The Museum of Cathy Read online

  She banged on Daniel’s chalet before going to bed, asking if Jack was in his bedroom, but her memories were unclear. She could have sworn she heard Daniel moving around in the chalet and a tap running. She cried on his doorstep and threw up in a bush next to his door, then figured Jack must be in there with Daniel after all, so she’d crawled dizzily into bed and fallen asleep while Jack, out there in the sea, was trying to save her.

  As soon as he hit her Daniel took three steps backwards, towards the door, and stood as far as he could from her still body. She had an insolent, sanctimonious expression on her face and he regretted it, as he always used to. Her expression was almost triumphant, as it so often had been in Essex. You didn’t answer the door when I came over, she’d said. I didn’t love you. White light had exploded in his head.

  The past was not how he had left it. He had buried something precious in the sand and now he’d dug it up the gift wasn’t the same as he remembered. It was always, always Cathy who made him lose his temper. In prison he’d actually felt calm a great deal of the time, particularly after he stopped sending her gifts. He was known as a steady and reliable sort, except for one time when some kid stole the only picture he had of Cathy. Daniel should have just knocked the guy around a little and taken the picture back, but instead he’d lost his temper. He’d seen Cathy’s face in the white light as he ruined the man’s shins and jaw.

  He hoped it would rain soon and the humidity would break. He bent down next to her and put his fingers on the pulse in her neck, which was strong. She’d be fine. The first time he’d ever knocked her out, back home, he’d been terrified she wouldn’t wake up and checked her pulse every ten minutes, putting a jumper under her head and cold water on her forehead in an effort to bring her back. He had been about to call an ambulance when she’d resurfaced of her own accord and walked off in a daze to her father’s chalet. He wished he wasn’t near her now. He’d thought so much about the moment he would see her again, but it wasn’t anything like what he’d expected. He was frustrated and told himself to take a deep breath and calm down. I didn’t ever love you, she’d said.

  Cathy’s head lolled to the side so that one cheek was pressed against the floor, near to where she’d dropped the Oxo Cube box. Her mouth was open an inch and sweaty strands of hair stuck to her temples. Her arms were limp by her side and the strap of her dress had slid off one of her shoulders. He tightened his fists and dug fingernails into his palm, trying to count backwards, but he couldn’t concentrate. When they were together in Essex he used to think about her breath all the time; its regularity, its speeding up when he was near, how easy it would be simply to make it stop and end their history at its source. She was so tightly knotted and inescapable inside his head, the origin of all his sadness. He stood with his back to the wall and held the counter. It would be a mistake to walk over to her now and put his fingers on her neck but it would not be an isolated, pivotal error of judgement. It would be intricately mapped to other almost-moments during their time together. The past and the future were in their blood and their brains. It all existed and it was simultaneous, real as the anger in him now.

  She was still out and hadn’t moved since she fell. Now he decided to leave the room and calm down, away from her. When her phone vibrated in her bag he reached to silence it. The screen said ‘Tom’. He removed the coral storeroom door key from the inside lock and ran his fingers over its tip. It felt like a tiny cityscape. He held his lion mask in his hand and left the coral storeroom, breathless at the sight of her lying there on the floor. He’d come back when he had a plan. If something was going to break before this humid night was over, he needed to make sure it wasn’t him. He slipped out of the door and locked it behind him.

  Tom pulled out more cabinet drawers. He touched travertine rock from the Getty museum gift shop in Los Angeles and a small gold Buddha. He opened up the map of Berlin they’d used when they first arrived, with its circles and arrows and routes marked in various coloured biros. He’d drawn a picture of Cathy’s profile across the centre of the city, over the Tiergarten, with the tip of her nose at the Brandenburg Gate. She had some of his tarot cards from ages ago, and a green cocktail umbrella he recognised although he wasn’t sure why. Tom opened all of the cabinets and pulled out the drawers indiscriminately. There was the heel from a red suede shoe and a green shell next to ancient used Paris Metro tickets. There were shells and toys. Tom was overwhelmed.

