Frank Derrick's Holiday of a Lifetime (11 page)

And where the bloody hell do you think you’ve been?

11

Laura seemed to be completely unfazed by Frank flying halfway across the world with a cat. While the woman with the Joan or Jackie hair completed some paperwork, Laura looked in through the grille at the front of the cat box.

‘Is that Bill?’ she said. ‘You brought Bill. Do you want any candy?’

She walked across the room to a vending machine and made her selection. Her phone rang. Frank recognized the ringtone from a Disney cartoon. He would have expected a loud rock guitar riff.

‘Hi, Mom. Yes. We’re just collecting something. No, we’re still at the airport. No, it was on time. Do you want to speak to him? Okay. We shouldn’t be too long now. Bye.’

Laura ended the phone call and threaded another dollar bill into the vending machine.

‘What shall I get you, Frank?’ she called out.

He looked over at the machine and he chose a Milky Way as it was the only thing that he thought he recognized. Joan or Jackie Collins handed him both his and Bill’s passports. Laura came over and gave Frank a Milky Way.

‘That was Mom,’ she said. ‘She can’t wait to see you. She didn’t want to speak to you on the phone because it would spoil the moment.’ She rolled her eyes as if to show how soppy she thought her mother was.

‘How is she today?’ Frank said.

Laura thought for a moment. ‘Sandra Bullock,’ she said.

‘Which is good, isn’t it?’ Frank said.

Laura nodded. She looked at the two passports Frank was holding – one human and one pet.

‘Does Bill have a photograph?’ she said.

Frank showed her the blank space on the pet passport where the photograph would have been. Laura seemed disappointed. The pet passport photograph had been optional and Frank had left it blank. Getting Bill to sit high enough and still enough on the stool in the photo booth at the big Sainsbury’s probably would have proved impossible. Getting him to pull the correct neutral expression, however, would have been a lot easier. Bill had a face for passports.

Flying a cat to America wasn’t cheap, but Frank didn’t want to leave Bill behind and he couldn’t put him in a cattery. Not again. He wasn’t sure that Bill had ever fully forgiven him for the last time. When Frank had found out that Kelly Christmas – who brought in the light and the motivation to put his teeth in – was allergic to cats, he was terrified that she might sneeze and not come to see him any more. And so Frank had put Bill into a cat’s home for a month. It was an act of betrayal towards his friend that Frank didn’t want to repeat.

To get Bill on the flight Frank had to have him micro-chipped, vaccinated against rabies and certified as fit to travel by a vet who must surely have been one of the richest men in Fullwind. Bill’s plane ticket was more expensive than Frank’s and he’d needed to be in a plastic travel box that was ventilated, lockable and large enough for Bill to be able to stand up, turn around and lie down in. Bill had more legroom on the plane than Frank.

Frank thanked the woman behind the counter and he walked back to the car with Laura who carried the cat box. At the car Frank held the box while Laura tipped the front seat forward and squeezed the box onto the backseat.

‘Will he be okay back there?’ Laura said.

‘As long as we don’t try to swing him.’

‘Mom says that about our house. Why would anyone swing a cat?’

‘I think it’s a Navy saying.’

‘Were you in the Navy?’

‘No.’ Frank expected Laura to start asking questions about the war and his role in it but they never came. At last, a generation that wasn’t interested.

They climbed into the car. Laura selected the ‘home’ preset on the sat nav and they pulled out of the parking lot. They didn’t speak all that much on the drive to Santa Monica. Frank was suddenly very tired. He looked out of the window. More boulevards, highways and freeways, liquor stores, gun shops and drive-thrus and barely a single pedestrian apart from an old homeless man pushing a shopping trolley full of old TV sets past a KFC. He was hungry. He tore open the wrapper of the Milky Way and bit into it.

‘Oh,’ he said. He put his hand to his jaw. ‘This Milky Way is a Mars bar.’ He removed the chocolate bar from his mouth and looked at the layer of chewy caramel that had almost torn the dentures from his mouth.

Everything was so American.

