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
’t counted ours yet,’ I said. ‘Come on, Pixie, tip ours out – carefully. That’s it. Now, you move them slowly, one by one, from this side of the table to the other and we’ll count them out together.’
Pixie and I had exactly sixty.
‘So we guessed right, Pixie!’
‘But I’ve got the most, so I’ve won!’ said Baxter. ‘I’m going to eat mine now.’
‘No, no, no, wait! This is a maths lesson. Now, let’s see. How can we work it so that we all have an equal share? How many Smarties should Baxter give to Bliss so that we’ve all got the same?’
‘I’m not giving my Smarties to Bliss – they’re all mine, from my glass!’
‘Just try putting these into Bliss’s pile,’ I said, moving a couple of his Smarties.
Baxter roared as if I was extracting two of his teeth.
‘That’s not fair, now she’ll have the most!’
‘Well, let’s count and see.’
So we counted all over again and of course we all had sixty. Well, Pixie must have been secretly helping herself, because we only had fifty-five now. She swore she hadn’t had any, but she had little bits of Smartie shell glittering on her teeth.
I allowed Baxter and Bliss to eat five too, and then we lined all our Smarties up by colour. Then we had to count how many were in the pink line, the blue, the yellow, the orange, the red and the brown. Then we tried a complicated swapping game, so that Baxter got all the orange Smarties, Bliss all the blue, and Pixie all the red. She kept licking hers so she could make lipstick for herself. All the Smarties were getting pretty sticky by this time so I gave in altogether and let them eat their sums.
Then I announced that it was playtime because I couldn’t think what to do with them next. Baxter drove his fork-lift truck all round the flat, Bliss put on Mum’s necklace and high heels and played at being Princess Bluebell, and Pixie went to the beauty salon and applied multi-coloured Smartie make-up all over her face.
I got my drawing pad and designed my own kitchen. I’d have a big shiny fridge full of posh meals for one and a long wooden table with six chairs. From Monday through to Saturday I’d sit at a different chair each time, and on Sundays I’d have my meals on a tray in my own bed, careful not to spill anything on my beautiful silky sheets.
I was a bit worried about the contents of our own fridge. We’d already run out of milk and I’d had to throw away some ham way past its sell-by date because it’d gone a bit green. We didn’t have any vegetables either, but that didn’t matter, because nobody liked them. We had some more fish fingers and a big pizza and eggs and bacon and oven chips, plus cake and biscuits and cornflakes in the cupboard, but that was all. It was only Wednesday. We’d have to start rationing things out a little. We’d had all the Smarties just now, so perhaps we could do without lunch.
I was willing to give it a try, and I certainly hadn’t had my fair share of Smarties, but the others started clamouring, whining that they were starving. The twins were used to eating lots at lunchtime because we all had free meals at school.
I heated up the big pizza, hoping that we might be able to save half of it for tea, but I couldn’t stop myself wolfing down my own share when it was there on my plate, and the others didn’t even try. We watched cartoons for a bit afterwards, but then the kids started getting fidgety and bored all over again.
‘I want to go out!’ Baxter moaned.
‘Look, it’s raining. We had this stupid argument yesterday. You’re not going out, especially if you’re just going to hang round those horrible bin sheds.’
I tried opening up my school again, organizing an art lesson, but they weren’t in the mood any more and started chucking my precious felt tips around.
‘I’m bored, I’m bored, I’m bored!’ Baxter yelled, right in my face.
‘I’m bored too!’ I shouted back. ‘All right, all right, we’ll all go out, even though it’s pouring.’
‘Can we go to the magic garden?’ said Bliss.
‘Yes, we’ll go there, but we’ll have to watch out for that couple with the dog, we don’t want them asking any more questions, do we?’
I knew it was mad to go out but there was a roaring in my head and I just couldn’t stand to be stuck in the flat with the kids any more. I made Baxter and Bliss put on their winter jackets. They didn’t have any raincoats, though Pixie had a silly little see-through plastic coat with a matching sou’wester hat. She liked the hat, pulling it down very low so she couldn’t see where she was going. She had welly boots too. They were really only baby size but she didn’t mind stuffing her feet in them. We only had our Tesco trainers, but I hoped they were waterproof.
I made them all quieten down in the hall, and then we crept out, leaving the door on the latch. A headscarfed lady was walking along the balcony but she just nodded at us timidly and let us pass.
The rain hit us full pelt when we were down on the forecourt, but after the first shock it didn’t seem to matter. We tilted our heads and drank the raindrops and then ran madly, waving our arms and twirling around like crazy people. Once we were out of the estate we ran pell-mell down all the streets and round the corner, knowing exactly where we were going now.
