The Museum of Cathy

by Anna Stothard

  Daniel had liked the military defence pill boxes on the estuary left over from World War II, giant moss-covered stepping stones lined up to stop the tanks rolling inland. The marshland area was transformed from a military defence to an industrial lot for making gravel after the war. Then in the Fifties the holiday cottages were built and the gravel pit turned into a bird sanctuary that filled the space between the estuary and the beach to the right of the houses. At low tide you could wade right out of the houses over the estuary and the marsh and it took just ten minutes to reach the beach. At high tide it would take twenty minutes because you had to go over a rickety bridge and through the bird sanctuary.

  It looks like a fucking ugly alien planet, the painter on that job had said.

  Daniel loved the alien landscape but did not say so. When the tide changed, sucking and pushing, it confused your sense of gravity. The liquid had different textures, depending on whether the tide was coming in or going out. Daniel began arriving early at the site and leaving late so he could walk on the beach at different times of day. Across the water was a small town with two turrets on its peninsular, an aging nuclear power station that sat on the horizon like a lost toy. During breaks from pounding nails and cutting wood Daniel would walk over to the second house from the end, which had a repossession sign in one of its windows.

  Daniel had been a carpenter for three years by then and had saved some money. He’d won a few amateur boxing matches and lived with his parents, so he hardly spent any­thing. He wanted to get started on his life, and didn’t give much thought to the risk of borrowing money from his boss. Daniel’s father thought he was getting ahead of himself and that the area was a dump, built quite literally on a sinking coastline at the edge of a marsh. His dad was a tentative man who never went on holiday or took a day off work. He thought buying the chalet would be a dubious investment, but Daniel badly wanted to own it, to transform it into a shabby-chic weekend retreat for London types and make a profit. The deck on the repossessed house was half fallen down, covered in rusted metal and fishing nets. Peeking through gaps in the boarded-up windows, he could see that the floorboards were warped and the doors hanging off their hinges. An ancient deck chair was upturned in the middle of the living room. Daniel thought he’d put in a second level with glass windows to let in the sun. He imagined he and Jack would spend weekends together crabbing off the deck, watching football in the living room, taking a boat down the estuary, having barbecues as the sun went down over the sea. Jack was nine years old then, a geeky and shy kid whom Daniel adored.

  Only one of the chalets was inhabited that first winter, the one at the estuary’s curve, where a middle aged ginger-haired man spent most of his days wrapped in blankets, bird watching on the deck and sipping whiskey straight from the bottle. The man’s face was lean, with broken capillaries all over his nose and cheeks.

  The seagulls are laughing at us! The drunk had said once, when he saw Daniel peering into the window of the derelict chalet next door. The seagulls were, indeed, giggling. The soundtrack to life on the wrong side of the seawall was provided by these hysterical seagulls.

  Most beautiful place in the world! The drunk shouted against the wind. Daniel agreed. He noticed that a ginger-haired child appeared occasionally at the chalet window, or running over the marshes as if she were being chased. She wasn’t in focus for him then, she was just the daughter of a drunk who lived nearby. Daniel had wondered if Jack would make friends with her when he visited for weekends. Daniel remembered flashes of a kid’s Wellington boots splashing desperately through the mud, a knot of red hair in the distance, a grazed knee running through the marsh, a vague sense of unease, even then, at the sight of her.

  A Lion Mask

  Cathy’s evening dress hung next to Tom’s tuxedo, both in dry-cleaning bags full of the deflated people they were about to become. She’d put their clothes here a few days ago, away from the smell of naphthalene and ethanol that haunted the other floors of the museum. Cathy untangled her dress from its static plastic and stripped off her white shirt and bra, her grey trousers and ballet shoes. She stood naked in front of Tom for a moment with the stone floor cold under her bare feet, surrounded by bones.

  “Should we get married in the museum?” she said.

  “The stuffed polar bear can be ring bearer,” Tom smiled. “Sorry.”

  “Ba-ba-boom,” Cathy smiled at his crap joke.

