The Museum of Cathy Read online

  A Heart Tattoo

  Cathy led Daniel up one more flight of stairs and through a network of galleries towards her office, where she kept her private memory museum. Most of the doors had glass panels in them so guests could marvel at a library containing a baby gorilla skeleton or a bone storeroom packed with toothy wolves marching away on bare wood floors. In one huge room, thousands of winged creatures were all poised in the darkness as if waiting for something to happen and a few skylights spread city light into the room. Daniel followed her obediently past hundreds of grinning marionette skeletons: kingfishers, parrots, swans. The parrots retained a particular air of sweetness, tilted eagerly forward with beaky smiles. Their wing bones stuck out at the joints as if hoping to begin a conversation or set off from their labelled blocks.

  Outside the windows the sky was luminous blue, without a single cloud or breeze. Berlin’s clubbers would only just be waking up now, nocturnal, yawning to stretch danced-out limbs and getting ready to become lost again in the city’s abandoned factories and power plants. While the museum was frozen in time the acid-addled punks would have stopped drawing trippy chalk sketches on the pavement outside her and Tom’s flat and would be drinking cans of beer in doorways. Families would be walking home from dinner and pushing their buggies over glinting stolpersteine, stumbling stones, brass plates embedded in the streets engraved with the names of Holocaust victims. Ghosts winked under your feet. Little traumas and memories in the shape of abandoned buildings that reminded you this was a city full of erasures. The city had a strong aversion to forgetfulness. It trapped the past and held onto the ruins, two-faced, one set of features looking forward and the other squinting backwards. It attracted wanderers but kept its history close. Cathy felt both entirely alien and perfectly at home here in Berlin.

  “You remember the museum in Brighton, Kit-Kat?” Daniel said. She and Daniel would visit natural history museums together, at first, when the relationship was at its calmest. Falling in love with Daniel when she was nineteen was an experience as intimately connected to whale ribs and lion teeth as it was to the tides on the Essex marshes. They used to spend their weekends at the London Natural History Museum staring at giant hummingbird cabinets and intricately labelled moth collections, even though he didn’t care about museums. He did it for her.

  “Of course,” said Cathy.

  Cathy and Daniel also used to visit the Grant Museum of Zoology in central London, lingering in that tiny single-room place cluttered floor to ceiling with shelves of toucan skulls and baby mole bodies preserved in jars. They used to spend weekends in Brighton, visiting moths in the Booth Museum and dusty ornaments in backstreet bric-a-brac shops. When Daniel started making more money they went to the Venice Natural History Museum and the Paris Natural History Museum and held hands under café tables. She couldn’t remember much of what they spoke about or ate or did the weekend they went to Paris for her birthday, when they’d seen the stuffed rhino that had once belonged to Louis XVII. One sunny moment of intense awe was embedded in her mind. They’d been in the Gallery of Comparative Anatomy. Sunlight had poured down from vast windows over thousands of bones, cloaking each creature in sunshine. Her recollections of that day weren’t visual, more a feeling of Daniel on the other side of the sunlit bone room. She’d felt gutted by loving him in that moment, her fingers tingled with it and her stomach churned.

  “I like the giant polar bear in the main gallery downstairs,” he said. Cathy kept walking through the museum into a room of bird skins with labels tied to their feet, like human bodies in morgues. They appeared closer to life in this prone posture than they did in the main gallery, where stuffed birds were forced into wily caricatures of their former selves and mounted on platforms.

  “He’s from Alaska and his name’s Qannik,” Cathy said. “Inuit for Snowflake. He was shot because he was terrorising a village there.”

  “A man-eating snowflake.”

  She slipped Jack’s toy soldier from her fist back into her handbag. He watched her do this. By her calculation she still had time before she had to go down and collect her prize. She led him away from the party, and into her office.

  Cathy and Jack spent most of that cataclysmic summer playing with half-crushed fox heads, yellowing shards of bone with gnawed edges and toy soldiers on the beach. She liked to catch moths in jam jars, watch them stagger and flutter and then release them back onto gusts of air. She didn’t pin moths then. She liked to observe the marsh through her father’s salt-blurred binoculars: caramel-coloured dandelions growing out of the mud under her feet, a vast white sky, her mother’s underwear hanging off the laundry lines amongst broken garden furniture. That underwear was always soaring off into the Essex marsh and being picked up by birders like her father, who’d said: she’s going to kill a finch with those pants one day.

