The Marble Collector

by Cecelia Ahern

  I line them up, I watch them roll, the movement of colours inside like kaleidoscopes. And then when every inch of my carpet is covered, I sit up, straighten my spine till it clicks. I’m not sure what else to do, but I don’t want to put them away again. They look so beautiful lining my floor, like a candy army.

  I pick up the inventory and try once more to see if I can identify them myself, playing my own little marble game, and as I do so, I notice that not everything written on the list is on my floor.

  I check the box again and it’s empty, apart from some mesh bags and boxes which are collectable for their condition alone, despite there being no marbles inside them. I flip the top of the third box open and peer inside, but it’s just a load of old newspapers and brochures, nothing like the Aladdin’s cave of the first two boxes.

  After my thorough search, which I repeat two more times, I can confirm that there are two missing items from the inventory. Allocated turquoise and yellow circular stickers, one is described as an Akro Agate Company box, circa 1930, the original sample case carried by salesmen as they made their calls. Dad has priced it at $7,500–$12,500. The other is what’s called World’s Best Moons. A Christensen Agate Company original box of twenty-five marbles, listed between $4,000–$7,000. His two most valuable items are gone.

  I sit in a kind of stunned silence, until I realise I’m holding my breath and need to exhale.

  Dad could have sold them. He went to the trouble of having them valued, so it would make sense for him to have sold them, and the most expensive ones too. He was having money troubles, we know that; perhaps he had to sell his beloved marbles just to get by. But it seems unlikely. Everything has been so well documented and catalogued, he would have made a note of their sale, probably even included the receipt. The two missing collections are written proudly and boldly on the inventory, as present as everything else in the inventory that sits on the floor.

  First I’m baffled. Then I’m annoyed that Mum never told me about this collection. That objects held in such regard were packed away and forgotten. I don’t have any memory of Dad and marbles, but that’s not to say it didn’t happen. I know he liked his secrets. I cast my mind back to the man before the stroke and I see pinstripe suits, cigarette smoke. Talk about stock markets and economics, shares up and down, the news or football always on the radio and television, and more recently car-talk. Nothing in my memory banks tells me anything about marbles, and I’m struggling to square this collection – this careful passion – with the man I recall from when I was growing up.

  A new thought occurs. I wonder if in fact they’re Dad’s marbles at all. Perhaps he inherited them. His dad died when he was young, and he had a stepfather, Mattie. But from what I know about Mattie it seems unlikely that he was interested in marbles, or in such careful cataloguing as this. Perhaps they were his father’s, or his Uncle Joseph’s, and Dad took the time to get them valued and catalogue them. The only thing I am sure of is the inventory being his writing; anything beyond that is a mystery.

  There’s one person who can help me. I stretch my legs and reach for the phone and call Mum.

  ‘I didn’t know Dad had a marble collection,’ I say straight away, trying to hide my accusatory tone.

  Silence. ‘Pardon me?’

  ‘Why did I never know that?’

  She laughs a little. ‘He has a marble collection now? How sweet. Well, as long as it’s making him happy, Sabrina.’

  ‘No. He’s not collecting them now. I found them in the boxes that you had delivered to the hospital today.’ Also an accusatory tone.

  ‘Oh.’ A heavy sigh.

  ‘We agreed that you would store them for him. Why did you send them to the hospital?’

  Though I didn’t recognise the marbles, I do recognise some of the other boxes’ contents as items we packed away from Dad’s apartment before putting it on the market. I still feel guilty that we had to do this, but we needed to raise as much money as possible for his rehabilitation. We tried to keep all the precious memories safe, like his lucky football shirt, his photographs and mementos, which I have in our shed in the back garden, the only place I could store them. I didn’t have room for the rest, so Mum took them.

  ‘Sabrina, I was going to store his boxes, but then Mickey Flanagan offered to take them and so I sent him everything.’

  ‘Mickey Flanagan, the solicitor, had Dad’s private things?’ I say, annoyed.