  Everyone called this room bone cellar. It housed dinosaur vertebrae the size of tractor wheels and mammoth thigh bones that could not easily be transported. Each of the objects was scrawled upon with the name of the quarry from which it had been dug while the museum’s collection number was usually printed more neatly on a fracture. Tom pressed the centre of his broken glasses higher up the ridge of his nose with his index finger. He still had the rabbit mask perched on top of his head. It was cool in the room.

  She took her green dress off its hanger. She’d bought it from Mauerpark flea market the previous week. They’d gone to the market together, perusing East German family photo albums and dolls with knotted hair while buskers beat their drums and played the saxophone in the park beyond. When she got the dress home she found moth holes in the lining, which made her laugh because moths were her area of expertise. Her PhD thesis had been an investigation into the long-held assumption that during a moth’s metamorphosis the caterpillars literally digest their own bodies, liquefying themselves almost completely until only cells called ‘imaginal cells’ survived, blueprints so distinct from the caterpillar that its immune system tries to kill them. She liked that idea but didn’t believe it. Her work had revolved around training caterpillars to avoid certain odours that were associated with a mild shock and discovering that the adult moths continued to avoid these smells after metamorphosis. Cathy had proved that along with these prettily-named imaginal cells, memory-storing neurons must survive the digestion process to become incorporated into the moth’s brain. Childhood was crouched inside the moth, just like the human.

  “What’s a rabbit’s favourite music?” Tom said. Cathy shrugged and Tom ran a finger down her torso from her collarbone all the way to her hip. She often felt a kind of shock when observing that she was indisputably an adult now, baffled by the finality of her limbs and the increasing permanence of each decision she made with them.

  “Hip hop,” Tom answered himself and laughed at his own joke. She laughed too, mostly because he was laughing. “What are you thinking about?” he said.

  “Rabbits?” What Tom would most like to do was to take her apart and observe all her crevices and connections, and then fit her together again. He grew up with a big family of tanned blonde sisters and stepbrothers in a rambling house by Griffith Park in East Hollywood. His father was a heart surgeon and his mother was a screenwriter, both gregarious people who persuaded Cathy to do things like join family softball teams and play board games after dinner. She always felt oddly lonely when his family were nearby, although they were wonderful. It was so different from her family. Elevator doors never closed on Tom, puddles didn’t splash him and airlines never lost his luggage. His parents had told him he was lucky so many times that by the age of ten when he cut out coupons from cereal packets or newspapers and didn’t get sent the gift basket, he assumed there had been a bureaucratic mistake. He said that over the course of his competition-entering childhood, he’d won family tickets to Universal Studios, a crate of sparkling wine, a lifetime supply of Hershey’s Kisses (which turned out to be fifty boxes), a $600 television, a limited edition box set of The Godfather and a camping lantern. He had the confidence of a person who had been loved a great deal, unconditionally, when growing up.

  She’d wanted Tom from the first time they spoke in Venice Beach. He had an easy nonchalance and even his outlandish character-traits, such as how he told terrible jokes and was fascinated with Tarot cards, seemed enviably normal. She would watch him flirt with interns and tourists out in the sunshin
e or in the staff rooms, laying down Tarot cards for them. Death, she’d overheard him saying, mock-solemnly, his mouth frowning and inquisitive eyes smiling with pleasure at the drama of it all, but that’s ok. Death is change. Change is good; it’s what we’re all searching for. She’d overheard girls saying they believed he really was psychic. She told herself she would never allow Tom to read her fortune. The Fool, she imagined him saying to girls.

  It wasn’t difficult to get his attention when she decided to. He seemed confused by his feelings for her, but that didn’t matter. They smiled at each other over staff meetings, ate pizza after work, and he left sketches for her on her desk. Eventually, when she took off her clothes for him in his studio loft a few blocks from the museum, there were Tarot cards strewn over the bed. The Sun. The World. The Hermit. He thought he’d charmed her, but it was Cathy who’d won. He assumed he’d waged war on her remoteness but she’d told him next to nothing of her life. His skin smelt of dirt and, somehow, sunlight. He did not guess that she’d grown up in a place that smelt of sewage, stealing lunch money from her dad’s pocket when he was passed out, and never having friends over. He did not guess that she had learnt to keep her memories trapped inside objects, where mercurial things could be archived and controlled. He did not realise that she spent her life being told she was bad.

