The Marble Collector

5

I’m home from school, a fever, the first and only day of school I’ve ever missed. I hate school; I would have wanted this any day at all in the whole entire year. Any day but today. The funeral was yesterday – well, it wasn’t a proper one with a priest, but Mattie’s pal is an undertaker and he found out where they were burying our baby sister, in the same coffin as an old woman who had just died in the hospital. When we got to the graveyard, the old woman’s family were finishing up their funeral so we had to wait around. Ma was happy it was an old woman she was being buried with and not an old man, or any man. The old woman was a mother, and a grandmother. Mammy spoke to one of her daughters who said that her ma would look after the baby. Uncle Joseph and Aunty Sheila said all the prayers at our ceremony. Mattie doesn’t say prayers, I don’t think he knows any, and Mammy couldn’t speak.

The priest called round to the house beforehand and tried to talk Mammy out of making a show of herself by going to the grave. Mammy had a shouting match with him and Mattie grabbed the brandy from the priest’s hand and told him to get the fuck out of his house. Hamish helped Mattie get rid of them, the only time I’ve seen them on the same side. I saw the way everyone looked at Mammy as we walked down the street to the graveyard, all dressed in black. They looked at her like she was crazy, like our baby sister was never really a baby at all, just because she didn’t take a breath when she came out. Even though they’re not supposed to, the midwife had let Mammy hold her baby after she was born. She held her for an hour, then when the midwife started to get a bit angry and tried to take her from Mammy, Hamish stepped in. Mattie wasn’t there and he took over, he lifted the baby out of Mammy’s arms and carried her down the stairs. He kissed her before he gave her back to the midwife, who took her away for ever.

‘She was alive inside of me,’ I heard Mammy say to the priest, but I don’t think he liked hearing her say that. He looked like it was a bit disgusting for him to think of things living inside of her. But she did it anyway, made up her own funeral at the graveyard, and it was cold and grey and it rained the whole time. My shoes got so wet, my socks and feet were soaking and numb. I sneezed all day, couldn’t breathe out of my nose last night, the lads kept thumping me to stop me snoring and I spent the whole night going from hot to cold, shivering then sweating, feeling cold when I was sweating, feeling hot when I was cold. Crazy dreams: Da and Mattie fighting, and Father Murphy shouting at me about dead babies and hitting me, and my brothers stealing my marbles, and Mammy in black howling with grief. But that part was real.

Even though I feel like my skin is on fire and everything around me is swirling, I don’t call Mammy. I stay in bed, tossing and turning, sometimes crying because I’m so confused and my skin is sore. Mammy brought me a boiled egg this morning and put a cold cloth on my head. She sat beside me, dressed in black, still with a big tummy looking like she has a baby in there, staring into space but not saying anything. It’s kind of like when Da died but this is different; she was angry at Da, this time she’s sad.

Usually Mammy never stops moving. She’s always cleaning, cleaning Bobby’s nappies, the house, banging sheets and rugs, cooking, preparing food. She never stops, always banging around the place, us always in her way and her moving us out of the way with her legs and feet, pushing us aside like she’s in a field and we’re long grass. Now and then she stops moving to straighten her back and groan, before going back to it again. But today the house is silent and I’m not used to that. Usually we’re all shouting, fighting, laughing, talking; even at night there’s a child crying, or Mammy singing to it, or Mattie bumping into things when he comes home drunk and swearing. I hear things that I’ve never heard before like creaks and moaning pipes, but there’s no sound from Mammy. This worries me.

I get out of bed, my legs shaking and feeling weak like I have never walked before, and I hang on tight to the bannister as I go downstairs, every floorboard creaking beneath my bare feet. I go into the living room, joined on to the kitchen, tiny at the back of the house like they forgot it and added it on, and it’s empty. She’s not here. Not in the kitchen, not in the garden, not in the living room. I’m about to leave when I suddenly see her in black sitting in an armchair in the corner of the living room that only Mattie ever sits in; so still I nearly missed her. She’s staring into space, her eyes red like she hasn’t stopped crying since yesterday. I’ve never seen her so still. I don’t remember it ever being just me and her before, just the two of us. I’ve never had Mammy to myself. Thinking about it makes me nervous: what do I say to Mammy when there’s nobody around to hear me, to see me, to react, to tease, to goad, to impress? What do I say to Mammy when I’m not using her to get a rise out of someone else, to tell on someone, or know if what I’m saying is right or wrong because of their reactions?

I’m about to leave the room when I think of something, something I want to ask, that I would only ask if it was just me and her, with no one else around.

‘Hi,’ I say.

She looks over at me, surprised, like she’s had a fright, then she smiles. ‘Hi, love. How’s your head? Do you need more water?’

‘No thanks.’

She smiles.

‘I want to ask you a question. If you don’t mind.’

She beckons me in and I come closer and stand before her, fidgeting with my fingers.

‘What is it?’ she asks gently.

‘Do you… do you think she’s with Da?’

