The Marble Collector

by Cecelia Ahern

  When she smiles at me it’s a full mouth of metal and my heart melts. My goofy, awkward beautiful daughter looks better in her pyjamas and spot cream all over her face curled up on the couch and watching Family Fortunes, than this yoke.

  ‘You look like crap,’ she says, giving me a hug. I freeze. If she thinks that then Gina will most definitely think it too. She’ll analyse it, dissect it, ask me a thousand paranoid questions with her claws dug into me, and I’ll have to deny everything. I have to get to the shower before she sees me. I can hear her in the kitchen, busy talking about prawn cocktails, her voice louder than everyone else’s. The marquee has taken over our tiny back garden, the side of it pushed up against the garden wall so that a corner of the shed roof is digging through the canvas, looking like it will pierce it, and somebody’s skull, at any moment. Gina is dressed and ready and beautiful as always, still, after all this time, talking and organising everybody like she lives in the Hollywood Hills. We don’t. I couldn’t give her what I know she longed for, which was the upbringing she had. Now that Sabrina is thirteen she’s talking about going to work. I don’t think she will, in fact I know she’s bluffing, it’s all just to say to me, ‘You’re not giving me what I need. You’re not making enough money.’

  I’ll have to sit in that tent for the next few hours listening to people ask me, ‘What are you doing now, Fergus?’ like I change jobs faster than my underwear. I haven’t found it easy staying put anywhere, but think I’m on to something now. Truth be told I’m not the best at managing my own money, but I know that now and I’ve copped on. I’m a good salesman, a great one; it all came from Mattie’s butcher’s shop, when I did my best to get out of cleaning guts and odd jobs that nobody else wanted to do. I started looking into getting better meat, I started advising Mattie on how best to sell it too. And it worked. Quickly found myself out of the back of the butcher’s and upstairs in the office, focusing on sales. Then when I married Gina I felt it was time for me to leave Mattie, take my skills elsewhere, which I did to much success. Mobile phones, mortgages, and now a friend wants to hire me for this new company. I just need to understand the markets, which I do. I’m not good at managing my own money, doesn’t mean I’m not good at making it for other people. I just need a qualification to convince people to believe me. I’ve enrolled in an evening course in town twice a week and then I’ll be a bona fide venture capitalist.

  ‘What’s in there? My present?’ She jabs at the bag in my hand and I pull it away sharply from her.

  ‘Sorry,’ she says, face suddenly serious, a little afraid, and steps back.

  ‘Sorry, love, I didn’t mean to, I just …’ I keep my bag behind my back. I need to hide it somewhere fast before Gina wonders the same thing. A night away from her and she’ll be in her element of paranoia.

  I rush upstairs to the spare bedroom that’s also used as my home office. From the way it looks I assume her ma is staying over, a multitude of candles, flowers, shampoo, shower gels, everything she’d need for a night away, she’s just short of adding a chocolate to her pillow. I pull the desk chair over to the wardrobe and stand up. The marbles are at the top, at the back, deep in the wardrobe. I can barely reach them myself I’ve hidden them so well and it’s exactly where I’m going to stuff this bag until I have time to empty it later.

  I hear footsteps on the stairs and I literally can’t get the bag in there fast enough. I’m pushing it but to no avail. If I’d used my common sense I would take the offending objects out separately, but I’m panicking. I’m sweating, can smell the black coffee smell from my armpits, feel the alcohol seeping from my pores from a night of partying. She’s too close. I close the wardrobe and jump down from the chair, travel bag still in my hand, chair still beside the wardrobe.

  The door opens.

  Gina stares at me, looks me up and down. I know it, feel it in my gut, more than any other time and it’s come close a lot of times, but I know the moment has come.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Just want to check up on something for work.’

  I’m sweating, my chest is heaving with panic and I try to control it.

  ‘For work,’ she says flatly.

  Her eyes are dark, her face fierce, I have never seen her look like this before. I feel it slipping away and I’m almost relieved but at the same time I don’t want it to go.

  ‘Where did you stay last night?’

  ‘The Winchester.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘King’s Cross.’

