The Twice-Lived Summer of Bluebell Jones (2 page)

And the next. I can watch the band much better from the shadows, in the corner. And my shoes really are too big.

The men at the bar are all talking over the music, moaning about rain and beer in plastic cups. I ignore them and watch, taking imaginary photographs: the pretty elf girl with a nose ring and lots of silver bangles, joining Tiger on the dance floor, matching her moves; a huddle of people about my age, hanging around at the coat-check.

There's a Chinese girl wearing purple lace-up boots, a chubby guy in what looks like a pirate outfit, and a tall, skinny, eyelinered boy wearing a top hat with a dead red rose tucked into the brim. He's trying to look bored, but the girl with the lace-up boots is totally into the gig, singing along with a huge grin on her face, and she knows all the words.

I want to go over there. It's like I'm
supposed
to go over there: as if they're waiting for me.

It'll be easy.

I could ask her if her parents are weirdly obsessed with the 1950s too.

I could ask about the pirate outfit.

I could ask Top Hat Boy why he's wearing a top hat, or where the rose came from: confident, a little bit flirty; like Monique, like Grace.

I could just say, “Hi, my name's Bluebell, it's my birthday today.”

But there's a lull between songs, and I hear
fairground
and
accident
from the voices at the bar.

Should close the whole bloody place down
.

Nah, was the kid's own fault.

Me, I blame the parents, letting her on that thing in the first place.

A howl of feedback pours from the speakers, piercing like a scream. I stick my fingers in my ears. I clamp my eyes shut. The high-pitched whine drops out, and Joanie and the Whales kick into “Great Balls of Fire”, the piano and the bass line rumbling through the floorboards – but I feel like I've been turned upside-down. It's as if I'm dangling high above, waiting to fall in the middle of the dance floor, splat.

That's when it hits me. This is what thirteen means: danger, change, the world turned upside-down. And it's scary, because I'm not a butterfly yet. I'm still a caterpillar girl, not big enough to ride the roller coaster.

Not ready to be thirteen at all.

No. That can't be right. There are rules; there have to be, even about birthdays.

I start to run – out of the Pavilion, back along the wet boards, into the safe warm shadows of backstage – not because I'm running away from anything; definitely not that. I need some air, some fresh air and to check my make-up (that's what teenage girls do, they do that loads, this is fine). Then I'm going straight back, and the butterfly will shoot right out of me. Somehow. Definitely.

My squashed white and blue cake is there on the dressing table.

HA PU BIRT LAY BLUBL, it says, sadly. Mum said we'd get a new one tomorrow, one that looks less like mashed potato, but she's already pushed in one skinny blue candle for me to blow out later.

There's a matchbox on the table, waiting.

It goes quiet onstage as I sink into a chair, wiping raindrops off my face. Then Dad's muffled crooning floats through the wall.

Every day, it's-a getting closer

Going faster than a roller coaster

I tap out the handclap-rhythm on the edge of the table, automatically. I've heard him sing this a thousand times. A cutesy little love song, sweet like sugar icing.

I look again at the candle, and the matchbox, and once the idea pops into my head I can't escape it. It's ridiculous. All I want is to be grown up, a real teenage girl, like Tiger, like Grace. But I don't feel thirteen yet, so why shouldn't I grab my chance to act like a little girl, one last time?

I fetch a big glass of water, because we've done the fire triangle at school and even wishes ought to be made in an appropriately safety-conscious environment. I fumble one match from the box and strike it (away from me, obviously). The shadow of my hand lunges huge and craggy, like a monster's, across the wall as I light the skinny candle. I stare into the flame, listening to Mum's drumbeats tapping. I shut my eyes tight, and whisper it:

I wish. . .

I have to get the words right.

I wish. . .

I think of the girl on the roller coaster; the girl who was saved.

I wish someone would rescue me
.

There's a sighing sound, and my fringe ruffles like someone's opened a window.

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? We 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.)