The Bed and Breakfast Star (15 page)

‘He fancies you all the same,’ said Naomi. ‘You and him will be slinking off to room one hundred and ten soon.’

‘Naomi!’ I nudged her and she nudged me back and we both fell about giggling.

The Manager and the bunny lady can’t let Room 110 because the damp’s got so bad all the wallpaper’s peeled off and the Health Inspector’s been round. But someone nicked a spare key and some of the big kids pair off, boy and girl, and sneak into the empty room together. They don’t seem to mind the damp.

But catch me going anywhere with Funny-Face. Least of all Room 110.

Naomi and I had a laugh about it, like I said, but as I got nearer and nearer the school there suddenly didn’t seem anything to laugh at.

‘Cheer up, Elsa. It’s OK, really it is. Look, tell me a school joke.’

I swallowed. My mouth had suddenly gone dry. For once I didn’t really feel in a jokey mood. Still, a comedienne has to be funny no matter what she feels like.

‘OK, so there’s this geography teacher, right, and he’s asking all the kids where all these mountains are, and he says to the little thick one, “Where are the Andes?” and the little thick one blinks a bit and then pipes up, “At the end of my armies.”’

My own andies were cold and clenched tight. I felt like the little thick one all right.

I was right to feel edgy. I didn’t like this new school at all.

I didn’t get to sit next to Naomi in her class. I was put in the special class, which was a bit humiliating for a start. They said it was just for a little while, to see how things worked out. Hmm. Fine if they did work out. But what if they didn’t? Where do you go if you’re too thick even for the special class? Do they march you right back to the Infants?

I didn’t like my teacher in this strange class I got stuck in. I wanted a young man teacher like Jamie. Mrs Fisher was old and probably a woman (though she had a moustache above her upper lip).

She also had a hard voice that could rip right through you, though when I first got shoved in her class she stretched her thin lips in a smile and said in ever such sugary, sweetie tones that she was pleased to meet me, and oh what a pretty name Elsa is, and here was my notebook and have this nice sharp pencil, dearie, and why don’t you sit at the front where I can see you and write me a little story about yourself.

She was trying to kid on she was really interested in me, but she couldn’t fool me. When she took us all out in the playground to have P.E., she got talking to one of the other teachers. The other teacher saw me barging around doing batty things with a bean bag and asked Mrs Fisher who I was. Mrs Fisher didn’t even tell her my name. She just said: ‘Oh, that’s just one of the bed-and-breakfast children.’

I’m not even a she. I’m a That. Some sort of boring blob who doesn’t have a name, who doesn’t even have a sex.

Elsa the Blob. Hey, I quite like that idea. I could be a great big giant monster Blob and squelch around obliterating people. Mack is still first on my list but Mrs Fisher comes a close second.

I wrote her a little story about myself all right. I wrote that my real name is Elsarina and I’m a child star – actress, singer and comedienne – and I’ve been in lots of adverts on the telly and done panto and heaps of musicals, and I was actually currently starring in a travelling repertory performance of
Annie
– me playing Annie, of course. And I wrote that my mum and the rest of my family are all in showbiz too, part of the company, and
that’s
why we’re currently living in a hotel, because we travel around putting on our shows.

I tried to make it sound dead convincing. But when she read it she just gave me one of those smug old smiles.

‘This is certainly some story, dear,’ she said. ‘Rather a
fairy
story, I’m afraid.’

The other kids tittered, though they didn’t know what she was on about. She handed me my story back with all my spelling and punctuation mistakes underlined. There seemed to be more red ink on the page than pencil.

But I was not deterred. If I was meant to be thick then some of the kids in the class were as dense as drains, and gurgled into the bargain. So I tried out my Elsarina story on them, and they were all dead impressed, even the big tough guys. I gave them a few quick samples of my comic routine out in the playground and some of them laughed and then I treated them to a rendition of ‘The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow’. I forget what a powerful voice I’ve got. One or two of them ran for cover, but those that stayed seriously seemed to appreciate my performance.

School didn’t seem quite so bad at this stage. I had my little group of fans who happily drank in everything I told them. I got a bit carried away and started elaborating about my mum being this really beautiful actress and yet she could belt out a song and dance up a storm in this really classy cabaret act . . . and every so often I seemed to step outside myself and hear my own voice and I could see I was tempting fate telling all these lies. Well, they weren’t completely lies. Mum
did
use to be beautiful before she met up with Mack and had some more kids so that she lost her lovely figure and gained a few worry lines. She could
still
look beautiful if only she’d bother to slap on some make-up and do her hair properly. She really did use to sing and dance too. She’d sing along to all the records on the radio in a happy husky voice and she’d dance away, wiggling her hips and waggling her fingers. So Mum
could
sing and dance and if only she’d had the right breaks then I’m sure she really could be a star . . .

All the same, I shut up at lunchtime when I met Naomi. It was great to have my own special friend to wander round the playground with. School dinners weren’t so bad either. They weren’t a patch on my Mega-Feast at home with Pippa, but you were allowed to choose what you wanted, so I had a big plateful of pizza and chips, and I set all our lunch table laughing with a whole load of pizza jokes that aren’t fit for publication. Even my silly old chip joke went down well salted.

‘Hey, you lot, what are hot, greasy and romantic? Chips that pass in the night!’

The afternoon wasn’t so great because we had to divide up into groups to do all this dumb weighing and measuring. I could do that easy-peasy but I didn’t have much clue when it came to how you write it all down. I didn’t want to admit this so I made a lot of it up, and then of course Mrs Fisher came nosing around and when she saw all my calculations she sighed and scored a line right through them, so it was obvious to everyone I’d got it all wrong. She sat down with me and tried to explain how to do it. I felt stupid in front of all the others and so I couldn’t take it in. She had to go through the whole gubbins again, speaking e-v-e-r s-o s-l-o-w-l-y because she obviously thought she had a right moron on her hands. The other kids started to snigger by this stage, so when Mrs Fisher at last left us in peace I had to work hard to regain their respect. I started on about my stage clothes and my mum’s stage clothes and my little sister Pippa’s stage clothes, and once I’d started on Pippa I couldn’t stop, and soon I’d turned her into this adorable little child star with chubby cheeks and a head of curls and though she hadn’t started school yet she could sing and dance like a real little trooper.

I was certainly going a bit over the top here, because even Mack and Mum admit that Pippa is plain. Well, the poor kid can’t help it, being lumbered with Mack as a dad. She hasn’t got chubby cheeks, she hasn’t got curls (Mum did have a go with her curling tongs once when Pippa was going to a party but her hair ended up looking like it had exploded). She isn’t even little – she’s nearly as big as me though she’s half my age – and as for singing and dancing, well, Pippa can’t ever remember the words to any song, let alone the tune, and the only sort of dancing she can do is slam-dancing, though she doesn’t
mean
to barge straight into you.

But I built her up into such a little Baby Wonder that the kids in my class were drooling, and they all wanted to see the show with me and this mega-brilliant little brat and our glamorous movie-star mummy.

‘Sorry, folks, we’ve been sold out for weeks because the show’s so popular,’ I said breezily, though my heart was beating fit to bust.