The Tulip Touch

by Anne Fine

  I’m no good at ages. She was older than Mum, and younger than most people’s grannies.

  ‘We were wondering if you could tell us the way to the castle.’

  ‘Castle?’ The woman looked baffled. ‘There’s no castle round here.’

  ‘Url Castle,’ persisted Tulip.

  It sounded so silly, I nearly let out a snigger.

  ‘No. Not round here.’

  But neither of us moved. And, in the end, she let us in the hall. While she leafed through a stack of pamphlets from a drawer, we rolled our eyes and made sneering faces at one another about the pictures on her walls.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said at last, looking up. ‘I can find nothing here.’

  But Tulip didn’t move, so neither did I.

  ‘You’ll have to go now, I’m afraid,’ the woman said after a moment.

  I watched Tulip meet her gaze and willed her not to push her luck and get us into trouble. But then Tulip put on her false smile.

  ‘Thank you for looking, anyway.’

  Hastily, I slapped on my dad’s be-pleasant-to-the-guests face.

  ‘Yes. Thank you for looking.’

  She was still staring when we turned at the gate.

  ‘Goodbye,’ Tulip called out sweetly. ‘Thank you again.’

  The woman didn’t move. I wondered if somehow, by accident, Tulip had picked a particularly suspicious person, or if, at the next house she chose, there’d be somebody even more wary and watchful.

  ‘Your turn,’ said Tulip. She made me run up and down the street till my face was sticky and burning. Then I knocked on the door.

  ‘Excuse me for bothering you. But could I please come in and have a glass of water?’

  The elderly gentleman ran his eyes over my school uniform, as if to assure himself it wasn’t fake.

  ‘You needn’t come in. I’ll fetch some water. Just stay there.’

  There was an edge to his voice, and he glanced round twice as he hurried to the kitchen. I knew if I so much as stepped over the wooden strip dividing indoors from out, he’d shoot back, whether or not the glass was filled, and order me away.

  The tumbler he handed me was clouded and knobbly.

  ‘There you are.’

  He stood and waited. I took a couple of sips. Tulip had assured me that, if I could only get the person chatting, I’d be inside in a flash. So I said,

  ‘We have some glasses just like this at home.’

  ‘Do you?’ he said coldly.

  We don’t, of course. The glasses at the Palace are crystal clear. Always shining. Always sparkling.

  ‘Please hurry and drink it. I have things to do.’

  I saw Tulip watching me from over the hedge.

  ‘It’s hard to drink fast,’ I said hastily.’The problem’s with my throat. With swallowing. Last time I was in hospital, they thought they’d got rid of it. It’s very unusual, you see, in someone my age. So everyone was very disappointed when it came back.’

  And I was in, of course. I only stayed a few minutes, till I felt ‘a little less dizzy’.

  But I’d got in.

  6

  Gradually, over the months, Tulip set harder and harder tasks.

  ‘May I please use your telephone?’

  ‘Do you have a biscuit for my friend?’

  ‘Would you lend me a pencil and some paper?’

  It was astonishing, sometimes, just how easy it was. Some people didn’t even count, said Tulip.They were obviously so lonely that if we’d been wearing masks and carrying knives, they’d still probably have ushered us into their kitchens. Others were bewildered or suspicious, which made it that bit harder to tack on the extras Tulip insisted on, like taking advantage of the house owner’s back being turned to swivel a framed photo round to face the wall, or slide their scissors off the table and stab them, points down, in the soil of a plant pot.

  We never stayed too long, though. Just in case. And, even so, I sometimes got home late. Usually, no one noticed. (It’s not as if I walk through the main door and ask for my key at Reception.) But sometimes, slipping silently up the back stairs, I’d bump into Mum and see her glance curiously at her watch.

  ‘Miss the bus, darling?’

  ‘It was silly,’ I’d say. ‘Marcie and I got chatting, and then Mr Phillips wanted something carrying round to the laboratories, and…’

  My voice trailed off, even before the next set of doors could swallow it entirely. She never called me back to hear the end. I doubt if she was listening, anyway. Always, in a hotel, there are dozens of things to get done. She was forever busy. And often I was glad of that. After Tulip invented Wild Nights, it might be hours before my heart stopped thudding, and I stopped being certain, each time the phone rang, that it was the fire service or the police.

