The Marble Collector

21

The best thing about having had to sell my car is meeting her. The bills were totting up, the income wasn’t, the car had to go. Thirty grand would go a long way. It took a while to make that decision, what’s a man without a car, but then when I made it, I never looked back. A financial advisor with no money, no car, and no clients. I was always going to be the first to go; subsequently the company folded, I didn’t feel any joy. We’re all in the shit together. More fellas like me, looking for the same kind of jobs.

I’m a salesman, have been all my life, it’s what I do best, it’s all I know. Today is my first day as a car salesman. I’m trying to feel positive, though I feel anything but. I’m fifty-six years old and I don’t have a car to get to my job as a car salesman – not that the boss knows that, but he’ll figure it out soon enough when he sees me huffing and puffing up the hill from the bus stop to work every morning. My doctor has been at me to exercise, my cholesterol, my blood pressure, everything is bad news. Every envelope I open is bad news. I’m officially a granddad and even little Fergus likes to remind me that I’m fat Granddad as he jumps on my belly. At least these short walks to and from the bus stop will give me some movement.

She’s standing alone at the bus stop, trying to figure out the timetable. I know she’s trying to figure it out because she’s wearing her reading glasses, is chewing on her lip and looks confused with a screwed-up face. It’s endearing.

She sighs and mutters to herself.

‘Can I help you?’

She looks around in surprise like she thought she was alone. ‘Thank you, I can’t understand this thing. Where is today? Is this today?’ She points with a manicured pink fingernail. ‘Or is this today? I’m looking for the number 14 bus, am I even in the right place? And this, you can’t read this at all, because some clever person decided to tell the world with a Sharpie that Decko is a fag. I mean, this is no big deal, I know some very happy fags. Decko might be extremely lucky, but not if he wants to get on the number 14 on a Monday morning. Then Decko will be a miserable fag.’

I laugh, it explodes right out of me. I adore her instantly. I study the timetable for some time, not because I’m concentrating, but because I want to be near her, because she smells beautiful. She finally looks at me, lowers her leopard-print reading glasses and I’m faced with the most stunning pair of eyes which illuminate her entire face, make her glow from within.

I must be making my feelings quite obvious because she smiles, in a flattered, knowing way. ‘Well?’

‘I have absolutely no idea,’ I say, which makes her throw her head back and laugh heartily.

‘I love your honesty,’ she says, taking off her glasses and letting them fall down on a chain to her chest, which is incredibly large and inviting. ‘You’re new to the bus too?’

‘Relatively. I just sold my car. All I know is that I’m to get on the seven fifty bus and stay on it for eighteen stops. My daughter. She likes to make sure I’m safe.’

She smiles. ‘My car is the reason I’m here too. Yesterday morning it decided to give up. Poof! just like that.’

‘I can sell you a new one.’

‘You sell cars?’

‘Today is my first day.’

‘Then you are doing rather well so far, and not even in the office,’ she laughs.

Together we try to figure out how to pay the driver, who won’t take our money but insists on us dropping it into a machine. She lets me go first, which means I take a seat first and I’m left wondering will she sit or pass me by. Praise the lord she sits beside me, which makes me feel warm.

‘My name is Cat,’ she says. ‘Caterina, but Cat.’

‘I’m Fergus.’ We shake hands, her skin is smooth, soft, she’s not wearing a wedding ring.

‘Scottish?’

‘My dad was. We left when I was two, moved to Dublin. What about you? Your accent is peculiar.’

She laughs. ‘Thank you very much. I’m from Black Forest in Germany. The daughter of a good forester. I moved to Cork after university, when I was twenty-four.’

She is addictive, I’m interested in everything about her and I forget the first-day nerves and relax completely in the seat, almost missing my stop. I ask her too many personal questions but she answers and asks back. I tell her too much about me – my debts, my health, my failures – but not in a gloomy way, in an honest way, in a way that we can both laugh.

Leaving her on the bus is like a bubble bursting, I don’t have the time or the courage to ask her for her phone number. I almost miss the stop. She presses the bell just in time. The bus pulls in, everybody is waiting for me to squeeze my way out of the seat to get off, all eyes on me. I can’t ask her out, it’s too rushed, too panicked. I get off the bus feeling enraged.

I spend the first few hours of my first day of work feeling like a spare part that can’t quite find its place. The other men aren’t too impressed by my hiring. They know I’m a friend of the garage owner, Larry Brennan. It’s one of the only favours I had left in my life and the only way I could get a job after five months out of work. We grew up together and he couldn’t say no. Probably wanted to, but he couldn’t.

As an unpopular man on the floor it is difficult to get to the customers. They jump in before me, manage to somehow distract my clients and poach them. It’s dog eat dog.

‘No, I want him,’ I hear a familiar voice in the afternoon when I feel like I want to go home and eat an entire box of Roses.

And there she is. My colourful, vivid, larger than life, foreign sparkler. On my first day, I make my first sale.

Rather unprofessionally I use her number from the paperwork to call her and ask her out. She is more than happy to hear from me and tells me she wants to cook for me. I go to her apartment on Friday night with a bouquet of flowers, a bottle of red and a clear mission. Tell her everything.

