The Museum of Cathy Page 6

  Cathy stiffened and cocked her head to the side, listening to her heartbeat. She could feel it under her tongue and in her neck. She’d been right about the voice on the phone: Daniel was there in the crowd, a stone’s throw away across the room. He wasn’t supposed to be out for another year. The last four years had lulled her into a false sense of security: she’d honestly thought he might have forgotten about her. His curly hair was sticking out of a lion mask as he read signs around the side of the room without speaking to anyone. She recognised the slope of his shoulders. His mask was bright yellow with serrated orange edges that were supposed to resemble a mane, but made her think of sunrays. Underneath the lion’s head was a square jaw covered in waxen skin and that thin, tight mouth. He was a suit amongst other suits and tuxedos. He was sipping champagne just like everyone else in the room. Blood rose to the surface of Cathy’s skin. She actually felt her veins plump up, acutely aware of her body.

  She’d seen his face in this hallucinogenic way before – a sketchy, severed portion of a man’s profile in a car during a traffic jam, or an incorrectly recognized frown in the cinema before lights went down. Even a smell could sometimes make her think he was nearby, a man passing by in a crowd who had created some invisible chemical reaction in her body, a misreading of pheromones, a tangle of chemical messengers creating spontaneous and undesirable images: her mouth licking the curve of his neck in the salty air, the angle of his smile. It had always turned out not to be him, of course.

  Daniel lifted the mask briefly and turned his head. Her blood was rushing, a panic of activity that made her fingers tingle and her shoulder tense. Cathy took a step backwards from the balcony so he wouldn’t see her. His eyes appeared momentarily from under the mask. His clean-shaven jaw emphasised his large, flat-ridged nose that didn’t exactly match the nose in her memory. His eyebrows were bushier than she remembered. It was peculiar to see him with such distance, without touch or smell and after this gap in time. Then someone stepped in front of him and the crowds shifted so she only saw flashes of him between heads and shoulders, just fragments of his nose or hands or shoulders.

  There was too much saliva in her mouth, and her armpits dampened. She wiggled her toes in her uncomfortable shoes and the area between each toe was wet as well. Her tongue rested in the gap on the bottom row of her teeth where she was missing a molar. The gap began to throb as if it recognized Daniel’s presence in the room. A bone in her right foot that never healed correctly ached and the far right edge of her collarbone seemed to twitch where once it had been fractured. Humans have twenty-seven bones in their hands. Gorillas have thirty-two. Such a complicated mesh of bones meant that if you fracture your scaphoid it will never heal quite right. You have a map of every break in your fingers forever, as she did, along with the map of scars on her skin. She tasted vomit in her mouth again and swallowed it down. She’d put the lead toy soldier in her handbag earlier. Now she took it out to hold in her fist.

  Having Tom and Daniel in the same space was as if two rebel versions of her soul had broken free of her body and were about to meet without her having the slightest bit of control over the result. Daniel was the most solid thing in the room. It had always been the case that wherever he stood, whether it was on a building site or in an antique shop or on the beach, he appeared to put down roots. He belonged wherever he happened to be standing. Daniel put the lion mask back down over his eyes and turned away again. Around him young women flicked their hair and men were led around by their ample stomachs. Pearls and hairspray glinted. Museum curators and technicians laughed loudly, betraying nasal problems and bad teeth.

  At the far end of the atrium the jazz band briefly paused and the thunder of conversation became louder, but then the music started up again and drowned it out. Feet danced in time with a saxophonist’s hands and a bow sliced at double bass strings. Lions discussed their careers with foxes. Cathy thought back to how, as her relationship with Daniel was ending and she had become terrified of him, they had sat together on her porch at low tide with their toes in the mud. Daniel’s friends had been in the chalet that day, with their lopsided lorry-driver tans and wrist watches they shouldn’t have been able to afford.

  Do you remember how you and Jack would make mud men down there at low tide, with carrots for noses just like snowman? Daniel had squeezed her hand.

