The Museum of You Page 4

  The Manchester and Liverpool lines run in tandem for a few hundred feet before they split and the line to Manchester heads west, curling past back gardens and sneaking under road bridges, while the Liverpool line arrows south, right in front of people’s houses. As the train barged down the middle of Railway Street and Railway Terrace, forcing buses and cars to stop at level crossings, Clover pressed her face up to the window. Once the houses and roads had been replaced by golf courses and pine woods, she turned to Mr Judge and began to tell him some of the things she’d read the previous night, in one of Dad’s books, in preparation for the trip.

  ‘Did you know some of the bodies from the Titanic sank to the bottom of the sea and never floated back up because of the pressure and the cold? Sea creatures ate them. All that was left was their shoes.’

  He didn’t know.

  ‘Did you know the wreck was only discovered in 1985? It’s covered in rusticles, which are underwater icicles.’

  He didn’t know that, either.

  ‘Did you know –’

  He said she could put all the details in the report she’d be writing for homework. And she could have a merit for being a good researcher. Then he pulled out his phone and played Fruit Ninja for the rest of the journey.

  The museum was made of red bricks, all of it, even the arched ceiling. Standing in the foyer was a bit like standing in an enormous old tunnel. The lights hung from steel wires and the floor was made of cobbles and pavement slabs. The air stank of coffee from the museum café, and when the glass doors opened and people stepped in and out of the building, Clover could hear seagulls squawking. Outside, tall ships and tugs floated in the Albert and Canning docks, on either side of the museum.

  Mr Judge said they could explore by themselves, as long as they were back in the foyer at lunchtime. Staff in blue museum T-shirts handed out trail booklets to accompany an exhibit called ‘Seized! The Border & Customs Uncovered’. There would be a prize for the first person to complete the booklet, so most people headed downstairs. Clover wasn’t interested in the prize. She climbed the metal staircase. It was open on one side so you could see the drop to the museum shop and a display of a wooden canoe filled with tiny human figures. On the other side of the staircase a wall had been painted to look like the side of a ship. There were glass-fronted portholes, and along the top, by the high museum ceiling, was a railing, from behind which MDF silhouettes of passengers waved.

  On the first floor Clover stopped beside a model of the Titanic in a glass case. It was long, perhaps as long as her bedroom, though it was difficult to tell. It had tiny lifeboats hanging from its sides and dozens of little portholes. She wished she could open the case and look through the Titanic’s portholes – it would be epic if it was filled with replicas of things that were on the real ship: flower arrangements, tablecloths and candlesticks; fancy curtains, paintings and cutlery; wooden beds, tools and musical instruments, all carefully placed on board to help people have a lovely time. All sliding about as the ship tilted. All crashing into the walls and ceilings as it sank. All sitting in the thick quiet at the bottom of the sea.

  On the other side of the display case, Clover noticed a woman scribbling into a notebook with a stubby pencil. She was too old to be a student and she wasn’t wearing a Maritime Museum T-shirt like the people who guarded the exhibits that visitors weren’t supposed to touch. Her navy jeans were smart and her painted toenails poked out of red wedge sandals. Clover edged around the case, pretending to examine the Titanic. When she got close to the woman, she glanced at the open notebook. The woman wasn’t drawing and her writing was too small to read.

  ‘Do you like the model?’

  Clover nodded, embarrassed to have been caught staring. But the woman seemed friendly, so she asked, ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘A gallery check.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  The woman tucked the pencil behind her ear, like a builder. ‘Once a week, we check to make sure everything’s working: the lighting, the touch screens on the computerised parts of the displays, and the objects themselves – some of them have environmental controls so we check to make sure everything’s okay.’

  ‘And that’s your job? Checking things?’

  ‘Part of it.’

  ‘What are the other parts?’

  ‘Coming up with ideas – concepts, that’s what we call them. Thinking about which exhibitions will be permanent and which will be temporary. Selecting the objects and deciding how we’ll interpret them. Making sure we get the text right –’

  ‘Did you always want to work in a museum?’