No more secrets. No more separation of my life. I’ve come to hate the man I’ve become. No more secrets. Not with Cat. This is my chance at a fresh start.

Her apartment is a sweet set-up, two bedrooms, one for her and her remaining daughter that she’s trying to get rid of. The walls are filled with her own paintings, drying on the windowsill are painted vases and paperweights, with lilac and pink flowers crawling upward, swirls and spirals on the paperweights. I study them while she prepares the food in the tiny kitchen, which smells delicious.

‘Oh, I’ve just started a painting class. Painting on glass, to be specific.’

‘It’s different to paper?’ I ask.

‘Indeed, and it costs seventy-five euro to know about it,’ she teases.

I whistle.

‘Do you have any hobbies?’

It’s an easy question, such an easy question for so many people. But I pause. I hesitate, despite my mission I’d firmly decided on all week while waiting for this evening.

Because of my hesitation, she stops what she’s doing. She moves to the opening that joins the kitchen to the open-plan dining and living area, oven gloves still on. Those green eyes meet mine.

I feel short of breath suddenly, like I’m admitting something huge. Feel sweat break out on my brow. Do it, Fergus. Say it.

‘I play marbles. Collect marbles.’ It is not a full sentence, I don’t even know it means anything, but I’m gripping the back of the kitchen chair and she quickly takes me in, my posture, my nerves and she smiles suddenly.

‘How wonderful. When do you play next?’

‘Tomorrow.’ I clear my throat.

‘I would love to come and see. Can I?’

Taken aback, I agree.

‘You know, I was playing with marbles myself today.’ She smiles, and has the cop on to talk while I try to compose myself again. ‘Yes, I’m a vet. And some very clever people came up with the idea of using a glass marble to keep mares out of heat. Today I put a thirty-five-millimetre glass ball into the uterus of a mare. First time for me, and for the horse. But do you know what? I think she’s been learning from these ping-pong clubs: she popped it straight back out again. Expelled it immediately. Got it right second time round, though. You know, the company I got them from call them “mare-bles”!’

I laugh, totally surprised by the ease of her taking my news, then by her own marble story.

‘I’ll get you one,’ she says, going back to the oven. ‘I bet you don’t have one of them in your collection.’

‘No,’ I laugh, a little too hysterically. ‘No I don’t.’

‘So tell me about your marbles, tell me about your collection.’

And so I begin at the beginning with Father Murphy and the dark room with my bloodies, and then I can’t stop. I tell her about Hamish and the hustling, I tell her about my brothers, I tell her about the world championships. We drink wine, and eat roast lamb, and I tell her about the games, about my team Electric Slags, I tell her the pubs I play in and how often. I tell her about Hamish, all about Hamish, and I tell her about my collection. I tell her about the marble swearing jar, I tell her about the cheating, I tell her that Gina and Sabrina have never known and I try, with difficulty, to explain why. We drink more wine, and we make love and I tell her more as we lie naked in the dark beside each other. It’s like I can’t stop. I want this woman to know who I am, no secrets, no lies.

I tell her about my brothers, how I pushed them away and will never forgive myself, and moved by my story she says that she will cook for them, and I say no, that is too much, I couldn’t, we all couldn’t. But she is an only child and has always wished for a big family. So over the course of the next few months, she cooks for Angus and Caroline, then Duncan and Mary, Tommy and his date, Bobby and Laura, Joe and Finn. And it’s a success, so we do it again, with her friends.

She asks me what was it that struck me about her, that had me hooked on her so quickly – because we were like that, addicted to each other. I say it was her eyes. They’re like cat’s eyes. Ironically. More specifically foreign cat’s eyes, mostly made in Mexico and the Far East. Most cat’s eyes are single colour four-vane and the glass has a light bottle-green tint to it. The outer rim of her eyes are bottle rim, the inside almost radioactive they’re so bright.

‘So what am I worth, in mint condition?’ she teases me one morning in bed. ‘Me at twenty-one, before my babies, perhaps?’

‘You’re in mint condition now.’ I climb on top of her. ‘Look at you…’ I lift her arms above her head, hold her down. ‘You’re beautiful.’ We kiss. ‘But you have no collectable value whatsoever,’ I add, and we both erupt with laughter.

She tells me that when I revealed to her my marble-playing hobby she knew from my face that just saying it was a big deal. She said I looked like it was life or death, that for whatever reason it had taken a lot for me to say it, and if she said the wrong thing I would be gone and she didn’t want me to leave.

The first gift she gives me is a mare-ble, painted by her, of course.

The only regret I have, each day I spend with Cat, is that I haven’t completed the perfection; I have not tied up all of my loose ends. This part will take me time, the part where I introduce Sabrina to Cat. It’s not because I don’t think they will get along – I know they will – but Cat knows about me, the real me, the marble persona, and Sabrina and Gina are completely unaware. To tell Sabrina about it would be to tell her that I cut her and her mother out of a part of my life for so long, that I effectively lied to the two people who were closest to me, who I was supposed to trust, and allow to trust me. I can’t think of the words for them. Cat tells me to hurry. She says to say things to people when you can; her ma died before she had a chance to make amends over their falling out. She says you just never know what can happen. I know that she’s right. I’ll do it soon. I’ll tell Sabrina soon.