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. Fucking. 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.
‘Fuck,’ 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 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.