The Marble Collector: The life-affirming, gripping and emotional bestseller about a father’s secrets

‘Part of his marble collection.’

‘He’s lost his marbles?’ She laughs. I don’t. She finally catches her breath. ‘Well, I don’t think your dad ever had anything to do with marbles, dear. Perhaps it’s a mistake, perhaps they’re not your father’s, or Mickey delivered the wrong boxes. Do you want me to call him?’

‘No,’ I say, confused. I look on the floor and see pages and pages covered in Dad’s handwriting, cataloguing these marbles, and yet Mum seems to genuinely know nothing.

‘The marbles are definitely his and the missing items were valuable.’

‘By his own estimation, I’m guessing.’

‘I don’t know who valued them, but there are certificates to show they’re authentic. The certs for the missing marbles aren’t here. The inventory says one item was worth up to twelve thousand dollars.’

‘What?’ she gasps. ‘Twelve thousand for marbles!’

‘One box of marbles.’ I smile.

‘Well, no wonder he almost went bankrupt. They weren’t mentioned as assets in the divorce.’

‘He mightn’t have had them then,’ I say quietly.

Mum talks like I haven’t spoken at all, the conspiracy theories building in her head, but there’s one question she’s failed to ask. I didn’t pack them and she didn’t know about them, but somehow they found their way to the rest of Dad’s belongings.

I take Mickey’s office details from her and end the call.

The marble collection covers the entire floor. They are beautiful, twinkling from the carpet like a midnight sky.

The house is quiet but my head is now buzzing. I pick up the first batch of marbles on the list. The box of bloodies that I showed to Dad, listed as ‘Allies’.

I start to polish them. Kind of like an apology for not ever knowing about them before.

I have a knack for remembering things that people forget and I now know something important about Dad that he kept to himself, which he has forgotten. Things we want to forget, things we can’t forget, things we forgot we’d forgotten until we remember them. There is a new category. We all have things we never want to forget. We all need a person to remember them just in case.

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I was supposed to be keeping my eye on Bobby. That’s exactly what Ma said when she left the house, in her usual threatening tone. ‘You keep your eye on him, you hear? Don’t. Take. Your. Eye. Off. Him.’ Every word a prod in the chest with her dry, cracked finger.

I promised. I meant it. When she’s looking at you like that you really mean whatever you’re saying.

But then I got distracted.

For some reason Ma trusted me with keeping my eye on him. It might have been something to do with the little chat we had about Victoria when the others were at school and we got to play the marble game together. I think she’s been different with me since then. Maybe not, maybe it’s all in my head, maybe it’s just that it’s different to me. I’d never seen her play like that before; a bit with the babies, but not down on the floor like she was with me, skirt hooshed up, her knees on the carpet. I think Hamish has noticed it too. Hamish notices everything and maybe that makes me a bit more cool to him too – Ma trusting me with things and not slapping the head off me as much as she usually would. Or maybe she’s like this with me because she’s grieving. I learned about grieving from a priest. I might have done that after Da died but I can’t remember. I think it’s just for adults.

Ma hates priests now. After what he said to her when Victoria died, after Mattie and Hamish chased him out of the house. She still goes to Mass though, she says it’s a sin not to. She drags us to Gardiner Street Church every Sunday to ten o’clock Mass, in our best clothes. I can always smell her spit on my forehead from when she smooths down my hair. Sunday morning smells of spit and incense. We always sit in the third row, most families stick to the same place all the time. She says Mass is the only time she can get peace and all of us will shut the fuck up. Even Mattie goes, smelling of last night’s drink and circling in his chair like he’s still pissed. We’re always quiet at Mass because my first memory of Mass is Ma pointing up at Jesus on the cross, blood dripping down his forehead and nails sticking out of his hands and feet, and her saying, ‘If you say one word in here, embarrass me, I’ll do that to you.’ I believed her. We all do. Even Bobby sits still. He sits with his bottle of milk in his hand as the priest drones on, his voice echoing around the enormous ceilings, looking at all the pictures on the walls of a near naked man being tortured in fourteen different ways, and he knows this isn’t a place to fuck about.

Ma is at school with Angus. He’s in trouble because he was caught eating all the communion wafers when he was doing his altar boy duties, locking them away after Mass. He ate an entire bag of them, three hundred and fifty to be precise. When they asked if he had anything to say for himself, he said he asked for a drink because there were dozens stuck to the roof of his mouth. ‘My mouth was dry as a nun’s crotch,’ he’d whispered late at night when we were all in bed and we’d almost pissed ourselves laughing. And then when we were all almost asleep, the giggles finally gone, Hamish whispered, ‘Angus, you know you haven’t just eaten the body of Christ, you’ve eaten the whole carcass.’ And that set us all off again, forcing Mattie to bang on the wall for us to shut up.

