Before Bobby has a chance to cry, Hamish takes hold of him again and starts squeezing him and shaking him, poking him in the belly and ribs. Bobby giggles again, despite the lingering smell of vomit, trying to dodge Hamish’s finger, thinking it’s a game, as we both get increasingly annoyed.
‘Are you sure he ate it?’
I nod, thinking he’ll turn me upside down next.
‘She’s going to kill me,’ I say, my heart pounding.
‘She won’t kill you,’ he says, unconvincingly, like he’s amused.
‘She told me not to play marbles with Bobby around, he always tries to eat them.’
‘Oh. Well then, she might kill you.’
I picture Jesus on the cross, the nails through his hands and wonder why nobody ever wondered if Mary had done it. If maybe the biggest miracle of all wasn’t Mary getting pregnant without ever touching a mickey, but Jesus’s ma getting away with nailing him to a cross. If I ever end up on a cross, the first person anyone will suspect is my ma and she won’t bother with the fourteen stations, she’ll just get straight to it.
‘He seems grand though,’ Hamish says as Bobby grows bored of us inspecting him and resumes playing with his train.
‘Yeah but I have to tell her,’ I say, nervously, heart pounding, body trembling. I’m thinking of thorns in my head, nails in my hands, a rag around my mickey and my nips out for everyone to see. She’d do it somewhere public too, like Jesus on the hill, for everyone to see, maybe my schoolyard or on the wall behind the butcher counter. Maybe hanging me off one of those giant meat hooks, so everyone who comes in for their Sunday roast can see me. There he is now, the lad who took his eye off his baby brother. Tsk, tsk, tsk. Two pork chops, please.
‘You don’t have to tell her,’ Hamish says calmly, going to the kitchen and grabbing a rag. ‘Here, clean up his puke.’
I do.
‘What if the fox gets trapped somewhere inside of him?’ I ask. ‘And he stops breathing?’
He considers that. We look at Bobby playing. Blond and white pudge crashing a train into the leg of a chair over and over, talking to himself in his own language where his tongue’s too big for his mouth and the words won’t come out properly.
‘Look, we can’t tell Ma,’ Hamish says finally. He sounds all grown up, and sure of himself. ‘Not after Victoria, she’ll go …’ He doesn’t need to say what Ma will do, we’ve seen enough to guess.
‘What will I do?’ I ask.
It must be the way I ask, I hear the baby in my voice, which he sometimes hates and wants to thump out of you, but instead he goes soft. ‘You don’t worry. I’ll sort it out.’
‘How?’
‘Well, it went in one way, only one way it can come back out. We’ll just have to keep an eye on his nappy.’
I look at him in shock and he laughs, that chesty cigarette laugh that’s already starting to sound like Mattie even though he’s only sixteen and Mattie is ancient.
‘How are we going to get it out?’ I ask, following him around like a little dog.
He opens the fridge, scans it, then closes it, unimpressed. He taps his finger on the worktop and looks around the small cubby kitchen, thinking, his brain in full action. I’m shitting myself but Hamish thrives on this stuff. He loves trouble, he loves it so much he wants my trouble to be his trouble. He loves finding solutions, spurred on by a countdown of how many minutes remain till our lives will be made hell. Most of the time he doesn’t find the solutions, he causes bigger problems trying to fix things. That’s Hamish. But he’s all I’ve got right now. I’m as useless as tits on a bull, as he tells me.
His eyes settle on the freshly baked brown bread that Ma has left to rest on the bread board, covered in a red-and-white checked tea cloth. She baked it fresh this morning and it filled the house with the best smell.
‘Ma told me not to touch it.’
‘She also told you not to take your eyes off Bobby.’
That’s me told. That nervous flutter again in my tummy, visions of a crown of thorns and being forced to carry a cross through the street, though maybe in Ma’s case it would be a load of dirty washing. That’s her cross to bear she always says. That and the six of us boys.
‘And just in case the bread’s not enough to flush it out …’ Hamish says, taking a bottle of castor oil from the cupboard and grabbing a spoon. He throws off the towel and picks up the bread. ‘Oh, Bobby,’ he sings, dancing the bread in the air in Bobby’s face. Bobby’s eyes light up.
