Double Act

by Wilson, Jacqueline

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Copyright

  About the Book

  No-one can ever be like a mother to us.

  NO-ONE. NO-ONE AT ALL.

  ESPECIALLY NOT STUPID FRIZZY DIZZY ROSE . . .

  Ruby and Garnet are ten-year-old twins. Identical! They do EVERYTHING together, especially since their mother died three years earlier. But can being a double act work for ever, when so much around them is changing?

  This ever-popular story now includes an extra-special new introduction by Jacqueline!

  For Anne, Derek, Thorne and Franca Dorothy

  WINNER OF THE SMARTIES PRIZE AND

  THE CHILDREN’S BOOK AWARD

  HIGHLY COMMENDED FOR THE

  CARNEGIE MEDAL

  I’m an only child. I always longed for a sister. I thought it would be particularly marvellous to have a twin sister. Then you need never feel lonely. You’d always have someone to play with, someone to share secrets, someone to walk to school with and whisper to at night.

  I’ve always been fascinated by identical twins. It must be so weird looking at another person exactly like yourself. Some twins invent their own language when they’re very little and get wrapped up in their own private twin-world. I wanted to write about this.

  I decided my twins would be particularly close because their mum had died. I like jewel names so I called their mother Opal. I thought she’d call her twin daughters jewel names too. Rubies are red and Garnets are red, often quite hard to tell apart. They seemed perfect names. Rubies are much more expensive than garnets. I thought my Ruby would particularly like that!

  Ruby was born twenty minutes before Garnet. She says that makes her the boss. She certainly bosses Garnet around! The twins look absolutely identical but they’ve got very different personalities. Ruby is very bouncy and funny and a terrible show off. She’s desperate to be an actress when she grows up. Garnet absolutely detests the idea of acting. She’s a very quiet shy girl, imaginative and hard working.

  I don’t think you’d be able to tell the twins apart at the beginning of the day – but you’d have more luck at the end. Both girls have fringes and long plaits. Garnet’s hair stays neat all day long, with carefully tied ribbons. Her shirt stays tucked in her skirt, her socks stay white, her shoes never get scuffed. Ruby can’t ever manage to stay neat and tidy. Her fringe sticks up and her plaits unravel and she loses her hair ribbons. Her shirt crumples, her skirt tears, her socks fall down and her shoes get covered in mud.

  They take turns writing an account of their lives in a big red book. I don’t always say who’s doing the talking but I think it’s pretty obvious. They’re meant to have done all the marvellous funny illustrations in the book too. Nick Sharratt has done all the Ruby drawings, Sue Heap has done all the Garnet drawings. It’s fun flicking though the book, seeing if you can tell the difference!

  Ruby and Garnet’s Dad starts up his own second-hand bookshop. My own house looks exactly like a bookshop. I’ve got about fifteen thousand books crammed all over the place. I’ve bought a lot of them from my favourite book shop in Hay-on-Wye, Addyman books. It’s run by my lovely friends Anne and Derek, so I decided to dedicate Double Act to the whole Addyman family.

  ONE

  WE’RE TWINS. I’M Ruby. She’s Garnet.

  We’re identical. There’s very few people who can tell us apart. Well, until we start talking. I tend to go on and on. Garnet is much quieter.

  That’s because I can’t get a word in edgeways.

  We are exactly the same height and weight. I eat a bit more than Garnet. I love sweets, and I like salty things too. I once ate thirteen packets of crisps in one day. All salt-and-vinegar flavour. I love lots of salt and vinegar on chips too. Chips are my special weakness. I go munch munch munch gulp and they’re gone. So then I have to snaffle some of Garnet’s. She doesn’t mind.

  Yes I do.

  I don’t get fatter because I charge around more. I hate sitting still. Garnet will hunch up over a book for hours, but I get the fidgets. We’re both quite good at running, Garnet and me. At our last sports day at school we beat everyone, even the boys. We came first. Well, I did, actually. Garnet came second. But that’s not surprising, seeing as I’m the eldest. We’re both ten. But I’m twenty minutes older. I was the bossy baby who pushed out first. Garnet came second.

