Welcome To Rosie Hopkins' Sweetshop Of Dreams by Jenny Colgan Read Free Book Online Page B

and headed into the tiny, immaculate kichen. Ornate old-fashioned tins were lined up on the white surfaces, labelled flour, sugar, tea. Unfortunately they were all empty. Next to the kettle – the old-fashioned kind, which stood on a gas hob – there was a half-empty box of loose tea, a kind of sieve and a flowery teapot covered in a knitted cosy. Rosie stared at it all for a while.
    Once she’d figured out how to light the gas, which flared up with a pop, she peered into the kitchen cupboards. They weren’t empty. But what she found surprised her. Instead of bread, pasta and cans of beans, there were packets and packets of sweets. Rainbow stars and jelly fish and cola bottles and Black Jacks; Minstrels and Maltesers, Highland Toffee and great slabs of Fry’s Chocolate Cream; soft little flying sauces and jelly flumps; twists of rhubarb and custards; Wham Bars and chocolate eclairs and wrappers Rosie couldn’t even identify. She opened up drawer after drawer, but it was the same story everywhere: jelly tots and jelly beans, lemon sherbets and fizz bombs, bubble gum and Parma violets.
    No wonder her great-aunt’s bones weren’t healing well, Rosie realised. This stuff was pure poison. But if it was too hard for her to lift a pan; too difficult to cook every day … She went back into the sitting room to announce that, starting tomorrow, she would do a shop and cook for them both, only to find her aunt snoring tiny baby snores, head nodding on to her chest, in front of the dying fire.
    ‘Lilian,’ she said, quietly at first, then more loudly. She suspected Lilian’s claims of not being deaf in the slightest were probably a little overstated, and she was used to working with the elderly. ‘Lilian. Lilian . Come on. Let’s get you to bed. We’ll eat better in the morning.’
    Leaning heavily on Rosie – she weighed about as much as a child – Lilian let herself be led into the neat, small bedroom at the back of the house. Once there, she pretended to be half asleep, and Rosie let her professional nursing training take over, as she efficiently found a nightgown and helped the old woman change and toilet. Pretending to be asleep meant Rosie didn’t get a thank you, but she decided on balance it might be best for both of them if it stayed that way. She looked at the tightly tucked white bedspread. It didn’t look like it had been pulled back for a while. There was nothing else for it. Carefully, Rosie bent down – bending from the knees, not the back, as her nurse manager must have yelled at her a million times – picked up the old lady and tucked her into bed, as cosy as a child. She placed the tea on the side table, mixed with cold water in case of scalding.
    Something came out of Lilian’s mouth that might have been a thank you, or just a sigh of relief, but the comfort and happiness of lying down in her own bed for the first time inweeks was simply too much: Lilian was overtaken, almost immediately, by the first good sleep she’d had in a long time.
    Rosie came back to the sitting room and looked around, counting the doors, and wondered where she was to go. Surely she wasn’t going to have to sleep in front of the fire in that tiny sitting room? Suddenly, even with the kettle cheerily whistling in the kitchen, she felt mind-achingly tired. She checked her phone; there was almost no signal here, and she had no messages. She texted Gerard quickly to say good night, but the message took a long time to get through and he didn’t reply. He was probably at the pub with his mates. She would have liked to say good night to him.
    Opening random cupboard doors, she found, finally, a pull-out wooden ladder, fixed to a trapdoor above. Was there something else up there? Surely Lilian would have mentioned it if she didn’t have a spare bed?
    The fire was dying down behind her and the dim lights made it hard to see her way. Rosie gave up looking for a light switch and tentatively felt her way up the ladder. At the top,