  Sure, she’d said. He’d always had the knack of making her feel scared and safe simultaneously, as if he was both the enemy and the only person who could save her.

  A Pinned Butterfly

  Tom smoked on the steps outside the museum and idly watched the half-naked protesters beyond. Floodlights illuminated the building’s façade. “End Oil Sponsorship!” they occasionally shouted, their shiny darkened faces intense. Immaculately dressed party guests smoked outside the museum’s wrought-iron doors. A bearded man lit an old woman’s cigarette and she smiled shyly. The smokers concentrated on ignoring the chanting.

  “Are they covered in treacle, do you think?” Tom heard a smoker say. Tom tilted his head to the side. He wondered if Cathy had seen the protesters. He stared out onto the road beyond the museum’s front lawn where an actress in a shimmery dress stepped from a limo and began walking towards the party. Tom recognised the actress from billboards and horror movies. She had the ideal face of a doll and was with an older man. The actress made Tom momentarily nostalgic for Los Angeles, for palm trees and swimming pools. He loved his life in Berlin but missed his parents and their backyard in East Hollywood, full of car engine parts and honeysuckle. His mother had a knack for attracting strays and their Thanksgiving lunches were legendary, attended by a constantly expanding crew of stunt doubles and insurance salesmen, minor celebrities and academics.

  As the couple walked arm in arm towards the museum entrance, some of the protesters reached behind some bushes and then quickly appeared again, ready for their big finalé. It happened quickly. A bodyguard emerged from nowhere to launch at the protesters, but by then the sticky content of the buckets had been lobbed in the direction of the red carpet where the actress and her date turned away a moment too late. They were immediately covered in thick black muck. The two guests hurtled back towards their limo, dripping. The police must have been waiting just beyond the lawn because they appeared on the scene almost immediately.

  “Don’t let Global Petroleum clean up their image without cleaning up their oil!” the protesters shouted. A few photographers had stayed outside and their cameras flashed now while the dripping older man helped his grimacing yet still beautiful lady climb back into her seat. The actress may have been crying, bitterly regretting having accepted an invitation from the PR Director of Global Petroleum. A male protester with a Mohawk hairstyle grabbed his backpack from behind a bush at the edge of the lawn and ran off down the street, a half-naked punk shimmering in the darkness. Tom wished Cathy were there to laugh about it with him. Two of the other protesters were bundled into a police car. The moon was fat and high in the sky, surrounded by faint streaks of cloud, and allowed Tom to see that one of the female protesters had run around the side of the museum before the policemen could grab her. Tom stayed and smoked in the warm evening for a little while longer.

  Jonas the guard was not guarding the solar system as he ought to have been, but was instead craning his neck to catch a glimpse of the commotion outside the museum. Cathy couldn’t see Tom in the party just then; she knew he was probably smoking outside on the steps. She didn’t think that Daniel had seen her yet. He’d hovered almost casually at the edges of the party for a while, drinking champagne and apparently studying dinosaur eggs and Trilobites, then moved off towards the back of the atrium.

  As she readied herself to face him, making her way through the animal bodies, she would have liked to press pause so she could scan the party for all its minute detail – observe puckering skin under the chins of elderly women, dirt forgotten at the edges of fingernails – but instead she drank a glass of champagne
in one gulp. She didn’t usually drink, because her father was an alcoholic and she quite liked the stuff as well. She weaved between foxes and zebras, unhooking the velvet rope to step into the solar system. She squinted through a wooden archway to the right of Pluto, into a dark connecting room with panelled ceilings and dioramas of animals poised in stage-set natural habitats. She expected Daniel to be loitering in front of the grizzly bears. He always used to like dioramas. Light twitched underneath drawn curtains, faintly illuminating an eagle nesting inside a cave of rocks in which a technician had left a stepladder and a can of paint, ruining the effect. Cathy saw that the room was empty, but she heard a creak of movement above her. She ought to have turned back then, before it had even started.

