The Museum of Cathy Page 13

  You have an unfair number of skills.

  I’m really not very good at this, he laughed. I did a class once.

  Foxtrot is F in the phonetic spelling alphabet, right?

  Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta . . . what’s E?

  Elephant?

  Echo. I wonder who invented it.

  Someone called Mike, or Oscar, or Romeo or Victor?

  They’d laughed together in the crowds that night. Elderly people kept telling them that they made a perfect couple and wanting to buy them drinks. Tonight, though, it was still early and there was just one couple dancing, methodically, to the sound of a waltz, watched from the balconies by a handful of self-consciously retro hipsters holding mint juleps and genuine Berliners sipping white wine spritzers and draft beers. The music plodded on as if in a time warp and Tom stepped up a spiral staircase towards the balconies to make sure Cathy wasn’t sitting hidden at a back table somewhere. An old man with a purple bow tie was reading a newspaper and a middle-aged couple were arguing, drunk in a way that suggested they’d been at it all day, but there was no Cathy. Tom bought a double whiskey with ice on the side and sat down for a minute. He listened to Waltz No. 6 by Chopin. The couple held each other stiffly as they shifted around the room, turning occasionally, not smiling at each other.

  Tom walked back to the museum with the tune of the waltz in his head. Before he went inside he saw a dirty leg sticking out from behind a tree in the corner of the car park and stepped idly towards it. The protester’s boyfriend hadn’t appeared. She smiled up at Tom as he approached her. She was sitting at the base of a chestnut tree in her black bikini with his jacket over her shoulders. Ants were crawling on her sugar-covered toes.

  “So my boyfriend hasn’t turned up,” she said. “Obviously. Has he called your phone back maybe?”

  “Afraid not,” he said. “You want to call again?”

  “I’m far too busy giving the ants diabetes to see my boyfriend.” She stuck her lower lip out sulkily, and blew air upwards so that her sharply-cut blonde bangs fluttered. “Twat. What’s your name?” she said to him.

  “Tom.”

  “I’m Iris. Like the flower. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “You don’t look very happy either.”

  “That’s because I’m half-naked in a museum car park and my boyfriend hasn’t called me back,” she said and blew air up from her mouth so her bangs fluttered again. “Covered in treacle. What’s your excuse?”

  “I don’t have one,” said Tom. They were silent for a moment. “I can go see if I can find some more suitable clothing from the lost and found, maybe? And I’ll give you some money for a taxi.”

  “Really? That would be great. Can I come with, though? The ants are tickling.”

  Tom didn’t relish taking this girl into the museum with him. Cathy must be at the party by now; he should go back before she got her award. He wouldn’t mention that he’d found her objects, not until later. He didn’t want to ruin her moment. But the oily teenager appeared so miserable and embarrassed, shivering in the car park, even with his jacket on her shoulders, that he couldn’t abandon her.

  Tom had been looking forward to going for a late dinner with Cathy after the party. He’d been looking forward to tumbling into the Turkish café at the end of their road, tipsy with champagne and all dressed up, to eat messy falafel sandwiches and laugh about their evening. He’d imagined Cathy’s award on the table between them, their knees touching under the table, her fingers brushing lightly over his as they did occasionally, as if just to say hello. He’d imagined her makeup a little smudged, leaning over to wipe mascara from under her eyes, then walking hand-in-hand up their staircase to their creaking old bed. He now had the distinct feeling that this wasn’t how their evening would be ending.

  “First we need to clean your feet somehow,” Tom said to Iris, looking around for the gardener’s hose as she got up, wiping sugared ants from her toes and ankles.

  Flashes of light were moving around in front of Cathy’s face and she saw that she was lying on the floor of a small room surrounded by ocean coral, at which point she remembered that Daniel had come back. She shivered and assessed her surroundings without sitting up. Along one wall was a large yellow cabinet containing bottles labelled as hazardous, and along the others were cabinets of endless coral: Blade Fire Coral, Spiny Flower Coral, Great Star Coral. The coral had similar patterns to human veins and tree branches. Most were white, as if carved from chalk, but some were red. The tap of the sink dripped in its corner and above it a window looked down on the museum’s scaffold-lined courtyard, where builders had recently been replacing crumbling brickwork and painting window frames.

