Frank Derrick's Holiday of a Lifetime (16 page)

‘None taken. Perhaps we should presume I won’t be offended by anything you say,’ Frank said.

‘Deal. Now do your Jimmy Stewart.’

When they got back to the house Frank was tired. Considering he was in a city where nobody ever walked, he’d done a hell of a lot of walking. Beth wasn’t back from work yet and he went for a lie-down in Laura’s room. He closed his eyes and he must have fallen asleep because when he opened them again he could hear Beth talking to Laura, their voices coming from different rooms in the house.

‘Did you tidy the kitchen cupboard?’ Beth said.

‘No. Why?’

‘I don’t remember all the cans being in such neat rows.’

‘You’d better check the bathroom towels,’ Laura said.

Frank presumed that Jimmy had tidied the cupboard when he’d last been there or that he’d been to the house today while they were all out. He tried to remember what film Laura was making reference to. He was sure that Julia Roberts was in it. It was probably another of Beth’s and Jimmy’s date movies. Maybe Laura had tidied the cupboard to remind her of it. He closed his eyes and fell asleep again. The next time he woke the house was quiet, it was dark and everyone had gone to bed.

16

Frank woke up, unsure for a moment again where or when he was. Instinctively, he felt around with his feet at the end of the bed for his hot water bottle. When he was at home, besides listening for the first aeroplane to fly over his flat in the morning, in the winter he’d also learned to tell the time by the temperature of his hot water bottle – the cooler the rubber, the later it was.

There was no hot water bottle. He wasn’t at home. He looked around the room. Bette Davis was there, still smoking and advertising whiskey. There were photographs of Laura and her friends, arranged in a circle on one wall. Concert and cinema ticket stubs were pinned to a cork noticeboard on another wall beside a large yellow foam hand with a pointing finger and the words ‘Number 1’ on it. The room was tidy. Perhaps too tidy for a busy twenty-year-old. Frank thought it had been tidied for his benefit. The only mess in the room was his; a shirt thrown on top of his open suitcase and a pair of his trousers with one leg in the case and the other out, as though they were attempting to escape. One of Frank’s socks was on the floor next to his upturned shoes, he’d spilled coffee on the bed sheet and there was a circular cup stain on the dressing table, the same as the one that he’d pictured on his non-existent Premium Bonds envelope.

He thought about the far greater mess that he’d left behind at home. Not just the drawers that he’d tipped out in the living room when he’d forgotten where he’d put his passport at the last minute or the clothes that he’d thrown on the bed during one final suitcase repack. And not even the smells from the open carton of milk he’d left in the fridge or the rubbish that he’d forgotten to empty from the kitchen bin, but the life mess that he’d left behind: his unpaid bills and impending homelessness.

Frank had told a lot of people that he was going on holiday. He’d told Eyes Facing South-West in the charity shop, he’d told the librarian, the woman in the post office, the man cleaning the photo booth and the child peeking through the curtain, he’d told the travel agent in the big Sainsbury’s and customs officers and airport security staff on both sides of the Atlantic. But he hadn’t informed any of his neighbours, he hadn’t told the postman, or even his landlord. He wondered how long it would be before somebody – Hilary, the head of the Neighbourhood Watch, perhaps – noticed he was missing and called the police, who would get no answer when they rang Frank’s questioning doorbell and they would have to kick the front door in.

He tried to put all thoughts of home out of his mind. He wondered how late it was. Even though he was still incredibly tired, he felt as though he’d slept for a long time. He was worried that he might even have slept through an entire day. The thought of losing that much of his time here made him feel sick. He thought he could feel the heat of the sun shining through the window but he wasn’t yet familiar enough with that for it to be a reliable means of telling the time.

He got up. His joints were certainly creaking and protesting like they did in the morning. He went into the living room. Beth had already left for her follow-up appointment and Laura was sitting on the sofa watching TV. Bill was asleep next to her.

‘Morning,’ Laura said. She got up from the sofa.

As if to prove how she could not be pigeonholed and perhaps as a result of Frank thinking that she might be a goth or an emo, she was wearing a sand-coloured suede skirt and a bright blue T-shirt. If she’d been standing on the beach, Frank might have lost sight of her.

