The Marble Collector

4

‘Sabrina, are you okay?’ Eric asks me from across his desk.

‘Yes,’ I say, keeping my voice measured while feeling anything but. I have just fired my mug at the concrete wall because I missed a near-drowning. ‘I thought there would be more pieces.’ We both look to the mug sitting on his desk. The handle has come off and the rim is chipped, but that’s it. ‘My mum fired a teapot up at the ceiling once. There were definitely more pieces.’

Eric looks at it, studies it. ‘I suppose it’s the way it hit the wall. The angle or something.’

We consider that in silence.

‘I think you should go home,’ he says suddenly. ‘Take the day off. Enjoy the solar eclipse everybody’s talking about. Come back in on Monday.’

‘Okay.’

Home for me is a three-bed end of terrace, where I live with my husband, Aidan, and our three boys. Aidan works in Eircom broadband support, though it never seems to work in our house. We’ve been married for seven years. We met in Ibiza when we were contestants in a competition that took place on the bar counter of a nightclub to see who could lick cream off a complete stranger’s torso the quickest. He was the torso, I was the licker. We won. Don’t for a moment think that was out of character for me. I was nineteen, and fourteen people took part in front of an audience of thousands, and we won a free bottle of tequila, which we subsequently drank on the beach, while we had sex. It would have been out of character not to. Aidan was a stranger to me then, but he’s a stranger to that man now, unrecognisable from that cocky teenager with the pierced ear and the shaved eyebrow. I suppose we both changed. Aidan doesn’t even like the beach now, says the sand gets everywhere. And I’m trying to stay off dairy.

It is rare that I find myself alone in the house; in fact I can’t remember the last time that happened, no kids around asking me to do something every two seconds. I don’t know what to do with myself so I sit in the empty silent kitchen looking around. It’s ten a.m. and the day has barely started. I make myself a cup of tea, just for something to do, but don’t drink it. I stop myself just in time from putting the teabags in the fridge. I do things like this all the time. I look at the pile of washing and ironing but can’t be bothered. I realise I’ve been holding my breath and I exhale.

There are things that I need to do all the time. Things that I never have the time for in my carefully ordered daily routine. Now I have some time – the whole day – but I don’t know where to start.

My mobile rings, saving me from indecision, and it’s my dad’s hospital.

‘Hello?’ I say, feeling the tightness in my chest.

‘Hi, Sabrina, it’s Lea.’ My dad’s favourite nurse. ‘We just got a delivery of five boxes for Fergus. Did you arrange it?’

‘No,’ I frown.

‘Oh. Well, I haven’t shown them to him yet, they’re sitting in reception, I wanted to wait to speak with you first, just in case, you know, there’s something in there that might confuse him.’

‘Yes, you’re right, thanks. Don’t worry. I’ll come get them now, I’m free.’

And that’s what always seems to happen. Whenever I get a minute to myself away from work and the kids, Dad is the other person who fills it. I arrive at the hospital thirty minutes later and see the boxes piled in the corner of reception. Upon seeing them I know immediately where they’ve come from and I’m raging. These are the boxes of Dad’s belongings that I packed after Dad’s home was sold. Mum had been storing them, but she’s obviously chosen not to any more. I don’t understand why she sent them here and not to me.

Last year my dad suffered a severe stroke, which has led to his living in a long-term care facility, giving him the kind of skilled care that I know I could not have given with three young boys – Charlie at seven, Fergus at five and Alfie at three years old – and a job. Mum certainly wouldn’t have taken on the role either as she and Dad are divorced, and have been separated since I was fifteen. Though right now they’re getting along better than they ever have, and I even think Mum enjoys her fortnightly visits with him.

There are those who insist that stress does not cause strokes, but it happened during a time when Dad was the most stressed in his life, coping with the fallout of the financial crisis. He worked for a venture capital company. He scrambled for a while, trying to find new clients, trying to win old ones back, and all the while watching lives fall apart and feeling responsible for that, but it wasn’t sustainable. Eventually he found a new job, in car sales, was trying to move on, but his blood pressure was high, his weight had ballooned, he smoked heavily, didn’t exercise, and drank too much. I’m no doctor, but he did all of these things because he was stressed, and then he had a stroke.

