The Bad Sheep Read online

  The Black Sheep

  By Julie Cohen

  Copyright © 2010 by Julie Cohen.

  The right of Julie Cohen to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publisher or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely

  coincidental.

  This Work includes characters, settings and situations from the novel Getting Away With It, published in 2010 by Headline Publishing Group, 338 Euston Road, London NW1 3BH.

  Cover photographs © John Miller/Getty Images (house) Icetray (gates) and Masterfile (girl)

  Lettering © Stephen Raw

  Published by Julie Cohen at Smashwords 2011

  About The Black Sheep

  Ten-year-old Liza and Lee Haven are identical twins, but they couldn’t be more different. Lee is the good twin, and Liza is the bad. And when Liza is selected to be a sheep in the horrific nightmare that is the annual Christmas Pageant, she knows she has to do something to shake up the residents of Stoneguard.

  A wry, funny standalone short story from the world of Getting Away With It, by Julie Cohen.

  You can find out more about Getting Away With It, and read a note from the author, at the end of this ebook.

  Praise for Julie Cohen:

  ‘Warm, fun and totally addictive. I loved it!’ Miranda Dickinson

  ‘Wonderfully escapist...intriguing, thought-provoking and sexy.’ Katie Fforde

  The Black Sheep

  Let me give you an example of my relationship with the good people of Stoneguard. I lived there for eighteen years, so there are lots of examples to choose from. But some memories are stickier than others; they fossilise in your mind and represent, or seem to represent, everything that you were thinking and feeling in that moment and in all the moments leading up to and after that one.

  It was at Christmas, long before the Horrid Christmas but horrible enough in its own way, maybe even the Christmas which determined my feelings about all my Christmases to come.

  Ma Gamble was the owner of the Wholefood Emporium, and a former Major in the British Army. She had no family of her own, but she marshalled the entire town as if they were her troops. Our vicar, Mr McGregor, was an ancient wizened man, who could hardly see through his spectacles, let alone through the back of his head; Ma Gamble had long assumed the role of moral protector of all of Stoneguard, and the Emporium was the hub of all information.

  The year my twin sister Lee and I turned ten, Ma Gamble had turned her steely eyes on the children of the town and decided that enforced carolling, craft-making and toy patrolling were not sufficient to keep the youth of the village out of trouble. It was always a danger when school was out of session. Children, left to themselves, could do anything. Given a spare five minutes without organised activities, we were liable to terrorise infants, set thatched roofs alight or vandalise the ancient stone circle.

  What we needed, apparently, was a Christmas pageant involving all the village children, whether the children wanted it or not. Ma Gamble called a meeting in the church on the first day of the Christmas holidays, and read out our names and the parts which had been assigned. She’d done all the choosing herself, of course, without the benefit of audition—what was the point of an audition when everyone had to participate, and when Ma Gamble knew every single child by sight, reputation and genealogy?

  At the end of the meeting, some children (and one twin in particular) skipped happily out of the church to dream of sugarplums and stardom and holding the Saviour of Mankind in her arms.

  Some of us (one other twin in particular) dragged our feet, shrouded in doom.

  ‘This sucks,’ I said before we were even out of the church. ‘Why do I have to be a sheep? Sheep are horrible. They smell.’

  ‘Stop whining, Elizabeth,’ said my mother, holding the door open for me, impatience tapping her fingers on the jamb. ‘The acoustics in the church have given me a headache.’

  ‘I don’t want to be a sheep. I hate sheep.’ We emerged into the churchyard. ‘Can we visit Nan and Granddad?’

  ‘I’ve already used up the whole of my lunch hour here,’ Mum replied. ‘Come along.’

  ‘It’s Saturday.’

  ‘And I have the Ice Cream Heaven accounts to look over, and you have your chores. Come.’ She began to walk briskly down the pavement, Lee tripping along behind her.

  I cast a baleful glance back at the churchyard, at the grey obelisk just visible from the lych gate, and considered going back to my grandparents’ grave anyway. I decided it wasn’t worth it; I could come later on, when she was busy with her accounts and she wouldn’t notice me sneaking out of the house. I joined my mother and my sister.

