The Museum of Cathy

by Anna Stothard

  “I made that extra hole so it fit his wrist.”

  “He loved you. You were a great older brother, I was so jealous that he had you.”

  “He used to get this blissful look when you were nearby, even so.”

  “He hated that I didn’t organise my objects properly. All my things were jumbled up together then, do you remember? He used to sit on the deck and sort my objects into categories. Shells, mum, dad, insects, bones.”

  “He would have liked this collection.”

  “Or sometimes he’d sort them out by the date they entered my collection, beginning with the mouse skull from the start of the summer.”

  Cathy took a step further into the room as Daniel picked up the mouse skull that she was referring to. He held it up.

  “This one?” he said.

  “Yeah. I spat at Jack, remember? Right between the eyes.”

  “He told you your breath stank.”

  “I’m sure he was right.”

  “Personal hygiene wasn’t your strong suit.”

  “He got dimples when he laughed.”

  “His feet were crazy ticklish.”

  “He was happy before it happened,” Cathy said. “We had fun collecting stuff on the beach that morning. You were going to take him to the toy shop the next day on the way to your parents and buy him some more soldiers,” she said. Daniel shook the matchbox and took out another match. She watched him scratch it along the side to coax up a flame. It fizzed and then straightened and he held it near the mouse skull. “Put it out,” Cathy said. “There are five hundred people downstairs.”

  He let it burn to his fingers and then, smiling at Cathy, blew it out.

  “He would have wanted you to be happy,” Cathy said.

  Daniel didn’t smile.

  “I should have burnt the whole chalet down when you left me.”

  “I shouldn’t have stayed as long as I did.”

  “I burnt your text books and pieces of driftwood, your dolls and trainers and clothes and all those feathers you used to collect. Feathers smell horrible when you burn them, like hair.”

  He picked up a feather from the cabinets and lit another match.

  “You don’t need to show me,” she said. “Do you remember how Jack sometimes used to have battles with imaginary bad guys on the deck?”

  “Yeah.” He held the match at the edge of the feather and the tip of the barbs appeared to melt without even igniting, but the curved shaft caught like a wick and a tongue of fire danced down the feather.

  “There are five hundred people downstairs. Fire alarms will go off.”

  “Do you remember how we used to build fires on the beach?” Daniel said. She watched the flame climb down the feather from top to tip, curling and bunching together into a black nodule as it did so and smelling, as he said, of hair.

  “You loved melting my Barbie dolls into weird shapes,” Cathy said.

  “You wanted to make them into super-heroes with extra limbs from other dolls, but you’d get really angry if I burnt their hair. It was a fine art, keeping you happy.”

  “You weren’t so easy, either,” said Cathy.

  “Jack hated it when we got too close to the fire.”

  “He’d sit behind you and look over your shoulders.”

  “You guys used to make night sandcastles.”

  “He was so methodical. His castles were perfectly symmetrical.”

  “Do you remember making fires on the beach later, when you were older?”

  “I’d have sand in my knickers and my mouth for weeks afterwards.”

  “You loved me.”

  “I know I did. I used to love you a great deal. I shouldn’t have said that I didn’t ever love you, just because I don’t love you now.”

  The burning feather went out of its own accord, an inch from the bottom. Daniel dropped the stub of feather and took out two of Cathy’s mother’s toy ballet dancers, a maroon one with no feet or hands and a blue one with her arms reaching high up into the air and her face turned to the side.

  “Please don’t burn Mum’s ballet dancers,” she said. She imagined that the blue ballet dancer winked at her as he held it. He kept the dancers in one hand but removed one of her father’s miniature Bombay Sapphire, bottles with the other. For fifteen years it had contained no alcohol, but she thought she could smell her father as Daniel’s big hands touched the blue glass bottleneck.

  He put both these objects down again. He looked tired. He picked up one of Jack’s little plastic cars. Cathy could almost see Jack moving the car in the air. The green four-by-four had been one of his favourites. She could see the car whooshing between Jack’s fingers; it was hallucinogenic, the car flying through the sky held aloft by Jack’s fingers with clouds behind it and water lapping around them, Jack’s feet pounding through the shallow breakwater.

  He stood up and she kept his gaze, waiting for him to step towards her, waiting for his foot to lodge in her stomach or her spine. She was holding her breath, waiting for the crack of her bones, the familiar ache of his hand over her mouth. She looked him straight in the eye and he reached into his pocket and took something out.

  She recoiled slightly, but he stood still and held an object out for her. It was a sea-eagle claw, an inch of brown bone attached to a finger.

  “I bought you a sea-eagle claw,” he said. Cathy took a small step forward in order to take it from him.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said, holding it. “Thank you.”

  “You once told me that a mouse’s forelimb, a whale’s flipper, a bat’s wing and a human arm share almost the same pattern of bones, so my hands are as much ancestors of the raptor as a bat’s wing.”

  “Do you still get arthritis in your hands?” Cathy said.

  “It’s been painful this summer.”

  “The heat,” she said.

  “He hated getting salt in his eyes,” Daniel said. They were two feet away from each other now, being watched by an elephant skull and a million moths.