  Did you know that sharks have no bones? Did you know that it would take less than six months to get to the moon by car at 60 MPH? Jack used to tell her all about cars and sharks the summer they met, but he didn’t know the names of birds or how tides worked or even where babies came from. He was wide-eyed and innocent, somehow, despite having a brother like Daniel with his leggy girlfriends and beer cans and roll-up cigarettes. Once she told Jack that a smooth sea-glass fragment was a precious diamond, created when sea boils at a constant temperature for over a hundred years and turns sea foam bubbles into rock. She traded her bit of common sea-glass, of which she had over a hundred pieces, for one of his biggest shark teeth and he thought this was a good deal until Daniel told him otherwise. Cathy and Jack became a two-person investigation team that summer, scrutinising everything from beetle wings to tidal patterns. They became allies against the tides, partners in beach-combing, shell-collecting, late night ghost stories and moth watching. It was always Cathy who led the charge and Jack who followed, adjusting his glasses and tripping over his feet.

  In Essex Cathy used to show off to Jack with all she knew about bird species and habits, but also told him all about animals that didn’t really exist, with names like Mooklocks and Gillygaloos and Banshees. Cathy would make up elaborate stories about foxes that walked on their hind legs, eagles without eyes, butterflies that created storms with their wings. Jack almost always believed her, or pretended to. Jack was so earnest, with his little spectacles and frizzy dark hair, his gap-toothed smile. She told him that dodos became extinct because their flesh tasted of sugar and they all ate each other. A duck’s quack doesn’t echo, and nobody knew why. Nobody knows.

  Daniel had just been a shadow in the background that summer, a semi-adult who got angry when they came back late or messy. He was a voice laughing with some girlfriend in his bedroom, or watching TV on the sofa. He smelt of Lynx and marijuana, at least that’s what Cathy’s mother once said. Cathy and Jack had liked tormenting Daniel’s girlfriends, who all had glossy lips and tight skirts, often with high-heels that got stuck in the mud if they tried to step anywhere away from the chalet. Cathy and Jack put spiders in their make up bags and used their underwear as slingshots. The girls rarely came over more than twice. One time Cathy and Jack looked through the bedroom window and saw Daniel with his back to them on a chair, with a naked girl straddling him. Cathy stuck out her tongue at the girl, who flipped her middle finger up without breaking rhythm. Daniel had shuddered and the girl arched her back, still half looking at the kids staring in through the window.

  Daniel was trying to teach Jack to swim that summer, but Jack hated getting his eyes salty. Cathy would sometimes come along to their lessons and slide under water like an eel, showing off, grabbing Daniel’s and Jack’s ankles. Jack would always stay where his feet could touch the floor. He liked to be in control of himself. The three of them used to make fires on the beach, finding dry driftwood and sticks for kindling, small twigs and grass for tinder. Daniel taught them how to set the tinder alight with matches and blow lightly on the base of the fire until it grew, adding driftwood. He always used to let mat
ches burn right down to his fingers, just to see Cathy and Jack scream. The most exciting moment was when the driftwood debated its ignition, resisting for a moment before allowing itself to shiver and flare. Frayed newspaper would rise up and float, slow motion. Jack would get scared and move away from the fire then, because he was a bit of a scaredy-cat. However much Daniel tried to persuade Jack to ride his bike faster, dive under water, and stand closer to the fire, Jack remained steadily sure of his limits. Cathy would lean forward, fascinated, to watch Daniel burn doll arms until the plastic skin blistered and it lost its shape. She helped him attach melted Barbies to Action Man torsos. They’d let them dry fastened together like Siamese twins. Many of Jack’s toy soldiers met similar fates, melted during apocalyptic fires and embedded with bits of Lego from fallen buildings. Daniel’s eyes would be bright. Jack would tell him to stop and Cathy would tell him to keep going.

  Daniel referred to their precious object collections as The Museum of Jack and The Museum of Cathy. Pick up your museum, he’d say. Is this part of The Cathy Museum or The Jack Museum? He’d hold up some stray shell or toy. If you don’t pick up your museum from the floor I’m going to throw it all away.

