The Museum of Cathy

by Anna Stothard

  But she didn’t tell him anything, just tried to unclench her jaw and breath deeply. She was a new person now, she told herself. Although at that point her objects were still all jumbled together in shoeboxes with little order to them, Cathy was beginning to see that she could keep her past locked up and out of sight if she wished. She could put a lid on the guilty girl: lock her up in a drawer like a specimen. Instead of pouring out her secrets to Tom, Cathy just swallowed hot desert air from the Santa Ana winds, as they merged with the salty beach air of the ocean in front of her. She held her tiny green cocktail umbrella tight between her thumb and forefinger.

  A flamboyance is a group of flamingos, she had said to Tom, instead of baring her soul to him. She then cringed at the randomness of the phrase. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand as she used to do as a kid. Tom replied:

  That’s not true.

  It is.

  A flamboyance? Seriously?

  I never joke about flamingos. She tried to smile, but only wanted to be alone in her flat again now. She’d wash her hair, dry it before she slept. She’d fall asleep looking out on laundry-lined rooftops and palm trees from the window above her bed.

  Nearly 50% of the bacteria in your body live on the surface of your tongue, offered Tom. Cathy had stuck out her tongue into the salty air.

  I think that’s true. And the human body contains three times more bacterial cells than human cells.

  Is this a game? He’d smiled sideways at her.

  Sure. She unclenched one fist, then the other, and tried to relax her shoulders.

  The groove in the middle of the place above your lips is called a tragus.

  False, that’s this bit, Cathy touched the button of skin-covered cartilage on her ear. The philtrum is above your lips.

  Tom shifted his lanky body, hesitantly, as if about to reach out and touch the groove above her lip, but then he didn’t and they both looked away from each other. Cathy turned her head to check behind her and the men who had been staring were no longer there. She smiled with relief. Her heart was beating fast.

  I didn’t know that about flamingos, Tom said.

  Cathy opened a low drawer of her cabinet, a childhood drawer, and picked up a toy lead soldier wearing a scuffed red jacket and a pointy black hat that shadowed his pinprick eyes. She put the lead soldier in the palm of her hand and wrapped her fingers around it. Small noises kept making her jump and her hands weren’t steady enough to pin moths. She couldn’t concentrate and even broke a wing, so had to stop. She was being awarded a prize that evening, for her research into the metamorphosis of hawkmoths, but would have to practise her speech later: she couldn’t focus with the Kissing Beetle nearby.

  She left the beetle in her cabinet but still had the lead soldier in her hand when, a few hours later, she walked out of the museum’s wrought iron door into the humid Berlin sunshine. She thought it would be cooler out there under the museum’s big birch tree than upstairs in her office with the chemicals and dust, but sweat continued to prick her skin. She sat down on a stone bench under the tree and put her thumb on the toy soldier’s face.

  The area outside the museum was busy with construction work. Cement mixers and diggers were everywhere that summer, stomping out the city’s incidental monuments, turning its bullet-scarred buildings and graffiti-caked façades into boutique hotels and shopping malls. Great pink pipes snaked for miles, meandering past art galleries and building sites and directly in front of the museum, carrying water sucked out from under the city’s surface. Perhaps it was because Berlin was built precariously on a marsh that Cathy felt so connected to the place. Below the pink pipes a girl in a denim skirt and a boy in board-shorts were eating sandwiches, while members of a gang of Japanese tourists were taking photos of each other. Sparrows were jumping around the lawn eating lunchbox crumbs; she tried not to watch the tight little shivers of their muscles. It was so hot that they burrowed their tummies in earth under the shrubs around the sandstone foundations of the building. A group of students were giving away flyers protesting against the museum being sponsored by the oil company. The protesters wore loose cotton trousers and tie-dyed skirts, their skin incandescent from conviction and sunshine.

