Lily Alone Read online

  I suppose what I really need is a good pair of wings. When I was little I used to feel my back and wonder if my sharp shoulder blades might be wings just starting to grow. I still imagined them sometimes, great white feathers tucked up tight like a fan, neat against my back. I’d pretend I could spread them any time I wanted and fly away. Sometimes I wouldn’t walk straight home from school to our first-floor flat. I’d puff my way up all the steps to the top balcony and stand there clutching the rusty rail, peering out, pretending I could just let go and soar over the treetops of the huge park.

  Peter Pan and Wendy and John and Michael flew without benefit of wings as far as I could remember. I wanted to check out their flying technique, so I was firm with Baxter and Bliss about my choice of DVD. Pixie was a pushover. She had inherited Bliss’s old Tinker Bell costume and loved wearing it. She ran off to get changed. It took quite a while as she wasn’t very good at dressing herself, usually ending up with a leg in a sleeve or arms through the neck hole. The costume was pretty sticky because she’d spilled juice all down it the last time she’d worn it, but she didn’t seem to care. I fixed her a fresh bottle to keep her quiet while she was watching, and I filled a big bowl with cornflakes.

  ‘This is our popcorn, like we’re really at the cinema,’ I said, switching the DVD on.

  I settled myself in the middle of the sofa with Baxter in the corner on one side of me, where he couldn’t torment the girls. I let him hold the cornflake bowl to make him feel special. I settled Bliss and her teddy in the other corner and squeezed Pixie in beside her, cuddling her close. They all fidgeted and argued and spilled cornflakes for the first ten minutes but then they quietened down and watched properly. It was as if the sofa itself had spread little leathery wings and flown us straight to Neverland.

  We didn’t budge until the cast list started rolling.

  ‘Again!’ Pixie begged. ‘Put it on again.’

  ‘Don’t be daft, it’s way past your bedtime.’ I looked at the clock. ‘Quick, it’s gone closing time at the Fox. Mum will be back in a minute and if she finds us all up she’ll be really mad. Come on, who can get into bed first?’

  Pixie toddled off to her little cot all by herself. It was much too small for her now but she screamed if we tried to make her sleep on the mattress with us. She scrambled over the bars and snuggled up, falling asleep as soon as her head hit her pillow. She was still wearing her Tinker Bell costume, with lipstick scribble all over her face, but I couldn’t be bothered to wash and change her.

  Baxter was much more of a challenge.

  ‘Come on, Baxter, get into bed!’

  He squared up to me, hands on his hips.

  ‘Who’s telling me to get into bed? You can’t boss me around. You’re not my mum,’ he shouted.

  He was only clowning around. I always tell him what to do, far more than Mum, but he just wanted to be difficult. I had to tip him over and pull his jeans off his waving legs and then stuff him inside his duvet. He immediately got up again, duvet pulled right over his head.

  ‘Baxter! Lie down!’

  ‘I’m not Baxter. I’m the Duvet Monster and I’m going to smother you,’ Baxter growled, staggering about the bedroom.

  ‘Don’t be the monster, I hate that,’ Bliss said.

  She seemed the easiest of the lot. She got into her nightie and lay down on our mattress cuddled up – but long after Baxter was sound asleep she was still awake, snuffling into a teddy tummy. I reached out and put my arm round her.

  ‘Bliss? Go to sleep,’ I whispered.

  ‘I can’t. Not till Mum comes back.’

  ‘She’ll be back any minute,’ I said. I wasn’t sure where she could have got to. It was definitely past closing time at the Fox. She’d said she’d only have a couple of drinks. I hadn’t necessarily believed that – but she’d promised to be back before midnight.

  I lay with my arm round Bliss, my legs twined round Baxter’s twitchy little feet, listening. I heard guys yelling and messing about down on the forecourt and then a series of thumps as they chucked beer cans about. They sounded like young lads. Mum wouldn’t be with them. Then I heard a couple having a screaming row and I tensed up, but the woman’s voice was too low and hoarse to be Mum’s. I listened to them swearing at each other and then the sound of a blow. Bliss tensed up.

  ‘Shh, it’s all right. They’ll go home now,’ I said.

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘She’ll be back soon. I bet she’s gone back to one of her friends’ flats for another drink. But don’t worry, she’ll be fine.’

  ‘Back by midnight?’ Bliss mumbled.

  ‘Yes, definitely,’ I said, though I was pretty sure it was gone midnight already.

  When Bliss went to sleep at last I wriggled cautiously off the mattress and padded into the kitchen. I flicked the light on. The clock showed it was ten to one. I shivered, wrapping my arms round myself. She’d promised to be back by midnight.

  A horrible series of images flickered in my head. I saw Mum screaming in a car, a man hurting her; Mum weeping and bleeding in a gutter; Mum lying horribly still, her eyes open, her face blank. I smacked my forehead, trying to make the images go away.

  I poured myself a glass of water and sipped it slowly, but I’d started to shiver and the glass clinked uncomfortably against my teeth.

  ‘Come home, Mum,’ I whispered.

  I sat down at the kitchen table and picked at the edge until my nail was sore. My feet were numb with cold so I got up and walked round and round the table. It was nearly summer – Mum had gone out without a jacket – yet I felt deathly cold. I wanted to go back to bed and warm myself up, but I didn’t want to wake Bliss or Baxter. I wished I wasn’t the oldest. I wanted to be the littlest, like Pixie, with people telling me what to do. That was the scary thing. I didn’t know what to do if Mum didn’t ever come back.

  I smacked my head again, trying hard not to think it. I wondered if I should put on some clothes and go out looking for Mum – but if the kids woke up and I wasn’t there either, they’d be terrified. And I was terrified at the thought of setting out round the estate in the middle of the night. It wasn’t just the thought of all the drunks and smackheads and bad lads. It was the dark itself. The thought of starting out along the dark balcony and feeling my way down the pitch-black stairwell made me shiver even more.

  I went into the living room and lay on the sofa, my head on Mum’s cushion. I could very faintly smell her musky perfume. I nuzzled into the cushion like Bliss with her teddy. The hard edges of the fairy-tale book were digging into my chest. I fingered the pages, thinking of all the weird people trapped inside: Cinderella with her pink and blue and white ball-gowns folded flat; Snow White crushed inside her glass coffin; the Three Bears flattened into floor rugs.

  I remembered when I was little and there was just Mum and me. She read me those stories then, over and over. She showed me the label inside the front cover.

  To Lily Green, First Prize for Reading, Writing and Spelling.

  I couldn’t read myself then, let alone write or spell, but I knew the shape of an L, the dot of an i, the curly tail of a y.

  ‘It says Lily. That’s my name! Is it my book, Mum?’ I asked.

  ‘It was my nan’s book. I loved my nan, much more than my mum, your nan. She used to read me stories from this book when I went to visit her. This is her school prize, see. She was ever so bright, my nan. I named you after her, Lily, and you’re going to be ever so bright too.’

  I wasn’t that bright. I couldn’t figure out how this Lily could be young enough to go to school and old enough to be a nan, but I liked the sound of her and I loved her story book. I wanted to go and visit her, but Mum shook her head sadly and said she was dead. And now my nan was dead too. She got ill just after the twins were born.

  ‘So we’re all on our ownio now,’ Mum said.

  We must actually have a set of other nans, the mothers of our dads, but we’d never met them either. Mum was right, we were on our own . . . so what w