  The ocean architecture throbbed because her head was pulsing. She carefully sat up and then got to her feet, holding on to the counter for balance. She took three steps forward and reached for the door, but turning the knob she found that it was locked from the outside. She rattled it weakly. Her limbs were so heavy that she had to sit down on the floor again. She usually knew what time it was, but now had no idea. She wondered whether she had missed the prize-giving already. She noticed that her phone was gone from her handbag, as well as Jack’s toy soldier and all Jack’s Oxo Cube objects. She put her head on her knees and could still sense him in the room and on her skin, as if he’d left remnants of himself there.

  It was supposed to be a basic fact of memory that emotional events have more impact than neutral ones, but her recollections of the morning they found Jack’s body mostly consisted of odd details. She knew that before they found him a cartoon called ‘She-Ra: Princess of Power’ had been on the little television in their kitchen, an episode about a reluctant wizard and a magical tree. She had poured herself a bowl of Cheerios to get rid of the bile taste in her mouth but she wasn’t in the least bit hungry. Jack had left some of his Micro machines and shark teeth in her bedroom when they’d been playing on her bunk beds the day before, all in the Oxo Cube tin. Perhaps they’d have a barbecue later, if he didn’t have to go back to his parents. Cathy’s mother was icing a lemon cake in the kitchen while these thoughts came and went. Daniel appeared at the door, and she told him that she and Jack had gone swimming, but Jack had come back before she did.

  The next thing she clearly remembered was watching Daniel walking over the bridge towards the beach, then her father following a moment later. Vomit rose up inexplicably into her mouth and she let some of it spill out into her hands, then onto the table and into her bowl of Cheerios. She didn’t know what she was scared of. A while later an ambulance appeared and couldn’t get over the little footbridge, so the paramedics had to run over the marsh carrying their gear. Bright orange uniforms disappeared after Daniel and the park ranger.

  Cathy’s mum said that it was at around this moment that Cathy began to scream, at the top of her voice, making repetitive high-pitched animal sounds. She didn’t remember it at all. Apparently Cathy knocked the kitchen table over and everything scattered across the room, but she didn’t say anything, just screamed mechanically.

  If she closed her eyes and dragged herself back to that morning, she could see herself standing calmly at her kitchen window observing Jack’s parents step out of an old car on the dirt road outside the chalets, but she couldn’t possibly remember seeing herself observing Jack’s mother, bleary-eyed with wonky lipstick and a large nose like both her sons. Or the father, solidly built with curly hair. Later a policeman appeared holding one of Jack’s trainers. The shoe was blue and white canvas with worn-out Velcro and biro doodles of stars that she’d drawn on them. The policeman plus Cathy and Jack’s parents all congregated round the single wet trainer. She remembered Daniel standing a little way off, watching as well. If her mother was to be believed, these were all things that Cathy had been told later rather than what she’d seen in front of her own eyes at the time.

  It was such a disorganised set of recollectio
ns with so many holes in it, quite unlike the solid and capable edges of her objects. After Jack died it was as if the fragments of sensory detail she’d experienced had been catalogued so illogically that the bits could not re-form coherently into a recollection. Shards of the day were in her mind’s basement, shards in back rooms and north wings and south wings and storage cupboards, or with erroneous labels attached so she could not see the whole in any reliable formation. It was liquid, upended.

  She wished she possessed memory in the same way she possessed Jack’s spectacles or his toy soldiers. She would have liked to own the moment in its unified entirety, hold it and understand it from every angle, but the memories slipped into themselves and changed. She couldn’t control it.

  Her mother said Cathy had refused to eat for days after Jack died and they’d had to take her to the hospital. Her father said that Cathy threw up on her first day at the school she and Jack were meant to be starting at together, when the teacher read Jack’s name on the register. She couldn’t unpick her memory of the story from any separate event. She remembered that she wasn’t invited to the funeral, which took place at a crematorium nearby. She registered that one day when she got home from school, Daniel’s chalet had been emptied. He’d done so much work on it, it seemed like all he’d done for months was fix up the place, yet it was still a dump when he left it. Cathy’s mother said he’d lost all his money when he sold it.