  Cathy typed ‘Hotel Shiro’ into Google on her phone. A map of central Berlin came up on the screen, with a red dot near Alter Jüdischer Friedhof, about twenty minutes’ walk from the Natural History Museum. She knew that cemetery, she and Tom had walked through it a few times to see the ivy-covered stone angels. It was near a knotted junction of hotels and coffee shops at Rosenthaler Platz U-bahn, a mecca for coders bent over their Macs. She looked up and watched a few of the protesters sunbathing on the lawn outside the museum, taking a break to sit on the dried-out grass. One blonde teenager had her eyes closed and her claret-coloured mouth a little open, chin tilted to the sky as if drinking in the sunshine.

  She pressed the ‘call’ button and rang Hotel Shiro.

  “Good morning,” said a voice on the phone. Cathy could hear the woman’s fingers tapping on a keyboard and a baby crying. Cathy was sweating and had the impression that she could smell cottony laundry detergent and deodorant from under her arms, as well as stale sandwiches from kids eating lunch nearby. Whenever she was nervous, her sense of smell heightened.

  “Do you have a Daniel Bower staying with you, please?”

  More tapping. “Doesn’t look like it. Have you got the right branch of Shiro? There is one in the centre of town.”

  A siren went off in the distance. Just to be sure, Cathy said:

  “How about Dan Green?”

  The woman checked, fingernails clacking on the keyboard as she typed this name. “Yeah, shall I put you though?”

  Cathy paused. For a moment, she felt as if something was stuck in her throat and that she wouldn’t be able to speak, but then she heard herself say:

  “Yes. Please.”

  The phone seemed to ring forever. She rubbed the angular limbs of her toy soldier between her fingers for comfort. Before the thirteenth ring, a raspy voice picked up:

  “Hello?”

  She recognised his voice. He sounded sleepy. Her body stiffened and a strong taste of acid, of vomit, arrived at the back of her mouth. She swallowed it back down again, a pattern of taste and revulsion that occurred repeatedly through the rest of that day. Almost immediately, more awake, he said: “Cathy?”

  She fumbled and pressed ‘end’ on her phone as quickly as she could. She put the phone down. She wondered how he could have known it was her on the line.

  A Seagull Skull

  Cathy’s lungs had ached when she walked through the early morning darkness away from Daniel’s sleeping body six years ago. It had been early and still dark when she ran. She’d carried her suitcase into St Osyth Town where the taxi was waiting for her. Her exit was meticulous because she’d planned it for months. Angeles was divine. Los, though, was loss.

  She’d tried to call the police from a payphone outside The Red Lion Pub in town that morning but couldn’t do it, because she could still sense the curves of his body against her skin and the smell of him in her hair. On arriving in Los Angeles she’d bought an international calling card from a liquor store called The Pink Elephant in East Hollywood and stood in the hot parking lot, staring at a phone booth littered with postcards of prostitutes. The sun had been so hot that the tarmac was sticky under her trainers and she felt as if the buttons on her skirt might melt.

  She’d told the police everything she knew about Daniel, but standing there on the melting tarmac with her single suitcase, she’d missed the memory objects she’d been forced to leave behind in Essex. She had known she would not get away quickly enough while carrying suitcases full of sentimental driftwood and animal bones, so she’d transferred the edited version of her life into new shoeboxes she could take in her suitcase. Standing there in the Los Angeles car park, she’d felt a pang of longin
g for the dried flowers picked on dawn-time foraging missions with her father, and crayon drawings of birds she’d made while her parents argued. She missed the texture of her beloved orange rowing boat, which had fallen into pieces when she was fifteen, and her stuffed songbird with big plaintive eyes that she’d once loved to distraction but had now not dared to take through customs. Her fingers tingled at the thought of her seagull skeleton, which took months to clean and fit back together with wire and glue. She might have been free when she arrived in Los Angeles, but she was lonely without the tactile remains of her memories.

  She wished that she could have brought her super colour 6355 camera to capture in pictures this new city. She would have taken a photo of the gritty motel on Hollywood Boulevard where she stayed her first week and the homeless man wearing a tutu who often sat by the stagnant pool. She loved Polaroids for their instant nostalgia, so accurate it made her heart ache. She brought one photo of Daniel with her to Los Angeles. He was knee deep in the estuary and grinning up at her with sparkling grey eyes. She was fascinated by how taking a photo somehow eradicated the actual moment. He had freckles and there was a bird circling above. Somehow, he looked like an animal, a natural part of the landscape around him rather than a human addition. She and Daniel had both been animal-like, then. She loved how photographs were not vulnerable to bias or emotions, how they were indifferent to hindsight.

