The Museum of Cathy

by Anna Stothard

  Would you rather try to survive a zombie outbreak or a robot uprising? Jessica had said vaguely, smoking her cigarette.

  Zombie. I’m bad with computers.

  Would you kill your parents if they became zombies or leave them to infect other people?

  Humane annihilation, absolutely.

  I bet you wouldn’t really, said Jennifer. You’d create a sleep rota or something and try to invent a cure, valiantly, against the odds.

  No one has the luxury of personal moral codes during an apocalypse. It’s survival. And anyway I don’t like my mother.

  Oh my god, would you be the savage maniac living in the U-bahn tunnels and becoming one with the night?

  I’d have Tom in the U-bahn tunnels with me, though. I’d stay with Tom even if zombies bit him.

  Apocalypse love, Jennifer had said. Gross.

  Tom, sipping coffee upstairs, had smiled.

  Cathy thought it was probably a quarter past eight now, but wasn’t sure. People would be beginning to worry if she wasn’t downstairs soon, getting ready for the prize-giving at nine o’clock. Tom would certainly be worrying.

  “You must have missed me a little,” Daniel said.

  “No,” she said, although this wasn’t entirely true. She had missed him a great deal when she first left, despite herself, even though for the year before she ran away she used to lie in bed at night and list disasters she’d very much like to befall him. About a year into their relationship they were just small calamities, such as hoping he would trip on his shoelaces in front of his colleagues and or that waitresses would put milk in his coffee when he asked for it black. He never used to say, “I love you”, although she knew he did love her. Once or twice she’d found guns in their chalet, casually left in a drawer or on the night stand. On another occasion the place was searched by police officers, but they didn’t find anything, because he’d hidden his contraband out on the bird sanctuary underneath an upturned boat. Twice she gave him an alibi, said he was at home when he’d been out late. When he took her to class in the morning she’d stare out of the window and wish him paper cuts between his fingers, the jarring noise of road works when he was trying to concentrate, fifty pound notes left in his jean pockets when he put them in the wash, and empty ice trays in the fridge when he wanted whisky. She wished him lice on his pillows and mould on his new loaf of bread and always being in the wrong queue at the airport. As time went on her imagined disasters became more elaborate. She wished him smashed glass under his feet, unexpectedly sharp knives, drunk drivers, and heart disease. Fatal late-onset allergies to bee stings or peanuts, undiagnosed until it was too late. A pocketknife slipping through his fingers onto bare feet, broken exit signs during fires, traffic accidents, police sirens. She’d sit there and list misfortunes in her head, but when he hit her and left her out on the beach all night, when she woke up in the morning with the taste of blood on her tongue, still she returned to his bed the next night. When he broke her collarbone and she spent a week in hospital, she didn’t tell the nurses how it had happened. She could never predict when he was going to hurt her; his was a secret rhythm of anger and penitence.

  “Essex was different without you when I went back. It even smelt different, like maybe they’d sorted out the sewage plant a bit. I missed you,” he said.

  “Will you live there again?” she said politely, although her skin was too hot and her mind was racing. At night she used to dream about how the space between the tendons of his neck would feel under the flat pad of her thumbs, finding their way down to his larynx and then pushing in on it. In her dreams she was so strong that her weight sank him. She’d feel the upward force of his wrists in the grooves of her shoulder as she slept, but she dreamed she was superhuman: the puzzle pieces of their bodies, thumbs and necks, palms and shoulder bones, all forced together with perfect symmetry. She’d wake before the end, shining with sweat and shaking from the exertion.

  “Only if you came with me,” he replied. Cathy could smell Daniel’s body in the warm museum air as they stood close to each other. It was sweat, deodorant, and the tang of swimming pool chlorine. He used to swim every day in Essex, his big body sliding through the surf and then emerging, his curly hair wet, snot in his nose. Each day we breathe about 23,040 times. We can close our eyes and our ears but smell is inescapable. It goes straight from the nose to the hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for long-term memory. Cathy hated the smell of roses and violets, tweed and old books. Her father had been gin and dandruff shampoo and, later, when he was really ill, rot. Her mother was icing sugar and sleep sweat.

  “You could be a carpenter again. You were a good carpenter.”

  “Will you come home with me, Kit-Kat?” he said.

  “No,” she shook her head.

  “This won’t ever be your home,” he said. “I’m your home. I’m back.”

  “You’re not my home any more.”

  Daniel stared at her then – unexpectedly – he looked away, as if he was backing down. He never used to back down.

  “What’s that one?” Daniel said abruptly, changing the subject, pointing to a tray of green moths on someone’s desk.

  “African Moon moths,” she said.

  “This one?”

  “Fireflies.” Trays of grub-like creatures were attached to minute handwritten labels, each with antennae as long as their wings.

  “Didn’t you and Jack used to try and catch them in Essex?”

