Double Act

‘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 ago.

And I’m Garnet. And just in case you haven’t guessed yet . . . We’re twins! Ruby wants us to write the account of our life, and though I wasn’t sure what to put at first, I like helping to tell our story.

See, you’re not so shy after all, Garnet! Our story has changed quite a lot since hippy-dippy Rose came on the scene. She’s Dad’s new girlfriend and she seems determined to change everything – Dad included. But one thing won’t ever change – Rose will never replace our mum. Rose and Dad can try to tell us to behave but we’re the stars of this show, and we’re always going to be Double Trouble.

Jacqueline Wilson is one of Britain’s bestselling authors, with more than 38 million books sold in the UK alone. 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. 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.

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.

Ruby writes to the headmistress of
Marnock Heights School – can you
remember her name?

Answers:

salt and vinegar, Opal, the Red Bookshop, a flea, Twins at St Clare’s, Miss Jeffreys, Brian, Jamilla

RUBY AND GARNET’S
GINGERBREAD TWINS

People have been baking gingerbread for more than a thousand years, and some people believe that Queen Elizabeth I served gingerbread men to important guests in the sixteenth century! You might want to ask an adult to help you to bake your very own identical gingerbread twins – they’re perfect for a delicious snack or tasty homemade present.

For your gingerbread twins:

• 350g plain flour, plus a bit extra for dusting

• 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda

• 2 tsp ground ginger

• 1 tsp ground cinnamon

• 125g butter

• 175g brown sugar

• 1 large egg

• 4 tbsp golden syrup

For the decorations:

• Icing in whatever colours you like!

What to do:

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C.

2. Line two baking trays with greaseproof paper.

3. Mix the flour, bicarbonate of soda, ginger, cinnamon and butter, and whizz in a food processor until you have a mixture that looks like breadcrumbs.

4. Stir in the sugar.

5. Beat the egg and golden syrup together and add to the food processor. Whizz again until the mixture clumps together.

6. Tip the dough out onto a clean surface. Knead until smooth, wrap in clingfilm and leave to chill in the fridge for 15 minutes.

7. Roll the dough out on a surface lightly dusted with flour, so that it’s about half a centimetre thick. Using cutters, cut out the gingerbread twin shapes and place carefully on the baking tray, leaving a gap between them.

8. Bake for 12–15 minutes, or until lightly golden-brown. Leave on the tray for 10 minutes and then move to a wire rack to finish cooling.

9. When cooled, put your little figures into pairs, and decorate with the icing. You could make each set of twins identical – or, like Ruby and Garnet, you might want to make one a bit more untidy than her sister . . .

VISIT THE WEBSITE!

There’s a whole Jacqueline Wilson town to explore! You can generate your own special username, customise your online bedroom, test your knowledge of Jacqueline’s books with fun quizzes and puzzles, and upload book reviews. There’s lots of fun stuff to discover, including competitions, book trailers, and Jacqueline’s scrapbook. And if you love writing, visit the special storytelling area!

Plus, you can hear the latest news from Jacqueline in her monthly diary, find out whether she’s doing events near you, read her fan-mail replies, and chat to other fans on the message boards!

www.jacquelinewilson.co.uk

For Anne, Derek, Thorne and Franca Dorothy

RHCP Digital

RHCP Digital Imprint is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

www.penguin.co.uk
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First published by Doubleday, 1995
This ebook updated 2015

The moral right of the author and illustrator has been asserted

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978–1–407–04880–2

All correspondence to:
RHCP Digital
Penguin Random House Children’s
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL

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 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