The Marble Collector

by Cecelia Ahern

  She is down on her knees beside me on the floor, but I can’t look at her. I’m busy.

  ‘Are you okay? Are you feeling well? You don’t look … Fergus, you are dripping wet.’

  ‘Right,’ I say, putting the marker down and sitting back on my haunches as I feel another drip of sweat fall from my nose. ‘This game is called Increase Pound, and that is exactly what it’s going to help us do. The small circle is the pound, the large circle is the bar. You shoot the taw from—’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes, you.’ I hand her some marbles, which she takes as though they’re hand grenades.

  ‘Fergus, it’s three p.m., shouldn’t you be at work and not playing marbles? This is ridiculous, I have to get back to work myself. I don’t understand, what’s going on?’

  ‘I was fired!’ I shout suddenly, which silences her and makes her jump in fright. ‘You’re the bank,’ I say, more aggressively than I intend. ‘You throw the marble and anything you hit in the pound becomes your property. If you don’t hit anything your taw stays where it is and you go again. You have ten tries.’

  I place my watch collection in the pound, the smaller inner circle. ‘Throw the marble. Hit it.’

  She looks at the watch collection and then at the items lining the circles which will follow and her eyes fill.

  ‘Oh, Fergus, you don’t have to do this. Joe can help you. You know that he’s offered already.’

  ‘I’m not taking handouts,’ I say, feeling dizzy at the thought of baby Joe paying my way. Joe who was never really part of my family until Cat welcomed him in with open arms. It wouldn’t be fair to him. ‘I got myself into this mess, I’m going to get myself out of it.’

  It was the marbles that got me into this situation in the first place. Getting rid of them will get me out of it. The lies, the deceit, the betrayal, me messing around, not focusing on the life I was living, splitting myself from myself and from my family. It’s Alfie’s birthday party and I can’t bring Cat to visit, because Sabrina doesn’t know Cat, she doesn’t even know my great love, and I don’t know where to start. To tell Sabrina about Cat would be to tell her about the marbles, and how can I do that? After a whole life of lying. Cat says she won’t say a word until I find a way to tell Sabrina, but it will slip out, it’s bound to, and then not to say it would be lying. Both of us lying to my daughter. Getting my marbles secretly valued in California was the real marker of how bad my financial situation had gotten. I was embarrassed, and that lie almost ended us, me showing up blind drunk back at the hotel. But she’s sticking with me. She says she understands, but it’s all a mess, it’s all a mess. It’s the marbles’ fault.

  Cat throws the marble. It’s a crap throw, a deliberately bad one, and it misses. Cat and I have played marbles together on many occasions. As soon as I opened her up to my world I welcomed her into it; she has been to marble games with me, to marble conventions, she’s not a great marble player, but she’s not this bad.

  ‘Do it properly!’ I yell, and she starts to cry. ‘Do it, do it!’ I pick the marble up and force it into her hand. ‘Throw it!’

  She throws it and it hits the watch collection in the pound.

  ‘Right, it’s yours. It’s the bank’s.’ I pick it up and toss it aside. ‘Next!’ I place down my ma’s engagement ring.

  She misses. I yell at her to try harder.

  ‘Fergus, I can’t. I can’t, I can’t, I won’t, please stop.’ Tears are streaming from her eyes and she collapses in a heap on the floor. I grab the marbles from her and I throw. I hit a ring box, that’s it, Mammy’s wedding ring: property of the bank. I throw it again and hit the Akro Agate Sample Box from 1930 valued between seven thousand and thirteen thousand. Of course I hit it, it is almost bigger than the pound.

  Next are the World’s Best Moons, in the original box, valued between four thousand and seven thousand. I hit it. My two most valuable collections. Them first, then everything else, everything must go.

  ‘I’ve found a buyer for these,’ I tell Cat a few days later, as I put the marble collections down in order for me to put on my coat. ‘I’m meeting him in town later. At O’Donoghue’s. He’s flown in from London to buy them. Twenty thousand dollars’ worth, we agreed fifteen thousand euro cash.’

  ‘You don’t look well, Fergus.’ She runs her hand over my face, and I kiss her palm. ‘You should lie down.’

  ‘Didn’t you hear me? I will, after I meet him.’

