The Worst Thing About My Sister Read online

  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 ridiculous 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.

  Pearl adores her wild sister. But will life at their new school tear them apart?

  MY SISTER JODIE

  Jodie. It was the first word I ever said. Most babies lisp Mumma or Dadda or Drinkie or Teddy. Maybe everyone names the thing they love best. I said Jodie, my sister. OK, I said Dodie because I couldn’t say my Js properly, but I knew what I meant.

  I said her name first every morning.

  ‘Jodie? Jodie! Wake up. Please wake up!’

  She was hopeless in the mornings. I always woke up early – six o’clock, sometimes even earlier. When I was little, I’d delve around my bed to find my three night-time teddies, and then take them for a dawn trek up and down my duvet. I put my knees up and they’d clamber up the mountain and then slide down. Then they’d burrow back to base camp and tuck into their pretend porridge for breakfast.

  I wasn’t allowed to eat anything so early. I wasn’t even allowed to get up. I was fine once I could read. Sometimes I got through a whole book before the alarm went off. Then I’d lie staring at the ceiling, making up my own stories. I’d wait as long as I could, and then I’d climb into Jodie’s bed and whisper her name, give her a little shake and start telling her the new story. They were always about two sisters. They went through an old wardrobe into a magic land, or they went to stage school and became famous actresses, or they went to a ball in beautiful long dresses and danced in glass slippers.

  It was always hard to get Jodie to wake up properly. It was as if she’d fallen down a long dark tunnel in the night. It took her ages to crawl back to the surface. But eventually she’d open one eye and her arm went round me automatically. I’d cuddle up and carry on telling her the story. I had to keep nudging her and saying, ‘You are still awake, aren’t you, Jodie?’

  ‘I’m wide awake,’ she mumbled, but I had to give her little prods to make sure.

  When she was awake, she’d sometimes take over the story. She’d tell me how the two sisters ruled over the magic land as twin queens, and they acted in their own daily television soap, and they danced with each other all evening at the ball until way past midnight.

  Jodie’s stories were always much better than mine. I begged her to write them down but she couldn’t be bothered.

  ‘You write them down for me,’ she said. ‘You’re the one that wants to be the writer.’

  I wanted to write my own stories and illustrate them too.

  ‘I can help you with the ideas,’ said Jodie. ‘You can do all the drawings and I’ll do the colouring in.’

  ‘So long as you do it carefully in the right colours,’ I said, because Jodie nearly always went over the lines, and sometimes she coloured faces green and hair blue just for the fun of it.

  ‘OK, Miss Picky,’ said Jodie. ‘I’ll help you out but that won’t be my real job. I’m going to be an actress. That’s what I really want to do. Imagine, standing there, all lit up, with everyone listening, hanging on your every word!’

  ‘Maybe one of my stories could be turned into a play and then you could have the star part.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ll be an overnight success and be offered mega millions to make movies and we’ll live together in a huge great mansion,’ said Jodie.

  ‘What does a mansion look like?’ I said. ‘Can it have towers? Can our room be right at the top of a tower?’