I must be making my feelings quite obvious because she smiles, in a flattered, knowing way. ‘Well?’
‘I have absolutely no idea,’ I say, which makes her throw her head back and laugh heartily.
‘I love your honesty,’ she says, taking off her glasses and letting them fall down on a chain to her chest, which is incredibly large and inviting. ‘You’re new to the bus too?’
‘Relatively. I just sold my car. All I know is that I’m to get on the seven fifty bus and stay on it for eighteen stops. My daughter. She likes to make sure I’m safe.’
She smiles. ‘My car is the reason I’m here too. Yesterday morning it decided to give up. Poof! just like that.’
‘I can sell you a new one.’
‘You sell cars?’
‘Today is my first day.’
‘Then you are doing rather well so far, and not even in the office,’ she laughs.
Together we try to figure out how to pay the driver, who won’t take our money but insists on us dropping it into a machine. She lets me go first, which means I take a seat first and I’m left wondering will she sit or pass me by. Praise the lord she sits beside me, which makes me feel warm.
‘My name is Cat,’ she says. ‘Caterina, but Cat.’
‘I’m Fergus.’ We shake hands, her skin is smooth, soft, she’s not wearing a wedding ring.
‘Scottish?’
‘My dad was. We left when I was two, moved to Dublin. What about you? Your accent is peculiar.’
She laughs. ‘Thank you very much. I’m from Black Forest in Germany. The daughter of a good forester. I moved to Cork after university, when I was twenty-four.’
She is addictive, I’m interested in everything about her and I forget the first-day nerves and relax completely in the seat, almost missing my stop. I ask her too many personal questions but she answers and asks back. I tell her too much about me – my debts, my health, my failures – but not in a gloomy way, in an honest way, in a way that we can both laugh.
Leaving her on the bus is like a bubble bursting, I don’t have the time or the courage to ask her for her phone number. I almost miss the stop. She presses the bell just in time. The bus pulls in, everybody is waiting for me to squeeze my way out of the seat to get off, all eyes on me. I can’t ask her out, it’s too rushed, too panicked. I get off the bus feeling enraged.
I spend the first few hours of my first day of work feeling like a spare part that can’t quite find its place. The other men aren’t too impressed by my hiring. They know I’m a friend of the garage owner, Larry Brennan. It’s one of the only favours I had left in my life and the only way I could get a job after five months out of work. We grew up together and he couldn’t say no. Probably wanted to, but he couldn’t.
As an unpopular man on the floor it is difficult to get to the customers. They jump in before me, manage to somehow distract my clients and poach them. It’s dog eat dog.
‘No, I want him,’ I hear a familiar voice in the afternoon when I feel like I want to go home and eat an entire box of Roses.
And there she is. My colourful, vivid, larger than life, foreign sparkler. On my first day, I make my first sale.
Rather unprofessionally I use her number from the paperwork to call her and ask her out. She is more than happy to hear from me and tells me she wants to cook for me. I go to her apartment on Friday night with a bouquet of flowers, a bottle of red and a clear mission. Tell her everything.
No more secrets. No more separation of my life. I’ve come to hate the man I’ve become. No more secrets. Not with Cat. This is my chance at a fresh start.
Her apartment is a sweet set-up, two bedrooms, one for her and her remaining daughter that she’s trying to get rid of. The walls are filled with her own paintings, drying on the windowsill are painted vases and paperweights, with lilac and pink flowers crawling upward, swirls and spirals on the paperweights. I study them while she prepares the food in the tiny kitchen, which smells delicious.
‘Oh, I’ve just started a painting class. Painting on glass, to be specific.’
‘It’s different to paper?’ I ask.
‘Indeed, and it costs seventy-five euro to know about it,’ she teases.
I whistle.
‘Do you have any hobbies?’
It’s an easy question, such an easy question for so many people. But I pause. I hesitate, despite my mission I’d firmly decided on all week while waiting for this evening.
Because of my hesitation, she stops what she’s doing. She moves to the opening that joins the kitchen to the open-plan dining and living area, oven gloves still on. Those green eyes meet mine.
I feel short of breath suddenly, like I’m admitting something huge. Feel sweat break out on my brow. Do it, Fergus. Say it.
