The Marble Collector

10

I see Hamish again when I’m nineteen years old. It’s the last thing I would have expected: to get on a plane and leave Ireland for the first time in my adult life, since arriving on a boat when I was five, for this reason.

Ma receives a visit from a garda, who received a phone call from the Irish embassy to say that Fergus Boggs has been found dead in London, and that somebody needs to go and identify the body.

‘London? But Fergus is here!’

Ma shouts and yells the house down, everybody runs to her, everybody that doesn’t run to her runs looking for me. I’m sitting in the pub having a pint and playing Bounce About when I should be at work in Mattie’s butcher shop with the other lads. I’ve just started and they have me doing the worst jobs, like washing away guts, which when hungover on the first week sent me racing to the toilet to vomit. It doesn’t make me queasy now, just bored, and I find a few pints at lunchtime gets me through it in the afternoons. I’m more interested in the kind of meat that Mattie’s buying, I’d like to get into that side of things, sourcing better kinds of meat, it’s something I want to talk to him about, but I know he won’t listen until I do at least a year of stinking, stenching time in the back.

Angus finds me at the pub and grabs me, tells me to say nothing, he doesn’t want to hear it, and drags me down the road to the house. I think I’m in trouble for stepping out of the shop for a pint when I should have been having a sandwich in the backyard. Duncan meets us at the front door, which is wide open. Mammy is holding court in the living room, surrounded by worried women, tea and scones. Three-year-old Joe is on her knee, bouncing up and down, big eyes worried and scared by Ma’s hysterics. Everyone parts for me like I’m the prodigy child she’s always wished for. She looks at me coming towards her like I’m an angel, with so much tenderness and love, I’m shitting myself and don’t know what the fuck is going on.

She puts Joe down and stands up. He clings to her leg. Ma reaches out to my face, her hands hot from the gallons of tea, her skin rough from a lifetime of cleaning and scorching. Her face is softer than I’ve ever seen it, her eyes piercing blue. I suppose I’ve seen it when she looks at her babies, when I caught her when I was younger when she didn’t know anyone was looking as she breastfed, as her eyes and the baby’s connected to each other like they were having a silent conversation. I just never remember her looking at me like this.

‘My son,’ she says tenderly, flooded with relief. ‘You’re alive.’

Which brings a sudden snigger out of me because I have no idea where this is coming from, all I know is I was dragged out of the pub for this nonsensical drama. Mrs Lynch tuts and I want to deck her because this spurs Ma on.

Ma’s look of serenity fades and she slaps me hard across the face. I mustn’t look sorry enough because she does it again.

‘Okay, Ma,’ Angus says, pulling me away. ‘He didn’t know. He didn’t know.’

‘I didn’t know what?’

‘A garda called by-’

Ma is helped to her seat, the grieving queen bee.

‘He said that Fergus Boggs was found dead. In London,’ Angus says. He slaps me hard on the shoulder, squeezes me, ‘But you’re not dead, you’re grand. Aren’t ya?’

I can’t reply, my heart is hammering. I know it then, I just know it. Hamish. No one else would have picked my name and he wouldn’t have picked anybody else’s name either. It was always me. Me and him. Him and me. Even if we didn’t know it at the time, I know it the moment I think he’s dead, feel his loss now more than when he upped and left.

‘Lighten up, everybody, will you?’ Duncan says and the women relax, get the joke, suddenly see the funny side in what has happened.

But Ma doesn’t laugh. And I don’t laugh. Our eyes meet. We both know.

I fly over on my first flight. Windy conditions and we bounce about the place, my mind completely off Hamish as I hang on for dear life and think about what a strange fate it would be, me dying going over to see if a fella who called himself me is dead.

Mrs Smith’s son Seamus is living in London and it’s been arranged that I can stay with him for a few nights. I don’t know what Seamus told his ma about his new life but I don’t imagine it’s this. Sharing one damp Victorian room with six other lads isn’t my idea of making it big in London, so I stay out as late as I can on the first night to avoid having to sleep on that floor. I avoid the Irish bar they all tell me to go to in case I’m forced to join up, and instead, after asking around in an English accent, I find a place called the Bricklayer’s Arms that advertises marble games. But first I walk the streets for hours knowing that every minute that passes is a minute closer to seeing Hamish, and sometimes I want the time to slow down, and other times speed up.

