What’s Up With Jody Barton? Read online

  I don’t care whether I am a minx or a sphinx . . .

  — Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens

  CONTENTS

  LIFE CAN BE PRETTY WEIRD SOMETIMES . . .

  TWINTUITION

  WELCOME TO MY WORLD

  THE MEANING OF BEAUTIFUL

  AN AMAZING LITTLE MIRACLE

  THINKING AND DREAMING

  ONE CAREFUL DRIVER

  RETURN OF THE MACK

  AND IT BURNS, BURNS, BURNS . . .

  WHEN YOU’RE STRANGE

  MILLION POUND QUESTIONS

  A BOY NAMED SULKY SUE

  LOST AT SEA

  AN APPOINTMENT WITH SUPERMAN

  IN THE LINE OF FIRE

  GRAND CENTRAL DESPAIR

  RUNNING ON EMPTY

  THE G-WORD

  ON GLADSTONE HILL

  FLASHY PACKAGING

  RAINBOWS

  Acknowledgements

  It seriously can.

  Sometimes, just when you think you’re rocking along nicely and minding your own business, life throws you a complete curveball and leaves you feeling totally and utterly freaked-out.

  And when that happens the important thing is to stay calm and not do anything stupid.

  So far in my life, I’ve had to cope with three of these curveballs and they’ve all been thrown at me within the past year. The first came just before the end of Year 10, when Chatty Chong gave me his phone number. Chatty Chong never gives his phone number to anyone. Usually, he doesn’t even speak to anyone. That’s why everyone calls him Chatty Chong. But then, one day, at the end of a maths lesson, he walked over to my desk, dumped his massive Gola bag down on it and said, ‘Do you want to pair up with me on this next maths project, yeah?’

  And I shrugged my shoulders and said, ‘OK then.’ Because Chatty Chong is brilliant at maths. He’s even better at it than I am and I got 96% in my last test. And Mrs Hamood, my maths teacher, said I would have got top marks if I’d spent more time on improper fractions and less time doodling in the answer book.

  Chatty Chong sort of smiled and said, ‘I’ll give you my number so we can talk about maths on the phone, yeah?’

  And I shrugged my shoulders and said, ‘OK then.’

  So he unzipped his bag, took out his pencil tin and scribbled down his phone number on a piece of graph paper. And then he pushed the paper towards me, sort of smiled again and said, ‘See you tomorrow, yeah?’ And without another word to anyone he picked up his Gola bag and walked out of the classroom.

  But here’s the really weird bit.

  When I looked down at that piece of paper, my heart nearly stopped. Chatty Chong’s phone number was almost exactly the same as mine. Apart from one single digit. All the other digits matched completely. They were even in the same order! When I saw this, it flipped me out so much that, at first, I thought it must have been some sort of weird joke. And then, because I really couldn’t believe it and needed to check, I took my phone out of my bag and punched in Chatty’s number.

  After half a ring, I heard Chatty say, ‘Yeah?’

  I said, ‘It’s me already. I wanted to tell you that our phone numbers are practically identical. Apart from one digit.’

  Chatty Chong went silent on the line for a few seconds and, even though there was loads of background noise from the corridor, I swear to God I could hear his brain ticking over. Then he said, ‘You’re joking with me, yeah?’

  And I said, ‘No. I’m deadly serious.’

  Chatty Chong whistled loudly down the phone.

  I said, ‘OI,’ and ripped the phone away from my ear. Then, after a second or two, I put it back and said, ‘ARE YOU TRYING TO TRASH MY EARDRUM OR WHAT?’

  Chatty Chong said, ‘Sorry.’ And, to be fair, he did sound genuinely apologetic. Then he said, ‘It’s just that the probability of that happening is one in a billion. And that’s without even counting the zero at the beginning. Otherwise, it would have been one in ten billion. But it’s still a big coincidence, yeah?’ And then the line went dead and I realized he’d ended the call. Like I said before, Chatty Chong is brilliant at maths. He’s a bit bad at chatting though.