  His precise, orderly girlfriend collected knick-knacks and souvenirs. He wanted to give her a kiss, observe her face clouding sulkily when he told her he’d found her collection. He didn’t care if she was angry with him.

  He picked up a fading photograph of a sandbank in the sea at sunset, with what was perhaps a factory or even a castle silhouetted on the other side of the water. She’d made her childhood home sound much uglier than it appeared in this faded photograph. She said she had no good memories of Lee-Over-Sands, so she would never take him to visit the area where she grew up. The landscape was desolate, sure, but beautiful. It was unnerving to see a picture of a past she’d never chosen to share with him. There was also a photograph of Yellow Horned Poppies reaching up high from a bed of shingle while bright purple Sea Lavender kept close to the ground. A dozen of the snaps were of Cathy herself, although none was full-length. She was fragments and body parts in this collection, freckled white hands with scuffed knuckles, a ring made out of a shell on the middle finger; a toe, a mouth, the lined palm of her hand. Fingers on a thigh, a hand cupping a shadow between open legs, then – out of place – a dead heron photographed on a mud bank.

  What’s your favourite bird, he remembered Cathy saying a few weekends ago in their empty flat with wooden floorboards.

  The Jeholornis, an ancient Chinese bird with two tails. You?

  The heron. I like the way they move.

  Do you have happy memories from being a child? He’d tucked hair behind her ear.

  Sure, some. You?

  Tell me one.

  I always won the sprinting competition on sports day. My mum used to let me help her bake cakes for the local teashop before she left. My dad would take me bird watching. That’s three. He had kissed the end of her nose. He hadn’t known she collected Polaroid photographs or dried flowers.

  Tom took particular notice of a Polaroid of a broad-shouldered man with a long, beakish nose and curly black hair. The man was standing in a river or estuary, smiling at the camera with an expression that could only be the result of loving the photographer. Tom considered this image, holding it at different angles and in different lights. The man had grey eyes and a bruise on his arm. Tom forced himself to look away from the photograph.

  He had been so pleased by how much she’d opened up since they moved to Berlin, but perhaps it was all in his head. Maybe he’d spent the last years loving someone who was still a stranger to him. He picked up a photograph of Cathy’s hands from the cabinet, her bitten-down finger nails covered in chipping teenage polish. The earth’s atmosphere at ground level exerts a pressure of about fifteen pounds per square inch. We don’t notice because the pressure inside us balances itself to equal the pressure outside us. A whale doesn’t feel the water pressing on it at many tons per square inch. The shape of a bird’s wing is designed so that as they move forward through the air, the pressure above the wing is less than the pressure below. As Tom slipped out of the office, he felt as if his pressure had been messed with and he was floating.

  Daniel had left Lee-Over-Sands the same week Jack drowned. He’d abandoned the chalet, then later sold it for next to nothing and acquired a nasty debt to Marcus in the process. Daniel began driving lorries for Marcus to pay off his debt. Daniel hadn’t been able to face his parents, so slept where he could for months. He liked the driving, spending long periods of time alone driving across the country and sleeping in his truck. He was aware that he was not only driving factory machinery and car parts across borders but the dan
ger of being in charge of illicit cargoes appealed. Later, the money did too. He tried not to think about Jack’s death. He did not go to the memorials his mother held every year. He continued boxing, making some money out of a renewed anger in his gut, but however hard he punched he still missed the way Jack lined up his pebbles on the kitchen table and picked the blueberries out of his blueberry pancakes. Daniel never ate blueberry pancakes after his brother died, and even the sight of a few pebbles or shells in a row made his palms sweat a little. He’d made a great effort to push thoughts of Jack away over the years.

