squad.
“Name?” the barista would ask.
He would inhale.
“Humphrey Dumphy.”
Then would come the pause. Always the pause. A delicate, professional pause, during which the barista’s face performed a heroic internal struggle between customer service and the nursery-rhyme section of the human brain.
On particularly cruel mornings, they wrote “Humpy” on the cup.
It was after one such incident, clutching a latte bearing the words “Humpty D.” in black marker, that Humphrey noticed a shop he was quite certain had not been there before. It was wedged, impossibly narrow, between a Starbucks and a phone-repair place advertising “UNLOCKED WHILE U WAIT”. Its windows were smoked with age, though the high street around it was mostly glass, chrome and disappointment.
The sign above the door read:
Nomenclature Solutions & Temporal Adjustments
By Appointment Only
Humphrey stared at it. The sensible part of him said that any shop offering both name changes and interference with time was probably best avoided, especially before lunch. Unfortunately, the wounded part of him had just had “Humpty D.” shouted across a crowded café.
He pushed open the door.
A bell rang somewhere very far away.
Inside, the shop smelt of old paper, sealing wax and thunderstorms. Shelves climbed into darkness, packed with ledgers so vast they looked less written than excavated. Behind a mahogany desk sat a woman who appeared to have been assembled from a Victorian census, a headmistress’s glare and a particularly strict umbrella. Her silver hair was wound into a bun with such gravitational authority that nearby objects seemed inclined to orbit it. Spectacles hung from a chain that might have been made of crystallised moonlight, or possibly very expensive string.
“Ah,” she said, without looking up. “Mr Dumphy. Punctual. That is encouraging.”
“I haven’t got an appointment,” said Humphrey.
“The universe made one on your behalf,” she replied, turning a page in a ledger the size of a dining table. “It often does that when humans are too busy being miserable to fill in the appropriate forms.”
“I’m not miserable,” said Humphrey, with the brittle dignity of a man whose coffee cup said otherwise.
The woman glanced at it.
“Indeed. And I am a ballerina. Ms Registraria, Keeper of the Great Name Registry. You have a complaint.”
It was not phrased as a question. Humphrey sat down, and to his own surprise the whole story came pouring out: nursery school; secondary school; university; office Christmas parties; dating apps where he had used “H.D.” and been asked whether he was available in Ultra High Definition. He spoke of job interviews in which his qualifications had been impressive until he introduced himself, at which point the panel’s mouths twitched like curtains in a draught.
Ms Registraria listened with the grave attention of someone accustomed to tragedies involving vowels.
“Yes,” she said at last. “A difficult allocation.”
“Allocation?”
“Names are distributed according to ancient principles. Family history, cultural resonance, comic potential. There are committees.”
“That explains a lot.”
“It explains everything. Changing a name, however, is not like changing a password. Proper alteration requires Temporal Rectification. We must adjust the whole life-thread: certificates, introductions, misheard announcements, school registers, embarrassing cake inscriptions. The past is surprisingly adhesive.”
“I don’t care,” said Humphrey. “I want out.”
“Be advised,” Ms Registraria continued, “that identity is not a coat one removes without finding another beneath it. There may be consequences. Echoes. Rhymes.”
“Nothing,” said Humphrey, with thirty-two years of accumulated humiliation burning behind his eyes, “can be worse than sounding like Humpty Dumpty.”
Ms Registraria gave him a look of such precise pity that, had he been wiser, he would have run.
Instead, he signed.
The moment his pen left the paper, reality folded like origami in a tumble dryer.
Jack woke to sunlight.
For several seconds he lay still, aware of something extraordinary: the usual small stone of dread in his chest was gone. No immediate memory of jokes. No old flinch waiting behind his name. He was in a bedroom he did not recognise, beneath clean linen, beside a bedside table on which a calendar confidently declared the year to be 2025.
“Morning, darling,” called a voice from downstairs. “Coffee’s ready.”
Darling.
Humphrey — no, Jack — sat up.
