One Hundred Names

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

If Kitty had been told that Ambrose had never before spoken to a human being, she would have believed it. She wasn’t rude but she had no real understanding of how a conversation worked. There was no eye contact, or at least only an accidental one, enough for Kitty to see the disfigured face and the varying eye colours. Perhaps Kitty’s reaction had been reflected in her face because Ambrose had chosen not to look at her again. Apart from failing to look her in the eye, where she positioned herself at the end of the table, she could turn her body away from Kitty. Kitty was looking at Ambrose’s right side. At least the hair there had been tucked behind her ear to show pale porcelain skin. She really was the most unusual person Kitty had ever met, not just physically, but characterwise too.

Her conversation was as unsettling as her demeanour. Her voice was quiet but, as if conscious of it, she spoke up on certain words and then forgot again, other words disappearing in whispers. Kitty had to listen hard to hear.

‘She called me. Yes it was. Last year. I remember. Because it was. Unusual.’ She shouted the word ‘unusual’, and then as if she’d given herself a fright she continued in a whisper, ‘She wanted to come to see me. To interview me. Yes, that’s what it was. I told her no. That I don’t. Do interviews.’

‘Did she say what the interview was about?’

‘Eugene. I told her to talk to Eugene about the museum. He deals with the public. Not me. She said it wasn’t about the museum. She didn’t know about the butterflies.’

‘It was about you personally?’

‘That’s what she said. I told her I didn’t want to. The list. She said she would keep me on the list anyway. I don’t know what that means.’

‘The list of people she wanted to interview,’ Kitty explained. ‘She left a list of one hundred names of people she wished to speak to and write about.’

‘She called me again. A few days later. She had a question about a caterpillar.’

‘The Oleander,’ Kitty smiled.

‘Laughing. She was laughing. She thought it was funny. In a nice way. She was nice,’ she said gently, and finally her eyes lifted and flicked to Kitty for a split second and looked away again, as if she knew Constance was gone. ‘She asked if she could visit. To talk to me. To see the museum. I told her she could visit. Not me. The museum. But it was only open for the summer months. Spring. She called me last spring. She never came.’

Kitty didn’t need to look away to hide her tears. Ambrose would not look at her anyway.

‘She got sick,’ Kitty explained and her voice came out as a croak. She cleared it. ‘She was diagnosed with breast cancer last year and she passed away two weeks ago.’

‘Daddy died of cancer.’

It wasn’t the usual sorry but it was full of empathy.

‘Are you here to collect her order?’

Kitty’s tears automatically stopped. ‘What order?’

‘Oh. I thought that was why you were here. I kept it for her. On display. I put it on display and nobody else bought it. A framed one. An Oleander moth. She said it was a gift.’

Ambrose suddenly upped and left the room, her long hair and loose clothing giving her a fluttering butterfly effect, and while Kitty waited, she wiped her flooding tears and smiled.

‘I ran the museum with Daddy,’ Ambrose explained after Kitty had gone into further detail about why it was she was really there. Ambrose, like most people, had been reluctant to talk to her at first, but when Kitty had suggested, quite honestly, that it would also be good for the business, as well as a personal adventure, and promised there would be no photographs of Ambrose, she agreed to start talking and Kitty kept writing as she talked, her mind racing as she tried to piece everything together.

Story Idea: People intrinsically don’t believe that they are interesting.

or

People who believe that they are not interesting, usually are the most interesting of all.

Kitty was aware of the threatening text messages she was receiving from Sally, who was still stuck in a lecture with Eugene and a group of tourists who kept asking too many questions, but Kitty couldn’t let this opportunity pass her by. She still had no idea why Constance had chosen Ambrose for the story, though she knew it was not for the butterfly museum, and she was determined to discover what it was Constance had already found. Kitty was personally and not just professionally interested in hearing this intriguing woman’s story.

‘Mammy and Daddy had opened it together but Mammy died and Daddy took over.’

Ambrose must have been in her forties, but it was difficult to say. She often sounded childlike, and held the shyness of a child, but equally often stooped her body and appeared like an old woman.

