The Museum of Cathy Page 9

  I’ve been looking everywhere for you. What are you doing?

  Playing pool, she said.

  Leave the girl alone, a man holding the snooker cue said. She’s just having fun.

  You need to come home, Tom said to her and then, out of nowhere, she reached over and threw a yellow snooker ball right at him with a look of intense, almost comedic, concentration. He dodged the ball and it hit a table behind him, sending beer glasses smashing to the floor and the barman swore, stepping out from behind the bar.

  Fuck, Cathy. Chill out, Tom said. As he stepped towards Cathy she threw two more snooker balls, one hitting his shoulder pretty hard. It was so unlike her.

  Don’t tell me to chill out, she slurred as he took her arm and twisted it behind her back enough to keep her still without hurting her. As she struggled he pushed her face down against the snooker table until she stopped wriggling.

  Get her out of here, the barman said.

  She had one cheek on the green table and drool coming from her mouth. He glanced away from her smile and pulled her up to standing position.

  Hit me, she’d said. There was snot in her nose and her breath stank.

  We’re going home.

  Hit me, she said. Please hit me.

  You’re wasted.

  Hit me, she said.

  Let’s go.

  He began to walk her out of the bar, leaving fifty Euros for drinks and broken glasses. At the door she waved goodbye to the men around the snooker table and they waved back, a little baffled.

  Hit me? she said more quietly to him outside the bar, her body so limp that he had to support almost all her weight. They got into the cab and her head lolled against his, but every so often she’d say hit me, hit me.

  A few hours later, after she’d spent some time throwing up, she cried in the bath while he sat next to the tub, watching her and making sure she didn’t fall asleep. She sometimes didn’t seem to know herself at all. He could see that there were fragments of her self and her past that Cathy went to a great deal of trouble to suppress. He knew she’d be embarrassed for weeks after this, although probably wouldn’t remember the details of what had happened.

  Armadillos always give birth to quadruplets, she said. Tom had one hand in the warm bathwater, swishing bubbles.

  If you won’t talk to me, maybe you should see someone, a professional.

  You’re so American, she said. Outside the bathroom window techno music played in a passing car.

  Astronauts in the first American space station grew 1.5-2.25 inches as a result of zero gravity, he replied. Being American isn’t so bad.

  The human eye blinks an average of 4,000,000 times a year, she said.

  4,200,000, he replied. I think.

  I once skinned and boned a seagull, she said. I found it on the marsh and I was bored so I buried it to take all the skin off it and cleaned the bones and used glue and wire to put the skeleton back together again. I gave it to my dad as a Christmas present.

  Tom had smiled and tucked her hair behind her ears, pleased with this revelation.

  I did the same thing with a dead cat I found once, he said, which was true. He’d found it in the back yard and his dad had helped him put it back together over the course of his summer holidays. My dad and I named the skeleton Garfield.

  We do have something in common after all, she’d said and he felt stung by her words, as if she’d just slapped him. He took his hand out of the bath and turned his back on her, but without leaving the bathroom. He watched her sleeping that night. Those last words while she was in the bath haunted him more than all the rest of the evening. He’d thought he’d loved others before her, but when he fell for Cathy it was an entirely different emotion. It was stickier yet also clearer: he could look a hundred years into the future and still see them tangled in bed sheets. He badly wanted to understand her.

  A Human Tooth

  Cathy put her fox mask and bag down on her neat laminate desk; Daniel left his own mask on his head. The long room had two doors in it: the one they’d just come in through via interlocking storerooms and the bird galleries and another, leading towards the opposite wing of the museum. A Polyphemus moth was pinned on a colleague’s desk, its brownish-yellow wings five inches long with a pattern that resembled owls’ eyes to confuse predators in the dark: witty evolution! The metallic wings of a Morpho butterfly caught light from the windows and sent it shooting off in different directions. Cathy reached for her little brass cabinet key in the pages of her Encyclopaedia of Insects. Her cabinet creaked as the doors opened and Daniel stepped towards her.

  She pulled a drawer open and he immediately ran his finger along a fish spine he’d sent her when she’d first left him. The line of vertebrae almost wriggled. She caught her breath as he moved a blue Trapezium Conch shell from its place. He held up her Kissing Beetle, rubbing its amber cage in his fingers.

  “It makes me happy you kept everything,” he said and gave her a satisfied, irritating, smile, telling her this was just what he’d expected from her.

  He touched a dried seahorse and an alligator tooth and frowned at the stuffed white tiger with wonky eyes that he’d won for her at Clacton Pier one summer.

  His gaze stopped on a red plastic wristwatch, flat on the green felt with its hands stuck at eight minutes past twelve. Jack’s watch. There were small toys from her childhood, including plastic soldiers that had been melted together into a single mutant warrior, a parking lot of Micro machine cars, and a metal Oxo Cube tin. The tin box still smelt a little of sea air and rotting mud, or she imagined it did, the salt clinging to its grooves. Cathy watched his expression: his skin was glossy and his eyes bloodshot.

  “You still have all his things,” he said quietly.

