The Marble Collector

19

I arrive home from the airport feeling rough, but feeling exhilarated, still on a high, the adrenaline racing around my veins shouting for ‘more!’; a night of partying preceded an early morning flight to get back in time for Sabrina’s thirteenth birthday party. Her first year as a teenager. Gina has arranged a marquee and private catering for forty people, mainly her family, thankfully none of mine could come. Or at least that’s what I told Gina; I only asked Ma to come but after Mattie’s recent heart operation she’s afraid to leave his bedside. Gina didn’t mind, I think she’s happy none of my family could make it, and she wasn’t surprised either, it’s nothing new. We’re not the closest of brothers. We were until I met Gina, then I separated her from my family, always thinking she was too good for them. After sixteen years I’m beginning to see that was a stupid idea; there are times, occasions when I’d like them to be here. When Sabrina did something, or said something and I wished they’d been there to see. Or a family day out when the waiter trips up, or a twat friend of Gina’s says something and nobody but me can see he’s a twat, I know they’d agree with me and I wish they were there. I could imagine a wisecrack from Duncan, the intensity from Angus, the way he took over at protecting me after Hamish went, as if he knew something, as if he knew he had to. Little Bobby’s charm, attracting all the ladies – we called him our ‘bit bait’. I think of Tommy looking out for Bobby all the time, still watching out for the slugs and snails in his path, and Joe the baby, the one who came long after we lost Victoria, sensible Joe, who looks at me, Angus, and Duncan like we’re somebody else’s family, not his, never fully able to connect with us, as we’d all moved out of the house as he grew up. He listened to stories from locals about Hamish and thought of him like a monster, the boogie man: if he wasn’t careful, Hamish would come and get him; if he wasn’t careful, he’d end up like Hamish. Hamish, the ghost in our home that was always there, sleeping in our room, eating at our dinner table, the echoes of him in every single room, his energies absorbed into everything around us, into all of us.

We didn’t talk like that about him though, neither did Ma. Hamish was funny, Hamish was strong, Hamish was brave. The best way to be the best you can be is to be dead. Ma mollycoddled Joe, made him a bit soft. Not in a sweet way, like most younger kids are, but in a way that made him worry, that made him fragile, that made him think he should be looked after more. She was afraid he’d hurt himself, she was afraid he’d get lost, get sick, die at any moment. Too dark out, too wet out, too hot out, too far away, too late, too early – No, Joe, just stay in with Ma and you’ll be grand. He’s a worrier, serious, thinks about everything twenty times before he thinks about it again. Safe. Has a boyfriend and lives with him in a new apartment on the quays, pretends to us he doesn’t, walks around with a coffee cup and a briefcase. I see him sometimes if I’m driving to town in the mornings. Gina would like Joe, he’s doing well for himself, something with computers, but Joe doesn’t like me. I miss them sometimes, when I least expect it, but I’m glad they’re not here today.

Sabrina greets me at the door, appearing happy, wearing too much make-up in a too short skirt with heels on for the first time. She’s letting her top fall off her shoulder, showing off her bra-strap – the new bra that Gina bought her a few weeks ago. She doesn’t look good, not to me, not even to me and I’m her dad, I’m supposed to think she’s perfect in everything, blinded by fatherly love. Not today. It’s a birthday lunch, the weather’s not great for April, it’s a grey day and Sabrina looks dressed for a garden party in Spain. The material of her skirt is flimsy and nearly see-through, a cheap silk of some sort, I can see the goosebumps on her skin.

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.’