The Marble Collector Part 18

'I'm going to take a shower,' she says, sliding away.

As soon as I hear the water start I do something I haven't done for a very long time, I cry. Deep and painful, like I'm a child again. I fall asleep before Cat is out of the shower. When I wake up I'm in hospital and the next time I see Cat is the first time I meet her, in a rehabilitation centre that I call home, where she is visiting a friend.

Marlow hands me a pair of gla.s.ses, tinted pink so that the world is immediately rosy and helps my beer buzz. The gla.s.ses are to help my eyes when I'm looking directly at the flame.

'Cute!' He pinches my nose lightly and fires up the kiln. 'I love to work with gla.s.s because it's so easy to manipulate and shape,' he explains, moving around the studio with ease and comfort, knowing where absolutely everything is without looking; reaching, placing, like a dance. 'Do you bake?' he asks.

'Bake? Yes, sometimes.' With the kids, and thinking of them snaps me into gear. I have kids. I have a husband. A beautiful husband. A kind husband who wants me to be happy. Who tells me he loves me, who actually loves me. I take a step back.

'It's okay.' He pulls me closer again, hot hand on my waist. 'Gla.s.s reacts similarly to sugar when melted. You'll see. But first, here's one part I prepared earlier.'

I move closer and take a look at an image he lays out on the table.

'I've wanted to do this for a while but I was waiting for the right project to come along ...' He looks at me through those long lashes again, marble blue eyes as though he's crafted them to perfection himself.

'You designed this?' I try not to look at his face. He's doing hypnotic things with his face. In fact with his entire body. Can't look, won't look, concentrate on the flame.

'Sure. It's made of finely ground gla.s.s powders. So there are two ways I could make your marble: here at the lamp, which creates the swirl effect you've already seen, but your dad has a lot of German swirls, not all handmade, so I think we should give him something different.'

He gathers a nucleus of opal gla.s.s on the end of a long stainless steel rod. He stands at the kiln, perfect posture, and slowly starts twirling the gla.s.s in the fire. The gla.s.s becomes illuminated, shiny and dripping like honey. He continues turning it to shape it into a sphere. Then he pulls it out of the kiln and I duck as the burning dripping gla.s.s is carried across the other side of the studio to an armchair. He sits on a wooden chair with high arms and he places the rod across the arms, and rolls it back and forth so that the gla.s.s at the end of the rod takes shape. The arms of the chair already have the indentations of the number of times he has done this. He's deep in concentration, no conversation now. In fact there's none for quite some time. He does this routine a few more times, moving back and forth from the kiln to the chair, beads of sweat on his forehead. He grabs hold of a newspaper in his palm and directly starts rolling the hot gla.s.s around in his hand to shape it.

At one stage during the process I remove my eyes from him, feeling giddy and light-headed from the bottle of beer and an unusually emotional day, taken away by the chill-out music and the atmosphere, and I see Lea through the trees, dancing with Dara. There is a celebration in the air, things are great, life is great. Life is full of adventure. I can't remember the last time I felt like this. While I watch this all happen my body relaxes, I even sway a little to the music. I can't take my eyes off Marlow, and the beautiful honey-like syrupy gla.s.s.

I stand back as he pulls the rod from the kiln and instead of sitting in the chair, he carefully rolls it over the powdered gla.s.s drawing he has prepared earlier. Once the drawing is on the gla.s.s, he continues to shape it into a sphere, careful not to distort the intricate image inside. He plunges the gla.s.s into a pot of crystal gla.s.s for the final layer.

Marlow dips the shaped boiling-hot gla.s.s into a tin bucket of water, steam hissing and rising as it sizzles and hardens. He knocks it and it falls off the end of the rod, landing in the water and bobbing to the top.

'We'll leave it there to cool,' he says, mopping the sweat from his brow.

He must be able to see the way I've been looking at him because he finally looks up at me and smiles, that sweet amused look he's had since he saw me. He reaches for his bottle and slugs the entire thing down. It's after two a.m. and my head is spinning.

I remember the marble he's just created and make an effort to look in the bucket.

