Copyright

First published in hardback in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books 2015

HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

Visit us on the web at www.harpercollins.co.uk

Text © David Baddiel, 2015

Illustrations © Jim Field 2015

Jacket illustration © Jim Field, 2015

Jacket Design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2014

David Baddiel and Jim Field assert the moral right to be identified as the author and illustrator of the work.

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

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007554522

Ebook Edition © 2015 ISBN: 9780007554553

Version: 2018-08-23

To the Grandmas – Sarah, and Dinks, late of this parish.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Part 1: Pause

Chapter 1: Fred and Ellie

Chapter 2: Eric

Chapter 3: Cyberdodo

Chapter 4: The other twins

Chapter 5: Fred’s football trials: just one example

Chapter 6: Wedgie

Chapter 7: Click here

Chapter 8: Say please

Chapter 9: The package

Chapter 10: Pair with Controller

Chapter 11: Prepare yourself

Chapter 12: Wwwwoooaargggh!

Chapter 13: 7.13

Chapter 14: Wheee! and wheheyheey!

Chapter 15: Countdown

Chapter 16: Have we got any bacon?

Chapter 17: Good behaviour

Chapter 18: I’mgonnakillyouuuuuuuu!!

Chapter 19: My turn

Chapter 20: Ellie Premium Edition

Chapter 21: You’re my stylist

Part 2: Upgrade

Chapter 22: Most Improved

Chapter 23: Flashback

Chapter 24: Time to shine

Chapter 25: it’s bananas, Morris

Chapter 26: A kind of looking-down smile

Chapter 27: It’s a deal

Chapter 28: A shaven gorilla

Chapter 29: Thor’s hammer of bacon

Chapter 30: Actually, it’s not Skype

Chapter 31: No More Questions!

Chapter 32: Nerd

Chapter 33: It’s got a flashing light on it

Chapter 34: Two cowboys about to draw

Chapter 35: The Boxspital

Chapter 36: Happy Christmas, Stones …

Chapter 37: Charged to the Max

Chapter 38: Emwmwtaapt Morris

Chapter 39: I am Karabuki!

Chapter 40: Pure Power

Chapter 41: …

Chapter 42: I’ve felt better

Part 3: Highest Level

Chapter 43: A big, flat, cardboard shoe

Chapter 44: The Bracket Wood and Surrounding Area Inter-school Winter Trophy

Chapter 45: The next game

Chapter 46: There’s only really one place

Chapter 47: What happened?

Chapter 48: Never even come near me with a football again

Chapter 49: Like this one?

Chapter 50: Paired

Chapter 51: Gravity Rush

Chapter 52: When it comes to the crunch

Chapter 53: Single bow

Chapter 54: Watch Out!

Chapter 55: 110 per cent

Chapter 56: A gentle little push

Part 4: Bonus

Chapter 57: Bonus Easter egg. On Christmas Day

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Read an extract …

Keep Reading …

Books by David Baddiel

About the Publisher

Fred and Ellie Stone were twins. But they were never sure whether or not they could call themselves identical. They certainly shared exactly the same birthday (20th September, eleven years ago) and they had the same mum and dad (Eric and Janine). But their names were Fred and Ellie. And a boy and a girl are, clearly, not identical.fn1

Yet they felt identical. They sometimes even felt that they knew what one another were thinking. And, even if they were 200 metres apart, they could mouth words at each other and always know what the other one was saying. They did look pretty identical too. They both wore glasses and, most of the time, their school uniforms (even though uniform wasn’t compulsory at their school). And they both, at the point at which this story begins, had braces on their top teeth.

They also both liked the same things. These included: superheroes; Japanese fantasy animation films; comics; maths (yes, they actually liked maths – sometimes they played a game called ‘Who Can Name More Decimal Places of Pi?’); and, most importantly, video games. All video games, but their favourites were FIFA, Street Fighter, Super Mario and Minecraft. The one thing they would save up their not-very-much pocket money to buy was the most up-to-date versions of these games. Ellie, though, was better than Fred at video games.fn2 Which Fred didn’t mind. He knew she had quicker fingers and better hand-to-eye coordination. And, even though he sometimes got frustrated at losing, other times he just liked watching her fingers speed across her controller, as if she was playing a classical concerto by heart. And, when I say her controller, I mean her controller. Ellie and Fred always used their own ones. Ellie in particular was always very definite about which one was hers. The feel and the weight of her controller – even if, to the untrained eye/hand, both of them may have looked/felt exactly the same – suited her style perfectly.

Which was why what happened to it was quite so upsetting.

Eric Stone was – there is no nice way of saying this – fat. Well, there are nice ways of saying it – and Eric did often use these ways, describing himself as big-boned, or portly, or suffering from terrible water retention – but the truth was he was fat. Because he ate too much. He didn’t have terrible water retention; he had terrible bacon-sandwich retention.