  ‘You don’t want to sell these. These are precious. All of your memories …’

  ‘Memories last for ever. These …’ I can barely look at them as I say it. ‘These will pay the mortgages for a few months, give me time to sort something out.’ What though? No job, no one hiring. Not at my age. Think, think, what, what. Sell the marbles.

  ‘You’re pale, you should lie down. Let me go for you.’

  It’s the best idea and we both know it. If I go I won’t be able to part with them and I need to, or the bank will take my home from me.

  She leaves with the marbles and I go to bed. She returns some time later, it’s dark, I don’t know what time it is and I feel like I haven’t slept but I must have. She comes to my bedside and I smell wine on her breath.

  ‘Did you sell them?’ I ask.

  ‘I got the money,’ she replies, placing an envelope by the bedside.

  ‘The marbles are gone?’

  She hesitates. ‘Yes, they’re gone.’

  She rubs my hair, my face, kisses me. At least I have her. I want to make a joke about her value but I can’t figure it out.

  ‘I’m going to take a shower,’ she says, sliding away.

  As soon as I hear the water start I do something I haven’t done for a very long time, I cry. Deep and painful, like I’m a child again. I fall asleep before Cat is out of the shower. When I wake up I’m in hospital and the next time I see Cat is the first time I meet her, in a rehabilitation centre that I call home, where she is visiting a friend.

  Marlow hands me a pair of glasses, tinted pink so that the world is immediately rosy and helps my beer buzz. The glasses are to help my eyes when I’m looking directly at the flame.

  ‘Cute!’ He pinches my nose lightly and fires up the kiln. ‘I love to work with glass because it’s so easy to manipulate and shape,’ he explains, moving around the studio with ease and comfort, knowing where absolutely everything is without looking; reaching, placing, like a dance. ‘Do you bake?’ he asks.

  ‘Bake? Yes, sometimes.’ With the kids, and thinking of them snaps me into gear. I have kids. I have a husband. A beautiful husband. A kind husband who wants me to be happy. Who tells me he loves me, who actually loves me. I take a step back.

  ‘It’s okay.’ He pulls me closer again, hot hand on my waist. ‘Glass reacts similarly to sugar when melted. You’ll see. But first, here’s one part I prepared earlier.’

  I move closer and take a look at an image he lays out on the table.

  ‘I’ve wanted to do this for a while but I was waiting for the right project to come along …’ He looks at me through those long lashes again, marble blue eyes as though he’s crafted them to perfection himself.

  ‘You designed this?’ I try not to look at his face. He’s doing hypnotic things with his face. In fact with his entire body. Can’t look, won’t look, concentrate on the flame.

  ‘Sure. It’s made of finely ground glass powders. So there are two ways I could make your marble: here at the lamp, which creates the swirl effect you’ve already seen, but your dad has a lot of German swirls, not all handmade, so I think we should give him something different.’

  He gathers a nucleus of opal glass on the end of a long stainless steel rod. He stands at the kiln, perfect posture, and slowly starts twirling the glass in the fire. The glass becomes illuminated, shiny and dripping like honey. He continues turning it to shape it into a sphere. Then he pulls it out of the kiln and I duck as the burning dripping glass is carried across the other side of the studio to an armchair. He sits o
n a wooden chair with high arms and he places the rod across the arms, and rolls it back and forth so that the glass at the end of the rod takes shape. The arms of the chair already have the indentations of the number of times he has done this. He’s deep in concentration, no conversation now. In fact there’s none for quite some time. He does this routine a few more times, moving back and forth from the kiln to the chair, beads of sweat on his forehead. He grabs hold of a newspaper in his palm and directly starts rolling the hot glass around in his hand to shape it.

  At one stage during the process I remove my eyes from him, feeling giddy and light-headed from the bottle of beer and an unusually emotional day, taken away by the chill-out music and the atmosphere, and I see Lea through the trees, dancing with Dara. There is a celebration in the air, things are great, life is great. Life is full of adventure. I can’t remember the last time I felt like this. While I watch this all happen my body relaxes, I even sway a little to the music. I can’t take my eyes off Marlow, and the beautiful honey-like syrupy glass.

  I stand back as he pulls the rod from the kiln and instead of sitting in the chair, he carefully rolls it over the powdered glass drawing he has prepared earlier. Once the drawing is on the glass, he continues to shape it into a sphere, careful not to distort the intricate image inside. He plunges the glass into a pot of crystal glass for the final layer.

