The Marble Collector

by Cecelia Ahern

‘It wasn’t nothing, tell me.’ I feel the anger pumping through my veins. Be calm or she won’t tell you. Be the patient, understanding fella who listens, don’t go thumping people. Not yet.

  ‘It was just so embarrassing, Fergus.’ She sits on the bed and looks tiny on the big bed. She’s twenty-one years old. I’m twenty-four. ‘She touched my …’ Her eyes widen and the anger leaves me and I feel a laugh rising.

  ‘Yeah? Your what?’ My fantasy game of Hundreds comes to mind. She’s on that bed, in the robe, my wife.

  ‘It’s not funny!’ She throws herself down, covers her face with a pillow.

  ‘I’m not laughing.’ I sit down beside her.

  ‘You look like you’re going to,’ she says, voice muffled. ‘I just didn’t know a massage was so invasive. I didn’t wait all this time to have sex to have a four-foot Italian mama maul me before you.’

  And on that I have to laugh.

  ‘Stop!’ she whinges, but I can see her smile buried beneath the pillow.

  ‘Did you like her hands on you?’ I tease her, my hand travelling up her leg.

  ‘Stop it, Fergus.’ But she means the teasing, not the touching, because for the first time she’s not stopping me. I have to do it now though, I have to show her the marble now, so that it’s me that she meets, it’s me that she makes love to for the first time, not him.

  I stop my own hand from travelling and she sits up, confused, hair all in her face.

  ‘I want to give you something first.’

  She moves her hair away from her face and she looks so sweet, and so innocent right at that moment that I take a mental picture of it. I don’t know it now but I’ll try to recall it in the future at the moments when I feel like I’ve lost her, or hate her so much I can’t help but look away from her.

  ‘I went for a walk around. And I found something special for you. For us. It’s important to me.’ My voice is shaking and so I decide to shut up. I take the pouch out of my pocket, remove the heart from the pouch, my fingers trembling. I feel like I’m giving a part of myself to her. I’ve never felt like this before. You married me yesterday but today is the first time you’ve met me. My name is Fergus Boggs, my life is marked by marbles. I unwrap the bubble wrap and I hold it out in my palm. Her reaction first, then my explanation. Let her take it in, drink in her drinking it in.

  ‘What is this?’ she says, her voice flat.

  I look at her in surprise, heart pounding in my throat. I immediately start to backtrack, back-pedal, hide in my shell. The other me starts warming up in the wings.

  ‘I mean, how much was it? We said we wouldn’t buy each other anything here. We can’t afford it. No more gifts, remember? After the wedding? We agreed.’ She’s barely looked at it, she’s so annoyed. Yes, we did agree, we promised each other, but this is more than a piece of jewellery, it means more to me than the ring she loves so much on her finger. I want to say that but I don’t.

  ‘How much did this cost?’

  I stutter and stammer, too broken and hurt to reply honestly. I’m caught between being him and being me, I’m unable to focus on being one.

  She is holding it too roughly, too harshly, she moves it from one hand to the other too carelessly, she could easily drop it. I feel tense watching her.

  ‘I can’t believe you wasted your money on this!’ She jumps up from the bed. ‘On a … on a …’ She studies it. ‘A toy! What were you thinking, Fergus? Oh my God.’ She sits down again, her eyes filling up. ‘We’ve been saving for so long. I just want to get away from living with Mum, I want it to be just you and me. We budgeted for this trip so carefully, Fergus, why would you …?’ She looks at the marble in her hand, confused. ‘I mean, it’s sweet, thank you, I know you were trying to be kind, but …’ Her anger starts to calm but it’s too late.

  She places her hands on my cheeks, knows that she has hurt my feelings though I don’t admit to it. I will take it back I tell her, I will gladly take it back, I never want to see it again ever in my life, to be reminded of this moment when I offered my real self and I was rejected. But I can’t bring it back because she drops it, by accident, and its surface is scratched, meaning it will never have a perfect heart again.

  On my journey back from Cavan to Dublin I can’t help myself slipping into my mind. My driving is clumsy, I have to apologise to other drivers too many times, so I lower the window for the fresh air and sit up.

