Dr Boogaloo and the Girl Who Lost Her Laughter Read online

  About the Book

  DR BOOGALOO was no ordinary doctor. Not at all like the one you might visit if you had a sore tummy. No, Dr Boogaloo was a very different type of doctor. He treated folks who suffered from rather unusual complaints. And how did he treat them? Why, with the most powerful medicine known to mankind … Music!

  BLUE was no ordinary girl. For starters, her name was Blue. But what was truly extraordinary about Blue was the fact that she hadn’t laughed for 712 days. Not a hee hee, a ho ho or even a tiny tee hee.

  Can Dr Boogaloo compose a cure before Blue loses her laughter forever?

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  CHAPTER 1: The Waiting Room

  CHAPTER 2: No Laughing Matter

  CHAPTER 3: Blue

  CHAPTER 4: Bessie

  CHAPTER 5: The Snorkel Porkel Crumpety Worpel Laughter Clinic

  CHAPTER 6: Skype Calls and Fried Grass

  CHAPTER 7: Monday

  CHAPTER 8: Treatment Begins

  CHAPTER 9: A Horse

  CHAPTER 10: Leonard

  CHAPTER 11: An Ultimatum

  CHAPTER 12: A Hum

  CHAPTER 13: The Reel-to-Reel Room

  CHAPTER 14: Jane Bond

  CHAPTER 15: A Hole in the Family Drum

  CHAPTER 16: Closed for Business

  CHAPTER 17: The Biggest Instrument Sale on Earth

  CHAPTER 18: A Dash of Red Castanets

  POSTSCRIPT: (What Happens After)

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR

  COPYRIGHT NOTICE

  For Atticus, Franny and Levon.

  With thanks to

  Rhona and David Nicol,

  who gave me my first

  musical cure – a loud blast of

  swing jazz administered before

  breakfast each and every Saturday.

  And for Finley Wright-Curnow,

  a master of musical medicine and

  laughter-maker extraordinaire.

  CHAPTER 1

  The Waiting Room

  As always, the waiting room at Dr Boogaloo’s was full. A boy wearing just a pair of underpants wriggled in his chair like a chopped-off lizard’s tail, spraying the room with a machine-gun laugh.

  HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA … HA-HA-HA-HA … HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA!

  Next to him sat a boy holding a phone to his nose, blabbering some sort of weird gobbledygook. Stuffed in his left ear was a banana; in his right, a cheese sandwich.

  Around the room, five small children popped and fizzed like lemonade bubbles while their mother – goldfish eyes bulging, hair electric – twitched and grimaced in her chair. Near the door, hidden behind huge orange sunglasses, was a green-haired girl eating the stuffing from inside a pillow. Cross-country skis swung from her feet.

  The door to Dr Boogaloo’s room opened.

  The sound of flamenco guitars and tubas rolled out into the waiting room.

  ‘Sam Petry?’ said Dr Boogaloo, looking smart as always in his trademark shiny silver suit. Apart from his round-rimmed glasses that magnified the kindest of eyes, his tall and thin frame with milk-chocolate skin, Dr Boogaloo looked not unlike a brand-new pencil.

  The boy with nothing but a lethal laugh and un-die-dundies got up and convulsed his way into Dr Boogaloo’s room.

  ‘Ah, Sam,’ said Dr Boogaloo, ‘what can I do for you?’

  ‘I’ve got – HA-HA – a –HA-A-HA-HA – terrible case of – HA-HA-HA – the tickles, doctor,’ said Sam. ‘I feel EXTREMELY tickly, HA-HA-HA – from the top – HA-HA-HA – of my head to the tip of my toes. I can’t even – HA-HA – put on socks the tickling’s so bad. I’m scared my teeth – HA-HA – are gonna – HA-HA – fall out from all this laughing.’

  ‘Mmm!’ said Dr Boogaloo. ‘Blasted tickles, eh? Terrible nuisance but easily fixed, I’m glad to say. What you need is forty-three blasts of a vuvuzela to be taken with breakfast – your mother won’t thank me for that – trumpet and wobble board before lunch, and some salsa played on a diddley bow just before bed. Now, here’s a vuvuzela.’

  The Doctor handed Sam a long, colourfully striped horn.

  ‘Remember that’s forty-three blows with breakfast. The trumpet, wobble board and diddley bow are on this CD. Tracks one and two. That ought to get rid of the tickles for you.’

