The Museum of Cathy

by Anna Stothard

  The smell of burning drifted in the air and she heard a noise coming from inside her office door. Music started up downstairs at the same moment, her chance to accept her prize lost now. She could taste his skin in her mouth from where his fingers had earlier touched her gums. She put her tongue in the gap where the molar used to be and inhaled the smell of burning. She stood very still outside her office, then pushed through the door.

  The birthday toast echoed amongst high ceilings, dinosaur skeletons and cabinets of gems. There was a wave of applause. Tom called Cathy’s cell again, but it was still turned off.

  “I’m extremely excited to be awarding the prestigious Loye grant to a young scientist with enormous promise,” said the director, whom Tom thought had always had a bit of a crush on Cathy, “In order that she can continue her research into the retention of memory through metaosis in Tobacco Hawkmoths. Would Dr Cathy Miller please come and join me on the stage?” The room applauded.

  Cathy did not appear on stage. She wasn’t amongst the other entomologists, or in the huddle of scientists waiting to get their prizes. The applause died down and eyes began to rove the room. Tom and Iris stepped backwards in unison from the balcony edge, having shifted forward slightly to watch the prize-giving, merging with the shadows again so nobody could see up there. The hiatus continued an awkwardly long time.

  “Does she have long red hair?” whispered Iris to Tom in the darkness.

  Tom didn’t reply to the question; after what seemed an age, the director made his apologies and continued on with the other awards. A microbiology professor went up, his face like bacteria under a microscope, a wildlife photographer marred by acne was next, a paleobiologist almost tripped over his feet on his way up to the stage.

  “How do you know she has red hair?” Tom said to Iris.

  “Wild guess, but I think maybe I saw her outside the museum earlier. She had her head in her hands and looked really upset.”

  “Why do you think it was her?”

  “A hunch. She said it was the heat making her ill, but she looked scared.”

  “Scared in what way?”

  “She looked pale and flinched when I touched her.”

  “She is pale, and most people flinch when strangers touch them.”

  “She flinched like she was scared of something. She was wearing a prim white shirt and grey trousers.”

  The jazz music started up again and Tom’s phone vibrated. He fumbled too-eagerly to get it out of his pocket, feeling tension roll off him at the thought of Cathy’s voice on the other end of the line. Instead it was a misspelt text from an unknown number, presumably Iris’s boyfriend.

  “I think it’s your Tasmanian tree hugger,” Tom said and showed Iris his phone. The party was suddenly back in full swing, drunk and loud, the prize giving finished. Iris wouldn’t be noticed slipping out of the party now.

  “She was scared,” said Iris. “I liked her. I’m glad you made me put on the Christmas jumper.”

  It was a wet kiss that lingered, cool on his skin for the briefest of moments and then evaporated by the time she’d turned away. Iris padded down the stairs and out of the museum’s front door wearing the Christmas sweatshirt.

  A Vertebra

  Cathy’s office was darker now, lit only by the moonlight coming through the windows. Daniel had struck a match as he approached Cathy’s cabinet. He’d stepped into Cathy’s office through the same door he’d left from earlier. He swung Cathy’s cabinet door open wider and was glad to be here now, to have all her objects and catalogued memories to himself. The bottle of chemical liquid was weighing down his pocket, crammed in next to the raptor claw that he hadn’t given her. He sat down on the floor and put the Oxo Cube box next to him. He took out drawers that contained objects from her life in Berlin, including photographs of her kissing her American, and sketches that looked nothing like her, except for a hint in the eyes. The first match burnt out and he lit two more. He pushed her objects roughly away, scattering them across the room. He took the rest of the drawers from the cabinet and arranged them on the floor around him. He picked out the objects he’d sent her: a coiled shell with glossy pink insides, the skull of a seagull, a fish spine, bird eggs, dried starfish, a fragile sea dollar, all things he’d imagined her loving and caring for. He took his time examining these objects, then he observed some of the objects that had been in her chalet when he’d first got back to Essex, which she had put away so as not to upset him. Daniel unfolded a bunch of newspaper clippings from a yellowing envelope. Inside was an article with a picture of Jack in his school uniform, the same photo they’d used at his funeral. The photographer had obviously told him to smile, but he looked clownish.

