The Marble Collector Part 3

'We agreed that you would store them for him. Why did you send them to the hospital?'

Though I didn't recognise the marbles, I do recognise some of the other boxes' contents as items we packed away from Dad's apartment before putting it on the market. I still feel guilty that we had to do this, but we needed to raise as much money as possible for his rehabilitation. We tried to keep all the precious memories safe, like his lucky football shirt, his photographs and mementos, which I have in our shed in the back garden, the only place I could store them. I didn't have room for the rest, so Mum took them.

'Sabrina, I was going to store his boxes, but then Mickey Flanagan offered to take them and so I sent him everything.'

'Mickey Flanagan, the solicitor, had Dad's private things?' I say, annoyed.

'He's not exactly a random stranger. He's a kind of friend. He was Fergus's solicitor for years. Handled our divorce too. You know, he pushed for Fergus to get sole custody of you. You were fifteen what the h.e.l.l would Fergus have done with you at fifteen? Not to mention the fact you didn't even want to live with me at fifteen. You could barely live with yourself. Anyway, Mickey was handling the insurance and hospital bills, and he said he'd store Fergus's things, he had plenty of s.p.a.ce.'

A bubble of anger rises in me. 'If I'd known his solicitor was taking his personal things, I would have had them, Mum.'

'I know. But you said you had no s.p.a.ce for anything more.'

Which I didn't and I don't. I barely have s.p.a.ce for my shoes. Aidan jokes that he has to step outside of the house in order to change his mind.

'So why did Mickey send the boxes to the hospital this morning?'

'Because Mickey had to get rid of them and I told him that was the best place for them. I didn't want to clutter you with them. It's a sad story really: Mickey's son lost his house and he and his wife and kids have to move in with Mickey and his wife. They're bringing all their furniture, which has to be stored in Mickey's garage, and he said he couldn't keep Fergus's things any more. Which is understandable. So I told him to send them to the hospital. They're Fergus's things. He can decide what to do with them. He's perfectly capable of that, you know. I thought he might enjoy it,' she adds gently, as I'm sure she can sense my frustration. 'Imagine the time it will pa.s.s for him, going down memory lane.'

I realise I'm holding my breath. I exhale.

'Did you discuss this walk down memory lane with his doctors first?'

'Oh,' she says suddenly, realising. 'No. I didn't, I ... oh dear. Is he okay, love?'

I sense her sincere concern. 'Yes, I got to them before he did.'

'I'm sorry, I never thought of that. Sabrina, I didn't tell you because you would have insisted on taking everything and cluttering your house with things you don't need and taking too much on like you always do when it's not necessary. You've enough on your plate.'

Which is also true.

I can't blame her for wanting to rid herself of Dad's baggage, he's not her problem any more and ceased being so seventeen years ago. And I believe that she was doing it for my own good, not wanting to weigh me down.

'So did you know he had a marble collection?' I ask.

'Oh, that man!' Her resentment for the other Fergus returns. The past Fergus. The old Fergus. 'Found among other pointless collections, I'm sure. Honestly, that man was a h.o.a.rder remember how full the skip was when we sold the apartment? He used to bring those sachets of mustard, ketchup and mayonnaise home every day from whenever he ate out. I had to tell him to stop. I think he was addicted. You know they say that people who h.o.a.rd have emotional issues. That they're holding on to all of those things because they're afraid of letting go.'

It goes on and I allow 90 per cent of it to wash over me, including the habit of referring to Dad in the past tense as though he's dead. To her, the man she knew is dead. She quite likes the man she visits in the hospital every fortnight.

'We had an argument about a marble once,' she says, bitterly.

I think they had a fight about just about everything at least once in their lives.

'How did that come about?'

'I can't remember,' she says too quickly.

'But you never knew he had a marble collection?'

'How would I know?'

'Because you were married to him. And because I didn't pack them up, so you must have.'

'Oh please, I can't be called to account for anything he has done since we separated, nor during our marriage for that matter,' she spouts.

I'm baffled.

'Some of the items are missing,' I say, looking at them all laid out on the floor. The more I think about it, and hearing that they were in the possession of his solicitor, the more suspicious I am becoming. 'I'm not suggesting Mickey Flanagan stole them,' I say. 'I mean, Dad could have lost them.'