  (And sure enough, it did.)

  Next up was Rocket Morrison Salt, the boy with half a lunch box dangling out of his ears.

  ‘Hello Rocket. What can I do for you?’ asked Dr Boogaloo.

  ‘Well, everythinx all mixthed up, Doctha Boogaloo,’ said Rocket, his tongue hanging out like that of a thirsty dog. ‘It all tharted when I thell oth my sthkate-board latht week and now I hear through my nosth, I thmell with my eyeth, tasth with my earth and thee with my tongue!’

  ‘Mmm, that is a problem, Rocket. And touch – is your touch working okay?’

  ‘Yeth.’

  ‘Okay, I won’t be needing the didgeridoo then. But I will need a wurlitzer, a harp, a hurdy-gurdy and a kazoo. Now, if we play them all backwards at half-speed, your senses will go back to where they came from. Doesn’t seem to matter what song, but it does all sound rather strange! Mind you, so is hearing through your nose, I imagine.’

  From the shelves above his desk, Dr Boogaloo pulled down a round silver can the size of a dinner plate. He removed the lid and took out a large old-fashioned reel of tape, which he then threaded through the metal machine crouching behind him.

  ‘Discombobulation of the senses,’ Dr Boogaloo continued, ‘very common with skateboarding accidents. You’re the third case this month. Had a boy in last week, could only see through his ears. He had to walk sideways everywhere. Like a crab. Ahem, I guess you weren’t wearing a helmet. Would I be right, Master Rocket?’

  Rocket nodded.

  ‘Okay, now we’ll use the headphones, if you don’t mind. Don’t want to discombobulate myself. You only make that mistake once, and believe me, I’ve used up my go already!’

  Dr Boogaloo plugged a cord into the machine, placed the headphones carefully on Rocket’s nose and pressed the Play button. After about five minutes, Rocket complained the music had stopped.

  ‘Well, you’re done then,’ said Dr Boogaloo.

  (And sure enough, he was.)

  Now, you’ve probably already twigged that Dr Boogaloo is no ordinary doctor. And not at all like the one you might go to see if you had the flu or a sore tummy or a cut that needed stitching. No, Dr Boogaloo was a very different type of doctor, indeed. He treated folks who suffered from … well … let’s call them unusual complaints. Strange disorders that would throw your average family doctor into a state of complete confusion. But not Dr Boogaloo. Strange disorders and unusual complaints were his specialty. In fact, his patients’ problems never seemed the slightest bit odd or strange to him. For hundreds of years, his family had treated every kind of weird disorder people have had the misfortune to suffer from. And how did they treat them? Well, you may have already guessed. They used the most powerful medicine ever known to mankind.

  Music.

  Now, you may not have ever thought of music as medicine but, according to the Boogaloos, music can cure anything! Of course, you need the right dose of the right music. No point listening to a jive if you’re in need of some boogie-woogie, and you can’t just substitute a hum for a chant, or an opera for a ballad, or a toot for a blow. Absolutely not! Musical medicine is an exact art. And it’s extraordinarily complicated. The way Dr Boogaloo explains it is this – everyone has their own tune but somet
imes, for one reason or other, we get all out of tune. We lose the beat, you might say.

  Unfortunately, your tune is just like your fingerprint. No two are the same. Which is why fixing tunes is SUCH a tricky business! It took hundreds of years for the Boogaloo family to perfect their musical cures, and even they can’t explain exactly how they work. One part vibrational biophysics and five parts pure mystery, musical medicine was almost as baffling as the disorders it was used to treat. But there was no denying it worked.

  The research was in.

  The facts were firm.

  The truth was crystal clear!

  Families who listen to lots of music very rarely fall ill, while families who never listen suffer terribly. And to this day, the Boogaloos had never come across a complaint that couldn’t be fixed with music.

  But that, regrettably, was about to change. As the doomsayers say, all good things must come to an end. And for the first time, in more than three hundred years, the unthinkable was just about to happen.

  CHAPTER 2

  No Laughing Matter

  Thursday the twenty-ninth of May started like any other day. Dr Boogaloo and his wife, Bessie (I’ll introduce you in three shakes of a tambourine), were having breakfast in their cottage behind the clinic. Beans, eggs and a cup of tea while listening to some Zimbabwean pop music and a bit of Balinese gamelan to soothe the Doctor’s wonky digestion. Being a touch gassy of late, he added some Spanish fandango and just a dash of accordion.

