Lula Does the Hula (2 page)

Could it be I was not alone in this bed?

‘NYEEEEEP!’

A panicked voice came down the phone: ‘Tallulah? Lula? What’s going on?
LULA! Answer me!
Oh, geez, oh, man, I’m gonna hang up and call 999!’

I catapulted out of my bed, across the room and squinted back at my tumbled duvet and scattered pillows, phone still in my hand.

‘Wait!’ I hissed into the handset, watching for another movement from under the duvet.

A dark-haired head lifted from my pillow and sighed.

Oh, frik.

It was Boodle
. . . Boodle had spent the night with me.

The gorgeous voice from the phone interrupted my
I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die
thoughts:

‘Lula? Lula? You okay?’ asked Jack.

‘No,’ I replied. ‘Not really. It’s Boodle. She spent the night.’ I got back into bed, shoving Boodle the Poodle over so I could get my snug nest back. There was the sound of muffled laughter from the other end of the line.

I coughed, sternly. ‘Apart from me dying at the hands of my sister when she discovers her dog has decided to move in with me, I’m fine,
thanks
.’ I said this last bit in a sarky voice to disguise the lie. The one about me being fine. No way was I going to let my boyfriend of only a fortnight know that I had anxieties, AND issues, AND maybe even some highly charged emotional baggage.

With Jack interning in the city with Channel 4 these last two weeks, the old rumours of me being a wEiRdy witch girl who damaged every boy she ever went near had started to resurface. So not fair! It took a lot for me to get my first kiss and prove There Was No Jinx – you’d think I could put all that behind me! But no one in this village was ever going to forget I had a history of injuring boys and a witchy grandmother, even if Grandma Bird was six foot under. It doesn’t help that crazy stuff always happens to me, but still. People shouldn’t jump to conclusions. People should stop muttering stuff every time they lay eyes on me. I have exceptionally good hearing for a girl who loves loud music, and I can hear the whispers:

Where has Jack de Souza disappeared to?

The city?

Nuh-uh – I don’t believe it. I bet he’s lying in an intensive care ward somewhere . . .

I heard he died.

Yep. He’s a goner. Should have stayed away from Tallu–

‘Hey? Tallulah?’

I was jolted out of my memory banks. ‘Uh! Yeah?’

‘So what do you think?’

‘Erm . . .’ I said, scrunching my knees up to my chest and pulling the duvet round me. ‘Sorry. I missed that. I’m not quite with it at 5 a.m. Pen’s been moaning about you waking the house up every morning, actually.’

As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I wished I could hit the rewind button.

‘She has?’ Jack sounded worried. He should be. My little sister is fierce, even for a fourteen-year-old. ‘It’s just that your mobile is never on. Or you never answer it. Should I stop calling?’

‘Noonnoonoonoo!’ I said in a panic. Jack laughed. Oh, GOD. Why did I have to be the uncoolest girl in the world? I coughed. ‘What I mean is, I’ll remember to charge my mobile. I will. I really will. It’s just that I can’t find my charger, so I have to keep using Pen’s, but she won’t let it leave her room, so I end up either not charging my phone, or else forgetting that it’s charging in there, or –’

‘Okay,’ said Jack easily. ‘It’s just I don’t wanna pee
Penelope off. She’s the type that would take revenge.’

‘Yes,’ I said with sad certainty, thinking I was already in for it, for sure. ‘Calling on this landline number is fine.’

‘I don’t want to wake up your family, though.’

I smiled. What a considerate boy. ‘Don’t worry. I pick up the extension out here really fast.’

‘You do.’ I could hear the grin in Jack’s voice. ‘You cannot
wait
to speak to me.’ Before I could bluster a response he said, ‘What’s happening in Hambledon?’

I sighed. Life in this town slash village had no way of competing with what Jack must be doing in the city. ‘Well, Dad’s writing a really bad song at the moment. So awful. The worst is he says he’s inspired by our young love.’ I flushed. FRIK! I’d just done it again! I’d said the love word. While referring to us.

‘Love, huh?’ said Jack, and he laughed. ‘Yeah.’

Okay, hold the phone. Just pause there for one smidgeony second. What does ‘yeah’ mean? Oh, frik. If only I had the phone on speaker right now, and Alex right beside me. She’d know for sure.

I coughed again, desperate to fill the silence. ‘So, um –’

‘So, um,’ mocked Jack. ‘Can’t wait to hear the song.’

‘Oh, the song,’ I babbled. ‘Be happy to wait. It’s bliddy bliddy badly bad. Though knowing my luck it’ll be in the top forty by tomorrow.’

‘Good,’ said Jack. ‘I’ll be back by then.’

And, shamefully, at the thought of my brand-new, first-ever, totally awesome boyfriend being back in a matter of hours,
I squealed
.

Then,
NO, TATTY LULA!
I yelped to myself.
DON’T SQUEAL AT THE LOVELY BOY!

‘Sorry,’ I murmured. ‘I thought I saw someone at my window.’

Which wasn’t a total lie, but I’m a courageous type and flitty shadows at my bedroom window have me reaching for my spikiest hairbrush, not doing ninny squealing. ‘Are you coming back on the train?’ I asked. ‘Today? What time? Should I, um, meet you at the station?’ A vision of
Casablanca
flooded into my head and I liked it.

But – oh, woe! – that vision was dashed.

‘Nah. I’m gonna drive in with Jazz at noon today, and go straight to the journ department. Could I see you this afternoon maybe? I’ll text you when I know where I’m gonna be after school.’

‘Driving?’ I said. ‘With Jazz?’ I think I sounded quite calm, but spinning round and round in my head was:
JAZZ? WHAT THE FRIK? JAZZ?
JAZZ?