  The deck doors were open so she climbed up and knocked on the glass doors, but he didn’t look up, so she walked into his chalet without invitation. He was sitting in a rattan chair, which was one of the few bits of furniture left in the chalet. There was also a white garden table that Daniel and Jack had used as a dining room table, with the chairs Daniel had borrowed from the deck of a house three doors down. In the corner of the kitchen were a few pennies, driftwood, old newspapers, and a fork. On the kitchen counter stood Jack’s favourite toy soldier, wearing a red jacket and black hat. The soldier stood up very straight. Cathy walked over to the soldier and picked him up.

  The chalet was quiet. Water rustled outside. It was getting ready to rain and the air was wet like the inside of someone’s mouth.

  That was in Jack’s pocket, Daniel said eventually, quietly, watching Cathy stare at the little soldier. She turned towards him and saw that Daniel had abruptly started to cry. That big man, who was always hammering and sawing things, always bad tempered, was in tears. It was nearly silent at first, but after a moment he was properly sobbing, his face all scrunched. She walked over hesitantly, still holding the soldier in her fingers, and she put her small arms around this man’s big shoulders. Her own scrawny body had jumped with his gasping, giant boxer’s shoulders throbbing with panicked child sobs that couldn’t take in enough breath. Tears streamed down his cheeks. She gripped the soldier. If Daniel and Cathy were a species, that hug on the deck after Jack died would have been their shifting moment, their shared mutation. He didn’t hug her back.

  Take it, Daniel said of the soldier. I don’t want it.

  It was his favourite.

  I know. I don’t want to look at it. You should have to look at this.

  Cathy felt sick.

  Do you understand what you’ve done? he said.

  I thought he was with you. I knocked on the door, she said.

  He looked away and didn’t reply.

  And so the soldier entered her collection. We think of our body as a permanent structure, yet most of it is in constant flux, with old cells dying and new ones sneaking in to take their place. The cells of the stomach live for five days. Our red blood cells last around 120 days, dying exhausted after travelling 300 miles through the body’s circulatory system. Even our skeleton is replaced every ten years or so. Some of the only pieces of our bodies that are thought to last a lifetime are parts of the brain and the muscle cells of the heart. It’s memories that give us the sense of a consistent self. The flashback of comforting a crying nineteen-year-old version of Daniel was a key part of Cathy’s identity, although its existence gave her shivers.

  Daniel stepped through a high-ceilinged room with stripped walls. Cathy was so different now, as if she wasn’t the same girl he’d loved but some newer model of the same doll. He’d spent so long imagining the moment when he would come back and put his thumb on the corner of her lip. He wasn’t sure he liked the person that she’d become but, even worse, he was reminded of the person he’d been when in in her presence.

  The museum was a maze and he didn’t know where he was. He probably wasn’t in the central wing any more, because he couldn’t hear the party at all. Every room he entered seemed to have several entrances and exits, the main rooms all interconnected with archways rather than doors. He made his way through a corridor where there were flashes of former opulence. Leafy mouldings criss-crossed the ceiling and met in knots of foliage near columns. You could tell that the walls and columns had once been painted bright colours, because occasional leaf murals remained in a faded green paint. Unlike the grand cathedral atmospheres of other museums he’d visited with her when they were together, this one seemed the sort where you might find a stuffed human or two lost in the back. He thought of Cathy’s body and his, sewn together in a waltz or a fuck. His breath grew more even the further he was away from her. He tried to inhale deeply and swallow his anger. As he passed he touched a skull, perhaps of a rabbit or a ferret, that was sitting on a wooden filing cabinet, and visualised Cathy passed out on the cork floor. He thought of her white skin. Maybe he’d only come back because she was a kind of habit.