'No peeking until it has cooled,' he says, coming close to me. He pushes me up against the work surface, his hips against my ribs and he takes off my pink gla.s.ses. I try to adjust to the fact nothing is rosy any more, it's real, unfiltered, not just in my head. It sobers me quickly. He traces a line all around my face, over each of my features, taking all of them in, slowly and softly. My heart is pounding and I'm sure he can feel it through his thin T-shirt.

He kisses me, which begins slowly but very quickly becomes urgent. For someone who moved so rhythmically and slowly at work, there is something panicked and urgent about how he moves now.

'I'm married,' I murmur in his ear.

'Congratulations,' he continues, kissing my neck.

I laugh, nervously.

Five years ago, when I was pregnant with Fergus, a friend came to me and told me that Aidan had had an affair. I confronted him, we dealt with it. I made a decision. Stay or go, go or stay. He stayed. I stayed. We remained, but we didn't remain as we were. We got worse, and then we got better. We had Alfie since. In my angry moments, which come far less regularly than they did, I always felt that I would grab the closest opportunity I could get to getting him back, by having an affair too, to make sure he truly understood how I felt. I know it's childish but it was real. You hurt me, I'll hurt you. But years on and there has been no opportunity, not at the school run, not at the empty pool, not at the supermarket with the kids, or at karate, or at football, or at art cla.s.s. No chance for an affair during the mum-related activities that fill my day. b.u.t.ter, cheese, ham, bread, slice. Raisins. Next. And that made me even more depressed about it, because even if I wanted to get him back, I couldn't.

I know that Aidan loves me. He's not a perfect husband and not a perfect dad, but he's more than enough. I am not a perfect anything, though I try to be. Sometimes I wonder if love is enough, or if there are levels of love. And sometimes I wonder if he can see me, even when he's looking right at me. Last Sunday I went an entire day with green paint on my upper lip, from a morning of painting with the kids, and he never told me it was there. We went to the supermarket, we went to the playground, we walked around the park and not once did he say, 'Sabrina, you have green paint on your face.'

When I went home and looked in the mirror and saw it there, a big green gloop on my upper lip, I cried with frustration. Did n.o.body see me? Not even the boys? Am I this thing that is expected to be covered in dirt or food or green paint? Sabrina, the woman with paint on her face, the woman with the sticky stain on her trousers, the woman with the finger marks and food splashes on her T-shirt. Don't tell her it's there because it's always there, it's supposed to be there, it's part of who she is.

I asked Aidan about it, some high-pitched unhinged accusation about gloop on my face. He said that he just didn't see it there, which made me wonder, did he look at me and not see it or did he not look at me at all for the entire day. Which is worse? We spent an entire session at counselling talking about it, about this green gloop that he didn't see. Turns out I'm the green gloop.

The green gloop started it, the near-drowning tipped me over the edge. And then I went looking for lost marbles in an attempt to fix things, save things, complete things for Dad, when perhaps it is myself that I'm trying to figure out.

Aidan is afraid that I'll leave him. He has told me this, he has been afraid of this since his affair. But I have no intention of leaving him. It's nothing to do with him or what he did so long ago that I don't even feel the pain any more, just an echo of it. It's all to do with me. Lately I've been trapped, not myself, or being my real self and not liking it, whatever. b.u.t.ter, cheese, ham, bread, slice. Raisins. Next. Watching an empty pool. Saving a man that doesn't want to be saved. Not being immersed in the thing I am most pa.s.sionate about, but on the edges, on the outside looking in. Window-shopping with a full wallet. Shopping with an empty wallet. Whatever. Feeling outside, pacing the edges, feeling redundant.

I lived with a dad who I've just today learned was incredibly secretive, and despite never knowing this, I too became a secretive person, maybe unconsciously mimicking or shadowing him, not opening up to Aidan. It might have happened after his affair, maybe it was before. I don't know the psychological reasons for it and I don't even care. I'm not going to dwell, I'm just going to move on. The important thing is, now I have no secrets.

The past year I was feeling something. I was bored.

But I'm not bored any more.