‘How did your mother die?’ Kitty asked gently. She expected her to say a fire or something that would help explain Ambrose’s appearance. She couldn’t figure out how to broach that subject. It was fascinating to her and yet it was the one question she felt she probably would never be able to ask and possibly the one issue that would never be broached.

‘Childbirth. Complications. She had me here. In the house. They probably would have saved her if she’d had me in a hospital but it’s not what she wanted. So. ’Twas to be.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Kitty took a slug of her tea. ‘Eugene seems to be a great help and certainly very knowledgeable,’ she said.

Ambrose looked up then and smiled. Not at Kitty but out the open door into the garden, which was alive with butterflies and nature. She seemed to light up. Then she faded again. ‘Eugene loves butterflies. I didn’t think it would be possible to find someone who loved them as much as Daddy did. I couldn’t do this. Not without Eugene.’

‘He says the same. He said that none of this would be here if it wasn’t for you,’ Kitty told Ambrose, who smiled shyly. ‘How did you find him?’

‘His mammy was my tutor. He came to my house with her for my classes. He was always bored stiff. Sometimes he’d sit in on the classes, other times, most times, he wandered around the museum. That’s how he knows so much. He’s been looking at those butterflies in frames for over thirty years.’

‘You were homeschooled?’ Kitty prompted.

‘Yes.’ Ambrose was silent but Kitty waited, sensing more was to come and beginning to understand her way of stop-start communication. ‘Children can say the cruellest of things. Isn’t that what they say? I was, well, I was unconventional.’

That was an understatement.

‘Daddy thought it best I stay here.’

‘Were you happy with that?’

‘Oh, yes,’ she said firmly. ‘This place is all I’ve known.’

‘Do you mind me asking how old you are?’

She looked like she did mind. Shoulders hunched, more face disappeared behind yet more hair to have a long discussion with herself, which Kitty could see taking place. ‘Is it important?’

Kitty thought about it. In some cases it wasn’t, in this it was. ‘If you don’t mind.’

‘Forty-four.’

Kitty’s phone continuously vibrated, four, five, six missed calls in a row. As soon as it would stop it would start again. Sally was mad, and Kitty didn’t want to miss her lift home.

‘Excuse me, do you mind if I use your toilet?’ Kitty asked.

Like being asked about her age, Kitty thought she would mind but Ambrose seemed relieved to have some respite from being questioned. One of Kitty’s favourite things to do was to snoop. She looked into every room she passed, then instead of going right as she was instructed, she took a left. Judging by the other rooms she passed, this must have been Ambrose’s bedroom and it took her breath away. One entire wall of the room, the wall facing the bed, was covered from floor to ceiling with magazine cut-outs of supermodels, actresses, singers, models. Some images were specific – of their hair, their eyes, their noses, their lips – others were of their entire faces. Some faces had been made up entirely of a collage of different women’s features. Just as her museum was covered in framed collections of butterflies, her bedroom was equally such a museum, a celebration of beauty. However, it felt less like a celebration than the museum, one that caused a shudder to run down Kitty’s spine. She quickly left the room.

When Kitty Logan finally left, Ambrose felt exhausted. She hadn’t had that much contact with anybody, apart from Eugene, of course, for a very long time, and she felt drained, tired from trying to cover her face, hide her emotions, work hard at appearing normal, sounding sane, all of the things that she was by herself in the comfort of her own home but which she struggled with when she came into contact with anyone who wasn’t inside her trusted circle. Those people consisted of Eugene; Harriet, the cleaner; and Sara, the young lady who worked in the museum. She rarely spoke to any of them, only when she absolutely had to, and it was only with Eugene that she could truly be herself because he was only Eugene, and what did he care? He had seen her all her life. The irony was that with everybody else she let her hair down and he was the only person for whom she could truly tie her hair back and look him in the eye.

She made her way to her bedroom and retrieved the magazine she had been reading that morning. Summertime, apart from the butterflies and her business, wasn’t her favourite time of year. Summer meant revelation, magazines were covered with photos of celebrities and pretty women on beaches in their bikinis, the museum was filled with pretty women who never questioned being able to tie their hair back and wander without self-consciousness through the rooms or down the street. Ambrose liked the winter when she could layer up and disappear. She hadn’t travelled much in her life but if she had her way she would book a holiday to somewhere cold, only she couldn’t leave the business or her butterflies in the summertime.

