The Museum of Cathy Read online

  Cathy had not been invited to the funeral. No children were there, which had made Daniel sad because it implied Jack hadn’t been popular at school. As far as Daniel was concerned Cathy was the only person who understood the depth of loss that Daniel experienced when his brother died. The loss was just there, always, between them, in the sound of the water or the sight of Cathy’s smile.

  A Christmas Sweatshirt

  Iris followed Tom through the side entrance of the museum and the sounds of the party became louder. They could hear laughter and jazz music. She’d cleaned her feet with the garden hose outside and now left wet footprints on the marble hall and the carpeted staff elevator.

  They stepped into the cool stone-walled basement where he’d got dressed with Cathy earlier. The party noises became muffled, reverberating slightly against the ceiling. The corridors down here had concrete floors and low ceilings tangled with pipes, halogen lights and fuse boxes. There weren’t many specimens in this area: a five-foot brown bear at the far end of the corridor had a dust sheet over his head like a wedding veil; some snakes were curled on a grey filing cabinet. The bear made Iris jump.

  “I’m a vegetarian.”

  “Lucky you don’t have to eat Yogi Bear.”

  “Doesn’t it bother you, being surrounded by death?”

  “Not exactly how I think about it.”

  Tom walked quickly, anxious to be rid of her before Cathy’s prize-giving. He motioned Iris towards a staff bathroom. He opened the door to a small janitor’s room containing two sunken floral armchairs and many dirty coffee mugs. He searched through a lost property box of socks, T-shirts, teddy bears and sunglasses. He picked out a Christmas sweater with black reindeers cavorting amongst snowflakes.

  “Thanks for doing this,” Iris said from the door. Tom turned to see her tanned body without its sugary costume, just the black bikini. She’d managed to wash most of the molasses off, revealing her dimples and golden skin and a tattoo of what was presumably an iris flower on her arm. He threw her a pair of pink leggings and the Christmas jumper. She put his jacket on a chair.

  The shape of her face and body reminded him of his first-ever girlfriend, centre midfield on the girls’ high school soccer team. He’d lost his virginity to Gemma in the girls’ locker rooms after school, aged sixteen. She was married to a film producer now and they lived in Bel Air with their two children.

  Iris began to pull on the leggings. He could see her reflection in the dark glass window. A hint of fleshy thigh, a belly button, as she wriggled into the leggings. She was miniature, maybe a foot smaller than him, and when he turned around again she had to tilt her neck quite far back to meet his eye. She didn’t put the jumper on.

  “That is so ugly,” Iris said, holding it in her hands. She had an expressive face, each frown or smile or blush providing a theatrical illustration of her thoughts. Tom figured he was over ten years older than this teenager. She had a straightforward prettiness and shallow eyes. She knew how attractive she was.

  “You’re blushing,” he said.

  “That’s the worst thing you can say to someone when they’re blushing.”

  “Darwin called blushing ‘the most peculiar and most human of all expressions’.”

  “I bet he didn’t blush, then. I can’t go on the train dressed in kids’ leggings and a Christmas jumper.”

  “Says the girl who arrived at a party wearing a bikini and molasses? And I’m happy to give you money for a taxi.”

  “He’s a proper activist, my boyfriend,” she frowned, ignoring Tom. “He’d never get stuck covered in treacle outside some shit museum. He was put in a Tasmanian jail once for a protest against logging in the Upper Florentine Valley.”

  She still hadn’t put the jumper on and her nakedness was giving the room a strange energy, expectant and lively. Her mouth reminded him of a small, coral-coloured drawstring bag. Tom was aware that she was standing too close to his body, but he didn’t step backwards to make more space. They were within easy touching distance of each other. Her legs were slightly parted and her hands were on her hips. Her nipples were visible, tight bullets of flesh underneath the fabric of her bikini top.

  “Put on your Christmas sweater.”

  “I don’t want to put on the Christmas sweater.” She smiled sweetly at him. At close quarters her breath smelt of bubble gum. She opened her lips a little.

