The Museum of Cathy Read online

  Inside Cathy’s cabinet were drawers full of more than two hundred small memory-objects she’d been collecting since she was a child. The archive began the winter before she turned ten, in coastal Essex where she was born, with a pristine mouse skull she found near the beach. It was a perfect specimen, almost entirely intact and bleach-white, with a delicate jaw that still opened. The collection spanned all the places she’d lived: Essex, until she escaped to Los Angeles age twenty-two, and now four years in Berlin with Tom. It ended a few days ago with a sketch of her mouth that Tom had made on a restaurant napkin. Her mouth was wide open, the slight gap between her front teeth exaggerated by the perspective. Between these two edges of her life were birthday candles, train tickets and childhood dolls. She did not like the turmoil of memories constantly poised in her mind, synapses and chemicals shifting their weight according to new moods and often threatening to collapse or disband. She could exert control over her memories here, and close the door on them.

  She had a number of objects that, like the Kissing Beetle, were connected to Daniel. She had a molar tooth that he knocked from her mouth when she was twenty, which made her smell blood each time she looked at it. She had a clump of her hair in a matchbox that had been pulled from her head when she was twenty-one. She had a seaside-arcade stuffed white tiger with wonky eyes that didn’t just allow her to remember being in love for the first time but performed some alchemy of time and place, so that she tasted Mr Whippy ice cream and stubble against her lips. Other objects were threats, which she’d been sent in the post after she left him. She had auk and gannet skulls, starfish and carved boats and seagull feathers. These objects made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end and her skin heat up. The last gift she’d been sent before the Kissing Beetle was over four years ago, an angel shark jawbone with teeth sharp as nails, after which the gifts had stopped.

  Her private museum’s purpose was not to escape her past, but to control it. Cathy had grown up near a bird sanctuary in one of twelve holiday chalets that were relics of an ill-advised Essex holiday camp from the Fifties. A floating caravan park, her mother called their street. She spent her childhood exploring coastal marshland full of migrating terns, salt stiff grass and North Sea tides. She spent it trawling bracken, crunching salty white grass under her Wellington boots in search of twisted driftwood and gems of sea glass. The twelve chalets on her street all had shaky insulation and noisy plumbing, not built for winter living, yet at some point her father had decided he didn’t want to belong to any form of society other than The Essex Bird Watching Society. So they’d lived in this isolated landscape all the year round, from before Cathy could remember. She’d grown up tracking the tides on a chart in her bedroom, mindful of her nervous mother’s theory about how all the buildings on their street would one day just lollop over the shrubby wall of marsh and out to sea in the middle of the night. It was never silent in Lee-Over-Sands. Even the word sounded like a bad incarnation, the O forced your mouth open but then you had to hiss and finish off the name. In the wrong mood, when birds appeared to hang from the sky and mist fell too quickly over the shifting tides, it made you think of spirits. It was a place where nature ruled. Cathy would scream her bike down the gravel road over the seawall between the sea and the town and float the high tides in her orange rowing boat that washed up in front of her deck when she was eight.

  At first her objects were curiosities from the natural world around her, rather than the anchors to specific emotions or memories that they became. Everyone collected things in Lee-Over-Sands. Window ledges all down the street were laden with driftwood, bones and glass jars of seashells. Even in the many near-derelict houses where nobody came for years and years at a time, mounds of sea glass and bird skulls still sat on ledges and decks, along with feathers and mouldy twists of rope. Scavenged things were just curiosities for Cathy then and memories were absorbed inside her. A dirty rabbit’s foot on a gold key chain did not sum up her mother’s essence. Her father was not epitomized by a small pair of binoculars with smudged lenses and two empty miniature bottles that had once contained Bombay Sapphire gin. Cathy was merely a hoarder before she turned ten; she was just a beachcomber then, a filler-upper of drawers and pockets.

  A Snake Ring

  Tom put a paper cup of black coffee and a fistful of sugar packets down on her desk and adjusted his glasses, which were held together with tape at one side. He kissed her warm neck and inhaled the smell of shampoo and sweat. She touched the engagement ring on her finger as he kissed her, as if checking it was still there.

