The Marble Collector

by Cecelia Ahern

  ‘London? But Fergus is here!’

  Ma shouts and yells the house down, everybody runs to her, everybody that doesn’t run to her runs looking for me. I’m sitting in the pub having a pint and playing Bounce About when I should be at work in Mattie’s butcher shop with the other lads. I’ve just started and they have me doing the worst jobs, like washing away guts, which when hungover on the first week sent me racing to the toilet to vomit. It doesn’t make me queasy now, just bored, and I find a few pints at lunchtime gets me through it in the afternoons. I’m more interested in the kind of meat that Mattie’s buying, I’d like to get into that side of things, sourcing better kinds of meat, it’s something I want to talk to him about, but I know he won’t listen until I do at least a year of stinking, stenching time in the back.

  Angus finds me at the pub and grabs me, tells me to say nothing, he doesn’t want to hear it, and drags me down the road to the house. I think I’m in trouble for stepping out of the shop for a pint when I should have been having a sandwich in the backyard. Duncan meets us at the front door, which is wide open. Mammy is holding court in the living room, surrounded by worried women, tea and scones. Three-year-old Joe is on her knee, bouncing up and down, big eyes worried and scared by Ma’s hysterics. Everyone parts for me like I’m the prodigy child she’s always wished for. She looks at me coming towards her like I’m an angel, with so much tenderness and love, I’m shitting myself and don’t know what the fuck is going on.

  She puts Joe down and stands up. He clings to her leg. Ma reaches out to my face, her hands hot from the gallons of tea, her skin rough from a lifetime of cleaning and scorching. Her face is softer than I’ve ever seen it, her eyes piercing blue. I suppose I’ve seen it when she looks at her babies, when I caught her when I was younger when she didn’t know anyone was looking as she breastfed, as her eyes and the baby’s connected to each other like they were having a silent conversation. I just never remember her looking at me like this.

  ‘My son,’ she says tenderly, flooded with relief. ‘You’re alive.’

  Which brings a sudden snigger out of me because I have no idea where this is coming from, all I know is I was dragged out of the pub for this nonsensical drama. Mrs Lynch tuts and I want to deck her because this spurs Ma on.

  Ma’s look of serenity fades and she slaps me hard across the face. I mustn’t look sorry enough because she does it again.

  ‘Okay, Ma,’ Angus says, pulling me away. ‘He didn’t know. He didn’t know.’

  ‘I didn’t know what?’

  ‘A garda called by—’

  Ma is helped to her seat, the grieving queen bee.

  ‘He said that Fergus Boggs was found dead. In London,’ Angus says. He slaps me hard on the shoulder, squeezes me, ‘But you’re not dead, you’re grand. Aren’t ya?’

  I can’t reply, my heart is hammering. I know it then, I just know it. Hamish. No one else would have picked my name and he wouldn’t have picked anybody else’s name either. It was always me. Me and him. Him and me. Even if we didn’t know it at the time, I know it the moment I think he’s dead, feel his loss now more than when he upped and left.

  ‘Lighten up, everybody, will you?’ Duncan says and the women relax, get the joke, suddenly see the funny side in what has happened.

  But Ma doesn’t laugh. And I don’t laugh. Our eyes meet. We both know.

  I fly over on my first flight. Windy conditions and we bounce about the place, my mind completely off Hamish as I hang on for dear life and think about what a strange fate it would be, me dying going over to see if a fella who called himself me is dead.

  Mrs Smith’s son Seamus is living in London and it’s been arranged that I can stay with him for a few nights. I don’t know what Seamus told his ma about his new life but I don’t imagine it’s this. Sharing one damp Victorian room with six other lads isn’t my idea of making it big in London, so I stay out as late as I can on the first night to avoid having to sleep on that floor. I avoid the Irish bar they all tell me to go to in case I’m forced to join up, and instead, after asking around in an English accent, I find a place called the Bricklayer’s Arms that advertises marble games. But first I walk the streets for hours knowing that every minute that passes is a minute closer to seeing Hamish, and sometimes I want the time to slow down, and other times speed up.

