The Tulip Touch

by Anne Fine

  7

  And after that, I put Tulip Pierce out of my mind, and got on with my own life. This time I did it properly. I spent my break-times in the library, gradually daring to take a seat nearer and nearer one of the small gangs of girls who sat together, till one day Glenys asked if she could borrow my protractor, and Anna told me that she liked my hair.

  And from then on, I joined them in the lunch queue every day, and walked to the bus stop with Glenys. A week or so later, when she was chatting about the party she was planning at the weekend, she asked me, ‘Why don’t you come too?’

  And I was in at last.

  I still saw Tulip in the corridors, on days she came. And, like the rest of them, I took an interest in her foul-tempered brushes with the staff, and all her defiant rebellions.

  ‘Did you hear what she called Mrs Minniver? Everyone’s saying she’ll be asked to leave.’

  ‘My dad heard that she’d been reported to the police for slashing the bus seats.’

  ‘It wasn’t bus seats. It was theft.’

  Tulip stormed up the staircases, and in and out of rooms, snarling at everyone.

  ‘Move out of the way, idiot!’

  And most of them did. She made almost everyone nervous. I think they all thought that someone the staff could barely pretend to control was far too dangerous even to stand near. The trouble she got in, instead of curbing her, seemed to make her worse. She became more and more insolent, almost insanely cocksure. Indifferent to threats and warnings, even to punishment, she took her continual suspensions in her stride. We’d see her swaggering out between the gates at all hours of the day, and not be able to begin to guess whether she’d been sent home officially, or just decided it was time to go.

  But, as her reputatuion grew, so did mine. In March, I passed all my exams so well I was commended. Miss Fowler called in my parents and told them she was moving me into a different stream.

  ‘It will be hard,’ she said. ‘But Natalie is doing so well, I’m sure she’ll manage.’

  And I did. Easily. Somehow, the harder I worked, the more I enjoyed it. And when, at the end of the school year, I won three of the prizes and had to walk across the stage in front of everyone to take my books and shake Miss Fowler’s hand, I realized Tulip and I had now reached equal distinction in our separate ways. Everyone knew me for an excellent pupil. And everyone knew her for a bad lot.

  And then I bumped into her in the cloakroom.

  ‘Move over, stupid!’ she snapped at me, pushing past.

  Perhaps she’d called me that once too often when we were younger. Or maybe, still carrying my brand-new prizes, I wasn’t ready to be insulted any more.

  Anyhow, stupid I was. Deliberately, quite deliberately, I let my eyes slide off her face, down her stained pullover to her puckered skirt.

  And wrinkled my nose.

  One look in her eyes, and I knew I’d gone far too far.

  ‘Oh, so we’re playing games again, are we?’

  Hastily, I tried to backtrack.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  She just ignored me.

  ‘We haven’t played one for ages, have we, Natalie? What do you feel like? Hogs in a Tunnel? Havoc? Road of Bones? How about Watch the Skies? You always enjoyed that.’

  I’d never realized eyes could go so hard. Suddenly I felt sick with fright.

  ‘Leave me alone, Tulip!’

  She made her eyes go wide.

  ‘That’s not very nice, is it? After all, you were the one to start.’

  ‘I haven’t started anything.’

  ‘Yes, you have. You just began with stinking Mackerel. I saw you.’

  Nobody knows you like your old best friend. There was no point in saying anything. I just made for the door.

  ‘That’s agreed, is it?’ she called after me. ‘Now it’s my turn to choose.’

  I pretended I wasn’t listening. Tugging the swing doors to make them close faster behind me, I hurried down the long corridor to get away. When, at the corner, I glanced back, she wasn’t behind me. But that wasn’t any comfort. After all, she had no need to follow me herself. Her menacing little words were doing that.

  I rushed into the safety of my next class, and took my seat, my heart thumping. Nobody looked my way. Nobody noticed. But I sat there in terror. I knew Tulip. And, deep inside, not only did I know that she’d not rest till she’d won the very last game of all. I also knew exactly which of them she’d choose.

  8

  The next few days, I felt like that poor trembling rabbit in Tulip’s clutch, waiting for something to happen. But one week turned into two, then three, and Tulip never even glanced my way. And then, at the end of the next week, the holidays started.

  Time and again, that summer, I checked with Julius.

  ‘You haven’t seen Tulip hanging around anywhere, have you?’

  He’d look up from whatever he was doing.

  ‘Tulip? No. Why? Is she coming round?’

  ‘I don’t think so. But if you see her, will you let me know?’

  I’d try not to sound worried, and maybe that was a mistake. Because once, when I asked him, I got a different answer.

