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?’
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‘All the rooms are our rooms, but we’ll share a very special room right at the top of a tower, only I’m not going to let you grow your hair any longer.’ She pulled one of my plaits. ‘I don’t want you tossing it out of the window and letting any wicked old witches climb up it.’ Jodie nudged me. She had started to have a lot of arguments with our mother. She often called her a witch – or worse – but only under her breath.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll keep my plaits safely tied up. No access for wicked witches,’ I said, giggling, though I felt a bit mean to Mum.
‘What about handsome princes?’
‘Definitely not,’ I said. ‘It’ll be just you and me in Mansion Towers, living happily ever after.’
It was just our silly early-morning game, though I took it more seriously than Jodie. I drew our imaginary mansion, often slicing it open like a doll’s house so I could illustrate every room. I gave us a huge black velvet sofa with two big black toy pumas lolling at either end. We had two real black cats for luck lapping from little bowls in the kitchen, two poodles curled up together in their dog basket, while twin black ponies grazed in a paddock beside our rose garden. I coloured each rose carefully and separately, deep red, salmon, peach, very pale pink, apricot and yellow. I even tried to do every blade of grass individually but had to see sense after dabbing delicately for half an hour, my hand aching.
I gave us a four-poster bed with red velvet curtains and a ruby chandelier, and one wall was a vast television screen. We had a turquoise swimming pool in the basement (with our twin pet dolphins) and a roof garden between the towers where skylarks and bluebirds skimmed the blossom trees.
I printed the title of each of our books in the library in weeny writing and drew every item of food on our kitchen shelves. I gave us a playroom with a trampoline and a trapeze and a jukebox, and one of those machines you get at the seaside where you have to manoeuvre a crane to pick up little furry teddies. I drew tiny teddies every colour of the rainbow, and I had a shelf of big teddies in our bedroom, and a shelf of old-fashioned dolls with real hair and glass eyes, and a splendid rocking horse big enough for both of us to ride on.
I talked about it to Jodie as if we’d really live there one day. Sometimes I imagined it so vividly it seemed like a real place. I just had to work out which road to take out of town and then I’d round a corner and spot the towers. I’d run fast, through the elaborate wrought-iron gates, up to the front door with the big lion’s-head knocker. I’d know how to press the lion’s snout with my finger and the door would spring open and I’d step inside and Jodie would be there waiting for me.
I wasn’t stupid, I knew it wasn’t really real, but it felt as if it might be all the same.
Then one morning at breakfast everything changed. I was sitting at the kitchen table nibbling at a honey sandwich. I liked opening the sandwich up and licking the honey, letting it ooze over my tongue, but I did it quickly and furtively when Mum wasn’t looking. She was very strict about table manners. She was forever nagging Jodie about sitting up straight and spooning her cornflakes up quietly without clanking the spoon against the bowl. Jodie slumped further into an S shape and clanked until she nearly cracked the china. Mum took hold of her by the shoulders and gave her a good shaking.
‘Stop winding me up, you contrary little whatsit,’ she said, going shake shake shake.
Jodie’s head rocked backwards and forwards on her stiff shoulders.
‘You’re hurting her!’ said Dad, putting down his Daily Express and looking anxious.
‘She’s not hurting me,’ Jodie gasped, waggling her head herself, and then she started da-da-da-ing part of that weird old ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ song when everyone bangs their heads to the music.
‘Stop that silly row! I suppose you think you’re funny,’ said Mum.
But Dad was laughing and shaking his own head. ‘You’re a right head-case, our Jodie,’ he said.
‘Trust you to encourage her, Joe,’ said Mum. ‘Why do you always have to take Jodie’s side?’
‘Because I’m my daddy’s girl,’ said Jodie, batting her eyelashes at Dad.
She was too. She was always in trouble now, bunking off school and staying out late. Mum could shake her head until it snapped right off her shoulders but she couldn’t control her. But Dad could still sometimes make her hang her head and cry because she’d worried them so.
He’d never say a bad word against Jodie.
‘It’s not her fault. OK, she’s always been a bit headstrong, but she’s basically been a good little kid. She’s just got in with the wrong crowd now, that’s all. She’s no worse than any of her mates at school,’ he said.
