Guys Read_ Funny Business_ Artemis Begins - Eoin Colfer [1]
This went on for a few years, and Donal got a bit of a reputation as the neighborhood fixer. Kids came from blocks away to hear his wisdom. They came with bonbons in their wagons and left with favors, tricks, con jobs, and sob stories. But Donal’s pièce de résistance, the one that the kids still talk about in the school yard, was pulled off in our own house with our own baby brother.
It happened like this. Every parent has to have an interest to stop their children turning them into blubbering head cases who sit in corners sucking their thumbs and flipping through photos of times when they were happy. In my mother’s case this interest was amateur dramatics.
She was the Wexford Drama Group’s leading actress. She played everything from a Southern belle to a society heiress. And one year, for her portrayal of an eighteenth-century island girl, my mother brought home the award for All-Ireland Best Actress. This was a proud moment for the Colfer family.
We were shown the crystal plate engraved with my mother’s name; we were even allowed to run our fingers along the carved facets and watch the light refracted along its edges. Then the plate was placed in our display case and we were warned never to touch it again. A warning like this pretty much ensures that the plate would be touched often and inevitably broken by one of the brood.
My baby brother, Niall, was the unfortunate who was destined to become the breaker. It could have been any one of us, as we regularly took down the plate when my mother was occupied. We used it to do crayon rubbings; we rolled its edges through uncooked pastry. It made a very effective puck in table hockey, and of course if a person felt like balancing something on his forehead, the award plate was the perfect size.
It was the table hockey that was to be Niall’s downfall. As the youngest in the family, he was a little short for the table and had never actually won a game, and so he decided to get in a little solo practice. It was only when he had struck the plate a square whack and it was skittering toward the other end of the table that it dawned on his pea brain that if there was no one at the receiving end, then the plate would fly off and, presuming gravity didn’t suddenly fail, crash to the ground.
Gravity did not fail, and my mom’s All-Ireland Best Actress crystal plate fell to the tiled floor and smashed into a thousand rainbow pieces. Three pieces and he might have been able to jigsaw them back together and it could have been days before Mom noticed. But a thousand? His goose was cooked.
There was only one person to turn to. Niall rushed into the garden where Donal was burying our neighbor’s G.I. Joe so he could blackmail him for his pocket money later. I, in my role as budding writer, was observing and taking notes.
We knew Niall was in trouble when we saw him coming. He had not done his hair, and Niall always did his hair before venturing outside. He was very vain about his blond mop, still is. And there were twin streams of mucus streaming from his nose, which either meant that he had eaten pepper again or that he had been crying.
“Donal! Eoin!” he cried. “Help! Help!”
I waved my hand across my face, Obi-Wan style. “I am not here,” I said.
Niall was six, so this did not compute. “Huh?”
“I am not here,” I repeated, jiggling my head for effect.
Niall’s mucus glands went into panicked overdrive. “Eoin is dead!” he wailed at Donal. “And his ghost is sitting on the grass right there.”
“Eoin is being a writer,” said Donal, and Niall instantly calmed, as everybody knows that writers do stupid things all the time.
Niall’s calm evaporated when he remembered his own crisis. “I broke Mum’s award. She’ll be back in a minute.”
Mum was in the front garden chatting to our neighbor. Niall had mere moments before she stepped inside to find her beloved plate shattered.
“You broke the award,” said Donal, who did not seem too upset; in fact, he seemed delighted that someone else was in trouble for a change.
“Yes. I broke the award.”
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