Frank Derrick's Holiday of a Lifetime (15 page)

‘What age? I can’t remember. I’m not good with numbers and dates.’ Frank counted years in his head. ‘I imagine I was probably around your age. Although this was the early 1950s, so we were both already practically middle-aged.’

‘That doesn’t make any sense,’ Laura said. ‘If you were middle-aged when you were twenty, you would have died when you were forty. Unless you’re a vampire. You’re not a vampire, are you?’

‘I’m not a vampire,’ Frank said. ‘I did say I wasn’t good with numbers. We left school a lot younger, though, and went straight to work. Average life expectancy was about seventy or thereabouts. If you lived to a hundred you’d get a telegram from the Queen and it would be on the news. These days everyone expects to live until they’re at least a hundred and fifty. I’m sorry, I seem to have got a bit sidetracked. What was the question?’

‘Was Grandma your first love?’ Laura said.

Frank blushed. ‘I suppose she was.’

‘And your last?’

‘Well, I don’t want to count my chickens, so I can’t say for sure quite yet.’ Beth looked up from her letters at Frank. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Let’s say yes.’

‘So you and Grandma were made for each other? Soulmates and life partners?’ Laura said.

‘You do become very close to someone after forty years,’ Frank said. ‘I don’t think either of us would leave the room without telling each other where we were going. Even if it was just to go to the kitchen or the toilet.’

Beth looked at him again. She was either surprised at how candid her father was being or waiting for him to be quiet because she couldn’t concentrate on finding a good Scrabble word.

‘Mom has told me she had some terrible boyfriends when she was growing up,’ Laura said.

‘Oh yes,’ Frank said. ‘She certainly did.’ Beth watched, virtually open-mouthed, as Frank told Laura about some of the self-centred and boorish boys and the rude, slovenly and thoughtless boys that Beth had dated.

‘Treble word. Seventy-one,’ Beth said. ‘Now give me the letters bag, Laura, and you, dear Father, can stop critiquing my love life.’

Beth won the game and Frank came last, although he protested that he would have beaten Laura if he wasn’t all of a sudden suffering from jetlag after all and if she’d spelled ‘agonise’ the proper way with an ‘s’ instead of a ‘z’, and if he’d been allowed ‘flavour’ rather than ‘flavor’.

‘This is America, Frank,’ Laura said. ‘Them’s the rules.’

After the game they watched
The Truman Show
on a movie channel and Frank wondered what significance the film played in Beth’s and Jimmy’s relationship. In a really long ad break Beth tried to explain to Frank for the fourth or fifth time exactly what her job involved but no matter how she described it and what it entailed – abstractor, facilitator, functional activator, micro management, credential-ling coordination, expeditor, pagination system operator – it still didn’t sound like a real job to him. He accused her of making up words to use in their next game of Scrabble.

When Frank was in the bathroom, taking his dentures out before bed, he kept breaking into involuntary bursts of laughter. He didn’t know at what. They’d all laughed so much tonight that he just couldn’t seem to stop. It was as though the air-conditioning unit might be pumping nitrous oxide into the house. If he’d died in his sleep that night and somebody had stood in a church and said that it was what he would have wanted, it wouldn’t have been entirely nonsense. It was the sort of thing that was often said about entertainers after they’d finished the punch line to their greatest ever joke or literally sung their heart out before dropping down dead on stage mid-curtain call, with the sound of the audience’s laughter and applause ringing in their dying eardrums. Frank had always thought it was a corny show business cliché, but, after just a few days with his family, it wouldn’t have been the worst time to triumphantly leave the stage in a box. He didn’t want to go back to Fullwind. There was nothing waiting for him there other than money problems and inclement weather. He had no great attachment to anything that he’d left behind. All that he loved in the world was here with him now.

15

There was a new updated itinerary printed and left out on the living-room table for Frank when he got up the next morning:

On the drive to Greystone Mansion, Frank and Laura shared traffic accident anecdotes like scars. Laura told Frank about how she’d cycled into a tree branch three years ago, resulting in her almost losing her sight and ending up with two different-coloured eyes. Frank knew about the tree and the bicycle but he didn’t know about the boy.