  He exhaled and entered a room that immediately felt vast, although it was so dark he could hardly see anything. Daniel sat down on the floor in the dark and closed his eyes, put his head in his hands, and counted backwards from ten again so he could think. His heartbeat began to slow down. In the dark and the quiet he held the toy soldier up in front of him and opened his eyes. He could just see the outline and feel its edges. Daniel used to buy Jack soldiers from junk shops in Brighton and Clacton. He’d bought him gunners, cavalry, tanks, once a box full of Waterloo British infantry, and bags of Victorian sailors. They even had a favourite toyshop. They’d go there and then to TGI Fridays for ice cream. Daniel hadn’t bought his brother this red one though, it must have been a gift from their parents or Father Christmas. Daniel remembered the shark teeth Jack collected on the beach at Walton-on-the-Naze, the most prized ones still impacted into their gums. He used to spend hours watching the little boy fill his anorak pockets with fistfuls of teeth and fossilised wood. Daniel would carry the anorak home over his shoulder and they’d scatter teeth on the kitchen table to count and sort them into matchboxes.

  Jack’s best shark tooth was an Otodus obliquus, shiny as black marble. Once he drew a map of all his favourite places around Lee-Over-Sands: the power station at Bradwell-on-Sea, the funfair at Seawick and the crabbing pier at Mersea Island, connected to the mainland by an ancient Roman causeway that disappeared at the highest tide. He drew Daniel’s chalet once, too, with a stick-figure Daniel and a stick figure Jack standing on the roof holding hands. He wondered where those things were now, if they were in Cathy’s collection. Daniel wondered if there was a picture of Jack in her cabinet. Daniel had been so keen to forget that he didn’t even have a picture of his brother. When Jack wore Daniel’s tank tops they used to hang down to his knees and make him look like a miniature gangster; a picture of Jack in that top would mean the world to Daniel now. Later, when Cathy had grown up, she wore his shirts and they would look similarly huge, but her nipples would press out through the ribbed fabric. Daniel didn’t mean that image to corrupt his thoughts of Jack. She always appeared in his mind when he didn’t want her to. Daniel held the soldier tight in his hands. He could feel blood pumping behind his eyeballs.

  He opened Jack’s matchboxes one by one and pushed out the trays with his thumb. Cathy and Jack had always liked matchboxes; they were so well-suited to a child’s han
d. Jack used to keep all his shark teeth in ‘Ship’ matchboxes. In Daniel’s collection one was full of shark teeth, another with small shells. The third, unexpectedly, contained matches, and Daniel skimmed a matchstick against the rough side of the box, surprised to see it catch light. He let it burn almost down to his fingers and inhaled the sulphur. The soldier flickered in front of him, glowing a shaky yellow. Around the soldier, pincer-shaped jawbones of bowhead whales grinned on wheeled trays. Giant rib cages, like great curved boats, rested on the floor. Rows of dolphin skulls were wrapped in plastic bags above him.

  Daniel had sat at the back during his brother’s funeral. He’d arrived as it was about to start and left just before the end, as the coffin disappeared to the sound of piano music Jack would never have listened to. It was held at a crematorium a mile or so outside Chelmsford in a small white room with salmon pink carpets that matched the pair of curtains drawn around the little coffin. Windows looked out on a manicured lawn and at the front of the chapel a photograph of Jack in his school uniform had been printed on a piece of card and displayed on what looked like an easel. There were maybe twenty people in the room, most of whom were his parents’ friends. Daniel’s mother wore a black skirt suit that she’d probably bought especially. She’d sobbed loudly. When she turned her head in profile, Daniel saw her face, dripping and melting, red around the eyes and nose, blotchy around the cheeks. Daniel’s father sat completely still, with his big shoulders hunched forward slightly and head bowed. Daniel couldn’t see his father’s face during the service, but imagined he was staring at the floor trying not to cry. Neither of his parents read something or spoke to the congregation at the funeral; that was left to an official who had never met Jack but who had been told to say how good he was at science, how much he loved his parents, how very much he would be missed. His parents blamed him for letting Jack go out swimming, for not noticing that Jack had sneaked out, for not keeping his little brother safe.