  She had left all her mother’s hundreds of shoes in Essex. Her mother had wide feet and she was constantly on the search for the perfect comfortable shoes. She had worked in the shoe department of Debenhams before she married Cathy’s father, then afterwards as a baker for the local café in St Osyth. She was superstitious and would get genuinely upset if Cathy opened an umbrella in the house or walked underneath a ladder. She always smelt of lemon cake and Superking cigarettes and was constantly buying things that they couldn’t afford, mostly shoes, trying to hide packages from Cathy’s dad. It wasn’t fetishist or extravagant: she just never seemed to own the right pair. She left Essex when Cathy was eleven years old and moved to Spain with a man she met at the café in town. Afterwards Cathy’s father put the shoes in bin bags to rot in the cellar, but Cathy would go through them sometimes, observing how her mother’s footprint was still in many of them, or droplets of her blood. It was basically a morgue of failed potential, all the people that her mother thought she might have been but wasn’t. Cathy’s favourites were a pair of wide-fit snakeskin kitten heels that, with all their straps, must have been ludicrously painful. Cathy also liked a pair of cork and plastic peep-toes she remembered her mother buying in Brighton and wearing just once, gleeful for about ten seconds before they started to rub her feet and she flung them grumpily into her handbag.

  Cathy abandoned hundreds of Sea Roses and Yellow Horned Poppies in Essex when she ran away, dried specimens she’d found on the marsh during bird-watching sessions with her father before his liver gave up. If she had more of her objects perhaps she would remember her father better. She had to concentrate now in order to stop herself from thinking of him as a cartoon alcoholic who drank gin with his cornflakes and threw things, which is what he became. He used to have a big smile that showed a broken tooth at the side of his mouth and made the wrinkles on his cheeks bunch up into pleats. He used to be the king of finding unexpected bee species nesting on warm sunny ridges further away from the sea and he would speak of how his life mission had been conserving the nesting ground of Little Terns. There were literally thousands of feathers all over her father’s house by the time he died, a few months before Cathy escaped Lee-Over-Sands. He died in a hospice, with five Brent Geese feathers in a vase by his bed instead of flowers.

  In her cabinet she still had one of the dried tropical flowers with dagger-like orange petals that grew all over Los Angeles, on dusty street corners and around liquor store parking lots as well as in smart hotel driveways and gated Malibu mansions. She’d been surprised by how vicious this common flower looked when she arrived in her new city, and how unlikely. She had a little gold Buddha from a massage parlour and the flyer from a street puppet show she’d once stumbled on late at night while unable to sleep. She was in a constant half-awake state then, and spent nights walking through this new world, where she was free to do as she liked but had no idea what that was. She was lonely and collected objects from the city as she’d once collected them from the marsh: discarded shopping lists in spiral bound notepads, a skateboard wheel, a torn photograph of two lovers. Seemingly inanimate things have more power than most people wanted to accept. They can consume you or liberate you. They can drag you down for the rest of your life or, if you let them, take on the burden of remembering.

  “Excuse me?” Cool fingers touched Cathy’s warm arm and she flinched. She’d laid her head down in the palm of her hands after cancelling the call with Daniel, the lead soldier still in her hand, and now the Berlin daylight around her seemed unnaturally bright. She wasn’t sure how long she’d been sitting like that. “Are you okay?” the voice said.

  In front of her was the blonde protester with the claret coloured mouth who had been sunbathing a moment ago. Cathy forced herself to take a deep breath, to exhale slowly and smile. It had been hot like this the first summer she and Tom were in Berlin. They’d spent a month, both between jobs, listening to language tapes while wandering the city, occasionally stopping off at bars, monuments or man-made beaches by the Spree.