An hour later I’ve changed two of the most indescribably wettest shits I’ve ever seen and there’s still no sign of the fox.
‘You’ve really trapped that fox, haven’t you, buddy?’ Hamish says to Bobby and laughs hysterically.
He offers another slice of brown bread and spoon of castor oil to Bobby and Bobby says, ‘No!’ and runs away. I don’t blame him and I’m glad. I’m literally up to my elbows in shitty terry cloths. I don’t know how Ma cleans them but I’ve boiled up some water and have steeped them for as long as I could, burning my hands in the process, tried rubbing the parts together to get the stains off but nothing. I still think I get the better end of the deal as it’s Hamish that sifts through the poo first with a knife before handing it to me to deal with. If I wasn’t so terrified about Ma coming home and finding the bread gone and a marble stuck inside her precious baby then I’d be able to laugh like Hamish is.
It is when Hamish is looking through Bobby’s third crappy nappy that I hear the key in the door. Ma’s home and my world ends. My heart thuds and my throat closes up like it’s the end of my world.
‘Hurry up,’ I whisper and Hamish sifts through the poo faster.
The front door opens, Hamish dashes out the back door, and Ma and Angus are greeted by a naked-from-the-waist-down Bobby who’s demonstrating tumbles on the floor, his pudgy legs crashing into everything as he follows through.
‘Everything all right?’ Ma asks, stepping into the room.
Angus is behind her, quiet, one red cheek like he’s been slapped, hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched, and I can tell she’s had a good go at him. He looks at me suspiciously. Hamish is in the back garden sifting through the poo. Or at least I hope he is; part of me thinks he’s nipped out the backyard door into the alleyway and left me to deal with this mess on my own.
A grin works its way on to Angus’s face, he knows that I’ve done something, I must look guilty. He’d love it if I got caught out. Convinced I’m about to get it, that the spotlight will be taken off him for a while, he grins at me.
‘What’s wrong, Tick?’
‘What on earth?’ Ma asks, looking at Bobby who’s on tumble hyper-drive. Then she sees the empty bread plate on the table, crumbs everywhere and out the window I see Hamish with a shitty hand in the window, a white marble between his fingers and a great big smile on his face. My relief is immense but now I’ve to deal with the brown bread situation.
‘Bobby ate some, I’m sorry,’ I say quickly. Too quickly. She suspects there’s more to it.
‘My brown bread!’ Ma shouts. ‘That was for tea. I told you not to touch it!’ she yells. Hamish appears beside me and dumps the soiled terry cloth in my hands, slips the marble in my pocket, his hands now clean.
‘Sorry, Ma, that was my fault,’ Hamish pipes up. ‘I told Fergus I’d watch Bobby for him, but I must have taken my eye off him because he ate it. You know what he’s like with putting things in his mouth.’ When Ma’s not looking, when she’s staring at her half-eaten loaf, devastated, he looks at me and winks.
Ma shouts a tirade of angry abuse at Hamish and all the time I think I should interrupt and confess to it all but I don’t. I can’t. I’m too chicken.
Ma sees the nappy in my hand, and the boiling water outside filled with cloths, and her expression changes so I can’t read it. ‘How many did you change?’
‘Three,’ I say nervously.
She surprises me then by laughing. ‘Oh, Fergus,’ she laughs, then ruffles my hair and kis
ses the top of my head. She goes outside to the toilet to flush the faeces, laughing as she goes, and I see Hamish watching her, sadly.
I ask him later when the others are asleep why he did that for me, why he helped me and then took the blame.
‘I didn’t do it for you. I did it for her. She doesn’t want to be disappointed in you, she’s used to it with me.’
Ma was right about Hamish being smart because when he gave me a calculating look in the eye and said, ‘You owe me one,’ I knew that he meant it and that he had me over a barrel. I don’t know if he always had what we did next planned, and that’s why he took the blame for the brown bread, knowing I’d have no choice but to do what he’d ask me to do, or if he thought about it after. Either way that was the beginning of our marble adventures, or misadventures, and brown bread incident or not, I would have gone anywhere with him.
But that pretty much describes Hamish. He was willing to go through any amount of shit to save my arse.
