CC 106: Every Marble An Omen

Clue #1:               

‘On our honeymoon (the first one) in Milan, my purse was stolen and I was hysterical and so were you for a bit but soon after you blamed me for being too careless with it on the metro, and later in the police station we were shouting at each other as the Italian police looked on like we were nutjobs.’

Clue #13:

‘Many many times, the electric would go off as we were about to have sex and you’d go to fix the trip switch, and by the time you came back, either myself or yourself had gone off the idea of sex altogether.’

Clue #4:

‘We attended the christening of my cousin Una’s daughter in Sligo.  What a little cherub.  That’s what I think now.  But back then, I didn’t give a shit.  Neither did you.  We were more interested in going to Lissadell House to see where Yeats wrote about the Gore-Booth sisters before those rich owners got their way and closed the grounds.  We were all set to stand outside and protest the closure at that time.  Remember?  Anyway, babies.  Furthest thing from our minds.’

Clue #9:

‘We were afraid to get a dog or a cat because we thought it would be too much work for us.  And we talked about how sad it would be when they died.  That wasn’t very optimistic of us.  Didn’t bode well for the future.’

Etc.

Etc. 

There were many clues scattered, it turned out.  I’d missed the greater majority, but Emer hadn’t, and they came at me with such whirlwind speed that I struggled to retain each of them, like she’d thrown a bucket of marbles into the air and I’d no time to pick them all up from the floor.  Every marble an omen.  One I picked up and recognised was the one about the christening.  The chimera of offspring had lurked with us for some time.  It was a clash of needs and attitudes over the years, and we were continually switching roles.  Sometimes I was the one who wanted to start a family, and she wasn’t up for it.  Sometimes she was the one who desired a child, and I talked down the notion.  And we could never agree on our reasons for wanting children.  Parental pressure, existential crossroads, societal conformity, or whatever.  We had these reasons, and we discussed them and argued them to a point where we sickened ourselves, and agreed only that none of them were good enough reasons at all.  Most couples seemed to be in tune with each other when it came to kids, and smoothly slipped into the situation without getting into the lather we got ourselves into about it.  But it was different for me now.  I’d reconciled myself with the idea, and was ready and willing to work with Emer in the whole reproduction enterprise.  A picture of our child was available to me where once it was hard to see, an unceasingly puzzling embryo in my mind, or one of those ultrasound photos that didn’t look quite human but you had to pretend it looked human to you to make everyone around you happy.   But now I could see quite clearly a little version of me with a lot of Emer in him, and a little version of Emer with a lot of me in her.  I saw myself reading fairy tales to my daughter, and showing my son his first Bruce Lee film, and bringing my wee girl from house to house to show her off to the neighbours in her beautiful communion dress, and kicking a ball with the both of them and acting like a fool in the garden to try to make them laugh.  Ah, these were the images you’d torment yourself with when the yearning grabbed you.  But I was ready now, I was sure of it.  I’d just picked the wrong time.

‘I didn’t notice these clues,’ I told her.  ‘I didn’t focus on the negative.  I can’t believe you spent the whole time collecting bad omens.’

‘Of course not.  I’m just saying.  All the signs were there.’

‘It wasn’t all bad.’

‘I’m not saying that.  I’m just saying that if you look back at it, and I have, you’ll see there were pointers along the road.’

‘Right.  I get ya.  I do understand what you mean about babies though.  Having one.  We never got there, it’s true.  But I still don’t know why.’

She took a long drag from the cigarette I’d just given her and then said

‘Yeah.  I don’t know.  We worried ourselves senseless about it.  Talked too much crap.  Fundamentally, I suppose I just thought it would happen out of the blue.  Unexpectedly.  It wouldn’t be planned. ’ 

‘Me too.’

‘That it would just be thrown at us, and it would be a big surprise, a pleasant one eventually, and we’d get on with it.’

‘Me too.’

‘But now I’m glad it never happened.’

‘Me too.’

We’d found that common ground again, dragged on our cigarettes with a harmony not witnessed since the Beach Boys, as the marbles rolled away from us to find fresh newlyweds to pester for however long.