Frank Derrick's Holiday of a Lifetime (17 page)

He thought about the cinema that he’d always planned on building in his garden back at home. He decided that if he went back to Fullwind –
if
he went back – he would definitely start building the cinema. He wanted his garden cinema experience to be like the one he’d just been a part of.

If someone had stood up and made a rabble-rousing speech before a film in England and if the audience cheered every time an actor’s name appeared on screen Frank would have found the enthusiasm phoney and annoying; people would have complained to the cinema management, but it was different here. The man introducing
Rear Window
, Troy McClure in the planetarium, the minibus tour guide, even the voice on the sat nav. Frank loved everyone’s sense of show business.

He’d only been here for a few days but he liked America a lot and he liked the people. He wished that he’d come over sooner. He was really enjoying himself. He hadn’t seen enough of Beth yet but that would change tomorrow and it had been great to spend time with Laura. She didn’t seem embarrassed to be seen with him, even when he was showing off with chocolate.

Frank looked out of the car window at his new favourite city. He liked how the freeway they were on was as wide as any of the roads in Fullwind were long and the way that every new road sign reminded him of the cinema or television or somebody famous: Long Beach and Sacramento, Cloverfield, Century City, Palm Beach and Sunset Boulevard, Rosa Parks, Kennedy, Franklin and Roosevelt, and his favourite: Christopher Columbus Transcontinental Highway.

He liked the way everywhere they went seemed to have been a movie location at some point. He liked the impressive-looking tall office blocks and the apartment buildings of Downtown LA that they’d driven past even though he couldn’t help being reminded of the Croydon skyline that Beth and Laura had travelled so far to get away from.

As he watched it all pass by he started to feel a bit carsick. He was nauseous from the chocolate and the peanut butter and from the popcorn and the bucket of soda in the cinema that had both at last lived up to his expectation American-size wise. But he was also giddy from everything that had happened in the past few days. Like a child he was tired but he didn’t want to ever go to bed in case he missed something. His brain was sparking and fizzing like a Tesla coil. He stared at the road ahead until the nausea passed. When they were back on Euclid Street, Laura parked the car and Frank thanked her for such a great day. She switched the engine off and turned to face him.

‘Listen, Frank. Jimmy might be here.’

‘What?’

Laura took a deep puff from her inhaler. Frank didn’t even know that she had asthma. She shook it and took another puff.

‘He wanted to bring me something for my birthday. I told him to just get me some wine and flowers and bring them round. I neglected to tell him that I would be out and Mom would be in. I thought if she saw him on the doorstep with flowers and a bottle of expensive wine, she’d think they were for her and invite him in. It would be a start. They’d have to say something to each other. Even if they argued or if Mom threw the flowers in his face or hit him over the head with the bottle, at least it would be a start. If he’s here, you should talk to him.’

‘Me?’ Frank said. ‘What?’ The car had stopped moving but his motion sickness had returned. ‘I don’t think I should interfere.’

‘You definitely should.’

Laura opened the car door and climbed out before Frank could protest further. She’d spoken in such a hurry and left him no space for excuses. He considered locking all the doors and staying in the car until it was time to fly back home. He liked Jimmy and he wanted him and Beth to be together again and he wanted Laura’s project to be successful but this wasn’t in any of the brochures or on the itinerary. Right now he felt like he’d been ambushed in the middle of his holiday and Jimmy’s sudden appearance felt like an outbreak of legionnaires’ disease in the hotel pool.

Frank slowly followed Laura to the house. She was already inside before he stepped onto the grass. He wondered if he should tell her that she’d forgotten to lock the car doors. Maybe it would be best if he stayed here and guarded the unlocked car. When he went into the house, the living room was empty apart from Bill. He’d made no attempt to escape while the front door was open. In just a few days of being confined to the indoors Bill had become institutionalized. Frank could hear voices coming from Beth’s room. She was talking to Laura. He hoped that he hadn’t heard crying.

On the living-room table there was a bunch of flowers wrapped in cellophane. Frank had no idea what type of flowers they were. Next to the flowers there was a bottle of wine. On the label it said, ‘Laura’s Red’. He wondered if Jimmy had had the wine specially labelled and bottled or if it was just a happy coincidence. He picked up the open card from the table next to the wine.