  ‘For the Strategic Technology Forum.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Yes, that’s what I thought you told me. So I called. Looking for you. There was no booking in that hotel under your name, no forum. No nothing. Unless you were at an Indian wedding, Fergus, you weren’t there.’

  She’s shaking now, voice and body trembling.

  ‘You were there with one of your slags, weren’t you?’

  This throws me. She’s never accused me of that before. Not directly. She has hinted as much with questions and uncertainty but has never come right out and said it. It makes me feel disgusting, the way she looks at me, for the way I’ve made her feel, reduced her to this version of a woman I’ve never met. It’s over, it’s over, she’s got me. I give up – or do I? I never give up. One more try. Don’t go without a fight.

  ‘No, Gina, look at me …’ I take hold of her shoulders. ‘I was there all right, the conference was in another hotel. It wasn’t booked under my name because work booked it through a travel agency and it’s probably under their name. I don’t know which one, but I can find out.’ My voice is too high-pitched, it’s weak, it’s breaking, it’s giving me away. With marbles you never have to speak, your voice can’t deceive you.

  ‘Get your hands off me,’ she says, voice quiet and threatening. ‘What’s in the bag?’

  I swallow. ‘I can’t … nothing.’

  She looks at it and I’m afraid that she’s going to grab it, open it, reveal the truth. She’s right, I wasn’t in The Winchester. I wasn’t at a work forum. I was in the Greyhound Inn, Tinsley Green in West Sussex, but I wasn’t with another woman. It is where I’ve been on the same day for the past five years for the World Marble Championships. In my bag are two trophies, the first trophy I’ve won with my team, and the second is for best individual player. The team is Electric Slags, named after the Christensen Agate transparent-coloured base marbles with opaque white swirls. ‘Electric’ because Christensen Agate slags are much brighter than those produced by any other manufacturer, the rarest colour being peach. I named the team this because it’s a marble that I bought after my liaison in the cabbage field. The marble reminded me of the cream of her skin, her peach hair and lips and the moment in the cabbage field five years earlier, a reminder that my marble life was my secret, my way of cheating. Naming the team after that was branding myself, I think with a mixture of pride and detestation, recognition and acknowledgement of who I am, a cheat with a title, who wanted to take his secret marble-playing further. It was an instant hit with my teammates, they’d no idea of the real meaning. The marble world is no different to the world of people, it too has its reproductions and fakes, and slags were an attempt to mimic hand-cut stones. Gina is my hand-cut stone, always was, always will be, while my cabbage-field lover and I were only ever slags and we both knew it.

  It was a coincidence that Gina used the word slag. She had no idea, I’m certain. My teammates, five other men, know nothing about my personal life, nothing beyond the games we play together and the banter that allows men to avoid any real personal discussion. We’ve got together five years in a row to win the world championships, this is the first time Ireland have ever won and I can’t tell anyone about it. There’s a small article in the paper today about the Irish win, accompanied by a grainy photo of the team, me deliberately hiding at the back, you can’t make me out. Electric Slags win for Ireland. And then of course mention of the best individual player, me, who scored the winning throw. />
  The game we played was Ring Taw, where forty-nine target marbles are placed on a six-foot raised ring. The surface is three inches off the ground and is covered in sand. The marbles are half an inch in diameter and can be glass or ceramic. Of course we used glass. Two teams of six players get a point each for each marble they knock out of the ring. The first team to knock out twenty-five marbles from the ring is the winner. Electric Slags beat Team USA to become the world champions; apart from Sabrina’s birth, the second greatest day of my life. A moment I will no doubt remember for ever.

  How can I tell Gina now? What would I say? For the past sixteen years I’ve been lying to you about a hobby of mine. It’s been a huge part of my life, but you know nothing about it. Women or no women, that in itself is a betrayal. It’s also weird, embarrassing. If I’m hiding a hobby, what else am I hiding? It’s gone on too long to explain, to go back. Why is it easier to lie? Because I promised Hamish. Sneaking out into the night from the age of ten, it was our secret. A secret kept from Ma that we were hustling, a secret from players that I was good. I don’t know why, but I kept that secret, like a pact with Hamish, a connection to him. We’re the only two, of people who matter in our lives, who know. Just you and me, Hamish. But Hamish is gone and Gina is here and I can’t carry on like this for the rest of my life. It will drive me mad, it is already starting to. I feel the pressure more than ever before. I’ll tell her. It will be difficult for a while, she won’t trust me, but she hasn’t for some time anyway. But I’ll tell her. Now.