  I strike up a game of marbles with some locals, just a game of Bounce About, like I’d been doing earlier, as if I was picking up where I left off. I can’t believe it’s the same day and I’m in a different country waiting to identify the body of someone claiming to be me, feeling like a different person.

  The game is for two to four players but three of us play until the third guy vomits on himself and then falls asleep in the corner with his own piss leaking down his leg. It’s just me and a fella named George then, who calls me Paddy like he doesn’t know it’s an insult. It’s okay because I beat him hands down. It doesn’t involve huge skill – you throw marbles, not shoot them. The medium-sized marbles are called bouncers; the first player throws his forward, the second player tries to hit it, and so on. It’s about as much as he can handle, he’s had so much to drink. If a bouncer is hit, the owner pays the thrower one marble, but you can’t take the bouncer, which is a problem because George’s bouncer is the only marble I’m interested in. Bouncers get away with murder that way.

  It’s a Czechoslovakian bullet-mould marble, it has a frosty finish to it. George tells me something about an acid bath. I ask him if I can buy it and he says no, but he gives it to me instead. I’ve told him about why I’m here and who I think I’m going to see and he feels sorry for me, says he had to view a body once that had been chopped up into bits and I wonder if it was an official identification at all, or something to do with his lifestyle. I even wonder if he was the one who had to chop it up into bits. His story doesn’t scare me off, though, oddly, the gift of the marble does make me feel a little better. I pocket the bullet and after getting lost for almost two hours, fall into Seamus Smith’s shithole bedsit at four a.m., stepping over bodies to reach my space, one guy going at himself till all hours thinking nobody can hear him.

  Four hours later I’m at the morgue looking at Hamish’s dead naked body on a slab. The coroner just shows me his face but I pull the sheet down more. Hamish has a birthmark on his belly button shaped like Australia; nothing really like Australia, but then that would have ruined the joke. ‘Want to see down under?’ I hear Hamish say to the girls, so clearly, like his lips could have moved. I smile, remembering him, everything good about him and the coroner looks at me, angry, like I’m smiling because I’m glad he’s dead.

  ‘I was just thinking of something funny he used to say,’ I explain.

  Then he looks at me like he doesn’t care, he’s just here for the scientific part, not the emotional bit.

  I feel the Czech bullet-mould in my pocket.

  ‘Was he shot?’ I ask. I always thought if Hamish was going to go before old age, that’s what he’d prefer. Like a cowboy, he loved those films.

  ‘No. Do you see a bullet hole?’ he asks, like he’s defending himself, like I’m accusing him of missing the evidence.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well then.’

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘The police will tell you.’ He covers Hamish’s face again. I haven’t seen Hamish for four years but I’ll never know how much he changed in that time because he was so bloated and bruised I could barely recognise him. I know it’s him all right, but I couldn’t begin to tell what he looked like as an older Hamish. They think he’d been in the water for two days, probably more, because his body floated to the surface, and decomposition had begun. The police officer that I talk to afterwards says something about the skin on his foot falling off like a sock, but that’s when I tune out. The part I remember more than anything else is that nobody had reported him missing.

  Fergus Boggs was drunk. He had drunk far too much when he bothered the two bouncers of Orbit nightclub
on Saturday night. When they turned him away they say he got aggressive. I have no reason not to believe them, it sounds like any of the Boggs boys so far, even little Joe has a meltdown when you tell him no, lying on his stomach and kicking his shoes off regardless where we are. As the youngest, Ma rarely tells him no. One bouncer got so frustrated with Fergus that he told him he’d let him in the side door so the boss wouldn’t see him get in so drunk, and without paying. Instead he took him to the dark alley and beat the lights out of him. With a broken nose and a broken rib, Fergus Boggs stumbled along until he tripped, fell into a river and drowned. He was twenty-five.

  Seamus Smith is waiting for me when I come out of the morgue. He’s smoking a cigarette and looking shifty, his hands shoved into tiny pockets in a leather jacket.

  ‘Is it him?’ he asks.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Fuck.’

  He takes out a packet of cigarettes and hands me one. I appreciate him bringing me to the pub from there because I don’t remember anything from the cigarette onwards. The next day me and Hamish get the boat together for the second time as I bring him home.