  ‘I thought I saw her a couple of days ago, by the old garages. But when I called her, she just disappeared.’

  ‘Next time, tell me straight away, will you?’

  ‘If you like.’

  I searched the garages, but found nothing. And, looking back, I’m not surprised. Tulip was cleverer than that. The days went by. Dad started paying me for little jobs, and Mum needed help in the office, so I was kept busy. Glenys came over once or twice, and I went to her house. And gradually I let myself believe that all Tulip had in mind that day was making me nervous. She knew exactly how faint-hearted I could be. What could be smarter than leaving me to worry, week after week, about something she’d long forgotten?

  And so I let myself stop fretting. There was so much to do. When school term began again after the summer, I had a whole lot more work and netball practice twice a week. I got a part in the school play, and what with the flurry of extra rehearsals after half term, before I could believe it, Christmas was on its way again.

  ‘Are you inviting Glenys?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘She’s off to her dad’s house.’

  ‘How about Anna, then?’

  ‘She says her mum would have a fit if she went to someone else for Christmas.’

  Dad shrugged.

  ‘Makes sense. I wouldn’t like it if you were away.’

  So I was there. There in my new green skirt through all the sherries and the canapés. There through Mr Hearns’s Christmas medley on the piano. There through the charity raffle.

  And there through the carols, as usual, with Julius bravely singing the first verse of Once in Royal David’s City all alone, and Mrs Scott Henderson chiming in on every last verse with her ghastly descants, and Mr Hearns faltering even more than usual because he’d mislaid his glasses. The guests sang out, their faces winking from brightness to shadow as, through the french windows, the coloured lights along the terraces blinked on and off, on and off, over and over.

  Oh, clever, clever Tulip! To pick the one evening everyone’s in the same room, and all the kitchen staff who haven’t managed to persuade Dad they’re not needed are running round in circles, or peering into special soups, or diving into ovens to check on yet another difficult dish. Clever, clever Tulip, to pick the only night no one’s around to see a small dark figure pouring petrol, and paraffin, and God knows what else, on all the sills and lintels, all the doors and benches, railings and signs, everything wooden round an old hotel.

  And clever Tulip, to give herself a good head start. To choose the night when no one is going to notice, till it’s far too late, that the sherry-flushed faces in the firelight are blinking pinker and brighter, pinker and brighter.

  ‘Fire! Fire! Outside on the verandah! Fire!’

  Alarms went off as the first flames broke through. The sprin
kler system Dad put in the year we came spun into action at once. Everyone did the right thing. Nobody panicked. The guests, as Mum said afterwards, were ‘Marvellous! Marvellous!’They gathered on the lawns, and ticked each other off on lists as though they’d been in fires all their lives. No one sneaked back inside to fetch their jewellery. No one played daft heroics for the cat. And though Cedric had to be dragged away from the oven in which his Boeufs en Croute were crisping up nicely, all the kitchen staff switched off their grills and their gas jets in an orderly fashion, and left immediately through the nearest doors.

  So by the time the first of Tulip’s carefully primed explosions shattered the glass in the conservatory, everyone was safely out, watching the flames take hold. And if she hadn’t thought to dig away the leaf mould of a hundred years to drag closed the giant iron gates at the bottom of the drive (and loop them round with so many chains and padlocks that the firemen believed her when she called out to them,‘No! Not these gates! The other ones. Round there!’), then the first fire engine wouldn’t have got bogged down in the muddy lane leading to their farm, and the second one would have broken in just that much quicker.

  And so the Palace burned. Julius and I stood side by side to watch. His face flared in the fire’s dancing light as one dark framed window after another burst into a fierce glow.

  He turned to me, his cheeks burning as much with excitement as the reflection of the flames.

  ‘Was it Tulip?’

  My face was probably as flushed as his as I began the long, long lie.

  ‘Now how on earth should I know?’

  Cheerfully, he turned back to the blaze to watch the firemen send their huge coils of water snaking over the parapets. Like Tulip’s stolen gold necklace hurled in the rubbish drum all that time ago, they slithered into the building’s giant shell, and vanished instantly. I wondered, was she watching too? How did it feel, to see the only place she ever loved go up in flames? Inside, the dimpled copper bar top she used to stroke was buckling and melting. The glorious curving banisters she trailed her fingers up a million times were twisting to ugly shapes as they charred. Did she care? Was she hidden up somewhere in a tree behind us, just like one more roosting peacock, crying her eyes out? Or had she simply laughed, and run offhome for yet another beating for being late?

