I wanted someone better than me. I didn’t know until later that was because I wanted to be better, like she’d rub off on me. Not more money but the politeness, the fucking genuine way she cared about what absolute tosspots were saying. We both lost our das at a young age so you can’t say she had a sheltered life, no child should have to live through that, but everything she did was within three streets of her house. The same for her friends. School, shops, work. Her da ran a button factory, they lived in one of those big houses in Iona, plenty of room for lots of children that they didn’t get to have because he died, dropped dead of a heart attack one day. Her ma turned their house into a guest house, they do well on match days with Croker nearby, and Gina works there with her. Always the perfect hosts. Polite. Welcoming. Every time I meet them it’s as if they’re standing at their guest desk, no matter where they are.
I knew Gina’s da died and I used that to chat her up. I used my da dying to get her, making up a load of old crap about how much I missed him, felt him around me, wondered if he was looking down on me and all that type of thing. I’ve learned that women love that stuff. It felt kind of nice to be that lad talking like that but I’ve never felt Da around me. Not once. Not ever. Not when I needed him. I’m not bitter about that, Da’s dead, dead’s dead, and when you’re dead you’d think you’d want to just enjoy being dead without having to worry about the people you left behind. Worrying is for the living.
Hamish, though, I don’t know, sometimes I think it with him, about him hanging around. If I’m about to do something that maybe I shouldn’t, I hear him, that smoker’s laugh that he had at sixteen, or I hear him warning me, the sound of my name coming through teeth clamped tight together, or I feel his fist against my ribs as he tries to stop me. But that’s just my memory, isn’t it? Not him actually meddling, helping me out, like he’s a ghost.
I could have talked to Gina about Hamish but I didn’t. I chose Da. Easier to make stuff up that way. It doesn’t make me a liar, or a bad person. I wouldn’t be the first lad to get a girl just out of saying things she wanted to hear. Angus got Caroline when he pretended for six weeks to have a broken leg after she ran into him on her bicycle. She kept visiting, feeling all guilty and every time she was coming he’d run in from playing football in the alley and leg it to the couch and put his leg up on cushions. We all had to go along with it. I think Ma thought it was funny, though she didn’t smile. But she didn’t tell him to stop either. I think she liked Caroline visiting. They used to talk. I think Ma liked having a girl in the house. Angus got her in the end. Duncan, too. He pretended to like Abba for an entire year. Him and Mary even had it as their first dance on their wedding day before he told her that night, drunk, that he hated it and never wanted to hear it again. She ran to the toilet crying and it took four girls and a make-up kit to get her out.
On our first proper date I took Gina to an Italian restaurant on Capel Street. I thought she’d like something exotic like that even though pasta wasn’t my thing. I told her about playing marbles then and she laughed, thinking I was messing.
‘Ah come on, Fergus, seriously, what do you really play? Football?’
It was then. I didn’t tell her, for a few reasons. I was embarrassed that she’d laughed. I felt uncomfortable in the restaurant, the waiters made me nervous, were watching me like I was going to rob the knife and fork. The prices on the menu were more than I thought they’d be and she’d ordered starter and main course. I was going to have to think of something before she went for dessert. Anyway when she laughed, I thought, yeah maybe she’s right, maybe it’s stupid, maybe I won’t play any more. And then I thought I can still play and have her, and that’s the way it went, thinking it’s no big deal keeping them separate, it’s not as if I’m cheating on her, though I had a few times by then. Waiting for a virgin wife, I had to be relieved a few times by Fiona Murphy. I swear she knew how desperate I was as soon as she’d see me. I didn’t bring Gina to my local, too many reasons, Fiona Murphy being one of them and every other girl I was with. Fiona literally had me in the palm of her hand. Her da had a job in the Tayto factory and she always had cheese-and-onion breath. But now that I’m married I’ll have to change all that. A vow’s a vow.