To be fair to Eric, he did – normally after a bit of prompting from his wife, Janine, and his children, Fred and Ellie – go on a lot of diets.

He’d been on the High Fibre diet, and the Low Carb diet, and the Juice diet, and the No Juice diet, and the Cabbage Soup diet, and the Pea and Mint Soup diet, and a diet he made up where he only ate banana muffins and cheese. He’d been on the 5:2 diet and the 6:1 diet and the 4:3 diet and the 2:5 diet and even the 17:28 diet (which meant not eating anything for a minute between 17:27 and 17:29 every day). He’d been to Weight Watchers and Chocaholics Anonymous and Sixteen-stoners’ Self-help and Big-boned Portly Bacon Sandwich Retentors Sit Around in a Circle and Say How it isn’t Really Their Fault (actually this last one was what Janine called all Eric’s diet groups).

Trouble was, the diets didn’t make Eric any lighter. If anything, they made him heavier because every time he finished one – and he did always finish them, normally after only four or five days – he would eat about five times his own weight in bacon sandwiches.fn1

Eric was just tucking into a bacon sandwich – the first one he’d had after giving up on the Jacket Potato Skin diet, which he’d followed for two whole days (it allowed you to eat jacket potato skins and you could put low-fat spread on them, which Eric had decided included mayonnaise) – when it, the thing that happened to Ellie’s controller which was so upsetting, happened.fn2

The bacon sandwich, in a way, was what caused the whole thing. Because, whenever Eric Stone had his first bacon sandwich after a diet, he would become so entranced by the fatty saltiness of the pork rashers and how deliciously it sat against the brown-sauce-smeared white bread that he would forget everything else and close his eyes. He would lose himself in that bacon sandwich.

Unfortunately, the point at which he was losing himself in this particular bacon sandwich was also the point at which he was sitting down, on the sofa, in front of the TV, plate in one hand, sandwich in the other, IN HIS PANTS.

His big, grey, bought-in-1987 Y-front PANTS.

He had been planning to open his eyes shortly and watch TV. But not for a little while. Not until he’d really savoured the saltiness. Not until … “Ow!!!” said Eric, opening his eyes very wide.

“What is it?” said Janine, not bothering to turn away from Cash in the Attic. Janine Stone never missed an episode and was convinced that one day she herself would find something in the attic worth millions of pounds. Which was odd, as the Stone family lived in a ground-floor flat.

“I’ve sat on something, J!” said Eric.

“Well, move off it then,” said Janine, still looking at the screen while stroking the family cat, a white fluffy beast called Margaret Scratcher.

“I can’t!”

“You can’t?”

“I think … I think it’s stuck!”

Eric stood up.

He turned round, facing away from his wife. Interestingly, despite the obvious pain he was in, at no point did he stop eating his bacon sandwich.

“Can you see it?” he said.

“What do you mean can I see it?”

He glanced over his shoulder. “Stop watching Cash in the Attic! Just for a second!”

With a big tut, Janine Stone forced her eyes away from the television and looked across Margaret Scratcher’s fur at her husband’s back. Then she lowered her gaze a fraction.

“What’s that?” she said.

“What’s what?”

“That black thing. Poking out of your pants.”

“That’s what I want to know!” said Eric. “Never mind it poking out, it’s poking me!”

There was another tut from behind him. Eric had once admitted – quietly, to his friends in his works canteen, over a bacon sandwich – that if his wife was a noise, she would be a tut.

“For pity’s sake, Eric. Bend over.”

Eric did as he was told. There was a short pause as Janine – and Margaret Scratcher – peered. Eric felt he could hear them peering. Then she said: “How on earth did you get that stuck up there?”

“How on earth did I get what stuck up there?”

“MY VIDEO-GAME CONTROLLER!!!” said another voice.

Ellie’s voice in fact. Sounding very upset. Reasonably, really, since she had just come into the living room to see her mother reaching out a slightly disgusted hand to retrieve her most prized possession from between the cheeks of her father’s 1987 Y-front-panted bottom.

As it happened, Ellie’s controller wasn’t actually broken. The toggle had gone a touch floppy and the X button looked like it had been knocked diagonal by whatever G-force it sustained while between Eric’s bottom cheeks. But it worked, kind of. If you ignored the fact that when it shuddered – like controllers do when you hit the bar in FIFA, or there’s an explosion in Call of Duty – it felt, to Ellie, like it was shuddering for another reason.

That reason being that it had been lost, for a short while, in a very bad place.