  She was acutely aware of the silence and stillness around them as he reached for Jack’s red Oxo Cube box from one of the drawers. She’d hidden all Jack’s stuff when she and Daniel got together, because it upset him. Around six inches long and four inches wide, the box had become oxidised, with a shiny black patina inside. This was the box in which Jack had always kept his most important objects. It felt as if Daniel was reaching his fingers into Cathy’s brain and plucking a memory out. The moment was surgical, severing connections and re-mapping patterns. As Daniel’s big thumbs touched Jack’s tin Cathy could have been sitting on the deck in Lee-Over-Sands next to her best friend, plump and bespectacled and eager, surrounded by their beachcombing finds. She could have been ten years old out in the salty cool morning air, holding pieces of perfectly round sea glass or driftwood carved by the sea into funny shapes as the tides shifted gloomily around them.

  Daniel took the objects out of her cabinet and put them on her desk: micro machine cars, matchboxes of soldiers and shark teeth, the watch, a pair of little silver glasses with the words ‘Whizz Kid’ engraved on the slightly bent left arm. The skin around Daniel’s eyes tensed and she saw the pulse in his neck. He knocked the cars with his clumsy arthritic hands so they were no longer in straight lines.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Cathy touched the mouse skull she’d found the first day she met Jack and Daniel, because she did not want Daniel to touch it first. Inside it still had chambers intact where the brain had been once. Daniel picked up one of Jack’s many matchboxes and pushed it open with his thumb. Inside were some baby milk teeth and a single adult molar tooth with long clean roots. As he picked up that molar tooth Cathy allowed her tongue to find the gap at the back of her teeth where that molar used to be.

  “You knocked that tooth out,” said Cathy. She had an unwelcome image of making love to Daniel on her little orange boat and the way he used to rock it to scare her. One time he’d pushed her in to the sea and she’d screamed. She’d climbed out onto the mud bank and they’d fucked there with a full moon making animals howl on the marsh. She’d been so aware of her body, always, when he was nearby.


  “It’s so messed up that you have all this. They’re disaster mementos. You’re like one of those freaks who collects poker chips from the Titanic and souvenir debris from earthquakes.”

  Unexpectedly, Daniel laughed and showed his own teeth.

  “So you’re comparing our relationship to the Titanic?”

  “There are similarities, no? You were leading lady and iceberg I think.”

  “I’d say we were more of an earthquake.”

  “Was I not romantic enough?”

  “Depends if you define romance as sending a girl souvenir bird skulls and animal teeth from prison for two years.”

  “Those were reminders, not souvenirs.”

  “You shouldn’t be here,” she said.

  He reached over then and took her jaw in his hand. She let him. She couldn’t look him in the eye as he opened her mouth and put his thumb inside. As if she was a horse he ran his thumb along her lower back teeth until he found the gap he’d once created. He put the tip of his thumb right in its raw cavity and it made her shiver. All her fractures and scars throbbed at the same time, as if worms were wriggling out of each spot of remembered pain: her right knee, scars on her stomach, her fractured finger bones. She felt a familiar and wrong sense of longing.

  “I’ve just missed you,” he said, his fingers still inside her mouth. She didn’t say anything, her throat constricted by his taste, and her emotion. “I know I messed up and hurt you badly, and I deserved what you did to me. I’ve learnt my lesson.”

  When he released her she felt dizzy with the lingering taste of him in her throat. Her chin was warm where it had rested on his hands. The papier mâché mask still sat on top of his head. His doughy face was marked with sunspots, his nose and cheeks uneven. Cathy could see, somewhere in the furrowed skin around Daniel’s brown eyes, the nineteen-year-old boy who’d moved into the chalet next to hers when she was ten and loved building fires out of driftwood on the beach.

  “Do you remember the canary I bought you in Essex?” Daniel said in the gloom of the museum. They could only just hear the party below, the noise floating up through libraries and the store cupboards underneath Cathy’s office. It was a long room cut into cubicles by an assault course of shelves, old cabinets and cork boards covered in drawings. There was an elephant skull watching them, and an owl.

  “Sure. He was beautiful,” Cathy said.

  “You left him in Essex.”

  Daniel was happy she’d kept all his gifts, objects which hadn’t been easy to send from prison. His friends on the outside had thought he was crazy, making them send feathers and shells and skulls to some girl in Los Angeles. Marcus helped at first because Daniel hadn’t let anyone else’s name slip, but two years into Daniel’s sentence there was a raid on the garage and thirteen drums of lubricant were found stashed with heroin and amphetamines. Marcus was jailed for sixteen years and Riley, Daniel’s replacement, for twelve. So in a way Cathy had helped Daniel.

  “What happened to the other things I left in the chalet?”

  “I burnt most of them before the police came,” he said and she raised her blue eyes to him, obviously unsure if he was serious or not. “They thought I was burning evidence, but I had no idea what was about to happen.” He paused. “Do you ever get the urge to re-arrange the stuffed animals in the dioramas in the museum at night? Or the birds in that giant gallery?”

  “No.”

  “Do you ever think how you’d like to be taxidermied?”

  “No.”

  “I’d have us dancing.”

  “We’ve never danced. Not once. I think we’d be some grotesque diorama, a beast with two backs.”