She asked if he wanted some breakfast and he said would it be all right for him to have a shower and a shave first? Laura gave him fresh towels and lined up bottles of shower gel, shampoo and conditioner along the side of the bath. She gave him some expensive-looking aftershave balm and left him alone while she went to start breakfast.

The shower and the shave woke Frank up but by the end of breakfast he was full and tired again. He would have loved a lazy day on the sofa watching television and catching up on what Bill had been up to but Laura had drawn up an itinerary and taken the time off work to be with him. He could chat with Bill anytime. And what had television done for him since the 1970s?

It took over an hour to drive to Griffith Park. They hardly spoke in the car because Frank was so tired. By the time they arrived at the observatory he was more awake. Laura parked the car and they walked back down the hill a short way so that Frank could have his picture taken with the Hollywood sign in the background. Laura stood back to fit Frank and the sign in the photograph. Frank was distracted by something and Laura called out, ‘Gaga! Say cheese!’ A nearby couple looked over, perhaps thinking that Lady Gaga might be at the Observatory. When they saw that Laura was talking to an old man, because of his long white hair and his eclectic clothing style, they weren’t entirely sure that he wasn’t Lady Gaga and so they took his picture just in case.

Inside the observatory building, Laura bought tickets for the planetarium show and while they waited for the start time they walked around some of the observatory exhibits. They looked at the Camera Obscura’s 360-degree view of Los Angeles, trying unsuccessfully to find Euclid Street and the jogger or the passing police car that Frank had seen on the computers in Fullwind library. They watched the caged Tesla Coil spark and crackle and the gently swaying brass ball of the Foucault Pendulum – which Frank was convinced was the name of a Vincent Price film. When they were standing by an eight-foot glass model of the Milky Way he said to Laura, ‘It’s called the Mars bar in England.’

Just before the planetarium show was due to begin Frank sat on a bench next to a bronze statue of Albert Einstein and Laura took their photograph. Frank said it would go with the Forrest Gump bench picture that Beth had taken on the pier and he asked if Laura knew of any other celebrity benches in Los Angeles? She said that there was a bench in downtown LA that featured in the film
(500) Days of Summer
but the grassy knoll where the bench was had been fenced off and closed due to state cutbacks. It was the first time that Frank had heard anyone use the phrase ‘grassy knoll’ when it wasn’t in relation to the assassination of President Kennedy.

In the planetarium Frank sat back in the seat that, according to Laura, could have been the very same seat that James Dean had sat in in
Rebel Without a Cause
and he looked up at the screen on the ceiling of the inside of the dome. He thought that he might fall asleep. But once the show began he was completely captivated. It wasn’t just the lasers and the sunsets, the big bangs and shooting stars. The man giving the lecture, who reminded Frank of Troy McClure from
The Simpsons
, told the story so well. It was entertaining, funny and educational – even though, much like the minibus tour or the safety demonstration on the flight over, Frank would forget everything he’d learned as soon as Troy had stopped talking.

After the show they went to the observatory cafe. In the queue for the cash register a woman heard Frank say the word ‘tomato’ to Laura and she asked him if he was Australian. He said he was from England and another woman in the queue sighed, presumably thinking that Frank was Hugh Grant, which is what Dustin Hoffman in
Rain Man
had told Frank would almost certainly happen to him when he was in America.

They sat at a table and ate lunch and Laura gave Frank a chocolate bar.

‘What’s that?’ he said.

‘Try it.’

He unwrapped the chocolate and took a small bite.

‘
This
is a Milky Way,’ he said. He overplayed his surprise, his face frozen and open mouthed. ‘It’s a Milky Way disguised as –’ he peeled the wrapper back to read it – ‘a . . . Three Musketeers?’

He asked whether Beth had passed on everything that he’d taught her about how to best and most enjoyably eat chocolate bars. Laura shook her head.

