The Tulip Touch

by Anne Fine

  Then my heart leapt up, and across I’d fly.

  ‘Tulip! Where have you been? It’s been ages. What do you want to do?’

  5

  We did everything. We went everywhere. We were called in from lawns and potting sheds, shrubberies and terrace gardens. When the cold weather came, they’d look for us in lounges and coffee rooms, alcoves and blanket stores. Sometimes it was awkward to come out because, for the last hour, we’d been wrapped in the folds of the plush ruby curtains, eavesdropping on some unwitting pair of bickering guests. But mostly we’d appear soon after we heard the determined footsteps and the call.

  ‘Time to go home now, Tulip.’

  ‘Can’t I stay?’

  ‘Your parents will worry.’

  It wasn’t true. If Tulip’s parents worried, they’d have shown up a dozen times before, when no one had even realized she was still with me till I was ordered off to bed. But Dad would keep a straight face. So would she.

  ‘Can I come back tomorrow?’

  ‘If you like.’

  Maybe she would. Maybe she wouldn’t. (I’d be waiting, whichever.) Sometimes Dad would notice me drifting round in a trance of solitude, and, realizing how busy he’d been lately, offer to take me fishing. We’d set off in the quiet hour after lunch, and there she’d be, hanging around the field end of the walk through the spinney.

  ‘You can send her home if you like,’ I’d say softly, stung that she hadn’t bothered to show up for me.

  But he’d greet her as cheerfully as usual.

  ‘Coming along?’

  She was no good at fishing. (Dad said that everything swam off the minute it saw her shadow.) He’d catch one thing after another, I’d do all right, and she’d get nothing. But she seemed happy enough. And so did he. He never seemed bored on the afternoons Tulip came.

  ‘What was that game you two were playing yesterday, when Mrs Scott-Henderson complained about the noise?’

  ‘Rats in a Firestorm.’

  ‘Did you find somewhere more sensible to play it?’

  She grinned.

  ‘We moved down to the cellars, and called it Hogs in a Tunnel, instead.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Very pleasant. Though I suppose it’s still less of a bother than that game you were playing all last week.’

  ‘Which? Fat in the Fire?’

  ‘It was Malaria! most of last week,’ I reminded her.

  ‘Why can’t you invent some quiet ones?’

  ‘I don’t invent them,’ I told him. ‘Tulip invents the games.’

  He turned towards her.

  ‘So,’ he said. ‘How about it, Tulip?’

  She cocked her head to one side.‘There’s Road of Bones.

  That’s very quiet. And we play Days of Dumbness quite a lot. No noise at all in that one.’

  He shuddered. ‘Days of Dumbness! Road of Bones! Don’t the two of you ever play anything pleasant?’

  She was grinning again now.

  ‘I suppose you played things like Happy Families and Tickle the Baby when you were young.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s the sort of thing we used to play back in the good old days.’

  She gave him her flirty look.

  ‘What’s the worst thing you ever did, Mr Barnes?’

  ‘When I was a child?’

  She nodded.

  If I’d asked him that question, he’d never have given a sensible answer. But Tulip could make Dad talk about anything, anything at all, and so he fell quiet, thinking.

  ‘The thing I feel worst about, even after all this time, is dropping my grandfather’s tortoise on the garden path,’ he told us finally. ‘I didn’t have the guts to go and tell, so I just shoved it out of sight under the nearest bush.’

  He still looked uneasy, remembering.

  ‘How old were you?’ I asked.

  ‘Eight.’ He made a quick calculation. ‘Twenty-seven years ago!’

  ‘Did it smash?’ Tulip demanded.

  The word she chose repelled him, you could tell. He picked a different one with care.

  ‘Its shell did crack, yes.’

  ‘Was it an accident?’

  ‘Of course it was an accident,’ he said sharply.’You don’t suppose I threw it?’

  ‘No,’ she said hastily.

  There was a silence. Then Tulip said:

  ‘You should have put it in the freezer to kill it.’

  Dad’s face was a picture.

  ‘It’s the kindest way, for fish and terrapins,’ she assured him. ‘Probably for tortoises, as well.’

  He’d forgotten his fishing line. He was staring at her now.

