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
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
and I won all the quizzes and Gladiators
and I was in Blue Peter and I was in lots of films
and best of all I had my very own comedy show and it was a huge success.
Just when I’d got into this happy little routine at the Royal, Mum went and mucked it all up. She stopped drooping. She started dashing about. She said we weren’t going to be stuck in this crummy bed-and-breakfast dump a day longer. She went to the housing department and the social services and the DSS. She armed herself with Hank and Pippa and me, and whenever we were stuck too long in a queue she sent Pippa and me off sniping into enemy territory in quest of a toilet and she primed her Hank hand grenade and set him off howling.
Mum went into battle day after day, but it didn’t make any difference to where we lived. We had to stay put because there wasn’t anywhere else for us to go. But someone down the Social told Mum about this drop-in centre where the kids could play and you got cheap food, so Mum thought she’d give it a go.
I didn’t like the sound of it.
It wasn’t that bad actually, just this big room, half of it for the mums and half a crèche for the kids. It was a bit of a crush in the crèche and there was just this one woman going crackers trying to keep all the kids chirpy.
We soon got them sorted out.
But then someone from the Council came and said the centre had to be closed because there wasn’t any more money to fund it. Mum started moaning and creating, saying this drop-in centre was practically saving her life because we were stuck in a bed-and-breakfast hotel and it was no place for little kids. The Council Someone got a bit stammery because Mum can get ever so fierce when she feels like it, and he promised to put Hank’s name down on the day nursery waiting list.
‘Oh, very funny,’ said Mum. ‘He’ll be twenty-one before he gets a blooming place.’
‘This little girly here will be old enough for proper school soon,’ he said, timidly patting Pippa.
Then he turned to me.
Oh-oh. I should have seen it coming and scarpered.
‘Why isn’t this girl in school, hmm? Now, I can help you here. We’ll get her registered at the local school straightaway and she can start on Monday morning.’
Thanks a lot.
It had been the one ultra big bonus of life at the Oyal Htl. NO SCHOOL.
I knew Naomi and Funny-Face and most of the other kids at the hotel had to go. I’d hoped I’d not got noticed. I don’t like school. Well, my first school was OK. There was a smiley teacher and we could play with pink dough and we all got to sing these soppy old nursery rhymes. I could sing loudest and lon
gest.
But then we moved up to Scotland and I had to go to a new school and it was all different and I got teased because of the way I talk. Then we moved back down South and lived in the flats and that school was the sort where even the little kids get their heads held down the toilet. That was a pretty grim way of getting your hair washed. I didn’t go a bundle on that school. But then the next one, my last school, wasn’t so bad. That was when we were living in the lovely house and we were almost an ordinary family and even Mack didn’t smack. Well, not so much.
It was a bit depressing though. They gave me all these tests and stuff and I couldn’t do a lot of it. They thought I was thick. I thought I was thick. I had to go to these extra classes to help me with my reading and my writing and my sums. The other kids laughed at me.
I like it when people laugh at my jokes. But I can’t stand it when they laugh at me.
But I had this really great remedial teacher, Mr Jamieson, only everyone called him Jamie, even us kids. He was very gentle and he didn’t yell at you when you couldn’t do something. He worked with me and whenever I learnt the least little thing he smiled and stuck his thumb up and said I was doing really fine. So I felt fine and I learnt a lot more and then Jamie got me to do some other tests and it turned out I wasn’t thick at all. I was INTELLIGENT.
Jamie asked me about all the other schools and he said that it was no wonder I hadn’t been able to learn much, because I’d had so many changes. But now I could get stuck in and swoop through all the stuff I didn’t know and Jamie said I’d soon end up top of the class, not bottom. So there.
But then Mack lost his job and we lost our house and we ended up in the Oyal Htl, miles and miles and miles away from my old school.