  I don’t know why Wild Nights came as such a surprise. Tulip had always had a passion for fire. Candles, matches, sparklers, bonfires – she loved them all. I can’t count the number of times Dad caught her behind the dustbins setting fire to paper just to watch it blaze and then flush with orange sprinkles as it crumpled to black at her feet. Give her some fancy wrapping paper, and she’d sit for hours tearing it into strips, and dropping them, one by one, into the fire in the back lounge.

  ‘Look! Look at this greeny-blue!’

  ‘Just like the peacocks’ fans.’

  Her face glowed with scorn in the firelight.

  ‘No, no. It’s much greener and bluer than that. These colours are magic.’

  We helped with every bonfire. Well, I helped. She simply poked holes through the sodden leaves, and watched the red caves deep inside them burn.

  ‘Come on, Tulip. I’ve fetched three whole bags while you’ve been standing there.’

  ‘Ssh! Don’t bother me.’

  The gardener used to nudge me. ‘Don’t go too close,’ he’d say. ‘Can’t you see Tulip’s worshipping her fire god?’

  It was a joke. But, honestly, you might have thought she was in church, the way she stayed so still, grave-faced and silent. Not like on Wild Nights. When we played that, some sort of unholy excitement ran through her every gesture, her every word. She’d push and pull me to the place she had in mind, while I begged not to go.

  ‘Oh, please, Tulip. Let’s just catch the bus straight home.’

  ‘You’re a coward and a lily-liver!’And sometimes worse. Once, a man passing by heard her swearing at me so foully, he stopped to stare.

  She made a face at him, and pushed me on.

  ‘We’ll get in trouble,’ I wailed.

  ‘So?’

  And I was quiet, because, for me, the notion of getting in trouble was so serious that I had to hide from her exactly how much it mattered. And she wouldn’t have understood, anyhow. Things were so different at her house. Tulip said very little, but I’d picked up the fact that she was always being punished for stupid things like knocking a fork off the table, or leaving a stiff tap dripping a tiny bit, or not coming quickly enough when Mr Pierce called her. Her dad would suddenly let fly, and keep at her till even her timid mother was forced to stop pretending she hadn’t noticed what was going on. She’d step in to try and stop him. Then Mr Pierce would turn his savage mood on her.

  ‘It makes no difference what I do,’Tulip explained.’He picks on me to start a fight with her.’

  So there was no stopping her by wailing about ‘trouble’. She simply grabbed handfuls of my coat, and pulled again.

  ‘Come on, Natalie! It’s all planned.’

  Sometimes I’d trawl around for an excuse.

  ‘No, not tonight. I promised Mum I’d help with next week’s menus.’

  Tipping her head to the side, she’d say sarcastically:

  ‘Does the itsy-bitsy baby want to go home to her mummy?’

  I hated it when she jeered at me.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘But only something small.’

  ‘A Sweetie Swipe?’

  ‘No. He watches us every minute, Tulip. He knows.’
r />   ‘All right, then. Exploding Greenhouse.’

  ‘No!’

  She made her last offer. ‘Dustbin fire! It’s only rubbish, anyway.’

  ‘All right. A dustbin fire. But only one.’

  ‘Only one.’

  ‘Promise, Tulip.’

  ‘Cross my heart.’

  Her eyes went wide with honest promising, just as, in half an hour’s time, they’d widen again from all the spitting orange magic conjured from some perfect stranger’s matching grey bins.

  ‘Tulip, you promised! One, you said.’

  ‘I meant one more, Stupid!’

  She was so horrid to me. Endlessly rude and disparaging. But, somehow, it didn’t hurt. I think I just treated her insults like bad weather, keeping my head down, and pressing on with my self-appointed task of keeping her out of trouble. It was I who prised the package she was about to send to Mrs Bodell out of her hand.

  ‘You can’t post that!’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You’re not allowed to put stuff like that in a letter box.’

