The Twice-Lived Summer of Bluebell Jones Read online

  Then someone laughs. It must be Tiger. Or maybe someone from the bar?

  I scrabble for an unrelated-to-birthday-wishes excuse for me to be sitting in the dark in front of a candlelit cake with my eyes shut, but there aren’t any, and the laughing happens again, so I crack open one eye.

  It’s not Tiger.

  It’s me. Brave hair. Fabulous grin. As different from me as possible. But it’s undeniably me, another me, standing in the doorway with a daft excited look on my face.

  “Happy birthday, Blue!” says the other me.

  And she blows out my birthday candle.

  2. Red

  I run out of there so fast it doesn’t matter that I’m wearing Tiger’s shoes, or that under the planks of the pier is the sea, rumbling and hungry like those trolls under bridges in fairy stories.

  Not that thirteen-year-olds believe in fairy stories. Thirteen-year-olds don’t make birthday wishes and imagine they come true, either. I knew I shouldn’t have eaten all those chips at lunchtime. Miss Kitchener says you aren’t supposed to eat too many hydrogenated fats, and I bet they had loads. I’ve deep-fried my brain in poison, and this is the consequence.

  I feel sick. And beyond pathetic. This time I really am running away: past the locked-up gates of the silent fairground; past Penkerry Dairy ice-cream café, the chippy (urgh), the bright lights of the Lucky Penny arcade.

  By the time I’ve made it up the big hill to Penkerry Point Caravan Park, I’m soaked. I towel off, leaving behind slug-trails of mascara, and swap my stupid borrowed clingy skirt for pyjamas. I scoop my duvet off the top bunk, grabbing Milly the one-eyed mouse too. I expect proper thirteen-year-olds don’t take a cuddly toy with them on holiday to help them sleep, but me and Milly don’t care. We’re going to curl up and watch crap TV on the sofa, just us. Maybe eat some biscuits.

  “Oh yeah, you really know how to party,” says a voice from the sofa.

  Oh god. It’s her again. Me. Only . . . not.

  With a yelp, I throw the duvet at her and bolt for the bathroom, slamming the door. Then I run both taps and start brushing my teeth. And humming. Not for any particular reason. Definitely not because there’s a shouty figment of my imagination on the other side of the door.

  “Oi! Blue! You wished me here, you can’t just bugger off!” she yells through the plywood.

  She can’t be me. I’m not at all shouty.

  “Hellooooo? This is moderately freaky for me too, you know?”

  The figment of my imagination seems to want me to sympathize with it.

  “Blue? What are you doing in there? I hope you’re not trying to get those black bits off that sink, ’cos trust me: never going to happen.”

  There are black stains on the sink. Tiger dyed Dad’s hair this morning, after he had a panic attack about three curly white hairs interfering with his quiff. It dripped on the taps, and the shower curtain as well. We’re going to get in loads of trouble for that: there’s a sign in the caravan park office – £50 flat rate charge for damage to property.

  How can anyone else know there are black hair-dye stains on our sink?

  “Hello, Bluuuuu-e?”

  I shout “Stop calling me Blue!” through the door. “No one calls me Blue. It’s Bluebell. My name is Bluebell.”

  “You hate being called Bluebell!” the figment shouts. “And everyone calls you ‘Blue’ – or they will soon. It’s cute. It’s a nickname. Like everyone calls me ‘Red’.”

  I have to open the bathroom door then, because I’ve been wondering about that.

  My hair is mousey brown, with a fringe, the rest always neatly tied back.

  Hers is red. Very red. London bus, traffic light, warning sign red. Short, too: cropped close above one ear and longer over the other, with a chin-length swoop of smooth hair like a parakeet’s wing dangling over one eye. It’s the sort of haircut I’d never have.

  But that’s my freckly face beaming behind it. Those are my feet, in those biker boots. Those are my arms, sticking out of an artistically scruffified purple T-shirt with a yellow smiley face on it. My bum is in those denim cut-offs.

  “Yay!” she says. Out loud, like it’s a word.

  She can’t possibly be me.

  But I look in her eyes and behind the beam and the boots I can tell she’s a little bit nervous, a little bit out of place. She’s real. This is happening. I needed someone to rescue me, and here she is.

