Kia ora koutou,
When I was a kid marbles were all the rage. Not many girls played marbles but our brothers and neighbours did, so we knew all about them. Some boys were good marbles players by eye and instinct and others had to learn, some never did but they tried.
My brother was pretty good and when he wanted to practise at home he was a bit hampered because he only had sisters and sisters were no good at marbles, right?
In my case this adage was absolutely bang on. I wasn’t any good at marbles because I was not interested in sitting on the ground flicking a little china/glass ball at another china/glass balls. The idea came dead last if put up against reading a book.
Sometimes though, I gave in and with a theatrically heavy sigh would sit down and play. The idea was you had one each in the centre and tried to hit them out. If you missed then you put the marble that had missed in the centre with the other marble and this kept on until one of you ran out of marbles and/or the other one managed to flick all the marbles out with their marble. That’s how I remember it anyway. I thought it pointless because you were bound to lose. It did not matter than you won occasionally. Overall you lost.
‘Not always,’ said my brother. ‘This time you might win.’
I did not win many games principally because I was not interested and got bored. I was never any good at sports either. I only ran in the school races because the teacher made me. Me and a kid called Api came in last every year. He did it on purpose and I did it because I could not run fast. Api and I were always put together in the square dances they made us practice too. He was useless because he kept laughing and I was useless because I was sulking about having to do it.
‘What is the point?’ I said to my brother.
‘To get more marbles,’ he said, like I was thick, ‘and not to lose your marbles.’
‘Yes but look at you. You’ve won a heap of marbles and want to play but no–one’s keen to play with you because you’ve won most of theirs.’
‘You said thirty minutes and you’ve only played twenty.’
‘I don’t care. I’m sick of it.’
‘But you said.’
And, dammit, I had, so I said, ‘Okay but only if you let me use your blue marble.’
This presented him with a bit of a quandary. That blue marble was his star marble. He never loaned it, hardly ever played with it because he didn’t want to get it chipped. He thought about it.
Then he gave in to the inevitable.
He wanted to play?
He had to get me to play
‘Here,’ he said and pushed the blue marble my way. ‘Go on, you promised half an hour and now its twenty–two minutes.’
So with another exaggerated sigh, I crouched down, got ready, shut my eyes and with a flick sent the blue marble into the centre. I did not even look where I had flicking it, I just wanted this over, but somehow, somehow it hit the heap of marbles and they all went spinning out. Not all of them went out of the ring, two remained. Neither of them was the blue marble.
He stared in horror and disbelief at the scattered marbles and worst of all, the blue marble, outside the ring with the others.
He had lost his blue marble.
He picked up the blue marble and wrapped it in his hand and then gave it to me and began gathering up the other marbles. He didn’t say a word.
Yeah, yeah, of course I gave it back to him.
But only after he promised never ever ever to ask me to play marbles again.
Renée