  Dad came up behind, and rested his hands on our shoulders. He couldn’t say a word. He just stood there and watched. And so did Mum. We stood in silence as the Palace gradually gave up the fight, and out of the deafening hissing and spitting and crackling and roaring, the silent billows of smoke curled away in defeat over the huge dark spinney where Tulip had crept to hide her dangerous little toys week after week, till she was ready to play the very last, very worst, game of all.

  9

  So now we’re off. Tomorrow we leave for Nettle Underwood. The Starbuck Arms. Dad’s pretty cheerful about it. Sometimes you’d think that Tulip had done him a favour.

  ‘These grand old buildings like the Palace have had their day,’ he keeps telling everyone. ‘Too many planning rules. Hotels that size can’t stay afloat with just a few loyal regulars and passing tourists. These days you really have to be up-to-date. Health centres. Swimming pools. A proper dance floor. Lifts to every floor. They’ve got all those at the Starbuck.’

  Mum’s come to terms with losing so many things. She had a weep about some photographs that were ruined (mostly because they were ones of Julius, I expect). And there were a couple of phone calls with the insurance people that left her shaking with rage. But yesterday she looked round the mess and clutter in the room where she’s dumped all we have left, and said to me,

  ‘Nothing worth dusting. Nothing worth bothering about. Come for a walk with me, Natalie. Let’s go and have coffee together in the village.’

  And no one there minds much. Drinks at the hotel were always too expensive for most of the people round here. And the company’s selling the site to someone who wants to build nice modern houses. So they don’t mind, either. They’re not blaming Dad. After all, he’s never made a serious mistake before. And though an accidental fire should have been stopped at the outset, everyone’s agreed that arson’s another matter.

  I worried terribly about Julius. But it turns out he doesn’t care a hoot. He won’t say anything in front of them, but to me he’s admitted it. He enjoyed the fire. ‘Brilliant!’ he calls it. He’s become famous at school, describing it over and over. And though we’re leaving now, he says he never wanted to move on to Talbot Harries anyway. He’s glad he’s going to another school.

  And so am I. Everyone needs the chance to start again. Though I was doing pretty well, it seems. I know because on Friday, Miss Fowler called me in to show me the report she’s sending on to Nettle Underwood. ‘After a period of confusion, Natalie Barnes has made a prodigious effort to find herself. She should go on to better and better things, and we all wish her well.’ I told Glenys we were leaving, and promised her that I’d write every week. But, if I’m honest, I’ll miss her less than the stone boy in the lily pond. She’s never been a close friend.

  Not like Tulip.

  I don’t think I’ll be seeing her again. Her name comes up the whole time, of course, what with the gossip about the police enquiry, and the probation officer’s report. Mum calls her ‘That witch Tulip!’ and Dad says ‘Nonsense, Emma!’ every time. But I can’t help but think that being a real witch would have been better for her. At least that way she’d have a little power. Tulip’s got nothing now. Yesterday, when we were packing, Julius asked me,

  ‘If you could rub Tulip out of your past life, would you do it?’

  And I had to shake my head. I can’t regret the times we had together. Sometimes I worry I won’t have times like that again, that there will be no lit nights, no incandescent days. But I know it’s not true. There can be colour in a million ways. I know I’ll find it on my own.

  I have strange dreams about her. Sometimes the two of us are sitting cross-legged in one of the outhouses behind her farm, stirring a liquid we call ‘flame-water’, or crawling on our bellies through an orchard, trying to set fire to the flowers. But mostly, when I dream, Tulip and I are back in our first school, giggling and being silly, or lying on our backs behind the parapet, our bare arms touching, playing Watch the Skies.

  I think about the day that Dad and I first saw her in that field of corn, and try to tell myself it was already too late. There’s no particular moment when someone goes to the bad. Each horrible thing that happens makes a difference, and there had probably been too many of those already in Tulip’s life.

  But I can’t convince myself.Yes, now I know that even back then, Tulip was going off to drown that poor kitten. But Dad was no older the day he pushed his grandfather’s tortoise under the bush and left it there to die. You could say that Tulip was braver and kinder. And people aren’t locked doors. You can get through to them if you want.

  But no one did. No one reached out a hand to Tulip. Nobody tried to touch her. I hear them whispering and they sicken me. ‘Bus seats!’ grumbles Mrs Bodell. ‘Locker doors!’ complain the teachers. ‘Chicken sheds!’ say the farmers. ‘Greenhouses! Dustbins!’ moan the neighbours. And Mum says, ‘A lovely old hotel!’

  But what about Tulip?

  I shall feel sorry for Tulip all my life.

  And guilty, too.

  Guilty.