The Museum of Cathy

by Anna Stothard

  What Cathy hated about memories was how they changed. You’d think that once something had happened, its dimensions would be solid. Things happen one way, after all. There are facts and fictions, only it’s difficult to hold on to the line when occurrences become memories. We see only splinters of our surroundings, portions that are later tied together to create the illusion of a scene. The story of our past is changed by the activity of seeing and recalling. Each time we remember an event it has the capacity to shimmer into something else. We remember the act of remembering. We remember what we tell ourselves. Remembering is an art, Cathy knew.

  It took Cathy fifteen minutes to climb up onto the roof of the Berlin Natural History Museum that evening in her long dress with moth holes in the lining. She had to stop a few times, trying not to look down, but eventually managed to haul herself up over a stone frieze and onto the flat rooftop. She stood with her head in the Berlin clouds.

  Insulated pipes snaked the rooftop amongst metal chimney tops and frosted glass skylights. Ledges of crumbling wall were decorated with old graffiti – a woman’s eyes, an hourglass and a tag of indistinguishable bubble lettering. The botanists’ garden of dahlias, daisies and herbs decorated one corner. In another some deck chairs were folded up and weighted down with cinder blocks.

  In the windows of the hotel opposite the back of the museum Cathy could see a woman staring at the television while breastfeeding her baby, a man typing on his computer, a teenager arguing with her father, a fat man eating a hamburger. She imagined releasing the scream she’d felt in her throat since she opened the Kissing Beetle that morning. The tourists in their hotels would stop watching TV and feeding their babies and eating hamburgers, all turning to see a girl in an evening gown screaming on top of the Natural History Museum.

  The jazz music stopped as Tom and Iris stepped out of the elevator. To escort Iris out of the front door would have drawn attention to her, but if he took her round to the back door he might miss Cathy’s award, so he ushered her up to the balcony around the atrium so that he could look down at the party and locate Cathy. It was nine o’clock; Iris stood next to him wearing the Christmas jumper and children’s leggings. The museum director was on the stage, adjusting his microphone for his speech.

  “I still can’t see Cathy,” Tom scanned the crowd of donkeys, birds and zebras in evening clothes. At the back of the room a flash of green silk caught Tom’s attention for a second. The crowd briefly parted, changing shape, but it turned out to be an old lady’s emerald-coloured jacket rather than Cathy’s dress. The Brachiosaurus skeleton loomed. It was almost as if each person had chosen the animal that most suited them, whether they were sheep or bears. Tom thought back to when he’d last seen Cathy that evening. A layer of sweat covered his body: he thought he smelt hormonal and as if he were an adolescent again. He wanted a cold shower, a glass of iced water, and to touch Cathy’s shoulder. Perhaps she’d fainted somewhere in the museum, or she knew he’d gone through her objects and was avoiding him, or she was in a bar on the other side of Berlin and he wouldn’t see her again until tomorrow morning. If he could just touch Cathy, then everything would be all right again.

  The museum party was getting louder and nobody stopped talking or laughing until the director cleared his throat and tapped the microphone to announce that the prize-giving was about to begin. Tom wiped sweat from his brow and neck. He could feel it collecting between his shoulder blades. The thin corridor they stood on was decorated with oil paintings and stag heads, creating hundreds of eyes staring down into the atrium below.

  “We are a small planet tucked away in the corner of a galaxy amongst millions of galaxies,” the museum director began, addressing the crowd of tipsy guests. “Natural history museums teach us the vastness of time and how little of it the human species has occupied. Our role over the last two hundred years has been to tell stories through objects, to allow the public to interact with their own history.”

  The director paused and touched his moustache. He had it professionally trimmed once a week, so it was said. From above Tom could see triangles of sweat on backs across the party. He could see bald patches and paper animal noses, but no Cathy. He dialled her number again, but her phone had been turned off.

  “But we must also look to its future,” said the director. “We must learn from yesterday’s narratives and weave these stories into new visions of tomorrow. I would like to raise a toast to two hundred years of inspiration, science and magic. Happy birthday to the Berlin Natural History Museum!”