  There was dust in Tom’s facial stubble and his bushy eyebrows, thousand-year-old specks that had been eased from a mammoth tibia with a dental pick and camel hairbrush. He always had dirt under his bitten-down fingernails. She’d spent the day cataloguing microscopic wings and antennae, using a needle to excavate the inner matrices of abdomens and thoraxes. She’d taken off his glasses and kissed his warm mouth, moving her hands down under his belt.

  She had to stop herself from acting like it was as much a fight as a fuck, which was how sex had always been before Tom. She’d only slept with two men before. She lost her virginity in one of the bird watching huts on the marshes, aged fifteen, to a gypsy boy whose mouth tasted of the seafood restaurant where he worked. She’d bit the boy’s lip and he bled more than she did. Then, aged nineteen, there had been Daniel, with whom pain was the norm. Tom was different from both. She’d taken Tom’s glasses off and kissed his warm mouth. The love was so different from anything she’d felt before. She did not feel she was merging with him, but that she became a more complete person in his presence. She was larva wriggling from her chrysalis then; she was turning into something new and she loved him for the freedom she felt in his presence. From that moment with Tom on the floor of his apartment her nightmares became a little less regular. She did not wake up five times a night any more, hearing the squall of seagulls and thinking she’d been knocked unconscious. Her dreams of choking, or drowning, became less intense, and often if she slept in the crook of his arm she didn’t dream at all.

  She never lied to Tom, exactly; she just never told him the entire truth. She did not want him to know of the person she’d been before she met him. A man like Tom never would have fallen in love with a girl like the Cathy of Lee-Over-Sands. His girlfriends had names like Arbela and Cynthia, with long tanned legs and weekly tennis lessons. Being with Tom made her past feel untraceable and she liked that feeling. She wanted him to always love her like he did that first night and never be disappointed in her, or disgusted by things she had done before she knew him.

  The air was still warm as Daniel merged with other guests walking on a red carpet towards the museum’s ornate iron door. Crowd barriers straddled either side of the pathway, with photographers lurking behind them along with five ­absurd-looking protesters wearing swimming costumes, their skin covered in some glossy black substance. It was supposed to look like petroleum; maybe it was body paint or food dye. Two of the activists held up signs with photographs of pelicans covered in oil. There had been an oil spill off the coast of Denmark recently and thousands of birds had died. The protesters shouted out ‘Slick PR Won’t Cover Your Spill!’ as guests walked into the museum. Daniel stretched his aching fingers. The sea eagle claw weighed down one of his suit pockets.

  The tuxedo-clad doormen kept glancing up at the semi­naked protesters, distracted from their jobs collecting invitations. Daniel stepped easily into the party at the elbow of an elderly woman with long grey hair and a velvet ball gown. Nobody asked Daniel to show his invitation. Despite feeling as if he’d just been untethered, that people avoided him in the street now, he walked easily into the party. The throng of people moved forward. Nobody told him that he was out of place amongst guests with smooth hands who wore velvet and smiles and gems. A waiter offered him champagne while a waitress handed him a papier-mâché lion eye mask with an elastic loop to go around his head. The mask had big eyes and varnished orange skin. He put it on, covering the top of his face.

  A woman wearing a papier-mâché zebra held her skirt hems off the ground in the marble-floored entrance hall and a man wearing a toucan did up his shoelaces. Daniel almost expected Cathy to appear immediately in front of him. Instead there were dinosaurs strung like puppets surrounded by pigs with exaggerated eyelashes and owls with little black beaks. The neck of the tallest dinosaur nearly reached the room’s triangulated glass ceiling. The heart of the Brachiosaurus, a sign said underneath it, would have weighed 400kg, as much as a horse. Other, smaller, dinosaurs ran alongside the giant, in between all these people.