  Marlow dips the shaped boiling-hot glass into a tin bucket of water, steam hissing and rising as it sizzles and hardens. He knocks it and it falls off the end of the rod, landing in the water and bobbing to the top.

  ‘We’ll leave it there to cool,’ he says, mopping the sweat from his brow.

  He must be able to see the way I’ve been looking at him because he finally looks up at me and smiles, that sweet amused look he’s had since he saw me. He reaches for his bottle and slugs the entire thing down. It’s after two a.m. and my head is spinning.

  I remember the marble he’s just created and make an effort to look in the bucket.

  ‘No peeking until it has cooled,’ he says, coming close to me. He pushes me up against the work surface, his hips against my ribs and he takes off my pink glasses. I try to adjust to the fact nothing is rosy any more, it’s real, unfiltered, not just in my head. It sobers me quickly. He traces a line all around my face, over each of my features, taking all of them in, slowly and softly. My heart is pounding and I’m sure he can feel it through his thin T-shirt.

  He kisses me, which begins slowly but very quickly becomes urgent. For someone who moved so rhythmically and slowly at work, there is something panicked and urgent about how he moves now.

  ‘I’m married,’ I murmur in his ear.

  ‘Congratulations,’ he continues, kissing my neck.

  I laugh, nervously.

  Five years ago, when I was pregnant with Fergus, a friend came to me and told me that Aidan had had an affair. I confronted him, we dealt with it. I made a decision. Stay or go, go or stay. He stayed. I stayed. We remained, but we didn’t remain as we were. We got worse, and then we got better. We had Alfie since. In my angry moments, which come far less regularly than they did, I always felt that I would grab the closest opportunity I could get to getting him back, by having an affair too, to make sure he truly understood how I felt. I know it’s childish but it was real. You hurt me, I’ll hurt you. But years on and there has been no opportunity, not at the school run, not at the empty pool, not at the supermarket with the kids, or at karate, or at football, or at art class. No chance for an affair during the mum-related activities that fill my day. Butter, cheese, ham, bread, slice. Raisins. Next. And that made me even more depressed about it, because even if I wanted to get him back, I couldn’t.

  I know that Aidan loves me. He’s not a perfect husband and not a perfect dad, but he’s more than enough. I am not a perfect anything, though I try to be. Sometimes I wonder if love is enough, or if there are levels of love. And sometimes I wonder if he can see me, even when he’s looking right at me. Last Sunday I went an entire day with green paint on my upper lip, from a morning of painting with the kids, and he never told me it was there. We went to the supermarket, we went to the playground, we walked around the park and not once did he say, ‘Sabrina, you have green paint on your face.’

  When I went home and looked in the mirror and saw it there, a big green gloop on my upper lip, I cried with frustration. Did nobody see me? Not even the boys? Am I this thing that is expected to be covered in dirt or food or green paint? Sabrina, the woman with paint on her face, the woman with the sticky stain on her trousers, the woman with the finger marks and food splashes on her T-shirt. Don’t tell her it’s there because it’s always there, it’s supposed to be there, it’s part of who she is.

  I asked Aidan about it, some high-pitched unhinged accusation about gloop on my face. He said that he just didn’t see it there, which made me wonder, did he look at me and not see it or did he not look at me at all for the entire day. Which is worse? We spent an entire session at counselling talking about it, about this green gloop that he didn’t see. Turns out I’m the green gloop.

  The green gloop started it, the near-drowning tipped me over the edge. And then I went looking for lost marbles in an attempt to fix things, save things, complete things for Dad, when perhaps it is myself that I’m trying to figure out.

  Aidan is afraid that I’ll leave him. He has told me this, he has been afraid of this since his affair. But I have no intention of leaving him. It’s nothing to do with him or what he did so long ago that I don’t even feel the pain any more, just an echo of it. It’s all to do with me. Lately I’ve been trapped, not myself, or being my real self and not liking it, whatever. Butter, cheese, ham, bread, slice. Raisins. Next. Watching an empty pool. Saving a man that doesn’t want to be saved. Not being immersed in the thing I am most passionate about, but on the edges, on the outside looking in. Window-shopping with a full wallet. Shopping with an empty wallet. Whatever. Feeling outside, pacing the edges, feeling redundant.