I’ve been with Gina for one year and she hasn’t met my family much in that time. Enough times to not cause outrage on either side, but I know it’s not enough. Short visits, quick visits. Pop into the house, drop by a party. Never let her get to know them, because then she’d get to know me, or the me she might think I am. I want her to know me through being with me.
‘There’s some drama going on with one of Gina’s bridesmaids,’ Angus says. ‘The one with the kegs for tits.’
I laugh. ‘Michelle.’
‘She says her boyfriend just got up and left the church, saw him leaving before she’d made her grand entrance.’
I make a face. ‘That’s a bit harsh.’
‘All the girls are in the toilet trying to fix her make-up now.’
I make a face again. But I’m not really listening to Angus, I’m concentrating more on what I’m about to say. The right thing in the right way.
‘Angus, you know the speech.’
‘Yep, got it right here.’ He takes it out of his pocket, a few pages, more pages than I was hoping for, waves it in my face proudly. ‘Spent all summer writing this. Spoke to a few of your old school friends. Remember Lampy? He had a few tales to tell.’
Which made sense as to why Lampy apologised to me after the ceremony.
Angus tucks it back into the inside of his pocket. He taps it to make sure it’s safe.
‘Yeah well … just remember that, er, Gina’s family and friends are … well, you know, they’re not like us.’
I know they’re the wrong words as soon as I say them. I know from the look on his face. It has been glaringly obvious they are not ‘like us’ all day. They’re quieter for a start. Every second word isn’t a swear word. They use other words to express themselves.
I try to backtrack. ‘It’s just that, they’re not exactly like us. You know? They’ve a different humour. Us Boggs and Doyles, we have a different way. So I was just wondering if you could go easy in the speech. You know what I mean? Gina’s grandparents are old. Very fuckin’, you know, religious.’
He knows. He looks at me with absolute contempt. The last time I saw this look on his face, it was followed with a head butt.
‘Sure,’ he says simply. Then he looks me up and down like he has no idea who I am, as though it’s not his own brother standing in front of him, in a puddle of piss. ‘Good luck, Fergus.’ Then he walks out of the toilet leaving me feeling like absolute shit.
His speech is boring. It is the most mind-numbingly boring speech in history. No jokes, just all formality. He didn’t reach into his pocket for his speech, all those handwritten pages that I know he spent weeks on and probably practised all night. It is hands down the worst speech ever. No emotion. No love. I could have asked a stranger on the street to do a better job. Which maybe is his point. A stranger, who doesn’t even know me.
Gina’s ma, the family doctor and the family priest all think he is ‘terrific’.
Ma’s dressed in the same outfit she wore to Angus’s wedding. Something else to Duncan’s wedding a few months ago and then back to this dress for mine. It’s pea green, a coat, a shift dress and low heels. A sparkly clip in her hair. Her best brooch. Da gave it to her, I remember it. A Tara brooch with green stones. She’s wearing make-up, powder that makes her paler and red lipstick that’s stuck to her teeth. She isn’t dancing. I remember her dancing all night at Angus’s. Her and Mattie do a good jive, the only time I ever see them physical with each other. At Duncan’s we had to carry her home. Here, she’s sitting down, stiff back, a glass of brandy in front of her, and I’m wondering what Angus said to her. Mattie’s watching the girls dancing, tongue running along his lips, like he’s choosing from a menu. Ma and Mattie are alone at the round table. All of my brothers and their othe
r halves headed off early with Angus; I assume he’d told them what I said. Something like telling him not to be a Boggs, pretend to be someone else. But that wasn’t exactly what I’d said, was it?
That’s fine with me though. I can relax more without them. No one is going to go flying across the room and smashing into a table because of a funny look or an intimated tone.
I go over and sit with Ma and we have a chat. Then as we’re talking she slaps me hard across the cheek.
‘Ma, what the …?’ I hold my stinging cheek, looking around to see who’s seen. Too many people.
‘You’re not him.’
‘What?’ My heart starts to pound. ‘What are you talking about?’
She slaps me again. Same cheek.
‘You’re not him,’ she says again.
The way she looks at me.