'What's missing?' she asks, with genuine concern. The man she divorced was an imbecile, but the nice man in rehabilitation must not be wronged.

'Part of his marble collection.'

'He's lost his marbles?' She laughs. I don't. She finally catches her breath. 'Well, I don't think your dad had ever anything to do with marbles, dear. Perhaps it's a mistake, perhaps they're not your father's, or Mickey delivered the wrong boxes. Do you want me to call him?'

'No,' I say, confused. I look on the floor and see pages and pages covered in Dad's handwriting, cataloguing these marbles, and yet Mum seems to genuinely know nothing.

'The marbles are definitely his and the missing items were valuable.'

'By his own estimation, I'm guessing.'

'I don't know who valued them, but there are certificates to show they're authentic. The certs for the missing marbles aren't here. The inventory says one item was worth up to twelve thousand dollars.'

'What?' she gasps. 'Twelve thousand for marbles!'

'One box of marbles.' I smile.

'Well no wonder he almost went bankrupt. They weren't mentioned as a.s.sets in the divorce.'

'He mightn't have had them then,' I say quietly.

Mum talks like I haven't spoken at all, the conspiracy theories building in her head, but there's one question she's failed to ask. I didn't pack them and she didn't know about them, but somehow they found their way to the rest of Dad's belongings.

I take Mickey's office details from her and end the call.

The marble collection covers the entire floor. They are beautiful, twinkling from the carpet like a midnight sky.

The house is quiet but my head is now buzzing. I pick up the first batch of marbles on the list. The box of bloodies that I showed to Dad, listed as 'Allies'.

I start to polish them. Kind of like an apology for not ever knowing about them before.

I have a knack for remembering things that people forget and I now know something important about Dad that he kept to himself, which he has forgotten. Things we want to forget, things we can't forget, things we forgot we'd forgotten until we remember them. There is a new category. We all have things we never want to forget. We all need a person to remember them just in case.

I was supposed to be keeping my eye on Bobby. That's exactly what Ma said when she left the house, in her usual threatening tone. 'You keep your eye on him, you hear? Don't. Take. Your. Eye. Off. Him.' Every word a prod in the chest with her dry cracked finger.

I promised. I meant it. When she's looking at you like that you really mean whatever you're saying.

But then I got distracted.

For some reason Ma trusted me with keeping my eye on him. It might have been something to do with the little chat we had about Victoria when the others were at school and we got to play the marble game together. I think she's been different to me since then. Maybe not, maybe it's all in my head, maybe it's just that it's different to me. I'd never seen her play like that before; a bit with the babies, but not down on the floor like she was with me, skirt hooshed up, her knees on the carpet. I think Hamish has noticed it too. Hamish notices everything and maybe that makes me a bit more cool to him too Ma trusting me with things and not slapping the head off me as much as she usually would. Or maybe she's like this with me because she's grieving. I learned about grieving from a priest. I might have done that after Da died but I can't remember. I think it's just for adults.

Ma hates priests now. After what he said to her when Victoria died, after Mattie and Hamish chased him out of the house. She still goes to Ma.s.s though, she says it's a sin not to. She drags us to Gardiner Street Church every Sunday to ten o'clock Ma.s.s, in our best clothes. I can always smell her spit on my forehead from when she smooths down my hair. Sunday morning smells of spit and incense. We always sit in the third row, most families stick to the same place all the time. She says Ma.s.s is the only time she can get peace and all of us will shut the f.u.c.k up. Even Mattie goes, smelling of last night's drink and circling in his chair like he's still p.i.s.sed. We're always quiet at Ma.s.s because my first memory of Ma.s.s is Ma pointing up at Jesus on the cross, blood dripping down his forehead and nails sticking out of his hands and feet, and her saying, 'If you say one word in here, embarra.s.s me, I'll do that to you.' I believed her. We all do. Even Bobby sits still. He sits with his bottle of milk in his hand as the priest drones on, his voice echoing around the enormous ceilings, looking at all the pictures on the walls of a near naked man being tortured in fourteen different ways, and he knows this isn't a place to f.u.c.k about.