  “If I’d known he’d gone in, I never would have left the beach without him. I really believed he’d come home,” she ventured, watching Daniel pulse his fists. She looked him directly in the eye, didn’t cast her eyes downwards.

  “He would have done anything for you.”

  “He never swam.”

  “You made him brave.”

  There was a pause. Daniel’s right eye twitched.

  “I didn’t answer the door when you turned up that morning,” Daniel said. “And I’m sorry. There’s nothing in the world I regret more than that moment.” His words hung in the air. “I was hung-over,” he continued. “I was with some girl. It makes me sick just thinking about it.”

  “You’ve never told me that before.”

  “Jack was brave. I like knowing that, at least, when I’m sad.”

  “We should have talked about that night. We both kept it bottled up.”

  He kept opening and closing his fists, but said nothing and didn’t move forward. She was holding her breath. The child inside her was waiting. Her forehead was collapsing forwards into four thick lines between her eyes. The shape of the space between them changed, became less compact and heavy. He let some air into the gap between their bodies. Her shoulders dropped. The angles and density of everything shifted.

  “Nobody will ever know you like I do.”

  “That’s true,” she said.

  “I shouldn’t have come back,” he said.

  “I’m glad you did, though.”

  Cathy bent over and picked up the lead toy soldier from where he’d left it on the floor in the Oxo Cube box. When she stood back up they both focused on the small toy man, standing to attention in the centre of Cathy’s palm with his pointy hat covering his eyes and his shoulders pushed back. Cathy continued to hold it out for Daniel to ta
ke from her. She wanted him to have it and the soldier seemed to stare up at them from under his hat, arms clasped to his sides, ankles pressed together and toes pointing out. Daniel hesitated, then reached over. He took the soldier without touching the skin of Cathy’s hand. She could see a damp sheen to his eyes as he held the toy aloft, his fingers around the base of the man’s lead feet. Daniel’s big eyebrows dipped, his mouth sloped downwards and he had to turn away from her suddenly.

  It isn’t always clear when you meet the people who will do you the most harm. She’d had dirt under her fingernails and was cradling a dead, frozen crow the first time he saw her up close, ten years old, with broken skin on her lips from the cold, and unwashed hair. She was malnourished and fetid and only a child, but his heart had started to beat too fast. He hadn’t known why then, couldn’t have known. He thought it was because he felt sorry for her, yet he was perturbed by how long it took for his heart to resume a normal pace once she’d run off into the marsh, smashing through puddles, that first morning. You never know when stories are about to begin, but you do know when they’re ending.

  He didn’t look behind him as he pushed out of the office doors and walked straight past Cathy’s American, who he now discovered had been standing at the door listening to the conversation. Daniel didn’t stop or acknowledge the eavesdropper. Although the American took a step after Daniel as he passed, he must have thought better of following him, instead turning back to check on Cathy. Daniel was relieved, because his throat was choked up and his eyes were wet. As soon as he’d turned a corner and was alone again he stopped for breath and held his stomach with his hands, as if he’d been punched and needed to recover.

  He put the bottle of chemical down on the floor at his feet. Perhaps this was where the future began, not in what was salvaged, but what could be cast off. He no longer wanted her constant presence in his head, or the sense of all the different moments he’d known Cathy co-existing in his imagination. She could not bring Jack back. He fiddled with the soldier in his hand and paused as a new sound arrived in the air. It was the soft, then increasingly forceful, patter of rain on the roof and windows around him. It sounded as if the sky had shattered. As the noise gained pace, he realised he didn’t feel angry any more. There were other ways to escape the past. The heat wave had finally broken, taking a sigh of tension with it. The air inside the museum immediately cooled down and, as Daniel stretched his fingers, his swollen knuckles hurt less. He took one step forward and then continued down the corridor towards the stairs without looking back, carrying the toy soldier in his hand. He badly wanted to be outside in the cooling rain, walking fast through the streets and away from Cathy.

  A Swallow

  An elephant skull and a swallow rested on a cabinet of moths, all specimens of natural history that didn’t have a place in the museum downstairs. The bird was particularly beautiful, three inches tall, with an ochre neck tapering down into forked blue wings. It had glossy black eyes Cathy could have sworn just blinked at her.

  A few corridors over, a gallery the size of a tennis court contained thousands more stuffed birds, so if this one was magically twitching back to life perhaps the matronly pelicans were also preening, the flamingos stretching their legs, the penguins sneezing and the two hundred hummingbirds rustling their feathers ready to seek revenge for the decades in which they’d been prodded and observed. Cathy smiled at the thought and then caught her breath when the swallow chirped twice, its feathered throat vibrating: it was not a specimen, after all. It looped down from the shelf and sailed past a cabinet of dragonflies to land on a pile of science journals.

  Cathy was not easily spooked. She would walk first into fairground haunted houses and swear on people’s lives without blinking, yet as the swallow looked for an escape route her hands were shaking. Trapped birds, her mother would say, were a warning.