  We live with our dad and our gran.

  Dad often can’t tell us apart in the morning at breakfast, but then his eyes aren’t always open properly. He just swallows black coffee as he shoves on his clothes and then dashes off for his train. Dad works in an office in London and he hates it. He’s always tired out when he gets home. But he can tell us apart by then. It’s easier in the evening. My plaits are generally coming undone and my T-shirt’s probably stained. Garnet stays as neat as a new pin.

  That’s what our gran says. Gran always used to have pins stuck all down the front of her cardi. We had to be very careful when we hugged her. Sometimes she even had pins sticking out of her mouth. That was when she did her dressmaking. She used to work in this posh Fashion House, pinning and tucking and sewing all day long. Then, after . . .

  Well, Gran had to look after us, you see, so she did dressmaking at home. For private customers. Mostly very large ladies who wanted posh frocks. Garnet and I always got the giggles when we peeped at them in their underwear.

  Gran made all our clothes too. That was awful. It was bad enough Gran being old-fashioned and making us have our hair in plaits. But our clothes made us a laughing stock at school, though some of the mums said we looked a picture.

  We had frilly frocks in summer and dinky pleated skirts in winter, and Gran knitted too – angora boleros that made us itch, and matching jumpers and cardis for the cold. Twinsets. And a right silly set of twins we looked too.

  But then Gran’s arthritis got worse. She’d always had funny fingers and a bad hip and a naughty knee. But soon she got so she’d screw up her face when she got up or sat down, and her fingers swelled sideways and she couldn’t make them work.

  She can’t do her dressmaking now. It’s a shame, because she did like doing it so much. But there’s one Amazing Advantage. We get to wear shop clothes now. And because Gran can’t really make it on the bus into town, we get to choose.

  Well. Ruby gets to choose.

  I choose for both of us. T-shirts. Leggings. Jeans. Matching ones, of course. We still want to look alike. We just want to look normal.

  Only I suppose we’re not really like the normal sort of family you read about in books. We read a lot of books. Dad is the worst. He keeps on and on buying them — not just new ones, but heaps of old dusty tomes from book fairs and auctions and Oxfam shops. We’ve run out of shelves. We’ve even run out of floor. We’ve got piles and piles of books in every room and you have to zig-zag around them carefully or you cause a bookquake. If you have ever been attacked by fifty or a hundred very hard hardbacks then you’ll know this is to be avoided at all costs. There are big boxes of books upstairs too that Dad hasn’t even properly sorted. Sometimes you have to climb right over them to get somewhere vital like the toilet.

  Gran keeps moaning that the floorboards won’t stand up to all that weight. They do tend to creak a bit. Dad gets fussed then and agrees it’s r
idiculous and sometimes when we’re a bit strapped for cash he loads a few boxes into our old car and takes them to a second-hand bookshop to sell. He does sell them too – but he nearly always comes back with another lot of bargains, books he couldn’t possibly resist.

  Then Gran has another fierce nag and Dad goes all shifty, but when he brings her a big carrier of blockbuster romances from a boot fair she softens up considerably. Gran likes to sit in her special chair with lots of plumped-up cushions at her back, her little legs propped up on her pouffe, a box of Cadbury’s Milk Tray wedged in beside her, and a juicy love story in her lap. They’re sometimes very rude, and when Garnet and I read over her shoulder she swats us away, saying we’ll find out something we shouldn’t. Ho ho. We found it all out ages ago.

  Dad reads great fat books too, but they’re not modern, they’re all classics – Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy. If we have a look at Dad’s book we wonder what the Dickens they’re on about and they seem very Hardy, but Dad likes them. He also likes boys’ adventure books – really old ones where the boys wear knickerbockers and talk like twits: ‘I say, old bean’, and ‘Truly spiffing’, and ‘Tophole’.

