It goes on and I allow 90 per cent of it to wash over me, including the habit of referring to Dad in the past tense as though he’s dead. To her, the man she knew is dead. She quite likes the man she visits in the hospital every fortnight.
‘We had an argument about a marble once,’ she says bitterly.
I think they had a fight about just about everything at least once in their lives.
‘How did that come about?’
‘I can’t remember,’ she says too quickly.
‘But you never knew he had a marble collection?’
‘How would I know?’
‘Because you were married to him. And because I didn’t pack them up, so you must have.’
‘Oh please, I can’t be called to account for anything he has done since we separated, nor during our marriage for that matter,’ she spouts.
I’m baffled.
‘Some of the items are missing,’ I say, looking at them all laid out on the floor. The more I think about it, and hearing that they were in the possession of his solicitor, the more suspicious I am becoming. ‘I’m not suggesting Mickey Flanagan stole them,’ I say. ‘I mean, Dad could have lost them.’
‘What’s missing?’ she asks, with genuine concern. The man she divorced was an imbecile, but the nice man in rehabilitation must not be wronged.
‘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.
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