  “You don’t want me, Iris, I promise. I very often talk about dinosaurs at the dinner table and do puzzles in bed and sometimes I forget to recycle. Often, I even forget to feel guilty about forgetting to recycle.”

  “You forget to recycle?” She gave him an outraged stare.

  “I hide recyclables in the normal trash. Plus I’m ten years older than you and I’ve never been jailed for arranging protests in Tasmania, so put the sweatshirt on.”

  “Separate your plastics? And get over yourself.” She laughed, but continued to stand half-naked in her leggings and bikini top, her mouth inches from his. He did not move.

  “I will start to recycle if you put on the sweatshirt.” He could hear whispers and vibrations of the party above them. Perhaps Cathy would be looking for him up there, wanting to make sure he was there for her prize giving.

  “Do you have a girlfriend?” said Iris.

  “We’re getting married.”

  “So you love her.”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “Why?”

  “What do you mean, why?”

  “I mean why do you love her?”

  “I just do.”

  “So you don’t know why?”

  “I love how much sugar she puts in her coffee,” he said. “It makes me laugh.”

  “That’s not really enough to get me to put on the Christmas jumper.”

  He could actually taste the bubble gum on her breath, not just smell it. She smiled. She was so entirely and simply existent in the moment. There would be no secrets in a relationship with her, no puzzles. He knew that if he spent just an hour with this bright-eyed teenager he would know almost everything about her. If he asked where she grew up she would tell him what boy band posters were in her childhood bedroom and where her first kiss happened and what age she’d been when her mother and her father divorced. It would all be clear. He briefly allowed himself to imagine putting his fingers down under the pink elastic of Iris’s children’s leggings and her tanned thighs parting a little. He imagined his fingers on her nipples and how smooth her skin would be.

  “She brushes her hair one hundred strokes before she goes to bed every night and I love watching her.” Iris wiped a rogue streak of sweaty molasses from her sternum, and then licked it off her finger. Her lower lip was shiny where she’d licked it. “When she laughs she gets a little line between her eyes,” he said. “Her eyes are amazingly blue.”

  “Nice, but still no,” Iris blew her fringe out of her eyes again, jutting her wet bottom lip from her mouth for a second to do so. He did want to lean forward and kiss her. He imagined the simple pleasure of it. The jazz music made distant, indistinct noises above him.

  “She thinks she’s solitary but she needs me.”

  “She’s a loner?”

  “Put on the sweatshirt,” Tom said. “Please. She regularly takes my breath away.”

  “No.” Iris turned her head slightly to the side, observing him.

  “She makes me feel . . . dismantled,” said Tom.

  “Dismantled?” Iris thought about it.

  “Completely. All the time. Like her hands, her tongue, her shyness and strength and humour, they’re either going to ruin everything in my life at some point, or be everything.” He felt breathless and his face was hot. “She makes me impossibly happy and oddly scared.”

  “Oh,” said Iris. “I’ll put on the stupid jumper then, I guess.”

  A moth appeared at the window where he was standi
ng. It was trying to get in from the courtyard towards the light. Iris pulled the Christmas jumper over her head.

  Cathy considered screaming out of the coral room window, but she couldn’t make a sound. Daniel sometimes used to lock her in her bedroom when he went out to see friends or go to work. She would never shout or climb out of the window, but just sit tight and wait for him to come home, because it was easier in the long run. Outside the coral storeroom window, scaffolding tubes criss-crossed the Devonian rock and fossil hall on the first floor with timber boards that created corridors. Cathy’s head was swimming as she opened the window. Cooler air touched her face and it occurred to her that it might be quite easy to climb out onto this scaffolding. She could see bike racks, rubbish bins full of broken bottles and cracked wood planks, a mire of smashed glass and magazines below. It smelt heavy and rotten out there. She knew she probably had a mild concussion so would have to be careful.