  The second freaky curveball got chucked at me just after that while I was on holiday in Spain. We’d only been there a few days when my sister started getting really intense stomach pains. To begin with, we all just laughed at her for pigging out on paella. My sister does tend to exaggerate rather a lot and she had queued up for third helpings of the main course the night before. But pretty soon I realized she was in proper crippling agony and I told my parents she needed to see a doctor fast. Then, after she’d seen a doctor, we realized she needed an emergency operation to have her appendix removed. The entire experience was freaky and horrible because I felt about as much use as a chocolate teapot. I don’t speak a word of Spanish so I couldn’t even organize a top-up for her phone. Even though she gets on my nerves, we’re as close as two freckles and seeing her look so manky and ill was horrible. To make matters worse, neither of us had any phone credit for almost three weeks. I never want to go through an experience like that ever again.

  But the most head-spinning moment of my entire life happened in February, a few weeks before my birthday. And although what I’m about to tell you may seem a helluva lot less dramatic than my sister nearly popping her clogs in a Spanish hospital it still felt massively dramatic to me. In fact, it felt as if I’d been hit by a major freakquake of a magnitude of 8.35 – and, for your information, that’s as powerful as the blast from a nuclear bomb! So I’m talking about one seriously intense curveball.

  Or, to put it more precisely . . .

  I’m talking about the very first time I looked over and saw Liam Mackie’s face.

  And although I managed to stay calm and didn’t do anything stupid on that particular occasion it was really only a matter of time before I would. But I’ll come to all of that later.

  Because there’s a lot to tell you and I need to start at the beginning.

  And in the beginning I was in the cafe and The Doors were playing at top volume. I should just explain that I love The Doors. They’re my favourite band. And Jim Morrison, their lead singer, is my favourite singer.

  I drew this picture of him in my maths book.

  Sadly, pictures and posters are pretty much all that’s left because he died the exact same year that both my parents were born. This means that he never owned an Xbox, never planted his feet into a fresh pair of K-Swiss trainers and didn’t even know what a status update was. But none of that matters to me.

  I still think he’s amazing.

  And, while I’m on the subject, River Phoenix was amazing too.

  River was an American actor and he died even younger than Jim did. In my opinion, River and Jim are two of the most incredible people who have ever existed. I’ve got pictures of both of them on my bedroom walls and I sit and look at them a lot. And quite frankly, until I saw Liam Mackie, I was never remotely interested in looking at anybody else.

  But I was telling you about The Doors. My favourite track of all is a song called ‘Light My Fire’. When it begins, it sounds just like any other cheery pop song, but pretty quickly it becomes clear that things aren’t always what they seem. Because, instead of being a few minutes long like most songs, this one just keeps on going and going. And all the time it’s getting louder and louder and faster and faster, and Jim just keeps on singing in this really intense and dark and hypnotic way for almost eight minutes. I get goose bumps every time I hear it. But the reason I’m talking about all this now is because it was this exact song that was playing in the cafe when I first looked at Liam Mackie. If I believed in superstitious spooky stuff, I’d say that Jim Morrison was trying to tell
me something.

  And when I close my eyes I can take myself right back to that very second. The Doors are turned up as loud as they’ll go and Liam Mackie is sitting on his own at a table by the window. In front of him is an untouched strawberry and banana smoothie. He has one foot resting on the empty chair opposite him and the other is tapping against the floor tiles to the beat of ‘Light My Fire’. His head is gently nodding along too. It’s the most effortlessly cool hipster head bop I’ve ever seen. And even from the other side of the cafe I can see that this boy is incredibly good-looking. I’d have to be blind not to see it. And it’s almost like I’m looking at River Phoenix. Only this time I’m not a saddo staring at a poster on my bedroom wall – I’m a saddo in an embarrassing orange apron staring at an actual proper person.

  But only for a second.

  Because as soon as I realize that I’m staring at him I quickly look down and frown at the floor.

  But it’s too late. Something has sparked inside me. It actually feels like there’s a firework trapped in my body. Or as if I’ve been struck by forked lightning or something. And, suddenly, I know that something utterly weird has happened. And it’s the kind of weird thing that I thought only ever happens in drippy books or romantic movies. I never thought it would ever happen to me. Not like this anyway. Never like this.

