The Morbid Curiosity Shop
A world of hellish make-believe awaits
At first, I thought I’d got the wrong place. It was a green-fronted shop front in Battersea, three stuffed peacocks and a bell jar filled with blue butterflies in the window. The street was dirty and smelled of Friday nights without Mike – overfried chips and stagnant alcohol.
A man dressed in black feathers answered, his irises whitened by novelty contact lenses. It unnerved me, I think, but only because I couldn’t tell where he was looking. The classic subterfuge of perverts.
“The Morbid Curiosity Shop is closed until the clock strikes 12,” he hissed, “or when hell opens, whichever comes first.”
“Did you book me to clean?” I asked, as I was fed up with the agency always sending me to the wrong place and not paying me for it. I showed him my phone.
“Oh,” he said, and his voice returned to normal. “Hang on.”
He removed his feather cape and he was wearing a Carhartt sweater underneath. “I’m having a nightmare of a morning. Kids threw a tantrum, Volvo broke down on the M25. You know how it is.” As it was, I didn’t. He didn’t ask me my name as we passed through an old stage curtain to the museum itself.
It was a smallish room, lined with glass cabinets of taxidermy animals, all contorted into various poses of fright or attack.
“Now, I need you to clean, but not too well. Keep it a bit dusty.” He wiggled his fingers like creepy rain. “A bit, woooo, you know?”
I looked at the stuffed lion. It was a dust trap, and I had no idea how I was meant to clean the eagle suspended from the ceiling. “Here are your keys,” he said.
It was weird, sure, but it wasn’t a bad place, and I found myself looking forward to it the next week. I suppose I liked it because it was curated, detached.
When I was cleaning I often felt like I was part of the plumbing, removing the waste products left by others. But here, the dirt felt unspecific.
“You’re just so quiet,” Mike had said when he broke up with me.
“Being with you is lonely.”
I asked what he meant and he shrugged. “I wish you were different.”
He used to support my dreams of being an actress, saying, “If anyone can do it, it’s you.”
I had dreams, then, of lighting up the West End, but it turns out I couldn’t even get a job in teeth-whitening adverts.
“You’re just a bit… blank,” a casting bloke from the Arcola told me.
When I was cleaning that strange museum, it was easy to abstract myself from normal life, to imagine I was an actor playing myself. I pictured sinister background music as I wiped down the butterfly cabinets with Dettol, as I vacuumed the stuffed lion, and I performed the pain in my back, too. My cracked, reddened hands were stage make-up. My audience, two canaries, whistled their approval. I wondered what it must feel like to look at their stuffed cousins. I once asked him if he would taxidermy them when they died.
“Hell no, I buy most of this stuff in,” he said, unwrapping a parcel of pinned cockroaches. He glanced at his watch. “Christ, I’d better get ready. Want to stay and watch?”
I lurked at the back as he charged two American girls £3 each for his “immersive museum experience”. As they browsed the cabinets, he whispered stories about a host of devils murdering a girl.
“This place is sick,” they said, and he served them doughnuts iced to look like eyeballs.
After that, I lingered each time. His stories were always about women being impaled or murdered or haunted; I thought he could have done with improvising his narrative a little.
“With acting, you’ve really got to live it,” Mike had said to me. “It’s like,” he’d mimed knocking on my head. “Like there’s nobody in there.”
I wondered at what point I became my job. The theatre curtain went down, but my role didn’t stop. The audience left and I was still there, ungumming sweets from the carpets, dusting the velvet chairs.
It was mid-june when I read about him in the paper. He’d been crushed by a Tesco delivery lorry near Luton. “An ignoble death for an eccentric,” somebody commented.
The agency texted me a reminder of the job, and I found I missed the place, so I didn’t say anything and went anyway. His feathered costume was still on the door, “pickled fingers” sausages were growing mould on the counter. I swept them into the bin, lifted the ostrich eggs and wiped underneath, dusted the antler clock and the lion. There was a knock on the door.
I was about to tell them that the place was shut, but then I caught the gleam of his costume. I stroked the arm. Black feathers as soft as water, like an invitation to dance. Another knock.
I wish you were different. And I wished it, too, standing there in my old fleece. I took the outfit, draped it over my shoulders. I felt powerful, as if there was something alive in my belly. I turned my hands to claws, felt my shoulders pulled forward into a wizened stoop.
I unlatched the door. I could have the locks changed in hours. A group of teenagers cowered from me, iphones bared.
“Your new overlord greets you,” I hissed. “Enter and sell me your soul for the sum of three pounds.”
He was dressed
in black feathers, his irises whitened