  Garnet likes old books too – stuff like Little Women and What Katy Did and all those E. Nesbit books. And she reads twin books too. Books like The Twins at St Clare’s. And all the Sweet Valley Twins. I read them too, because you can read them nice and quickly. But the books I like best are true stories about flashy famous people. Actors and actresses. I skip everything boring and just read the best bits when they’re on telly and making movies and all over the front of the newspapers, very flashy and very famous.

  We’re going to be famous too someday, you bet. So I’ve started writing our life-story already. It’s funny, Garnet is usually the one who writes stuff. Her writing’s neater than mine. So often I get her to do my schoolwork. She doesn’t mind.

  Yes I do.

  I was rifling through one of the boxes of books upstairs and right at the bottom there was this lovely fat red book. Ruby red, with a leather spine and one word picked out in gold lettering: ACCOUNTS.

  I thought it was the title but when I opened it up there were just all these blank pages.

  I asked Dad what had happened to the story and he said it wasn’t a proper book at all. Accounts are sums. You add up everything you’ve bought. That’s keeping accounts.

  ‘Only I don’t like keeping accounts. I just feel guilty seeing how much I’ve spent,’ said Dad. ‘You can have it to scribble in, twins.’

  So I’m scribbling away.

  I’m not.

  Yes you are. I keep letting you have a turn. And I’m not just writing about me, I’m writing about us. Giving an account of ourselves. Hey, Garnet, find a dictionary and look up the word ‘account’.

  Account: 1. A verbal or written report, description, or narration of some occurrence, event, etcetera.

  Yeah! That’s exactly what I’m doing. Writing an account of our lives.

  Everything’s a bit boring right this minute but maybe soon we’ll somehow get our big chance and we’ll achieve our lifetime’s ambition and be actresses.

  I don’t want to be an actress.

  Of course we want to be actresses. Honestly, Garnet, give over jogging me. (She can be a bit stupid and shy at times. She doesn’t think we’ll ever make it as flashy film stars, but I keep telling her all we need is CONFIDENCE. She keeps going on at me now, saying she doesn’t want to be a star. Well, that’s mad. She can’t mean it. Who on earth wouldn’t want to show off all day in front of the camera and go to posh parties every night with all the other stars?)

  We’ll live in our own flash flat with masses of flowers in every room and huge boxes of chocs to dip into whenever we fancy, and we’ll wear ruby-red sequin frocks and ruby jewellery to match – OK OK, Garnet, you can have garnets, only they’re not as precious and valuable and sparkly, are they?

  That’s not what you wanted to say? Well, what do you want to say then? All right. You write your bit now. Go on. Here you are. Get cracking. You write about you.

  I don’t know what to put.

  I’m not used to writing about me. It’s always us. I do like writing though. I was a bit annoyed when Ruby bagged this beautiful red book and started scribbling all that stuff. I thought we could maybe use it to write down our plays. We’ve always played these pretend games together right from when we were little. We pretend to be other people and make things up. It used to seem so real that it would get muddled into our ordinary life. It can still seem real for me, but Ruby often mucks about and won’t play properly. She doesn’t like going over and over a play, she just wants me to keep making up new ones for us. She doesn’t seem to realize it’s hard work. And if we keep starting on new plays then some of the best old plays get forgotten. I want to write them down properly to keep them safe.

  I like making up plays and I don’t mind acting them out when it’s just Ruby and me and we’re totally private and imagining it so it could almost be actually happening, but I can’t bear proper acting.

  Ruby and I were twin sheep in the nativity play when we were still in the Infants and it was one of the most truly awful experiences of my life.

  Not the most awful, of course.

  That was when

  Look, you’re not writing any of that sad stuff, I won’t let you. This is me again. Ruby. Garnet’s just gone off, all humpy because I happened to scratch her a tiny little bit when I snatched the pen. I asked her nicely first. And it’s my turn now. You have to be able to take turns fairly when you’re twins.