I smile at the realisation.

Marlow is looking at me with a lazy grin. 'Don't you want to get him back?' he guesses. 't.i.t for tat, tat for ...' his hand travels up my top, '... t.i.t.' We both laugh at that, and he removes his hand good-naturedly. 'I'm sensing no.'

'No,' I agree, finally.

He backs off then, respectfully, easily. 'It's cooled off now, if you want to take a look.' He scoops out the marble, polishes it and studies it before handing it to me.

'It's beautiful,' I say, transfixed. 'How much do I owe you?'

He gives me a final kiss. 'You're so sweet. This is for you ' He hands me a second marble. 'I have a theory that the marble is a reflection of its owner. Like with dogs,' he smiles. Then he picks up his beer and drags himself lazily back to the party that is still in full swing.

The marble he has given me is the brown one I was immediately drawn to when I first arrived. It looks like a plain brown marble when you see it first, but when I hold it up to the moonlight, it glows with orange and amber like it has a fire burning brightly inside. Just like its owner.

It is four a.m. when I finally drag myself and Lea from level four of the multistorey. The sun is rising over the city, my watchful moon no longer in sight; she has left me to my own devices now that my mission is complete. Lea collapses into the seat beside me, exhausted. For all her free love and serenity earlier, she now looks green in the face. She insists on coming to the home with me. She has an early shift, she'll sleep it off in the staff room. Besides, I know she cares enough about my dad to want to be with him first thing in the morning.

I don't intend on staying long. I just want to leave the marble by Dad's bed so that he sees it when he wakes. So that it's hopefully the first thing he sees when he wakes.

Of course the home is closed. I ring the doorbell and security recognises Lea and lets us inside.

'Jesus,' Grainne whispers, looking at her colleague. 'Look at the state of you.'

Lea giggles.

'Did you meet him?'

She nods.

'Well?'

'I'll tell you in the morning.'

'It is the morning,' Grainne laughs.

I tiptoe down the corridor, into Dad's room. He's lying on his back, looking old, but happy, snoring lightly. I balance the marble on his bedside locker, alongside a note, and kiss him on the forehead.

I wake up feeling like I've lived a thousand lives in my dreams. Fragmented memories linger in the moment I first open my eyes then delicately disintegrate like a morning frost in the sunrise. The ghosts of the past and present and their voices begin to diminish as I take in my surroundings. It's not Scotland where I have images of green and gra.s.s, lakes and rabbits, my da's hunched shoulders, sad eyes and the smell of pipe smoke; it's not St Benedict's Gardens where I woke up every morning as a child with another brother's feet pushed up against my face as we sleep top to toe in bunk beds. Not Aunty Sheila's bungalow on Synnott Row where we woke up on the floor of her house for the first year after arriving in Ireland, not Gina's ma's home in Iona where we slept for the first year of our marriage while we saved up enough money to buy our own, and not the home we lived in during our marriage. It is not the apartment that I lived in alone for so many years that for the first time in a long time is now so vivid to me and I can hear the calls and shouts from the football field beside me as I lie on on a Sat.u.r.day and Sunday morning. Nor is it the bedroom I slept in with Cat, the one that feels orange and warm, sweet and glowing when I close my eyes. I'm here in the hospital, my home for the past year, the place where up until some time yesterday I was content to be in, to stay and call home. But I have a feeling now, no not a feeling, an urge, to leave. This is an empty place and outside is full, whereas before I felt the opposite. There has been a shift in my mind, something has moved ever so slightly, but that slight movement has had seismic implications. I feel hungry to know, where before I felt full. I want to hear now, where before I was deafened. In fact I had deafened myself. Self-imposed, for protection, I a.s.sume. Dr Loftus will tell me. We have a session this morning.

This change does two things to me. It makes me feel hope and it makes me feel hopeless. Hope that I'll get there, hopeless that I can't get there now.

My mouth is dry and I need water. I look around for my gla.s.s of water which is usually on my bedside locker, on the right side so that they make me practise moving my right arm. Where there is usually just my gla.s.s, I see a marble. A large, beautiful royal blue marble. It is lit up by the morning light coming through the window and it takes my breath away. It is a sight to behold, its beauty, its elegance, its perfection, such a rarity.