  “It worked,” I whisper. “I . . . I wished you here.”

  Red nods proudly. “Well, not just you all by yourself,” she adds. “I mean, one wish on its own doesn’t come true – otherwise when you were six you’d have blown out your birthday candles and Tiger would’ve turned into a talking pony called Pippi Clip-Clop, remember?”

  Whoa. I’ve never told anyone that.

  Red grins. “Don’t worry, I’m as repulsed by our six-year-old self as you are.”

  “So, if I couldn’t wish you here on my own. . .” I say slowly, trying to catch up. “That means you wished for it too? At the exact same time as me?”

  She slips her hands into her pockets and shakes the wing of hair out of her eyes, giving me a flash of silver earrings (two! In one ear!). A steady smile creeps across her mouth.

  “Yeah,” she says, half-word, half-laugh. “I guess we must have.”

  “So is it your birthday as well? Your. . .” I look her up and down. “Fourteenth birthday?”

  She looks down at herself, then at me.

  “Yeah,” she laughs again.

  “You’re from the future?”

  “Yeah!”

  I sit down on the closed lid of the toilet, hard. A tiny corner of my brain is thinking sensible, practical, this-is-scientifically-impossible thoughts. But the rest is froth made of questions. What’s it like in the future? When will I cut my hair and turn into you? Is Grace still my Best Friend Forever? Did you happen to write down this week’s lottery numbers somewhere handy? Will I. . .

  “Oh!” My voice is squeaky as I clap my hands to my lips. “Do I have a baby brother or a baby sister?”

  Red takes a breath, and opens her mouth to answer – but suddenly outside I hear someone singing “Girl, You’ll Be A Woman Soon” in a fake cowboy accent, and a lot of noisy shushing.

  Red’s mouth clamps shut.

  She jerks a thumb towards the noise. “Is that. . .?” she whispers.

  “Yes! Go! You’ve got to go!” I yelp, leaping out of the tiny bathroom towards the caravan’s front door.

  The key scrapes in the lock.

  “Go where?” says Red, looking round. “It’s a caravan! And that’s the only door!”

  “The bedroom!” I hiss, pushing the front door closed again as it begins to swing inwards. “Hide in the bedroom!”

  The caravan has two: one with a double bed for Mum and Dad next to the bathroom, and mine and Tiger’s narrow one alongside it, with bunk beds and a scratchy orange curtain instead of a door.

  “Oi, you weirdo!” shouts Tiger yawnily, hammering from outside. “Tired people getting rained on out here!”

  “Just a minute!”

  I glance over my shoulder. No sign of Red, just a flapping orange curtain.

  Phew.

  “Hi!” I say, pulling the door inwards, stepping back to let Mum, Dad and Tiger in, and casually resting an elbow on the wall so I’m blocking the corridor. “How are you? How is . . . everything?”

  “Er, we’re fine. You, I’m suddenly not so sure about,” says Tiger, giving me a stare as she hefts Dad’s guitar case on to the sofa.

  “Two encores, birthday girl!” says Dad, trying to give me a victory hug even though he’s soaking wet.

  “The second one was to a totally empty room, but then that’s never stopped him before,” says Mum, shaking drips off the tips of her hair. “You feeling all right, baby? W
e were worried when we couldn’t find you.”

  “Sorry. I’m fine.” I glance back at the orange curtain. “I mean, I felt a bit sicky, earlier, so I left. I should probably go and lie down. In the quiet. On my own.”

  “You crash out, petal,” Dad says. “I’ll bring you in some tea, settle your tum.”

  “No!” It comes out louder than I mean, and he raises an eyebrow. “Don’t bother. I’m going to go straight to sleep.”

  Tiger yawns, and tries to slide past me. I slap my palm flat against the sticky wood-effect vinyl on the wall, blocking her path.

  “Hey! I’m just going to change, so I don’t wake you up crashing around when I go to bed, OK?”

  She grabs my wrist and pushes, and I shuffle backwards along the narrow passage, still trying to block her, right up to the orange curtain.

  Tiger crinkles her perfect forehead and narrows her big blue eyes. “What did you do? Did you break something? Lose something? If you’ve spilled that grim bluebell perfume all over my bed. . .”