  ‘For as long as I can remember. When I was a little girl, my mum was a keeper at Liverpool Museum. That’s what the job used to be called.’

  ‘A keeper?’

  ‘Lovely name, isn’t it?’

  ‘Like a zookeeper or a park keeper, but for museums? Someone who’s in charge of keeping stuff?’

  ‘Yes! But we’re called curators now; it’s a good word, too. An old word – it’s Latin. We take care of the displays and objects. And we make lots of lists.’ She waved her notebook to demonstrate.

  ‘So you’re in charge of all this?’ Clover glanced at the displays, the models and the wall-mounted screens showing black and white footage of passengers waving from skyscraper-high decks.

  ‘There’s lots of people involved: designers, conservation people –’

  ‘What do they do?’

  ‘The designers work on the displays. They decide how to mount things and they think about the best way to show the objects. The conservation people clean things, they have to –’

  ‘Do you have stuff that isn’t on display at the moment?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘Where do you keep it?’

  ‘There’s some onsite storage. But we keep a lot of it in a big object store for Liverpool Museums.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘I can’t say, sorry. For security.’

  Clover imagined a library, but with things sitting on miles of shelves, and curators pacing down the endless aisles, their footsteps echoing in the vast space as they agonised over which objects to display. ‘But how do you get all the stuff in the first place?’

  ‘Sometimes we borrow objects from other museums and sometimes we buy things. Often, people give us objects, things that have been in their families for ages.’

  ‘And they don’t mind having their stuff on display?’

  ‘No, I think people like sharing their lives.’

  ‘How do you decide what to display and what to leave in the store?’

  ‘Well, it’s all about which objects fit the narratives we’re telling. We do some research – there’s a database; every object has a unique catalogue number that stays with it. We have photographs and text about the history of each piece. And a section about its provenance – that’s the story of the object: where it came from, why it’s important and so on.’ She pulled the pencil out from behind her ear and tested its end with her front teeth. A moment later she lowered it, leaned forward and whispered, ‘Do you know what the best bit about this job is?’

  Clover shook her head.

  ‘Touching things – with gloves on, you have to be careful – touching things that are part of the past, especially personal items. You get a feeling about them as you hold them. You’re doing something special . . . looking after culture and history, looking after people’s stories. That’s what it’s all about.’

  That was how the idea started.

  Light streamed through the big windows of the industrial building and the idea sat in the warmth all afternoon as Clover explored the main exhibit, ‘Titanic and Liverpool – the Untold Story’. She had to pick a card about a passenger to carry with her until the end, when she would find out whether the person lived or died. She picked two, just in case. Violet Jessop, a pretty, soft-faced nurse, and Mildred Brown, whose features were completely obscured by the shadow of an enormous hat. ‘My name is Violet Jes
sop,’ the first card read, and it was as if Violet’s voice was calling across the years. At the bottom of both cards it said, ‘Discover my fate at the end of this exhibition.’ She held the women’s cards against her chest and hoped for happy endings.

  Clover learned that there were five grand pianos on the Titanic and twelve dogs, three of which survived. She saw a display of items salvaged from the debris field: a ceramic sink, a chamber pot, a ventilation grille, tiepins, glasses, a watch and a letter opener. Perhaps Violet and Mildred had touched some of the things. The curator had almost certainly touched them before they were placed in the glass display cases. Did she really get feelings about objects just by touching them? Did the stories seep out of the metal and glass and leather, through the protective gloves and into her fingertips? Clover thought of Violet and Mildred; she wished them lifeboats, life jackets and childhood swimming lessons.

  The idea fed on details. By the time Clover reached the end of the exhibit it was ready – full of energy and wrapped in a protective coat of patience, like a seed. She paused to read about the women whose cards she’d carried. Violet Jessop survived and went on to work as a nurse in the British Red Cross during World War One. Mildred Brown also survived. It was a good sign, further evidence of the idea’s rightfulness.