  ‘I really, really hate sheep,’ I said. ‘Why do there have to be sheep anyway?’

  ‘It’s a stable, Elizabeth. There are shepherds.’

  ‘I think sheep are nice,’ said Lee. ‘They’re lovely and fluffy.’

  I rolled my eyes at my sister. She could talk; she wasn’t a sheep.

  ‘Why couldn’t I be the angel?’ I asked. ‘The angel gets to fly.’

  Nobody answered me on this one. Probably because the answer was too obvious even to say aloud. If you were going to choose an angel in Stoneguard, it was never going to be me.

  ‘Why can’t I be a star at least?’

  ‘Ma Gamble said that Candace got to be the star,’ Lee said.

  ‘I could be one too.’

  ‘There’s only one star.’

  ‘Who says?’

  ‘The Bible.’

  I frowned under my heavy brown fringe. Leave it to Lee to invoke the ultimate authority. Or one of them. I appealed to the other one.

  ‘Do we really have to do this stupid pageant, Mummy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because Ma Gamble has organised it for the children of the village, and you are a child of the village.’ We rounded the corner; our house loomed ahead of us, tall and red with blank windows. There was a wreath on our door of spiky holly, slightly softened by a gold ribbon.

  ‘But you don’t even like Ma Gamble.’

  ‘Elizabeth, that is a singularly unsuitable thing for a child to say.’

  ‘But it’s true. You bare your teeth at her every time you see her.’

  ‘All the more reason for you to perform in this pageant.’

  ‘That doesn’t make any sense.’

  ‘Elizabeth, I am warning you.’

  ‘But I’m a sheep, Mummy.’

  We went into the house. It was hardly any warmer than outside. My theory was that our mother spent so much time making and marketing ice cream that she never noticed that her living quarters were always freezing. Lee thought it was because the central heating was old and didn’t work properly. My mother and my sister took off their boots and coats, while I stood in the hallway, fully-dressed and dissatisfied.

  ‘I’m not doing it,’ I announced. ‘I’m not doing the stupid pageant. I hate it.’

  ‘Liza,’ cried Lee in dismay. My mother rounded on me, her face carved into furious stone.

  ‘I have said you will do the pageant, Elizabeth, and you will.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Because this family’s business is set in Stoneguard, and it depends on Stoneguard, and you are the representative of this family. Therefore you will do as you are expected.’r />
  ‘Lee can represent the family. She’s Mary, anyway. She wants to do it and I don’t.’

  ‘I don’t mind, really,’ said Lee.

  ‘You will both be in the Stoneguard Christmas pageant and that is final. I have a reputation to maintain.’ She put her scarf on the coat rack with a decisive jerk of her wrist, and walked away from us. We heard her office door slam shut.

  *

  ‘You are going to do it, right?’ Lee asked me later, in our bedroom. We had made a tent out of our sheets and collected all our dozens of teddy bears underneath it with us. Lee sat perched in her flannel pyjamas on a pillow, her knees up near her ears and her hair pulled back into a plait just like mine.

  ‘There’s no point talking about it.’ I hugged Baba Bear to me.

  ‘Maybe Ma Gamble will let you be a second star if you ask really nicely.’

  ‘I don’t care. I don’t want to be a star either.’

  Lee walked her bear, Bobo, across the pillow and back. ‘Did you—you didn’t want to be Mary, did you?’

  I laughed out through my nose, without smiling or opening my mouth. It was something I’d seen my mother do. ‘I don’t want to be anything.’

  ‘Because—because if you really, really wanted to be Mary, you could be. I would let you. I could be the sheep and nobody would know the difference.’

  I looked at my sister. She was holding Bobo tight and biting her lip.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I really don’t want to be Mary. You can keep it. It’s better for you anyway, you’re like the princess of the town or whatever.’