His speech isn’t easy to understand and he’s in a wheelchair, though he’s working on his walking. He’s lost an enormous amount of weight, and seems like a completely different man to the man he was in the years leading up to his stroke. The stroke caused some memory problems, which enrages Mum. He seems to forget all the hurt he caused her. He has been able to wipe the slate clean of all of their problems and arguments, their heartache and his misdemeanours – of which there were many – throughout their marriage. He comes out of it smelling of roses.

‘He gets to live like none of it happened, like he doesn’t have to feel guilty or apologise for anything,’ Mum regularly rants. She was obviously planning on him feeling bad for the rest of his life and he went and ruined it. He went and forgot it all. But even though she rants about the Fergus before the stroke, she visits him regularly and they talk like the couple they both wish they’d been. About what’s happening in the news, about the garden, the seasons, the weather. It’s comforting chat. I think what angers her most is the fact that she likes him now. This sweet, caring, gentle, patient man is a man she could have remained married to.

What has happened to Dad has been difficult, but we haven’t lost him. He is still alive and in fact what we lost was the other side of him, the distant, detached, sometimes prickly side of him that was harder to love. The one that pushed people away. The one that wanted to be alone, but have us at the end of his fingertips, just in case, for when he wanted us. He is quite content where he is now; he gets along with the nurses, has made friends, and I spend more time with him now than I ever have, visiting him with Aidan and the boys on Sundays.

I never know what exactly Dad has forgotten until I bring something up and I watch that now all too familiar fog pass over his eyes, that vacant look as he tries to process what I’ve just said with his collection of memories and experiences, only to find it coming back empty, as if they don’t tally. I understand why Nurse Lea didn’t bring the boxes directly to him; an overload of too many things that he can’t remember would surely upset him. There are ways to deal with those moments, I gently sidestep them, move on from them quickly as though they never happened, or pretend that I’ve gotten the details wrong myself. It’s not because it upsets him – most of the time it goes by without drama, as if he’s oblivious to it – but it upsets me.

There are more boxes than I remember and, too impatient to wait until I get home, I stand there in the corridor and use a key to pierce through the tape on the top of the box and slice it open. I fold back the box, curious to see what’s inside. I expect photo albums, or wedding cards. Something sentimental that, far from conjuring beautiful memories, starts Mum spouting about everything that was taken from her by her own husband. The dreams that were shattered, the promises that were broken.

Instead I find a folder containing pages covered in handwriting: my dad’s looping swirling letters, that remind

me of school sick notes and birthday cards. At the top of the page it says Marbles Inventory. Beneath the folder are tins, pouches and boxes, some in bubble wrap, others in tissue paper.

I open some of the lids. Inside each tin or box are deliciously colourful candy-like balls of shining glass. I look at them in utter shock and amazement. I had no idea my dad liked marbles. I had no idea my dad knew the slightest thing about marbles. If it wasn’t for his handwriting in the inventory, I would have thought there was a mistake. It is as if I have opened a box to somebody else’s life.

I open the folder and read through the list, which is not as sentimental as it first seemed. It is almost scientific.

The pouches – some velvet, others mesh – and the tin boxes are colour-coded and numbered with stickers, to save confusion, and adhere to the colours on the inventory.

The first on the list is a small velvet pouch of four marbles. The inventory lists them as Bloodies and, beside that, (Allies, Fr. Noel Doyle). Opening the pouch, the marbles are smaller than any others I can see offhand and have varying red swirls, but Dad has gone into detail describing them:

Rare Christensen Agate ‘Bloodies’ have transparent red swirls edged with translucent brown on an opaque white base.