  There was a fair near the caravans at Seawick and they weren’t allowed to go without an adult, but it was worth the risk of being late home, just to escape the spooky quiet of Lee-Over-Sands. One evening at Seawick Cathy found a bunch of fake tattoos on the ground and told Jack that he could put them on her, if he liked.

  Cathy and Jack stood round the back of the dodgems next to a chain link fence that faced towards barley fields; the air smelt of passing sewage, stale cigarettes and popcorn. Sometimes, when the wind changed in Lee-Over-Sands, for a second you could smell sewage in the air from a plant up-wind from the beach. They didn’t put that in the brochure when you spent our savings, darling, did they? her mother would say. Jack held the butterflies, hearts and skull and cross-bone tattoos in his little hands. Over his shoulder Cathy could see the duck-hook game that was impossible to win, but nobody noticed them back there. Fairground workers laughed and swore within earshot. Colourful lights flicked in the darkness.

  You have to take your top off, Jack said. The butterfly needs to go just above your belly button, I reckon. She remembered her skin tensing with the salty breeze. He licked the inky picture on waxy transfer paper and got down on his knees in the ground to press it onto her stomach.

  He put a heart with an arrow through it on the bony area between where her breasts would one day be. She was not girlish. She was a vehement tomboy, but it crossed her mind that when she was a grown-up she might fall in love with Jack. He was solemn and flushed as he licked each picture and pressed it onto her skin for the required minute then peeled the paper slowly away, leaving a wet picture on her body. That part of her skin would be cold for a moment.

  It was no more sexual than being huddled in her bedroom telling stories about the ghost of St Osyth, a seventh-century East Anglian Queen beheaded in the wood behind the village church, or riding their bikes down the big hill near Point Clear and curving at the last minute to stop from flying straight out into the sea. Shadows filtered past from the dodgems.

  His cheeks were flushed with colour as he touched her. It was getting late and they ought to go home or they’d get in trouble. It was all a revelation, an uncurling towards adulthood. She wished she’d reached up on tiptoe and kissed Jack that evening at the fair. She would have done if she’d known what was going to happen to him.

  If the protesters had aimed to disrupt the party with their fake oil spill, they’d done a terrible job. The guests in the three interconnecting galleries were all drinking more than they’d meant to and laughing louder, eating canapés and discussing the police drama. Tom was a little tipsy. The music had gained in tempo and the double bass player kept spinning his instrument on the stage.

  “What do you call a fly without wings?” Tom said as he approached a colleague. She smiled condescendingly, waiting for the punch line. “A walk. Cathy loves that joke. Have you seen her? The prizes will start soon.”

  “Sorry, no,” said the colleague. “She’s probably having some involved conversation about moth wing patterns in the back, right?”

  “If you see her, give me a call?” Tom said.

  “Course.”

  “Why wouldn’t they let the butterfly into the dance?” said Tom. “Because it was a mothball.” His audiences smiled without laughing. “Obviously,” added Tom and walked off.

  He hoped she was deeply involved in some geeky minutia of entomology. When Cathy was doing her PhD she used to bring caterpillars home to their apartment when they were in the process of turning into moths. It’s hard to really know someone until you live with them. It’s all very well going to the cinema and sleeping over twice a week, but you don’t know a person until they – for example – fill your bathroom with mutating caterpillars and stay up all night sitting on the bathroom floor under phosphorescent lights to watch them and make notes. Or until you watch them iron their underwear on Sunday. Genuinely, she ironed her knickers. She owned a cupboard full of almost the same white shirts, like a uniform. She cleaned the kitchen until it sparkled every night before bed. She said that where she grew up, you just couldn’t get bed linen dry, so mould grew in the creases. She said her hair used to smell of mud and that the bathtub in her house was so rusty that the water was always the colour of diluted blood. So now she liked things to be immaculate. Somehow in Los Angeles, despite every second block of apartments having a swimming pool and the sea being just around the corner, she’d always managed to avoid swimming without it being a big deal. She’d never brought her swimming costume, or she wouldn’t feel well. It was only in Berlin that he found out that she was scared of water. She grew up on the coast but hated swimming. Even swimming pools freaked her out and she’d refuse to get in them past where she could stand. Other idiosyncrasies just made him smile. She often laughed to herself, little chuckles and smiles he wasn’t sure she was aware of. She also watched cartoons when she was alone. Never with him, but sometimes he saw them on her computer or walked in on her watching Tom and Jerry or Roadrunner. She brushed her hair exactly a hundred times before she fell asleep. He didn’t know how much he could love her until they moved in together in Berlin and explored a new city together, taking photos of each other with fairy-tale sculptures in Friedrichshain park and lounging on man-made beaches by the river.