  ‘Oh.’ She breathed a sigh of relief, and then tried to cover it up with a little sigh of sympathy. ‘A sheep isn’t really that bad. I’ll help you make your costume.’

  ‘Maybe I can stand close to Candace in her star costume and people will think I’m a cloud.’

  ‘Maybe.’ She contemplated her bear for a minute, and then smiled. ‘I think Will Naughton will make a good Joseph, don’t you?’

  ‘No.’ I twisted Baba’s ear.

  ‘Don’t you think he’s really cute?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I almost fainted when I heard he was going to be Joseph.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he’s—well he’s going to be my husband!’

  ‘You want to snog him, don’t you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You do.’

  ‘No!’ Lee said again, but she giggled. She did want to.

  ‘He’s good looking,’ I said, ‘but thinks he’s better than everyone just because he’s rich and goes to boarding school and lives in that big house.’

  ‘We live in a big house.’

  ‘Our house could fit inside Naughton Hall.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that. I meant do you think people might say that about us?’

  ‘No! We don’t—we’re not—’ My ten-year-old brain tried unsuccessfully to articulate the difference between old money and new. ‘He’s like all big and important and stuck-up. He doesn’t even talk to anybody.’

  ‘I don’t think he’s stuck-up. I think he’s lovely.’

  ‘And he uses wax to make his hair all messy. Ick.’

  ‘I like it.’ Her cheeks went pink. ‘Imagine if I really did get married to him. It would be like a fairy tale.’

  ‘Eww.’ I plucked at Baba’s fur. ‘Maybe I could dye my sheep costume green and be a bush. I’d rather be a bush than a sheep.’

  ‘Maybe Candace will get sick and you’ll be allowed to be the star.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I told her. ‘I’ll think of something.’

  *

  But the day of the pageant arrived and I was still a sheep. It was December the twenty-third. In the afternoon, Ice Cream Heaven had its Christmas party and our mother bundled us into scratchy velvet dresses and walked us down cold country lanes to the ice cream factory. The inside of the office block was decorated with tinsel and fairy lights twinkling around the desks and windows, and it was filled with warm tall grown-ups, their tedious chatter, and the smell of cigarettes and perfume. Lee and I were the only children; it was really an employee party, during office hours. We had our costumes in plastic bags so we could go straight to the school hall after.

  Lee and I were given a paper cup of lemonade each and put to work in the small kitchen scooping ice cream into tiny plastic wine glasses. It was Mulled Wine Magic, this year’s Christmas limited edition flavour. My hands got sticky right away; I wiped them on my dress and sniffed the ice cream.

  ‘Do you think it’s alcoholic?’ I asked. It certainly smelled it.

  ‘Mum said not to have any, so it must be.’

  Lee’s scoops were perfect spheres; mine were shapeless blobs. I held my nose and tipped one of them into my mouth, swallowing it as quickly as I could. Then I tipped in another. The ice cream headache grabbed the front of my brain immediately; I ate two more scoops straight from the container, shuddering.

  ‘Do I look drunk?’ I asked, squinting against the pain and rubbing my eyebrows.

  ‘A little,’ said Lee.

  ‘Maybe I should try to nick a tin of beer.’ I washed my mouth out with lemonade and spat into the sink. ‘Ugh.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because if I’m drunk and tripping all over things, Mum will send me to my room and I won’t have to do the pageant.’

  Lee crumpled her forehead and bit her lip, as she always did when she was worried about me, but she didn’t have time to say anything because our mother appeared in the doorway in her green Christmas suit. ‘Everyone is waiting, girls.’

  We loaded the cups on trays and circulated amongst the grown-up employees, delivering to them the fruits of their labour. Lee took longer at this than I did, because she stopped to chat with each adult as she went, offering them pretty replies to their questions about school and the pageant and what she wanted for Christmas. I was too busy thinking about sheep, and trying to feel whether I was drunk or not, to do anything but shrug, even though I felt the force of my mother’s frown all the way across the room. We were meant to represent the business by being cheerful and cute and identical, just as we were in the photos for the adverts.