‘Sure,’ said Jack. ‘You sound squeaky . . . Don’t you want me to drive? Have you had a witchy premonition about ice on the roads or something?’

I laughed. Well, I did my best to laugh. ‘No no. I – I just hadn’t realised you were there with Jazz.’

‘Seriously? Didn’t I –? Haven’t I –?’ He spluttered to a halt. ‘Whoa, weird. I guess I’ve just been so into hearing what’s up in your neck of the woods that I haven’t really said anything about her.’

‘Are you saying I do most of the talking in these break-of-dawn sessions?’ I teased, trying to sound light-hearted.

Jack laughed. ‘You’ve got the most to say. I’ve just been work work work.’

‘With Jazz.’
Oh, now why couldn’t I just leave that alone?

‘Yep,’ replied Jack, oblivious. ‘She came up to the city last week. She knows a lot of media types, which is good. Her dad, y’know,
owns
newspapers and whole channels. She’s got great connections. You remember her, right?’

Yes, I remembered her. You, dear reader, probably won’t, because she drifted in and out of my last adventure with scarcely any mention. She was part of a posse of Jack admirers, all hanging around him at the cinema the first time we met. Even then I got a hostile vibe from her. A sense that she wanted Jack for herself.

Oh, boy. I felt a prickle of unease that I tried to squash immediately. No frikking way was I going to turn into a mad psycho jealous type. No way.

‘Jazz . . .’ I said, bright and breezy. ‘Sure I do. Shouldn’t she be back on campus already for the start of term, though?’

‘Nope,’ said Jack. ‘We’re doing the same course, so she’s kind of joining me in this special project work I’m
doing, and Channel 4 are keen for us to keep it moving together. Our profs and tutors have said it’s all good.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘All good.’

But it didn’t feel all good at all. Noooo. Not good AT ALL.

So there I am, scrunched up over the phone, trying to concentrate on what my boyfriend is telling me while I worry about whether he really is my boyfriend, actually.

He was still wittering away about the delights of Jazz, so in the next available break I tried to change the subject. ‘Hey, where are your digs? I think Mona told me, but I’ve forgotten already.’

Mona is Jack’s superhot sister, remember? And she’s still going out with Arnold – the geek I turned into a god with a mega makeover (if I say so myself. Okay, not quite a god. Quite fit, more like).

‘We’ve got a house at the bottom of Mason. Just down the road from Mona’s dorms.’

‘We?’

‘Yeah, me, Jazz and Forest.’

‘O-oh,’ I stammered. ‘Wow. You live with Jazz.’ Pause. ‘Um. It’s great that you can see so much of her and still work well together, yeah?’

‘Yep,’ said Jack. ‘And she makes a mean three bean salad.’

Three bean salad
, I thought.
I bet it’s frikking mean. Like the rest of her.

Stop it! Stop it! Be lovely!

But before I could extol the virtues of beans (are there any?) there was a hammering at my door.

‘Who’s there?’ asked Jack straight away.

‘You can hear that?’ I jumped out of bed, holding the handset to my ear with my shoulder and grabbing the canister of pepper spray (long story) from my bedside table.

‘Course I can hear that! They’re gonna bash your door down! Don’t open! It’s got to be –’

‘Pen!’ I finished, opening the door, spray still at the ready. Ha! So there
had
been a face at my window. ‘What the –?’

But before I could get a word out she’d shoved me in the shoulder with a baseball bat (where the hell did that come from?), knocking me back hard against the wall where she pointed my mobile at me like it was a Glock semi-automatic.

I was so discombobulated I let the phone I was holding fall to the ground, promptly stepped on it and my left leg skidded out from under me. I went down like a tonne of bricks, falling on my right hand and slamming down the depressor for the pepper spray.

A little unfortunate . . .

Because Pen got a faceful as she stormed in through the doorway.

*

Even by my previous record of inflicting grievous bodily harm on people this was pretty bad. Pen got one glancing strike to my head before collapsing in a screaming, blithering, raging heap.

‘You –! You –! You – you – you –! HEEELP! HEEEELP!’

I sprang to my feet, my eyes stinging like billio as I tried to read the side of the pepper-spray canister. Should I get water? Would that make it worse?

‘WATER!’ shrieked Pen.

‘Oh frik! Oh frikly frikly frik!’ I whimpered, spinning round to face my teensy kitchen. I grabbed the kettle and lunged back to Pen.

All the while a little tinny voice was coming from the phone: ‘Lula? Tallulah? Hey! Are you okay? Lu–’

Then I threw the water at Pen’s red, streaming face, the phone fizzed and died in the deluge and within seconds my mobile rang.

You will think less of me here, but I’m afraid I snatched my mobile from the floor where Pen had thrown it, thankfully far from my healing waters, and headed for my bathroom, leaving my sister howling in the doorway, scrabbling at her eyes.

I’d only got a bit of the spray in my face, but it was super stingy and the warm flannel I swiped over my eyes was bliss.

‘Hello?’ I croaked into my mobile. ‘Jack? Is that you?’

‘No,’ snapped Alex, obviously in her News Reporter
zone. ‘This is no time for love, Tatty. The police are swarming all over Frey’s Dam, and I can’t get in there to get stills or clips for Jack’s Channel 4 stuff. You have to help me trespass. Now.’

‘What?’ I said, still clutching the flannel. ‘Wh–’

‘Oops,’ said Alex. ‘Gotta go. See you in five.’

‘Wha–?’ I yelled, but the line was already dead.

My bathroom door slammed open.

And standing there looking totally nutso was Pen.

Her eyes were red and enraged, her hair dripped in rats’ tails around her grim face and she had her pointy finger out. The pointy finger was shaking with fury.

I was shaking with fear.

‘Two things!’ shrieked Pen.