  I hurled it as far as it would go into the road, and watched with satisfaction as a car rolled over it.

  ‘Good job I didn’t bother with a stamp,’ she said, unruffled.

  In the same way, I confiscated her rude Christmas cards, one by one, as she finished them.

  ‘Tulip, it’s such a waste. You spend ages doing all this brilliant lettering, and I have to rip them into pieces and stuff them in the bin.’

  ‘Nobody makes you.’

  And it was true. Nobody made me. But still, somehow, I’d come to believe that keeping Tulip out of the trouble she spent her whole life fomenting was time well spent. And maybe it was, for me. It kept me close to her, and I needed Tulip. While I trailed round quietly, doing what I was told and being no trouble, Tulip lived my secret life. While teachers watched me sitting quietly at my desk, I was really outside on the hill with Tulip, openly watching the rest of us file in and out of classes. When I answered the Palace guests’ boring questions over and over again, always polite, always smiling, I was secretly swearing as foully as she did. And when Mum didn’t notice me as she swept past, looking for Julius, I was in silent rages that would put Tulip to shame.

  I was as bad as she was, and the clever thing was, nobody even noticed. Even Dad was fooled.

  ‘You’re looking pale. Are you sure that you’re sleeping properly?’

  ‘I’m all right.’

  He turned me round to the light.

  ‘But you’ve got shadows underneath your eyes.’

  ‘I’ve been doing a lot of homework.’

  ‘Tell me another!’ he scoffed. But you could tell that he believed me. And why not? It was a whole lot easier, and took less time, than trying to find out the truth.

  7

  Spring came, and Tulip’s moods got worse and worse. She swung doors in my face, and kicked a huge dent in my cloakroom locker, and was so hateful that even I took to steering clear of her for days on end. Then I’d walk in the girls’ lavatories to find her scratching foul words on the wall over the sinks. And just as if we’d never been apart, I’d be back to trying to stop her.

  ‘Tulip, they’ve only just finished painting in here. What’s the point of making it look horrible straight away?’

  She gouged the plaster with her locker key.

  ‘It’s their own fault! They shouldn’t have chosen such a vile colour!’

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘It’s stupid, that’s what. Pink! Pink for nice little girlies!’

  ‘It’s better than that old green.’

  ‘I liked that green.’

  ‘You said you didn’t. You were always going on about it.’

  Plaster sprayed from the wall.

  ‘Oh, shut up, Natalie!’

  She’d never had any patience, but now it seemed everything got under her skin. She was angry with everyone. And it didn’t make any difference whether or not they were cross with her first. Almost as soon as anyone spoke to her, on went that little mask of frozen rage.

  And when she wasn’t angry, she was spiteful.

  ‘That’s rubbish, what you’re drawing, Natalie.’

  I kept my eyes on my paper. Apart from Games, when we were often ordered into separate teams, Art was the only lesson we had together now.

  ‘At least I don’t draw the same thing every week.’

  And it was true. Give Tulip a piece of paper, and all she’d ever draw were children with huge, forlorn eyes copied from soppy greetings cards she’d lifted from the shop beyond the bus stop.

  She moved her hand across to hide some now, because Mrs Minniver was coming our way.

  ‘Have you started yet, Tulip?’

  ‘I was just thinking first.’

  Mrs Minniver inspected her watch.

  ‘You’ve got exactly half an hour. By the time that bell rings, I want to see a proper painting. None of your usual little self-pitying cherubs up in one corner. Every inch of that paper must be covered. Now get on with it.’

  Tulip turned to me sourly.

  ‘So what is it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What we’re supposed to be doing!’

  ‘Self-portrait,’ I said coldly.

  ‘Really?’

  It seemed quite genuinely to be news to her. And, peaceably enough, she lifted her brush and pulled my tray of paints nearer her easel than mine, to start with her careless brush stabbings and pokings.

  ‘Aren’t you going to draw yourself first?’

  ‘I know what I look like.’

  ‘But you’ll go over the edges.’

  ‘I’m not doing it with edges.’

