The Marble Collector by Cecelia Ahern

Author:Cecelia Ahern [Ahern, Cecelia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2015-08-24T16:00:00+00:00

I’m lying on a picnic blanket though I can still feel the bumpy ground beneath me, earth and broken rock. I’m roasting in my suit. My tie is off, my sleeves rolled up, my legs feel like they’re burning in my black pants beneath the heat of the summer sun. There’s a bottle of white wine beside us, half of it already drunk, I doubt we’ll make it back to the office at all. Friday afternoon, the boss probably won’t return from lunch as usual, pretending to be at a meeting but instead sitting in the Stag’s Head and downing the Guinness, thinking nobody knows he’s there.

I’m with the new girl. Our first sales trip together, this one took us to Limerick. I’m helping her to settle in, though she’s currently straddling me, and slowly opening the buttons on her silk blouse. I’d say she’s settling in just fine.

No one will see us, she insists, though I don’t know how she can be so sure. I’m guessing she’s done this before, if not here, somewhere like this. She leaves the blouse on, a salmon peach colour, but undoes her strapless bra which falls to the blanket. It topples off the blanket and on to the soil. Her panties are off already, I know this because my hands are where the fabric should be.

Her skin is a colour I’ve never seen before, a milky white, so white she glows, so pale I’m surprised she hasn’t sizzled under the sun’s blaze by now. Her hair is strawberry blonde, but if she’d told me it was peach I would have believed her. Her lips are peach, her cheeks are peach. She’s like a doll, one of Sabrina’s china dolls. Fragile. Delicate looking. But she’s not fragile, nor angelic; she is self-assured and has a glimmer of mischief in her hazel brown eyes, an almost sly lick of her lips as she sees what she wants and takes it.

It is ironic that we are lying in this cabbage field on a Friday afternoon, the day when my ma would serve us up cabbage soup. The word soup was an exaggeration, it was hot water with slithery slimy over-boiled strips of cabbage at the bottom. Salty hot water. The money would always run out by Friday and Ma would save for a big roast on a Sunday. Saturday we would be left to our own devices, have to fend for ourselves. We would go to the orchard and laze in the trees eating whatever apples we could, or beg and bother Mrs Lynch next door, or we’d rob something on Moore Street, but they were quick catching on to us so we couldn’t go there much.

It is doubly ironic that we’re lying in this cabbage field because in a game of marbles the banned practice of moving your marble closer to the target marbles is called ‘cabbaging’, which is cheating. This is no great coincidence, of course. I tell her this fact as we pass

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