  ‘Tulip, how would you ever know that?’

  ‘I suppose I just heard it somewhere. And remembered it.’

  Dad turned to me.

  ‘Did you know?’

  I wanted so much to say I did. But Tulip would have known I was fibbing.

  ‘No,’ I said sullenly.

  He turned back to her.

  ‘And do the things you hear worry you?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I think about them for a bit. But mostly I’m interested more than I’m worried.’

  There was a flurry underneath her float.

  ‘Is that a bite?’ he asked, happy to be distracted. ‘Have you been lucky for once? Is that a bite?’

  ‘No,’ she said, not even looking. ‘No, it’s not.’

  6

  I did go to her house, of course. But only once. I can’t remember what fired me up. Had I, for once, something to tell her that I should be brave enough to sidle to the edge of the lawn, then so casually slip out of sight in the shadows? Those huge, overhanging trees must have given a sense of foreboding to the venture. But I didn’t falter, and, out in the sunlight again, stayed on the far side of the fence till I was beyond the view from the highest Palace window. Hotels are filled with bored people. You can always be sure that, whatever you are doing, there will always be somebody standing and watching.

  I hated Tulip’s house. It wasn’t just that the carpets were stained and the furniture battered. It was that Tulip herself seemed different, just a shell, as if she had slipped away invisibly and left some strange, strained imitation in her place to say to me, ‘What shall we do now?’ or, ‘Want another biscuit?’

  I pushed the packet of damp crumbs aside. I’d have suggested going into her bedroom, but the glimpse of a stained sheet spread over a chair to dry as she kicked closed the door had warned me that wouldn’t be welcome.

  ‘Shall we go in the yard?’

  I wanted to get out of the kitchen. Tulip’s mother was giving me the creeps with her beg-pardon smile and her tireless, tuneless humming; as if, in that horrible, smelly, sunless back room, she’d completely forgotten a song was supposed to have a melody, let alone a beginning and ending. Hearing that awful, interminable drone was like listening to a robot pretend to be a person.

  The back yard had clumps of weeds waist high. But there were far too many smashed bottles lying about for us to play most of our creeping games. So, in desperation, I said:

  ‘Let’s go and find your kitten.’

  She looked at me blankly.

  ‘Well,’ I corrected myself, feeling stupid. ‘Cat, by now.’

  ‘We don’t have a cat.’

  ‘You were carrying one the day I met you.’

  Her eyes went pebble hard.

  ‘I expect I had to give it away’

  I knew she was lying. So, in my eyes, of course, it was a merciless cat killer I met when, retreating from the unpromising yard, we came face to face with Mr Pierce, striding in through another door. I watched as he filled a cracked cup with water, drank it down, refilled it, drank more, then turned back from the sink. His eyes came to rest on me, and never moved till I snatched up my jacket and, burbling excuses, rushed away.

  ‘I’m sorry I had to go like that,’ I said to her next morning at school.‘I suddenly remembered I was supposed to –’ />
  And off I went again. Burble-burble. Burble-burble. Tulip looked cross and bored until I stopped. Then she said:

  ‘Dad’s all right when you’re used to him.’

  But I had no intention of giving him even one more try. From that day on, I stopped nagging Dad about letting me go there, and used the excuse he had taught me to save Tulip’s feelings,

  ‘They won’t let me near dogs like Elsa.’

  And stayed away.

  7

  And I saw lots of her at school. She had no other friends. Nobody else could stand the embarrassment of pretending that they believed her awful lies.

  ‘The army’s borrowing one of our fields today. When I get home, they’re going to let me drive a tank.’

  ‘Oh, I really believe that, Tulip!’

  ‘So likely!’

  They’d walk off, scoffing. I’d stare at the ground, and, guess what, I’d feel sorry for her. I knew she was making a fool of me in front of everyone. (Only an idiot would make a show of believing her rubbish.) But instead of just walking away, exasperated, like everyone else, I’d try taking her arm and distracting her.

  ‘Want to play Road of Bones on the way home?’

  She’d shake me off, rude and ungrateful. Even back then I had to ask myself why I stayed around. It wasn’t out of pity, I knew that. Nobody has to carry on telling ridiculous lies, even after it’s obvious that no one believes them.