  In front of the museum now, in the same heat as that first summer, the teenage protester’s hair was cut straight across her shoulders and her forehead, a sharp fringe that almost obscured her eyes. She was tanned and radiantly confident, the sort to jump first when skinny-dipping in lakes with friends.

  “I’m fine, thank you,” Cathy said, composing herself and pushing her shoulders back. Through the museum’s front doors Cathy could just hear the building’s intercom telling everyone it was closing for a private function: they must have started to set up the party. Children trailed out of the front door, unwrapping melted chocolate bars and sucking on warm juice boxes.

  “You flinch when you’re touched,” the teenager said to Cathy matter-of-factly. She must have been around seventeen, with thick eyelashes and a tattoo of a flower on her shoulder. “Do you feel tilted, off balance?”

  “I’m just hot,” said Cathy. The girl made her think of fidgeting with half-wet candle wax between her thumb and forefinger. In another mood Cathy would have wanted to draw her into conversation. Cathy had always enjoyed talking to complete strangers. Not people at parties or friends of friends, but old women on the bus or loopy men in cafés. She’d get an urge to tell elderly couples in the park about how her father had once tried to suffocate the neighbour’s tabby cat with a pillow because he thought it was murdering the nesting terns in the bird sanctuary, or confide in bartenders about how her mother used to sing Disney songs and show tunes while she cooked lemon cake. She didn’t say anything to the protester.

  “I wanted to give you this.” The teenager pressed a flyer into Cathy’s lap. It had a silhouetted picture of a dripping pelican against a white background. The pelican’s beak drooled oil. “Smile cause it might never happen, you know.” Cathy hated that phrase. People said it to her remarkably frequently. She saw that her hands were shaking. She wished she were in her noisy bed, asleep next to Tom. She wished she were sitting on Kottbusser Bridge with him, watching the canal underneath, or on a train zooming out of the city past rooftops and abandoned factories.

  Cathy made her way back into the museum and paced down a long rubber-floored corridor. She couldn’t face Tom for lunch because he’d know something was wrong.

  With the soldier still in her fist she marched down a flight of stairs towards what was called the spirit collection. It was not a curated selection of souls, as the name suggested – nothing to do with the anatomy of phantoms or the evolutions of poltergeists – just rooms of specimens preserved in alcohol. There was air conditioning in the baseme
nt, one of the few temperature-controlled places in the museum. The cool air was relieving. Her breathing began to go back to almost normal, although her hands still shook. There was no phone reception down there, so neither Daniel or Tom would be able to call her. As she walked into the luminous corridors of the spirit collection, full of snakes and plants in fluid-filled jars, she imagined the markings on her skin from all the falls and slaps and bumps and fucks and hugs of her life so far, her physical existence sketched out as a topographical map with contour lines marking the terrain of her fingers, toes, tongue. The Essex mud flying up into her face when she stamped in it after the rain, sea holly scratching her ankles. Thumb marks on her wrists and bruises on her thighs, a map of all the places she’d left parts of her body, all the mouths and beds and cities and hotels and desks where she’d shed skin or blood or saliva. She hovered in the museum corridor and imagined her skin renewing itself, her cells transforming and growing over time until – as a molecular biologist would have it – there were none of the original cells left. None of the damage that Daniel had wrought.

  A Raptor Claw

  Daniel stood absolutely still at his hotel window after putting down the phone. The window faced a nineteenth-century military cemetery, weeping grave angels and wonky headstones just visible through sunlit trees. On the street below, tourists and students drank coffee or smoked cigarettes in the sunshine. Daniel had spent the previous day walking along the river Spree as it cut like a vein through the centre, but he liked it best in his hotel room. Two dreadlocked backpackers counted coins in their palms below the window and a child licked an ice cream with an expression of extreme, sullen concentration. How the child licked his ice cream briefly made Daniel think of the jaunty ice-cream vans and shark fossil shops in the town where he grew up, but then he focussed back on his immediate surroundings. He listened for noises in the corridor outside his room and in the adjoining rooms. A conversation was going on in Japanese or Chinese. A television in the next-door room droned with ads for toothpaste and action movies.