  Instead she drifted up the stairs, the fingers of her right hand sweaty on the cast-iron banister and the fingers of her left sweaty around the toy soldier. She was an adult now; she could face him. The hairs on her neck and hands pricked as she crooked her neck to look up. Daniel was standing on the first floor landing with his elbows leaning on the balcony, his thin lips smiling down at her under his lion eye mask. She opened her mouth to speak but instead held tight to the toy soldier. Daniel jolted his head backwards, motioning for her to come upstairs, then shrank back into the shadows. She bent to unhook her sandals and walked up barefoot.

  The previous week, before coming to Berlin, Daniel had made his way back to Lee-Over-Sands. He’d caught the train to Clacton-On-Sea and walked for two hours until he reached Lee-Over-Sands. The lorry company’s garage was now a Tesco Metro. He’d walked by without stopping into the town nearest to his chalet, St Osyth. There were new restaurants on the main street, the teashop had become an Indian restaurant, and a gift shop had turned into a KFC. Over the sea wall and past the sewage plant, he’d trudged towards Lee-Over-Sands and had found all the chalets there bustling with families and warm lights. Cathy’s old chalet had been torn down and they were building something vast and modern in its place. Around the back, some old wood, which may have been the cladding of the previous house, was piled up and in the process of being burnt. Daniel looked through the windows and saw architect diagrams pinned on the walls and marsh water seeping up through the floor. Daniel had stood in front of his old chalet, which was newly painted with a fresh asphalt roof. He could smell cooking, maybe a roast chicken, and hear laughter. Through the window a family was eating dinner together in a small kitchen. They’d built a sunroof up top, as Daniel had once planned to do. He must have stood there for longer than he should have, because a man in a polo shirt came out the front door and put his hands on his hips.

  Can I help you? the man had said. He squinted at Daniel, who knew his eyes were sunken and his hair probably wild. Inside, the man’s family had stopped eating and were glancing shiftily out of the window.

  I used to live here, Daniel replied. I was wondering if I could come and look around? Daniel didn’t mean any harm. He’d just come to see the place in which the most important events of his life had taken place.

  It’s late, the man said. I’m sorry, but we’re eating dinner.

  It will only take a minute.

  I’d like you to leave now, the man said.

  I’m on public property.

  You’re making my family uncomfortable.

  I’d just like to see my old house.

  I will call the police.

  Why would you do that? Daniel wondered if they knew who he was, and what had happened in the chalet. You don’t need to do that, Daniel said, and turned away. I’m leaving.

  He’d slept in one of the bird watching huts that night, in the strange absolute blackness of the marsh. He’d dreamed of Cathy’s tights low between her crotch because they’d shrunk in the wash. He’d dreamed of her licking her dry lips as a child. Cathy, nineteen, still with knees and ribs as bony as bird-skulls, sitting naked and cross-legged on the deck working on a tan that never came. He used to drop her off at lectures outside some sixties concrete block of Essex University and feel fiercely protective as she marched boyishly into the building, the cool kids all looking at her like she was feral. That night in the bird hut he dreamed about the unique blue colour of her eyes and how her face would go liquid when she drank too much.

  He allowed himself to think what it would be like if she were to come back with him to Lee-Over-Sands. They would rent one of the chalets. Perhaps they would cook hamburgers out on the deck, covering them in a vast amount of ketchup. She would laughingly make him wear oven mitts to bed again, so he didn’t scratch his eczema during the night. He would watch her out on the marsh in her nightgown on summer evenings, catching moths with a butterfly net. She used to set up a torch on some dry bit of the marsh and for an hour or so would attract swarms of them to her body. She’d put her hostages in specially made jam jars, each with a little bit of poison at the bottom, and by morning every spare surface of their flat would be full of asphyxiated creatures. They don’t know they’re dying, isn’t it great? She used to say, getting ready to pin them.