  ‘I’ve won a big competition. I found a scratchcard in my cornflakes and I was lucky. So now I’ve won this beautiful yellow silk dress.’

  Next time we bought sweets in Harry’s supermarket, I’d linger by the breakfast cereal shelves.

  ‘There’s nothing about a competition on any of these packets.’

  ‘No. It was a scratchcard inside.’

  ‘Strange that no one else got one.’

  ‘They only sent out a few as a special anniversary thing. That’s why the prize is a yellow silk dress. It’s the very same one that the model wore in their first advert.’

  That’s what Dad came to call the Tulip touch – that tiny detail that almost made you wonder if she might, just for once, be telling the truth.

  ‘And then this man went grey and keeled over. And as I was phoning for the ambulance, his fingers kept twitching, and his wedding ring made a tiny little pinging noise against the metal of the drain.’

  ‘So I wasn’t at school because the police needed one extra person my age and size, for a line-up. They wouldn’t say why they’d arrested the girl, but one of them did tell me that he thought she was Polish.’

  ‘Ah!’ Dad would murmur in unfeigned admiration. ‘Polish? The perfect Tulip touch!’

  She’d give him a pained wooden stare. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  He’d turn away, of course, to hide his grin. But I’d be left to see the look of venom on her face. Tulip loathed being teased. It was as if the moment these stupid stories were out of her mouth, she believed them completely, and anyone who queried even a tiny part of them was going to be her enemy, and hated for ever.

  So it was Dad, not me, who risked a bit of mischief a couple of weeks later.

  ‘So where s the great yellow dress, Tulip? How come you haven’t brought it round to show us yet?’

  She looked surprised. ‘Didn’t I tell you? I had it ready in a bag. Then Mum knocked over a bottle of bleach, and some got on the sleeve. So she’s posted it off to a big firm in Chichester that does a lot of mending for the royal family, to see if they can patch it from the hem.’

  Dad watched her, spellbound. Once she was gone, he turned to Mum.

  ‘Poor little imp. What sort of squashing must she get at home, to think she has to make up all this stuff to impress us?’

  Mum just said irritably:

  ‘You’d think she had more than enough brains to know better!’

  And you would, too. She was miles cleverer than me. If it weren’t for her missed days, and undone homework, she would have beaten me in every test. But, even in good weeks, Miss Henson had problems with Tulip.

  ‘Please try and settle down. You’re distracting everybody round you.’

  ‘Now that’s not what I told you to do, is it?’

  ‘Tulip! I warn you, I have had enough!’

  If she’d spoken to me that sharply, I’d have died of fright. But Tulip didn’t care. A moment later, she’d be rushing out of her seat across the room.

  ‘I can see Julia’s rubber on the floor!’

  And a minute or so later:

  ‘Now I’m going across to help Jennifer with her project.’

  There was a plaintive and immediate wail.

  ‘Stop her, Miss Henson! I don’t want her help!’

  Out came the tongue. (Tulip’s, not Jennifer’s.)

  ‘Tulip! Back to your table! Sit down! And stop being such a nuisance!’

  I sat so quiet I was hardly there. That’s why she left us side by side, I expect. So I could water Tulip’s fidgets down. But somehow we went together well, and things worked out. We were the triangles in primary band. We shared counting the lunch money two months in a row (though, now I look back, I realize that was probably Miss Henson’s way of getting the job done properly through Tulip’s month of office). And we were the Ugly Sisters in the Christmas play.

  At first, I could tell, both Miss Henson and Mr Barraclough were deeply dubious about giving Tulip the part she begged for so piteously.

  ‘I have to warn you, Tulip. If you miss more than a couple of rehearsals, we’ll have to take the part off you. So are you sure?’

  She nodded vigorously.

  ‘And I must have a note from your father saying he won’t mind you coming in for the evening performances.’

  Tulip’s keen look turned sour.

  ‘Nobody else has to bring in any note.’

  Miss Henson sighed.

  ‘I’m sorry, Tulip. It’s just that Mr Barraclough hasn’t forgotten yet.’

  When she’d walked off, I asked Tulip:

  ‘Hasn’t forgotten what?’