  “Happy birthday!” the crowd echoed.

  Tom badly wanted Cathy to be standing opposite him. He wanted to be in a flea market with her, looking through tat. He wanted to be in a park or a garden or an airport. The biggest hailstone ever weighed more than 1kg and fell in Bangladesh in 1986, he’d say to her if she were here now. An individual blood cell takes about 60 seconds to make a complete circuit of the body, she might reply.

  Matches

  A gust of air skimmed right over Daniel’s head, making him start and turn to look up at the animal faces lining the walls. He lit another match and saw a tiny blue-feathered bird – a live one – moving its wings on one of the larger stag antlers, shifting its weight from foot to foot and tucking its wings closer under its taupe neck. It must have flown through an open window and got lost in the unusual heat, unable to work out how to get out again. The feathery knot of muscle flung itself full-pelt off from the antlers and down the corridor, drawing a thread through the dark corridor like a fish sliding through a slipstream. It hovered in the air at the end of the room as if waiting for Daniel to follow it and Daniel had a sense that the bird was deep in thought. Daniel didn’t move. The match went out. He lit another, inhaling the sulphur and wood smell in the air. He knew the creature in front of him was a swallow. Hordes of these birds used to come to Lee-Over-Sands in the spring and dance on the marshes. The bird stared at Daniel.

  One magpie was sorrow, Cathy’s mother used to say. Two was joy. An albatross meant getting lost at sea and kingfishers meant getting your wish. Swallows, he remembered, were a symbol of re-birth. He held Jack’s Oxo Cube box. He wanted to be on the beach with Jack, teaching his little brother to make a fire in the sand. Collecting wood, digging a ditch half way down the water’s edge, lighting tightly coiled torches of newspaper to throw into the kindling. He thought of Cathy sitting on the coral storeroom floor where he’d left her, awake by now perhaps and biting her nails while staring at the door, digging under the corners of her toenails for the dirt that collected there at the edges every day. She’d be listening for creaks outside the door, waiting for him to come back, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to be near her. The two swollen knuckles on his right hand were throbbing again. It would surely rain soon. He wanted to be in some wide-open space, as the bird probably did. He wanted to be alone and in control of himself, not close to Cathy and, because of her, lost in memories that hurt him. The swallow launched itself off again in the half-darkness. As it flew through a slim gap in a door and disappeared from sight, Daniel wanted the museum ceiling to dissolve and all the solid objects, the shards of bone and fossil, to splinter into a million pieces.

  The bird had gone. Daniel moved into a room where a giraffe skin was hung up on a rail inside what looked like a half-open wardrobe. He lit another match to see it clearly, sliding the door a little further to reveal the skins of elephants and alligators, otters and seals, warthogs, gibbons and bats, all lined up as if they were costumes for a surreal theatrical production. Daniel blew out the match and continued with long strides in the direction of Cathy. He loved the smell of blown out matches. You didn’t answer the door when I came over, Cathy had said to him. You only remember what you want to. As he walked down the corridor back towards the coral storeroom, he kept stopping to look at things, biding his time. He ran his finger along books and touched the tail of a stuffed fox. He needed to go back and check Cathy was okay, but he was relucta
nt. As he walked through the museum he imagined she would be sitting on the floor and he’d sit down next to her, lean against the wall, his knees and his head in his hands. He wouldn’t touch her. He should never have touched her at all. He would turn towards her and be honest. He would look her in the eye and say: I didn’t answer the door and I’m sorry. There’s nothing in the world I regret more than that moment.

  She would smile.

  It wasn’t your fault, she’d say simply. We should forgive each other.