  Daniel slipped it into his pocket. He’d like a picture of Jack’s grass-stained knees to keep or a recording of his voice carrying across the marsh, asking what was for dinner. Or a picture of Cathy and Jack on the beach surrounded by tin cans and bicycle spokes and teacups without handles and such. Daniel had been so happy then.

  He picked up some Polaroids of Cathy’s teenage body. He put his thumb on her freckled white hands and on her toe, then on a captured shadow between her open legs. With the dying end of the last match he’d lit, he thoughtfully set alight the corner of the photograph of her legs. It caught immediately, curling, letting off a rancid chemical smell, turning the Polaroid’s edges into lacy ash before they disintegrated. The heat made the chemicals in the picture turn watery red. He wanted the stuffed museum alligators and birds she loved to decay, for the skeletons to divide from each other and the feathers to burn off the skin of all the dried-out birds.

  He no longer wanted to be weighed down by Cathy’s presence. He wanted all the misguided gifts he’d sent her to collapse into nothing, from shells to the Kissing Beetle. He wanted her mother’s toy ballerinas to evaporate, the miniature glass bottles that had held Bombay Sapphire and still smelt of gin, the mouse skulls and dried flowers: he wanted it all to be far away. He thumbed the bottle of Ethyl acetate in his pocket, thinking of the pleasure he used to find in burning objects on the beach when Cathy and Jack were little, the stench of incinerating plastic and curling newspaper as they ruined dolls and cars together, sand spitting off the driftwood as it turned to ash and the toy soldiers became faceless. Daniel imagined pouring Ethyl acetate on Cathy’s objects and throwing a match on top so the memories spat and collapsed into nothing, the fire spreading quickly through the museum from room to room. He envisioned the satisfaction of walking away while the museum flung smoke into the sky and everything Cathy loved was wrecked.

  He didn’t love her any more. As the photograph burnt away it was a revelation, or a punch, but it didn’t feel like a surprise. It was more as if the realisation had finally wormed its way to the surface of his mind. He used the corner of the photograph to set alight one of Jack’s toy soldiers. Not Jack’s favourite soldier with the red coat, but a small khaki plastic one with an orange hat. The body morphed, the plastic fumed, then the body collapsed. As the soldier melted, the tight feeling in Daniel’s gut disbanded slightly.

  You didn’t answer the door. He repeated the words in his head. That morning, before he’d found Jack’s body, he’d gone to his room to wake him up, but his bed was empty. Daniel figured he’d gone to Cathy’s for breakfast, so ate toast with strawberry jam on his own and watched The Simpsons. The girl he had slept with the previous night was snoring gently and dribbling on Daniel’s pillow. After finishing his coffee and toast he knocked on Cathy’s parents’ door at the house at the curve of the estuary. He could see Cathy in her pyjamas watching a cartoon and eating cereal while her mother was making lemon cake in the kitchen. Cathy’s dad looked even more hung-over than Daniel felt. Cathy had stared insolently at him for a moment, and then went back to the TV. Her dad said Jack hadn’t come over for breakfast that morning.

  Where’s Jack? Daniel had said to Cathy. At that moment he remembered the crying outs
ide his door a few hours earlier but didn’t mention it. Were you with him?

  We went swimming but he came back ages ago, she replied.