Jimmy appeared to be selling the wine to Laura rather than giving it to her as a birthday present. He’d signed the card: ‘All my love, Dad’. Frank didn’t understand the significance of the flavours or of the wine’s year but he thought that Laura would like it because it was in a black bottle.

He put the card back on the table and sat on the sofa waiting for something to happen. He suddenly remembered how tired he was. He couldn’t sit far enough back into the sofa to properly relax. His body was both heavy and weightless at the same time. Beth came out of her bedroom. She’d tied her hair back and removed her make-up and any evidence that she might have been crying. If Frank hadn’t understood before what Laura had meant by undercurrents of Audrey Hepburn, he knew now.

‘I should make dinner,’ Beth said.

‘I’m not actually all that hungry,’ Frank said, trying to help by not making her cook when she was upset. ‘I ate half a pound of peanut butter at the observatory.’

‘That’s nice,’ Beth said. She sounded as exhausted as he was. She sat on the sofa next to him and put her head on his shoulder. Frank listened to the sound of her breathing. He thought she might already be asleep.

‘How was it today?’ he said. ‘At the hospital.’

‘Everything is fine,’ Beth said. ‘I’m fine. Lump is gone. Do you mind if we don’t talk about it tonight?’ Frank didn’t know if she meant the follow-up care, Jimmy, or both, but either way, it suited him as much as it did Beth. ‘I’m knackered,’ she said. She tried so hard to find her old voice that instead she sounded like Dick Van Dyke in
Mary Poppins
.

The house was very quiet. Frank wondered what Laura was doing. He listened to Beth breathing next to him. He tried to detect an audible change in her breathing as a result of the radiation. Shorter or deeper breaths or a rasp or a wheeze. He didn’t know what to look for. He wanted to stroke her hair.

‘A woman at the observatory asked me if I was Australian,’ he said.

‘That stops after you’ve been here for a couple of years.’

Laura came out of Beth’s bedroom. She picked up the flowers and took them into the kitchen and brought them back in a vase and put the vase on the table. She read the card and looked at the wine and then at Frank and her mother, who had now definitely fallen asleep on his shoulder. Laura must have been crushed by this failure of her project but then she smiled at Frank and shrugged as if to say, ‘Oh well.’

Later on they ate pasta and salad from plates on their laps and watched
While You Were Sleeping
with Sandra Bullock. Frank was distracted from the story by constantly looking from the TV to Beth and trying to compare the actress’s mood with his daughter’s and hoping to see a likeness. After the film they were all yawning and it was agreed that the day had nothing left to offer other than sleep and so they prepared for bed. Beth went to the bathroom to brush her teeth and Frank put his in a glass while Laura unfolded the air bed and prepared a place on the floor for Bill. When they were all in their separate rooms they called out goodnight to each other like the Waltons. Frank closed his eyes, the sound of Laura inflating the air bed like bronchial whale song eventually soothing him into a deep sleep again.

17

In the morning Laura couldn’t get the doors of Jimmy’s car to open.

‘You’re going to have to ring him,’ she said but Beth said that she didn’t want to.

‘I’m going to be late.’

Frank watched from the doorstep as Laura tried to persuade Beth to phone Jimmy so that he could contact the car company and get them to unlock the car via their computer. He was thinking how much simpler things were when cars had keys, one for the door and another for the ignition, but he kept the thought to himself because he didn’t want to be that old person who said those old-person things. Laura would have joked about starting handles and a man walking in front of the car waving a red flag, then all his hard work namedropping David Bowie and the Sex Pistols would be for nothing. He watched Laura trying to open each of the car’s doors unsuccessfully and he couldn’t help thinking that he was witnessing another phase of the Reunion Project and that Laura had deliberately disabled the car’s computer somehow. Like a nun in a modern day remake of
The Sound of Music
.

