The Museum of Cathy Read online

  Child’s body found in Lee-Over-Sands

  The name of the child who drowned at Colne Point Beach in Lee-Over-Sands on Tuesday morning has been released. Authorities say nine-year-old Jack Bower of Chelmsford was found on the beach by his brother, Daniel Bower, who had performed CPR. Paramedics were called and pronounced him dead at the scene. Circumstances leading to this tragic death are unclear. Mr Bower, nineteen years old, lived in a chalet on Beach Road and is said to have sometimes looked after his brother during weekends and holidays. Funeral details have not yet been announced.

  Tom peeled a photo from the same envelope of the curly haired boy with the silver glasses, this time in a T-shirt and shorts grinning at the camera. He held the hand of a teenager who was presumably his older brother: they looked just like each other. In the background of these two brothers stood an early simulacrum of Cathy, a ragged little girl with bright, bright, bright ginger hair and hundreds of freckles. There was no scar on her forehead. She was wearing an oversized white T-shirt with a diet Pepsi logo on the front.

  Tom looked away from young Cathy and folded the pages back up. He touched a pile of fortune-cookie messages, which he guessed were from his and Cathy’s favourite Chinese restaurant down the road from her old apartment in Los Angeles. ‘A feather in the hand is better than a bird in the air’, said one of the fortune cookie messages. ‘Actions speak louder than talks’. ‘You look pretty’. ‘Maybe someday we will live on the moon!’

  In the half-darkness Cathy could see soot marks on the walls above the air vents, bits of wall where the plaster was coming off. The windows still let in enough light to see by as they walked through a collection of small mammal skeletons that appeared to march – a ghost army – from wall to wall under a wooden roof. As they stepped deeper into the museum, the music became quieter.

  “Let’s stop,” Cathy said. “Let’s talk here. I don’t want to go further.”

  A room to the right was full of gormless plastic Neanderthal mannequins, ranging from bent monkeys to upright humans. The mannequins were all on their sides, arms sticking out of boxes amongst boards with information about evolution. Daniel kept walking. He opened a couple of doors off a skinny corridor, all of which had keys in their doors but weren’t locked. One led into an office with a messy desk and walls covered in posters from former exhibitions: ‘One Million Years of the Human Story’ and ‘Whales: Giants of the Deep’. Another was full of filing cabinets and cardboard boxes. Another room had a strange chalky smell coming from the shelves of dried coral against the walls.

  “It’s quiet in here,” he said, and entered.

  There was a sink and a small window looking down on a messy courtyard, around which the various wings of the museum were arranged. Daniel washed his face with cold water in the sink. Stone fingers reached out from boxes and jars all over the room with pretty names on their labels: Carnation coral, Tongue coral, Flower Leather coral. Near the sink was a yellow metal cabinet full of bottles with chemical labels. Dusky light came through the one window, outside of which was a bunch of scaffolding. Daniel reached forward and touched Cathy’s face, putting a thumb on the corner of her mouth.

  “You’ve smudged your lipstick,” he said.

  She didn’t reply.

  “I never thought I’d see you in lipstick. You look pretty.”

  “I’ve grown up.”

  “I can see that.”

  “I’m getting married.”

  Daniel kept his eyes steady.

  “Congratulations. Is he the geeky American you met in Los Angeles?”

  “You had people following me.” It was a statement, not a question and Daniel didn’t reply. “Why did you stop sending me things? Was it because I left Los Angeles?”

  “The lorry company was busted on a big job so Marcus and that lot became less helpful. If you hadn’t called the police on me I would be in jail for a lot longer. I should be thanking you.”

  “Well don’t.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “I wanted you out of my life. That’s the only reason I did it.”

  “Consider my gifts as tokens of appreciation, despite your motivation.”

  He brushed hair off her face and she remained still.

  “I understand why you left and I’m still here in front of you saying I love you. Nobody will ever know you like I do.”

  “I haven’t missed you,” Cathy said.

  “I’m in control now,” he said. Cathy raised an eyebrow. “Jack would want us to forgive each other,” Daniel said. “And he’d want you to come home.”

