The Marble Collector: The life-affirming, gripping and emotional bestseller about a father’s secrets

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, and have 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.