Double Act Read online

  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