It is a sphere of the world. Within its royal blue ocean there lies a map of the earth, created to perfect proportions. The land, mountains, in browns, sandy and honey colours, every continent, country accounted for, every island. There are even wispy white clouds in the northern hemisphere. The entire world has been captured inside this marble. I reach over with my left hand to pick it up, I will not risk using my weakened right side, not at such a moment, for such a task. I turn it around, inspecting every inch. The islands intact, the ocean seems to glow from the inside. There is not a scratch, not a scuff. It is perfect. What a marvel, what a marble. Larger than usual, it is 3.5 inches in diameter, I let it sit in the palm of my hand, it's big and bold. I sit up, pull myself up, heart pounding at the discovery, I must get my gla.s.ses to see. They are on the bedside locker to my left, easier to reach for. I see, once they are on, that there is a note. I place the marble on my lap carefully and reach for the note with my left hand, a strain to reach so far and I must be careful not to knock the marble to the floor, which would be catastrophic.

I reach for it and settle back to read.

Dad, You have the world in the palm of your hand.

Lots of love, Sabrina X.

As the tears roll down my cheeks and I stare at it for what feels like an endless time, I believe her. I can do this. I can take my life back again. Sleep starts to call me again. Tired eyes, I take off my gla.s.ses and make sure the marble is safe. It reminds me of a marble I saw while on honeymoon, one I really wished to buy but couldn't afford. I suddenly have an image of Gina on honeymoon, of her face, young and innocent in a hotel room in Venice, freckles across her nose and cheeks, not a st.i.tch of make-up, moments before we made love for the first time. That image of her is in my mind forever, a look of love, of innocence. I have an overwhelming urge along with that memory to give her this marble, to give her the world. I should have done it then, but I will do it now, I will give her the part of me I held back for so long.

Sabrina will understand, as will Cat, as will Gina's husband Robert. In time Gina can pa.s.s it on to Sabrina or to the boys when they're older. It can be like an heirloom, pa.s.sing the world on to the next generation.

And to Cat, I will give my full heart.

I arrive home at five a.m. It's been a long day and night. I yearn to fall into bed for at least a few hours before Aidan and the kids return.

I'm not sure about Amy's moon theories, but there's a comforting one that I heard while in the waiting room at Mickey's yesterday. A new moon is a symbolic portal for new beginnings, believed by some to be the time to set up intentions for things you'd like to create, develop and cultivate. In other words, make new. Make new memories.

I think of myself as a little girl during the night of a full moon, wide awake, alert, head constantly thinking and planning, unable to rest, as though a beacon was sending messages. Was it the moon that made me do this? I don't know. I should probably not cancel my therapy sessions though. The real conversation has just begun.

It's bright as I walk up the path to my door, I see Mrs O'Grady my neighbour peeking out at me through lace curtains as I do the walk of shame. As I slide the key in the lock I don't feel like a different woman, but the same woman, slightly changed. For the better.

I dream of kicking off my shoes, stripping off my clothes and falling into bed, having a few hours until the kids come home, but the door opens before I have the chance to turn the key, and it is then I notice Aidan's car parked outside.

Aidan greets me, an exhausted handsome mess of a man whose expression makes me laugh instantly.

'Mummy!' the boys run to me, throwing themselves at me and grabbing a limb each. They squeeze me tight, as though they haven't seen me for a week instead of less than twenty-four hours.

I hug them tightly while Aidan looks at me, exhausted, but concerned.

'Where have you been?' he asks, when they give up on their cuddles and instead drag me down the hall to show me something so incredibly exciting that they have found. They bring me to the containers of marbles all laid out on the floor, I'd left them there before rushing out the door to Mickey's office yesterday morning.