On the chair beside the wardrobe lay a dressing gown monogrammed with the initials J.D. His phone recognised his face. His driving licence, found after a brief and undignified rummage through a wallet, read:
Jack Dawe
He whispered it aloud.
Jack Dawe.
It had bounce. Simplicity. A faint avian quality, admittedly, but nothing fatal. There might be the occasional jackdaw joke from men who wore novelty socks, but compared with Humphrey Dumphy, it sounded practically landed.
He went downstairs.
In the kitchen stood the woman who had called him darling, and Jack discovered that Temporal Rectification had been generous to the point of suspiciousness. She was beautiful in a way that made thought momentarily impractical: auburn hair pinned loosely at the nape of her neck, green eyes, a mouth made for laughter and currently attempting it. She stood beside a gleaming coffee machine as if domestic life had been art-directed.
“Sleep well?” she asked, kissing his cheek.
Jack’s heart attempted something gymnastic and unsanctioned.
“You’re magnificent,” he said.
She laughed, though the sound had a crack in it, like ice over deep water.
“Oh, Jack,” she said. “Still the charmer.”
Over the following days, Jack explored his new life with the reverence of a tourist in heaven. He had a respectable job, respectable shoes and a respectable surname. The post arrived without mockery. His email signature did not look like a practical joke. When he gave his name in cafés, baristas wrote “Jack” and moved on with their lives, those blessed, unimaginative lives.
Yet the house contained a sadness he could not rename.
It lived first in small silences. His wife — Marjorie, he learnt, Marjorie Dawe — would smile a fraction too late. She would stand at the kitchen window with her tea growing cold, looking at the street as though waiting for an apology from history. In photographs around the house she was radiant, but even there Jack noticed it: a shadow at the edge of her expression, like someone hearing distant music no one else could bear.
He tried tenderness. He tried jokes. He tried cooking, which was a mistake neither of them mentioned again. Each evening, the sadness remained, polite but immovable.
At last, one Sunday, after a trip to Tesco during which a child near the self-checkout had sung something and Marjorie had gone white, Jack could bear it no longer.
“Please,” he said, taking her hands. “Tell me what’s hurting you.”
Her green eyes filled at once, which was somehow worse than if she had shouted.
“Oh, Jack,” she whispered. “Don’t you see?”
He did not. Happiness had made him slow.
“Our names,” she said. “Jack Dawe. Marjorie Dawe.”
Then, softly, bitterly, she sang:
“See-saw, Marjorie Daw,
Jacky shall have a new master…”
The words landed with nursery-room brightness and adult cruelty.
“It follows us everywhere,” she said. “Children in parks. Old men at bus stops. The woman at the pharmacy who thinks she’s hilarious. Even the neighbours. Especially the neighbours. They have a Labrador called Banter, Jack. They are not people of restraint.”
Jack stared at her.
“I knew when I married you,” Marjorie went on. “Of course I knew. I thought love would be louder than a rhyme. I thought if we built enough ordinary days — bills, holidays, burnt toast, dentist appointments — the song would fade. But it doesn’t. It waits. It waits in other people’s mouths.”
Something inside Jack gave way with a small, nursery-rhyme crack.
He had escaped his wall only to find someone else sitting beneath the rubble.
“I’m so sorry,” he said.
“It isn’t your fault,” said Marjorie, though they both felt the universe listening. She leaned against him. “We’ll manage. People manage worse things than names.”
“Yes,” Jack said. “Though usually with fewer children chanting at them.”
She laughed then, properly for a second, and he held on to the sound as if it were a rescue rope.
That evening, outside, dusk gathered along the garden fences. Somewhere beyond the hedge, children’s voices rose, careless and immortal:
“See-saw, Marjorie Daw,
Jacky shall have a new master,
He shall have but a penny a day,
because he can’t work any faster!”
Jack closed his eyes.
Some walls, he realised, are not there to imprison you. Some are there to keep out the universe’s sense of humour. And once breached, not all the king’s horses, nor all the king’s men, nor even the most fastidious officials of time and nomenclature, can put a man’s peace of mind together again.