I strike up a game of marbles with some locals, just a game of Bounce About, like I’d been doing earlier, as if I was picking up where I left off. I can’t believe it’s the same day and I’m in a different country waiting to identify the body of someone claiming to be me, feeling like a different person.

The game is for two to four players but three of us play until the third guy vomits on himself and then falls asleep in the corner with his own piss leaking down his leg. It’s just me and a fella named George then, who calls me Paddy like he doesn’t know it’s an insult. It’s okay because I beat him hands down. It doesn’t involve huge skill – you throw marbles, not shoot them. The medium-sized marbles are called bouncers; the first player throws his forward, the second player tries to hit it, and so on. It’s about as much as he can handle, he’s had so much to drink. If a bouncer is hit, the owner pays the thrower one marble, but you can’t take the bouncer, which is a problem because George’s bouncer is the only marble I’m interested in. Bouncers get away with murder that way.

It’s a Czechoslovakian bullet-mould marble, it has a frosty finish to it. George tells me something about an acid bath. I ask him if I can buy it and he says no, but he gives it to me instead. I’ve told him about why I’m here and who I think I’m going to see and he feels sorry for me, says he had to view a body once that had been chopped up into bits and I wonder if it was an official identification at all, or something to do with his lifestyle. I even wonder if he was the one who had to chop it up into bits. His story doesn’t scare me off, though, oddly, the gift of the marble does make me feel a little better. I pocket the bullet and after getting lost for almost two hours, fall into Seamus Smith’s shithole bedsit at four a.m., stepping over bodies to reach my space, one guy going at himself till all hours thinking nobody can hear him.

Four hours later I’m at the morgue looking at Hamish’s dead naked body on a slab. The coroner just shows me his face but I pull the sheet down more. Hamish has a birthmark on his belly button shaped like Australia; nothing really like Australia, but then that would have ruined the joke. ‘Want to see down under?’ I hear Hamish say to the girls, so clearly, like his lips could have moved. I smile, remembering him, everything good about him and the coroner looks at me, angry, like I’m smiling because I’m glad he’s dead.

‘I was just thinking of something funny he used to say,’ I explain.

Then he looks at me like he doesn’t care, he’s just here for the scientific part, not the emotional bit.

I feel the Czech bullet-mould in my pocket.

‘Was he shot?’ I ask. I always thought if Hamish was going to go before old age, that’s what he’d prefer. Like a cowboy, he loved those films.

‘No. Do you see a bullet hole?’ he asks, like he’s defending himself, like I’m accusing him of missing the evidence.

‘No.’

‘Well then.’

‘What happened to him?’

‘The police will tell you.’ He covers Hamish’s face again. I haven’t seen Hamish for four years but I’ll never know how much he changed in that time because he was so bloated and bruised I could barely recognise him. I know it’s him all right, but I couldn’t begin to tell what he looked like as an older Hamish. They think he’d been in the water for two days, probably more, because his body floated to the surface, and decomposition had begun. The police officer that I talk to afterwards says something about the skin on his foot falling off like a sock, but that’s when I tune out. The part I remember more than anything else is that nobody had reported him missing.

Fergus Boggs was drunk. He had drunk far too much when he bothered the two bouncers of Orbit nightclub on Saturday night. When they turned him away they say he got aggressive. I have no reason not to believe them, it sounds like any of the Boggs boys so far, even little Joe has a meltdown when you tell him no, lying on his stomach and kicking his shoes off regardless where we are. As the youngest, Ma rarely tells him no. One bouncer got so frustrated with Fergus that he told him he’d let him in the side door so the boss wouldn’t see him get in so drunk, and without paying. Instead he took him to the dark alley and beat the lights out of him. With a broken nose and a broken rib, Fergus Boggs stumbled along until he tripped, fell into a river and drowned. He was twenty-five.

Seamus Smith is waiting for me when I come out of the morgue. He’s smoking a cigarette and looking shifty, his hands shoved into tiny pockets in a leather jacket.

‘Is it him?’ he asks.

‘Yeah.’

‘Fuck.’

He takes out a packet of cigarettes and hands me one. I appreciate him bringing me to the pub from there because I don’t remember anything from the cigarette onwards. The next day me and Hamish get the boat together for the second time as I bring him home.

The police officer wasn’t pressing charges against the bouncer who ‘bounced him about a little’ because the police agreed Fergus was being a nuisance and the bouncer didn’t mean to kill him, it was Fergus’s inebriation that led to his drowning. Bouncers get away with murder that way.