  Snoozing in a comfy chair in the corner was Boris, a guitarist from Uzbekistan. His guitar, perfectly balanced on his giant belly, rose and fell without the slightest wobble as he snored like a big bass drum. The Boogaloos assumed that Boris, who was wearing a cheesy Hawaiian shirt, with his feet resting on a suitcase, must have arrived sometime during the night.

  Because most of the Doctor’s cures needed to be played live, the Boogaloo Family Clinic was always full of musicians. As everybody knows, musicians love to be loved and at the Boogaloos’ they were part of the family. Breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea – the clinic was like their second home. One morning, just before Dr Boogaloo was about to take his morning piddle, he found a drummer from Belize asleep in the bath!

  After breakfast, Dr Boogaloo and Bessie headed off for the clinic. That morning, the waiting room was chockers with children. Which wasn’t unusual. Because children grow so fast, their tunes struggle to keep up. Dr Boogaloo had treated every kind of childhood disorder you could think of: Refusal To Wear Anything To School Except A Purple Bikini In The Middle Of Winter Syndrome, Refusal To Go To School At All Unless Travelling There By Elephant Syndrome, Can Only Sleep If Wearing A Pair Of Goggles And A Snorkel Syndrome. Some people make the mistake of thinking these children are being stroppy. Which absolutely wasn’t the case. Their tunes were just a little out of whack. All they needed was a musical cure from Dr Boogaloo and they were right as rain again.

  Sometimes, of course, it wasn’t the children who needed fixing. It was the parents! It was very common for parents to mistake children behaving exactly the way children are meant to behave as some sort of shocking problem. Parents are sooooooo anxious these days, I’m sure you’ll agree. It’s enough to drive any normal kid insane. In those delicate situations, Dr Boogaloo would pretend to fix the children but secretly he’d be retuning the parents. A little ‘loosen up’ musical cure from Dr Boogaloo and even the biggest worry wart of a parent will instantly stop fussing, and the children can carry on being children again.

  First up that morning was nine-year-old Charlie Magee, who himself looked more worried than a lizard trying to cross a busy road.

  ‘Morning, Charlie,’ said Dr Boogaloo. ‘Now, what seems to be troubling you?’

  ‘Dr Boogaloo, my head is filled with mean, nasty thoughts. I can’t stop imagining doing random, terrible things to people.’

  ‘I see. Can you give me an example, Charlie?’

  ‘Plenty! Just this morning I imagined putting a dead cockroach in my sister’s Wheaties, throwing my brother Sid’s homework out the car window, and emptying my pot-o-slime into Lucy’s schoolbag. Oh, and wiping my snot in her hair. I think that’s it. Er, and setting fire to Principal Godfrey’s ridiculous bushy eyebrows.’

  ‘Hmm, okay, and …’

  ‘Oh, and I imagine karate-kicking pretty much EVERY SINGLE PERSON I WALK PAST!’ interrupted Charlie, jumping up from the chair and demonstrating his best tornado high-kick. He sat back down and hung his head in shame. ‘You have to help me, Dr Boogaloo. I’m horrible. Rotten to the core!’

  ‘And have you ever done any of these nasty things?’ asked Dr Boogaloo as warmly as a pair of woolly slippers yet as cool as a cucumber as he always was when listening to his patient’s problems. To which Charlie responded no, he hadn’t, but his head was full of them, every minute of every day. He even dreamt about doing them!

  ‘Well,’ said Dr Boogaloo, ‘what wonderful self-control you have! I think you’re fine. In fact, better than fine. We all have bad thoughts, Charlie. We just can’t act on them is all.’

  ‘Really?’ said Charlie, his eyes as wide as a couple of fried eggs on a plate.

  ‘Really. Your mind is your mind, and you can do with it as you choose. Never mind those thoughts. You can be a karate-kicking, snot-wiping, homework-throwing, Wheaties-spoiling, eyebrow-burning pyromaniac all you like in here,’ said Dr Boogaloo, tapping his head, ‘as long as you don’t let him out.’

  ‘Oh, what a relief, Dr Boogaloo!’ said Charlie. ‘So it’s okay I’m now imagining giving you the rude finger and stomping on your toes?’