  The police officer wasn’t pressing charges against the bouncer who ‘bounced him about a little’ because the police agreed Fergus was being a nuisance and the bouncer didn’t mean to kill him, it was Fergus’s inebriation that led to his drowning. Bouncers get away with murder that way.

  When I opened the box of marbles, I opened up a can of worms.

  I don’t know if I sensed it when I looked at them, when I held them in my hands and my eyes scanned the inventory, but I knew it when I saw the way Dad’s face changed as soon as he set eyes on the bloodies. And it’s confirmed even further by learning of the messiness my family created simply by the decision of where to store boxes. I don’t know what to do next. It’s the moon, I’ve too many thoughts, can’t process them all at once. Breathe.

  Once outside Mickey’s office I call Mum, fuming inside.

  ‘How’s Miss Marble getting on?’ She laughs at her own joke. ‘Did you see Mickey Flanagan yet?’ I hear the anxiety in her voice and I wonder if she’s afraid of me discovering her lie.

  ‘Which of Dad’s brothers didn’t want you to store the boxes?’ I ask.

  She sighs. ‘Mickey told you. Oh, love, I didn’t want him to tell you.’

  ‘I appreciate that, Mum, but if I’m going to find these marbles, I need the truth?’

  ‘You’re really going to look for these missing marbles? Sabrina, love, is everything okay? With you and Aidan? Are you still going to counselling?’

  ‘Yes, we’re fine,’ I say, as if on autopilot. I should never have mentioned the counselling to Mum, now she thinks everything I say and do is a result of our couple counselling, which I’m going to for Aidan’s sake. I’d be perfectly content not to bother. But I’ve been saying that a lot lately without really thinking about it. Are we fine? I change the subject back. ‘Tell me what happened with the boxes and Dad’s brothers.’

  She sighs, knowing she has no choice but to address it, and as she speaks I hear the anger. Not at me but at him, at the situation last year. ‘Angus called me, but it was really all of them that had the problem. They’d heard we’d been around at Fergus’s apartment. They didn’t want me with his belongings. They were fine with you having them, but I told them you had no space. You know the rest.’

  I try to picture Angus. I was never particularly close to my uncles and aunts, I never saw them much because Dad didn’t. While growing up I saw them at the odd family event but we never stayed long, Dad was always uptight, somebody would always say something to annoy him and we’d leave early. Mum never protested, she hated his family events too, somebody would always end up in a fight, a drunken cousin flipping over a table of drinks in a fight with a girlfriend, or sisters-in-law who couldn’t keep their sharp tongues to themselves. There was always drama at a Boggs–Doyle event and we rarely went. We spent most of the time popping in, or as Dad would say, ‘Let’s show our faces.’ That’s all he ever wanted to do with his family, show his face. Perhaps that’s all he did with us too, because who is this man I’m learning about?

  Angus is the oldest of the brothers, a butcher, so not the one with a van. I think Duncan has the van, but that’s not to say they weren’t all in on it. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen them all. I haven’t been dragged to a family do since I was eighteen, and I didn’t invite them to my wedding. Aidan and I had a small one in Spain with twenty guests.

  Do I really want to visit Angus to ask him what happened last year? Why didn’t you want my mum to store Dad’s things? Did you want them for yourself so you could steal Dad’s marbles? What a ridiculous line of questioning. And do I really blame the brothers for not wanting Mum to keep their brother’s things? They were absolutely right and I only see that now. At any moment Mum could have decided to throw them on a bonfire, fuelled by wine and a bitter memory of something Dad did to her to make her life a misery, even though she’s now happily remarried.

  ‘Did you know about him having a marble collection?’ I ask her again, firmly. ‘Did you pack them away in his apartment?’

  ‘Not at all. I told you that yesterday.’

  There is enough annoyance and hurt in her voice for me to believe her.

  ‘And if I had come across them when we were packing them up, I would have thrown them straight in the skip,’ she says defiantly. ‘A grown man with marbles, honestly.’