  I went over to Doris Pinchbeck, a wiry lady who’d worked as my mother’s Production Manager since before I was born. Doris was about as fond of idle chit-chat as I was; she was standing to the side of a group of Production ladies wearing tinsel bows pinned to their coveralls. She took a cup of the ice cream I offered, and which she’d probably made personally herself, and nodded at me. ‘Merry Christmas, eh,’ she said.

  I nodded back at her.

  ‘Where are my favourite girls?’ boomed a voice, and I turned to see Jonny Whitehair, my mother’s Sales Manager. He was a big man with big hair, glossy and dark and combed back from his forehead in a semi-Elvis pompadour. He reached out for me and Lee, put a big hand on each of our shoulders and dropped a big kiss on the top of each of our heads, the same as he did every time he saw us. He smelled of hair tonic, beer and cigarettes. ‘Hazel sent something over for you.’ Jonny took his hands off our shoulders and rummaged in the pockets of his suit jacket. He wore a white shirt, a tie with poinsettias on it and he had a gold tooth that winked when he smiled.

  ‘Here you are.’ He gave us each an identical packet of red tissue paper tied with shiny red ribbon. I could tell from the feel that they were his wife’s Christmas biscuits.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Whitehair,’ Lee said. I nodded and slipped my packet into the pocket of my dress.

  ‘Ah, well, you enjoy them. Now is this Mulled Wine Magic? Don’t mind if I do.’ He took a cup from each of us, and sat on his desk to eat them, in between sips of his beer glass and conversation with Mr Sales, our mother’s accountant.

  Lee went off to replenish her tray, but I lingered. Our presents hadn’t been the only thing in Jonny Whitehair’s jacket pockets; as he sat on his desk his pocket gaped open, and I could see the top of a gold packet of Benson and Hedges, and a red plastic light
er.

  The room was crowded, and I was shorter than everyone except for my sister. The adults talked about incomprehensible and boring things and laughed too loudly. I put my tray down on the corner of Jonny Whitehair’s desk and looked around quickly to make sure nobody was watching me. Then I reached forward and lifted the fags and lighter from his pocket and stuck them into mine along with the biscuits. I picked up my tray and retreated to the kitchen.

  The party didn’t last long; though my mother pulled out all her social stops for these important business events, she was the boss and everyone else was eager to get to the pub where they could properly relax. Before it ended, Lee slipped off to change into her Mary costume and appeared to admiring oohs and ahs. She did look beautiful; the blue dress and scarf over her head and all the attention made her rosy-cheeked and bright-eyed. I stood by the door, my plastic bag in my hand, my stolen fags in my pocket, planning. Then it was over and I watched Jonny Whitehair borrowing a Marlboro Light from Glenys Munt, saying, ‘I don’t know where they’ve got to, I must have left them in the car. No worries, I’ll buy some more at the pub.’

  Lee practised walking in a Virgin Mary-like glide all the way from the factory to the school, where the pageant was taking place. I dawdled. ‘Why can’t you be more like your sister, Elizabeth?’ my mother snapped.

  I kicked a pebble.

  The Victorian school hall was a-bustle with children and parents. Ma Gamble, wearing some sort of hand-woven red sack over woollen tights, took charge of us as soon as we appeared. ‘Lee, you look lovely. Go to the stage, Muriel Johnson’s parents are waiting for you to practise holding the baby. Liza, you need to get into your costume right away. You can do it in the toilets. Hurry up!’

  I dragged my feet to the girls’ toilets. The window there was far too small to squeeze through, and the school entrance was guarded by Ma Gamble and assorted other adults. There was no escape from sheepdom. I locked myself into a cubicle and put on my costume. This consisted of black tights and a black jumper, onto which I had haphazardly glued cotton wool. The jumper was just long enough to cover my bum. Carefully, I put Jonny Whitehair’s cigarettes and lighter into the waistband of my tights along with the tube of crimson lipstick I’d nicked from my mother’s room. I stuffed everything else back into the carrier bag, and emerged.