‘I was dating this guy who turned out to be an idiot, but a romantic one,’ Laura said. ‘He rented a tandem for us and because he was the guy, he had to go at the front, even though my legs were probably stronger. Anyhow, we ended up on some side street on this dumb bicycle made for two and he steered us under a tree and instead of shouting “duck” or doing the chivalrous thing and protecting me from the branch by taking it full in
his
face,
he
ducked. What a hero. It’s called heterochromia,’ Laura said, referring to her eye condition. ‘Kiefer Sutherland and Robert Downey Junior have it too and David Bowie and Alexander the Great. It’s mostly dogs who get it, though. Tell me about your accident. It was a milkman, right?’

‘Yes. I was walking and he was driving a milk float. I was probably going faster than him. He drove into me and I ended up underneath the milk float. I broke my arm and a bone in my foot. Isn’t it pronounced Bowie?’ Frank said. ‘Like Joey.’

‘Bowie,’ Laura repeated, in a transatlantic cockney accent that was not dissimilar to that of David Bowie himself. ‘What exactly is a milk float? I thought it was something to do with parades?’

‘That’s just a float,’ Frank said. ‘A milk float is a van for delivering milk. They’re electric and they’re very slow. It’s probably the most embarrassing thing you can be run over by. You have milkmen in Los Angeles, don’t you?’

Laura nodded.

‘I expect your milkmen are a lot different to ours,’ Frank said. ‘They probably look like film stars. More glamorous than Benny Hill.’

‘He’s that guy who gets chased around by women all the time, right?’ Laura asked.

Frank was as surprised that a twenty-year-old American girl would have heard of Benny Hill as Laura had been that an eighty-two-year-old English man would know what a goth or an emo was, or that he would be the one to teach her the correct way to pronounce the names of rock stars.

They drove in through the gates of Greystone Mansion and up the steep hill to the car park. They walked slowly around the vast public park, through courtyards and gardens, stopping to sit on benches by fountains and ponds and to look through the windows of the gothic neoclassical Tudor-style concrete seven-chimneyed folly of a building at the black-and-white marble floor inside. Bette Davis had once walked down the stairs holding that hand-carved oak banister. Batman lived here. They talked about the other films that had been shot on location there, competing with each other for who had seen the most. Laura asked whether Frank had ever seen a TV movie that Bette Davis was in with James Stewart. He hadn’t heard of the film and he was sure that Laura had only mentioned it so that she could ask him again to do his James Stewart impression. Frank still refused. He said that it would probably come out sounding more like Sean Connery. She asked him to do Sean Connery instead and see what happened. Frank looked up at the faux Tudor mansion that they were sitting in front of and something dawned on him.

‘Do you remember my friend John?’

‘I haven’t forgotten about Jimmy Stewart yet,’ Laura said.

‘My friend Smelly John . . .’

‘Smelly John?’ Laura said, thinking she’d misheard him.

‘Yes. Smelly John lived in sheltered housing. Do you have sheltered housing in America?’

‘I don’t think so.’ Laura was still eager to find out what made John smelly.

‘It’s a sort of warden-assisted home. For retired people mainly,’ Frank said.

‘Like a retirement community?’

‘A retirement community. That makes it sound more romantic. John’s retirement community was a place called Greyflick House. The coincidence has only just occurred to me. Greyflick House and Greystone Mansion. It wasn’t quite as posh as this, I’m afraid,’ he said. He thought about the communal lounge and the armchairs, the broken lights, the noisy plumbing and the sticky carpeted corridors of the plain rectangular brick building that was Greyflick House. ‘It was really just a box for old people and I don’t think many films were made there. I won’t include it in my bus tour.’