This seems to take her by surprise. Her eyes fill and she struggles to talk. I think if the others were here I wouldn’t have asked such a stupid question. I’ve gone and upset her, the very thing Mattie told us not to do. I need to get myself out of it before she yells or, worse, cries.

‘I know he’s not her da, but he loved you, and you’re her mammy. And he loved children. I don’t remember loads about him but I remember that. Green eyes and he always played with us. Chased us. Wrestled us. I remember him laughing. He was skinny but he had huge hands. Some other das never did that, so I know he liked us. I think she’s in heaven and that he’s minding her and so I don’t think you need to worry about her.’

‘Oh, Fergus, love,’ she says, opening her arms as tears run down her face. ‘Come here to me.’

I go into her arms and she hugs me so tight I nearly can’t breathe but am afraid to say. She rocks me saying, ‘My boy, my boy,’ over and over again, and I think I might have said the right thing after all.

When she pulls away I say, ‘Can I ask you another question?’

She nods.

‘Why did you call her Victoria?’

Her face creases again, in pain, but she composes herself and even smiles. ‘I haven’t told anyone why.’

‘Oh. Sorry.’

‘No, pet, it’s just that nobody asked. Come here and I’ll tell you,’ she says, and even though I’m too old, I squeeze on to her lap, half on the armchair, half on her. ‘I felt different with her. A different kind of bump. I said to Mattie, “I feel like a plum.” Says he, “We’ll call her Plum, so.”’

‘Plum!’ I laugh.

She nods and wipes her tears again. ‘It got me thinking about my grandma’s house. We used to visit her: me, Sheila and Paddy. She had apple trees, pears, blackberries, and she had two plum trees. I loved those plum trees because they were all she talked about, I think they were all she thought about – she wouldn’t let those trees beat her.’ She gives a little laugh and even though I don’t get the joke, I laugh too. ‘I think she thought it was exotic, that growing plums made her exotic, when really she was plain, plain as can be, like any of us. She’d make plum pies and I loved baking them with her. We stayed with her on my birthday every year, so every year my birthday cake was a plum pie.’

‘Mmm,’ I say, licking my lips. ‘I’ve never had plum pie.’

‘No,’ she says, surprised. ‘I’ve never baked it for you. She grew Opal plums, but they weren’t reliable because the bullfinches ate the fruit buds in winter. They used to strip those branches clean and Nana would be crazy, running around the garden swatting them with her tea cloth. Sometimes she’d get us to stand by the tree all day just scaring them away; me, Sheila and Paddy, standing around like scarecrows.’

I laugh at that image of them.

‘She gave the Opal more attention because it tasted better and it grew larger, almost twice the size of the other tree’s plums, but the Opal made her angrier and didn’t deliver every year. My favourite plum tree was the other tree, the Victoria plum. It was smaller but it always delivered and the bullfinches stayed away from that one more. To me, it was the sweetest…’ Her smile fades again and she looks away. ‘Well, now.’

‘I know a marble game called Picking Plums,’ I say.

‘Do you now?’ she asks. ‘Don’t you have a marble game for every occasion?’ She prods at me with her finger in my tickly bits and I laugh.

‘Do you want to play?’

‘Why not!’ she says, surprised at herself.

I’m in such shock I run up the stairs faster than I ever have to get the marbles. Once downstairs she’s still in the chair, daydreaming. I set up the game, explaining as I go.

I can’t draw on the floor so I use a shoelace to mark a line and I place a row of marbles with a gap the width of two marbles in between. I use a skipping rope to mark a line on the other side of the room. The idea is to stand behind the line and take it in turns to shoot at the line of marbles.

‘So these are the plums,’ I say to her, pointing at the line of marbles, feeling such excitement that I have her attention, that she’s all mine, that she’s listening to me talking about marbles, that she’s possibly going to play marbles, that nobody else can steal her attention away. All aches and pains from my fever are gone in the distraction and hopefully hers are too. ‘You have to shoot your marble at the plums and if you hit it out of line you get the plum.’

She laughs. ‘This is so silly, Fergus.’ But she does it and she has fun, scowling when she misses and celebrating when she wins. I’ve never seen Mammy play like this, or punch the air in victory when she wins. It’s the best moment I’ve ever spent with her in my whole life. We play the game until all the plums are picked and for once I’m hoping I miss, because I don’t want it to end. When we hear voices at the door, the shouting and name-calling as my brothers return from school, I scurry for the marbles on the floor.

‘Back to bed, you!’ She ruffles my hair and returns to the kitchen.

I don’t tell the others what me and Mammy talked about and I don’t tell them we played marbles together. I want it to be between me and her.

And in the week that Mammy stops wearing black and bakes us plum pie for dessert, I don’t tell anybody why. One thing I learned about carrying marbles in my pockets in case Father Murphy locked me in the dark room, and going out with Hamish and pretending to other kids that I’ve never played marbles before, is that keeping secrets makes me feel powerful.