The Museum of Cathy Read online

  Daniel’s nose had a flat ridge down the middle and there was a bump in his right cheek, which he noted as he stood, dishevelled, looking into the mirror next to the window. His body was larger than Cathy would have remembered, with three tattoos on his arm that hadn’t been there when she’d known him. He pulsed his fists. As he reached to touch the raptor claw on the desk and he thought of her perhaps touching it later, both their fingers on the same surface, all the different moments that he’d known Cathy arrived simultaneously in his imagination. The young woman who disappeared in the middle of the night and thought she was free because she betrayed him. The sullen teenager with feverish skin who smelt of damp laundry and mud, collecting driftwood on the beach. The girl with a slack tomboy walk and a smile full of mockery. The child with matted bright orange hair cut short above her ears in a way that suggested she’d done it herself with kitchen scissors, whom he’d disliked immensely for her solitary and too-loud laugh, for the way she used to scream as she rode her bike over the seawall. She was still like a phantom limb: he had never quite stopped feeling her presence as an untouchable part of his body.

  Amongst a million or so specimens hidden in the museum corridors and attics were seven entire elephants, sliced into pieces, along with three preserved gorillas, three twelve-foot whale skulls, two giraffes and four lions, their bodies all kept in vast fluid-filled tanks in ballroom-sized spaces. It was almost laughable. A scientist looking for a particular species often had to walk through miles of corridors to find what he or she was looking for.

  On his way to the museum café for lunch with Cathy, Tom moved quickly past goats, rhesus monkeys and three-toed sloths, down the curled stairs towards the first floor landing. The museum was built on the site of an old ironworks factory, so banisters and cabinets all over the building curled with welded iron vines and animals. The entire east wing had been bombed at the end of World War II and never recovered from the second-floor insect collection exploding down into the first-floor library, which in turn landed in a tumble of beetle shells and reference books on top of a shattered beluga whale skeleton on the ground floor. The wing had been built up again slowly, like an expanding city, full of dead ends and circles.

  “Don’t touch the sun, please,” said the guard to a child, ushering everyone out. This was the guard’s main purpose in life, it seemed: to stop the sun getting sticky fingerprints on its surface. He’s creating an army of little Icaruses, Cathy had noted once. Tom daringly touched the sun as he stepped out through the atrium.

  The party was being set up and the smell of cut flowers hit him as he neared the hundreds of white roses and lilies spread across white fold-out tables, waiting to be arranged. Boxes of champagne flutes were being unpacked and ivory candles put into candelabras. Cardboard boxes were spilling over with papier mâché animal masks to be given out as party favours, each one fitted with black elastic to pull over the back of the head. Tom stopped to pick up a goat and a pig mask from the box, before putting them down again. Finally, he decided on a papier mâché bunny rabbit with a pink nose, white ears and a wistful expression on his face. He walked through the atrium carrying it.

  “Berlin’s Natural History Museum opens its doors tonight for its new gem gallery, ‘All The Glitters’,” a radio played. “Many of Europe’s leading artists, donors and cultural supporters are expected to be greeted at the event. Also promising to make an appearance are members of an environmental group protesting against the museum’s sponsorship by international oil conglomerate Global Petroleum.”

  Cathy wasn’t in the café at their window table where they usually met for lunch, or outside under the tree where she sometimes sat in the shade. It was only ten past; he wasn’t particularly late. He called her phone and it went straight to voicemail. She might have been on the line, but she often lurked down in the basement when it was too hot upstairs. There was no cell reception down there.

  Down in the bowels of the museum a tall room was full of embalmed miniature dolphins, rat spines and forlorn seahorses. Cathy was sitting at a metal counter on the far end, perched on a stool. The walls of specimen jars glowed around her with a yellow tint.