  ‘He’s not exactly a random stranger. He’s a kind of friend. He was Fergus’s solicitor for years. Handled our divorce too. You know, he pushed for Fergus to get sole custody of you. You were fifteen – what the hell would Fergus have done with you at fifteen? Not to mention the fact you didn’t even want to live with me at fifteen. You could barely live with yourself. Anyway, Mickey was handling the insurance and hospital bills, and he said he’d store Fergus’s things, he had plenty of space.’

  A bubble of anger rises in me. ‘If I’d known his solicitor was taking his personal things, I would have had them, Mum.’

  ‘I know. But you said you had no space for anything more.’

  Which I didn’t and I don’t. I barely have space for my shoes. Aidan jokes that he has to step outside of the house in order to change his mind.

  ‘So why did Mickey send the boxes to the hospital this morning?’

  ‘Because Mickey had to get rid of them and I told him that was the best place for them. I didn’t want to clutter you with them. It’s a sad story really: Mickey’s son lost his house and he and his wife and kids have to move in with Mickey and his wife. They’re bringing all their furniture, which has to be stored in Mickey’s garage, and he said he couldn’t keep Fergus’s things any more. Which is understandable. So I told him to send them to the hospital. They’re Fergus’s things. He can decide what to do with them. He’s perfectly capable of that, you know. I thought he might enjoy it,’ she adds gently, as I’m sure she can sense my frustration. ‘Imagine the time it will pass for him, going down memory lane.’

  I realise I’m holding my breath. I exhale.

  ‘Did you discuss this walk down memory lane with his doctors first?’

  ‘Oh,’ she says suddenly, realising. ‘No. I didn’t, I … oh dear. Is he okay, love?’

  I sense her sincere concern. ‘Yes, I got to them before he did.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I never thought of that. Sabrina, I didn’t tell you because you would have insisted on taking everything and cluttering your house with things you don’t need and taking too much on like you always do when it’s not necessary. You’ve enough on your plate.’

  Which is also true.

  I can’t blame her for wanting to rid herself of Dad’s baggage, he’s not her problem any more and ceased being so seventeen years ago. And I believe that she was doing it for my own good, not wanting to weigh me down.

  ‘So did you know he had a marble collection?’ I ask.

  ‘Oh, that man!’ Her resentment for the other Fergus returns. The past Fergus. The old Fergus. ‘Found among other pointless collections, I’m sure. Honestly, that man was a hoarder – remember how full the skip was when we sold the apartment? He used to bring those sachets of mustard, ketchup and mayonnaise home every day from whenever he ate out. I had to tell him to stop. I think he was addicted. You know they say that people who hoard have emotional issues. That they’re holding on to all of those things because they’re afraid of letting go.’

  It goes on and I allow 90 per cent of it to wash over me, including the habit of referring to Dad in the past tense as though he’s dead. To her, the man she knew is dead. She quite likes the man she visits in the hospital every fortnight.

  ‘We had an argument about a marble once,’ she says, bitterly.

  I think they had a fight about just about everything at least once in their lives.

  ‘How did that come about?’

  ‘I can’t remember,’ she says too quickly.

  ‘But you never knew he had a marble collection?’

&
nbsp; ‘How would I know?’

  ‘Because you were married to him. And because I didn’t pack them up, so you must have.’

  ‘Oh please, I can’t be called to account for anything he has done since we separated, nor during our marriage for that matter,’ she spouts.

  I’m baffled.

  ‘Some of the items are missing,’ I say, looking at them all laid out on the floor. The more I think about it, and hearing that they were in the possession of his solicitor, the more suspicious I am becoming. ‘I’m not suggesting Mickey Flanagan stole them,’ I say. ‘I mean, Dad could have lost them.’

  ‘What’s missing?’ she asks, with genuine concern. The man she divorced was an imbecile, but the nice man in rehabilitation must not be wronged.

  ‘Part of his marble collection.’

  ‘He’s lost his marbles?’ She laughs. I don’t. She finally catches her breath. ‘Well, I don’t think your dad had ever anything to do with marbles, dear. Perhaps it’s a mistake, perhaps they’re not your father’s, or Mickey delivered the wrong boxes. Do you want me to call him?’

  ‘No,’ I say, confused. I look on the floor and see pages and pages covered in Dad’s handwriting, cataloguing these marbles, and yet Mum seems to genuinely know nothing.