  Daniel had walked out onto the marsh shouting Jack’s name. Cathy’s dad came out with him and they walked in opposite directions. Daniel scratched an itch on his arm as he turned a corner past some rocks on the beach and in the early morning light saw a pile of clothes that had washed up there. Birds were dancing in the waves at the water’s edge, playing chase with the sea foam. The air was cool. The sky was white. Getting closer, Daniel saw they were Jack’s clothes - Jack’s lurid green GAP sweatshirt, his stonewash jeans - and began to run. Up close, he found one trainer and two blue socks, one pulled down slightly over a bloated foot. The child’s face was misshapen. Daniel wouldn’t have recognised him if it weren’t for the clothes. Daniel shouted for help and the words were sucked up into the empty sky and marsh around them. He had to shout several times before he heard Cathy’s father’s shout back. Daniel put his lips to his brother’s lips and tasted cold seawater and vomit. Cathy’s father must have called the ambulance, because eventually the noise of sirens mixed with the cries of the seagulls. Daniel kept doing mouth to mouth until it came. Cathy’s father must have called his parents, too. When Daniel reached into his brother’s pocket for some clue to what had happened he only found Jack’s favourite lead toy solider in there. His parents wouldn’t let him ride in the ambulance with his brother’s body after he was pronounced dead.

  One of Jack’s wet trainers remained on the floor next to the ambulance tyre marks; it must have fallen off when they took his body. It had Cathy’s scribbles all over it, which had made their mother angry a few weeks ago. They were blurred from the seawater. Daniel’s parents had gone to the hospital, but they’d told Daniel not to come. Daniel was nineteen and his whole world changed in that moment. He’d been hung-over after a night of gin and porn while his baby brother drowned.

  As the soldier descended into a puddle of plastic limbs, the flame weakening, Daniel heard a swish of air in the room and looked up to see Cathy standing there at the door.

  Tom marched through a gleaming steel taxidermy lab. In huge silver tanks around the corners of these high-tech rooms, animal bones were exposed to enzymes that stripped off flesh, finely timed according the size of the skeleton. A pelican was being restored on the sideboard, the shrunken skin on his neck revealing stitches and stuffing. An elongated penguin sat in the middle of the room, assembled by someone who’d clearly never seen a live penguin.

  “Cathy?” Tom shouted, but got no reply.

  He opened the doors to a room with four rhino horns peeking out from wooden crates. The rhinos had been removed from the public displays downstairs because of a spate of robberies in Europe that summer.

  The scientific name for the Indian rhinoceros is Rhinoceros unicornis, Cathy had said the other day, looking at the ponderous expressions of the rhinoceros heads trapped amongst filing cabinets. They’re unicorns.

  Fat and wrinkly unicorns. The creatures all had wrinkled frowns with worried overbites, boxed up in here amongst filing cabinets.

  Don’t be cruel. Don’t you think they’ve been through enough?

  The rhino heads looked sly today, as if plotting their escape from this dusty former registrar’s office. Tom crossed over a skinny yellow corridor where all the doors were closed except one. It was about halfway down the corridor and wide open.

  “Cathy?” he said.

  Nobody replied, so he walked towards the door. Inside the coral storeroom, Cathy’s high-heeled shoes and handbag were on the floor as if she’d spontaneously combusted. The window was open, facing out on the trash-filled courtyard. Tom panicked and shouted her name out of the window. When he heard no reply, only traffic and distant party music, he eased himself up onto the counter and climbed out onto the scaffolding. He put his feet on the wooden base of the scaffolding and stood up.

  He shuffled along the ledge and tried to get in through each of the windows that overlooked the courtyard, but they were all locked: either she’d climbed back in through one of them and locked it behind her, managed to make it down to the courtyard, or scrambled onto the roof. Below him the ground was mossy with dandelions springing up in the corners where the window glass met the brick. Tom could see the glint of a few bikes against racks on the far side, but mostly the space was filled with numerous trash cans and skips. Bricks and pieces of wood were piled against the wall amongst bottles of paint thinner and cans of paint. There was a full moon which, together with the city lights, illuminated his walk. The air smelt of the methane and rotten eggs coming from the rubbish bins.

  “Cathy!” he shouted.