‘Quite!’ said Mum. ‘Moorcroft’s a rubbish school. The kids aren’t taught properly at all. They just run wild. Half of them are in trouble with the police. It was the biggest mistake in the world letting our Jodie go there. She’s heading for trouble in a big way. Just look at her!’
I thought Jodie looked wonderful. She used to have pale mousy hair in meek little plaits but now she’d dyed her hair a dark orangy-red with streaky gold bits. She wore it in a funny spiky ponytail with a fringe she’d cut herself. Dad said she looked like a pot of marmalade – he’d spread her on toast if she didn’t watch out. Mum said Jodie had ruined her hair and now she looked tough and tarty. Jodie was thrilled. She wanted to look tough and tarty.
Then there were her ears. Jodie had been begging Mum to let her have her ears pierced. Mum always said no, so last year Jodie went off and got her ears pierced herself. She kept going back, so there are five extra little rings up one ear.
‘You’ve got more perforations than a blooming colander,’ said Dad.
Mum was outraged at each and every new piercing.
‘Hey, hey, they’re only pretty little earrings,’ said Dad. ‘It’s not as if she’s got a nose-stud or a tattoo.’
‘Yet!’ Jodie whispered to me.
She’d tried going to a tattoo parlour but they said she was too young. She inked butterflies and bluebirds and daisy chains up and down her arms and legs with my felt pens instead. She looked incredible in her underwear with her red-gold hair and her earrings and her fake tattoos – but her clothes were mostly as dull and little-girly as mine. Jodie didn’t have enough money to buy much herself. Mum was in charge when it came to clothes-buying. Dad didn’t dare slip Jodie some money any more. She’d told him this story about her clunky school shoes rubbing her toes sore, so he gave her forty pounds for some new ones. She bought her first pair of proper high heels, fantastic flashy sparkly red shoes, and clacked happily round the house in them, deaf to Mum’s fury. She let me try them out. They were so high I immediately fell over, twisting my ankle, but I didn’t care. I felt like Dorothy wearing her ruby slippers in The Wizard of Oz.
Jodie was wearing the clunky school shoes this morning, and the grey Moorcroft uniform. She’d done her best to customize it, hitching up the skirt as high as she could, and she’d pinned funny badges on her blazer. She’d inked little cartoon characters all over her school tie. Mum started on a new nag about the tie, but she interrupted herself when she heard the letterbox bang.
‘Post, Pearl. Go and get it, pet.’
I’m Pearl. When I was born, Mum called me her precious little pearl and the name stuck. I was born prematurely and had to stay tucked up in an incubator for more than a month. I only weighed a kilo and was still so little when they were allowed to bring me home that Dad could cradle me in one of his hands. They were very worried about Jodie’s reaction to me. She was a harem-scarem little girl who always twisted off her dolls’ heads and kicked her teddies – but she was incredibly careful with me. She held me very gently and kissed my little wrinkled forehead and stroked my fluffy hair and said I was the best little sister in the whole world.
Sisters appear in Jacky’s books all the time! Here’s a fun quiz to test your knowledge.
1. In Clean Break, what is Em’s little sister called?
2. Who threatens to name her ne
w baby stepsister Ethel?
3. Name all the Diamond Girls.
4. Who is Pippa and Hank’s joke-telling big sister?
5. What school do sisters Pearl and Jodie go to?
6. Which famous twins do Ruby and Garnet audition to play in Double Act?
7. In Lily Alone, Baxter has three sisters – name them all!
8. Name the sisters whose unusual mum is called Marigold.
9. Who has a very difficult brother named Will?
10. In Little Darlings, what’s the name of Destiny’s secret sister?
Answers
1. Vita
2. Andy
3. Dixie, Rochelle, Jude and Martine
4. Elsa
5. Melchester College
6. The Twins at St Clare’s
7. Lily, Bliss and Pixie
8. Dolphin and Star
9. Violet
10. Sunset
About the Author
JACQUELINE WILSON is one of Britain’s bestselling authors, with 30 million books sold in the UK. She has been honoured with many prizes for her work, including the Guardian Children’s Fiction Award and the Children’s Book of the Year. She is the author most often borrowed from libraries over the last decade. Jacqueline is a former Children’s Laureate, a professor of children’s literature and in 2008 she was appointed a Dame for services to children’s literacy.
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