Eoin Colfer - Screwed

While I have the phone in my hand I check for missed calls and see there are six from Mike and three from Zeb.

Screw those guys.

My malicious side half hopes that Mike takes Zeb hostage to hurry me along. A little light torture would not go astray on that guy. Nothing life threatening, but as far as I know Zeb rarely uses all of his toes.

My Twitter icon is chirping, telling me that there is a Tweet from my psychiatrist, who is doing online wisdom now, which he assures me was inevitable, so he might as well be in the vanguard. I have never actually Tweeted, but I do follow Dr. Simon and Craig Ferguson, who is one funny Celtic fecker.

There is something compulsive about Tweets, so I read Simon’s latest:

Remember, my phobic posse: it’s always darkest before the dawn unless there’s an eclipse.

I wonder who that’s supposed to comfort.

I swipe back to Sofia’s brief final message and just the sight of that simple emoticon makes me feel a couple of degrees warmer.

Sofia. Could there be a chance for us?

Shit. I’m gonna be writing poetry soon.

My proximity sense tingles and I know someone is standing before me. I know without looking that it’s a woman. My subconscious throws up the clues: perfume, footsteps leading up to this moment, the sound of her breathing. A woman, but not Mary.

So, I look up and there’s a rich lady not three feet away, staring at me like she’s seen her maid in Tiffany’s. This gal is maybe forty but with ten years of that slate wiped clean by spas and exercise. She’s got burnished blonde hair framing her striking face, which is horsey in a good way, and a gym body being hugged very nicely by a red velour sweat suit that I just bet has something provocative writ large on the ass. I can tell this lady is rich by the glitter-ball diamond on her finger and the fact that a cluster of waiters is bobbing six feet away, worried that something might happen to her.

I have no idea what this is but I do not have time for it.

I go for pre-emptive dismissal.

“Lady,” I say. “Whatever you think—”

She cuts me off. “Mr. McEvoy? Daniel McEvoy?”

This is a surprise. Rich folk do not generally recognize me, since I let my country-club membership lapse when Enron went under.

“Who’s asking?” I ask, seeing as we’re in a noir movie.

Uninvited, the lady pulls up a chair and sits opposite.

“Daniel,” she says. “I think that I may be your grandmother.”

We must be watching different movies.

Mary pours more coffee and reinforces her earlier hip-bump with a high-beam cleavage flash because, as a professional, she knows that statistically even the presence of another female will drop my tip by 5 percent.

Get a grip, soldier. The girl is pouring coffee and you’re forty-three years old.

I can’t help it. I read layers of meaning into the actions of everyone around me. I guess it’s because sometimes it seems as though everyone around me has bad intentions toward my person. And as my shrink Simon once told me: being paranoid never got anyone killed, not being paranoid on the other hand . . .

The glam gran has slid onto a chair opposite me and is busy muting her phone so we don’t get interrupted. She orders a grapefruit juice from Mary without even glancing at my lovely server, then eases herself into the story.

“I go to the gym here. It’s really good. And I have a trainer who comes to my house. Pablo is fantastic. I’m more flexible now than I was at twenty.”

I don’t comment; effective as Pablo’s techniques may be, this is all preamble.

“You look good too, Daniel. Solid. Are you married? Do you have kids?”

I shake my head once to cover both questions.

“Me neither,” she says. “Not really. Anymore.”

Three short sentences. All loaded.

“I’m really sorry . . . eh . . . Nana, but I’m under a bit of pressure today.”

She slaps her own cheek gently, dislodging a tiny puff of foundation, which I would have sworn she was not wearing.

“Oh my God. Where are my manners?” she offers her hand for a shake, at a weird sideways angle, like royalty. “I’m Edit Vikander Costello.”

She pronounces Edit to rhyme with Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.”

I shake the hand. To be honest it’s less of a shake and more of an undulation, but I feel strength in the soft dry skin.

“Costello?” I say. “So you married old Paddy?”

“Wife number four,” she says. “The first to outlive him.”

This was something of a feat. Paddy Costello had always seemed to be carved from granite.

“So, you’re not my blood grandmother?”

“No. I’m the later model. Version Four point oh.”

“And how would you know about me, Edit? How could you possibly recognize me?”

“I’ve been looking for you, Daniel. For six months I’ve had Irish detectives on your trail. And you turn up here, two blocks from my apartment on Central Park South.”

“Why are you looking for me? Did old Paddy leave me a whack?”

Edit was embarrassed and refolded her napkin. “No. You were disinherited, along with your mother. I’m looking for you because Evelyn is missing and she’s the only family I have left.”

Evelyn Costello. Just hearing the name shoots me back to nineteen seventies Dublin. My mother’s baby sister, the girl who defied her own father to cross the Atlantic and visit with us. The girl who told my dad she would skewer his sausage with an icepick if he ever accidentally wandered into the wrong room again.

That was so cool. We didn’t even have an icepick. No one I knew did.

Evelyn Costello. My first hero. I saved every penny for weeks just to make sure we did have an icepick if she visited again.

My Aunt Evelyn, who used to bring me to the swimming pool except for that time when she couldn’t for some mysterious lady-reason that I didn’t understand at the time and don’t know a whole lot about now.

“Evelyn’s missing?”

Edit began folding my napkin. “Yes. She had addiction issues, like her mother. We put her in Betty Ford the last time she relapsed, but you know Evelyn, don’t fence me in, right? She checked out and we haven’t seen her in over two years. She missed her father’s funeral.”

If Edit is expecting my Aw face, she doesn’t get it. I don’t hold fathers in the same esteem as 1960s sitcoms. One hundred percent of my father figures were drunken, abusive devils who walked the earth.

Edit realizes my heartstrings have not been plucked.

“Sure, they had their differences, but Ev loved her father, and Patrick loved her. It’s a tragedy that she may not even know he’s dead.”

She knows, unless she’s been living under a rock, and even then, most rocks these days have network. When Paddy Costello’s heart finally shattered in his chest under the sledgehammer blow of massive coronary, all the major studios had a video obituary ready to air. Big Paddy Costello: the last magnate. The man who built America, or some such shit.

My grandfather.

We know all about empire builders in Ireland. I saw a couple in the army too. I figure if a man is serious about putting together a major hunk of kingdom, then he’s gotta keep a laser focus on that prize his whole life and burn anything that might distract him. His competitors for example. His family for example.

“I thought she might contact you, Daniel. You guys were close, right? She talked about you.”

It’s true. We were close, even though she only stayed with us maybe a dozen times. Evelyn always had spirit. When I was fourteen and she was sixteen, Evelyn came home from a grabby date one night and gave me a stern lecture on the proper way to handle a girl’s boobs. A boy never forgets something like that. Never ever.