  In the space of a single second, I’ve fallen hopelessly and helplessly and head-over-hi-tops in love with the boy who looks like River Phoenix.

  And then my sister nudges my arm, nods her head in his direction and says, ‘See that fit guy over there? I totally intend to go out with him.’

  Me and my sister are twins. She’s Jolene and I’m Jody. We’ve both got brown hair, we’re both left-handed and we both have these weirdly long little toes that make us look like long-toed mutants. Also, we’ve both got hazel eyes that change colour depending on what we’re wearing and we both get these funny dents in our cheeks when we laugh. But apart from that I’d say we’re fairly different.

  Well, actually, we’re a lot different.

  In fact, we’re so totally and utterly and entirely different that we weren’t even born on the same day. That’s how different we are.

  Jolene was born a few minutes before midnight at the end of one day and I flumped out fourteen minutes later at the start of the next. And straight away, before the ink had even dried on my birth certificate, I learned the importance of turning up to things on time. And now I’m never late. Not to school. Not to the cafe. Not to anything. Because, sometimes, rocking up fourteen minutes late can be a massively big deal. And it can also mean that you miss out on certain things.

  Like birthdays.

  I’ve only properly genuinely had four birthdays in my entire life – and I’m sixteen years old. My fourteen-minutes-faster twin has had all sixteen of hers. The other week, my parents took us out to the London Dungeon and then on to Pizza Shack to celebrate the fact that Jolene was officially sixteen and I was officially four. But when all the stuff in this story was happening she was still fifteen and I was still three.

  Confused?

  So are most people. But, actually, it’s quite simple. Jolene was born on the twenty-eight of February and I was born, fourteen minutes later, at 12:08 a.m. on the morning of the twenty-ninth.

  Which means I was born on a leap day.

  Which means I am officially what is known as a leapling!

  Now being a twin isn’t such a massively unusual thing. The last I heard, the probability was about 1 in 32. This means that there should roughly be one twin in almost every class in my school.

  But being a leapling like me is unusual. You won’t find one of us in every classroom. You won’t even find one of us in every school. Because the likelihood of being born on the twenty-ninth of February is only 1 in 1,461. And, even though that’s nowhere near as random as finding out that you’ve got the exact same phone number – except for one single digit – as your maths-project partner, it’s still pretty damn rare, I reckon. And when you think about it I’m probably the rarest leapling of the lot. Because, if you did a survey to find out how many leaplings have a twin born on a totally different day, I bet anything you like that the answer would be one. Me. Mrs Hamood once told me I was a mathematical curiosity. I went red when she said this. I was pleased though.

  But, maths compliments aside, being a leapling mostly sucks. Seventy-five per cent of the time, I’m forced to share Jolene’s birthday on the twenty-eighth and, although she’s usually very cool about this, we both know that it’s her special day much more than it is mine. Take when we were ten, for instance. My mum and dad had a big party for us in the cafe and we were allowed to choose a film for all our friends to watch. I wanted to see Ice Age 2 – The Meltdown and Jolene wanted to see Pirates of the Caribbean – Dead Man’s Chest. We ended up with my choice because Jolene got nasty and said, ‘Whose birthday is it, actually, anyway?’

  My dad overheard her and said, ‘Right, that’s it. You’re watching the ice thing.’

  But in the end I didn’t enjoy a single second of that film. I was too busy feeling bad about gate-crashing Jolene’s party.

  And then there are the conversations like the one I had once with Chatty Chong. He asked me when I was sixteen and I said, ‘End of February.’

  And he said, ‘What day?’

  And I said, ‘The twenty-ninth.’

  And Chatty said, ‘No way, yeah?’

  And I said, ‘Way yeah!’

  And Chatty whistled in amazement and said, ‘So you’re actually only three, innit!’ And then he went all quiet and looked a bit freaked out.