  In Los Angeles she’d always been a listener rather than a talker. She didn’t seem really to trust him until he’d agreed to leave Los Angeles with her. Her frown the day she told him she’d been offered a job in Berlin had broken his heart. She’d said she wanted a clean start and he’d thought she wanted to go alone, but actually she’d wanted a clean start together. It wasn’t necessarily the best career move for him, but it wasn’t difficult for him to get a job at the same museum and it was worth it to see the smile on her face when he said he’d come with her: she claimed it was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for her. She said it was the happiest day of her life.

  During silences that first year together, he would have to fight the urge to launch into an anecdote or tell another bad joke just to fill the quiet. She was reserved and he was used to actresses and extroverts, yet her silences were more interesting to him than the intimate and easy monologues of his previous girlfriends. Cathy would sit so absolutely still, opposite him at dinner or next to him in the car, and the expression on her face always had a sort of magic to it. She wasn’t beautiful in the way other girls he’d dated were, but the attraction he felt towards her was more intense. Sometimes it worried him, because he imagined the other people who might have had the same reaction.

  Two people, she’d told him early in their relationship. I lost my virginity to a boy who lived in a caravan near my house when I was fifteen.

  And the other?

  I had a boyfriend from age nineteen until I moved to Los A
ngeles.

  Did you go to university with him?

  No, he lived in a chalet a few doors down. He drove lorries.

  A truck driver? Tom had smiled and then regretted the smile because she quickly looked at the floor and her cheeks flushed. That sort of tone was the reason she didn’t like to spend too much time with his parents.

  Shall we order Chinese food tonight? She’d changed the subject.

  She had never quite been able to relax with his parents. His mother had admitted to Tom that she thought Cathy was tightly coiled. She has uncanny poise, his mother had said, not as a compliment. His friends also thought she was too different from the extrovert prom-queen types he’d previously dated. His friends teased him about being so smitten with this aloof, occasionally awkward, quiet English girl with a scar on her forehead and long auburn hair. Everyone was against him following her to Berlin. There was something impermeable about her when they first met her, as if she lived only in the present tense without a past or a future. Tom had fitted together other pieces of her past slowly, as if he was building up the history of an archaeological site.

  One of the strangest thing about her that he discovered in Berlin was that it wasn’t entirely true that she didn’t drink, which is what she’d always maintained. She was normally so self-contained and still, yet after they moved in together she would occasionally disappear for a night without calling or coming home. She’d probably done this in Los Angeles, too, but they weren’t so close then. In Berlin it had happened five times that he knew of. Every time he’d gone out to look for her, but usually had no luck. She’d eventually come home of her own accord, reeking and penitent. On the third time he actually found her, at four am, after many hours searching all over Neukölln. She’d managed to get quite far out, to a bar near Treptower Park and the derelict East German amusement park that where you could book guided tours during the day and into which teenagers snuck at night to have sex and shoot up. He’d found her in a basement sports bar with a neon cigarette sign outside it and dirty windows. Cigarette smoke hung low in the air and chalky-faced East German men were bent over their beers. It was a pocket of the city where you rarely heard people speaking English. Tom stepped inside, not expecting her to be there, but there she was playing pool with a bunch of drunks. Her hair was scraped back into a high ponytail and her skin had a cellophane sheen to it. She was laughing too loudly. She had none of the stillness or the quiet that he’d come to associate with her and for a moment he genuinely thought maybe it wasn’t her, just someone similar. She’d tripped over her feet and he took a step forward to catch her in case she fell. The men all turned towards him. She didn’t fall over, but grinned at him.