‘I play marbles. Collect marbles.’ It is not a full sentence, I don’t even know it means anything, but I’m gripping the back of the kitchen chair and she quickly takes me in, my posture, my nerves and she smiles suddenly.
‘How wonderful. When do you play next?’
‘Tomorrow.’ I clear my throat.
‘I would love to come and see. Can I?’
Taken aback, I agree.
‘You know, I was playing with marbles myself today.’ She smiles, and has the cop on to talk while I try to compose myself again. ‘Yes, I’m a vet. And some very clever people came up with the idea of using a glass marble to keep mares out of heat. Today I put a thirty-five-millimetre glass ball into the uterus of a mare. First time for me, and for the horse. But do you know what? I think she’s been learning from these ping-pong clubs: she popped it straight back out again. Expelled it immediately. Got it right second time round, though. You know, the company I got them from call them “mare-bles”!’
I laugh, totally surprised by the ease of her taking my news, then by her own marble story.
‘I’ll get you one,’ she says, going back to the oven. ‘I bet you don’t have one of them in your collection.’
‘No,’ I laugh, a little too hysterically. ‘No I don’t.’
‘So tell me about your marbles, tell me about your collection.’
And so I begin at the beginning with Father Murphy and the dark room with my bloodies, and then I can’t stop. I tell her about Hamish and the hustling, I tell her about my brothers, I tell her about the world championships. We drink wine, and eat roast lamb, and I tell her about the games, about my team Electric Slags, I tell her the pubs I play in and how often. I tell her about Hamish, all about Hamish, and I tell her about my collection. I tell her about the marble swearing jar, I tell her about the cheating, I tell her that Gina and Sabrina have never known and I try, with difficulty, to explain why. We drink more wine, and we make love and I tell her more as we lie naked in the dark beside each other. It’s like I can’t stop. I want this woman to know who I am, no secrets, no lies.
I tell her about my brothers, how I pushed them away and will never forgive myself, and moved by my story she says that she will cook for them, and I say no, that is too much, I couldn’t, we all couldn’t. But she is an only child and has always wished for a big family. So over the course of the next few months, she cooks for Angus and Caroline, then Duncan and Mary, Tommy and his date, Bobby and Laura, Joe and Finn. And it’s a success, so we do it again, with her friends.
She asks me what was it that struck me about her, that had me hooked on her so quickly – because we were like that, addicted to each other. I say it was her eyes. They’re like cat’s eyes. Ironically. More specifically foreign cat’s eyes, mostly made in Mexico and the Far East. Most cat’s eyes are single colour four-vane and the glass has a light bottle-green tint to it. The outer rim of her eyes are bottle rim, the inside almost radioactive they’re so bright.
‘So what am I worth, in mint condition?’ she teases me one morning in bed. ‘Me at twenty-one, before my babies, perhaps?’
‘You’re in mint condition now.’ I climb on top of her. ‘Look at you …’ I lift her arms above her head, hold
her down. ‘You’re beautiful.’ We kiss. ‘But you have no collectable value whatsoever,’ I add, and we both erupt with laughter.
She tells me that when I revealed to her my marble-playing hobby she knew from my face that just saying it was a big deal. She said I looked like it was life or death, that for whatever reason it had taken a lot for me to say it, and if she said the wrong thing I would be gone and she didn’t want me to leave.
The first gift she gives me is a mare-ble, painted by her, of course.
The only regret I have, each day I spend with Cat, is that I haven’t completed the perfection; I have not tied up all of my loose ends. This part will take me time, the part where I introduce Sabrina to Cat. It’s not because I don’t think they will get along – I know they will – but Cat knows about me, the real me, the marble persona, and Sabrina and Gina are completely unaware. To tell Sabrina about it would be to tell her that I cut her and her mother out of a part of my life for so long, that I effectively lied to the two people who were closest to me, who I was supposed to trust, and allow to trust me. I can’t think of the words for them. Cat tells me to hurry. She says to say things to people when you can; her ma died before she had a chance to make amends over their falling out. She says you just never know what can happen. I know that she’s right. I’ll do it soon. I’ll tell Sabrina soon.