12

Frank must have looked at his family’s Los Angeles home a dozen times or more since Christmas on the computers in the library. He’d viewed the house from a satellite high above the earth and looked at it from 360 different panoramic degrees, walking virtually along the street, zooming in close enough to read the slogan on a jogger’s shirt and the number on the roof of a passing police car. The jogger and the cop car were always there every time he looked. When Laura drove Jimmy’s car onto Euclid Street, Frank felt like he knew it as well as the one on which he lived. The jogger and the cop car weren’t there and he hadn’t noticed before quite how many of the buildings were bungalows and in the online version of the street, Beth wasn’t standing outside the open front door of hers waiting for him. She was wearing a baggy grey sweatshirt and matching trousers. She was barefoot.

Laura pulled the car up in front of the house and Beth came round to the passenger side of the car. She helped Frank out and she hugged him. At first he held back from fully reciprocating the hug, fearing that she might have been so thin from the cancer or the radiation that she would have fallen apart in his arms. When the plane had landed, he’d been concerned that he might not recognize Beth when he first saw her in the airport – what he was really most afraid of was that it would have been the illness that had changed her and made her unrecognizable. But, thankfully, she barely looked any different to when he’d last seen her, and she didn’t disintegrate in his arms.

‘How was the flight?’ Beth asked, still holding on to him.

‘It wasn’t too bad.’ Frank couldn’t help checking Beth’s head for signs of hair loss.

Laura said hi to her mother and walked around to the back of the car.

‘I’ll get your bags, Frank,’ she said.

‘Thank you, Laura,’ Frank said, and then to Beth, ‘I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to her calling me Frank.’

‘I know,’ Beth said, finally releasing him from the hug but still with a hand on his arm. ‘I was Beth for a while. I’m Mom again now. Are you hungry? You must be exhausted.’ He looked at her face properly for the first time. She didn’t look particularly pale or drained.

Laura walked by with Frank’s overnight bag over her shoulder and carrying his suitcase in two hands.

‘Don’t forget,’ she said to Frank. She gestured with a nod of her head towards the car.

‘What’s that?’ Beth said.

‘Just a minute,’ Frank said. He bent down and found the lever that tipped the car seat forward. He leaned inside and lifted the cat box out.

‘Dad?’ Beth said. ‘Tell me it isn’t Bill.’

There was a meow from inside the cat box as though Bill was answering Beth. It was a short meow. He’d never been a particularly verbose cat but, like his expressionless face, his meows could sometimes speak volumes:

Yes, it’s me. Who did you expect? Why does everyone keep asking if it’s me? Who did you all think it would be? And by the way, if Frank isn’t hungry, I certainly am. I’m starving. And exhausted? Why not ask me if I’m exhausted? I’ve spent most of the day in a plastic box. I’ve been shut in the dark with everybody’s suitcases and a hell of a lot of noisy dogs. So yes, let’s all go inside, shall we, so I can get out of this sodding box.

Beth hadn’t been quite as thrilled by Bill’s surprise appearance as Frank had hoped she would be.

‘What were you thinking, Dad?’ she said. ‘Keeping pets is against the terms of our lease agreement. We could lose our home.’

Frank apologized. He said that he’d thought that it would be an unexpected surprise for her. She said that she’d had enough unexpected surprises; what she needed was some dull predictability. He said that he really hadn’t known what else to do with Bill.

‘Catteries,’ Beth had said. ‘Cat hotels. A cat sitter? You could have paid somebody to come to your flat and feed him every day for however much it must have cost to fly him here. How much did it even cost?’

Frank knocked £200 off the price of Bill’s plane ticket and rounded it down another twenty pounds, hoping a more moderate price tag would help his argument.

‘I wish you’d think things through,’ Beth said.

‘I know,’ Frank said. ‘You’re right. I never do.’ Which wasn’t true. For two months he’d thought about Bill running around Beth’s garden, chasing a ball of wool and bothering all the American mice – Mickey, Minnie, Jerry. What he hadn’t thought through was that there might be no fence around the garden or that Bill wouldn’t be allowed in the garden because of the terms of Beth’s lease agreement. Beth took a deep breath, she held it for five seconds and when she exhaled, the anger seemed to leave her body. It looked like a method that someone had been paid an hourly fee to teach her.

‘Well, obviously there isn’t anything we can do now,’ she said. ‘Bill is here. We’ll just have to keep him indoors and hope he doesn’t pee on everything.’

They agreed to start the holiday over again. Beth made Frank go outside, she shut the door and then opened it and welcomed him into her home as though he’d just that minute arrived. She hugged him and even though the cat box was already in the house she pretended to be surprised to see it.

‘And you brought Bill with you!’ she said.

She led Frank to the sofa and they both sat down.

‘Shall I make coffee?’ Laura said, slightly weary at the lame display from two generations of old folks. ‘Or tea? Mom’s bought English Blend.’

‘Could I have a cup of coffee please?’ Frank said. Beth looked surprised by his request, perhaps because she didn’t remember him ever liking coffee, and she was right, but Frank didn’t want to be seen as an unadventurous Englishman abroad with a suitcase full of PG Tips, pork pies and Union Jack clothing. Laura made the coffee and Frank pretended to like it. Bill was less tactful, impolitely staring at the saucer of soy milk when Laura put it on the kitchen floor in front of him:

Soy milk! Not even soya. What the hell is soy milk?

Laura found a plastic paint roller tray and filled it with torn-up strips of newspaper and, like Frank, Bill must have been avoiding going to the toilet on the plane too, because he immediately filled the makeshift litter tray. And then he drank the soy milk.

Beth showed Frank where the bathroom was and Laura’s bedroom, where he’d be sleeping. He was surprised how small the house was. There were two bedrooms, a bathroom, a living room and a tiny kitchen. The front door of the house opened directly into the living room. With the door open you could watch the TV from across the street. There was a small tree on the grass to the side of the house. The house was detached and from the outside it looked like a children’s painting: a front door with a window on each side and a tree. It reminded Frank of the prefab that he’d lived in with his parents after the war.

They all sat together in the living room. They watched TV and then Frank told them about his flight, about the food and the films and Dustin Hoffman in
Rain Man
and the woman with the make-up and hair at the cargo building and how a Milky Way was a Mars bar. He asked what the time was in England and Beth said that it was about four in the morning and when she saw that Frank was struggling to keep his eyes open, she suggested he should go to bed. Laura took Frank’s suitcase and overnight bag into her bedroom for him. Frank said that he would have been fine in the living room sleeping on the sofa or the floor. But it had already been decided. Laura was going to sleep on the air bed in the living room. She often stayed up late watching TV anyway. Frank had said all right but only if Laura was really sure; he said that he would be happy to sleep in a tent in the garden and Beth called out from the living room, ‘Let’s deal with one lease agreement violation at a time, Dad.’

Frank said goodnight to Laura and closed the bedroom door, then took a few things out of his overnight bag and his pyjamas out of the suitcase. He put them on and went to bed. Even though he was incredibly tired he couldn’t get to sleep. It was almost time for the first aircraft of the day and time to get up back at home. He listened to the sound of Laura pumping up the air bed in the living room until she was breathing heavily in sync with the foot pump. Soon Frank couldn’t distinguish between the two sounds as they eventually soothed him into a deep sleep.

Euclid

Frank woke up the next morning with no idea what the time was or even if it was the morning. He was incredibly hungry. His stomach rumbled. His four clocks were over on the dressing table on the far side of the bedroom, like the New York, London, Paris and Berlin clocks on the wall of a city bank or advertising firm. He was in Laura’s bedroom. Bette Davis was looking at him from the opposite wall above the row of clocks. It was a framed poster advertising bourbon whiskey. Bette was smiling with a cigarette on the go.

He listened for aeroplanes. Nothing. He heard a car drive slowly by outside. There was a radio playing somewhere in the house and a female voice quietly singing along with it. He couldn’t tell if it was Beth or Laura.

He’d had a dream that he was in a taxi, returning home from the airport. It had been snowing and then it had rained and Fullwind was covered in an uneven layer of dirty grey slush. As the taxi drove through the village, Frank noticed changes. Apart from everywhere looking like the inside of a broken snow globe, the charity shop was now called Poun-daMental! and the nativity scene had been the victim of a barn burning. His flat was gone. In its place was a huge Tesco superstore.

He reached across to the bedside table for his glasses but there was no bedside table there. He needed to go to the toilet and he really had to eat something soon or he thought he might throw up. He lay on his back to take the weight off his empty stomach and looked up at the square tiles of the false ceiling above. He pictured a bank robber moving one of the tiles to one side to hide a bag of money or drugs in the roof space, like in a film.