  “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!” He’d planned to say as he walked in the room with the rabbit mask on his face, pretending to be the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. Only he caught a strange expression on her face before she realised he was there, which made Tom pause to observe her in silence for a moment before she saw him. When she didn’t know he was looking at her, he would sometimes catch this feverish and uneasy glassiness on her pretty face. It used to happen a great deal when they first knew each other in Los Angeles, but had occurred less regularly once they moved to Berlin. It was a childish look and in those brief moments before she saw him and broke into a smile or a joke, she appeared lost. The expression would evaporate a second later, only visible when she thought he wasn’t there.

  Immediately on seeing him across the room, she reconfigured her expression into something more present.

  “Hi,” she smiled. “Did I forget about lunch? Sorry.” She wasn’t sorry. Her eyes remained bloodshot and her voice expressionless. Her skin was even whiter than usual now amongst the luminous jars of methylated spirit. She put her hand in her pocket, mock casual and boyish, but not quite pulling it off.

  “Is something wrong?” he said.

  “No,” she smiled at him. It was a fake smile, though. The edges of her lips even shook slightly, objecting to being raised. Spontaneous and conscious smiles use completely different facial muscles. One is conjured up intentionally and the other is only partially a result of your known desires. Cathy’s smile just then was a shop-assistant smile with blank eyes. She thought she was unreadable but she wasn’t.

  On the shelf behind her a stingray had its wings folded forward in an empty embrace inside a cylindrical tube, its own ludicrous grin visible on the flat underside of its body. She stepped back towards the chair again and as she did so, her elbow knocked over some of the glass specimen test tubes lined up on the desk. They both lunged to catch the test tubes as they rolled off. He saved one and the other slipped through her fingers to smash on the floor. The tubes were marked Hyles gallii, containing green caterpillars that were now limp squiggles on the floor. A smell of alcohol filled the air. Tom walked over and took her hands in his instead of letting her bend down and deflect her mood by picking up bits of glass and caterpillar from the floor.

  “Is that one of the masks they’re giving out at the party?” Cathy said, motioning the rabbit in his hand. Tom could see goose pimples on Cathy’s neck and two creases in between her eyes. Perhaps Cathy was nervous about talking in front of so many people this evening when she received her prize.

  “They have all sorts. Foxes, lions, pigs, zebras.”

  “Put it on then, White Rabbit.” She took the mask from him and put it over his eyes, slipping the elastic tenderly behind his head.

  “Everything okay?” he said.

  “Oh, my paws and whiskers! I’ll be late.” She made her hands into paws and raised her eyebrows, putting on a rabbit-voice: “I’m late! I’m late! For a very important date!”

  “Okay,” said Tom, smiling. “You’re okay.”

  “The Duchess! The Duchess! Oh my dear paws! Oh my fur and whiskers!”

  Tom laughed and tucked her hair behind her ear, looking at her through the pinholes of his mask’s eyes. “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?” he said.

  “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,” she replied, and then paused. “Sorry to be jumpy. I think I’m nervous about this evening.”

  “Do you want to practise your acceptance speech?”

  There was a sense of transience about Cathy, as if she might slip through Tom’s fingers at any moment, disappear completely, or shape-shift. He could never quite put his finger on it, yet while her lips moved through her speech in the spirit collection and the
blood came back to her face, Tom thought about how remarkable it was that it took months of being near Cathy even to realise she existed. She’d worked in the same museum as him in Los Angeles, but she was one of many mousy student scientists busy with minuscule and painstaking tasks. He may have once noticed her walking down Wilshire Boulevard in a prim shirt and ballet slippers and thought it a curious sight, because who on earth walks in Los Angeles, but he hadn’t stopped to give her a ride. He would not have been able to describe her face or personality. At the time he was dating a surfing-obsessed blonde with anaesthetised big eyes that gave her a dopey expression; she was the sort of girl who touched her tank top straps and scratched her stomach in public. They used to have unsatisfying sex, self-consciously cinematic. He expected that she faked most of her orgasms and afterwards she always looked triumphant and despondent in equal measure.