Basically, Ellie just didn’t really want to touch her beloved controller any more. Which everyone in the family, including Eric, understood. In fact, Eric, who was a nice person and a good dad – even if he loved bacon sandwiches almost as much as his children – went so far as to tell Ellie that he was perfectly willing to pay for a new controller. As long as she didn’t tell anyone what had happened to the old one.

The day after Eric made that promise, Fred and Ellie were in their school computer room. Well, it wasn’t really a computer room. Bracket Wood Comprehensive was a good school – more or less – but it didn’t have any money. And so what it called a computer room was in fact a cleaning cupboard with all the cleaning materials taken out and an eight-year-old laptop on the shelf where there used to be five half-full bottles of Toilet Duck.

However, Fred and Ellie didn’t mind. Because right then they were enjoying going through all their favourite gaming sites and reading reviews of all the latest controllers. Ellie, in particular, was really enjoying herself.

“People who aren’t gamers don’t know this, do they?” she was saying. “They think that controllers just come in black plastic with some buttons, bundled with a console. But they’re so wrong! Look!”

Fred, who tended just to listen when Ellie got very excited about anything to do with gaming, nodded. She was right. Clicking quickly through many different web pages – her skill at video games showing in how expert she also was with a mouse – she pulled up on the screen loads of different types of controller.

Black ones, grey ones, silver ones, rainbow ones, camouflage ones, football team colours ones; ones with big toggles, small toggles, toggles that were gear sticks and steering wheels; controllers with blue lights and white lights and red lights and yellow lights; with ribbed handles and smooth handles and leather-clad handles and handles shaped like hands; with headphones and microphones and speakers attached; and ones you could personalise yourself – you could even have one made in the shape of your own name!

“The two Ls in Ellie could be the handles!” she said excitedly.

“Yes!” said Fred, wondering how that would work with ‘Fred’. Maybe if he went for Frederick the k and the d could be the handles … but, then again, Frederick was probably a bit long for a video-game controller. He’d have to hold his hands really wide apart.

“What browser are you using?” said their sort-of friend Stirling, one of the few other pupils at Bracket Wood who could often be found in the computer room. He was standing behind Ellie, peering at the screen.

“Browser?” said Ellie, not turning round. “I dunno. Safari?”

Stirling looked at his younger sister, Scarlet. They burst out laughing.

“Safari! Oh dear! Oh dear! Oh dear!” they said together.

Ellie raised her eyes at Fred, who raised his own back. Stirling and Scarlet were very technologically aware and very proud of it. This was one reason why, as far as Fred and Ellie were concerned, they were sort-of friends, rather than friends.fn1

“Is that wrong?” said Ellie.

“Well, it’s not wrong, but if you want to be truly up to speed …” said Stirling.

“… both design-wise and speed-wise,” said Scarlet. “As in download speed,” she added helpfully.

“Then I think we would suggest, wouldn’t we, Scarlet …?”

Scarlet nodded eagerly. “… Allegro?” she said. “Quicksmart? Protickle? Internet Wing-Ding? Paloma’s World? Browzzzer?”

“All great,” said Stirling. “But for me, top of the browser tree has to be, at this moment in time, Cyberdodo!”

“Oh, of course, Cyberdodo!”

“Never heard of it,” said Ellie.

“Where does it say that? Twitter?” said Fred.

“Twitter? Oh dear! Oh dear! Oh dear!” they went.

“What are you, a pensioner?” added Stirling. “No, Cyberdodo is what everyone recommends on …”

“… Instantgone?” said Scarlet. “Wizzstream? Quack? FaceTunnel? Pinterestingenough? Derkanpooderleck?”

Stirling shook his head. “… ChatWhiskers!”

“ChatWhiskers! Of course!”

Ellie, who had continued to stare at the screen while all this was going on, turned round at last. “Stirling. Scarlet. Can I ask you a question? Are you even on social media?”

They looked at each other. Then shook their heads.

“Are you in fact even allowed to use a computer without your parents’ supervision?”

Scarlet and Stirling looked at each other again. Then shook their heads.

“Our mum says we can when we’re in Year Five,” said Scarlet quietly.

This was the other reason that Stirling and Scarlet were only sort-of friends: they were in Years Three and Two. They were eight and seven.

“OK, iBabies …” said Ellie, turning back round to the computer. “Then perhaps some of your recommendations can wait. At least until …”

“Well, well, well.”

This wasn’t said by Stirling or Scarlet. In fact, when Ellie and Fred turned round, Stirling and Scarlet had vanished.

Standing there instead were the other twins in the school: Isla and Morris Fawcett.

“Oh no,” said Fred.

Like Fred and Ellie, Isla and Morris were twins; but also like them, a boy and a girl and therefore, also, non-identical twins. But, unlike Fred and Ellie, they were really obviously non-identical. Isla was very, very pretty, tall for her age and slim, with blue eyes and a tiny nose and long hair that she would sometimes sweep back across her face as if she was in a shampoo advert.