  I shake my head.

  “Well, what then?”

  I swallow, hard. Before I can find the right words, Tiger raises both eyebrows sky-high.

  “Have you got a boy in there?” she whispers, sounding both thunderstruck and utterly thrilled.

  Dad’s head snaps round. “What? What was that?” His head plonks on to Tiger’s shoulder, mouth cartoon-wide. “Really, has she got a boy in there?”

  They exchange gleeful grins.

  Honestly, with role models like these it is a miracle that I even exist.

  “No!” I hiss – and then Dad tickles my side so my arm drops, and Tiger ducks round me to swish the curtain open.

  I squeeze my eyes tight shut.

  “What’s he like?” shouts Mum from the sofa.

  “Skinny,” Dad shouts back.

  I open my eyes, half-expecting to find that a skinny boy has somehow decided to appear out of my imagination too.

  But there’s no boy.

  No Red, either.

  Tiger checks under the bed and in the narrow wardrobe and, well, there are no other hiding places because, like Red said, it’s a caravan.

  Except there is no Red.

  Of course there’s no Red. There’s just stupid old me: Bluebell Jones, who is so pathetically still a child that she’s made up an imaginary friend.

  Dad slips his hand under my fringe to feel for a temperature, and crinkles his brow seriously. “Yep, there’s no doubt. Skin, then some kind of bony structure, like a skull, and inside?” He raps my forehead. “The mysterious brain of a teenage girl.”

  I wish.

  I dream that Mum has the baby, and it is a literal peanut. She wheels it around in a pram, and takes it on funfair rides, as if it is a normal-sized normal-shaped baby with a face and arms and legs, and no one says a word.

  I like it. It’s quiet, and doesn’t take up space.

  I wake up with Milly the mouse’s worn ear pressed against my cheek, and a clanging twisting feeling, like I’ve done something bad. Forgotten-PE-kit bad. Argument-with-Grace, everyone-hates-me bad.

  Then I remember. It was my birthday yesterday, and I thought I saw another me. A grown-up, brilliant, teenage me.

  All in my head. Nothing’s changed at all. Why didn’t Grace tell me thirteen isn’t just a thing that happens to you overnight, without you having to do anything?

  Why didn’t I work it out myself? I’m brainy. I got As in Science and Maths and DT and Art and a B in English even though Miss Kitchener says I need to take a less literal attitude towards poetry. (I don’t, though. Poetry is stupid. If you think someone is nice you can just tell them they’re nice, you don’t have to go on and on about how their hair is like a tinkling stream and put “O!” at the beginning of all your sentences.)

  But I’m not just brainy. I know I’m not bright and shiny like Dad or Tiger or Mum, but I’m not terrible. I have interests. I have extra-curricular leisure pursuits. I like Pixar films and Parma Violets. I am gradually wallpapering the entire surface of my bedroom with perfectly tessellating photographs; one wall’s half done already, and, in patchwork, a corner of the slopey ceiling over my bed. I wake up every day to see the same two pictures: me and Grace poking out our tongues, and a close-up of Tiger’s left eye, huge like a wet pebble. When I grow up I would like to find a cure for peanut allergy, and take pictures for magazines.

  And there’s all the rest. I’m bigger on the inside. I worry about the future and exams and university fees and jobs and, you know, dolphins in tuna nets. And who I’ll be, and why. I’ve been the boring parts of a teenager for years already. I’ve just been waiting for my outsides to catch up, so everyone else can see it.

  But last night, it didn’t happen. And I don’t know how to fix it.

  I make a little moany noise of misery, then clamp Milly to my mouth. Tiger’s not normally visible to the human eye before ten; wake her any earlier and she’s all snarls.

  I roll over and hang my head off the bunk to check, wrinkling my nose at the flotsam of books and clothes she’s managed to spread over the tiny floor space already. It’s AS level results day in four weeks. From the number of books, I think she’s planning a few resits. I don’t need a ladder to get down from the top bunk; I could fashion my own out of Cliffs Notes and knickers.

  (All my stuff should be on the floor too. Thirteen-year-olds are messy. Why am I not suddenly uncharacteristically messy?)