  He would like to be forgiven. The night before Jack died, Daniel had watched several films in his room: two Bonds, some porn. He was with a leggy girl who was smoking menthol cigarettes that night. The two of them had put Jack to bed, pretending to be grown-ups, then got drunk on cheap gin like the teenagers they were. They’d spent the night fucking and drinking and early the next morning Daniel had heard a noise at the front door that sounded like a fox scratching at the wood underneath the chalet. He went out into the kitchen, not so much to investigate as because it woke him up and he knew he needed a glass of water. He heard noises on the front stairs, but at that moment he was naked and stank of come and beer, so only looked through a window at her. Cathy was wearing a pair of tracksuit bottoms but no top, and her knees were hunched up to her chin. Her hair was wet like she’d just had a shower or been swimming and she was taking in hectic gulps of sea air with her eyes scrunched closed. Her face was blotchy from the tears. She leant over and banged at the door in frustration but Daniel didn’t open it. He thought she must have had an argument with Jack – maybe this was what a lover’s tiff looked like for ten-year-olds. She was the sort of kid who tumbled and screamed rather than fell and cried. Since he’d met her she’d fractured a bone in her foot from jumping off a wall, she’d had to be rescued from the roof of a derelict chalet while trying to save Apricot the tabby cat, who afterwards jumped down easily of his own accord, and sliced open her knee falling down on glass at the fairground where she wasn’t allowed to go. Daniel hadn’t wanted to talk to his melodramatic feral neighbour just then. After a few moments she appeared to get bored of sitting there making trouble, sniffed her tears away, and walked back to her own chalet. He’d never told her that he remembered this.

  Now Daniel opened the door to the coral room, but Cathy wasn’t there where he’d left her in the darkness amongst chalky white fingers of sea garden. He closed his eyes tight and felt his head swim with a feeling he didn’t understand: he realised it could be relief. Her shoes and handbag sat on the cork floor and the window was open. It looked out on what Daniel now noticed was scaffolding erected around a small courtyard of skips and bike racks. Daniel touched pieces of coral in the otherwise empty storeroom.

  He opened the yellow cabinet on the far side of the room and peered inside at plastic and glass bottles in all shapes and sizes, labelled ‘Isopropyl alcohol’, ‘Ethylene glycol’, ‘Propylene glycol’ and such. He picked out a smallish bottle labelled ‘Ethyl acetate’ that had a symbol of a flame on the bottle. He opened it and smelt the flammable kick of nail polish or glue. It made him think of throwing white spirit into bonfires to make Jack and Cathy scream on the beach years ago, all of them watching the flame leap up and eat everything in its path. Daniel put the bottle in his jacket pocket. He walked back out of the coral storeroom again with his blood pumping hard.

  Cathy took a few steps to an open skylight in the roof of the bird gallery. She peered down the hole into the room of stuffed birds. The ceiling was low, maybe seven feet above the floor. She sat at the edge of the skylight with her legs hanging inside the building, and then turned over so she was on her stomach with her torso on the roof, her legs still dangling inside. She pushed off and hung by her arms like a child jumping out of a tree. The jolt hurt her shoulders a little as she let go to fall barefoot on the wooden floors.

  Cathy landed right in front of a cabinet of swans, bending her knees so as not to make too much noise. She immediately listened for any door hinges or floorboards creaking around her. Daniel was probably somewhere in these rooms. The air smelt just faintly of mould. She could hear music from downstairs, but not much else. When a swan flies against the wind, her mother used to say, it is a sign of rain. If a child sees a dead swan, the child will become ill. A single swan on a lake means death is in the air. Cathy stood absolutely still amongst the bored and glassy eyes of stuffed birds. A stuffed flamingo is an intensely sad thing and she tried not to look, but still imagined it wriggling awake on those long legs.

  The music stopped downstairs and a microphone squeaked. She was not directly above the atrium, but could still hear the party. She guessed that this was the start of the prize-giving ceremony and it was a relief to have some indication of what time it was. She could still get there. She’d be a bedraggled sight with a thumping eye and no shoes, but it would be worth it. Aged ten, she didn’t care what people thought of her: she could be that person again. She could collect a prize for research she’d work hard on. She could leave Daniel roaming this museum on his own; she didn’t have to play cat and mouse with him. She could have a late night dinner with Tom at the Turkish café at the end of their road while people stared at them because they were all dressed up eating falafel with their fingers. She could begin to tell him about what happened to her. Her knee could touch Tom’s knees under the table, her fingers brushing lightly over his just to say hello. Later she could watch Tom inhale cigarettes in the dark on the balcony of their apartment, and next week they could buy a cat, and next month they could get married. When she kissed him then, maybe there would be dust in his stubble and his eyebrows, thousand-year-old specks that had been eased from a mammoth tibia just like the first time they’d kissed in Los Angeles. Yet Cathy still had a bad feeling in her gut and she could have sworn she could smell the faintest hint of smoke, or burning, in the air.