Morris looked like a badly shaven gorilla.

New pupils at the school, therefore, tended to be frightened of Morris. Which they were right to be. But the person they really needed to be frightened of was Isla.

Because Morris and Isla Fawcett were the Bracket Wood school bullies. They prided themselves on it. They spent a lot of time working on their bullying style. They had even been heard to talk about their bullying brand. And within that brand, although Morris did more of the actual physical work – he covered Chinese burns, dead legs and wedgies – it was Isla who was the mastermind.fn1

“Go away,” said Ellie.

“I don’t think so,” said Isla, reaching over and turning the laptop screen towards her and her brother.

“OoooOOOOooooo!!” they said, both going up sarcastically on the middle OOOO.

Ellie raised her eyes to heaven. “How long have you two been practising that?” she said.

“About three day—”

“Shut up, Morris!” said Isla. “Anyway, I see you’re looking for video-game stuff, are you?”

“Yeah! Are you?” said Morris, who tended, when not exactly sure what to do re the whole bullying thing, just to repeat what Isla said.

“Well spotted!” said Ellie. “Thank God there’s a photo on the screen so that you could work that out. How would you have known if it was just words?”

“Very funny …” said Isla. “At least I can see it without glasses.”

“There’s nothing wrong with wearing glasses!”

“Oh, isn’t there? Shall we go and ask Rashid? If he likes girls with glasses? Or, for that matter, girls with braces and pigtails and who still dress like they’re in Year One …?”

Ellie blushed and looked away.

Rashid Khan was universally considered to be the most handsome boy in their class. More importantly, he was also universally considered to be the nicest boy in their class.

Now, Ellie wasn’t very interested in boys – she was much more interested in video games – but something about Rashid did make her feel a bit funny inside. A long time ago – back in Year Four, before Isla Fawcett had completely grown into the bully she now was – Ellie had stupidly confided this to her and now she was always worried that one day Isla was going to tell Rashid. Who, Ellie was sure, probably liked Isla, or at least girls who looked like Isla, more than Ellie anyway.

Fred, knowing that the mention of Rashid had embarrassed his sister, said: “Leave it, Isla.”

“Sorry, what was that?” said Isla, turning to him.

“Yeah, what was that?” said Morris, also turning to him.

It was true Fred hadn’t said it very loudly.

“Nothing,” said Fred.

“Oh, that’s very odd,” said Isla.

“Yeah. Odd. Very,” said Morris, improvising.

“Because I’m sure you said something. Was it maybe … something about being a boy who isn’t even as good at video games as his sister …?”

“Yeah! His sister!” said Morris.

Fred looked away, embarrassed.

Even though he didn’t mind at all that his sister was better than him at video games, he did mind people at school making fun of him for it. Which some did. Not because Ellie had told everyone, but because Eric, at Bracket Wood’s last parent-teacher evening, when asked by their form teacher, Miss Parr, what he thought Ellie’s particular talents were, had said: “Video games. You’d have thought that would’ve been the boy, but no, she’s the one with the magic fingers!!”

Unfortunately, Eric’s voice was very loud and booming, and everyone in their form room – and most of the rest of the school – had heard.

“In fact, Fred, you’re probably even worse at video games than you are at actual games!” said Isla.

“Yeah! Actual games!” said Morris.

“Like …” said Isla, turning to Morris.

There was a pause.

“What?” said Morris.

“I thought you might say this bit,” said Isla.

Morris frowned. “What bit?”

“The bit about which games he’s rubbish at …? Like, give some examples?”

Morris looked blank.

“Oh, come on, Morris!” said Isla. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to always drive the bullying? To have to come up with all the clever things to say to humiliate other children? Frankly, I’m starting to think you’re just a passenger in what we’re doing here.”

Morris frowned again. Then he frowned some more. Finally, his face cleared. “Football!” he said, clicking his fingers.

“Yes! Well done, Morris! Yeah! What are you worse at, Fred – FIFA or football? You could hardly be worse at FIFA – because I’ve never seen anyone so bad at football!”

“Yeah, so bad at football!” said Morris.

“Oh, shut up!” said Ellie, getting up to face the bullies.

“Yeah, shut up!” said Fred, getting up and facing them too. He had had enough.

Because football meant a lot to Fred. He wanted more than anything to be in the Bracket Wood First XI. He wanted to be in the Bracket Wood First XI and score the winning goal in the final of the Bracket Wood and Surrounding Area Inter-school Winter Trophy. Ever since he was old enough, he had gone to the school trials for the team. And every year he hadn’t got in. Every year something had gone wrong.

Let’s just take a moment out from the main story to look at the last time Fred went to one of the trials for the school football team.

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