‘For instance, with a Milky Way,’ he looked at the wrapper again, ‘or a Three Musketeers, you first bite the chocolate from the end. And then the same with the sides.’ He bit the chocolate from the ends and then the sides of the bar. ‘Then, carefully, try and get the top layer of chocolate off in one piece.’ He removed the top layer of chocolate. ‘You then roll the nougat into a ball.’ He rolled the nougat between his fingers like Plasticine and then he put it into his mouth.

‘That’s gross,’ Laura said.

‘I’ve made myself feel a bit sick now,’ Frank said.

When his stomach had settled he told Laura the correct methods for eating other chocolate bars, including a Twix, a Kit Kat, an Aero, a Crunchie and a Bounty. He realized that with the exception of a Cadbury’s Creme Egg and a Walnut Whip, all his methods were the same and involved carefully removing the chocolate to expose the filling inside. His area of expertise suddenly seemed quite negligible.

When Laura went to the restroom (Frank was already picking up the language) he watched her walk away and then he turned to look out of the window of the cafe at the hills and the sky the colour of Laura’s T-shirt and at the Californian sunshine and the Hollywood sign, and he thought about his place in the universe, trying to remember what Troy McClure had told him that was, and not for the first time since he’d arrived in America he wondered how he was ever going to get on the plane back home.

When she came back, Laura tipped three chocolate bars onto the table: a Butterfinger bar, a Hershey and something in a bright orange packet with the word ‘Reese’s’ in yellow lettering across the centre. Frank still felt a bit sick and didn’t want to eat any more chocolate but he opened the wrapper of the Hershey.

‘Hmm. There isn’t much I can teach you with this,’ he said. ‘You could melt it in front of a fire or freeze it and smash it with a hammer, I suppose. Let me get back to this one later on.’ He put the Hershey bar to one side on the table and tore open the Reese’s wrapper. He took out one of the two peanut butter cups and examined it, turning it around in the palm of his hand as though he were pricing up a diamond. ‘I think what we have here is a cupcake,’ he said. And he stuffed it into his mouth whole.

The peanut butter was incredibly salty. He moved his mouth from side to side. He took his glasses off. He looked a bit unwell.

‘You don’t have a peanut allergy, do you?’ Laura said.

Frank held his open palm up and shook his head. ‘Just a minute,’ he said. He swallowed the last of the gooey peanut butter and he sat back in his seat.

‘Silly old sod,’ he said.

They went to the gift shop where Frank bought a sweatshirt with planets on the front for himself, an Albert Einstein doll for Beth and a cat collar with stars and stripes on it for Bill. He said that Laura could have anything in the shop that she wanted. She chose a pencil. It was the cheapest thing on sale.

Before they went back to the car Frank posed for a picture by the James Dean statue and then they drove back towards Hollywood. Laura asked Frank if he was too tired to go to the cinema but he knew that she’d already bought the tickets and even though he was sure that if he’d closed his eyes for a second he would have fallen fast asleep, he insisted that he was wide awake and that he was really looking forward to seeing
Rear Window
in a cinema for the first time.

The film was introduced by an enthusiastic young man who told the equally enthusiastic audience about the making of the film and its more recent restoration; then, after a long round of applause, with whooping and loud cheering, the audience fell silent and the film began.

James Stewart’s name appeared on the screen and everyone cheered and applauded again. Laura nudged Frank.

‘Do your impression,’ she whispered.

The audience cheered once more for Alfred Hitchcock’s on-screen director’s credit and then there was absolute silence as they watched the film.

After twenty-five minutes, Hitchcock made his cameo appearance winding up a clock in the apartment opposite James Stewart’s and the audience in the cinema cheered and applauded. At the end of the film they clapped again. Some people stood. Everyone stayed until the credits for the film and also for its restoration had both finished and the house lights were switched on.

On the drive back to Santa Monica Frank told Laura how much he’d loved seeing the film in a cinema. He’d watched it so many times on television. It was one of his favourite films – which she already knew as it was the reason why she had bought the tickets. He told her that when he was stuck in his flat after being run over by the milk float he would sit at his living-room window and pretend to be Jimmy Stewart in
Rear Window
. He was still too shy to demonstrate it when Laura asked him to.