  When Daniel came back to Lee-Over-Sands it wasn’t because of Jack and certainly wasn’t because of Cathy, but just because he needed to keep his head down for a while and Lee-Over-Sands was at least good for that. The haulage company had got into trouble. Daniel wasn’t privy to the details back then, he just knew he had to make himself scarce. He didn’t rent the chalet he used to own, but instead a moss green one in the centre of the street. He found he’d forgotten many things about the area, like how a crust of scum formed at low tide where the water lapped the mud.

  He’d been surprised by the limpness of the chalets and how the humidity rested on your shoulders even on a cold day. He didn’t for a moment think that Cathy or her father would still be living in the same crumbling street on a sinking coastline. It was low tide the afternoon he returned and Daniel looked through binoculars at three oyster farmers collecting shells out on the beach in their galoshes, an old man throwing sticks for his pit-bull. Daniel swept his lenses over the horizon, a shaky line in the shaky rain, and paused over a figure of a girl. He put the binoculars down again, orientated himself and lifted the lens a second time to watch Cathy on the marsh. She bent down to pick something up from the ground, then lifted her own binoculars to the sky. She swung them along, following the path of an eagle above her. Daniel did the same and then considered turning away before she saw him.

  Daniel was sure, even from half a mile away, that she took a deep breath the moment she saw him; whether it was from recognition or curiosity he wasn’t sure. She stopped with her shoulders facing away from the sea and her binoculars facing his. Guns raised across enemy lines. The air tightened and colours were sharper. They both dropped their binoculars from their eyes and she began to walk forward away from the sea, directly across the low-sludge of marsh water and estuary water towards his chalet while pulling her rain hood off and raising her head up at him with those unexpectedly blue eyes.

  Her hair was long like her mother’s used to be and far darker than it had been when she was a child, sodden, perhaps, with rain and sea air. The thousands of freckles that used to make a constellation on her face had faded to just a scatter across her nose and cheeks. She appeared young and old simultaneously. Her face was insolent, with thin lips and skittish eyes that were much brighter, now, than when he’d first met her. It wasn’t a pretty face. She had an alley cat look to her and he immediately disliked her for having stayed all these years, felt ill that that she hadn’t left this nightmarish and lonely place with its crusts of scum.

  You’re back, she said, simple as anything, head tilted up and nose shiny with rainwater, like she’d merely been waiting for him to get back from a weekend away. He was surprised to be recognised. She’d only been a child then.

  Not for long, he replied. Just a week or two.

  Strange choice for a holiday. Shall we have a cup of tea? She crossed her hands over her chest.

  I haven’t been shopping.

  I have tea, she said.

  She kept her hands folded over her chest and he put on hiking boots to follow her down the street and into her chalet at the end of the road, nearest the bird sanctuary. As soon as he walked through the peeling blue door into the smell of space heaters and gin he knew it was dangerous to have come back. He hadn’t realised how much he’d missed it there and how much it meant. Every surface of Cathy’s house was still covered in shells and stones, although now there were cheap gold hoop earrings and eye shadows mixed in amongst her bowls of frosted sea glass.

  The chalet’s kitchen linoleum curled upwards at the edges with black muck in the crevices between tiles. The gas hobs were filthy and empty bottles filled rubbish bins as well as lining windowsills, decorated with dried marsh weeds and flowers. He saw through an open door that her bed was still the same bunk bed she and Jack used to play on; she’d just removed the top level. A black uniform with a white name tag on it lay crumpled on the floor next to the bed, maybe from the pub in town. Other surfaces were covered in papers and biology textbooks. Daniel could hear a man snoring behind the closed bedroom door, presumably Cathy’s father.

  Daniel’s palms sweated as Cathy put the kettle on and began to heat up cinnamon buns in the oven. She had a greasy bag of them and they looked stale. There had been many girls before Cathy, of course, too many in the years of trying to escape himself, but nothing that he couldn’t walk away from easily. He’d never been in love. Staring at this girl as she put stale cinnamon buns in an oven he remembered her mother used to make fairy cakes, he found it difficult to breathe.