It’s three a.m. and I’m out with Hamish. He often comes to get me during the night, but these days it’s different, no nudging, kicking, or hand across the mouth so I won’t scream with fright as I used to do when he woke me in the middle of the night. Instead he has to throw stones against the window to wake me up. He hasn’t been living at home for a few months now since Ma threw him out. She found out he was working for The Barber, but that’s not why she threw him out. Mattie and him had a massive fight, where they thrashed the house walloping each other. Hamish even put Mattie’s head through the glass of the good cabinet – glass everywhere and he had to get three stitches. Tommy pissed his pants even though he said he hadn’t.
So Hamish is out of the house. At twenty-one years of age Ma says he should be out of the house anyway, married and working. Even though he’s out I still see him. We can’t hustle people any more like we used to, I’m fifteen now and everyone knows I’m the best marble player around, or one of them; there’s a new fella on the scene, Peader Lackey. People like to watch us play against each other, The Barber sets it up in his barbershop at night. He likes to entertain his people, he has meetings in the back, in his office and while that’s going on he has drinks and smokes in the shop, cards, marbles, women, you name it. Hamish says The Barber would bet on a snail race. Not to his face, obviously. You don’t want to piss off The Barber. If you do, and you go in for a cut and a shave, you can end up with a lot more damage done.
The Barber gives me a few bob for showing up, Hamish takes most of it. Still it’s the same as with the caramels when I was ten: I’d do it for free then and I’d do it for free now. People place bets on who’ll win and Hamish is the tote. You better watch out if you don’t pay up, Hamish commands a lot of respect, with him being close to The Barber, and the ones who don’t pay are looking for trouble, which they get.
But Hamish didn’t wake me up tonight, I find him in the alleyway behind our house, bent over and looking for pebbles. I sneak up on him and kick him in the arse and he jumps like The Barber has a hot blade to his neck.
I break my shit laughing.
‘What the fuck are you doing up?’ he says, trying to play it all cool but his pupils are all wide and black.
‘None of your business.’
‘Ah that’s how it is, is it?’ he grins. ‘Heard you’ve been getting fresh with one of the Sullivan girls. Sarah, is it?’
‘Might have been.’ It always surprises me how Hamish knows everything. I haven’t told anyone about Sarah, kept it right to myself – not that there was anything to tell, she won’t do much till her wedding day, said as much herself. She’s sweet enough, but I didn’t meet her tonight. I was meeting her sister Annie, who’s a lot less sweet. Two years older and she caught me up on what her baby sister wasn’t sharing. My legs are still shaking from it, but I feel alive, like a man, like I can do anything. Which is probably a bad place to be in when Hamish is involved.
He motions for me to follow but doesn’t tell me about what we’re out to do. I figure it’s a game of marbles somewhere that he’s set up with an audience to bet, which is what it usually is. On the times it’s not, it’s about visiting the lads who haven’t paid up. We go to the school, climb over the back wall and get to the dorms easy. Hamish already knows a way in, and when we climb in a window I send a jar of marbles on a desk spilling all over the floor. I expect Hamish to clock me one but instead he pisses himself laughing. None of the brothers come, thankfully. It’s one thing getting a clatter on school time, it’s quite another to get it when you shouldn’t even be there. Hamish is laughing like a maniac, and slips on the marbles, and that’s when I smell the drink on him. I get a bit worried then.
Two boys sit up in their beds, sleepy. They’re fifteen, same age as me, but I look younger.
‘Get up, you faggots,’ he says, hitting them both over the heads. He uses shoelaces and school ties, anything he can find, to tie their hands behind their backs, their ankles to chair-legs and tells them we’re going to play a little game.
While he’s messing around with them I tidy the marbles up from the floor, and take a look at them. The collection has no value, just a bunch of opaques, cat’s eyes, swirls and patches, nothing mint, nothing collectable. This surprises me because I know one of the lads is a rich boy. Daddy’s a doctor, drives a fancy car, I would have been expecting a little bit better than this. I root through the jar and find gold. It’s a two-colour, peerless patch made by Peltier. It stands out because the edges are curved instead of straight and it’s my lucky day because he has three of them with picture marbles on, that’s with black transfers of one of twelve different syndicate comic characters fired on the marble. I’ve never seen these before. The young lad watches me studying it. He’s right to be worried. He’s got three of them, Smitty, Andy and, can you believe it, Annie. Annie is red on white with the black transfer. It’s kind of like fate. I’m not a cruel bastard, I only pocket one: Annie.