There is a cube box of more bloodies, dating back to 1935 from the Peltier Glass Company. These are appropriately colour-coded red and are listed together with the velvet pouch. I scoop a few marbles into my hands and roll them around, enjoying the sound of them clicking together, while my mind races at what I’ve discovered. Pouches, tins, boxes, all containing the most beautiful colours, swirls and spirals, glistening as they catch the light. I lift some out and hold them up to the window, examining the detail inside, the bubbles, the light, utterly enchanted by the complexity within something so small. I flick through the pages quickly:

… latticinia core swirls, divided core swirls, solid core swirls, ribbon core swirls, joseph’s coat swirls, banded/coreless swirls, peppermint swirls, clambroths, banded opaques, indian, banded lutz, onionskin lutz, ribbon lutz…

A myriad of marbles, all of them alien to me. What is even more astonishing is that in other pages of his handwritten documents he has included a table charting each marble’s value depending upon how it measures up in terms of size, mint, near mint, good, collectable. It seems that his humble box of bloodies are worth $150-$250.

All of the prices are listed in US dollars. Some are valued at fifty dollars or one hundred, while the two-inch ribbon lutz has been priced at $4,500 in mint condition, $2,250 in near mint, $1,250 in good condition and collectable is $750. I know next to nothing about their condition – all of them appear perfect to me, nothing cracked or chipped – but there are hundreds of them packed away, and pages and pages of inventory. What Dad appears to have here are thousands of dollars’ worth of marbles.

I stop and think. All around me are the sounds and smells of the care home and it transports me from the parallel marble world back to reality. I was worried about him being able to pay for his hospital costs but if his pricing is correct, then he has his nest egg right here. I’m always worried about those bills. We have no way of knowing when he might need another operation or new medicine, or a new physio. It’s always changing, the bills are always climbing and the proceeds from the sale of his apartment didn’t go far after paying his mortgage and numerous debts. None of us had known that he was in such a bad financial state.

His writing is impeccable, a beautiful flowing script; he hasn’t made one mistake and if he did I imagine he started the page over. It is written with love, it has taken great time and dedication, research and knowledge. That’s it: it’s written by an expert. It’s the writing of another man, not the one who now grasps the pen with great difficulty, but neither does it fit with the father I knew, whose only hobby seemed to be watching and talking about football. Wanting to take my time to go through the boxes at home, I pack everything away again and Gerry, the porter, helps me carry them to my car. But before locking them in the boot, I hesitate and take out the small bag of red marbles.

Dad is sitting in the lounge, drinking a cup of tea and watching Bargain Hunt. He watches the show every day: people searching for items at markets and then trying to auction them for as much as possible. Maybe there have been hints of his passion all the way along and I missed them. I think of the inventory and wonder if I should go back for it. As I watch him staring intently at the pricing of these old objects, I wonder if in fact he does remember exactly what is in those boxes after all. He sees me before I have time to think about it any further and so I go to him, to his smiling face. It breaks my heart how happy he is to receive visitors, not because he’s lonely but because he could often be so irritated by others before, unless it was to convince them to buy something from him, and he now can’t get enough of people’s company, for nothing in return.

‘Good morning.’

‘Ah, to what do I owe this pleasure?’ he asks. ‘No work today?’

‘Eric let me off early,’ I explain diplomatically. ‘And Lea called me. She said it was an emergency, that you were revving up the inmates, trying to organise a breakout again.’

He laughs, then he looks down at my hands and his laughter stops immediately. I’m holding the bag of red marbles. Something passes on his face. A look I’ve never seen before. As quickly as it arrived, it’s gone again and he’s smiling at me, the confusion back.

‘What’s that you’ve got there?’

I open my hand, reveal the red marbles in the mesh bag.

He just stares at them. I wait for him to say something but nothing comes. He barely blinks.

‘Dad?’

Nothing.

‘Dad?’ I put my free hand on his arm, gently.

‘Yes,’ he looks at me, troubled.

I loosen the drawstrings on the mesh purse and roll them into the palm of my hand. As I move the marbles in my hand they roll and click together. ‘Do you want to hold them?’

He stares at them again, intently, as though trying to figure them out. I want to know what’s going on inside his head. Too much? Everything? Nothing? I know that feeling. I watch for that sliver of recognition again. It doesn’t come. Just bother and irritation, perhaps that he can’t remember what he wants to remember. I stuff the marbles in my pocket quickly and change the subject, trying to hide my disappointment from him.

But I saw it. Like a flicker of a flame. The ruffle of a feather. The flash of the sea as the sun hits it. Something brief and then gone, but there. When he saw the marbles first, he was a different man, with a face I’ve never seen.