  “You can’t use him like that.”

  “I can say whatever I like about my brother.”

  The storeroom’s air smelt of chalk and Daniel could feel their hearts beating in unison, like he wasn’t sure where he began and she ended. He didn’t like her tone or the arch of her eyebrows, almost disdainful, or how she appeared to think she had the upper hand over him. He’d imagined this moment so often over the last years, as well as imagining what they would do together after he came to find her. They’d buy a boat, perhaps. They’d ride on the estuary. They’d dance on the deck. She would make objects talk to each other, beer cans to shoes and umbrellas to washing up sponges. They would go back to their origins. In the storeroom of coral he picked up her handbag and took Jack’s lead toy soldier out of it, putting it in the palm of his hand. He smiled at her and she smiled tentatively back. He tensed his fists.

  I’m a seagull! Jack used to jump on Daniel’s bed in the morning, pretending to swoop. Jack often used to pretend he was some sort of bird, racing up and down the beach with his hands outstretched to catch the wind with his anorak flapping behind him like wings. He was a child deeply immersed in his own world, as Cathy was. Watching them play together was almost spiritual, like they might slip out of this life because they were so deep in their heads. Jack could often be found in elaborate battles with ghosts at the end of their parents’ garden or in the living room, drop kicking them and punching, but when it came to school friends Jack was the one who was pushed around at bus stops. Daniel always felt fiercely protective of his little brother, with his toothy grin and silver glasses with tape around the nose or safety pins on the arms. He tried to take Jack to the boxing gym with him sometimes, but Jack would forget his trainers or get a stomach ache and end up reading in the dressing room, eating liquorice allsorts. Daniel had wanted to make Jack stronger.

  One of the reasons that Daniel persuaded his parents to let Jack come to Lee-Over-Sands so much was that it would be good for him to be outside catching crabs and going on long walks, learning to tie a boat knot and make a fire. But Cathy had succeeded in building Jack’s confidence where Daniel had failed. Daniel used to go out to the sea every few days with Jack, hold him afloat while he kicked his legs, but Jack would cry if he got salt in his eyes. Jack was shy with Daniel, as if he wanted to be liked, but Cathy didn’t care what anyone thought of her and this rubbed off on Jack. He ran faster in her presence and spoke louder: when she was around, he even tried to go under water sometimes. Daniel’s parents saw how Jack came out of his shell after he started spending weekends with Daniel in the chalet.

  No credit to me, Daniel had told his father. It’s this ginger kid he fancies.

  Jack started to laugh more once he became friends with Cathy. He no longer clung to Daniel quite so much, he was no longer always standing on the side-lines watching Daniel paint and mend things. Instead he would disappear off into the marsh in the morning and come back in the evening full of stories about birds and burnt-out cars, changing tides and washed-up detritus from cargo boats. His cheeks became pinker and his body less scraggly. Suddenly he had secrets and whispered games.

  First thing in the morning you could hear all sorts of strange things on the marshes beyond the street where she grew up. Cathy always liked the moment when the moon was still visible in the sky but th
e sun was already coming up. It was misty and cool that morning, and it felt as if anything were possible.

  A crow, behind Cathy and Jack on the mudflats as they walked from the bridge to the beach, had opened and closed its wings, only just visible in the mire. Jack always climbed out of his bedroom window while she climbed out of hers and they would meet up at the bridge. The early morning air bit their skin and they waded together across a shallow part of the estuary in their Wellington boots. His favourite toy soldier was in his pocket, and her best mouse skull was in her fist. The horizon was invisible and they’d stood up on a mound of grass looking out on the marsh and the murky pebble beach.

  The morning she left Jack to drown they’d caught their breath on the quiet ridge and the scream of a gull broke out like a drunk at a party when everyone else was hushed. The rusty remains of a car engine had a small cloud of bees diligently nosing up to marigolds around it. Cathy led Jack by the hand towards the beach where he died, their Wellingtons squelching in the wet sand. In Lee-Over-Sands it was easy to imagine that the water had some sort of consciousness. It was creaturely, the way it crawled and licked.