  “Yeah.” They would flash on July evenings in Lee-Over-Sands and she’d catch them in jam jars. The females were grub-like and flightless with thoraxes that glowed yellow and green. They’d band together on stones and hedges, raising their luminescent abdomens to the moon, waving them seductively from side to side. The winged males fluttered around in high excitement, a bit like moths, but glowing weakly. Their adult lives lasted just a few days, maybe a week at the most and in that time they had to find a mate and have their babies and then expire, exhausted. It was beetle melodrama, frantic passion, courtship dances and competitions for affection, short pleasure and fast death.

  Her feelings for Daniel had always been blurred, like a battle going on inside her. For example, when she left Essex for Los Angeles, after months of planning, at the last minute she’d taken one of Daniel’s T-shirts with her. She’d been terrified that he’d wake up and stop her but she still doubled back, her suitcase already on the deck, tiptoeing into her bedroom to grab a T-shirt hanging on the edge of the bed where he was sleeping. Perhaps part of her had wanted to be caught or maybe she really did just want to keep his smell, although by the time she arrived in Los Angeles a miniature bottle of her mother’s perfume had spilt in the suitcase and the shirt no longer smelt of him. She pretended to herself that she was scared of any reprisal for what she did after leaving Daniel, yet this wasn’t the whole story. Far worse than the physical fear was the little masochistic nugget in the back of her mind that told her she was only pretending to be the sort of person Tom could love; that she was in fact still the feral, guilty girl from years ago with bruised ribs and a black eye sitting next to Daniel with her toes in the estuary mud. The level-headed part of her knew she’d probably be dead by now if she’d stayed with him and that she was vastly happier without him. Yet it was this nasty twitch towards the past that truly terrified her, the battle in her mind, the sense that maybe it would be easier to stop pretending and just slink back in time with Daniel. She was scared that it would be easy to go back to the patterns that she knew so well, rather than stay with patterns that made her happy.

  She smiled as she stood in her office now. Daniel smiled back, close to Cathy’s face. In her lowest moods she wondered if she had called the police not to keep him from coming after her, but as a crutch to stop her from going back to him.

  “Let’s go downstairs. We can talk downstairs. You’re scaring me.”

  “I’d rather talk her
e,” he said. “You wouldn’t be here in this job if it wasn’t for me,” he said. “You wouldn’t have a degree. You’d still be counting moths in Essex. You don’t seem very grateful.”

  Daniel had paid her father’s medical bills, and her university fees. She’d known how he got the money, but she took it anyway.

  “I’m grateful for everything you did for Dad and me in Essex.”

  She heard a creak outside her office now. It was probably an old pipe or some other element of the museum building warping in this midsummer heat, beams changing shape or plaster cracking, but she was startled. The building appeared to have been melting this week.

  “Cathy?” came the voice of Tom a few corridors over. “You back here?”

  Cathy winced. She didn’t want Tom to walk in on this. Daniel obviously didn’t, either, because he picked up Jack’s objects from the counter. He put some cars, a handful of matchboxes, the watch and glasses in the Oxo Cube box. He picked up her shoes and handbag and came up close to her. She had an urge to touch him and run away simultaneously, so stayed absolutely still and rooted to the spot.

  “I want to talk about Jack,” Daniel said quietly, under his breath. “I want to talk about the night he died. That’s all. Will you do that for me?”

  “Yes,” she said simply.

  There was no other answer she could have given to that question, or nothing her body could have done except lead Daniel quietly through the opposite door from the one she had first brought him through. She took him away from the bird galleries, away from Tom, and into the quiet depth of the museum. During all their time together after it had happened, they’d never actually spoken about the night Jack died. They spoke around it, hinted at it, referenced it but had never had a conversation about it. Perhaps we can never escape our childhoods. We walk around with the ghost of previous selves crouched inside us like mariachi dolls. We can run away, but the past-selves will follow. We can pretend to be rid of these incarnations and tell ourselves we are untethered, but habits and ghosts of the past are always lurking.

  Fortune Cookie Messages

  Tom imagined Cathy would be bent over her beetle tray, cataloguing something that she’d been meaning to get round to for a while, or practising her speech. When Cathy was in one of her moods she could often be found with her tweezers poised over cigar boxes full of beetles sent in by amateur collectors, envelopes and tin boxes full of uncategorised bugs. The last row of cabinets in the entomology room was devoted to the thousands of miscellaneous creatures the museum received each year: colourful 1920s cigar boxes full of beetles glued to card scrawled over with the smallest of handwriting, whole drawers of matchboxes sent from the Congo or Borneo and others overflowing with mothy envelopes or rolled up scrolls of paper with cotton coming out of either side to hold the uncategorised bugs inside. These disorganised creatures made Cathy nervous. In spare moments she could be found on a ladder there, untangling the wings of ladybugs from the hind legs of Darkling Beetles.

