Lily Alone Read online

  I muttered to myself as I drew, even though I could hear Baxter bashing and Bliss begging and Pixie yelling her head off. But then Bliss started crying too, high-pitched and panicking, and I couldn’t blot them out any more.

  ‘What is it?’ I said, stamping to the door and flinging it open.

  Bliss covered her face and made frantic gulping sounds, trying to stop crying. I looked at Baxter, who was red in the face.

  ‘What have you done to her?’ I demanded.

  ‘I haven’t done anything!’

  ‘Yes, you jolly well have!’

  ‘I haven’t even touched her,’ said Baxter, widening his eyes and jutting his chin, acting innocence.

  ‘Bliss, what did he say?’ I asked.

  Bliss shook her head. She’d never ever tell tales on Baxter, no matter what he did. Luckily Pixie blabbed like anything. She stopped her own howling to gasp, ‘He said you’d run away!’ and then carried on yelling.

  ‘Stop that silly noise! You’re giving us all a headache. What’s this rubbish about, Baxter? Of course I haven’t run away, silly. It was you who did that, not me.’

  ‘Yeah, but I said you could run away and not come back, like Mum. I said you were maybe running away right that minute because we couldn’t get in the bedroom door and you were ever so quiet and wouldn’t answer us. I said you might have done a runner out the window.’

  ‘Baxter, we’re on the first floor! If I jumped out the window I’d fall to my death!’

  ‘I know that, but I can’t help it if Bliss is silly enough to believe it,’ said Baxter.

  ‘Oh, you’re so horrible to poor Bliss. Come here, darling!’ I cradled Bliss in my arms. Her eyes were screwed shut but tears still seeped down her cheeks and her nose was running too. ‘Look at the state of you! Baxter, don’t you feel sorry?’

  ‘No, she’s silly,’ said Baxter.

  ‘I’m not silly,’ said Pixie, bouncing up, suddenly bored with crying.

  They chased each other all round the flat, squealing, while I sat Bliss on the edge of Mum’s bed and rocked her in my arms until she stopped gasping and heaving.

  ‘There now! Better?’

  Bliss sniffed and nodded, nuzzling against my chest.

  ‘You mustn’t let Baxter tease you so. He walks all over you,’ I said gently.

  ‘He didn’t walk on me,’ Bliss mumbled, taking me literally.

  ‘I know, but he just wants to wind you up. You mustn’t take him seriously. You know i wouldn’t jump out the window!’

  ‘Yes, but you could maybe creep out the door,’ Bliss whispered.

  ‘I’m not going to do that. I’m going to stay with you and Baxter and Pixie for ever. Well, if I do have to nip out for anything, I promise I’ll always always always come back.’

  We sat there, hugging hard, thinking about Mum.

  It rained again on Wednesday and I grew desperate, trying to think of some way to amuse the kids. I wished we could go to school. I longed to see Mr Abbott so that I could go on the gallery trip. I knew I’d be fine. I could lie and bluff until the cows came home. But I couldn’t leave the kids to their own devices all day long in the flat. Baxter would break everything and terrorize his sisters, Bliss would tremble into a jelly, and Pixie would scream her head off until Old Kath came knocking. Then she’d find out Mum had gone off and she’d tell and we’d be taken away to some dumping ground for neglected kids and never be allowed to see Mum again.

  We couldn’t go to school – but perhaps we could play school. I gave the kids a good breakfast: cornflakes and ice cream because we’d run out of milk. Then I told the kids to stay sitting at the kitchen table, while I dressed up in Mum’s navy skirt and grey top and her navy high heels.

  ‘Me wear heels too!’ said Pixie.

  ‘And me,’ said Bliss.

  ‘No, I’m wearing them because I’m your new teacher, Miss Green. You’re my pupils, all three of you. You’re coming to my special school.’

  ‘I thought you said we were on our holidays,’ said Baxter. ‘I don’t want to go to your stupid special school.’

  ‘Oh, you’ll like my school, I promise you, Baxter. Sit down, all of you. I’m going to make you your own little notebooks. Baxter, you can cut the paper with the sharp scissors because you’re such a careful big boy.’

  I was taking a serious risk. Baxter might well have run amok with the kitchen scissors and cut off Bliss’s thumb and Pixie’s curls, but he rose magnificently to the occasion. Under my instruction he carefully cut six sheets of my previous drawing pad into quarter strips. I gave Bliss a needle and thread and showed her how to sew the folded paper into little booklets. Pixie clamoured to help too, so I set her to sharpening pencils. She liked this job so much she sharpened them into stumps, but at least it kept her quiet and happy.

  ‘Right. Now, lesson time!’ I said, clapping my hands. ‘Good morning, class. You say “Good morning, Miss Green”.’

  ‘Good morning, Miss Green,’ they parroted back.

  ‘We’re going to have a spelling test first,’ I said.

  Baxter groaned.

  ‘I’m not doing boring old spelling,’ he said, flinging down his pencil.

  ‘This is exciting new spelling,’ I said. ‘The first word is . . . knickers!’

  They all giggled.

  ‘No giggling now. Write down “knickers”. Come along.’

  Neither Baxter nor Bliss knew about the weirdly silent ‘k’ in knickers, but they did their best to spell it out. Pixie couldn’t write anything yet, but she did a lot of scribble at the top of her page, joining in.

  I carried on, going through as many rude and silly words as I could think of – quite a long list. Baxter was terrible at spelling but even he could make an accurate stab at some of them, mostly because he’d seen them scribbled all over walls. When we were done I pretended to mark their papers and drew them each a big star at the bottom, even Pixie.

  ‘Now we’ll have a maths lesson,’ I said.

  ‘We don’t do proper maths yet,’ said Bliss.

  ‘You can do my maths,’ I said. ‘It’s special counting.’

  Mum had bought a bumper pack of Smarties tubes she’d hidden at the back of the cupboard. I opened them all up and tipped the brightly coloured sweets into our glasses.

  ‘Ooh, pretty,’ said Pixie, reaching for a handful.

  ‘No, you mustn’t eat them, Pixie. Not yet. This is a maths class. Don’t worry, I’ll help you. You can be teacher’s pet.’

  ‘Will you help me too?’ Bliss said.

  ‘You won’t need help, Bliss, I promise. Now, look at your glass of sweets. OK! Write down in your work book how many you think there are.’

  ‘But we don’t know,’ said Bliss.

  ‘You have to make a guess,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t matter if you get it wrong.’

  Bliss guessed forty. Baxter guessed a hundred. Pixie and I guessed sixty.

  ‘Now, here comes the good bit. Tip your glasses up and we’ll count how many Smarties we’ve really got.’

  ‘I can’t count that many,’ said Bliss.

  ‘We’ll all count together,’ I said. ‘We’ll do yours first, Bliss. Tip them out carefully on the table.’

  I helped Bliss start counting, moving her Smarties into neat little rows. We all counted out loud together. Pixie couldn’t manage accurate consecutive numbers and yelled, ‘One, two, three, twenty, fifty, a hundred,’ which was off-putting, but we persisted, doing two counts to make absolutely sure. Bliss had fifty-eight Smarties.

  ‘Now it’s your turn, Baxter,’ I said.

  He tipped his Smarties out so enthusiastically that half of them spilled off the table onto the floor. Baxter’s Smarties got a bit fluffy but he didn’t seem to mind. He counted hurriedly and not always accurately, so we had to keep starting again. Eventually we discovered he had sixty-two Smarties.

  ‘Hurray, hurray, I’ve got the most,’ he said.

  ‘Well, we don’t know for certain sure. Pixie and I haven