Angus loves being an altar boy; he gets paid for it, more for funerals, and when he’s in class the priest passes by his window and gives him the thumbs up or down to let him know what he’s needed for that weekend. If it’s a thumbs up it’s a funeral, and he’ll get more money, if it’s a wedding, he gets less. No one wants to be an altar boy at a wedding.

Duncan is at Mattie’s butcher shop, plucking feathers off chickens and turkeys as punishment for cheating in a school exam. He says he wants to leave school like Hamish did but Ma won’t let him. She says he’s not as smart as Hamish, which doesn’t make much sense to me because I thought it was the smart ones that do better at school, it’s the dumb ones that should leave.

Tommy’s playing football outside and so it’s my job to look after Bobby. Only I wasn’t watching him. Not even God could watch Bobby all the time, he’s a tornado, he never stops.

While he’s playing on the floor with his train, I take out my new Trap the Fox game that I got for my eleventh birthday. It’s from Cairo Novelty Company and the hounds are black and white swirls and the fox is an opaque marble. I don’t see Bobby grab the fox but from the corner of my eye I see him suddenly go still; he’s watching me. I look at him and see the opaque in his hand, close to his mouth. He does it while giving me that sidelong cheeky look, his blue eyes twinkling mischievously like he’d do anything just to get a rise out of me, even if it means his death.

‘Bobby, no!’ I shout.

He smiles, enjoying my reaction. He moves it closer to his mouth.

‘No!’ I dive at him and he runs, the fastest little fucker you’ve ever seen on two legs. All chub and no muscle at one hundred miles an hour, weaving in and out of chairs, ducking, diving. Finally, I have him cornered, so I stop. The marble is against his lips.

He giggles.

‘Bobby, listen.’ I try to catch my breath. ‘If you put that in your mouth, you’ll choke and die, do you understand? Bobby all gone. Bobby. Fucking. Dead.’

He giggles again, tickled by my fear, by the power he has over me.

‘Bobby …’ I say, warning in my voice, moving slowly towards him, ready to pounce at any moment. ‘Give me the marble …’

He puts it in his mouth and I dive on him, squeezing his pudgy cheeks, trying to push the marble back out. Sometimes he just holds things there. Stones, snails, nails, dirt … sometimes he just puts stuff in his mouth like it’s a holding room then spits it out. But I can’t feel a marble in his mouth, his cheeks are all squidge, all flesh, mixed with his spit and snotty runny nose. He makes a choking sound and I prise open his mouth and it’s empty. Just little white milky fangs and a squishy red tongue.

‘Fuck,’ I whisper.

‘Uck,’ he repeats.

‘HAMISH!’ I yell. Hamish is supposed to be out working, or looking for a job, or doing whatever it is that Hamish does now that he’s out of school, but I heard him come home, bang the door closed and bang his way up the stairs to our room. ‘HAAAYYY-MIIIIIISH!’ I yell. ‘He ate the fox! Bobby ate the fox!’

Bobby looks at me, startled by my reaction, by my fear and he looks like he’s about to burst into tears any second. That’s the least of my worries.

I hear Hamish’s boots on the stairs and he bursts into the room. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Bobby swallowed the fox.’

Hamish looks confused at first but then sees my game on the table and understands. As Hamish goes towards Bobby, Bobby really looks as if he’s going to cry. He tries to run but I grab him and he squeals like a pig.

‘When?’

‘Just now.’

Hamish picks Bobby up and turns him upside down. He shakes him as if trying to shake the coins from his pockets like I’ve seen him do with lads before. Bobby starts to laugh.

Hamish puts him back on his feet again and opens his mouth, sticks his fingers inside. Bobby’s eyes widen and he starts retching, vomits up some foul-smelling porridge.

‘Is it there?’ Hamish asks, and I don’t know what he’s talking about until he gets down on his knees and looks through the vomit for the marble.

Before Bobby has a chance to cry, Hamish takes hold of him again and starts squeezing him and shaking him, poking him in the belly and ribs. Bobby giggles again, despite the lingering smell of vomit, trying to dodge Hamish’s finger, thinking it’s a game, as we both get increasingly annoyed.

‘Are you sure he ate it?’