  That’s a Banshee, she’d said of a low wailing in the distance. It’s like a fox, but without legs. They push themselves forward with their tail.

  Liar, said Jack, who was becoming less gullible by then, near the end of this cataclysmic summer.

  Her past was rising as she stood in front of Daniel in the coral storeroom. Cathy opened the Oxo Cube box and picked out Jack’s glasses. They were maybe the most evocative object in her collection of memories, the strangest because they almost used to be a part of his body. Like keeping the bone of a saint. She’d found the glasses amongst hairballs and shadows next to a chocolate wrapper and a broken periwinkle shell under her bunk bed a few weeks after he died. He’d had about five pairs, because he was always losing or breaking them. They all had silver rims and tortoise-shell temple ends that hooked over his ears. They summed him up: owlish, delicate, orderly, wide-eyed, and even though he no longer existed when she found the spectacles under the bed, it was as if Jack was staring at her. This object was his body, a part of Jack’s anatomy she’d interacted with all summer. The glasses had watched her do handstands and known to add turrets to her sand castles. She’d folded them and placed them carefully on top of his cars and shark teeth, next to his red watch.

  “Underneath that smart dress and lipstick you’re still my Cathy,” Daniel said.

  “I’m not yours,” Cathy said, but weakly.

  She could sense the familiar places on Daniel’s body: how the muscles in his arm used to flex as he kissed her and how his wrist fitted exactly in the curve behind her neck when they were lying down. She did not want these muscle-memories any more than she wanted to remember his smell. Her bare feet wriggled on the scuffed floor. Daniel’s breath was hot on the side of her face so her hairs rose up to attention again. He reached over to a desk and picked up a green apple left uneaten by one of her colleagues earlier that afternoon. He took a bite and the juice frothed up. He offered her a bit. She shook her head. The first time he and Cathy fucked was out on her father’s deck with water lapping underneath, sunshine hitting her chin and the near-blue of her thighs in a polka dotted bikini. He’d just finished eating an apple and he dropped the core into the estuary before he turned her around to press the axis of her hips into the wooden deck rail in a way that hurt. He bent her over towards the sea like the prow of a boat and when he was finished, a black bug, shiny as the pupil of an eye, had crawled up her Achilles heel over the dune of her ankle while he kissed her, up to the ripples of her knee. Its wings had shrugged slightly, but it kept going, plodding a straight line with almost imperceptible footprints across the top of her thigh onto her hipbone. Daniel had picked it up from her skin between his thumb and forefinger, and then squashed it.

  Although she was standing in the museum now, she was on the edge of the world, stomping through marsh water in Lee-Over-Sands. She was on her kitchen floor, her lip bleeding and her legs spread. She was naked on the deck with her spine on mouldy wood. She was waiting to fall unconscious, covering her head with her arms and curled in the foetal position. She was forgiving him as he cried on her lap. It was all happening at the same time in her head. All the breaking and tasting and the mutual, consuming guilt merging with the loneliness that marked both their lives after he came back to Lee-Over-Sands.

  Coral

  Teenage-Cathy was yawning awake through layers of time as she stood with Daniel in the coral storeroom. Not the fearless child but the teenager who jumped at loud noises and dreamed of pain. She held Jack’s Oxo Cube box. Daniel put his hand on her face and brushed a finger down her neck.

  “You belong with me,” he said.

  “I don’t belong to anyone,” she said.

  “You can tell yourself that if you like, but it’s not true.”

  The look in his eyes was exactly the same look she’d known on the Essex marshes. It made her think of blood and she didn’t like it. Staring at him now, she saw his face was hard and his lips thin. They were so close they might have kissed. She could smell his breath. If she allowed herself to be weak now her whole life would change. She would go back to the marshes, to the mud and the salt water, to the little barbecue and the smell of damp and every time mist fell on the marsh she would feel sick with guilt about Jack; and Daniel, probably, would start to hurt her again. Her bones would ache when she slept and she’d add new scars to the museum on her skin. She didn’t want to fall back in time like that, to an earlier and sadder incarnation of herself. She wanted to wake up tomorrow on her and Tom’s wrought iron bed in their Berlin flat with white floorboards and watch him sleep for a moment, full of love for him. She wanted to spend the weekend walking through Berlin with Tom, winding through courtyards and alleyways, occasionally holding hands. She wanted Tom’s stupid jokes and his kindness and to let him understand all the parts of her she’d kept hidden.