Still refusing to ring Jimmy, Beth offered to drive Laura to work in her car instead. She told Frank that she wouldn’t be long and he watched from the doorstep as Beth and Laura drove away along Euclid Street, which was actually 13th Street, and thought that, considering Jimmy’s obsession about things being in order, it must have made living on it something of a nightmare for Jimmy. When the car was out of sight Frank listened to the sound of the engine fading until the street was almost silent. A dog barked in the distance and he heard either a woodpecker or somebody hammering a picture onto a wall and the constant hum of traffic on a highway somewhere. Or it may have been an air conditioning unit in the house next door. Frank went back inside.

Last night he’d dreamed that he was involved in a game of chicken with Jimmy. They were both driving towards the edge of a cliff when Frank’s shirt somehow got tangled around the handle of his car door and he couldn’t get the door open. Just as he was about to drive over the cliff, Frank woke up. It took him a moment to realize that the dream wasn’t familiar because it was a recurring one, but because it was a scene from
Rebel Without a Cause
. Now he wondered if the locked car door aspect of the dream had been a premonition or a form of déjà vu.

In the real world, of course, Frank wouldn’t have even known how to start the car. He’d never learned how to drive. It was one of those things that he’d always meant to do, like getting a professional shave. What was it that people said about learning to drive? It takes one lesson for every year of your life before you were ready to pass your driving test? Frank would now need eighty-two driving lessons. Not only could he not drive but he also couldn’t change a tyre or put petrol in the car either. He didn’t know how to light a barbecue or set up a snooker table. He couldn’t grout or glaze, fire a rifle or put up a tent without help. If there genuinely had been something wrong with Jimmy’s car he would have been of no help.

He brought a chair over from under the table and sat down at the living-room window. Bill was next to him on the window sill and the two of them watched, waiting for Beth to return. Passing drivers might have thought that Bill was stuffed if his otherwise fixed stare hadn’t followed them as they drove by the house.

Since arriving in America, Bill hadn’t exactly seen the sights but he’d been stroked by Beth and Laura more times than Frank had ever managed. Frank and Bill had been living alone together as a couple for so long that there was very little physical contact between them any more. Laura would tickle Bill’s belly and wave her hands around in front of his face for him to try and pat with his paws. He’d never been so fussed over. Bill probably didn’t want to go home either.

After fifteen minutes at the window, Frank started to feel himself getting cramp in his leg and he left Bill to keep a lookout while he went for a short walk to stretch his legs. In the kitchen he filled the kettle. He was developing a taste for coffee and wondered if he would still like it when he got back home, or if it would turn out to be one of those holiday drinks like ouzo or grappa that became undrinkable when the holiday was over. He took a cup down from the shelf and opened the cupboard above and looked at the neat rows of tins.
Sleeping With the Enemy
. That was the name of the film that he’d been trying to remember. He would have to wait until he got back to Fullwind and the library before he could find out the name of the actor who tidied the kitchen cupboard and straightened Julia Roberts’s towels so terrifyingly in the film.

There was a calendar on the kitchen wall. On the last day of his holiday Beth had written ‘Dad goes home’ in red pen. He wondered how she’d felt when she’d written it and tried to detect traces of relief or sadness in the pen strokes and check for hidden asides in invisible brackets: (thank God) or (at long last).

While the kettle boiled he switched the TV on to drown out his internal monologue that seemed desperate to discuss going home. On the local news a freak hailstorm had covered a small area on the other side of Los Angeles in a layer of what looked like snow. Children were having a snowball fight on an outdoor basketball court while their parents were interviewed on camera in the foreground. The freak weather was so unusual that the children had to wear oven gloves and plastic carrier bags taped over their hands to pick up the snowballs because they didn’t own any gloves. Frank looked out of the window. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

He watched the rest of the news and a few advertisements with their speedily read terms and conditions that invalidated all the claims made that preceded them. There was an advert for ‘senior assisted living’ in a luxury retirement beachside home that showed a lot of very happy retired people walking around the gardens and sitting by fountains and under palm trees. A full calendar of events and activities was promised for the residents. T’ai chi, bridge, chess and opera. Movies, fitness and computer classes, mini golf, dog shows, makeovers and chair volleyball. There was a pool and a sauna. Frank thought of Greyflick House with its armchairs in a circle and the smell of school dinners and everyone looking bored. Even though Greyflick House was less than a quarter of a mile from the beach, the sea view was obscured by a housing estate and an incinerator.