The Tulip Touch

by Anne Fine

  ‘But we could sell our stories to the paper. We could be photographed with our arms around Janet.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Janet doesn’t even like us.’

  Tulip’s eyes shone.

  ‘I bet she’s so upset. She won’t be able to stop thinking about it.’

  I was disgusted with her. Why was she so nosy about other people’s feelings? Did she have none of her own, that she should be so obsessed about someone else’s? And she didn’t even feel sorry for Janet, that was obvious. She had the same look on her face as when we gave that horrible box to Jamie, and when she made Marcie cry by lying to her that she’d failed her maths. She just liked to prod and invent, and twist and poke,

  to watch people go ugly with fright, or burst into tears of misery.

  Now she was rolling Muriel’s name round and round.

  ‘Brackenbury. Brackenbury. It’s odd, isn’t it? Because, I expect, when she was found, she was near bracken. And near berries.’

  ‘If you don’t stop talking about it, I’m catching the next bus home.’

  She didn’t even hear me.

  ‘Drowned! Think of it. To get so close to the bank, and still go under. Swallowing all that water. I expect Janet will keep waking up imagining it now. I bet she will. After all, it’s her sister.’

  ‘Don’t, Tulip! It’s horrible,’

  ‘Yes, isn’t it?’

  I stared at her. She thought I meant ‘horrible to drown’, not ‘horrible to say’. And settling herself on the wall by the bus stop, she just went on and on.

  ‘It must feel awful, opening your mouth for air, and more and more water rushing in instead. I expect you swallow so much that, when they find you, you’re all swollen up. Not like with kittens. I bet a person must keep trying, over and over, to –’

  But I’d stopped listening. Everything round us – the street, the cars, the people – all bleached away to invisible. And I was back to eight years old, holding my father’s hand on a baking afternoon, and seeing Tulip for the very first time, still as a stone in that cornfield.

  Not yet a friend of hers. Not yet sucked in. And not in the slightest scared of her.

  ‘You drowned that kitten, didn’t you?’

  She broke off her excited ramblings.

  ‘Which kitten?’

  ‘The one you were holding on the day we met. I always thought it was your dad who got rid of them. But it was you.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t.’

  She said it quite firmly, though it wasn’t true. But I was used to that. And suddenly I understood how Tulip could lie and lie, and never see how ridiculous her untruths looked to other people. In her eyes, it was the world that was wrong. If the world had only been right, if things had only fallen out the way they should, then she would never have had to lie, or steal, or be spiteful. If the world had only been right, she’d be a nice and good person – the girl she was inside, before it all went wrong, and she got spoiled all along with it.

  ‘It was you,’ I persisted.

  ‘So what if it was?’

  ‘Nothing.’ I kept my voice easy, even bright. ‘I was just wondering, that’s all.’

  ‘Wondering what?’

  ‘What it was like.’

  She turned to look at me. I forced myself not to show even a flicker of feeling. I closed my mind to her. Slam! Clang! Shutters down! I wasn’t going to play The Tulip Touch right now.

  ‘It’s none of your business.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘It’s just that I never realized. And you never said.’

  She gave the flippant playground retort.

  ‘You never asked.’

  I felt like screaming at her, ‘Why should I ask, Tulip? Whoever would have even thought?’ But, instead, I walked my fingers steadily along the wall, and tore off a strip of moss.

  ‘Did it take long?’ I asked, casually pulling the shreds apart.

  Can you sense truth coming? Oh, I think you can.

  ‘That’s why I always had to do it myself,’ she said, firm, proud, self-righteous, even. ‘So it would take less time. They had to be done, you see, or we’d be overrun’ I knew it was her father’s word from the way that she said it. ‘Overrun. But Dad wouldn’t take the time. He’d just shove them in a crock of water and slam the lid, and you could hear them scrabbling and pushing at the top. And it took forever.’

  I bet it did. I could hear it as I sat listening. The mewings and scratchings. The lid lifting like potatoes on the boil. The driblets of water down the side of the crock that only let in more air to prolong the struggle.