  “It’s too hot again,” Tom said, and tucked a strand of hair behind Cathy’s ears. Cathy wasn’t good with heat, she became sullen and veins rose to the surface of her skin. She was designed for rainy English summers.

  “Morning,” she smiled and kissed his left hand where it now rested on her shoulder. She began to pour sugar packets into her coffee. She did it almost haughtily, as if daring him to stop her or tell her it was unhealthy.

  She arrived at work hours before he did, because he was incapable of being on time and she was incapable of being late. As he cycled towards the museum his creased shirt would flap out behind him and an unlit cigarette hung in the side of his mouth, ready to be smoked the moment he parked his bike. He usually took his feet off the pedals as he drove over a canal at Hallesche-Tor Bridge, talented at finding pleasure in small moments. He tried not to sound his bell at tourists near Checkpoint Charlie and continued on up over the river Spree. He smoked his first cigarette of the day on the museum’s lawn and then bought coffee from the cafeteria to take to Cathy.

  She was his favourite subject to sketch, parts and pieces in countless notebooks along with whatever whale ribs or spikes of a Stegosaurus’s backbone he was studying at the time. They’d been together five years, four years in Berlin and one before that in Los Angeles, where they’d met, but still he didn’t feel he’d ever entirely captured her likeness. Her perfectly symmetrical eyes and thin lips were not immediately pretty. It was a blank-canvas face, only visible when she was animated or engrossed. When something interested her, she abruptly became beautiful but she could never fake this kind of engagement. He always worked quickly: the curve of her ears, her high forehead with its inch-long scar from slipping in a pile of construction material when she was twelve. Her body was covered in lingering flaws from tumbling into gravel and playing red rover with older boys as a child. She’d been in a car crash when she was a teenager, one of many examples of a shitty childhood she didn’t like to talk about much. The marks and misalignments had shocked him when he first saw them, but now fascinated him: lines on her shoulder from diving into a bramble bush, scars on her knuckles and elbows and forehead from the car accident, her past quite different from Tom’s careful urban upbringing. She’d fractured her metatarsal bone jumping off a wall as a kid and had a tiny bump on the outside of her right foot that made her flinch if you touched it. When he sketched her feet he could never get that bump exactly right.

  “The adult body contains over 100,000 miles of blood vessels,” Tom said as she continued to insert pins around the moth on her desk, pursing her mouth while contemplating the truth of his statement. She spent her days spreading moth wings, running pins through their thoraxes and trapping them in perpetual low flight.

  “Fact. The largest diamond in the world is ten billion trillion trillion carats,” she offered. She took the next moth body from an envelope, ready to pin it.

  “Sounds unlikely.” They played this game in supermarket queues and over dinner, on public transport and in bed, fact or fiction, teasing each other and storing up details of life to share.

  “It’s true, scout’s honour. It’s a star named Lucy, after ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’, 50 light-years from the earth,” she said.

  “You were never a scout. You don’t have any team spirit.” He touched the vertebrae on her neck, peaking up like islands after a flood. “The tongue of a blue wh
ale weighs the same as a fully grown female African elephant,” he said. Because Cathy’s hair was dark red you would have thought her eyes would be brown, but in fact they were blue and they illuminated in flashes. Tom joked that she made an excellent seventh impression; she was a subtle thing that snuck up on people.

  There had been a group of acrobats practising nearby when he’d asked her to marry him last week in the Hasenheide Park opposite their flat and gave her his grandmother’s ring, a snake with a ruby in its head. A passer-by offered to take a photo of them afterwards. The resulting image chopped both their heads off, but they got the photo developed anyway and it was currently propped up on their kitchen table. You can just see their decapitated bodies and a child acrobat doing a handstand in the background.

  “True,” she said. “A flock of starlings is called a murmuration.”

  “True. A crow can remember human faces and hold a grudge,” he said.

  “False. Legend,” she said. She smiled up at him. “Nowhere in the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme does it actually say that the character is an egg.”