  A few months after moving to Berlin they’d had an argument about where they would spend the following Christmas. He’d wanted to meet her mother and hadn’t realised that Cathy hadn’t seen the woman since she was eleven. They’d been together a little over a year then and he’d known she wasn’t close to her mother, but had no idea they were completely estranged. Later he’d found her organising seashells quietly in the museum, referencing them against a giant encyclopaedia. Tom had sat on the floor of with his back against the wall and watched her slim fingers handling shells, her downcast blue eyes flickering a little. Another small instalment of her life came out. She put down the shells and took four little toy ballet dancers out of her pocket. They were boys and girls about two inches high, caught in furious pirouettes with red and blue costumes that had faded over time. Some were missing legs, or arms, but she told him now she’d idolised them all and played games in which they were a circus troupe travelling the world. They were gifts from her mother.

  It was unforgivable, Cathy said, that her mother had left her with her alcoholic father in that weird part of the world. Cathy said her mother was dressed in an orange skirt-suit the morning she left, with a little silk scarf around her neck and knee-high black leather boots that squeaked when she walked. She’d smelt of lily-of-the-valley perfume. Cathy had peeked out of the door in her pyjamas and saw suitcases at the door. Her father wasn’t around, but he must have known she was leaving because he never once mentioned her absence. They just muddled on.

  Cathy had looked so fragile that afternoon after she’d told Tom all this, thumbing the ridges and crevices of her ballet dancers and staring at her hands. Tom had touched a ballet dancer with a blue dress, one step closer to knowing Cathy.

  Tom stepped into the solar system exhibition, up past the bespectacled gorilla in the library and the small mammal gallery on the first floor, then up again into the bird galleries on the top floor. He marched through a warren of bird-filled corridors towards Cathy’s moth rooms.

  “Cathy? You back here?” he said as he got near her rooms. The air fell back onto the diluted rhythms of the party downstairs, which was almost directly underneath.

  “Cathy?” he said again.

  He loved the museum’s empty corridors and laboratories at night, all the cluttered spaces holding their breath ready for the next day.

  “Cathy?”

  No reply, so he stepped into her office, which was empty. He sat down on Cathy’s office chair and flicked on the desk light. A fox mask was on the desk, presumably hers, so she’d been here earlier. He looked at the tray of hawkmoths she’d been busy pinning that week. On graph paper nearby were tidy diagrams of torsos and eyes. He opened one of the notebooks lined up on her shelf and his knee fidgeted as it always did, moving up and down. It knocked against a specimen cabinet under her desk, making one of its doors creak open a half-inch against his knees.

  Tom put his hand down onto the cabinet doors. He pushed the chair back and the cabinet door opened a little more. The drawers had typed labels with words like ‘phylogeny’, ‘biogeography’ and ‘wing polymorphism’ on them. He bent down and pulled out one of the drawers open. It was labelled ‘mating frequency and Nosema prevalence’. Inside, he was surprised to see no boring articles on hawkmoths but odd bits and pieces such as a piece of thin white coral, a tiny magpie skull, and a paper airplane he remembered making from a restaurant menu near their apartment a while back.

  He opened another drawer labelled Hyles lineata in which there was a doll’s head, some bird feather specimens, a pink birthday candle and a cassette tape of Sleeping Beauty. The spokes had vomited out a tangle of pink magnetically coated tape and the rivets in the plastic case were covered in what appeared to be mud smudges. He ran his hands over the little pile of her mother’s ballet dancers, all still stretching and reaching. Had she given these drawers boring labels so nobody would look in them, or had the labels belonged to the cabinet before she filled it with these curious objects? They were typed so it wasn’t obvious.

  Tom opened up one of his own sketchbooks, one that he’d thought he’d left on the bus a couple of months ago, which was full of drawings of dinosaurs and parts of Cathy’s body. He observed an oak leaf, train tickets, pretty beer bottle tops. He ran his fingers over a single blue leather glove from this past winter – she’d dropped its twin off Oberhaum Bridge by mistake. Tom smiled, weighing up how angry Cathy would be that he’d gone through her things with the pleasure of seeing this secret collection.

  He’d always been fascinated by how little Cathy appeared to own. A few books and pieces of clothing, but her possessions had been minimalist in her various apartments in Los Angeles and now it was the same in their shared apartment in Berlin. He was messy by nature but because it upset Cathy so much when he left dishes in the sink and trousers on the floor, he was now near immaculate. He owned many things himself: engine parts and bits of bone, paintings and movie posters. When they m
oved to Berlin from Los Angeles she only brought one suitcase with her and shipped just a couple of boxes of what she said was entomology stuff, equipment and books. Obviously it had included the stuff he’d found here.

  He felt as if he’d caught Cathy eating toast over the sink. Tom couldn’t keep himself from smiling at this cabinet: she was a hoarder. He sat back in her chair. His self-contained girlfriend, who ironed her underwear and rarely wanted to speak about the past, was a secret hoarder of autobiographical objects.

  He picked up a bird skull and then a small fish skeleton. He noted the wing bones of a seagull and a couple of fossilised shark teeth. A dried white starfish. Tom unfolded a wad of newspaper clippings in an envelope, opening them under the bright light of Cathy’s desk lamp. The first was a clipping with a school picture of a solemn little boy with wiry black hair and pasty skin, a big nose holding up wonky silver glasses. Tom turned away from the newspaper, considering – just for a moment – that this collection was a map that he ought not to read without her permission: