The Roo Club

Chapter One

As she approaches, quietly, on tip toes, the sudden scatter of squabbling ducks, busily preening themselves whilst basking beside a Parliament Hill Fields pond, reminds Emily of the transience of happiness. When the birds noisily flap and splash down into the water in the middle of the pond, well away from her, their hysterical quacks muddle the girl’s dark thoughts. Thoughts about death being her only release from interminable pain; thoughts that, but for the whispered words of her big brother, Jimmy, would be put into action in the same pond with pockets filled with stones…

…As once happened with that writer Jimmy told her about: Virginia Woolf.

She turns, leaving the ducks to quack amongst themselves about her rude intrusion into their wet little lives, and heads for her granny’s house in the Vale of Health at the other end of Hampstead Heath.

Jimmy’s suggestion. His alternative to death by drowning.

*****

“Hi, there. You the new girl? I’m Emily. My dad’s a doctor. A surgeon. Cuts people open and all that… ugh!”

The other girl smiled. Briefly.

“Belinda,” she responded. “Nice to meet you, Emily. And the only thing my dad cuts is a purple pimple on his chin when he shaves.”

Emily giggled.

“It’s gross!” said Belinda.

“Come and meet my friends over there,” suggested Emily. “We’re all into music, you know. Because of this school. I’m a pianist. Like my granny. She’s famous. Played in the Carnegie Hall. Once. Bit old now. Hands too knobbly to play in concerts. She has loads of money, though. Lives by the Heath. Maybe–?”

“Introduce me to your friends, Emily,” interrupted the other girl.

“Oh… right. Cool!”

Five girls, grouped together, looked up as Emily approached with the new girl.

“Hi guys! This is Belinda. New here. Comes from… erm…?”

Emily looked at Belinda.

“Fucking state school on the Northern Line. Left behind an annoying little sister for them to do something with so I can get on with my life. Here. Best girls’ school in North London, Dad says.”

“He’s got a purple pimple on his chin,” added Emily, grinning.

But Belinda ignored her. Instead, she turned her back on the girl who had so cheerfully befriended her, immediately entering into lively discussion with Emily’s friends about the attributes of their school, how she’d love to get to know them all, share time with them, chill out.

So began Emily’s nightmare…

*****

“Emily? What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be at…?” Granny halts mid-sentence on seeing a solitary tear emerge from the corner of one of her granddaughter’s sorrowful eyes before snail-trailing down the girl’s pale, young cheek. She opens her arms wide, hugs Emily and strokes her hair when the girl starts to sob uncontrollably. She takes her granddaughter into the sitting room where, for what seems an eternity, they sit together in silence, on the settee, the elderly pianist’s arthritic arm resting across the girl’s shoulders.

“Trouble at school?” Old Mabel finally asks.

Without looking up, her head now pressed against her granny’s shrivelled bosom, Emily nods.

“Work? Exams?”

The granddaughter shakes her head.

“Boys?”

Emily giggles through her tears and shakes her head again.

“Mummy and Daddy okay? Getting on all right?”

Emily nods.

“The North London Festival of Music and Drama? You’re worried that you, Lingling and Schubert won’t get first place? Hellish difficult, the F minor Fantasy. Musically, not technically.”

Emily looks up.

“I’ve lost my friends.”

“Oh dear, that is careless. Where do you think you left them?”

“Granny!” Emily sits back. She wipes her tears with the back of her hand and frowns at her grandmother. “That new girl I mentioned the other day…”

“Belinda?”

“Uh-huh!

“She’s stolen my friends. I mean, not exactly stolen them. More like put them all against me. By doing things. Saying things. Even Lingling’s being mean now. Can’t see how we can go ahead with the Festival Competition. And whenever I practice the piano, I just see her. Belinda. With that look on her face. Puts me off. And she knows she’s much better looking than me.”

“Oh, no way! That is not possible.”

“I daren’t tell Mum. She’ll only phone the school and make things a thousand times worse. As for Dad, he’d…”

“He’d go storming off to your school armed with a scalpel, right?”

Emily grins.

“Jimmy told me to come here.”

