The Bed and Breakfast Star (12 page)

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 real shops in the town. Especially the Flowerfields Shopping Centre. It’s this great glass shopping mall with real flowers blossoming in big bouquets all round the entrance, and painted flowers spiralling over the door of each individual shop, and there are lovely ladies wandering round in long dresses who hand you a flower for free.

Mum and Pippa and I could spend hours and hours and hours wandering round the Flower-fields Shopping Centre.

Of course we couldn’t ever buy the books or the tapes or the toys or the outfits. But we could go back the next day and the next and read and listen and play and try them on all over again. And then when we had to trail all the way back to the Oyal Htl and we were all tired and we didn’t even have the money for the bus, we could still smell our flowers and pretend they were big bouquets.

I made up this story to myself that I was a famous comedienne and I’d just done this amazingly funny routine on stage and everyone had laughed and laughed and then they’d clapped and clapped and begged for an encore and showered me with roses . . .

‘Hey, Mum, Pippa, what do you get if you cross a rose with a python?’

‘Oh Elsa, please, give it a rest.’

‘I don’t know what you get – but don’t try to smell it!’ I laughed. Then I tried again.

‘What did one rose say to the other rose?’

‘Hello, Rose,’ said Pippa. She laughed. ‘Hey, I said the joke!’

‘Don’t you start too,’ Mum groaned.

‘That’s not a joke, Pippa. It’s not funny. No,
listen
. What did one rose say to the other rose? It said . . . Hi, Bud. See?
That’s
funny.’

‘No it’s not,’ said Mum.

I ignored her.

‘All right then. What did the bee say to the flower?’

‘Hi, flower?’ said Pippa. ‘Is that right? Have I said the joke now?’

‘No! Pippa, you can’t just say any old thing. It’s got to be a joke. Now, what did the bee say to the flower? It said, Hello honey.’

‘And I’m going to say Goodbye Sweetie if you dare come out with one more of your daft jokes,’ said Mum, but she didn’t really mean it. She was just joking herself.

Mum could still be a lot of fun, especially going round Flowerfields – but when we got back to room 608 she wilted like the flowers.

We spent the evenings indoors. So did everyone else around us. The people in room 607 had more arguments. The people in room 609 still had their telly blaring. The people underneath in room 508 still played their heavy-metal music. You could feel our room vibrating with the noise.

We tried going downstairs to the television lounge. Well, that was a laugh. There wasn’t anywhere to lounge, like a sofa or a comfy armchair. There were just these old vinyl straight-back chairs, the same sort as in the breakfast room, but even older, so you had to play musical chairs finding the ones without the wobbly legs. There wasn’t much of a television either. It was supposed to be colour but the switch wouldn’t stay stable, so people’s faces were gloomy grey for a bit and then suddenly blushed bright scarlet for no reason. There was something wrong with the sound too. It was all blurry and every time anyone talked there was a buzzing sound.

‘I’m starting to feel that way myself,’ said Mum, putting her hands over her ears.

‘Don’t throw another moody on me, for goodness sake,’ said Mack. ‘I can’t stick this. I’m going out.’

Mum hunched up even smaller in her chair after he’d gone. I went over to her and tried putting my arm round her. She didn’t seem to notice.

‘Good riddance to bad rubbish,’ I said fiercely.

We both knew where he’d gone. Down the pub. He’d drink all our money and then try to scrounge from some mates. And then he’d come staggering back and be all stupid and snore all night and in the morning he’d have such a sore head he’d snap at the least thing.

I got ten out of ten for an accurate prediction. But by the afternoon he was acting sorry. He’d won a bet down at the betting shop so he took Mum out in the evening while I babysat and then on Sunday morning he got up ever so early. I heard him go out before anyone else was awake. I couldn’t help hoping he was maybe doing a runner. But he came back at ten o’clock, staggering again, but this time it was because he was carrying a television.

‘I got it for a fiver at a car-boot sale,’ he said triumphantly. ‘There! Now we don’t have to sit in that stupid lounge. We can watch our own telly. Great, eh?’

It wasn’t a colour television, just a little old black-and-white portable set. It took ages to retune it when you changed channels, and of course you couldn’t get Sky. But it
was
our own television. We could put the sound up so loud you could hardly hear the arguments in 607 and if we tuned into the same programme as the people in 609 it was like we were listening in stereo.

Mum didn’t get so droopy now she had the television to watch. She switched on as soon as she woke up and it was still on long after I settled down to sleep. I liked to listen to it as I snuggled under the covers. But sometimes I put my head right down under my duvet and put my hands hard over my ears so that they made their own odd roaring noise and then I switched on this tiny private little television inside my own head. It was much better than the real thing because I could make up all my own programmes.

I was the lady on breakfast television interviewing people in my bedroom

and I was in all the soaps