  He used to make her feel so small and needy. She was glad he’d hit her just then, because until that moment there had been a flicker of need still inside her, an enduring child-Cathy who was drawn to Daniel and what he represented. The violence was a reminder of everything belittling and traumatic she’d left behind when she ran from him. He was not, and would never be, her home again. As she leant out of the window, she knew with absolute clarity that she did not belong to Daniel. She had loved him because she did not realise there was kinder love in the world and because she was scared. She did not want to be scared any more.

  Cathy was already barefoot, her neat black heels and handbag on the floor. She would leave them there. She listened at the door and imagined she could hear footsteps outside; she pulled up her dress to above her knees and tied it there so it didn’t get in the way. She placed one bare foot out of the window, then the other, and sat on the window ledge, her toes touching the scaffolding. She took a deep breath before slipping out of the window completely, getting into a crouched position as close to the building’s wall and as far from the edge as possible. Her head was throbbing, and the humid air was fat with potential rain.

  Cathy pressed her back to the building’s wall. She felt lighter than she had done in a long time as she stood up and moved, quickly but steadily, before Daniel could appear in the storeroom again. She didn’t mind heights, but sometimes when she was on bridges and the top floors of shopping malls, the idea of falling appealed to her. She tried not to look down through the half-inch gaps between the wooden scaffolding planks as she walked to the next set of windows, only to find they were both locked. If she fell now she’d be a sacrifice to Daniel’s cruelty. And a puzzle: detectives would wonder why this girl with a badly hemmed second-hand dress knotted to her thighs had fallen from a museum window. She looked down. There was a nasty drop from where the scaffolding ended to the courtyard floor and she didn’t want to risk jumping. Looking up towards the roof instead, she wondered if she could climb back in through one of the skylights. She hesitated for a moment, then began to climb higher and higher up the outside wall, scrambling quite easily on the metal pipes to reach the roof.

  After Jack had died and Daniel left at the end of the summer, Cathy began to stay in when it rained and stopped riding her bike over the seawall at breakneck speed. The Monarch butterflies migrated south and the water swelled up from the autumn rain. After that summer, the wind clattering on her bedroom windows made her anxious, as did seawater gurgling in the old pipes. Everything from fox footprints in the mud to birds scattering from their perches on the telephone wires made the back of her throat ache with tears. She would be so sorry that the birds were frightened. The fierce, brave girl she had once been became frayed at the edges, worn as a pebble licked by the sea. She spoke less, ran slower.

  Driftwood was never curled into the shape of celebrity faces or animals any more, as if the sea had run out of inspiration, yet she became more interested in keepsakes. She began ordering her previously haphazard collection of small important objects. An object that was redolent of her father was comforting, because the object did not stay out all night or fall over in the shower as her father was starting to do. Her mother’s lucky rabbit-foot was comforting because it did not have changing moods, was not desperately sad one minute and hyperactive the next. After that summer her parents argued all the time and Cathy was convinced it was all her fault.

  Cathy began to appreciate the certainty of solid things rather than the morphing excesses of the weather and peoples’ emotion. When her mother came into her bedroom and said she was leaving Essex for a little while because she was unhappy, Cathy had just nodded, because it seemed reasonable enough. She didn’t ask her mother to stay, because she knew her mother would say no. Cathy’s mum gave her eleven two-inch-high ballet dancers that she’d played with as a girl. Cathy added the eleven dancers and her mother’s lucky rabbit foot to her collection. Later, she added the empty blue bottles that had contained her father’s Bombay Sapphire. She added newspaper articles about the night Jack died, and articles about the imaginary lion who escaped on Lee-Over-Sands the following year. She couldn’t leave the house without at least one of the objects that had once belonged to Jack, his plastic watch or glasses or soldiers. The solidity of these mementoes calmed her down.