  ‘I’ll show you,’ I say, taking the bag from behind my back and unzipping it, my fingers shaking like you wouldn’t believe. Even in the final moments of the most important game of my life, my fingers were rock steady.

  ‘No!’ she says suddenly, afraid, stopping me, hand held out.

  I want to tell her it’s not what she thinks it is, though I don’t know what she thinks it is, but it can’t be this.

  ‘No. If you say you were there, you were there.’ She swallows hard. ‘Everyone will be here in fifteen minutes, please be ready.’ She leaves me, the zip open on the bag, the metal of the trophy shining for me to see. If she’d just looked down.

  Later that evening, mask back on, sweat washed off, prawn cocktail and chicken Kiev polished off, pavlova waiting to be eaten, I go in search of Sabrina. I find her curled in a ball on the couch, crying.

  ‘What’s wrong, love?’

  ‘John said I look like a slag.’

  I take her in my arms, the tears washing away the too much make-up. ‘No, you’re not that. You’ll never be that. But all of this –’ I look down at her outfit. ‘It’s not you, love, is it?’

  She shakes her head miserably.

  ‘Remember,’ I feel a lump in my throat, ‘just always remember to be you.’

  The Marble Cat is smart black-framed pub on Capel Street with Kilkenny flags suspended on beams from the frame. It’s inviting, advertising its daily specials – root vegetable soup and Guinness brown bread and Dublin Bay prawns – on a blackboard outside, unlike some of the others which wish to shut out the world and light and lock the door behind. It’s four p.m. on Friday and it’s not yet bustling with end-of-day workers ready to let their hair down and unload their stress for the weekend. The pub is separated into the pub and lounge. I choose the lounge, always less intrusive. Three men sit up at the bar, staring deeply into their pints; there are a few empty stools between each of them, they are not together but occasionally converse. Two other men in suits, eating soup and bread rolls, talk shop but there is no one else in the place.

  A young barman stands behind the bar, watching the racing on TV. I approach the bar and he looks at me.

  ‘Hi.’ I keep my voice down and he comes closer. ‘Could I speak to the manager, please? Or anybody who has worked here a long time?’

  ‘Boss is here today, in the bar. I’ll get him.’

  He disappears through the opening to the pub next door and after a few moments the space is filled by an enormous wide man.

  ‘Here’s the marble cat himself,’ one man at the bar says, suddenly coming alive.

  ‘Spud, how are ye?’ he says, shaking his hand.

  He’s enormous, over six feet and broad, and it’s then when I look around the walls of the pub that I realise who he is. Photographs, trophies, framed jerseys, newspaper articles of All-Ireland finals and wins cover every inch of the walls. Black-and-yellow stripes – the cats – and I realise suddenly what the pub name refers to, part of it at least. Kilkenny hurlers are famously called The Cats, a term which refers to anyone who is a tenacious fighter. I can see him smashing into other players, hurley in hand, before helmets and protective gear, pure solid. A marble man. He leans on the bar to get closer to my level though he’s still towering, elbows on the varnished wood.

  ‘They call you the marble cat?’ I ask.

  ‘They call me lots of things. Glad it was that one that stuck.’ He returns the smile.

  ‘You don’t know this fella?’ Spud pipes up. ‘Six All-Ireland medals in the seventies. Kilkenny’s star player. Nothing like him before, nothing like him since.’

  ‘How can I help you?’ he asks, turning away from Spud to end the chat.

  ‘My name is Sabrina Boggs.’ I watch his face for recognition, Boggs isn’t a common name, but there’s nothing. ‘My dad is having memory problems, and I wanted to help fill in the gaps for him. He used to drink here. He was a regular.’

  ‘Well you’re in luck, because I know every single person that comes through that door, especially the regulars.’

  ‘He played marbles, I thought that’s why he chose to come here, but you’re not a marble pub,’ I laugh at myself.