Eggs in the bush, Hamish tells them we’re playing. It’s a guessing game, which requires no skill whatsoever. The kind of game we play when the family go on a long journey, not that we go anywhere much. It’s too expensive and Ma says we’re a bloody nightmare and that she can’t take us anywhere. We usually end up getting split up and going to different members of her family for a week. Two years in a row I’ve gone to Aunty Sheila, who has two girls and only lives around the corner. Back sleeping on her floor again, I have no good memories of being there and they’re the worst summer holidays ever, except cousin Mary was friends with Sarah Sullivan and that’s how I met her. It was worth pretending to be the nice kind gentleman cousin for a week.
Back to the game, and a player picks up a number of marbles and asks the other players to guess a number. If they guess correctly they get to keep the marbles, if they get it wrong, they have to pay the questioner the difference between the number guessed and the number held. Except Hamish puts his own spin on the game. Every time they get it wrong, the difference in the amount guessed and the amount held is how many times he lands a punch to their face and body. It stops being fun really quickly. We’ve gone collecting money a few times before, scared lads a few times, usually it’s just enough for them to see Hamish in their room at night, knowing he’s been sent by The Barber, but never this – or at least, never this bad. Hamish is wired. He punches too much, too hard, those boys are bleeding and crying and tied to the chairs.
I try to tell him that’s enough and he fires himself at me, pulls my hair so hard on my head I think my scalp’s about to come off. The alcohol from him smells worse now, and his eyes are bloodshot, like it took a while to hit him. What I mistook in the alley for a fright and then joy at seeing me was something else. He roughs them up a little more and one of the boys cries really loudly for help, his nose bleeding, his eye all shut up. I don’t get any satisfaction from it, they’re only kids, and it’s not even that much money. Hamish gets his hands on their savings and takes it all, then we’re out of there. We walk back to the house in silence;
he knows I disapprove and Hamish hates that. Although he tries to be the big man, what he really wants is for everyone to like him. But he has never known how to make that happen.
He doesn’t walk me back to the house, just leaves me at the alley entrance. I think he’s going to walk away without a word, but he’s got more to say.
‘So, The Barber told me to tell you not to win tomorrow night.’
‘What?’
‘You heard me. Don’t win.’
‘Why?’
‘Why do you think? He’s got something going with someone. You lose, he wins a packet. You might get a bit of it.’
‘Who am I playing?’
‘Peader.’
‘I’m not losing to Peader, no way.’
‘Lookit, you have to.’
‘I don’t have to do anything. I don’t work for The Barber, you do, and I’m not losing for anyone.’
He grabs my collar and pushes me hard up against the wall, but I’m not afraid, I just feel sad. I see a bully, my brother, where I once saw a hero.
‘You be here at eleven tomorrow night, okay? Or else.’
‘Or else what? You won’t be my brother any more, Hamish?’ All of a sudden, I’m furious. Furious with the way Hamish hit those boys, furious with the way he’s implicated me in it, furious that he thinks he can still tell me what to do and I’ll do it, no questions asked. ‘You going to slap me around like you did with those lads tonight? I don’t think so. You think Ma will ever let you set foot in the house again if you do that?’
He shifts uneasily. I know he wants to come home more than anything. He’s a homebird, though he has a funny way of showing it. He’s the kind of fella that teases a girl senseless if he fancies her, who treats you bad if he wants to be your friend, who hangs around his family and acts the prat when really he wants to be invited inside.
‘The Barber will come after you,’ he threatens me.
‘No he won’t. The Barber’s got better things to be doing than worrying about me and a marble game. He just uses it as a distraction to whatever he’s doing in that room. He uses you to cause a distraction, Hamish, that’s all. Has he ever asked you into that back room? He won’t even bother coming after you, he’ll get someone else to do it for him. He doesn’t care about you. I’m not losing for him, I’m not losing for you. I’m never losing, full stop.’