‘Dad had a secret life,’ I say, hearing my voice shake as the adrenaline continues to surge through me at the discovery. In the background I hear Alfie having a meltdown over baked beans; he doesn’t want beans, he only wants marshmallows, or Peppa Pig shaped pasta. Aidan tries to calm him down while listening to me. I keep talking. ‘He was an entire other person. Hamish O’Neill,’ I say angrily. ‘Did you ever hear him use that name?’
‘Hamish O’What? No! Alfie, stop. No way, honey. Tell me more. Fine, you can have marshmallows for dinner.’
Confused by who Aidan is addressing at any time, I just keep talking. ‘I met these men in the pub, they were on his marble team, they had never even heard of me. Said Dad was secretive, one of them thought he was a spy …’ My voice breaks and I stop talking, concentrate on the road. I’ve taken two wrong turns and an illegal U-turn where everyone beeps me out of it.
‘Sabrina,’ Aidan says, worrying, ‘do you want to wait until I’m home to look into this further?’
‘No,’ I snap. ‘I think it’s rather apt. Don’t you? With everything you’ve been saying about me.’
He’s quiet. ‘Sabrina, you’re not him, that’s not what I was saying.’
‘I’ll call you later. There’s somebody else I need to see.’
‘Okay. Just …’
‘Don’t say if I think it will help, Aidan.’
He’s silent.
Alfie suddenly roars down the phone, ‘Beans make you fart, Mammeeee,’ before we’re cut off.
I never called Mattie Granddad because Dad never called him Dad. I must have questioned it at some stage as a child, but I don’t ever remember the answer, I don’t remember ever wondering why he wasn’t Granddad, I just always knew he wasn’t Dad’s dad. I was told that my granddad died when Dad was young and Mattie married my grandma, who quite honestly scared me. They both did.
But it strikes me as odd now, at thirty-three years old, that despite the fact Mattie raised my dad from the age of six, I never considered him my granddad. Disrespectful.
Grandma Molly was tough, not soft like my Nana Mary and I felt she viewed me as though I never acted grateful enough, reminding me of my pleases and thank yous a thousand times a day and leaving me jumpy and never completely comfortable.
In later years Mum told me Grandma Molly always said to her, ‘You give that child too much.’ She also used to have a go at Mum about not having any more children, which for some reason wasn’t happening for them. Now it could be treated, back then, Mum just kept trying. I think that had a huge part to do with how their relationship went sour, apart from the fact they were very different people who had different opinions on almost everything. Mum couldn’t take the criticisms from her mother-in-law, who’d spent her entire life having and raising children, it was the entire point of her life.
‘I wasn’t used to someone not liking me,’ Mum once told me. ‘I tried really hard with her, but she still didn’t like me. She didn’t ever want to like me.’
The one thing they had in common was their love of Fergus.
When Dad visited Grandma Molly he did so mostly on his own. He called in on her from time to time, on the way home from work or on the way into town. Sometimes I was with him, sometimes not. We’d all meet at Christmas for an hour on Christmas morning. I’d sit quietly, overly thankful for my new set of pyjamas, while they all chatted. She died when I was fourteen and it felt like somebody I didn’t know had died. Secretly I felt a bit relieved that I wouldn’t have to visit her any more. Visiting her was a dreaded chore. Then at the funeral I saw my cousins, who I barely knew, all in tears and being consoled by my uncles over their loss, and I felt so guilty because I didn’t care as much as they did. I didn’t feel the loss like they did. And then I cried.
When I married Aidan I felt the right thing to do was invite Mattie to the ceremony and reception. Mattie didn’t come.
I have rarely given Mattie much thought. My children don’t know him, I never visit him. My mum abhors him, thinking him a vile old man who got even worse when Molly died. But again, I feel guilty about that. I thought Dad wanted nothing to do with his family, he certainly behaved that way, and I thought it was no big deal if we went along with that, if it was a relief to us. But now I wonder why I didn’t probe, press, encourage, wonder. Why? And as his secrets come to the fore, I want to know these people. I want to know why Dad became the way he became.
Mattie is almost ninety years old and lives alone in a ground-floor one-bedroom flat in Islandbridge. I know his address because I send him an annual Christmas card. A photo of the kids every year. He’s not expecting me to call.