  She ought to have continued through the bird gallery and down the stairs, but instead she stood still and sniffed the air again just to make sure. Perhaps it was her imagination, adrenalin confusing her senses, but she could smell burnt-out matches and hot dust. Maybe it was just another alien stink sweating out of the walls in this heat wave, but it made her palms sweat. Nerves had always heightened her sense of smell dramatically. As she stood there she did not notice a blue-feathered swallow watching from the room’s far corner. The bird swooped through the dusty air, neat as a paper airplane, to catch its breath in the opposite corner of the room. Although Cathy felt a shiver, a twitch of moving air, she was distracted by the smell and remained unaware of the little flash of life in the museum full of death. She had a picture of the museum as an origami structure that was re-arranging itself while she was inside it and not letting her escape, while new doors were being created and corridors were stretching. She also felt as if she was being watched, but this wasn’t unusual for her. Cathy would often turn a corner in this museum and sense she was being observed, only to see a stuffed polar bear or grumpy squirrel glaring from a doorway or cabinet.

  She listened for the slow groan of cabinet doors or footsteps around her, attentive to any noise that might be Daniel in the shadows. Experimentally, just to put her mind at rest before continuing downstairs to collect her prize, she walked away from the stairs and instead in the direction of her office, to see if the burning smell would intensify or disappear. She moved through two more small rooms and into the corridor lined with warehouse shelving and the drawers of colourful birds’ eggs outside her office. As she walked, the smell got stronger, a bit more chemical. Cathy felt sick, hearing her blood beating in her ears, and she didn’t notice that the precise, almost mannerly, swallow had followed behind her in loops and dives.

  The swallow flew with quick and stealthy wing-beats. It landed on shelves and cabinets between dives. The museum director was still giving a speech; she could hear muffled German and a squeaking microphone through the floorboards. She had time to run out of these interlocking storerooms back through the bird gallery onto
the landing and down the stairs, then through the solar system and make it into the atrium for her prize, but she didn’t move. Cathy heard an odd swish, a ruffle. The swallow knocked something off a shelf and made her jump. Her head throbbed, surrounded as it was by cabinets. The bird must have landed softly, because no noise followed the crash. She held her breath and waited for Daniel’s breathing on her neck, or his hands on her shoulder.

  Downstairs, the museum director stopped talking and Cathy found herself standing outside her office door. She thought of how Daniel used to love setting fire to her toys on the beach when they were younger, melting her dolls and turning toy soldiers into puddles. She closed her eyes.

  All her scars tingled then, that little museum of experience on her skin. In natural history museums the whole bursting expanse of nature was boiled down into a story that you could walk through, room-to-room, creature-to-creature: butterflies born in the Amazon and pinned in Italy, which somehow found their way to Berlin, a rhino shot on the Indian subcontinent in the early nineteenth century and then skinned, stuffed and shipped to Paris, acquired by the Berlin Natural History Museum in 1910, swapped for a bald eagle and a pot-bellied pig. Same with a body: a bite on her thigh, rope burn on her ankles, a mark on her knuckles where the skin tore to the bone after he smashed it into a wall. The humerus bone in her arm, snapped from being pushed off the deck. The scar on her forehead from hitting her head on a window and smashing it. He’d driven her to the hospital and sobbed after that episode, bringing her hundreds of tulips over a series of days. She could have told someone then, but she didn’t because she was weak and didn’t know how she’d survive without him. Her body had healed; the feverish dreams of seagulls scavenging inside her head had subsided. She’d kept their world secret for such a long time. Her scars and her objects were all just stories now.