  So, anyway, Jolene and I are totally different. But, to be honest, most twins are. Even the ones who look like they’ve been photocopied. Check them out closely and you’ll see what I’m saying. There’s always one who’s fractionally taller, slightly smarter and a bit better-looking than the other.

  I’d love to say that in our case that person is me. But I can’t. Because it would be plain wrong.

  And there’s no way I’m going to say it’s Jolene. Because that would be plain wrong too.

  The truth is that it’s pointless even going down that route. We’re polar opposites. If I was explaining all this to Chatty Chong or to Mrs Hamood, I’d just draw a diagram of a very big circle and place me and Jolene at either end of its diameter. Like this:

  But most people don’t think in maths diagrams so I’ll try to explain myself a bit more clearly in words.

  Jolene is a complete jabber-jaws and I’m fairly quiet.

  Jolene is always late to things and I’m always on time.

  Jolene spends forty minutes in the bathroom every morning and I don’t.

  Jolene does our geography, RE and German homework and I do our art, music and maths. (We take our own individual chances on all the other stuff.)

  Jolene thinks Chatty Chong is a Nerdasaurus-rex whereas I think he’s all right.

  Jolene loves listening to Beyoncé and The Black-Eyed Peas and I only like The Doors.

  Jolene walks stupidly slowly and I walk stupidly fast.

  So really we’re about as twinny as pork and peas. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t get along because we definitely do. And, even though we wind each other up and call each other names and steal each other’s stuff and eat each other’s Easter eggs, I really love my twin sister. And she loves me too. I know this for a fact because most of the time I’ve got a pretty good idea of what’s going on inside her head. I suppose it’s called my twintuition. Whenever she’s happy or sad or excited or bored, I usually know about it before she even tells me. For some weird reason though, this twintuition only ever travels in one direction. I’m really good at guessing what’s going on in Jolene’s head, but she’s hopeless at working out what’s going on in mine. I think she knows it’s mostly stuff connected with my maths GCSE and she’s stopped taking an interest.

  Even so, we’re close. How could we not be? She’s my fourteen-minutes-faster sister and we’
ve been laughing our heads off over private jokes and hanging around together since before we were even born. But I’ve got to admit that, every now and again, there are odd moments when I catch myself thinking about how much easier it might be if I wasn’t one half of twins. I don’t think this often. Just on random occasions. And one of those random occasions was that freaky moment in the cafe when we both got butterflies over the exact same person.

  Me and Jolene live in a maisonette above a cafe. The cafe is called Chunky’s Diner and the owner – Chunky Barton – just happens to be our dad. When I’m not at school or in my bedroom or hanging out at Brent Cross Shopping Centre, I’m almost always helping my dad by doing a bit of washing up or wiping a few tables or pressing a few buttons on the microwave. Usually, Jolene is there helping out too. And, in return, he gives us a big fat wodge of cash to spend. It’s a really top deal because I don’t mind the work. I don’t even mind that my dad makes us wear hideous bright orange T-shirts and matching aprons that have got ASK ME ABOUT OUR CHAMPION CHUNKY BREAKFAST printed on them. It’s still way better than delivering leaflets or holding a big sign with an arrow on it that says GOLF SALE. And, to be honest, there isn’t actually ever that much to do because we’ve only got about ten regular customers and they never come in all at once. Occasionally, some random boring person will walk in and ask for a sausage roll or a bacon sandwich and then my dad will get very excited and say:

  ‘New customer?’

  And the random boring person usually smiles and nods and mumbles something about just passing by or being lost and my dad smiles back and says, ‘Do me a favour, pal. If you like what we do here, tell everyone. And if you don’t like what we do tell the wife.’

  Then they both laugh as if my dad has just said something seriously witty – even though he quite blatantly hasn’t.

  And a little while later, my dad turns to Jolene and me and says, ‘I bet you anything in the world that our new customer rode all the way here on the Chunky Bus.’ Then he winks – just like he’s the wisest person in the whole of Willesden – and starts happily singing as he fries his onions. And the song he’s always singing goes like this: ‘And it burns . . . burns . . . burns . . . the ring of fire.’ It’s an ancient song by a spooky old American cowboy called Johnny Cash.