  He figured she must have climbed down into the courtyard and walked round the museum to the front. There was a worryingly big drop between the scaffolding and the floor, which he only just negotiated without hurting himself. If she’d jumped down like that she might well have a sprained or broken ankle. He trudged round the side of the museum. Guests were still smoking on the front stairs at the and drinking champagne underneath the Brachiosaurus skeleton inside. Instead of mixing with the party he took the elevator up to the top floor. He didn’t want to talk to Jonas the guard. Tom picked up the atlas vertebrae of a horse as he made his way through the museum. Twenty-four vertebrae make up a horse spine, a human’s has thirty-three. Seven cervical, twelve thoracic and five lumbar, all heavy industrial names for fragile lozenges of bone that we share – give or take – with snakes and dinosaurs, owls and chameleons. Most people assume bones are inanimate parts of their bodies, but in fact they are just like museums or cities, just like hearts and skin, constantly changing and marking the passing of time. A bone’s exterior shape tells us about the animal’s anatomy, growth rings show the climate the animal lived in, the microscopic structure provides clues to the animal’s metabolism. Tom was about to walk into Cathy’s office when he heard voices inside, so instead looked through the glass panels in the doors.

  Cathy’s body language was both familiar and different. The man with her was pale, his body language aggressive: Tom recognised him from the smiling Polaroid image in Cathy’s personal natural history museum. Tom wanted to burst in, to do something absurd and heroic, to break the tension, to reach out and touch her, but instead he held onto the bone in his fist and watched through the panelled glass.

  Cathy had opened her office door and stepped forwards. Daniel was sitting on the floor surrounded by her objects. The air smelt of burning plastic. Her knees were shaking and she could feel her pulse in her fingertips, neck and even her eyelids. Her memories were bubbling and reconsolidating so she was losing moments of the present, savouring a taste of salt, a texture in the clouds, a word here and a smile there. She could see a burnt photo beside his knees. She could almost feel the memory traces forming new patterns in her head.

  They’d fucked against the frame of the peeling open window of her bedroom the afternoon before she’d finally managed to leave Essex, her lungs filling with marsh air. Daniel had tried to force her head further down so her body would be ninety degrees over the window ledge and her head thrust outside into the marsh air, but she had held herself upright in a way she would not have normally, with her arms and elbows against the window frame. It had hurt to keep herself from bending over while he pushed her, but she hadn’t wanted to be pushed down anymore. She hadn’t said anything, she’d never expressed herself with words. Instead she’d just disappeared in the middle of the night and reported him to the police.

  Now she watched Daniel with her objects spread around him. She felt history falling. Scattered near Daniel were her auk and gannet skulls, exotic shells, toy boats and seabird feathers, all in the wrong places. She should not have let him handle these emblems of the past that she’d put so much effort into cherishing all these years. She shouldn’t have allowed him to reach inside her mouth with his dirty fingers and touch her missing tooth. It was w
eak of her.

  Daniel lit another match and smiled at Cathy. His papier mâché lion mask also appeared to smile in the darkness. The flame wavered.

  “What are you doing?” she said.

  She could see his knuckles, illuminated by the flame, turning white. The flame gobbled up the match and slid close to his fingers. He blew it out at the last minute and smiled an adolescent smile at her. Objects were jumbled together on the floor without any comforting gaps between them. The spectacles and the matchboxes of shark teeth, the little cars and toy soldiers scattered amongst shells and ballerinas. Dried flowers from Los Angeles with broken petals sat next to Tom’s sketches and Jack’s green plastic cars, nothing in the correct order any more.

  “Do you think Jack would have worked in a place like this, if he were still alive?” Daniel said.

  “He wanted to be a racing-car driver.”

  “Of course.”

  “But he could have been a scientist.”

  Daniel put his thumb on the face of Jack’s broken plastic wristwatch. She was surprised that the watch didn’t begin to tell the time again, immediately, the moment that Daniel’s touch came into contact with the plastic.

  “We used to pretend we could make all the birds and tides pause with it,” she said. “He loved that watch. He used to say ‘my brother gave me this watch’. ”