  That stuff she wrote is daft anyway. What’s the point of writing plays down in books? You should play plays. And she’s got to be an actress because that’s what we’ve always wanted to be, and while we’re still trying to get famous we can do adverts and game shows on the telly. Identical twins are a Mega-Novelty.

  Garnet can’t reject Fame just because of that one unfortunate experience being a sheep when we were little.

  She got so worked up and nervous when we had to perform that she wet herself. On stage. In front of everyone. But it didn’t really matter. I don’t know why she still gets all hot and bothered if I happen to bring it up. It was dead appropriate, actually, because that’s what real sheep do all the time. They don’t hang around the stable with their back legs crossed, holding it in. They go all over the place. Which is what Garnet did. And everyone thought it was ever so funny. Except Garnet.

  Got to go now. I can smell Sunday dinner. Yorkshire pud, yummy yummy yummy in my tummy.

  Ruby! You mean pig. You’ve put about me being the sheep!

  Look, you were the one who mentioned it first. You went on and on about it.

  Yes, but I didn’t say what happened. It was my most painful and humiliating secret. And now you’ve told, Ruby.

  I haven’t told. I’ve written. And this accounts book is secret. Just for us. We can write everything down in it. All our secrets.

  Yes, but you haven’t written down your secrets. You’ve written down mine.

  Oh, quit fussing. Let’s go and eat. I’m starving.

  Gran’s a bit cross because Dad’s ever so late back from his car-boot sale and she’s had the dinner turned down low for the last half-hour and her Yorkshire is going all sad and soggy.

  Like some silly twin. Come on, Gran’s calling.

  Dad should have been back ages ago. He is all right, isn’t he?

  Of course he is. You are an old worryguts, Garnet. He’ll have just bought up an entire bookstall, that’s all, and he’ll be having trouble stuffing them all into the car. You know what he’s like.

  Yes, but he’s not usually as late as this. And he likes Gran’s Sunday dinners as much as we do. What if he’s had an accident?

  Oh, Garnet, shut up. Coming, Gran.

  TWO

  WE HAVEN’T BEEN able to write a proper account because tons and tons of stuff has been happening. And now I suppose I should write it all out and yet I don’t know where
to start. You have a go, Garnet. Go on.

  I don’t want to go on. I want to stop. No. I want to go backwards. Back past the day Dad was late back from the boot fair. Back past the ordinary us twins and Dad and Granny day after day part. Back through the awful bit when Mum died and

  STOP IT STOP IT STOP IT

  No, Ruby. We can’t stop now. We’ve got to remember. And don’t you see? We’ve got to make Dad remember. And then he’ll stop seeing Rose.

  Ah. All right. But tell it quickly. The bit about Mum. Tell it as if it was a story and not real so that it won’t hurt so much.

  Once upon a time a man called Richard fell in love with a girl called Opal. Opals are beautiful stones that shine all different colours. But some say opals are unlucky. This girl Opal was beautiful and she shone and Richard knew he was lucky lucky lucky to have met her.

  Richard loved Opal. He sometimes mucked about and called her Oh Pal. Because he said she was his pal. And he gave her an opal ring.

  Where’s that ring? Remember how we used to be allowed to try it on? But I haven’t seen it for ages. Oh no. Oh Garnet, you don’t suppose Dad will give it to Rose?

  No! Of course not. Gran’s got it safe in her jewel box and she says we’ll get it when we’re grown up.

  Which one of us? It ought really to be me, seeing as I’m the eldest. But I’ll let you borrow it sometimes. If you’re careful.

  I’m the careful one. Look, you’ve interrupted my story now.

  Go on then. You got to the ring bit. Dad gave Mum the ring.

  Richard gave Opal a beautiful opal ring, milky-white but with all different pinks and blues and greens and purples, sparkling like magic whenever it caught the light.

  They got their own flat.

  They got married.

  They had twin daughters.

  Which is which? I’m that one, the baby with Mum.