The Museum of Cathy
Page 18
“True,” he said.
“It scares me that memories aren’t necessarily facts.”
“More scary than aliens spying on us from the future?”
“Yes.”
“Jack drowned,” Cathy said. “He was my friend for a summer when I was ten. I should have been looking after him. He went into the sea because he saw I was in trouble, but he couldn’t swim well.”
“I’m sorry,” Tom said.
“I didn’t realise until it was too late.”
She bent down over her objects and touched a little matchbox with a ship on the front, which opened to reveal a pile of shark teeth and human teeth. At the back of the matchbox a strand of neon ginger hair was tied to strand of curly black hair. Some of the teeth were perfectly shaped and others broken. She held a strand of orange hair between her fingers.
“I used to have bright orange hair. I mean, lurid ginger. It got darker when I was fourteen. Jack’s hair was black like Daniel’s.”
“Are these your teeth?” Tom said.
“Afraid so. Plus some shark teeth.”
“No tooth fairy?”
“I didn’t want to lure strangers to my bed with bodily offerings.”
“Pragmatic.”
“Seems sad, out loud.”
“We’ll make sure our kids aren’t scared of the tooth fairy.”
“I’d like that,” she smiled and wiped the remains of tears from her eyes. Her nose twitched and the bird did a loop of the room again. She knew that it wasn’t an specimen come to life, but she still allowed herself to think what would happen in the atrium downstairs if a nineteenth-century alpine eagle threw itself above the party guests in a billow of ancient dust, or the six-foot polar bear stretched its limbs.
“The human brain takes in eleven million bits of information every second but is only aware of forty, you know that?”
“By the time I’ve finished speaking this sentence the earth will have spun 1450 metres,” she said, then tilted her head to the side. “Daniel used to hit me a lot. I was never in a car crash like I told you; my scars are mostly from him, although I was an accident-prone kid, too. I stayed far too long with him. I thought I deserved what he did to me. I didn’t know how to get away.”
“I love you,” he said. “I will always love you. Everything is going to be okay.”
“If you drilled a tunnel straight through the Earth and jumped in, it would take you 42 minutes and 12 seconds to get to the other side,” Cathy offered Tom as she kissed his arm. “I love you, too.”
“That assumes the planet is uniform in density throughout. Polar Bears can run at 25 miles an hour and jump over 6 feet in the air.”
“Let’s get a polar bear for the flat,” she said.
“We’ll need a bigger place.”
“Butterflies taste with their hind feet,” Cathy said and she touched Tom’s feet with her toes. Cathy’s head felt clearer than it had been in a long time, maybe since she was a child. The swallow ruffled its wings. As she drew a breath of warm rainy air, the bird dipped its neck and launched off its perch.
The swallow rose up and slipped neatly out the wide-open window towards the Berlin rooftops. Cathy stepped forward and watched the creature skim on a line of breeze with its forked blue tail spread out, riding the wet air. She smiled as it pulled the tips of its wings back at the end of each stroke and looped, agile, into the future.