'I was teaching them how to play,' Aidan says, guiding me away from them. 'I hope that's okay, they know to be careful with them. Although all I wanted to do is ram them down their throats they've been a nightmare,' he groans, wrapping his arms around me, and pretends to cry. 'Alfie has not slept. At. All. Charlie p.i.s.sed on the sleeping bags and Fergus wanted to eat a frog he caught for breakfast at four. We had to come home. Mind me,' he whimpers.

I laugh, hugging him tight. 'Aidan ...' I say, a warning tone for what's about to come.

'Yes,' he replies, still in place, but his body stiffens.

'You know the way you said not to let another man kiss me ...?'

'What?' he pulls back, his face contorted.

'Dad! Mum! Alfie swallowed a marble!'

We both run.

An hour later I kick off my shoes, peel off my clothes and fall into bed. I feel Aidan's lips on my neck, and I've barely closed my eyes when the doorbell rings.

'That's probably your lover,' he says grumpily, turning over and leaving me to answer it.

I groan, pull on my dressing gown and drag myself to the door. A blonde woman smiles nervously at me. I recognise her and try to place her. I recognise her from the hospital. I speak to her in the canteen, in the halls, in the garden, when we're waiting for our loved ones. And then it all falls into place. Our loved one was the same person all along. I smile, feeling a major weight lift from my shoulders. I hadn't been completely in the dark. I know her.

'I'm so sorry,' she says, apologetic. 'I know it's a Sat.u.r.day morning and I didn't want to disturb you and the children. I've been awake most of the night waiting for day to come, this was as long as I could wait. I just have to give you this.'

I turn my attention to the large bag she's holding out with two hands. She hands it to me and I take it. It's heavy.

'It's part of your dad's marble collection,' she says, and I stop breathing. 'I took them from him before he had his stroke, before he sold the apartment, for safekeeping. He sent me out to sell them. I pretended to him that I did. The money I gave him was a loan from his brother Joe.' She looks haunted by that admission. 'I felt it was important to keep them safe, they are so precious to him.' She looks at them as though she's unsure of letting them go. 'But you should have them. The collection should be complete, just in case he asks for them again.'

I look at the bag in total surprise that they're here, in my arms.

'I haven't even told you who I am,' she says shakily.

'Are you Cat?' I ask, and her face freezes in shock. 'Please, come in,' I say, grinning and opening the door wide.

We sit up at the breakfast counter as I carefully open the bag. I want to cry with happiness. An Akro Agate Company, Original Salesman's Sample Case from 1930 and the World's Best Moons original box of twenty-five marbles. I run my hands over them, unable to believe that they are here, that after a day of searching for them, they eventually found their own way home.

I'm lying on the floor of Aunty Sheila's living room. Around me, Hamish, Angus and Duncan are in sleeping bags, fast asleep. My hand throbs from where Father Murphy walloped me today and I can't help it, I start to cry. I miss Daddy, I miss the farm in Scotland, I miss my friend Freddy, I miss the way Mammy used to be, I don't like these new smells, I don't like sleeping on the floor, I don't like Aunty Sheila's food, I don't like school, and I particularly don't like Father f.u.c.kface. My right hand is so swollen I can barely close it and every time I close my eyes I see the cold dark room he locked me in today and I feel panic, like I can't breathe.

'Hey!' I hear someone whisper and I freeze and stop crying immediately, afraid that one of my brothers has heard and will tease me.

'Psst!'

I look around and see Hamish sitting up.

'Are you crying?' he whispers.

'No,' I sniffle, but it's obvious.

He shuffles over on his b.u.m, moving his sleeping bag closer to mine so that we are side by side. He gives Angus's head a kick and Angus groans and rolls over to make room for his feet. At eleven years old Hamish always gets what he wants from us and he always does it so easily. He's my hero and when I grow up I want to be just like him.

He puts his finger on my cheek and wipes my skin. Then he tastes his finger. 'You are f.u.c.kin' crying.'

'Sorry,' I whimper.

'You miss Da?' he asks, lying down beside me.

I nod. That's not all of the reason, but it's part of it.

'Me too.'

He's quiet for a while and I don't know if he's fallen back asleep.

'Remember the way he used to do the longest burp?' he whispers suddenly.

I smile. 'Yeah.'