The Marble Collector

8

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.’

It must be the way I say it because he gets it straight away, he believes me, he knows he’s nothing to The Barber, has always tried to make himself more important than he is, like pulling the stunt he pulled tonight. I’ve revealed him and he hates it. He knows there’s nothing he can do to talk me out of it, or into it.

When I walk down the alleyway and get close to the house I suddenly feel a slap on the side of my head. It stings. I think it’s The Barber at first, not him but one of his boys. Instead it’s Sarah and she’s crying.

‘Jesus, Sarah, what are you doing out here at this hour?’

‘Is it true?’ She’s crying. ‘Did you and Annie… do it?’

By the next day I can forget about Annie, I can forget about Sarah and I can forget about Hamish.

The guards come round looking for Hamish, but Hamish has already legged it. He’s luckier to have escaped the wrath of Ma than anything the guards would have done to him. Everyone thinks I know where he is but I don’t. I tell them I don’t and that I don’t care either. It’s true too. He went over the line last night and I can’t back him up on that one. For the first time, I can’t. It should make me feel sad but it doesn’t, it makes me feel tougher, stronger, like if I can think I’m better than Hamish then that practically gives me superpowers. I’ve never thought of myself as better than Hamish and I spend the day puffed up with something like pride.

That night in bed the lads and I are whispering, we have to because Ma is so close to the edge any one of us will get it over nothing. Duncan says a lad he knows who works on the docks saw Hamish getting on a boat going to Liverpool.

And now I feel less like a superhero. I didn’t think our meeting would be the last. I wanted a chance for us to make it up, for him to say sorry, for him to see what a big man I was. The lads talk about what Hamish will do in England, having a laugh picturing him in situations, but all I do is lie in the dark and see him working his way through England to Scotland, some old-fashioned image of him climbing across the land with a stick, finding some of Da’s family to settle down with, living on the farm I can’t remember any more, working the land like Da did. The thought helps me drift off to sleep, but no less worried, no less guilty, and feeling none of the superpowers I’d felt only moments earlier.

I get a warning from the guards for being a stupid kid in the wrong place at the wrong time, being influenced by my older brother. As a gesture I give the rich boy that Hamish beat up his Annie marble, much as it pains me to do it. But I win it back off him a few weeks later. That and the whole comic collection. Whenever I see those marbles they remind me of the night I became a man with Annie and the night that I went one way and Hamish went another. And sometimes when I really want to go the other way, Hamish’s way, when life is just begging me to do it, I take them out as a reminder and it quietens the voice.

I don’t see Hamish for a long time, and when I do, the sight of him is enough to tell me never to cross to the other side, ever. But seeing a dead body will do that to most people.