  She sat beside Dagmar on the train home and was daunted to silence by her stillness and the way she kept eyes trained on some distant spot, lips locked like cockle halves. Dad says the danger in spending your kindness on other people is that you might not have any left for yourself – it doesn’t stop him from being kind, though. Shielded by the dark as they passed through a tunnel, she whispered, ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘I am fine, thank you,’ came the reply.

  Clover couldn’t think of anything else to say, so she opened the notebook she’d bought in the museum shop and slipped the passenger cards between the pages. There were plans to make, words she might forget if she didn’t write them down: concept, object, text, curator, keeper, exhibit, display. She pulled a pen out of her blazer pocket and, for the rest of the journey, toyed with the notebook and tended the idea.

  When she got home from school, Dad was kneeling in the hall. He’d unscrewed the radiator and his thumb was pressed over an unfastened pipe as water gushed around it. The books and clothes and newspapers that used to line the hall had been arranged in small piles on the stairs. Beside him, on the damp carpet, was a metal scraper he’d been using to scuff the paper off the wall.

  ‘Just in time!’ he said. ‘Fetch a bowl. A small one, so it’ll fit.’

  She fetched two and spent the next fifteen minutes running back and forth to the kitchen emptying one bowl as the other filled, Dad calling, ‘Faster! Faster! Keep it up, Speedy Gonzalez!’ His trousers were soaked and his knuckles grazed, but he wasn’t bothered. ‘Occupational hazard,’ he said, as if it wasn’t his day off and plumbing and stripping walls was his actual job.

  Once the pipe had emptied he stood up and hopped about for a bit while the feeling came back into his feet. ‘I helped Colin out with something this morning,’ he said. ‘The people whose house we were at had this dado rail thing – it sounds posh, but it’s just a bit of wood, really – right about here.’ He brushed his hand against the wall beside his hip. ‘Underneath it they had stripy wallpaper, but above it they had a different, plain kind. It was dead nice and I thought we could do that.’

  Dad found a scraper for her. The paint came off in flakes, followed by tufts of the thick, textured wallpaper. Underneath was a layer of soft, brown backing paper which Dad sprayed with water from a squirty bottle. When the water had soaked in, they made long scrapes down the wall, top to bottom, leaving the backing paper flopped over the skirting boards like ribbons of skin. It felt like they were undressing the house.

  The bare walls weren’t smooth. They were gritty, crumbly in places. As they worked, a dusty smell wafted out of them. It took more than an hour to get from the front door to the wall beside the bottom stair. That’s where Dad uncovered the heart. It was about as big as Clover’s hand, etched on the wall in black permanent marker, in Dad’s handwriting.

  ‘I’d forgotten,’ he murmured. And then he pulled his everything face. The face he pulls when Uncle Jim is drunk. The face he pulls when they go shopping in March and the person at the till tries to be helpful by reminding them about Mother’s Day. The face which reminds her that a lot of the time his expression is like a plate of leftovers.

  She didn’t say anything, and although she wanted to, she didn’t trace the heart with her fingertips. Instead, she went up to the bathroom and sat on the boxed, pre-lit Christmas tree Dad bought in the January sales. When you grow up in the saddest chapter of someone else’s story, you’re forever skating on the thin ice of their memories. That’s not to say it’s always sad – there are happy things, too. When she was a baby, Dad had a tattoo of her name drawn on his arm in curly blue writing, and underneath he had a green four-leaf clover. She has such a brilliant name, chosen by her mother because it has the word love in the middle. That’s not the sort of thing you go around telling people, but it is something you can remember if you need a little boost; an instant access, happiness top-up card – it even works when Luke Barton calls her Margey-rine. Clover thought of her name and counted to three hundred. As she counted she drew her finger through the dust on the Christmas-tree box. Once she’d finished counting she wondered about the factory where the tree was made – who assembled it, who touched it and packed it? ‘Made in China’, it said. There were probably workers’ fingerprints all over the box; there might even be specks of skin and hair inside it. She thought of all the things her mother might have touched in each room of the house. Had she a favourite mug? Was some of the dust in the second bedroom made up of her skin? If the police came, might they find her fingerprints?