  I believe her, but it makes me wonder what she came across in the apartment that I didn’t, that she considered not worth keeping. Maybe she wasn’t the right person to help me out at the time. And why am I only thinking of all this now? Guilt is eating away at me. I was busy, I was stressed, I was worried. I should have handled it all better. Perhaps I should have invited his brothers to join us, see if there was anything they’d like, from his past. Perhaps that’s why they were angry with Mum, I didn’t include them in anything. I just took over, thinking I knew everything there was to know about him.

  ‘Mum, have you remembered what your marble fight with Dad was about?’ I refuse to let that one go. I know she was holding out on me and I need to know as much as I can right now. No more secrets.

  ‘Oh, I can barely remember now …’ She goes quiet for a moment and I think that’s the end of her answer, when she suddenly continues. ‘We were on our honeymoon, that much I remember. He went wandering off on his own, like he always did, no explanation, then came back after spending months’ worth of our savings on some ridiculous marble.’

  I slide the inventory out of the folder as I’m driving, keeping a close eye on the road. I cast my eyes over the list.

  ‘Was it a heart?’

  ‘I can’t remember the design.’ She goes quiet. ‘Actually, yes, I think it was. It drove me insane that he would spend all of our money on it. We spent three days in Venice unable to eat a thing, I remember sharing a can of Coke one day because we hadn’t the money for anything else. Silly eejit,’ she says softly. ‘But that was your father all over. By the way, how did you know it was a heart?’

  ‘Oh. I just … guessed.’

  I run my finger over Dad’s handwriting: ‘Heart – damaged. Condition: collectable. Venice ’79.’

  So it wasn’t Mum who packed up the marbles, or took from them. I think I’ve established she would have wanted nothing to do with them.

  Access. I have to think who had access to the boxes. It wasn’t Mickey, it wasn’t his family. There’s no way of me ever really knowing that for sure, but I have to trust him. Access. Contacting the delivery company from last year seems a long shot: Excuse me, did you ever happen to steal some items you were delivering last year? Maybe Mickey is wrong about the marbles not being in the box when they arrived at his house. Maybe they were taken yesterday, and yesterday’s delivery driver isn’t a long shot.

  ‘Can I help you, Sabrina?’ Amy asks gently as I walk back into the waiting room.

  I try to compose myself. The moon made m
e do it. ‘I received a delivery from Mickey yesterday, from his home to my dad’s hospital, and I was trying to figure out who delivered it. Do you know anything about it?’

  ‘Know about it? I spent an entire weekend in that garage, unpaid, arranging deliveries. Not my job, but tell that to Mickey.’

  My heart leaps a little, feeling a bit of hope. ‘Were the boxes sealed before you sent them?’ I ask lightly, not wanting to offend her.

  ‘Oh God,’ she groaned. ‘Yes they were and they were very carefully stored, I can tell you that, but don’t tell me something was broken, or missing.’

  ‘Well, yes, actually something was missing.’

  ‘Oh, Looper.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Sorry, it’s Looper. The delivery guy. To explain, yes absolutely the boxes were sealed when I got to them, and I was under strict orders not to open them either. Mickey wouldn’t want me seeing in his stuff – yours weren’t the only ones in there, by the way. There was a bunch of stuff that had to go. Old furniture, clothes, all in storage that hadn’t been touched in years, covered in dust. Anyway, I used Looper to deliver them, Mickey’s nephew. He’s had so many complaints, but I have no choice but to use him. Mickey’s trying to help out family, you know how it is. It’s between you and him, I’m afraid, I can’t get involved, but I can give you his contact details.’

  ‘Yes please,’ I say happily, feeling that perhaps all is not lost. I’m getting places.

  ‘Do you know your way around here?’ she asks, handing the address over reluctantly.

  ‘No but I have satnav.’

  Amy bites her lip. ‘Satnav won’t even know where you’re going,’ she says. ‘It’s pretty remote.’

  ‘It’s okay, I have time,’ I say, moving towards the door. For the first time in I don’t know how long, I feel a surge of excitement.

  ‘Just be careful, he’s not really a people person, and particularly on a day like today –’ she gestures towards the sky – ‘days like today are made for people like him,’ she adds before I close the door.