  Aidan is on loudspeaker in the car. I needed to call him, to root myself with my life. Talk to somebody real.

  ‘So you’re looking for the missing marbles now?’ he asks after I fill him in on everything that’s happened so far today, apart from the mug-throwing incident, and I hear the squeals of delight as the kids have a water fight in the background.

  ‘I don’t even know if it’s about the missing marbles any more,’ I say, suddenly deciding. ‘Finding out about Dad seems to be much more important than finding the actual marbles. It started with them and it opened up more questions, big gaping holes that I need to fill. There is a side to Dad that I never knew, there is a life he led that he kept from me and I want to discover it. Not just for me. But if he can’t remember it, how can he ever know that part of himself again?’

  Aidan leaves a long silence and I try to read it. He thinks I’m crazy, I’ve finally lost it, or he’s jumping around with jubilance that I’m newly energised. But his response is calm, measured.

  ‘You know best, Sabrina. I’m not going to tell you not to. If you think it will help.’

  He doesn’t need to say any more, I understand what it means. If it will help me and, as a consequence, us.

  ‘I think it will,’ I reply.

  ‘Love you,’ he says. ‘Try not to let any more men kiss you.’

  I laugh.

  ‘Seriously. Be careful, Sabrina.’

  ‘I will.’

  The kids shout down the phone to me, love you, miss you, poo poo, wee wee head, and then they’re gone.

  A blonde woman delivered the marbles. I will delay my visit to Dad for now. I need to find the blonde woman who delivered the marbles, the woman who knows the man that I don’t, and there is only one woman I can think of who fits that description, who agreed to meet me as soon as I called.

  She’s sitting in the darkest corner, away from the window, the light, the buzz of the rest of the café. She looks older than I remember, but then she is older than I remember. Nearly ten years have passed since we’ve seen each other, almost twenty since I saw her first. She’s still blonde, her hair one week over its last needed colour, the greys and brown showing at the roots. Ten years older than me she is forty-two now, I always thought she was so young, but so much older than me. Too young for him, but still much older than me. Now we could look the same. She looks bored as she waits and I wonder is the boredom hiding the nervousness beneath, anxiety that I feel as soon as I see her. She sees me walking towards her and she fixes her posture, lifts her chin in that proud move and I hate her all over again like I always did. That self-righteous bitch who thought everything she wanted was automatically supposed to be hers. I try to calm myself, not allow the anger to bubble over.

  I saw her with Dad when I was fifteen years old. It was before my parents separated. He introduced me to her less than a year later. I was supposed to think they’d just met, that this was the beginning of a beautiful new relationship for him, that I was to be supportive and happy but I knew that he’d been with her all along. For how long I don’t know, but I never said a word. He hadn’t just lied to Mum, he had lied to me too, because he looked at me and said the same words. Lies.

  They were drunk at lunchtime when I saw them and every time I pass the same restaurant to this day I get the same feeling in my stomach and see them all over again. People don’t know that they do that to people when they do the things they shouldn’t. Hurtful things are roots, they spread, branch out, creep under the surface touching other parts of the lives of those they hurt. It’s never one mistake, it’s never one moment,
it becomes a series of moments, each moment growing roots and spurting in different directions. And over time they become muddled like an old twisted tree, strangling itself and tying itself up in knots.

  I was off school early to go to the dentist, one of my many train-track appointments to try to get to the bottom of my internal cheek bleeding as they scratched and scraped as I talked and chewed. I remember my mouth throbbing as I walked down the road, tears in my eyes from frustration because another cruel boy made another cruel joke at school that day and I was tired of laughing and pretending I didn’t care. It was then that I saw Dad. In a fancy restaurant in town, one of the expensive ones with tables outside that I was too embarrassed to walk by. At fifteen, feeling eyes on me from every corner of the street, my head was bowed, my cheeks already pink, my walk self-conscious, but I couldn’t help it. When you try hard not to look at something it means you’d have to poke your own eyes out to stop you from looking at that something. So I looked up at all the eyes that I was afraid were looking at me and laughing, and I saw him. I actually stopped for a moment and somebody crashed into the back of me. It was only for a second and I moved again, but I saw enough. Him and her in a table by the window, drunk face, drunk eyes, quick kiss, hands groping under the chair. I didn’t say anything to Mum about it because, well, they were so bad at that stage I thought maybe she knew, thought that the woman was the reason, or at least one of the reasons for things being so bad. I never said a word about seeing them together, even when I was introduced to her months later in that fake made-up rehearsed introduction as if they’d just recently met. I always hated her.