  Cathy was not his normal type by a long stretch. He spoke to her briefly during a Christmas party on Venice Beach once, more out of pity than anything else because she didn’t seem to know anyone. The conversation had felt as if she were speaking the lines of a play, and she kept looking over her shoulder, distracted. The second time he saw her was after he broke up with his surfer girlfriend and spent the night at some other similarly blonde and tanned woman’s run-down apartment in La Brea, not far from the museum. Madly hung-over, he’d stumbled into his one-night-stand’s bathroom and moved a hand down to his pyjama bottoms to piss. He’d heard a noise to his right so glanced blearily towards the tub, where the girl from the Christmas party was lying naked in water the colour of the avocado bathroom tiles. She had a scar on her forehead that he hadn’t noticed on the beach. Her breasts and one knee made islands above the water while most of her body was a subterraneous landscape. Her nipples were larger than he would have expected, and almost the colour of bruises. Her hair was a similar colour, dark from the bathwater and spread out around her shoulders. One of her ankles hung over the edge of the bath. She didn’t cover her body but raised a single eyebrow at him. His hand was still on his half-hard morning cock and she laughed. When her face crinkled he noticed her knuckle-pale cheekbones and how her eyes were blue rather than brown, which he never would have guessed.

  There was something about her laugh that morning and the glint in her eyes that took his breath away. She’d materialised in front of him, a ghost stepping from an empty space. There was a stillness about her that made him want to be near her. He tried to sketch her body from memory later that day, but found it impossible to capture the shape of her eyelids, how her second toe was marginally longer than her big toe, or the shape of her lips when she frowned. It turned out that even photographs never really looked like her at all. He started to sketch her and leave his drawings on her desk, which he hoped wasn’t creepy but probably was; he teased her, became fascinated by her secretive smile, and asked her out so many times she eventually said yes. Later, he moved half way around the world because she wanted to explore the world. Everyone thought he was crazy, but from that moment in the bath he’d been devoted.

  The Calla Lily Inn was off-season and almost empty; the only other guests were four elderly women having their yearly get-together, cackling by the pool and chain-smoking Virginia Slims. Cathy hadn’t told anyone that she and Tom would be staying in Palm Springs, an hour’s drive from Los Angeles. They had spent that week reading science journals and playing cards on glass-topped tables by the pool, he lounging in the sun while she read in the shade with her head resting on fraying patio cushions, surrounded by palm and banana trees. Surfacing from the hotel each evening, smelling of chlorine and sex, they went for hamburgers on Canyon Way or to the cinema on Calle Alvarado. There was a wig shop next to the cinema and one night they spent hours choosing between blonde synthetic bobs and curly black ones that transformed her face. In a feathered blonde hairstyle her eyes looked different, less blue but larger. Shoulder length waves made her cheekbones stand out. It was a curiosity of Cathy’s adolescence that her frizzy orange hair had turned much darker around the time she started getting breasts and hips and bleeding. It had darkened so much that people who knew her as a kid didn’t necessarily recognise her. The wig styles in Palm Springs had names such as ‘Applause’, ‘Envy’ and ‘Snuggle’. Tom bought her a black one called ‘Nocturnal’ that made her skin ghostly. She wore it all evening and was amazed how people stared and men smiled. People did not usually notice her from a distance; her appeal was a close-quarters thing. She was still wearing it when they returned to the hotel.

  While Tom stripped off his T-shirt and glasses to dive straight into the swimming pool the innkeeper handed Cathy their room key and a small parcel. She held her breath and opened the parcel before Tom got out of the pool, fumbling through tissue paper. Inside was an inch-long fossilized tooth that she took out and held between her fingers.

  What’s that you got there, honey? The manager looked a bit worried.

  An alligator tooth, I think. Cathy continued to hold it and studied its sharp tip. She slipped the black wig off her head, abruptly self-conscious, turning around to see if anyone was watching her. Assuming Daniel had gone to prison, and she had to assume that, then he would have been inside for over a year by then. He had friends, though. Behind her she could only see shaky desert air and tropical flowers, but decided she would make an excuse to go back to Los Angeles the next day. This was worse than him just knowing where she lived.