  After waking up in the bird hut he walked to an Internet café in Clacton. It wasn’t difficult to work out where she was now. He’d lost track of her over the last four years, hadn’t been able to send her gifts because Marcus and the rest of the haulage company had been arrested by then. On the web he saw that she’d been interviewed about her research in a journal called The Annual Review of Entomology and had an article published in a journal called Systematic Entomology. Both referenced the Berlin Natural History Museum, where he found her photograph in the staff list of the website. Although it meant breaking his parole, he booked a plane ticket to Berlin. There was nothing for him in England anyway.

  Now Daniel waited for her to wind up the museum stairs towards him, away from the jazz and chatter. He felt perfectly in control of his emotions. He’d waited a long time for this moment. A stuffed flamingo watched from behind glass panels in a pair of doors at his shoulders, along with what appeared to be a badger and a distraught fox with a bulging neck and moulting fur. Daniel did not believe that mistakes happened in isolation; he believed that they cultivated and thickened inside us over a lifetime, waiting to occur. He couldn’t blame circumstance or luck for the transgressions of his own life any more than he could let Cathy blame circumstance for hers. Turning points were not bound to fate but to each person’s deeply rooted, inescapable nature. He touched the wall to stabilise himself as she moved nearer to him.

  Cathy tried her best to smile. She felt a little giddy from drinking that glass of champagne too quickly and wished she hadn’t. The darkness on the landing had a formal quality, like a theatre before the curtains came up, and her heart was beating fast inside her rib cage again. Cathy held her fox mask in one hand and her toy soldier in the other. Daniel nudged his lion mask off his eyes onto his head so it pushed his curly hair off his face like a parody of a fascinator. His grey eyes were duller than she remembered, and sunken in shadowy grey skin scratched with crow’s feet. He looked much older than he ought to have done. Standing there in front of him felt unearthly. It was the convergence of decades and his body appeared enormous, as if it were filling the entire staircase and corridor just with his shoulders.

  “Do you remember Louis XVII’s rhino in Paris?” he said now, instead of hello. That’s not what she would have expected him to start with.

  “Yes, I remember him,” she said carefully. “You claimed he looked like a cross between a war tank and unicorn.”

  It was a stuffed rhino they’d visited once, murdered by revolutionaries during the French Revolution and displayed at the Paris Natural History Museum. For her twenty-first birthday he’d taken her to Paris and bought her too many presents. It was two years into their relationship. He was making money from the haulage company then and he’d wanted her to feel pampered, but she’d acted like they were still in Essex and eaten with her fingers in posh restaurants then licked them clean, which she knew he hated. She’d put
her baseball cap on the table, itched under her armpits on the metro. Out of all the intricate knickers and dresses he bought her that weekend the only gifts that really made her smile were objects she’d chosen herself from a natural history dealership called Deyrolles on the left bank of the river Seine. She chose a pinned blue butterfly in a glass-fronted shadow box along with a shiny green seashell that fitted exactly in her fist. At midnight on her twenty-first birthday she’d sat curled on the hotel sofa still wearing the grubby tracksuit and baseball cap that he’d been trying to get her out of, surrounded by unopened shopping bags of nicer clothes but happily cradling a luminous green shell in her palm. She’d wiped her nose with the palm of her hand. Across her lap was the pinned navy-blue butterfly. She was usually slow to smile but she’d smiled that night, observing how the spray of paler blue made symmetrical patterns on each wing. It had been a good weekend.

  Cathy stood at the top of the staircase and raised her eyes to his.

  “I spent years trying to make you wear a dress, and now here you are, all grown up and it had nothing to do with me. You look beautiful, Kit-Kat.”

  Her mouth went ahead and smiled slightly when he said her old nickname. A tick, a neurological betrayal, not just her brain against her body but one part of her mind vying for autonomy against a simultaneous version of her desires. As she pushed the muscles of her face firmly down again she wondered if he’d noticed the renegade smile. Her body felt strange. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand and stopped herself from finishing that gesture from childhood.