‘Ice cream!’ Pixie panted, hopping along in her stubby boots.
But the ice-cream man wasn’t there, probably thinking he wouldn’t get many customers in the pouring rain. When we went in the park gates it seemed pretty deserted, only ten or so cars in the car park. I looked around warily all the same, ready to do a runner if Arnie and Elizabeth loomed into view – and spotted a little playground behind a wooden fence.
‘Look! Let’s have a little play, there’s no one there.’
‘It’s a baby’s playground, not a big boy’s playground with a den,’ said Baxter.
‘Can’t we go to that magic garden?’ said Bliss.
‘We’ll let Pixie have a little play here first and then we’ll go to the magic garden,’ I said. I was starting to wonder if it was really such a great idea. Bliss and Pixie were shivering, their hair in rat’s-tails, and Baxter had splashed mud up to his kneecaps. They got in a worse state jumping about in the little playground and hurtling up and down the slide. Baxter actually started rolling on the ground, but I decided it wasn’t really doing any harm and at least he was using up some of his energy.
‘You’re like a little piglet playing in the mud, Baxter,’ I said.
Baxter made revolting grunty pig noises, and the others joined in. Pixie pulled her boots off, because they were starting to hurt her now. She announced she was ‘paddling’. I played ‘This little piggy went to market’ with her and she squealed with laughter. Bliss kicked off her trainers, wanting me to do it to her too. They were having such mad fun in the mud I felt tempted to kick my own shoes off and run around madly, just for the fun of it – but then another car drew up in the car park. There was a slamming of a door and then a lot of shouting. At us.
‘What on earth are you children doing?’ this posh woman shrieked. Her snooty-nosed elegant long-haired dog started barking enviously. It was plain she never let him have a lovely roll in the mud.
‘They’re just playing,’ I said.
‘For heaven’s sake, it’s pouring with rain!’ she declared, as if we somehow hadn’t noticed. ‘Look at the state of you!’
I was pretty muddy by this time and the three kids were covered all over, as if they were chocolate-coated. Baxter even had it in his bristly crewcut, so he looked like he had a mud helmet.
‘It’s only mud. It’ll wash off,’ I said.
‘Look at your jackets!’
Yes, I was beginning to worry about their coats.
‘Whatever will your mother say? Where is she?’
I gestured vaguely towards the toilets at the park gate.
‘Well, you go and find her then! I don’t think you should be allowed back in this lovely playground. You’ve made all the seats and slide muddy – look! Now run along at once.’
‘You can’t tell us what to
do,’ said Baxter, his chin jutting. ‘It’s not your park. It’s for everyone.’
‘It’s for people who love nature, not for little guttersnipes and vandals who want to spoil everything.’ She peered out at us from her silly checked rain-cap, looking like she really hated us.
So we hated her too. When Baxter bent to scoop up a handful of mud, I didn’t stop him. He straightened, took aim – and threw it at her. It landed right on top of her rain-cap, as if a flying cow had done a dollop on her. She looked so incredibly funny we all burst out laughing – we simply couldn’t help it.
She turned a hideous beetroot colour. I grabbed the kids quickly.
‘Run!’ I said.
So we ran for it. I picked up Pixie while Baxter and Bliss legged it for themselves. I hoped she’d give up when we ran towards the gate, but she stormed after us, her delicate-looking dog lolloping along, teeth bared.
‘Run faster!’ I panted.
We got to our corner, whizzed round it, and then I darted through a gate and hid behind someone’s hedge, Baxter and Bliss tumbling after me. We flung ourselves down on the muddy ground and lay still, trembling. I put my hand over Pixie’s mouth just in case she cried. We heard barking, hasty footsteps, angry shouting. I was sure the dog would sniff us out, but perhaps his long nose was too refined for smelling. We heard them hurtle past us. I waited a little, my heart pounding in my chest, and then dared peep through the hedge. They were much further up the road, veering from pavement to pavement, still looking for us. We had to get moving before they came back down.
‘Quick – and quietly!’ I whispered.
We scrambled through the hedge to the gate and ran back down, along the road, and then up the next street, which I was pretty sure led to our estate. Bliss and Baxter were running in their bare feet, but they’d had the wit to grab their trainers.
‘My welly boots!’ Pixie mumbled mournfully, waggling her bare toes.
‘We’ll have to go back for them tomorrow,’ I said. ‘Come on, let’s get home now, quick.’
We’d slowed down, trudging upwards, Bliss limping now and brushing her sodden coat anxiously, though Baxter still stamped along, happy to be a mud boy. We got to the top of the road – and found it joined up with the first road, and – oh no, oh no – there was the rain-cap woman and her dog coming panting into view.