The Bed and Breakfast Star Read online

  I was scared I’d get into trouble with Mum and Mack for getting Pippa soaked, but luckily Mum didn’t notice and Mack had gone out for a takeaway and taken Hank with him. Hank loves to go anywhere with Mack. He’s a really weird baby. He thinks his dad is great.

  I think Mack is great too. A great big hairy warthog.

  Pippa and Nicky and Neil and Nathan weren’t the only ones who got soaked when they went paddling in the basins. The floor in the Ladies turned into a sort of sea too. Naomi and I tried to mop it up a bit but we only had loo paper to do it with so we weren’t very successful.

  Mrs Hoover had to mop it up properly and she wasn’t very pleased. I felt bad about it so the next day Pippa and I helped her with her hoovering. I’d got lumbered with Hank as well, but I tried hard to get him to flick a duster. He seemed determined to use it as a cuddle blanket but Mrs Hoover didn’t mind.

  ‘Oh, what a little sweetie! Bless him!’ she cooed.

  ‘Have you got some sweeties?’ Pippa asked hopefully.

  ‘You’re just like my little granddaughter, pet. Always on at her Nan for sweeties. Here you are, then.’ Mrs Hoover gave us both a fruit drop. Hank had to make do with chewing his duster, because he might swallow the fruit drop whole and choke.

  ‘Yum yum, I’ve got an orange. I nearly like them best. I like the red bestest of all,’ said Pippa hopefully.

  I tutted at her but Mrs Hoover tittered.

  ‘You’re a greedy little madam,’ she said, handing over a raspberry drop too.

  ‘What do you say, Pippa, eh?’ I said.

  ‘Thank you ever so much Mrs Hoover.’

  ‘You what?’ said Mrs Hoover, because Mrs Hoover wasn’t her real name at all, it was just our name for her. Her real name was Mrs Macpherson but I didn’t like calling her that because it reminded me too much of my Mack Person. My least favourite person of all time.

  He’d given me another smack because Pippa and I were playing hunt the magic marble in our room and I’d hidden it under the rug covering the torn part of the carpet. How was I to know that Mack would burst back from the betting shop and stomp across the rug and skid on the marble and go flying?

  I couldn’t help laughing. He really did look hilarious. Especially when he landed bonk on his bum.

  ‘I’ll teach you not to laugh at me!’ he said, scrabbling up.

  He did his best.

  But I’ve had the last laugh. I sloped off into the Ladies all by myself and had a little fun with my new black magic-marker pen.

  I soon got into a Royal Hotel routine. I always woke up early. I’d scrunch up in bed with my torch and my joke books and wise up on a few more wisecracks. I’d tell the jokes over and over until I had them off by heart. I’d often roll around laughing myself.

  Sometimes I shook the bed so much Pippa woke up wondering if she was in the middle of an earthquake. If I caused earthquakes Pippa was liable to cause her own natural disasters. Floods.

  Mum kept getting mad at her and saying she was much too big to be wetting the bed and she didn’t let Pippa have anything to drink at teatime but it still didn’t make much difference. Pippa cried because she was so thirsty and she still wet the bed more often than not.

  So another of my little routines was to sneak all Pippa’s wet bedclothes down to the laundry room before Mum and Mack woke up. There were only two washing machines and one dryer. You usually couldn’t get near them. But early in the morning everyone was either fast asleep or getting the kids ready for school so there was a good chance I could wash the sheets out for my leaky little sister.

  The only other people around were some of the Asian ladies in their pretty clothes. They looked like people out of fairy tales instead of ordinary mums in boring old T-shirts and leggings. They sounded as if they were saying strange and secret things too as they whispered together in their own language. Some of their children could speak good English even though they’d only been over here a few months, but the mums didn’t bother. They generally just stuck in a little clump together.

  I felt a bit shy of them at first and I think they felt shy with me too. But after a few encounters in the laundry room we started to nod to each other. One time they’d run out of washing powder so I gave them a few sprinkles of ours. The next day they gave me half a packet back and a special pink sweet. It was the sweetest sweet I’d ever eaten in my life. It was so sweet it started to get sickly, and when I got back to room 608 I passed it on to Pippa. She enjoyed it hugely for a while but it finally got the better of her too. We rubbed a little on Hank’s dummy and it kept him quiet half the morning.

  Keeping Hank quiet was a task and a half at the hotel. He’d always been a happy sort of baby, even if he did act like a bit of a thug at times, bashing about with his fat fists and kicking hard with his bootees. But he’d never really whined and whimpered that much. Now he didn’t seem to do much else. It was probably because he was so cooped up. He was just getting to the stage when he wanted to crawl around all over the place and explore. But he couldn’t really crawl in room 608. It was much too little and crowded.

  It was dangerous too. If you took your eye off him for two seconds he’d be doing this

  or this

  or this.

  There was only one way to keep him out of mischief.

  He didn’t like it one little bit. He wanted to be up and about.

  Mum and Mack didn’t want to be up and about at all. They just wanted to sleep in. Most days they even stopped bothering to go down to breakfast. So Pippa and Hank and I had our breakfast and then we helped Mrs Hoover and then we played about in the corridor. We set Hank down at one end and charged up to the other end and had a very quick game before he caught up with us.

  Hank got so good at crawling he could probably win a gold medal at the Baby Olympics. If we wanted any peace at all we had to change his crawling track into an obstacle race.

  Sometimes we collected several babies and had a proper race. The other brothers and sisters placed bets. That was good. Pippa and I coined it in, because Hank always won.

  We got a bit noisy and sometimes Mack would come staggering out into the corridor and tell us all to pipe down. He’d yell if he was in a bad mood but he didn’t frighten anyone now. The kids just muttered amongst themselves about pimply bums and brain transplants and cracked up laughing. All the girls had read the jokes in the Ladies toilet downstairs. Even some of the boys had dashed in and out for a dare.

  Mack and Mum often didn’t get up properly until lunchtime. Lunch was my favourite meal of the day because I could nip along to the shop on the corner and choose it. I had to make sure I bought a packet of ciggies for Mum and the Sun for Mack, and maybe something boring like a carton of milk or a packet of biscuits – but then I could buy crisps and Coke and chocolates and sweets and anything else I fancied with the money left over. Pippa and I always had a Mega-Feast.

  SAMPLE WEEK’S MENU OF THE MEGA-FEAST

  Monday : Apple juice, Mini Cheddars, Toffee Crisp, Woppa, Spearmint chew

  Tuesday : Strawberry Ribena, Californian corn chips, Cadbury’s Flake, Buster bar

  Wednesday : Lucozade, Chicken Tikka Hula Hoops, Bounty, Flying Saucers

  Thursday : Dr Pepper drink, Chipsticks, Galaxy, Sherbert Fountain

  Friday : Coke, Salt-and-vinegar crisps, Crunchie, Fizz cola-bottle sweets

  Saturday : Strawberry Break Time Milk, Pork scratchings, Picnic, Dolly-beads

  Sunday : Lilt, Skips (chilli flavour), Fruit-and-nut chocolate, Giant Bootlace

  This is all times two, because Pippa always copied me. Hank generally wanted a lick here and a munch there after he’d had his bottle and his baby tins, but there was still heaps left for us.

  We sometimes went out in the afternoons. Once we went to the park.

  I liked it best of all when Mack went down the betting shop and took Hank along too and Mum and Pippa and me went to the shops. Not the shop on the corner. Not the Kwik-Save or the off-licence or the chip shop down the road. The