  “What does that mean? A beast with two backs?” he said.

  “It’s a Shakespeare quote. Othello.”

  “Show off.” He smiled. “Have you missed me?”

  “I haven’t missed you,” she said. “Not for a moment.”

  “Liar,” said Daniel.

  The first time Daniel hit her they’d been out on the deck cooking sausages on the barbecue. She was nineteen. He was twenty-eight. He’d been back in Lee-Over-Sands for three months then. His colleagues had been in the chalet all day and a faint smell of cheap aftershave and sweat hung in the air. The clouds in the sky were bunching up as if waiting to rain and a low mist hung over the marsh and the sea.

  Does mist like this give you the shivers? Cathy had said. Sausage fat hissed and the waves broke against sand beyond the estuary underneath the deck. Moths hovered at the sliding doors, banging against the glass trying to get to the light. Smoke rose off the barbecue, a slightly different colour from the mist.

  Why? He said. She looked at his grey eyes and black curly hair, his big nose and wide shoulders, trying to gauge if he really didn’t know what she meant.

  Because of Jack?

  Clearly he did know what she meant, because the next thing she knew he’d knocked her sideways with the back of his hand. Her head hit the floor a little way from the barbecue. She heard seagulls and waves and then fell unconscious. When she woke up she had a jumper under her head. The fire was out and the food was gone and Cathy walked to her dad’s chalet three doors down instead of going inside to see Daniel again. That day she learnt that only Daniel was allowed to mention Jack, and even he would never mention the night Jack died. When she stumbled home her dad was asleep on the mangled sofa in front of a cookery channel, a beer can and a whiskey bottle on the floor in front of him. Cathy washed her face in the sink and the water turned red from where her head had hit the floor and bled. She peed in the toilet, noticing that her dad had stubbed out a bunch of cigarettes even though he knew they blocked the sewage system. She would pick them out in the morning. She couldn’t leave Essex. She couldn’t leave her dad, or her objects.

  You okay, Dad? she said when he stirred.

  Tip-top, her dad had mumbled, and then fell back to sleep.

  Tom sipped champagne in the museum’s atrium and stood in front of a large cedar wood cabinet and a 407.48 carat yellow diamond. The museum director, a distinguished man with an equally remarkable handlebar moustache, was conferring amongst the party organisers, presumably discussing the details of the speech he was going to make. He could see Cathy’s boss, a woman with an unflattering bob of black hair and vermilion reading glasses that matched her lipstick. A diamond called The Incomparable announced itself as the third-largest diamond ever cut. He scanned the crowd of guests more intently for her auburn hair and green dress. He pushed his way over towards the solar system exhibition to ask the guard if he’d seen Cathy. Jonas, protector of the solar system and the sun, knotted his mouth and narrowed his eyes. The museum had appalling security systems; both the guards and the technology were ancient.

  “She’ll be down in a minute,” said Jonas. “She forgot something.”

  “I’ll just go check on her,” Tom said and didn’t wait for Jonas to shrug before beginning to lope up the spiral stairs two steps at a time.

  The previous night they’d cooked pasta together in their little kitchen with the windows wide to catch the breeze. They’d eaten on their tiny balcony outside the bedroom, amongst muddy plant pots and ashtrays. A mariachi band had passed by under the balcony as they spoke, a group of teenagers had smoked weed in a children’s playground, the sun had gone down and when he kissed Cathy she’d tasted of tomato sauce. A cat named Maud, belonging to their neighbour across the hall, jumped onto their balcony and pawed Cathy’s thigh while Tom was kissing her.

  Evening Maud, she’d stroked the cat. Berlin summer light was beautiful, filling the wide streets and illuminating the pastel building façades.

  We should get a cat one day, Tom said.

  Cathy loved their flat. She’d never really settled anywhere in Los Angeles, she was always finding reasons to move – broken air conditioning, mad housemates, annoying locations – but the Berlin apartment w
as her home. She adored the high windows, the white floors and Maud, whom she looked after when the owner went away. The room was opposite Hasenheide Park and not far from Tempelhof, an abandoned airport turned playground, full of allotments and picnickers. She liked all the open spaces and being able to spend time outdoors. Berlin apartment blocks are often built around courtyards, so what appears from the street to be a single building is in fact a network of apartments. Cathy wasn’t particularly sociable, in general, but she had made friends with many of the residents in her building and loved spending time on the picnic benches around the courtyard. Maud’s owner was an old man with missing teeth for whom Cathy went supermarket shopping every Saturday. In the flat below was a mother of five children who dyed her hair a different colour every month and invited Cathy in for Turkish coffee. Cathy’s closest friend in Berlin was an artist named Jennifer who lived on the ground floor and had recently painted a mural of a safari over the entire front of the building, much to the owner’s anger and everyone else’s amusement. Jennifer went out clubbing most weekends and would roll home in her leather pants just as Cathy was waking up on Sundays. Leaving Tom to sleep in, Cathy would often go downstairs into the courtyard and watch Jennifer chain smoke cigarettes and mumble about her exploits the previous night. Tom had opened the kitchen window the previous weekend and heard their conversation among the picnic benches while he drank coffee upstairs.