  I leaned across to see. She tugged her easel round, away from me. I went back to my own work. We sulked in silence for a little while. Well, I sulked. I think she just became absorbed in her painting. That horrid humming that she shared with her mother got on my nerves, but I didn’t argue about it. I just kept hard at work, fretting about the face in my painting – too long, then too short, then too rubbed out and messy – till Kirstin strolled over to borrow a rubber and complain.

  ‘That stupid Jeremy she’s put me with! He’s lost two of my rubbers already!’

  ‘Well, look what I’ve got,’ Tulip said contemptuously.

  I looked up. She was pointing at me.

  And did I rise up and hit her? Did I slap her face? Send her wobbly easel flying and pour the scummy brush water over her head?

  No. I just said feebly, ‘Oh, do shut up, Tulip!’ and kept on with my work.

  But I did hate her, then. I hated her so much that I could hardly wait for the half hour to disappear. I’d seen her fierce rubbings and scrubbings, her brutal daubs. Most people would take more care hurling rubbish in their dustbins. I’d seen her splayed brush come back again and again to the black, and what was left of the purple, and to the fiery red she’d turned to ditchwater with her careless rinsing. Suddenly I couldn’t wait to see what Mrs Minniver made of Tulip’s self-portrait.

  The bell rang. She appeared in front of us.

  ‘Finished?’

  Tulip shrugged, totally indifferent, and tore her sheet of paper from the easel. Mrs Minniver took it from her. But though her face darkened as she inspected the painting, something about it must have given her pause, because she pinned it back on the easel and stepped back to look at it from further away.

  And I stopped pretending that I wasn’t watching, and looked at it too. It was the strangest thing. The fury and contempt of Tulip’s brush work had turned to whirlpools of violence on the paper. Everything about it was dark and furious, and every inch of it seemed to suck you in and swirl you round, making you feel dizzy and anxious. And everywhere you looked, your eyes were drawn back, over and over, to the centre, where, out of the blackness, two huge forlorn eyes stared out as usual, half-begging, half-accusing.

  I waited for the explosion. Would it be ‘wasting paper’ or ‘dumb insolence’? Or, �
��I warned you, Tulip. No more self-pitying little staring round eyes’?

  But Mrs Minniver just said,

  ‘Look at it. Now that you’ve finished, at least take a look,’

  Putting her hands on Tulip’s shoulders, she turned her to face the easel. Tulip’s eyes went cold and hard. Mrs Minniver waited. But when it became obvious that Tulip wasn’t going to say a word, she simply sighed.

  ‘Well, then. Off you go,’ she said gently.

  Tulip reached out to rip the painting off the easel, but Mrs Minniver put out a hand.

  ‘No. I’ll keep this.’

  Tulip stalked off. I stayed behind to pack her things along with mine, and ask,

  ‘Will she get into trouble?’

  Still staring distractedly at the painting, Mrs Minniver repeated,

  ‘Trouble?’

  ‘For making that huge mess,’ I insisted.’And doing more big round sad eyes, even though you told her that was exactly what she mustn’t do.’

  I don’t know what I expected. But certainly not a look of such contempt.

  I felt so frustrated and betrayed. I could practically feel myself screaming inside. Why does Tulip always get away with it? Why does nobody ever stop her? Why? Why? Why?

  But the best I could manage to Mrs Minniver was a sullen:

  ‘It was supposed to be a self-portrait. That’s what you said. A self-portrait. Nothing else!’

  I waited for her to tell me off. ‘Disloyalty to a friend’. ‘Making trouble’. But she just turned back to the painting.

  ‘Oh, Natalie,’ she said, as gently as she’d spoken to Tulip. ‘Look at it. Just look at it.’

  And this time it was there for me. My anger and frustration blew away like so much litter. I stood beside Mrs Minniver, staring at Tulip’s self-portrait, and this time all that I could think was what I finally managed to whisper.

  ‘Oh, Mrs Minniver! I’m just so glad that I’m not her.’

  8

  So was it pity drew me back? Time and again, I’d almost gather up the strength to break away, and something would happen to stop me in my tracks. Like the day we heard the news about Muriel Brackenbury.

  ‘Just think! We know somebody whose sister has drowned!’

  ‘Tulip, stop saying that.’