  ‘Kilkenny is called the Marble City,’ he explains kindly. ‘The footpaths of the city streets were paved with limestone flagstones and on wet winter evenings they glistened. Hence the name.’

  I bet he’s told this countless times to American tourists.

  ‘A very dark grey limestone was quarried just outside of the city at a place called the Black Quarry. Between you and me,’ he speaks out the side of his mouth and looks around, ‘I wanted to give the pub that name, but the money men reckoned the Marble Cat would be better for our pockets.’

  I smile.

  ‘But we did play marbles here at one time, you’ll be pleased to know. A small group used to come in. What is his name?’

  ‘Fergus Boggs.’

  He frowns immediately, then shakes his head. He looks at the men at the bar. ‘Spud, you know a fella named Fergus Boggs, played marbles here?’

  ‘Not here,’ Spud says, without thinking about it, eyes back in his pint.

  ‘He would have been here five years ago,’ I explain, wondering if Regina’s story is to be trusted.

  I’ve piqued his curiosity, I can tell. ‘Sorry, love, we only had a small marble team in here. Spud, who’s here, Gerry, who’s in there,’ he points to the bar, ‘and three other fellas. No Fergus.’

  ‘Show her the winners’ corner,’ Spud shouts proudly.

  The Marble Cat chuckles and lifts the bar counter. He towers over me. ‘Let me give you a tour. I don’t think Spud wants me to show you any of my walls of fame, but down here is the Electric Slags’ corner.’

  Feeling disappointed that they’ve never heard of Dad, I follow him through the bar to the far corner. Spud hops off his stool and follows us.

  There is a glass display cabinet on the wall, inside are two trophies. ‘This is the trophy they won at the World Marble Championships back in …’ he searches his pockets for his glasses.

  ‘Ninety-four,’ Spud says immediately. ‘April.’

  The Marble Cat rolls his eyes. ‘The second trophy is for Best Individual Player. Spud didn’t win that – I can tell you that without needing my glasses,’ he teases, still patting down his pockets.

  ‘And over here is where we got a mention in the paper.’ Spud points to the framed newspaper cutout and I move closer to view the photograph.
/>   ‘If you look close you’ll see Spud has hair,’ the Marble Cat says.

  To be polite I move closer. I follow the line-up and suddenly my heart pounds. ‘That’s my dad.’ I point him out in the line-up.

  The Marble Cat manages to locate his glasses and moves his face closer to the frame. Then suddenly he booms, ‘Hamish O’Neill! That’s your dad?’

  ‘No, no,’ I laugh. ‘That’s wrong. His name is Fergus Boggs. But that’s him. Definitely him. Oh my God, look at him, he’s so young.’

  ‘That’s Hamish O’Neill,’ the Marble Cat says, prodding Dad’s face with his thick finger. ‘And he was a regular. Sure I know him well.’

  Spud steps in now too. ‘That’s Hamish,’ he says defensively, looking at me as though I’m a liar.

  I’m stunned. My mouth opens but nothing comes out. My head is racing, too many questions, I’m too confused. I study the photo myself to see if it’s Dad at all, maybe I’m the one who’s wrong. It was almost twenty years ago, maybe it’s somebody that looks like him. But no, it is him. Are they messing with me? Is this a joke? I study them, and their faces are as serious as mine.

  ‘She says her dad is Hamish,’ the Marble Cat says to Spud, excited, his voice booming through the pub so that the two men in suits are listening now.

  ‘I heard her.’ Spud narrows his eyes at me.

  The Marble Cat laughs, his laughter filling the whole place. ‘Gerry!’ he yells into the bar next door. ‘Get in here, you’ll never guess who is here!’

  ‘I know who’s in there and I’m not going anywhere near him. Not until he apologises!’ a man yells back grumpily.

  ‘Well then you’ll be a long time in there,’ Spud yells back.

  ‘Ah would you ignore your feud for a few minutes. What is it, a year now?’ the Marble Cat hollers. He walks to the bar, there in three long strides, and shouts through the doorway that leads from the lounge to the bar. ‘Hamish O’Neill’s daughter is here.’