  Her father always had schemes for things to buy or make. In another life he’d owned a chain of gift shops in Chelmsford, but he’d sold it when Cathy was a baby. After that he made bird-feeders for local markets and homemade beer for local pubs that didn’t want it, hanging out in pool halls pretending he was a hustler and taking tourists on bird-watching tours. A varied career, her mother used to say, sarcastically. He was the park ranger for a while: that was the job of which he had been most proud, the two and a half years he spent sitting in the ranger’s cabin talking to people about the birds they’d seen. He’d write a list of all the birds spotted that week on a white board placed outside the hut and update people on such things as the nesting ground of Little Terns. The last summer he was employed people kept finding him drunk in his boxer shorts in the cabin. Later, Cathy had to clean up his vomit and lock herself in the bathroom when he was in a mood, waiting for him to pass out so she could go to the kitchen and make tea.

  Cathy had always thought her mother’s superstition was an annoying quirk, but after the summer Jack died some of her mother’s preoccupations rubbed off on her. Three seagulls flying together, directly overhead, became a warning of bad luck soon to come and Cathy would stand absolutely still waiting for another gull to join the threesome before she walked away.

  Sparrows carry the souls of the dead. When a swan lays its head and neck back over its body during the daytime it means a storm is coming that evening. An acorn at the window will keep lightning out. It’s bad luck to put a hat on a bed. If you say good-bye to a friend on a bridge, you will never see each other again. Three butterflies together mean good luck. A swallow abandoning its nest on your house means your house will burn. Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. An older boy at school mocked her for not stepping on cracks and she punched the boy. She was expelled, and had to go to a school that was further away. She was convinced that she made bad things happen with her mind. When storms came and whipped up her imagination she’d get panicky, thinking that her imagination had generated the storm rather than the other way around. She felt she was magic.

  She didn’t mind being unpopular at school. She was used to being alone: collecting moths in jam jars and pinning beetles on polystyrene sheets didn’t endear her to the cool crew. She took photos of herself with her Polaroid camera, sometimes just to watch how the new dimensions of her body moved, worried that childhood was slipping off her body like a snake’s sloughed skin. Sometimes, when her fingers searched under the elastic of her pyjama trousers she was scared of the images that filtered into her imagination. Cathy’s night thoughts as she became a teenager were not populated with other people’s faces or bodies. In her fantasies she had only a sense of her own body floating i
n blank space. In one recurring dream her limbs were pinned down into mud and she was squirming in it, unable to see where she was, but terrified. Every time she woke up from the dream she was wet between her legs. In other dreams she was flying over the marshes, a cross between Peter Pan and a ghost, except that as soon as she realised she was naked, she would start to fall and the falling would be awful yet pleasurable. She would dream of the girls in high heels that Daniel used to bring home.

  She would often dream about dead animals and being lost on the marshes. Sometimes if she actually found a dead animal on the marsh the morning after one of these dreams, a dead swan or seagull, a fox or the licked-clean skeleton of a magpie, she would think of the animal as murdered by her messy thoughts.

  She felt dirty all the time and as if there was no release for the trouble in her head. She would go out on the beach where nobody ever came and take off all her clothes, just to sit there in the cold and look at how her body was changing. She tried to encapsulate the moments with her camera. Her nipples doubled in size between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, but her toes didn’t change at all. Her eyebrows lengthened, but her face was a half-inch wider when she was thirteen than when she was eighteen. She had Polaroid photographs of the arches of her dirty feet and her forehead, examining her body as an archaeologist would examine a skeleton: the scratch marks from walking and running; small white teeth, thin mouth, blue eyes that she could see were the brightest and prettiest thing in her face.

  When Daniel came back she wouldn’t call what happened falling in love. It was more as if they fell into a pattern they ought always to have been in. He encircled her and became her home. He came back and all the loneliness crumbled. It was accepted between them that they wouldn’t talk about Jack. She’d put all Jack’s objects away in boxes, all his micro-machine cars and shark teeth, because it obviously caused Daniel pain to see his brother’s things. They bottled those feelings up. Cathy and Daniel never used to speak about that summer when their paths first crossed.