  “He likes you,” Tom said from the doorway. She didn’t immediately turn towards him, instead reaching over a desk to open the window. A low hum of jazz music and laughter lifted up from the party in the museum’s public galleries two floors below.

  “He’s not in a position to be choosy.” Her face was still tilted away from Tom as he stepped into the room. The bird remained poised and stared directly at Cathy from its shelf. Tom adjusted his glasses and did the same. She looked new but familiar in her green silk evening dress, as if she’d discarded a layer of herself and climbed out raw. Her hands were shaking and when she eventually shifted her face in Tom’s direction she revealed a bruise forming on her eye and a little blood on her mouth.

  The swallow darted off across the room again, making them both flinch, still not heading for the window. Swallows were supposed to have excellent spatial sense, but perhaps this one was a baby. It re-arranged its feathers and skimmed off its perch in front of Cathy’s face, soaring down from the table to a cabinet full of Monarch butterflies, where it shat a pool of white that dribbled down the glass.

  The creature flapped its wings while treading air, its body curled into the shape of a comma. Cathy’s skin had a feverish sheen to it. She licked a droplet of blood off her top lip with her tongue.

  “Are you going to tell me what happened to you tonight?” said Tom. “I’ve missed you.”

  “Is it a swallow?” Cathy said, instead of answering him. Tom took another step forward. “He looks so scared.”

  “He’s just disorientated.”

  “He’s beautiful.”

  The window was wide open but no breeze entered the room. All Cathy’s objects were strewn over the floor, poured out of their cabinet as if they’d tried to escape.

  “I was standing at the door,” he said. “I heard that conversation.”

  Cathy didn’t react, but picked up a green and yellow Micro machine truck with black windows and silver wheels from an Oxo Cube box on the floor. It had white painted headlights and red brake lights at the back.

  “I’m glad you listened,” she said and took a step forward to put the car in his hand.

  “It’s a Chevy four-by-four,” Tom said. He pulled down the hatch at the end and then clicked it back into place again with his finger.

  “It was Jack’s favourite,” she said of the car. Tom rolled the car up her arm from her wrist to her shoulder, where he let it stand for a moment. “He was my best friend.”

  The little bird flew from one side of the room to the other, still not making it to the window. Its deeply forked tail slashed the air. Outside the open window, fine needles of water were beginning to fall through the air, gently at first. The cool rain immediately softened everything and as the droplets gained force it was as if the evening’s tension had been let out through a trap door in the sky. They heard the laughter of people running for cover in the city down below.

  “I didn’t know where you were,” he said.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t want to lose you.”

  They were quiet for a while.

  “The biggest molecule in the whole of nature resides in your body,” Tom whispered in the darkness, listening to the water.

  “You make it sound like I’m hogging the best atoms,” she said. Her breathing was beginning to become more regular. He could see that he might start to understand her. “You won’t ever lose me unless you want to.”

  “You have seven octillion atoms in your body but if we took all the empty atomic space out of you, you’d fit into a sugar cube.”

  “That wouldn’t be very nice of you.” Her voice was quiet.

  “I could keep you in my pocket.”

  “I’d be a black hole, too heavy for your pocket.” She took a deep breath of humid museum air, trying to steady herself. “You remind me of Jack, a bit. Just occasionally. He was always coming up with geeky facts about sharks and fossils and stuff. He was always fidgeting and making jokes. I’m sorry I never told you about him.”

  “You’re a puzzle.”

  “You
wouldn’t have liked me, if you’d known me back then.”

  “More fool me. I bet I would have.” The bird beat its wings, perched on the shelf again. “You don’t give me much credit,” Tom said.

  “I’m always so scared you’ll fall out of love with me.”

  “Why would you think that? I’ve never done anything but love you.”

  “But what if you don’t really know me?”

  “Then I’d like to know you. I’m not going anywhere.”

  The simplicity of that statement made Cathy want to cry. As the rain fell harder, the bird ruffled his feathers and the air smelt of wet grass and damp bricks instead of matches. She felt almost weightless. Maybe she really hadn’t given Tom much credit over the years but she would share herself more fully from now on. Her head throbbed and the bird swooped down to the floor, a burst of energy in the rain.

  She thought back to a morning in the Essex marshes when it had rained through the night and she’d stepped out into the marsh before any one else woke up. She must have been eight or nine, before she met Jack or Daniel. The area had been silent, but when she looked up into the sky, a massive flock of starlings was making patterns there. The spectral birds moved in unison as a single animal, turning corners as if they were a trickle of liquid transforming into gas. The birds had flicked their collective neck, playing, everything connected. She’d loved to watch birds making patterns in the sky.

  “You missed your prize,” Tom said.

  “I know.”

  “We can put your collection back in order,” Tom said.

  “If aliens on a planet one hundred million light years away were looking at us right now, all they’d see were dinosaurs,” she said.

  “They wouldn’t see me kiss you?” He kissed her cheek lightly, just under the forming bruise on her cheek. “The more I know you, the more I love you.”

  “A light year is 5.88 trillion miles so they’d see back in time when we didn’t exist.” She paused and thought. “The act of remembering what you saw changes the neural substrate of the original memory trace.”