  “False. It must say he’s an egg. It’s true about the crows, though. Never piss off a crow.”

  “They don’t teach nursery rhymes in California? Philistine.”

  “Lunch at 2.30 today?”

  “Perfect,” she said, taking another sip of sugary coffee. She turned her head to kiss his hand again. “And I would have made an excellent scout, thank you.”

  “You would have led a meticulous regiment.”

  Sometimes Cathy would go through his sketchbooks after he’d drawn something, and neatly label the anatomy of his messy drawings. The lack of structure in his books worried her. She liked order. That her own pelvis and the toes of an Ankylosaurs shared the same A4 page went against her instinct for cataloguing life. So she would sit at the little table they used as a desk in their flat and frown as she labelled her own ear canal, pinna, cartilage. Neat arrows. The same with a hummingbird’s skeleton: ulnar, radius, thoracic, caudal, lumbar vertebrae. She said the names as she wrote them. She labelled the sketches he made of her long legs, tangled amongst cheap sheets on their bed. Tibia, she printed. Cathy’s fibula. Cathy’s femur. Cathy’s coccyx, Cathy’s sacrum.

  When Tom left her office, Cathy slipped the Kissing Beetle safely into a top drawer next to the sketch of her half-open mouth. She kept her private museum at work because Tom couldn’t see a drawer or a notebook without opening it; he was insatiably curious, which she loved about him, but not in this particular instance. She had never shown him her objects because she had no desire for her past and future to mingle. The oppressive pleasure and stillness she found in the indexed memories was not something she wanted to share, even with someone she loved as much as Tom. Her respect for objects was almost spiritual, but not communal.

  One of her favourite objects in the cabinet was a green cocktail umbrella, which she’d been spinning in her hand the first time she ever spoke to Tom. They’d been sitting on a wall looking out on Venice Beach in mid-December, just before Christmas, their bare feet in the Californian sand. She’d been in Los Angeles three months then and had not yet reinvented herself since leaving Daniel. She was soft around the edges, newly hatched and unsure. She’d thrown away all her damp-seeped clothes, her marshy tracksuits and oxidised hoop earrings that smelt of home, then bought new clothes from a charity shop on Hollywood and Western. She could go for weeks without speaking about anything much except what sort of Starbucks coffee she would like. For months didn’t touch anyone or, it seemed, anything. Concrete and plywood and metal all had the same texture for her in Los Angeles, the same level of heat and wetness. Her concession to human contact was going to these cheap massage parlours that smelt of dumplings, where she’d lie naked on futons in rooms cordoned off by fraying curtains. She allowed Thai women to unbutton her pressure points, twisting their elbows into knots between her shoulder blades and opening up her joints with their small fingers. They did not mention her scars. She missed wading into mud with the tide licking her toes, as if her body was physically detoxing from the glut of sensation that had marked her life until then.

  Her university in Essex had arranged for her to do a work placement at the Los Angeles Natural History Museum, cataloguing ice age insect fossils dug up from the La Brea tar pits. She had begged for one of the few jobs they offered abroad but once she arrived, she’d made no effort to make any friends. It shouldn’t have been a great surprise that nobody spoke to her when she turned up at the museum Christmas party in Venice Beach three months into the job. Regretting the numerous buses it took her to get there, she bought a cocktail and sat outside on a low wall at the beach’s edge, sipping her drink and twirling her cocktail umbrella. Eventually a blond man with wide perfect teeth and blue eyes came and sat down next to her, lighting a cigarette and offering her one.

  She declined. He smelt of beer and started rambling tipsily about how he was spending Christmas with his family in Palm Springs, about all its complicated dynamics involving disapproval and love affairs and money. Cathy had smiled politely and wondered why he was talking to her. She expected that he’d just wanted to sit down for a smoke, and she happened to be there. When he asked about her Christmas plans she lied and told him she was going back home to Essex for Christmas; she didn’t want to say she had nowhere to go. She and this first incarnation of Tom watched the Santa Monica Pier in the distance, a Ferris wheel’s pink and blue light reflecting a puddle of sherbet colour onto the otherwise dark water. Soda cans were skimming the pavement as hot air sprayed down into Los Angeles from Nevada and Utah, spreading wildfires and anxiety, then exhaling into the sea. The atmosphere was static. People smoked cigarettes on fire escapes and the balconies of seaside apartment buildings, watching the stormy sea, and the sidewalk cafés were crowded.

