The Marble Collector

17

I’m lying on a picnic blanket though I can still feel the bumpy ground beneath me, earth and broken rock. I’m roasting in my suit. My tie is off, my sleeves rolled up, my legs feel like they’re burning in my black pants beneath the heat of the summer sun. There’s a bottle of white wine beside us, half of it already drunk, I doubt we’ll make it back to the office at all. Friday afternoon, the boss probably won’t return from lunch as usual, pretending to be at a meeting but instead sitting in the Stag’s Head and downing the Guinness, thinking nobody knows he’s there.

I’m with the new girl. Our first sales trip together, this one took us to Limerick. I’m helping her to settle in, though she’s currently straddling me, and slowly opening the buttons on her silk blouse. I’d say she’s settling in just fine.

No one will see us, she insists, though I don’t know how she can be so sure. I’m guessing she’s done this before, if not here, somewhere like this. She leaves the blouse on, a salmon peach colour, but undoes her strapless bra which falls to the blanket. It topples off the blanket and on to the soil. Her panties are off already, I know this because my hands are where the fabric should be.

Her skin is a colour I’ve never seen before, a milky white, so white she glows, so pale I’m surprised she hasn’t sizzled under the sun’s blaze by now. Her hair is strawberry blonde, but if she’d told me it was peach I would have believed her. Her lips are peach, her cheeks are peach. She’s like a doll, one of Sabrina’s china dolls. Fragile. Delicate looking. But she’s not fragile, nor angelic; she is self-assured and has a glimmer of mischief in her hazel brown eyes, an almost sly lick of her lips as she sees what she wants and takes it.

It is ironic that we are lying in this cabbage field on a Friday afternoon, the day when my ma would serve us up cabbage soup. The word soup was an exaggeration, it was hot water with slithery slimy over-boiled strips of cabbage at the bottom. Salty hot water. The money would always run out by Friday and Ma would save for a big roast on a Sunday. Saturday we would be left to our own devices, have to fend for ourselves. We would go to the orchard and laze in the trees eating whatever apples we could, or beg and bother Mrs Lynch next door, or we’d rob something on Moore Street, but they were quick catching on to us so we couldn’t go there much.

It is doubly ironic that we’re lying in this cabbage field because in a game of marbles the banned practice of moving your marble closer to the target marbles is called ‘cabbaging’, which is cheating. This is no great coincidence, of course. I tell her this fact as we pass the fields; not of my involvement, no, only the men I play with know this and nothing much else about me. I simply share the term with her as we pass fields of cabbage, me in the passenger seat, her driving – on her insistence, which is fine with me as I’m drinking from the wine bottle, which she occasionally reaches for and takes a swig from. She’s wild, she’s dangerous, she’s the one who will get me in trouble. Maybe I want this. I want to be found out, I don’t want to pretend any more, I’m tired. Maybe the mere mention of a marble term is the beginning of my undoing. She looks at me when I say it, then slams her foot on the brake, spilling my wine, then does a U-turn and heads back the way we came. She pulls in beside the cabbage field, kills the engine, gets out of the car, grabs a blanket from the back seat and heads for the field. She hitches her skirt up to climb over the wall, high up on her skinny pale thighs, and then she’s gone.

I jump out of the car and scurry after her, bottle in hand. I find her lying on the ground, back to the soil, looking up at me with a satisfied grin on her face.

‘I want a part of this cabbaging business. What do you think, Fergus?’

I look down at her, drink from the bottle of wine, and look around the field. There’s no one around, passing cars can’t see.

‘You know what it means?’

‘You just told me: cheating.’

‘No no, what it means exactly, is when you shoot from an incorrect spot.’

She arches her back and spreads her legs as she laughs. ‘Shoot away.’

I join her on the blanket. Gina’s at home in Dublin, at Sabrina’s parent-teacher meeting, but despite the thought of her, this opportunity really doesn’t offer much of a challenge to me and my morals. This electric peach girl isn’t the first woman I’ve been with since I married Gina.

Apart from the day baby Victoria was stillborn and I cheated at Conqueror to win Angus’s corkscrew marble on the road outside of our house, I have never since cheated in a game of marbles in my whole life. I don’t need reminding from anyone, not even as I enter her and she cries out, that in the marble world I am a man of my word, a perfect rule-abiding man, but the man without the marbles? His whole life has been about cabbaging.