  ‘The marbles are definitely his and the missing items were valuable.’

  ‘By his own estimation, I’m guessing.’

  ‘I don’t know who valued them, but there are certificates to show they’re authentic. The certs for the missing marbles aren’t here. The inventory says one item was worth up to twelve thousand dollars.’

  ‘What?’ she gasps. ‘Twelve thousand for marbles!’

  ‘One box of marbles.’ I smile.

  ‘Well no wonder he almost went bankrupt. They weren’t mentioned as assets in the divorce.’

  ‘He mightn’t have had them then,’ I say quietly.

  Mum talks like I haven’t spoken at all, the conspiracy theories building in her head, but there’s one question she’s failed to ask. I didn’t pack them and she didn’t know about them, but somehow they found their way to the rest of Dad’s belongings.

  I take Mickey’s office details from her and end the call.

  The marble collection covers the entire floor. They are beautiful, twinkling from the carpet like a midnight sky.

  The house is quiet but my head is now buzzing. I pick up the first batch of marbles on the list. The box of bloodies that I showed to Dad, listed as ‘Allies’.

  I start to polish them. Kind of like an apology for not ever knowing about them before.

  I have a knack for remembering things that people forget and I now know something important about Dad that he kept to himself, which he has forgotten. Things we want to forget, things we can’t forget, things we forgot we’d forgotten until we remember them. There is a new category. We all have things we never want to forget. We all need a person to remember them just in case.

  I was supposed to be keeping my eye on Bobby. That’s exactly what Ma said when she left the house, in her usual threatening tone. ‘You keep your eye on him, you hear? Don’t. Take. Your. Eye. Off. Him.’ Every word a prod in the chest with her dry cracked finger.

  I promised. I meant it. When she’s looking at you like that you really mean whatever you’re saying.

  But then I got distracted.

  For some reason Ma trusted me with keeping my eye on him. It might have been something to do with the little chat we had about Victoria when the others were at school and we got to play the marble game together. I think she’s been different to me since then. Maybe not, maybe it’s all in my head, maybe it’s just that it’s different to me. I’d never seen her play like that before; a bit with the babies, but not down on the floor like she was with me, skirt hooshed up, her knees on the carpet. I think Hamish has noticed it too. Hamish notices everything and maybe that makes me a bit more cool to him too – Ma trusting me with things and not slapping the head off me as much as she usually would. Or maybe she’s like this with me because she’s grieving. I learned about grieving from a priest. I might have done that after Da died but I can’t remember. I think it’s just for adults.

  Ma hates priests now. After what he said to her when Victoria died, after Mattie and Hamish chased him out of the house. She still goes to Mass though, she says it’s a sin not to. She drags us to Gardiner Street Church every Sunday to ten o’clock Mass, in our best clothes. I can always smell her spit on my forehead from when she smooths down my hair. Sunday morning smells of spit and incense. We always sit in the third row, most families stick to the same place all the time. She says Mass is the only time she can get peace and all of us will shut the fuck up. Even Mattie goes, smelling of last night’s drink and circling in his chair like he’s still pissed. We’re always quiet at Mass because my first memory of Mass is Ma pointing up at Jesus on the cross, blood dripping down his forehead and nails sticking out of his hands and feet, and her saying, ‘If you say one word in here, embarrass me, I’ll do that to you.’ I believed her. We all do. Even Bobby sits still. He sits with his bottle of milk in his hand as the priest drones on, his voice echoing around the enormous ceilings, looking at all the pictures on the walls of a near naked man being tortured in fourteen different ways, and he knows this isn’t a place to fuck about.

  Ma is at school with Angus. He’s in trouble because he was caught eating all the communion wafers when he was doing his altar boy duties, locking them away after Mass. He ate an entire bag of them, three hundred and fifty to be precise. When they asked if he had anything to say for himself, he said he asked for a drink because there were dozens stuck to the roof of his mouth. ‘My mouth was dry as a nun’s crotch,’ he’d whispered late at night when we were all in bed and we’d almost pissed ourselves laughing. And then when we were all almost asleep, the giggles finally gone, Hamish whispered, ‘Angus, you know you haven’t just eaten the body of Christ, you’ve eaten the whole carcass.’ And that set us all off again, forcing Mattie to bang on the wall for us to shut up.

