Free Lily Alone by Jacqueline Wilson

Pixie helping after she dropped a plate, but Bliss was very obliging.
    â€˜Good girl, Bliss. You can take Headless to the playground.’
    Headless was Bliss’s favourite cuddly teddy. She slept with him in her arms but Mum never let her take him out because he looked so awful. He used to be called Whitey because he was a polar bear, but now he was a sickly yellow-grey. He really was headless. Baxter had tried to tug him out of Bliss’s grasp and his head had come right off. Mum had tried to sew it back on but she couldn’t stitch it tight enough. His head wobbled alarmingly and fell off again when we were crossing a road – and a car ran over it. Mum wanted to put the rest of Headless in the bin but Bliss wouldn’t hear of it. She loved him more than ever now he was mangled.
    â€˜I want my teddy,’ said Pixie.
    â€˜Yes, we can take all the teddies – we can have a teddy bears’ picnic!’
    I wrapped all the battered animals in Pixie’s old cot blanket and took the rest of the Frosties, a packet of Jammy Dodgers and a bottle of Coke from the kitchen. Pixie ran along beside me, wanting to add all sorts of weird stuff.
    â€˜Let’s take a chair for all the teddies to sit on! Let’s take the teapot so the mummy teddy can have tea! Let’s take the washing-up bowl so we can do the washing up! Oh, let’s take the washing-up squirty thing so we can make bubbles!’
    Bliss and Baxter could barely talk when they were Pixie’s age, they just mumbled together in their own twin language. I started to wish Pixie was a twin too – she was like a little woodpecker drilling into my brain. Still, it stopped me thinking too much. I was learning that the trick to stop feeling scared was to keep busy busy busy.
    So I carted the teddies and their picnic to the door and sent the kids off to the toilet to do a wee because I didn’t want to get all the way to the playground and then have to trail back almost immediately because of an urgent call of nature. I was actually pulling the front door shut behind us when I suddenly stiffened. The door key! I felt sick. The flats seemed to slip sideways, as if there was a sudden earthquake in south-west London.
    Mum had gone off with her handbag – and the keys were in a little pouch inside. Had she taken them with her? I rushed back inside, leaving Baxter and Bliss playing with the fork-lift truck, while Pixie started setting up a preliminary picnic on the doorstep. I looked on the coffee table, on the kitchen worktop, in all Mum’s drawers in the bedroom. I couldn’t find a spare key anywhere.
    Mikey still had a set of keys, I knew that, and hated the way he could burst in on us any time he wanted. But he was in Glasgow now, so couldn’t help out.
    What were we going to do? We couldn’t stay stuck inside the flat till the weekend. And what if Mum didn’t come back then?
    I knew you could get new keys made, but you had to have another set to copy. You could get a whole new lock with a set of new keys – folk were doing it all the time on our estate to keep people out – but that cost a lot of money. We didn’t have any money, apart from a few pennies to rattle in an old piggy bank.
    â€˜Come on , Lily, we want to go to the playground!’ Baxter shouted.
    â€˜The bears are hungry, They’re growling, grrr, grrr, grrr,’ said Pixie.
    â€˜I’m coming ,’ I said.
    I couldn’t keep them in. They’d be like wild bears themselves by lunchtime.
    I put the door on the latch and pulled it closed. I looked up and down the balcony to see if anyone was watching. If any kids saw they could get in they’d steal stuff and trash the flat. I stood biting my thumbnail. Still, we didn’t really have any stuff worth stealing. And the three kids had done a pretty good job of trashing the flat already, especially Baxter. We still had his purple crayon marks all over the walls