‘Who is it?’ he yells.
‘Sabrina,’ I say, then add just in case: ‘Sabrina Boggs.’
‘Who?’ he yells.
I hear the door being unlocked and we stand face to face. After squinting and glaring, looking me up and down, it is clear that a further explanation is required.
‘I’m Fergus’s daughter.’
He takes me in again, then turns and shuffles back to his armchair in front of the TV. He’s wearing a short-sleeved shirt with a stained white vest beneath and he makes an effort to button it up with his gnarled fingers. He’s older but pretty much exactly as I remember him during my childhood visits. In an armchair, distracted by the TV.
‘Sorry I didn’t go to your wedding,’ he says straight away. ‘I don’t go out much to social things.’
I’m embarrassed. The wedding was in Spain and I knew he wouldn’t make it. ‘I know Spain wasn’t easy for a lot of people, but I wanted you to know you were welcome.’
‘Made a change for me to be invited somewhere instead of the Boggs,’ he chuckles. He’s missing some teeth.
‘Oh, yes,’ I redden again. ‘It was a numbers issue, my family is so big that we just couldn’t include everyone.’
His stare doesn’t make it easier for me.
‘You’re not in touch with them.’
‘With … my uncles? I wish that hadn’t happened,’ I say, genuinely meaning it, though I never realised it before. Sitting before me is the man who raised my dad and he’s a stranger to me. ‘Dad wasn’t close with them, unfortunately, and I suppose that had an effect on me and them,’ I explain.
‘They were as thick as thieves,’ he says, the thick sounding like ‘tick’. ‘They called him that. Tick. Did you know that?’
‘They called Dad thick?’
‘No. Tick. Because he was the smallest. The smallest Boggs.’
I have a feeling the house was split into Doyles and Boggs. I never asked Dad about whether it was an issue for them growing up. Why didn’t I?
‘But he held his own,’ he says. ‘He outsmarted them.’
I feel proud.
‘Not that it was hard, with them pack of feckin’ eejits,’ he snorts.
‘Does the name Hamish O’Neill mean anything to you?’
‘Hamish O’Neill?’ he asks, frowning, like it’s a test and he’s failed. ‘No.’
I try not to express my disappointment.
‘But there was a Hamish Boggs,’ he says, trying to be helpful. ‘The eldest Boggs boy.’
I nod, my mind whirring. I’d forgotten about Dad’s eldest brother up until now, his name hardly mentioned. ‘I’ve heard of Hamish. Were he and Dad close?’
‘Hamish?’ he says, surprised, as if he hasn’t thought of him since he died. ‘Him and Hamish were glued together. Your da would follow him around like a lapdog; Hamish would throw a stick and your dad would scramble to get it. Hamish was clever, you see. A dumb git, like I said, but he was clever. He’d find the smartest fella in the room and he’d keep him under his thumb. Did that to your da. It worried his ma no end.’
This is new to me. I sit up.
He thinks for a while.
‘Smartest thing to do was keep Hamish away from the lot of them. I kept telling Molly that.’
‘And did she?’
‘Well he died, didn’t he?’ he says, and laughs a cruel laugh. When I don’t join in, he brings it to a slow end. ‘That lad didn’t get what wasn’t deserved,’ he says, finger wagging at me.
‘How did Hamish die?’
‘Drowned. London. Some fella punched him, he was worse for wear, fell into a river.’
I gasp. ‘That’s awful.’ I’d known he’d died, but never knew the details. Never asked for them. Why hadn’t I?
He looks at me, surprised that someone would think it so tragic after all these years, as though Hamish wasn’t a real person. And now I can see he’s wondering what my visit is about.
‘Was my dad very upset when Hamish died?’
He thinks about it, shrugs a little. ‘He had to view the body. Flew over on his own. Angus wanted to go, but sure I couldn’t be sending all my staff away to London,’ he raises his voice defensively, still fighting a forty-year-old argument over sending Dad over on his own. ‘Ara’ it was probably tough for him on his own over there. His ma was worried. First time away and all that, seeing his brother dead, but he had to go – the authorities thought it was him that was dead.’