  All her cocky self-confidence had drained away. She said so sadly:

  ‘It took hours and hours.’

  I passed her half my moss. It sat on her skirt in a crumbling lump, but she didn’t push it off.

  ‘I did try to stop him. Once I even went at him with a fork. But he just laughed, and called me “another little cat who could do with a ducking”. He didn’t even bother to wallop me.’ (Even after all this time, she sounded a little surprised.) ‘He just threw me out of the house, and rammed home the bolt. Then he sat with his feet on the table, reading the paper, and I had to watch through the window. It took hours and hours.’

  Her spongy bitten fingertips scrabbled for comfort in the moss.

  ‘Not hours,’ I consoled her. ‘Kittens wouldn’t be strong enough. Honestly. Not hours.’

  ‘Long enough,’ she said. ‘So ever since then I’ve always done it myself. Because it’s quicker. And once they’re under, I never let them up again.’

  I put my arm around her. No wonder she was so interested in Muriel Brackenbury’s horrid death. If someone else had known the horrors of all those thrashings and struggles, and beads of air glistening to the surface, maybe she wasn’t so alone.

  I slid off the wall. Taking her hands in mine, I tugged at her gently.

  ‘Come along, Tulip. Time to go home.’

  Then, one day, I heard the office staff discussing her.

  ‘What has that child done with her hair?’

  ‘Which?’

  ‘Tulip Pierce.’

  I rooted deeper in the chest of lost property, hiding my face.

  ‘Oh, Tulip.’

  They stared out of the window in silence for a while. Then one of them said,

  ‘She is a strange one, that’s for sure.’

  Her colleague sniffed.

  ‘I can’t be doing with her. Bold and sassy if you speak to her. But the minute she wants something from you, she turns into Miss Cute & Mincing.’

  ‘Have you seen her fingernails? They’re bitten raw.’

  ‘I can’t think what she’s done to her hair. It looks as if someone’s been at it with the garden shears.’

  The phone began ringing, and the nearest one turned from the window.

  ‘My sister knows the mother,’ she remarked. ‘Just through her dealings with the farm.’ She reached out to press the flashing red button. ‘She says she always gets the feeling that one day she might start screaming and never stop.’

  I wondered who she meant. Tulip’s mother? Or Tulip? And was this what the painting was about? Was this why Mrs Minniver, and everyone else, treated Tulip as if she were as dangerous as one of her own dustbin blazes?

  Poke a fire, and it flares more fiercely. Everyone knows that.

  The only safe thing is to stay away.

  I think I almost came to the decision then. And maybe a dozen other times when I stepped out in early morning air, and knew I couldn’t face her. On those days, I’d skip school myself, and spend the hours hiding in the Palace’s abandoned laundry, where my footfalls raised puffs of dust, and I had to sit uncomfortably amid tubs and basins, in the shadow of a giant old mangle, watching a frill of light creep under the door.

  At four o’clock, I’d make my way, out of sight, around the Palace to the bus stop. After a day in oily gloom, the great bars of sunlight sweeping so cleanly over the fields made me feel tearful and giddy.

 
I’d make sure Tulip was nowhere in sight.

  Then I’d walk home, as usual.

  9

  Tulip wore black until it was taken from her.

  ‘The colour for sweaters in this school is blue,’

  ‘But I’m wearing black for Muriel.’

  ‘Muriel?’

  ‘Muriel Brackenbury.’

  You could tell that the teachers were disgusted. ‘Self-indulgence stretched into morbidity,’ said Mrs Powell. Mr Hapsley gave her a detention each time he saw her. And as soon as Miss Fowler was told, she stormed down the stairs from her office.

  ‘Take off that pullover. It’s confiscated.’

  ‘But I don’t have another one with me.’

  ‘That’s your problem, Tulip. Maybe tomorrow you’ll wear proper uniform.’

  I found her waiting at the bus stop, shivering.

  ‘Why didn’t you go straight home?’

  ‘I can’t. I daren’t. She said she’d be phoning my father.’