  Homicides and suicides spike during Santa Ana winds, Tom had said after a pause, in his Californian drawl. Her sundress kept spilling up in the hot blustering air and she kept tucking it under her thighs. She took off her baseball cap and then regretted it, because he might ask about the scar on her forehead. It went from the far edge of her right eyebrow straight up to her temple and she always covered it with make-up before she left the house, but it was still visible, one of the mementos from her old life that she couldn’t put in a box and close the door on.

  That’s what these are, Santa Ana, he said of the wind, and appeared not to notice her face.

  Cathy spun her little green cocktail umbrella and took a sip of her drink. It tasted of gin and cinnamon. Three elves and a man dressed as Mrs Claus spilled out of the bar behind them. Tom lit another cigarette from the last but did not appear nervous, merely overflowing with energy. He moved constantly, his foot tapping the floor, his thumb rolling over the lighter in his hand. She’d seen him around the museum: he was a successful palaeontologist who’d already published various papers. He had a square jaw and a thin mouth that was often smiling. His glasses usually had some tape around one of the arms to keep them together. A cheer went up in the crowd behind them, so Cathy and Tom turned to watch the scene. A drunken man with dreadlocks had fallen off his skateboard, but Cathy’s gaze immediately landed on three older men drinking beer at a crowded sidewalk café nearby. One of the men had a side parting and thick eyebrows; another was deeply tanned, with a three-inch beard. This bearded man appeared to be staring in Cathy’s direction. The third man in the trio had his back to her, but his perfectly still, uncommonly broad shoulders and curly black hair brought a lump to Cathy’s throat. It couldn’t have been Daniel, but she still felt sick.

  He had found out where she was almost immediately, within weeks of her leaving Essex. She didn’t know exactly how he managed it. He didn’t come for her but he continued to give her gifts, as he had done when they were together. First a tropical shell had arrived at The Los Angeles Natural History Museum for her, three weeks after she arrived in her new city. From a white box f
ull of tissue paper, she’d unwrapped a pretty Ramose Murex shell with three jagged Mohawks of solidified flesh sticking out from a coiled body. Turning it over, she saw that the shell’s open underside was so shiny it appeared wet, the lips much pinker than her skin as she ran her fingers along the slit. She pretended to herself that it must have been delivered to the wrong person. A week later the skull of a seagull had turned up, neatly wrapped in chocolate brown paper with a blue label from an expensive shop called Deyrolle in Paris that they’d once visited together. The seagull’s head was smooth, but its beak reminded her of a dagger.

  There was never a note, but other objects followed, sent to the museum and then also – more worryingly – to her flat. A fish spine, a Trapezium Conch, a carved rowing boat. She was insane to have accepted a single one of these objects, yet she did. Daniel had no business fastening her to him with voltaic things, changing the external brain of her archive. She should have thrown them away, but she placed each gift in her shoeboxes and suitcases. He knew her devotions, after all, and despite the fear each object brought with it she obediently added these gifts to the narrative of her life.

  In the Santa Ana winds, sitting next to Tom, tears had pricked up in Cathy’s eyes. She didn’t think the older man with curly hair in the sidewalk café was actually Daniel, but tears came into her eyes because the thought occurred to her. These mixed feelings almost made her want to turn to the lazy-limbed and confident near stranger to her right and tell him how sounds used to echo on the marshes where she grew up, and how tides reinvented the landscape every morning. How, if you sang a song or shouted, birds would wheel up from the ground right into the sky and start scavenging. How she would stand naked on the marsh and scream, because there was no one around for miles. How it was never the same world twice and the tides marched like ghosts up and down the marshes. How pleased she was to have got away from the landscape of her past. She wanted to tell him how her childhood had been ruled by the moods of the sea and the sky.