  I lived with a dad who I’ve just today learned was incredibly secretive, and despite never knowing this, I too became a secretive person, maybe unconsciously mimicking or shadowing him, not opening up to Aidan. It might have happened after his affair, maybe it was before. I don’t know the psychological reasons for it and I don’t even care. I’m not going to dwell, I’m just going to move on. The important thing is, now I have no secrets.

  The past year I was feeling something. I was bored.

  But I’m not bored any more.

  I smile at the realisation.

  Marlow is looking at me with a lazy grin. ‘Don’t you want to get him back?’ he guesses. ‘Tit for tat, tat for …’ his hand travels up my top, ‘… tit.’ We both laugh at that, and he removes his hand good-naturedly. ‘I’m sensing no.’

  ‘No,’ I agree, finally.

  He backs off then, respectfully, easily. ‘It’s cooled off now, if you want to take a look.’ He scoops out the marble, polishes it and studies it before handing it to me.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ I say, transfixed. ‘How much do I owe you?’

  He gives me a final kiss. ‘You’re so sweet. This is for you –’ He hands me a second marble. ‘I have a theory that the marble is a reflection of its owner. Like with dogs,’ he smiles. Then he picks up his beer and drags himself lazily back to the party that is still in full swing.

  The marble he has given me is the brown one I was immediately drawn to when I first arrived. It looks like a plain brown marble when you see it first, but when I hold it up to the moonlight, it glows with orange and amber like it has a fire burning brightly inside. Just like its owner.

  It is four a.m. when I finally drag myself and Lea from level four of the multistorey. The sun is rising over the city, my watchful moon no longer in sight; she has left me to my own devices now that my mission is complete. Lea collapses into the seat beside me, exhausted. For all her free love and serenity earlier, she now looks green in the face. She insists on coming to the ho
me with me. She has an early shift, she’ll sleep it off in the staff room. Besides, I know she cares enough about my dad to want to be with him first thing in the morning.

  I don’t intend on staying long. I just want to leave the marble by Dad’s bed so that he sees it when he wakes. So that it’s hopefully the first thing he sees when he wakes.

  Of course the home is closed. I ring the doorbell and security recognises Lea and lets us inside.

  ‘Jesus,’ Grainne whispers, looking at her colleague. ‘Look at the state of you.’

  Lea giggles.

  ‘Did you meet him?’

  She nods.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I’ll tell you in the morning.’

  ‘It is the morning,’ Grainne laughs.

  I tiptoe down the corridor, into Dad’s room. He’s lying on his back, looking old, but happy, snoring lightly. I balance the marble on his bedside locker, alongside a note, and kiss him on the forehead.

  I wake up feeling like I’ve lived a thousand lives in my dreams. Fragmented memories linger in the moment I first open my eyes then delicately disintegrate like a morning frost in the sunrise. The ghosts of the past and present and their voices begin to diminish as I take in my surroundings. It’s not Scotland where I have images of green and grass, lakes and rabbits, my da’s hunched shoulders, sad eyes and the smell of pipe smoke; it’s not St Benedict’s Gardens where I woke up every morning as a child with another brother’s feet pushed up against my face as we sleep top to toe in bunk beds. Not Aunty Sheila’s bungalow on Synnott Row where we woke up on the floor of her house for the first year after arriving in Ireland, not Gina’s ma’s home in Iona where we slept for the first year of our marriage while we saved up enough money to buy our own, and not the home we lived in during our marriage. It is not the apartment that I lived in alone for so many years that for the first time in a long time is now so vivid to me and I can hear the calls and shouts from the football field beside me as I lie on on a Saturday and Sunday morning. Nor is it the bedroom I slept in with Cat, the one that feels orange and warm, sweet and glowing when I close my eyes. I’m here in the hospital, my home for the past year, the place where up until some time yesterday I was content to be in, to stay and call home. But I have a feeling now, no not a feeling, an urge, to leave. This is an empty place and outside is full, whereas before I felt the opposite. There has been a shift in my mind, something has moved ever so slightly, but that slight movement has had seismic implications. I feel hungry to know, where before I felt full. I want to hear now, where before I was deafened. In fact I had deafened myself. Self-imposed, for protection, I assume. Dr Loftus will tell me. We have a session this morning.