‘Come on.’ She throws her purse at Mattie, and he jumps to action, eyes off the dancing girls, tongue back inside. ‘We’re going.’
By midnight my family are all gone.
‘Long way to get home,’ Gina’s ma says, politely, as if trying to make me feel better, but it doesn’t.
I tell myself I don’t care, I can dance, I can chat, I can relax with them all gone. The hard man, the unbreakable, unbeatable steelie.
She’s never been for a massage before and so as soon as we arrive at the hotel in Venice she goes straight to the spa. She’s glowing, excited, I can tell she feels grown up. We were married yesterday and we still haven’t had sex. We partied hard until three a.m., in spite of all the Boggs and Doyles leaving early, the sing-song was in full swing when we left and then we both collapsed in a heap on the bed and had to get up an hour later for a six a.m. flight. Definitely no time for sex, particularly sex for the first time. For her obviously, not me. I sit on the double bed and bounce up and down. I’ve waited for her for a year, I suppose I can wait for the length of a massage. She thinks I’m a virgin too, I don’t know what got it into her head, I never claimed I was, but that’s how all the people in her life are. They’re the following-those-rules type of people and she got it into her head that I am too. I just went along with it, save myself the trouble.
I know how I want to do it with her. The first time. I’ve thought about it. I want to play Hundreds with her. You draw a small circle on the floor. Both players shoot a marble towards the circle. If both or neither marble stops in the circle then we shoot again. If only one stops in the circle that player scores ten points each time the marble stops in the circle on subsequent throws. Gina never wears a bra, she doesn’t need to, and always wears a tight tank top and flares. She doesn’t wear make-up, freckles across her nose and cheeks, freckles on her chest bone. I think about kissing them all. Most of them I’ve kissed already. The first player to reach one hundred points is the winner and the loser hands over a predetermined number of marbles. Only in our game, which will involve white wine because now we’re married and grown up, whoever doesn’t make it to the circle will have to strip off an item of clothes. She’s never played marbles before, she’ll keep missing, I’ll miss just enough times too to make her comfortable. By the time I reach one hundred, I want her in the circle, naked. But this won’t happen, I know. This is just what’s kept me going this year while I do the gentlemanly thing and wait. I’ve never mixed marbles and sex before, and although Gina laughed the first time I told her I played marbles, I want to do this with her, with my wife.
Gina is worth the wait. She’s gorgeous, any fella I know would do the same. She’s too good for me of course. Not too good for the me that she knows, but for the me that she doesn’t know. The part of me she knows is some man I’ve concocted over time. He’s good with people, patient, polite, interested. He doesn’t think everyone she introduces him to is up themselves and he wouldn’t prefer to top himself than have a conversation with them. It’s better being him, he makes life easier for him and me. But he’s not me. I try to keep her away from my family as much as I can; whenever her and Ma talk I break out in a cold sweat. But Ma will never say anything, she knows the deal, knows that I’m in way over my head, but she wanted me to marry her just as much as I do so she could tick me off her list, another of her boys taken care of. Gina’s only met Angus briefly, at the wedding; he’s living in Liverpool and he can stay there, but Duncan, Tommy, Bobby and Joe are okay in small doses. She just thinks they’re always busy. Good enough.
She knows one of my brothers died, thinks Hamish drowned. Well he did, but she thinks it was some freak accident. I plan on keeping it that way. Hamish’s problems were his own but I don’t want him bringing that into my new life. Gina’s sweet, she’s naïve, and she judges people. She’d hear a thing like that and she’d look at me different. She’d probably be right. Not that I’m trouble, I’m always on the right side of the law, but I’m not the lad who promises to play croquet with her granddad. Thank God her dad’s dead and her granddad’s not far from it.