  Where’s your mum? he said shakily as she passed him a cup of tea. He wanted to ask how she’d been, why she hadn’t left the area, if she still ever thought about Jack, but he didn’t. Words didn’t seem easy.

  Escaped to Majorca.

  Majorca?

  She’s married to some Spanish hotel owner and she has her own bakery near his resort.

  You don’t see her? Daniel asked. Cathy was speaking calmly, but he could see that it hurt. Daniel had never liked Cathy’s mother much, but it seemed appalling that the woman had left her daughter there on the edge of the world.

  No, but I suppose we weren’t close.

  And your dad?

  Cirrhosis of the liver. He’s asleep right now.

  Sorry.

  He saw a bowl full of tiny plastic Micro machine cars and a windowsill decorated with an army of plastic soldiers, some melted together into patterns of limbs and heads. The sight of them made his shoulders tense. He hadn’t thought about those toy soldiers for years, those elaborate beach fires. He used to love going out onto the beach with Jack and Cathy to watch objects melt, particularly enjoying how the toy soldiers would pucker and almost throb, before relaxing into each other and merging. There were also a few lead soldiers, including Jack’s favourite, the one with a red jacket and a pointy hat. Daniel picked the lead soldier up, then realised exactly what it was and put it down again as if stung.

  Are these . . . Daniel couldn’t finish the sentence, and his voice closed up. It made his head pound.

  I’ll put them away, she said, looking stricken. Sorry.

  Grief does not evaporate. Cathy’s face in the murky light made him think about how Jack would always not be there, through all actions and situations. It all flooded back to him as he looked at her, all the grief and guilt that he’d tried to suppress for the last years. Jack would never drink cold beer, sleep in the pressed sheets of a hotel bed or look back on old photographs. It now also occurred to Daniel that Jack would never see Cathy, nineteen years old, smiling tentatively with her hands on her hips. Jack would have loved to see her now. The absence of Jack was similar to fear; it flushed Daniel’s veins with blood and adrenaline, yet standing in Cathy’s kitchen he had the distinct sense that Jack was there, in the room with them. Daniel had felt a white heat in his head, but also as if he’d arrived home. Daniel, quite abruptly, wanted to reach over and touch the girl. When Cathy passed him a cinnamon bun on a plastic plate with roses on the rim, Daniel had tears in his eyes and had to turn away.

  Tom stepped outside the museum’s front door to light a cigarette, simultaneously checking his phone to see if she’d called him back. It was a quarter past eight and the prize giving was at nine. He called her phone again: it went straight to voicemail. Tom wasn’t sure if he felt angry with Cathy or just confused by her collection of
autobiographical keepsakes. Sometimes he thought he was just about to figure her out, then he’d discover there had been some fundamental mistake in his thinking, like getting the first word wrong in a crossword and having to rub the whole thing out to start again.

  Tom hoped Cathy wasn’t at a bar somewhere now, with that strange nocturnal look on her face. He called her yet again and when she didn’t pick up he made his way out of the museum onto Invalidenstraße where roadblocks and construction machinery were left out in the street ready for the next morning. He stepped into the Mercure Hotel, a taupe building he’d never been inside before. The nearly empty bar smelt of air freshener and he stepped back out again. Clouds were gathering in the sky. He did a loop of the streets near the museum, peering into smoky hostel bars, Italian restaurants, and newsagents with men drinking beer on the pavement. He had an idea and turned left onto Chausseestraße, where there was a gate under an illuminated green sign for Ballhaus Berlin, one of the city’s old dance halls. He’d been there a few times with Cathy to watch elderly couples tango in the century-old room under vast chandeliers, and the last time they’d gone they’d tried to foxtrot.

  I can’t believe you know how to foxtrot. You’re totally ridiculous, Cathy had said as he tried to lead her, without much success but with great amusement. Although he knew the basic steps they kept bumping into other couples and stepping on each other’s toes, having to stop and say sorry or kiss her.