  Angus loves being an altar boy, he gets paid for it, more for funerals, and when he’s in class the priest passes by his window and gives him the thumbs up or down to let him know what he’s needed for that weekend. If it’s a thumbs up it’s a funeral, and he’ll get more money, if it’s a wedding, he gets less. No one wants to be an altar boy at a wedding.

  Duncan is at Mattie’s butcher shop, plucking feathers off chickens and turkeys as punishment for cheating in a school exam. He says he wants to leave school like Hamish did but Ma won’t let him. She says he’s not as smart as Hamish, which doesn’t make much sense to me because I thought it was the smart ones that do better at school, it’s the dumb ones that should leave.

  Tommy’s playing football outside and so it’s my job to look after Bobby. Only I wasn’t watching him. Not even God could watch Bobby all the time, he’s a tornado, he never stops.

  While he’s playing on the floor with his train, I take out my new Trap the Fox game that I got for my eleventh birthday. It’s from Cairo Novelty Company and the hounds are black and white swirls and the fox is an opaque marble. I don’t see Bobby grab the fox but from the corner of my eye I see him suddenly go still; he’s watching me. I look at him and see the opaque in his hand, close to his mouth. He does it while giving me that sidelong cheeky look, his blue eyes twinkling mischievously like he’d do anything just to get a rise out of me, even if it means his death.

  ‘Bobby, no!’ I shout.

  He smiles, enjoying my reaction. He moves it closer to his mouth.

  ‘No!’ I dive at him and he runs, the fastest little fucker you’ve ever seen on two legs. All chub and no muscle at one hundred miles an hour, weaving in and out of chairs, ducking, diving. Finally, I have him cornered, so I stop. The marble is against his lips.

  He giggles.

  ‘Bobby, listen,’ I try to catch my breath. ‘If you put that in your mouth, you’ll choke and die, do you understand? Bobby all gone. Bobby. Fucking. D
ead.’

  He giggles again, tickled by my fear, by the power he has over me.

  ‘Bobby …’ I say, warning in my voice, moving slowly towards him, ready to pounce at any moment. ‘Give me the marble …’

  He puts it in his mouth and I dive on him, squeezing his pudgy cheeks, trying to push the marble back out. Sometimes he just holds things there. Stones, snails, nails, dirt … sometimes he just puts stuff in his mouth like it’s a holding room then spits it out. But I can’t feel a marble in his mouth, his cheeks are all squidge, all flesh, mixed with his spit and snotty runny nose. He makes a choking sound and I prise open his mouth and it’s empty. Just little white milky fangs and a squishy red tongue.

  ‘Fuck,’ I whisper.

  ‘Uck,’ he repeats.

  ‘HAMISH!’ I yell. Hamish is supposed to be out working, or looking for a job, or doing whatever it is that Hamish does now that he’s out of school, but I heard him come home, bang the door closed and bang his way up the stairs to our room. ‘HAAAYYY-MIIIIIISH!’ I yell. ‘He ate the fox! Bobby ate the fox!’

  Bobby looks at me, startled by my reaction, by my fear and he looks like he’s about to burst into tears any second. That’s the least of my worries.

  I hear Hamish’s boots on the stairs and he bursts into the room. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Bobby swallowed the fox.’

  Hamish looks confused at first but then sees my game on the table and understands. As Hamish goes towards Bobby, Bobby really looks as if he’s going to cry. He tries to run but I grab him and he squeals like a pig.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Just now.’

  Hamish picks Bobby up and turns him upside down. He shakes him as if trying to shake the coins from his pockets like I’ve seen him do with lads before. Bobby starts to laugh.

  Hamish puts him back on his feet again and opens his mouth, sticks his fingers inside. Bobby’s eyes widen and he starts retching, vomits up some foul-smelling porridge.

  ‘Is it there?’ Hamish asks, and I don’t know what he’s talking about until he gets down on his knees and looks through the vomit for the marble.