  So that’s how I came to go on my last Wild Night. This time, it was a shed a mile out of town. I don’t know where she’d got the paraffin. Maybe she’d sneaked it from home. I can’t believe the people who owned that chicken farm were stupid enough to leave three whisky bottles filled with paraffin in a ditch on their own land.

  ‘Tulip –’

  ‘Ssh! If you can’t help, at least don’t spoil things by fussing.’

  ‘Are you quite sure the shed’s empty?’

  ‘You know it’s empty. We’ve walked through it twice. Now pass me the last bottle.’

  The shed went up like nothing I’ve ever seen. Huge flames licked the sky, and smoke billowed up like a giant black genie freed from a bottle after thousands of years. The fire roared and crackled. Rafters collapsed like straws. And the dancing sparks spat and hissed as, one by one, the empty racks seethed and frizzled.

  But this time it was Tulip tugging at my arm.

  ‘Natalie! Natalie!’

  I shook her off. The only thing I wanted was to stand and watch this great orange dragon leap higher and higher.

  ‘Natalie! Quick, or we’ll get caught! The police always suspect everyone standing and watching!’

  But, though she pulled at me, I wouldn’t budge. Why go to all the trouble to raise a fire, and then not stay and watch? All round that chicken farm were hedges and hawthorn trees and clumps of bushes. If she’d been here before to stuff her bottles of paraffin into the ditch, surely she could have found some place we could have hidden. Why take so many risks, then walk away from all the glorious, spell-binding magic you’ve created? Why miss the fizzing, crackling glory of something so plain and drab exploding into fireballs and shooting stars?

  ‘Oh, please, Natalie! Please!’

  She tugged so hard at me, I had to go. But as I stumbled after her, still looking back, I knew I was bewitched. The Tulip Touch had really got me this time. I knew I’d dream of fires for ever, and wake in the middle of my dull, dark nights to see the flames she might have lit in me still shooting up to scorch the sky. I’d see whole streets, entire cities, burning. I’d switch on my bedside light and, for a while, the old familiar pictures on the walls and clothes on the chair might blot out the smouldering visions. But I’d be sure Tulip was lying waiting in some bleak bedroom. And I’d know the minute my room was dark again, she’d pick up where she left off, and send more of her own imaginings into my boring dreams, to set them ablaze with her own growing frenzies.

  ‘Natalie? Natalie! Are you all right?’

  I heard the whine of a siren. Was it in my head, or coming from across the field?

  ‘Down here. Quick!’

  She pushed my head below the level of the ditch, and stayed close behind me as we crept along.

  ‘See that gap? That one!’

  I crawled through the tiny hole in the hedge. She followed, and we lay on our backs, panting. I still felt dizzy and strange. And then, suddenly, out of the whirl of confusion came the first inklings of other, darker, more destructive visions.

  And slowly, slowly, I came to my full senses at last.

  Is it like this for everyone? Is it unusual to have your life bowling along steadily in one direction, and then, in a flash, change utterly? Change everything. For those were the moments when our friendship died. It’s as easy as that to pin down. Oh, I let her rattle on, lifting her head to look at the fire engines, working out which way we ought to go back to the bus stop if we weren’t to be noticed, talking excitedly about how fast that old wood flared up and burned. But all the time I was thinking, people hide in sheds. I’d spent whole days in the abandoned laundry. If someone I didn’t know had walked through, I would have held my breath in the shadow of the huge, rusting mangle. And in the tension of the moment, even someone with hearing as good as mine might not have noticed the soft suspicious splatter of liquid on old trampled straw.

  And what about Julius? He had a dozen dens. So did his friends. They hid for hours in outhouses so frail and rotten that, under the ivy that held them together, they would flare up in a moment.

  Was Tulip mad as well as bad?

  I clambered to my feet, and held out my hand as usual to pull her up.

  ‘Come on, Tulip. Time to go home.’

  On the bus, she was her old, cocky self, flirting with the driver and slyly tipping people’s shopping bags over with her feet.

  Halfway back, she got restless.

  ‘Want to play All the Grey People?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. And I did a good job of pretending all the way. But when you’ve just won the hardest game of all, the others lose their colour. And so my heart wasn’t in it, and it fell flat.