  Daniel continued through the party, uncomfortable in his suit. He didn’t like crowds. At the back of the atrium a four-person jazz band was playing next to a 150-million-year-old bird trapped in Bavarian limestone. It was a lizard with wings, a link between dinosaurs and birds, according to the sign. The creature appeared to have been dancing with wild abandon, arms flung up in a chaos of pleasure before getting squashed mid-pirouette. He had come to the museum yesterday to give her the Kissing Beetle, thinking he would wait for her outside, but then he saw a van unloading party supplies into the museum’s side door. A red carpet had lolled from the back of the van like a tongue and there was a sign above the door wishing the museum a happy 150th birthday.

  The air was sludgy and too hot. He scanned the crowd for Cathy. She might not even be there. She wasn’t a huge fan of parties. Guests were taking photos of themselves with the open-mouthed seven-foot polar bear at the back of the room, while a giraffe head jutted out from the wall amongst deer and leopards. If Cathy were with him she’d describe their characters: there was no such thing as an inanimate object in her book. These would be eager bulls, a flirtatious giraffe, a dubious fox. She was always ‘doing the voices’ of objects, even after she’d grown up. Sunglasses would often have conversations with muddy boots in the chalet they used to share on the coast; her fragments of strangely shaped driftwood would discuss the weather. He thought of white sheets and Cathy’s body tangled up in them, all nearly the same morning-white-light colour, her body and the cotton.

  Daniel turned towards the gems, where more guests were lingering and chatting along the left hand side of the room. In high-tech cabinets of spot-lit rocks, Serbian Jadeite was displayed next to a Martian meteorite that had fallen near Tissint in Morocco in July 2011. He caught sight of his face in a mirror behind the meteorite and almost didn’t recognise himself in his suit. He hadn’t been clean-shaven in years. He could easily pass in the crowd, he thought, surprised, although the semi-circles under his eyes resembled three-day-old bruises. The roots of his curly hair had flecks of grey in its black coils now. The skin was lined around his eyes and mouth.

  At the far end of the atrium he could see a sliver of daylight through the front door and he wished he were out there in the fresh air instead of in this stifling gallery of gems and dead bones. He badly wanted to be alone again, far away from all these people, back in the safety and control of his hotel room. He told himself he was just here to see a girl who had done a great deal of harm to him in his life, to give her a gift in person, to scratch a perfectly reasonable itch, to know what her voice sounded like now, w
hat expression her eyes would have when she saw him again.

  Cathy stood on the balcony that circled the atrium and watched the party fill up below her. The museum no longer smelt of bones and children but like a smart department store. Tom was speaking to some of the museum’s donors below her. He appeared schoolboy-ish in anything that wasn’t made to measure, a teenager in the midst of a growth spurt. He was an excellent networker, though, always speaking to the right people and smiling at their jokes. Cathy stared around the atrium at all its obvious wealth and the shoes without scuff marks. Each person was two-faced, with their animal masks on their faces or heads. There were maybe five hundred guests in the atrium and adjoining galleries, all speaking above music that echoed in a tall space built exclusively for museum hush. The sound of protesters on the lawn outside was mostly drowned out by the jazz band and close-packed conversation, but between songs Cathy heard chanting. She hardly knew anyone in the room, and even the ones she did know looked like strangers tonight. She pretended to herself that she wasn’t scanning the room for Daniel. He’d always hated crowds and she’d never seen him at a party before, certainly not one like this.

  A television newsreader was holding court below her. Cathy visualised the guy without skin or three-piece suit, his skeleton arranged on a varnished wood block. The women he was surrounded by would be presented alongside like gazelles at a watering hole. These guests were the current victors on this planet, eating canapés around the naked bones of species that had been remiss enough to allow their extinction. So the humans peered at their ancient predecessors, gossiped over fossilised bones, magnanimously considered buying raffle tickets to support the museum’s upkeep. Cathy hoped that one day another species would create new museums and amble around staring at human spinal columns and fossilised toes.