“Big brother Jimmy who doesn’t exist, right?”

“He does! Just that no one else can see or talk to him.”

“Well, he did the right thing.”

“I really came to the Heath to end it all in one of the ponds, but…”

“But Jimmy saw sense, right? Look, help yourself to whatever you can find in the kitchen. Muffins came out pretty well this morning. Jenny told me to make them. Must’ve been having words with your Jimmy.”

Emily stares at her grandmother.

“Who’s Jenny?” she asks.

“Get those muffins and a glass of milk, and I’ll introduce you.”

*****

Emily’s phone rang. She had stopped messaging and social networking after Belinda peppered Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter with snide comments about her being ‘weird’.

It was Lingling.

Ever hopeful, Emily eagerly answered.

Silence.

“Lingling?”

More silence.

“Is that you? You okay for a practice tomorrow?”

Giggles, then the phone went dead.

*****

“When I was a girl…”

Old Mabel pauses to take a bite out of a muffin. Emily grins.

“Like a hundred years ago?” the girl offers.

“Enough of your cheek, young lady. When I was a child, I had a best friend forever. I called her Jenny.”

“And no else could see or hear her?”

“Or knew about her. See, I never went to a special school like you. Your great grandparents weren’t wealthy.”

“Yeah. Your dad worked on the railway. LNER, you said. All the way to Newcastle.”

“Ticket conductor.”

“And you got teased at school. Because—”

“We never talked about that. The ‘other family’, Jenny called them. In Newcastle.”

“Weren’t you curious? To know what they looked like.”

“Not when all that teasing just about destroyed me. But Jenny helped me through it all. Jenny and Beethoven.”

“Do you still talk to her?”

“Now why would a young girl like Jenny want to chill out with an old lady like me?”

“Because…” Emily pauses. She looks at the muffins, picks one up and holds it in front of her grandmother. “Because you’re the best!”

“But there is someone she’d love to meet. I know it.”

“Me?”

“You’d not see her. Or be able to talk with her.”

“Hmm!”

“But your big brother, now?”

Emily’s eyes light up.

“Jenny and Jimmy get together, like?”

“Who knows where that might lead. Perhaps Jenny could help Jimmy sort things out for you.”

Emily studies the muffin in her hand as if hoping to see Jenny appear in it.

“How?” she finally asks.

“Well… when you’ve finished staring at that delicious muffin, and put it where it belongs, in your tummy, we could go over the Schubert Fantasy together whilst Jimmy and Jenny get to know each other.”

And so, with muffins in tummies, grandmother and granddaughter sit side by side, at the dusty Steinway grand piano in the music room, to be joined by Schubert, leaving Emily’s brother and Mabel’s longstanding best friend forever to get to know each other before coming up with a plan.

A plan that might save the girl from endless torment at school… and from death.

Chapter Two

“So! You’re Emily’s big brother. Finally, we get to meet up.”

Jenny glances at grandmother and granddaughter now discussing the music on the piano music rest, seemingly arguing over who should play primo and who, secondo. Emily wants to stick with primo as Lingling always likes to be down in the bass, but her granny is insisting she swap places for a change.

“It’ll help you to empathise with your friend,” says the old lady. “Understand her better.”

“I just can’t believe we came second last year with Debussy’s ‘En Bateau.’ Lingling and I were such good friends then.”

“You both deserved first prize. Remember… I was there!”

“Okay. Let’s swap places, but I can’t see how this’ll make Lingling like me again.”

After switching places, grandmother and granddaughter enter the troubled mind that plagued Schubert’s final years, and Emily soon discovers how right her granny has been. It isn’t all scary darkness down there in the lower octaves. There are moments of joy and of humour. The same feelings she used to experience when hanging out with her friends at school. Before…

…Before Belinda!

“My dear friend, Mabel, was always so right about everything,” Jenny says. “Let’s leave them to get on with the music, Jimmy. Good opportunity to find out more about that Chinese girl, Lingling.”

“You mean…?” begins Jimmy.

“I do, indeed!” agrees Jenny.

“But I’ve never…”

“Never travelled outside Emily? What with being her big brother, and all?”

“Guess we never saw the need.”

“And she was thinking about killing herself? Shame on you!”

“Is it… you know… kind of creepy? I mean for me and Emily to be separated. Will I still exist?”

“You’ve heard her say so many times how real you are. Just that others can’t see or hear you. Look, I may look like a teenager, but I’ve been around for well over seventy years. Learned a lot. I helped your granny get to where she is. Become what she became. One of the greatest pianists of the last century. Just stick with me and, whatever happens, do not panic. Remember… no one, apart from Emily, can see you.”

“I wish Emily could see you. I think you’re gorgeous!”

“Watch it! No time for all that lubby-dubby stuff.”

“Would she know? If I’ve gone.”

“Of course she would. You’re inside her. Like a part of her. But we can wait till tomorrow. When she meets up with Lingling at school. Meanwhile…” Jenny offers Jimmy her elbow, grinning. “We stick together and get to know each other. But absolutely no funny business. Remember, I’m seventy-seven.”

“Worst luck!” mutters Jimmy, also grinning.

“Is there anything more you can tell me about Lingling? Other than that she’s Chinese.”

“Came to London two years ago. From Hong Kong. With her mum. Got some sort of a music scholarship.”

“Is she good?”

“I know absolutely nothing about classical music. More into rap myself…”

“Jabber, jabber, jabber! And you call that music?”

“Yeah! It’s got beat, man. And soul.”

“Hmm! How does your little sister put up with you?”

“’Cos I’m the greatest! And way more handsome than—”

“Shut up! Lingling… tell me more.”

Arms linked, they leave Emily and her granny in the soulful company of Franz Schubert and stroll out through the closed back door into a small, tidy little garden where, seated together on a bench, Jimmy tells Jenny what little he knows about Lingling.

*****

After sitting down next to Lingling, who did no more than briefly glance at her, Emily took out her iPad and sheets of mathematical equations from her school bag before placing it under her chair.

“Wish I had your brain,” she whispered. “For me, maths is a total nightmare.”

Lingling’s only response was a slight shrug of her shoulders.

“You okay for a practice tonight?”

“Maybe,” whispered the Chinese girl. “Depends on what Belinda has planned.”

Which Emily took to mean, ‘No!’

*****

“Well,” begins Jimmy, “as always, Emily was the first to approach Lingling when she came to the school two years ago. They soon became real mates. Loved the same sort of music. Never out of each other’s company at school and met up together every weekend. Not only to play music on Emily’s piano. Went to the playground in the park. Joked about, and got teased by, the boys. Lingling’s really pretty, you know. In an oriental kind of way. The boys took to her. As they would to–”

Jimmy attempts to take hold of Jenny’s hand, but she quickly pulls it away.

“Like I said, ‘No!’ Look, just tell me more about Lingling the girl. What she’s like. Apart from being Chinese and pretty. Her parents. Background. Anything!”

“Well, I do know it’s just her and her mum. Her dad’s still in Hong Kong. Work, I guess. Dunno what he’s into. Triads?”

“Don’t make fun of her dad, Jimmy. So… does she get on with her mum?”

Jimmy wipes a little collection of crumbs off his trousers. Must have got there when Emily had one of granny’s muffins, he reckons. A thought occurs to him. If he and Jenny leave their real-life sister and friend behind, will he get to taste muffins himself? And chocolate cake and spaghetti carbonara that Emily so raves about?

“Well? Does she? Get on with her mum?”

“Dunno! Emily never went round to her place. It was always the other way around. When they were friends. And my sister’s so generous, she never questioned why it was always her doing the entertaining. Countless sleepovers at our place, but never Lingling’s.”

“And you didn’t think to ask yourself, ‘Why not?’ You’re supposed to be her big brother!”

“Just that… well, I know next to nothing about girls.”

“And you come from inside one?”

“Not now! I’m on my own, guys! Plus, she can be my imaginary sister. The other way around, for a change.”

“Stop wittering, Jimmy. We’ve work to do. Tomorrow we’ll join Emily and Lingling at school. I take it they still sit together in class, whatever Belinda says or does.”