  From the bus stop, we walked together to the bridge.

  ‘Well,’ I said cheerfully. ‘See you tomorrow.’

  ‘Why don’t I come as far as the Palace?’

  I gave her a long look. She really hadn’t realized I was out of it. She didn’t know that she could never recast the spell.

  ‘If you like,’ I said.

  We strolled arm in arm up the drive. I felt quite calm. I wasn’t worried in the least. And that, in itself, felt strange. It seemed that, from the day we’d met, I’d been in thrall to Tulip. Everything I’d said, everything I’d done, had her in mind. Like a tongue to a wobbly tooth, my every thought had come straight back to her. I had become a shadow to my parents. I’d floated out of reach of Julius. I had no friends. I hadn’t been there for anyone, except for Tulip.

  And it was over. All over.

  I let her walk with me as far as the last bend in the drive. Then, as the Palace came in view, I broke away, and dropping my school bag, I ran as fast as I could across the rose garden, under the archway, and down the narrow twisty path snaked over with tree roots.

  I heard her calling.’Natalie! Natalie!’ But I didn’t answer. I just ran. Stay away from fire. And when I’d reached the middle of the thicket, I came off the path and dived into the bracken.

  I crawled and crawled. While she was thrashing between the trees, I’d make a little progress. Then when she was perfectly still, cunningly waiting, I didn’t move at all.

  ‘Natalie! Natalie!’

  She was beating so fiercely at the undergrowth with a stick that I got a little further under the cover of her noise. And then even further, till I had reached our old mud slide. And down I went, down, down, sideways like a rolling log, faster and faster, until I came to rest in the very deepest bracken.

  And there I lay, grinning up at the fronds that had closed over my head. She’d never find me now. I was safe in the green dark of jungle, of deep, deep, sunless pools. I lay on my back and listened as she called.

  ‘Natalie! Natalie! Come out, stupid! It’s raining!’

  The first few drops pattered through the whispering fronds.The dripping turned into trickles, but I didn’t move. Let her call. Let her search for me.

  Let her give up and go home.

  A soft bead of rain ran over my forehead and in my ear,
and I recalled Miss Golightly, years before, explaining a picture in Assembly.

  ‘He’s pouring the water over the baby’s head to put her on the side of light.’

  Tulip crashed nearer, but my heart stayed steady.

  ‘Go away,’ I willed her silently, playing The Tulip Touch backwards for the very first time. ‘Turn around. Go away. I don’t want you anywhere near me.’

  Not fire. Light.

  She called a few more times, ever more hopelessly.

  And then she left.

  Part Three

  1

  It was like coming out of hospital. You don’t get straight back into being yourself. It takes a little time. And just as someone with a broken foot gingerly tests it each morning to see how much pressure it can take, I stretched things a little further every day.

  I had to be careful with Tulip. She was on her guard.

  ‘What happened on Friday? Why did you run off like that?’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I suddenly felt so queasy. I knew I couldn’t make it back to the Palace, so I ran off between the trees.’

  ‘Didn’t you hear me calling?’

  ‘I was sick.’

  The next day, she wanted to come home with me.

  ‘We’ve got workmen,’ I told her. ‘And Dad says he doesn’t want any extra visitors.’

  ‘What about the weekend?’

  ‘There’s a special wedding party.’

  ‘We could stay out of sight.’

  ‘No, Tulip.’

  She gave me a suspicious look. I knew how odd it must have sounded to her. She’d never heard me saying no before.

  ‘You’re hiding something, Natalie.’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘Well, something’s going on. I used to be able to come, even when there were special parties and weddings.’

  I let the same look of dumb insolence spread over my face as I’d seen so often on hers.

  ‘Well, that was last year, Tulip.’

  At this reminder of the game we used to play, she turned on her heel and walked off. I went back to my classroom, grinning. And it was only then I realized that, in this small daily probing of sides of myself left too long untested, I’d come across a few things I’d totally forgotten. The feeling of power. The sense of being in control.