  Regina.

  It made me think of the word Vagina. She was just that. Every time I heard her name, every time I had to say her name, I was all the time hearing and saying Vagina. I called her it once by mistake. She laughed and said, ‘What?’ but I pretended she’d misheard. She giggled to herself thinking her hearing odd and funny.

  And now here I am face to face with Vagina. And I have to ask her for her help, something I hate to do but it’s necessary. She is the only lead I have, she is the only woman I know that was in Dad’s life for the longest amount of time who could have had access to his personal belongings, his apartment, the blonde woman who delivered the marbles to Mickey Flanagan’s house, who could help solve this mystery.

  We don’t hug or kiss when greeting, we’re not old friends, not even acquaintances, not even enemies. Just two people who got twisted together.

  She works at the hair salon next door to the café we’re in, the same hair salon that Mum and I have avoided going to for almost twenty years. I called her from the car, after Mickey’s phone call, and don’t know what I was expecting but I’d come up with a few guesses. She could straight out tell me to never call her again. She could politely pawn me off, suggest a date in the future that kept changing. I didn’t expect the instant agreement to meet. She was about to take a coffee break, she could meet me in thirty minutes. I wasn’t prepared for that. Twenty minutes on the phone with Aidan explaining it all and I’m still not prepared.

  ‘I really appreciate you agreeing to meet with me on such short notice,’ I say, as I sit down and take off my coat, feeling like that awkward fifteen-year-old again with her eyes on me as I clumsily hang up my coat on the back of the chair. ‘I’m sure it came as a bit of a surprise to you.’

  ‘I was waiting for you to call,’ she says, matter-of-factly. ‘No, not waiting. Expecting,’ she says. She’s wearing an oversized black cardigan pulled down past her hands like she’s cold, but it’s not cold, it’s a beautiful day and I realise she’s nervous.

  ‘Why’s that?’ I ask, picturing Mickey Flanagan’s wife on the phone, grasping the receiver in two hands in her house, in urgent hushed tones telling her, She knows, Regina, Sabrina knows that you were here and that you delivered the marbles. She’s on her way to you now.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says thoughtfully, taking me in. ‘You were always an interesting little one. You always looked like you had a lot of questions but never asked any of them. I used to wait for you to ask, but you never did.’

  ‘I don’t think I was looking at you in any particular way because I wanted to ask you questions,’ I say, and her smile drops a little. ‘I knew you and Dad were together before they separated, I saw you both in a restaurant long before …’ I pause for her reaction. ‘I had a hard time listening to your lies. I could tell you both enjoyed it.’

  This gives her a surprise, a little jolt, and she sits upright. Then she smiles. ‘So is that what this is about? Letting me know I didn’t pull the wool over your eyes?’ She asks it as though she’s amused, not an ounce of apology or disgust with herself. I don’t know why I expected there should be.

  ‘No, actually.’ I look down, add a sugar to my cappuccino, stir it, take a sip. Centre myself. I’m here for a reason. ‘As you know, there are a few things that Dad doesn’t recall.’

  She nods, genuinely sad.

  ‘So sometimes I have to contact people in his life to see if I can fill the holes.’

  ‘Ah,’ she says, humble now. ‘Anything I can do to help.’

  Breathe. ‘Did you know about his marble collection?’

  ‘Did I know about his, what now?’

  ‘Marble collection. He had a collection. And he played marbles too.’

  She shakes her head, her forehead wrinkled in a frown. ‘No. I never, we never … marbles? The things that children play with? No. Never.’

  My heart drops. I thought. I really thought … ‘Did you deliver boxes to a house in Virginia last year?’