I chose Venice for the honeymoon. I’ve wanted to come here since I saw a documentary about the Murano glass factory, an entire island dedicated to making glass is an island I want to if not live on, at least visit. I don’t have much money, in fact we have very little to spend here at all, but I’m not leaving this country without a pocket full of marbles one way or another, whether I have to beg, borrow or steal. This honeymoon is being funded by Gina’s granddad who couldn’t help but step in when he heard we were going to Cobh for our honeymoon. Pick anywhere you want, he said. Anywhere in the world. Gina was hoping for a week in Yugoslavia because that’s where one of her friends went on honeymoon, but I managed to talk her into three days in Venice instead. Yugoslavia we could maybe some day afford by ourselves, Venice we couldn’t. Venice is a real escape, an adventure in another world. She bought it, because I meant it. I don’t care about her grandda helping me out, giving me money. I’ll take any helping hand offered, it doesn’t hurt my pride. If I don’t have it, I don’t have it; if someone wants to give it, then I’ll take it.
I pace the small room; it’s not the most luxurious hotel, far from it, but I appreciate being here at all. I’d sleep anywhere and I can’t wait to get out and explore.
I thought I’d be knackered from last night but I’m hopping. I’m eager to get moving. I don’t know how long a massage is but I’m not sitting here in this room when there’s a world out there waiting for me. I don’t think Gina will want to spend much time looking at marbles, not in the way I want to, so I take my moment now and slip away. I don’t have to go far before I see the most incredible marbles I’ve ever seen in my life. They’re contemporary art marbles, definitely not for playing with, they’re for collecting. I’m in such awe that I can’t move from the front window. The salesman comes outside and practically pulls me in, he can see the lust written all over my face. Problem is I have the lust for them but not the money. He answers question after question that I throw at him about every aspect, allows me to examine the works of art under a 10x loupe so I can see the skill of the artist. They are clear handmade glass marbles with elaborate designs captured inside. One is clear with a green four-leaf clover trapped deep inside, another is a goldfish that looks like it’s swimming in bubbles, another has a white swan in a swirl of blue sea. There’s a vortex, a swirl of purple, green, turquoise, green storms that corkscrew to the very centre of the marble. It’s hypnotising. Another is of an eye. A clear marble with an olive green eye and black pupil, red veins trickle around the sides. I feel like it’s watching me. Another is called ‘New Earth’ and it’s the entire planet, every country created inside, with clouds on the outer layer. It’s a work of pure genius. The entire planet captured in a four-inch marble. This is the one I want but I can barely afford one, let alone the collection. The cost of one is the amount of money I have for the entire three days.
It takes everything I have to walk away and it’s the walking away that fires the salesman into action. The best negotiator is the one who is always willing to walk away and he thinks I’m hustling him, wh
ich I’m not, I would sell my house for this collection if I had a house. We have to live with Gina’s mother for a year while we save up for a deposit for a house. To even be thinking about buying any of these marbles is pure ludicrous and I know it. But. I feel alive, the adrenaline is rushing through my body. This is the only good side of me, the best side of me and she doesn’t know it. Looking at these marbles, I vow right here to be faithful to her and I don’t mean not sleeping around, but to let her see the real me for the first time. Show her this marble, show her the biggest and best part of me.
I buy a clear marble with a red heart inside. It has corkscrew swirls of deep red, like drops of blood captured in a bubble. I bargain hard and pay almost half of what he was asking for. It’s still too much money but it’s not just a marble for me, it’s for Gina, an offering of who I truly am. It means more to me than the ceremony yesterday and words that I didn’t feel in my heart. This means something to me. This is the scariest, bravest thing I have ever set out to do in my adult life. I’m going to give her this heart, my heart, and tell her who I am. Who she’s married.
The seller wraps the heart in bubble wrap, then places it in a burgundy velvet pouch, pulled closed by a gold plaited tie and glass beads that I can’t help but admire. Even the beads on the pouch are beautiful. I push it deep into my pocket and return to the hotel.
When I get back to the room I can see she’s been crying but she tries to hide it. She wears a bathrobe which is tied tightly at her waist.
‘What’s wrong? What happened?’ I’m ready to punch someone.
‘Oh nothing.’ She wipes her eyes roughly with the sleeve of her towel until the skin around them is red raw.