Frank lifted the zip-up travel document pouch out from inside his trousers, where it was attached to his belt so that nobody could steal it. He unzipped the pouch and took out his wallet. He opened the wallet and found an old postcard of Smelly John that he kept in the wallet like a picture of a war bride or a lovechild. When he removed the postcard the cheque from the landlord came out with it. The cheque still wasn’t torn up; that was the extent of Frank’s escape plan. That he might somehow still be able to cash the worthless piece of paper or give it back to the landlord in exchange for his home. He poked the cheque back into the wallet and unfolded the postcard and gave it to Laura. The postcard picture of Smelly John was taken in the 1970s when he was a young punk rocker. His hair was green and shaped into spikes and there was a Coke-can ring pull hanging from his left earlobe. On the postcard, Smelly John was standing next to a red telephone box and a London policeman. It was like a still from a Hollywood film that was set in London. Smelly John, the policeman and the phone box were the equivalent of the joggers and the gymnasts and the other LA props on Santa Monica Beach.

‘He’s a punk?’ Laura said.

‘
Labels
,’ Frank said and he shook his head. ‘But yes. That’s why he’s called Smelly John.’

‘Cool. How old is he now?’

‘He
was
sixty-four. He died about a year and a half ago.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Laura said. She gave Frank the postcard.

‘He left me this in his will,’ Frank said. ‘Not just the postcard. He left me some other things too. Some old records, but I’ve got nothing to play them on. He left me his hats. He had quite a small head, it turns out. There were a few other things as well. No great fortune, sadly.’

‘No treasure map?’

‘No treasure map.’ Frank put the postcard back in his wallet. ‘I could send you the records, if you like. I saw you have an old record player in your room. You’d probably like the music more than I would. Do you like the Sex Pistols?’

Even after goth, emo and David Bowie, Laura could still be surprised by her grandfather. She was intrigued and perhaps a little fearful of what he might say next.

Frank told Laura how Smelly John had been to the first ever Sex Pistols concert and how he’d always said that he was going to have their music played at his funeral. When he died Frank hadn’t made it to the funeral and didn’t know whether anybody would know what music John had wanted played or if they would have been true to his wishes.

‘A few weeks after the funeral I went to the cemetery. Even though John wasn’t buried there, because he’d been cremated. But still, I found the most neglected-looking gravestone right over the far side of the cemetery. The name on the gravestone was illegible and it was broken and overgrown by weeds. I pretended that was where John’s body was. It was the most punk rock-looking gravestone there. This all sounds silly when I say it out loud.’ He looked like he was going to abandon the story.

‘Go on,’ Laura said.

‘I took a cassette recorder with me. I’d originally bought it to play a Spanish language tape on. I never got round to that, but anyway, I had to record John’s music from a CD onto the tape.’

He told Laura how he’d put the cassette recorder on the ground by the gravestone and waited until he was sure that there was nobody else around and then he’d played ‘Pretty Vacant’ by the Sex Pistols for Smelly John. The song had been accompanied on the cassette tape by the distant barking of a neighbour’s dog and halfway through there was the sound of a backwards doorbell. When the music was finished a man’s voice said, ‘
¿Puede darme algo contra el mareo una piscina?
’ Which, if Frank had ever played the tape before, he might have learned meant, ‘Can you give me something for sea-sickness?’

‘That’s a nice story,’ Laura said. ‘Funny/sad. I could do your hair like that for you, if you like? Spike it up and dye it green. We could get a pretty spectacular Mohawk out of your hair.’

Frank said that he would think about it. He said that he hadn’t been in a hairdresser’s for a very, very long time and Laura said that, as a trained hairstylist, she had already managed to work that out. She said that he had the longest hair of anyone she knew, male or female. Frank asked if they did old-fashioned shaves at her salon. He said that it was one of the things that he’d regretted never having experienced.

‘That and water skiing,’ he said.

‘We should write a list.’

On the walk back to the car, Laura said, ‘You know how you said Grandma was your first and last love?’ Frank nodded. ‘Mom’s never gonna meet her Mr Right because she already has – and he’s in Pasadena staying with his brother. Sooner or later she’s going to start dating again and I don’t want her to end up with another one of those bad boyfriends you talked about. I don’t want a racist or a car thief for a stepfather, Frank. Most men are idiots. No offence.’

‘None taken.’

‘Mom is not going to be able to pick and choose any more. She’s an old woman. No offence.’