  ‘Last year? Virginia? Cavan? No, why would I … I haven’t seen Fergus for almost five years, and even when we were together we were more off than on. We weren’t exactly platonic. We just met up occasionally when, you know …’

  I don’t want to know their reasons for meeting, I don’t need to hear it, it’s clear already. I’m so disappointed, I just want to grab my coat and go. There is no point to the remainder of this conversation, no point in finishing my coffee.

  Maybe she senses this. Tries her best to be useful. ‘Do you know one of the reasons why Fergus and I broke up for good?’

  ‘Let me guess,’ I say wryly. ‘He cheated on you.’

  She takes it well, it makes me not want to throw any more at her as I feel it cheapened me and not her.

  ‘Probably. Though that wasn’t the reason. He was so secretive. I never quite knew exactly what he was doing or where he was. And not because he didn’t answer a question but because he’d answer it and somehow I’d realise that, after listening to him, I still didn’t know. He was vague. I don’t know if it was deliberate, but to pin him down was to confuse him, annoy him, seem like a nag, which I never wanted to be, but he had the ability to make a person a nag, because he never answered, he never really explained. He didn’t understand why I needed to know so much. He thought there was something wrong with me. I did wonder if he was cheating on me. And the thing is, I didn’t care, we didn’t have that kind of relationship, but it bothered me that I couldn’t get answers. So I started following him.’ She takes a timely sip of her tea, enjoying it as I hang on her every word. ‘And I realised after a very short time that he was not as exciting as he seemed. He was going to the same place all the time, or at least most of the time.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘He was going to a pub.’ She arches her eyebrow. ‘He loved to drink. Boring, isn’t it? I was hoping it was something else. I followed him for two weeks. And one time … oh my God, it was so funny, he almost caught me!’ She starts laughing and I can tell she’s settling down for a long chat. But I don’t have the time.

  I finish my cappuccino.

  ‘Regina,’ I say, hearing Vagina in my head. ‘Which pub was he going to?’

  She stops, realising I’m not here to listen to her detective stories into my father’s behaviour. She’s back to how she was when I entered. Bored. Unhappy. Disappointed nothing in her life lived up to
anything it could have been. Waiting for the people she hurt in the past to make an appearance and spice up her life, make her feel powerful.

  ‘One on Capel Street.’

  ‘My dad wasn’t an alcoholic,’ I say to her, though I don’t really know this. I don’t know his life in detail but I think I’d have known that, wouldn’t I?

  ‘Oh I know that,’ she laughs, and I feel stupid, my cheeks burn. ‘My daddy was an alcoholic. Believe me, I couldn’t spend two minutes with one. But they had some things in common. Fergus lied about most places he went to. About visiting his mother, about going to the pub, about going to watch matches, about being at meetings, or being away for a weekend. He didn’t lie because he was going somewhere more exciting or more daring, or to be with another woman. The life he escaped to was not exotic. He was sitting in a pub. He didn’t even need to lie to me, I wasn’t trying to pin him down.’ She leans in, hands clasped, matter-of-fact, eyes alight like she’s enjoying every moment of the revelation. ‘Sabrina, your dad lied all the time. He lied because he wanted to, because he liked to, because he got some kind of buzz out of it. He lied because that’s the kind of person he chose to be, and that was the kind of life he chose to live. And that’s it.’

  ‘What was the name of the pub?’ I ask, refusing to believe her explanation. I know that Dad lied, but he lied for a reason. And I want to find out what that reason was.

  Regina looks as though she’s trying to decide whether to tell me or not, like a cat playing with a mouse, one last game with me before she knows I’ll never see her again. ‘The Marble Cat,’ she says finally.

  ‘Aidan,’ I say loudly, pulling the car out of my parking space.

  ‘How are you doing?’ he asks.

  ‘Just met with Regina,’ I say confidently, feeling like I’m flying now.

  ‘Vagina? I didn’t think you’d go through with it. I thought that woman gave you nightmares?’

  ‘Not any more,’ I say confidently. ‘Not any more.’

  ‘So where to next?’ he asks.