  When she went downstairs Dad had recovered his empty face and she couldn’t help asking a question, just a small one.

  ‘Is there any more writing under the paper?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘She didn’t do a heart as well?’

  ‘Help me with this, will you?’

  They pulled the soggy ribbons of paper away from the skirting and put them in a bin bag. The house smelled different afterwards. As if some old sadness had leaked out of the walls.

  Clover kneels on the small square of floor she has cleared. Dad used to sleep in this room. Before. It isn’t quite as big as hers – it’s almost square shaped, whereas hers is rectangular. The sun stabs a sharp slice of light through the window – there’s only one here; it’s larger than either of hers and it looks out over the back garden. On the first day, she squeezed past the boxes and tried to push up the sash, hands already sweaty in the blue plastic gloves she’d taken from the dispenser at the petrol station. But the window wouldn’t budge.

  Underneath the jumble of boxes and other stuff there’s a double bed. No duvet and no sheets, just the base and the bare mattress, topped by sheaves of papers, envelopes, shoes, books, a pile of folded-up material – bed sheets? curtains? towels? – a few cushions and several carrier bags that are beginning to dissolve, snowing plastic on to the floorboards below. From in among the piles of stuff she can see the sharp poke of picture frames. Wait there, she thinks, I’m coming for you.

  The bed sits in front of the chimney breast. In the alcove on either side of it are matching wardrobes. They are old, with corrugated fronts like window shutters; they were probably white before the sun sleeked through the window and toasted them yellow. Access to the wardrobes is blocked by bigger boxes, the kind Colin keeps in his van for when people are moving house. Some of these are fastened with brown tape, others are open. She’ll reach the wardrobes, eventually.

  The walls are wrapped in old paper. Swirls of orange, yellow and lime-green flowers on a milky blue background. Some of the flowers are definitely roses. There are daisies too, but she isn’t sure whether the others have names or are just flower shapes, like the ki
nd you draw when you are small. The paper is interrupted by a picture rail. Above the rail, the wall is painted lime green. The floor-length curtains are green, too. After she failed to push up the sash, she held one of the curtains and fanned it open. It was striped where the sun had bleached the material; the stripes were light, dark, light, dark, like bamboo stalks.

  The room is half and half, which is to say, if a stranger stepped into it, they might think it half packed or they might think it half unpacked; it seems it could be either. She imagines Dad beginning the packing, initially determined, sustained by the idea of how it would look once it was done; folding, lifting, arranging, and then standing with one hand on his hip, rubbing the fuzz of his hair with the other, thinking about the best way to proceed. At some point he must have got disheartened. Perhaps it made him sad. Perhaps he was too busy; looking after a baby is hard work. Or it could be that he had another idea in the meantime and the enthusiasm trickled down his arms and out of his fingers until, shoulders slumped, he closed the bedroom door.

  But now she’s here. And she will sort it out.

  The floor is wooden, not polished and shiny, just exposed, bare. It is already making divots in her knees. She lifts a pile of paper off the end of the bed and places it beside the boxes and the carrier-bag flakes. Specks of dust take flight and she blows a following wind after them. Then she unfastens her red mock-Converse trainers and settles, legs crossed.

  A quick rifle reveals that the pile consists entirely of unopened mail addressed to her mother. She slides her hands out of the blue gloves and unwraps letters offering double glazing and conservatories, and credit card applications, along with shopping surveys and requests from charities. Catalogues: clothes, kitchens and seeds. And holiday brochures: cruises, skiing, beaches and canal boats. All sorts. Nothing important. When she has finished, she has a new pile that’s bigger and messier than the one with which she started. But that’s okay. If she’s going to get all this cleared up, she’ll have to make a mess first.