  ‘Absolutely, Charlie. My mind is now enjoying giving you a swift kick up the bum. So all is well. Have a lovely morning.’

  Charles Magee left delighted. All the worry gone from his face, he looked as happy as a rescue puppy that’d just been adopted.

  After Charles, Dr Boogaloo attended to Dan Mutter, who had the very delicate problem of always forgetting to wear underpants to school – nothing some congas and a theremin couldn’t fix.

  At ten o’clock he saw the Ipsy twins, whose noses had grown so long they’d started to curl! A calypso tune played on the bagpipes stopped those noses in their tracks. Although, Dr Boogaloo said Mrs Ipsy should really have brought them in a little sooner. While he’d stopped those noses growing, they were still a tad on the long side with a good-sized hook on the end. Luckily for the twins, they do carry it rather well.

  Next up that morning was poor old Barton Blonk, who couldn’t open his mouth without swearing – a flumpet, flugelhorn and fujara did the trick, even if it did take a few tries! Barton Blonk was so used to being rude, he found it mighty hard to be nice. In fact, he’s only a smidge nicer than before, but Dr Boogaloo said there’s nothing much he can do about that. Now Barton calls everyone a ‘*&%$#^&&**&#@#’ instead of a ‘%**##%*$@%$@**&@*&$$@&*%$@%&’, which is an improvement of sorts. After an MA+ Parental Guidance Recommended goodbye from Barton, Dr Boogaloo checked his schedule. His next patient wasn’t in for another half an hour.

  Time for a cup of tea with Bessie, he thought. (Sorry, I haven’t forgotten – I’ll introduce Bessie in two tings of a triangle.) But as the Doctor went to leave, there sitting in the waiting room was a young girl and her mother. Both mother and daughter were dressed head to toe in immaculate white – white clothes, white shoes and impossibly posh white gloves! Dr Boogaloo waved them in. He never turned a patient away, even if it was time for a cup of tea.

  ‘Now, how can I help you, ladies?’ Dr Boogaloo asked.

  ‘Well,’ said the girl’s mother, ‘it’s terrible! My daughter, Blue, can’t laugh anymore. It’s just disappeared! All her laughter has gone! At first I thought she took after her father’s side of the family. To be quite honest, they’re a miserable bunch, but they don’t mind a laugh every now and then. And it’s not from me. If there’s one thing that runs in my family, it’s a good sense of humour. I can see the funny side of a funeral!’

  Blue’s mother looked at he
r daughter and began to weep.

  ‘I’m sorry, Doctor, it’s just … it’s very hard to live with someone who never laughs. You’ve no idea what it’s like,’ she sniffed. ‘Blue’s father and I work very hard. Our time at home is precious. And we only have one child. WHAT IF SHE STAYS LIKE THIS? It’s like this big black cloud hanging over everything. It’s ruining our lives! I know it’s a horrible thing to say but …’

  Blue’s mother leaned in towards the Doctor. She lowered her voice to a loud whisper as if Blue wouldn’t hear her, which quite clearly she could.

  ‘It’s very hard to love someone who doesn’t laugh, don’t you think, Doctor? Love and laughter go together, wouldn’t you say? And I mean, it’s not like she’s good at tennis or anything. No particular special skills, I’m afraid.’

  Blue’s mother wiped away her tears with a white silk handkerchief and gave the Doctor a creepy kind of smile. Her teeth glowed lightbulb-white after one too many whitening treatments. She pulled out a mirror from her purse.

  ‘Do you have medication for this sort of thing?’ she said, pouting like a tropical fish and reapplying her lipstick. ‘I heard about your clinic from my interior decorator, Mildred – wonderful decorator – and she said you might be able to help?’

  Blue shifted uncomfortably in her chair and stared at her white shoes. Her cheeks flushed a deep red and her shoes squeaked as she curled her toes tight.

  ‘Okay, Blue,’ said Dr Boogaloo, ‘can you tell me how long it has been, do you think?’

  ‘Seven hundred and twelve days,’ replied Blue, fidgeting with her too-tight plaits. Set against her simple white dress, they fell to her waist like honey-coloured rope. ‘I remember my friend Sophie and I were in year two. It doesn’t sound so funny now, but Sophie got her words all mixed up and called Mr Gouci “Mr Grouchy”. We nearly wet our pants we were laughing so hard.’