The Bed and Breakfast Star by Jacqueline Wilson Read Free Book Online Page B

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