Ma is at school with Angus. He's in trouble because he was caught eating all the communion wafers when he was doing his altar boy duties, locking them away after Ma.s.s. He ate an entire bag of them, three hundred and fifty to be precise. When they asked if he had anything to say for himself, he said he asked for a drink because there were dozens stuck to the roof of his mouth. 'My mouth was dry as a nun's crotch,' he'd whispered late at night when we were all in bed and we'd almost p.i.s.sed ourselves laughing. And then when we were all almost asleep, the giggles finally gone, Hamish whispered, 'Angus, you know you haven't just eaten the body of Christ, you've eaten the whole carca.s.s.' And that set us all off again, forcing Mattie to bang on the wall for us to shut up.

Angus loves being an altar boy, he gets paid for it, more for funerals, and when he's in cla.s.s the priest pa.s.ses by his window and gives him the thumbs up or down to let him know what he's needed for that weekend. If it's a thumbs up it's a funeral, and he'll get more money, if it's a wedding, he gets less. No one wants to be an altar boy at a wedding.

Duncan is at Mattie's butcher shop, plucking feathers off chickens and turkeys as punishment for cheating in a school exam. He says he wants to leave school like Hamish did but Ma won't let him. She says he's not as smart as Hamish, which doesn't make much sense to me because I thought it was the smart ones that do better at school, it's the dumb ones that should leave.

Tommy's playing football outside and so it's my job to look after Bobby. Only I wasn't watching him. Not even G.o.d could watch Bobby all the time, he's a tornado, he never stops.

While he's playing on the floor with his train, I take out my new Trap the Fox game that I got for my eleventh birthday. It's from Cairo Novelty Company and the hounds are black and white swirls and the fox is an opaque marble. I don't see Bobby grab the fox but from the corner of my eye I see him suddenly go still; he's watching me. I look at him and see the opaque in his hand, close to his mouth. He does it while giving me that sidelong cheeky look, his blue eyes twinkling mischievously like he'd do anything just to get a rise out of me, even if it means his death.

'Bobby, no!' I shout.

He smiles, enjoying my reaction. He moves it closer to his mouth.

'No!' I dive at him and he runs, the fastest little f.u.c.ker you've ever seen on two legs. All chub and no muscle at one hundred miles an hour, weaving in and out of chairs, ducking, diving. Finally, I have him cornered, so I stop. The marble is against his lips.

He giggles.

'Bobby, listen,' I try to catch my breath. 'If you put that in your mouth, you'll choke and die, do you understand? Bobby all gone. Bobby. f.u.c.king. Dead.'

He giggles again, tickled by my fear, by the power he has over me.

'Bobby ...' I say, warning in my voice, moving slowly towards him, ready to pounce at any moment. 'Give me the marble ...'

He puts it in his mouth and I dive on him, squeezing his pudgy cheeks, trying to push the marble back out. Sometimes he just holds things there. Stones, snails, nails, dirt ... sometimes he just puts stuff in his mouth like it's a holding room then spits it out. But I can't feel a marble in his mouth, his cheeks are all squidge, all flesh, mixed with his spit and snotty runny nose. He makes a choking sound and I prise open his mouth and it's empty. Just little white milky fangs and a squishy red tongue.

'f.u.c.k,' I whisper.

'Uck,' he repeats.

'HAMISH!' I yell. Hamish is supposed to be out working, or looking for a job, or doing whatever it is that Hamish does now that he's out of school, but I heard him come home, bang the door closed and bang his way up the stairs to our room. 'HAAAYYY-MIIIIIISH!' I yell. 'He ate the fox! Bobby ate the fox!'

Bobby looks at me, startled by my reaction, by my fear and he looks like he's about to burst into tears any second. That's the least of my worries.

I hear Hamish's boots on the stairs and he bursts into the room. 'What's wrong?'

'Bobby swallowed the fox.'

Hamish looks confused at first but then sees my game on the table and understands. As Hamish goes towards Bobby, Bobby really looks as if he's going to cry. He tries to run but I grab him and he squeals like a pig.

'When?'

'Just now.'

Hamish picks Bobby up and turns him upside down. He shakes him as if trying to shake the coins from his pockets like I've seen him do with lads before. Bobby starts to laugh.

Hamish puts him back on his feet again and opens his mouth, sticks his fingers inside. Bobby's eyes widen and he starts retching, vomits up some foul-smelling porridge.

'Is it there?' Hamish asks, and I don't know what he's talking about until he gets down on his knees and looks through the vomit for the marble.

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 n.o.body 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 s.h.i.tting 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 h.e.l.l. 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 t.i.ts 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.