The Marble Collector: The life-affirming, gripping and emotional bestseller about a father’s secrets
A box of possessions. A father with no memory. A daughter with just one day to piece together the past.When Sabrina Boggs stumbles upon a mysterious collection of her father’s belongings, her seemingly uneventful life suddenly alters and shifts.In the single day she has to search for answers about the man she thought she knew, a man who can no longer remember his own story, Sabrina uncovers far bigger secrets than she could have imagined. And discovers that sometimes it’s the people closest to us that we know the least.
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Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2015
Copyright © Cecelia Ahern 2015
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Cover design by Heike Schüssler
Cecelia Ahern asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007501847
Ebook Edition © May 2016 ISBN: 9780007501830
Version: 2018-06-22
For my Sonny Ray
I saw the angel in the marble and I carved until I set him free.
Michelangelo
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Playing with Marbles
Chapter 3: Playing with Marbles
Chapter 5: Playing with Marbles
Chapter 7: Playing with Marbles
Chapter 8: Playing with Marbles
Chapter 10: Playing with Marbles
Chapter 12: Playing with Marbles
Chapter 14: Playing with Marbles
Chapter 15: Playing with Marbles
Chapter 17: Playing with Marbles
Chapter 18: Playing with Marbles
Chapter 19: Playing with Marbles
Chapter 21: Playing with Marbles
Chapter 23: Playing with Marbles
Chapter 25: Playing with Marbles
Chapter 27: Playing with Marbles
Chapter 29: Playing with Marbles
Chapter 31: Playing with Marbles
When it comes to my memory there are three categories: things I want to forget, things I can’t forget, and things I forgot I’d forgotten until I remember them.
My earliest memory is of my mum when I was three years old. We are in the kitchen, she picks up the teapot and launches it up at the ceiling. She holds it with two hands, one on the handle, one on the spout, and lobs it as though in a sheaf-toss competition, sending it up in the air where it cracks against the ceiling, and then falls straight back down to the table where it shatters into pieces, murky brown water and burst soggy teabags everywhere. I don’t know what preceded this act, or what came after, but I do know it was anger-motivated, and the anger was my-dad-motivated. This memory is not a good representation of my mum’s character; it doesn’t show her in a good light. To my knowledge she never behaved like that again, which I imagine is precisely the reason that I remember it.
As a six-year-old, I see my Aunt Anna being stopped at the door by Switzer’s security as we exit. The hairy-handed security guard goes through her shopping bag and retrieves a scarf with its price tags and a security tag still on it. I can’t remember what happened after that; Aunt Anna plied me with ice-cream sundaes in the Ilac Centre and watched with hope that every memory of the incident would die with each mouthful of sugar. The memory is vivid despite even to this day everyone believing I made it up.
I currently go to a dentist who I grew up with. We were never friends but we hung out in the same circles. He’s now a very serious man, a sensible man, a stern man. When he hovers above my open mouth, I see him as a fifteen-year-old pissing against the living room walls at a house party, shouting about Jesus being the original anarchist.
When I see my aged primary school teacher who was so softly spoken we almost couldn’t hear her, I see her throwing a banana at the class clown and shouting at him to leave me alone for God’s sake, just leave me alone, before bursting into tears and running from the classroom. I bumped into an old classmate recently and brought the incident up, but she didn’t remember.
It seems to me that when summoning up a person in my mind it is not the everyday person I think of, it is the more dramatic moments or the moments they showed a part of themselves that is usually hidden.
My mother says that I have a knack for remembering what others forget. Sometimes it’s a curse; nobody likes it when there’s somebody to remember what they’ve tried so hard to bury. I’m like the person who remembers everything after a drunken night out, who everyone wishes would keep their memories to themself.