  Lord, for a minute I thought it was a bullet. A bullet in the mail! It did have the shape and weight of a bullet, Cathy thought. Glossy black and brown enamel. Oddly enough, I’ve had a guest receive bullets in the mail before, but a pack of them. You see all sorts in my line of work. But never known someone get a tooth.

  No, said Cathy. Not a bullet. The next day she slipped off into town, saying she was going to an art gallery and instead went to an Internet café to shut down her email account, then persuaded Tom that they should go home earlier than planned. She’d had four email accounts and three phone numbers since leaving him, just in case that was how he was finding out where she was all the time. For the fifth time since arriving in Los Angeles, she moved apartments again. It didn’t ever make a difference. In cinema queues and buses she would think she saw one of Daniel’s friends, half-remembered faces from her past, and a moment later whoever it was would be gone.

  A pinch of good quality grave dirt and some 1000-year-old hair, you got yourself a Voodoo curse. The innkeeper had grinned with big crimson lips. I’m kidding, honey. You’ve gone even whiter than you looked in that wig.

  It’s someone reminding me they’re thinking of me.

  They could have sent a greetings card.

  Cathy had smiled without enthusiasm.

  As the sun cooled down Daniel made his way steadily through Berlin towards the museum with the sea eagle claw in the pocket of his suit. “Across Europe this week the heat wave has caused wheat crops to burn,” said an English paper in a newsagent’s, “while strawberries have been left to rot because they cannot be picked fast enough”. Daniel bought the newspaper and flicked through the pages before dumping it in a rubbish bin as he turned onto a main road. His shoes rubbed and he knew that his white shirt would be sweaty by the time he arrived. A baby screamed from under a ridiculous white sun hat and an old man stood out on the pavement to smoke, wiping his brow. Crowds poured out of Nordbahnhof station, many of them talking on their phones. He had a sense that he was made of a far heavier substance than everyone else on the streets and that people noticed the encumbrance apparent in each of his movements. He sensed people gave him a wide birth on the hot pavement.

  Nearer the museum some streets were being dug-up. A smell of melted tarmac hit his nostrils as diggers lurched their necks, little Hitachis and giant yellow CATs both biting at the road. Daniel observed leathery men bending and shouting amongst their metal animals. The men reminded him of his father, as did the smell of tar and aggregate being pressed down by a steamrol
ler. He could almost see his mother waiting on the sidelines to give his dad his sandwich and thermos at lunchtime. Daniel hadn’t spoken to either of his parents in years, although they still lived in the same suburban Chelmsford house he and his brother Jack had been brought up in, with the same frosted glass door and lace curtains. Daniel had stopped by their house to watch them just before he came to Berlin and almost not recognized the two old people returning from the weekly supermarket shop on a Friday afternoon. They were bent and chalky-haired. The last time he’d seen them they’d been substantial and angry people. Daniel had wanted to knock on the door but hadn’t been able to bring himself to do it. He wasn’t sure what they knew of his life now. He’d wanted to cross the road and help his father with the shopping but couldn’t.

  Back when Daniel and his younger brother still lived with his parents in that house with lace curtains and a frosted glass door, Daniel had worked for a construction company. It was not the same one as his father worked for, but run by a man named Marcus who also owned a nightclub, a garage and a fleet of lorries. Daniel had spent a month the winter before his nineteenth birthday re-cladding and decking a chalet out on a desolate stretch of marshland called Lee-Over-Sands. Each of the twelve shacks appeared to be made out of driftwood. They had flat asphalt roofs and no water mains, just plastic butts outside. The chalets were perched on cinder blocks to protect them from flooding but still their walls were sodden. Ragged electricity cables looped down the street, blackbirds sitting on them. Sometimes the birds bounced on the wires as if for the fun of throwing out sparks in bright patterns. Daniel later discovered these birds could cause fires in the fields behind the houses. Little pyromaniacs, Cathy’s father once described them.