The Bed and Breakfast Star (11 page)

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.