  Tiger’s not there. I can see the covers have been slept in, but she’s gone. I look at my watch: half past seven. Maybe Penkerry makes everyone go peculiar.

  I toss and turn in the narrow bunk for a bit, but Dad’s snores keep thrumming through the cardboard wall. Eventually I give up on sleeping, flip over, and tug out the bag that’s wedged behind my pillow.

  My birthday presents. They don’t exactly cheer me up. Tiger got me Haribo, and a clockwork mouse for the Great Mouse Army that lives on my bookshelves at home. Mum and Dad got me a camera, like they promised. All mine, so I don’t have to keep begging to borrow Mum’s digital.

  This one’s called a Diana, and it’s new but made to look old: plasticky, junk-shoppy. It’s got a huge squarish flash that snaps on to the top, like an old cartoon. It even uses film, so there’s no screen to see the picture you just took – and the prints are supposed to come out ultra-bright and unreal, like The Wizard of Oz.

  Thirteen-year-old me should find that vintagey and hipster.

  I just wish they’d got me something they thought I might like.

  As for the rest of the pressie pile – from all the uncles, and Granny in Australia, even Grace – it follows the usual theme. Bluebell notelets. Bluebell soap. Perfume that smells like bluebells, with a plastic bluebell wedged in the bottle. Tiger never gets old-lady-smelling stuff for her birthdays. I don’t think they make stuff with tiger lilies on. Or tigers. Even if they did it would be all fierce and grr and Tigerish. I’d wear perfume if it smelled like tigers and had a plastic tiger in it.

  We’ve got a list of possible Peanut names pinned up on the fridge, brought from home. I should be a kind future big sister and swap out all the stupid flowery names for better present inspiration. Like “Money”, or “iPod”. “Giftcard” has a nice ring to it. Meet my baby brother/sister, Giftcard Jones. That way Peanut will never, ever have a birthday as rubbish as this one.

  There are scrunchy footsteps on the gravel outside, and a click at the door. A moment later, Tiger appears, flushed and sweaty. She’s wearing jog bottoms and too-white trainers, and there’s a twinkly smile in her eyes as she swishes through the orange curtain.

  “Morning!” she announces, then bites her lip, guiltily dropping her voice to a whisper. “You should get up, it’s gorgeous out there!”

  “Where have you been?” I whisper back.

  “For a run on the beach,” she sa
ys brightly.

  I don’t think I’ve even seen Tiger run for a bus.

  She tugs off her trainers, still laced up, and swishes back through the curtain. I hear the plasticky throb of water hitting the base of the shower, and her singing to herself through the wall.

  I bet the pretty nose-ringed elf girl goes for a morning run on the beach too. Tiger’s only just stopped sobbing herself to sleep over breaking up with Sasha the Cow (even though she was a cow), but Tiger goes through girlfriends like Dad does guitar strings. Looks like she’s back in the game.

  People always ask what it’s like, having a sister who goes out with girls. Like they think it’s catching.

  Seriously. Yesterday I was twelve. I’m sharing my bed with a cuddly mouse. I don’t think I even have a sexuality to be confused about yet.

  I suppose I should start worrying about that now, too.

  I stare at Milly’s single orange eye. It stares back, accusingly, as if even she thinks I should’ve outgrown her.

  I throw her on the floor in disgust.

  “Whoa, there! Don’t take it out on the mouse.”

  I scrunch my eyes up tight, but it’s not like I don’t recognize the voice.

  “Morning!” says Red. She’s standing there, right next to my bunk bed. Same smiley-face T-shirt and cut-off shorts. Same wicked grin. Same total-impossibleness.

  “Yes, I’m really here, no, you aren’t dreaming or mental, I really am you from the future, and please can we skip all this part because, hello, everyone hates that bit in a film where the hero is stupid and needs the whole plot explained to them even though it was all written on the back of the DVD.”

  I blink at her from behind a safe corner of my pillow. “Am I really seeing you? How did you get in? Where did you go last night?” My stomach does a backflip, and I wield the pillow between us like a shield, pressing myself against the wall, as far back as I can get. “Were you here all night and I just couldn’t see you? Or am I just, you know . . . insane and seeing things?”

  Red’s shoulders flop. “Seriously, we have to do all this?”