  Cathy pushed her shoulders back and took a deep breath.

  “You miss Jack, not me,” Cathy said. “I never really loved you, I just felt guilty.”

  “You did love me. Of course you did,” he said.

  “The only reason we were together was because we both felt guilty,” she said. “It was always about Jack. It was guilt, not love.”

  “That isn’t true.”

  “You didn’t answer the door when I came over the morning he died,” she said without second-guessing herself or hesitating. “You only remember what you want to about that morning.”

  There was a pause as those words sunk in: a strange, black hole sort of pause that could have moved in various different directions. She could hear creaks in the museum, a car horn in the city beyond, an ambulance roaring. His eyes flashed. He inhaled, his body tensed and he took a step back from her. Her chest tightened with the memory of all the other moments in her life, just like this one.

  “I didn’t ever love you,” she said.

  With a familiar blinding crack her head reared back into a wall and she dropped the Oxo Cube box. It clattered onto the floor. She’d asked for it. She knew the buttons to press. Cathy had a sense of time protracting, a slow motion flash going off. The brave child inside her shielded its little face and curled up tight to fade away. The teenager gasped and the adult blanked out, unconscious on the floor of the coral storeroom. There was a point when memories become stories. The life he was dredging up seemed so far away and yet so intimate.

  The aim of the early morning beach-combing missions with Jack was that the first haul was often the best. Flip-flops and trainers. Colourful ammunition cartridges. Lighters. Cleaning fluid from cargo ships and trawlers that they knew not to touch. Cathy did a cartwheel in the marsh that morning, leaving fingerprints in the mud. She had gone swimming, leaving Jack with her clothes on the beach as she often did. It was no big deal; she swam in the sea all the time without incident and he
never went in without Daniel being around. She’d jumped the waves then dived right under and was hit by the salty adrenalin that only comes from holding your breath under cold seawater. She surfaced once, spitting and blowing snot out of her nose, then waved at Jack, who was just visible waiting for her on the beach as he always did. Seagulls had patterned the sky above his little silhouette, dipping in and out of the cloud. They were already screaming at the rising sun when all of the other birds began to wake up. Cathy had dived under again and suddenly the texture of the water changed. Something tugged at her middle and wouldn’t allow her to surface. She had opened her mouth to shout, then inhaled water and was dragged down.

  She nearly drowned that morning. She wasn’t sure how she didn’t, but she was a strong swimmer and probably remembered to swim sideways rather than against a rip current. She remembered surfacing and vomiting. The beach and the bridge and the houses had all been sucked up inside a thick mist by then, the way that a dream fades when you try to recall it. The marsh had simply disappeared into the sky. She shouted Jack’s name but nobody replied as she began to swim towards the beach and then climbed up onto the sand, throwing up in the waves again. She walked shakily to where she guessed she’d left Jack with her clothes and hoped he would be waiting for her. She shouted again, but he still didn’t reply so she assumed he’d got scared when the mist came down over the beach, and that he’d gone home without her. He was scared of the dark, and tides, and being on his own. Cathy found her clothes where she’d left them and walked away from the beach.

  The morning Jack drowned she’d left the beach hanging with mist and quiet. A crow flew out of the haze and made her jump, a foot in front of her, before slipping away again. Mist was creeping amongst blades of grass as if it were just rising dew, only it appeared to be falling out of the sky. Something had crunched under her foot, a snail perhaps. She tripped over a sea heather bush and landed on her knees in the thistles, scraping the palms of her hands. She vomited seawater into the scrub again and tried to count her steps to calm herself down. The gulls were too loud and she had a feeling that the water was following her, ghost water, chasing her ankles and wanting to climb down her throat into her lungs again so she couldn’t breathe. The tides were hounding her, scheming to fill her up and drag her down.