  ‘Last time. Before you came. I was a Dancing Bean.’

  ‘Was it difficult?’

  (It seemed the best way of asking, ‘What went wrong?’)

  ‘I did it fine,’ she said. ‘I learned the song. I knew the dance. But then something came up. So I couldn’t do it.’

  I’d been fobbed off with that ‘something came up’ too often myself. But in the first flush of being her Ugly Sister, I felt generous.

  ‘You’d think he’d want you to have a good part this time.’

  She executed what I could only take to be a short snatch of Bean Dance.

  ‘It wouldn’t have mattered so much, except for the others.’

  ‘Others?’

  ‘The other beans.The dance was a bit complicated, you see. So they couldn’t do it without me.’

  ‘Oh.’

  I had a sudden vision of everyone trying to get through the big night with only one Ugly Sister. Me. But, in the end, there wasn’t any trouble. Her mother sent in the note. Tulip showed up every day that we had a rehearsal. And she and I turned out to be the stars of the show. Tulip’s witchy foot-stamping frenzies and my vacuous no-one-at-home stare were far more fun to watch than prissy Cinderella’s tears. Each time we stumbled off stage, Mr Barraclough was waiting with the grease stick. My first few discreet spots grew, scene by scene, into a riot of measles. He’d spray more cobwebs onto Tulip’s frizzy green wig, and push us both on again, hissing,

  ‘Brilliant, the pair of you! Keep it up!’

  And so we did, three evenings in a row, getting the loudest laughter all the way through, and the longest applause at the end. After the last show I was so forlorn I refused to let anyone take off my make-up. The giant spots rubbed off on my pillow-case, and Tulip had to hand in her green wig in the morning. But no one could wipe the performance out of us.

  ‘Will you two stop lolling against one another! If you don’t, I shall separate
you.’

  ‘Natalie, don’t nudge Tulip when you know the answer yourself. You’re not a dummy. Put up your own hand, please.’

  ‘Tulip, she’s not a puppet on a string. Just because you need to go, it doesn’t follow that Natalie has to go with you.’

  Halfway through January, Miss Henson finally moved us apart. We wailed and fussed.

  ‘It isn’t fair! We weren’t being naughty. We were just being sisters, like in the play’

  ‘Hard cheese,’ she said brutally. ‘I’m afraid that was last year.’

  And that, of course, set off the next game. That Was Last Year. The silliest remark would set it off.

  ‘Marcie can’t find her gloves.’

  ‘No. That was last year. She’s looking for her panties now.’

  ‘Have you seen Miss Henson’s new car?’

  ‘That was last year. She came on a broomstick this morning.’

  They were so stupid and unfunny, we only whispered them. But still they sent us into such spasms of amusement that the others would gather round us in the playground.

  ‘What’s the big joke?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  We’d stick our knuckles in our mouths and snigger some more.

  ‘Oh, leave them. They’re just being silly’

  And so we were. So silly that, before I realized what was happening, the taint of unpopularity had thickened and spread.

  ‘Oh, please don’t make me sit by Natalie. She just giggles all the time, and makes faces with Tulip.’

  ‘I’m not sitting with her, either!’

  Miss Henson caught the flu. Her father had to go to hospital. And everyone she tried to seat us beside put up a really hard fight. It’s strange to think that we go down whole difFerent paths because of accidents in other people’s lives. My friendship with Tulip could have been derailed, or, at the very least, diluted a little.

  But flu. A broken hip. A bit of squawking round the class.

  And she gave up.

  ‘All right, then. If you promise to behave yourselves, I’ll give you one more chance. Just one.’

  8

  What were we like then, the pair of us, Tulip and Natalie? I lift a photograph out of the box, and see us laughing. We look happy enough. But do old photos tell the truth? ‘Smile!’ someone orders you. ‘I’m not wasting precious film on sour faces.’ And so you smile. But what’s behind? You take the one Dad snapped by accident when Tulip came down the cellar steps just as he was fiddling in the dark with his camera. Suddenly the flash went off, and he caught her perfectly (if you don’t count the rabbity pink eyes). She’s a shadow in the arched entrance of that dark tunnel. And how does she look in that, the only one to be taken when no one was watching?