She carefully cut out a photograph of a soapstar she didn’t recognise who had been snapped on the beach in a tiny bikini after apparently shedding all the weight after having her baby a mere six weeks ago. She stuck the photo on the wall, making sure it wasn’t blocking any of the others she needed to see and she proceeded to sit on the end of her bed and examine it for fifteen minutes. She looked at her eyes, her nose, her lips, her long neck, the arch of her back, her pert bottom, the way her thighs were firm and tanned, the way her toes were perfectly painted and wore little shoes of sand. She got lost in the photograph; for moments Ambrose was that girl, she was on that beach, she was getting out of the water, feeling eyes on her and feeling the heat on her body, feeling the sea water tricking down her body but knowing that she looked great, feeling light and happy and relaxed as she made her way to her sunbed to sip a cocktail. Ambrose lived it so vividly in her head.

Kitty Logan had asked her why she collected butterflies, why the fascination? Ambrose hadn’t lied, but hadn’t answered her truthfully as her response was incomplete. Why did she love butterflies? Because they were simply beautiful. And she wasn’t.

It was the same reason she had always loved the story of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ when she was a child, and despite the fact she was twenty-three when the Disney film was released, she went to see it in the cinema time and time again, watching it every day when it was out on video, knowing every word, every look, every single gesture each character made. Her daddy had been bewildered by her childish fascination with a cartoon, but he had misunderstood her love for it. It wasn’t for the romance, it wasn’t because she wanted to see a beast become handsome again, she watched it because, like the Beast capturing Belle, she knew what it was like to recognise beauty, to be so fascinated by it and to feel so alive when around it that she wanted to trap it and keep it locked up inside for her to see and celebrate every day.

‘Who on earth is texting you?’ Sally asked as they drove home from Kildare. It was the first thing she had said in a while and Kitty guessed she was slowly being forgiven.

‘Why?’ Kitty frowned.

‘Because you’ve had that stupid smile on your face since you started that little textersation.’

‘Textersation? No, that is not a word.’

‘Stop trying to change the subject, who is it?’

‘It’s no one, it’s just Pete.’ She said it way too nonchalantly.

Sally’s eyes widened. ‘Pete, the prince of doom duty editor whom you despise Pete?’

‘I never said I despised him.’

‘Oh. My. God.’

‘What?’

‘Oh dear. You know what’s happening, don’t you?’ Sally jested.

‘Shut up, no, it’s not. Be quiet, okay?’ Kitty attempted to place her hand over Sally’s mouth to stop the words coming out. Sally giggled and the car swerved so Kitty took her hand away immediately.

‘Okay, fine, I won’t say it, but you know you know it,’ she said in a singsong voice.

‘He’s just seeing if I’m okay,’ Kitty said, closing her phone and putting it away in her bag, and as soon as she did that she regretted it because she wanted to see if he’d responded to her rather witty and well-planned last text.

They settled into silence again and drove towards the darkening night, the sky red in the distance.

‘Red sky at night,’ Kitty said, ‘shepherd’s delight.’

‘Oh, don’t be silly,’ Sally said. ‘That doesn’t make any sense. It’s supposed to be torrential rain tomorrow.’

They fell into silence again and Kitty’s mind drifted from Pete and on to her story. She thought of all the people she had met so far: Birdie Murphy, Eva Wu, Mary-Rose Godfrey, Archie Hamilton and Ambrose Nolan. She tried to find the link between them all but just couldn’t see any. She twisted their life stories around in her head, tried to compare and contrast each and every little thing she knew about them, and while similarities could be found, there was no real link, no real story, but each was so strong in its own rights. She needed to start with a fresh mind and listen to their stories – perhaps constantly trying to find a link was stopping her story from flowing. She reached for her bag and Sally teased her about going for her phone but Kitty had already forgotten about that. She took out her notepad and pen and Sally realised she was in the zone and left her alone.

She thought of Ambrose, of the framed butterflies and the pictures on her wall.

Name Number Two: Ambrose Nolan

Story Title: Kalology – The Study of Beauty