“True.”

“Then tomorrow will be your first step into the unknown. Across the divide.”

“Divide?”

“Between different realities. And…”

“And?”

“How’s your Greek?”

“Emily likes Greek yoghurt.”

“I’m talking more than yoghurt, chum. Hippocampus.”

“Yeah, I saw one of those when I went with Emily and Lingling to the London Zoo one weekend. Great big, lazy, fat bugger, it was. Huge teeth though, so I kept quiet. Didn’t want Emily to get bitten by it.”

“Hippocampus, not hippopotamus! It’s that part of the brain where memories are stored. Lingling’s memories. As we’re not real for Lingling, we can travel there unnoticed and find out who she really is, this girl who pretends to no longer be Emily’s friend. Because of Belinda.”

Chapter Three

“You don’t have to whisper,” Jenny says to Jimmy as Emily sits down next to Lingling in class the following morning. “Remember, you’re only real for Emily, but she’ll not be hearing you when she’s busily occupied in their world. As soon as Lingling turns around, just follow me. Into her eyes. The back of each eye connects directly to the brain where we’ll make our way to the hippocampus. And no, it won’t bite like a hippopotamus. Think of it as a railway station. To take us to places in Lingling’s past. Like going on a rail journey.”

“Have you done this before?” asks Jimmy.

“Like I told you, I’m seventy-seven. So, there’s not much I haven’t done before. If you…” Lingling turns to face Emily and Jenny holds her breath.

“Sorry couldn’t make Schubert practice at the weekend,” says Lingling. “Belinda invited me round to Kami’s with her.”

“Now!” urges Jenny, in silence. She grabs Jimmy’s arm, and together, unseen, they take a running jump at, and into, the Chinese girl’s face. A quick scramble up the girl’s pale cheek, then…”

“Wow!” exclaims Jimmy. “I thought it would be all dark and dingy in here, but it’s really quite bright.”

“Think different dimensions, Jimmy. Now, if I’m right, the hippocampus will be somewhere in…” Jenny circles around in different directions, for inside the girl’s brain there is no ‘up’ nor ‘down’. Jimmy wonders whether it would be much the same if he were an electron whizzing about inside a computer looking for an app. Not that being inside Emily taught him much about IT other than switching things on and off.

“There, in that direction!” suggests Jenny, pointing up and to his left.

“Game for anything!” says Jimmy, more to quell his mounting anxiety that perhaps getting inside Lingling’s young and active brain is not such a good idea after all. He has an uneasy feeling that this is a first for Jenny, too.

He follows Jenny through a kaleidoscope of ever-changing, colourful patterns, soon forgetting his fear. Unbelievably beautiful, he thinks, and cannot help but wonder whether he, too, has a similar weirdly wonderful world inside his own head. He can hardly wait to tell his sister all about it, but, according to Jenny, what he tells the girl must depend on what they find in Lingling’s hippocampus.

Not hippopotamus!

“Over there!” announces Jenny. “Hong Kong, here we come!”

*****

“What do you mean, Baba[1]’s in trouble?” Lingling asked her mother in English. She preferred to speak in English now that she was heavily into Western music that she so adored. Baba, coming from the mainland, wanted her to learn the erhu[2], but she went on so about it sounding like a mosquito being tortured that he desisted, and finally agreed to her having piano lessons.

“You know about those things happening in the streets, Lingling?” the girl’s mother asked.

“The demonstrations? To keep Hong Kong ‘special’, like before? Different from Mainland China?”

“Your baba came here to escape what he calls the ‘communist devils’. It’s how we met, Baba and me. And now the devils, they come here anyway. To take away our freedom. Our rights. Our independence.”

“So?” queried Lingling. “Why is Baba in trouble?”

Tears welled in her mother’s eyes. Somehow these told the girl what she needed to know. That her father was in prison. Already, she knew this meant she might never see him again.

“I so tried to warn him, Lingling. To say nothing. Or even tell lies. Like say that he loves Xi Jinping. But you know your father. Only ever tells the truth.”

[1] ‘Daddy’ in Chinese

[2] Two-stringed Chinese musical instrument