Frank Derrick's Holiday of a Lifetime (2 page)

‘Is Laura okay?’ he said, his default question.

‘She’s fine.’ Beth’s default answer.

On any other day, Frank would have been devastated at the news of Jimmy’s departure from the family but for now he could only focus on his daughter. She told him to promise not to worry and she wouldn’t hang up the phone until he did. Frank promised, however meaningless that promise was. Because he
would
worry. Beth told him that she loved him and they said goodbye. When she hung up, Frank listened to the phone line. There was a second or two of nothing and then the short loud boop of disconnection, followed by silence and the crackle of the static and dust in the wires of Frank’s ancient phone that he’d had for so long that he didn’t realize he was still renting it from British Telecom. The basic £30 plastic phone had so far cost him over £750. Almost a minute passed and then he put the phone down.

2

THANKSGIVING

Halloween seemed to go on for days. Frank sat in the dark watching television with the sound down, ignoring his doorbell ringing from dawn till dusk with people trying to trick him out of his treats. It carried on right the way through November.

Dong-ding
– ‘Do you need a gardener?’

Dong-ding
– ‘Did you know you’ve got a few loose slates on your roof, mate?’

Dong-ding
– ‘Can I interest you in boiler cover?’

Dong-ding
– ‘Have you considered an emergency twenty-four-hour call-line neck pendant?’

Dong-ding
– ‘Are you happy with your mobile provider?’

Dong-ding
– ‘Have you thought about Jesus today?’

Frank Derrick’s doorbell was the talk of Fullwind. The paperboys passed the news to the postmen, who sent a letter up to the roofers, who shouted it from the rooftops to the window cleaners below. Jehovah’s Witnesses spread the word to the charity collectors, to the political canvassers and the gardeners touting for business who, in turn, told all the trick-or-treaters and knock-down-gingerers. It seemed like everybody wanted to have a go on Frank’s doorbell.

It was, to be fair, an unusual doorbell. The two notes of Frank’s doorbell were the same as those of the world’s most recognizable and popular doorbell – the ‘ding-dong’ of sitcoms and Avon ladies – but when everyone pressed Frank’s doorbell, the two notes ascended; they went up instead of down – ‘dong-ding’ – as though the bell was asking a question or as if it had an Australian accent.

When the doorbell rang one morning at the end of November, Frank decided to ignore it. It would only be more door-to-door spam. He wasn’t expecting anyone. He doubted that all his neighbours would be waiting on the doorstep to sing him an early Christmas carol before presenting him with a huge hamper and an enormous card too big to fit through the letter box, signed by them and everyone else in Fullwind-on-Sea. And if it was carol singers, they’d be tone-deaf carol singers or local children who didn’t know the words. The same lazy local children who dong-dinged Frank’s doorbell at Halloween with the hoods of their sweatshirts pulled over their heads or stood outside the library on 5 November with a balloon in a pushchair.

The doorbell rang again.

‘Perhaps it’s for you, Bill,’ Frank said. He looked down at his cat and the cat looked back with the same impossible-to-read expression as always. It never changed, whether he was happy or sad, indifferent, hungry, thirsty, full, bored, excited, angry, scared of a dog, chasing a mouse, coughing up a fur-ball; the same blank expression of Botoxed irascibility that, today, seemed to be saying:

Whatever, Frank. Just answer the door and let me out. Going to the toilet indoors is so bloody uncivilized.

Frank sighed. ‘Dong-ding merrily on high, Bill.’ He walked across the living room, stepping over DVD cases that he was in the middle of putting into alphabetical order. Frank had a lot of DVDs and he’d made it as far as ‘I’ before he’d stalled for almost an hour to perfect his impression of Michael Caine in
The Italian Job
. With Frank’s impressions it could sometimes be as star studded as the red carpet on Oscar night in the living room. Michael Caine, Humphrey Bogart, James Stewart, Sean Connery and Roger Moore could all be there. Most of the time, though, the carpet wasn’t red; it was cream-coloured, more freshly so underneath the armchair and sideboard. And it was just Frank and his poker-winning-faced cat Bill – which hadn’t seemed such a daft name for a cat when Ben was still alive – eating their individual dinners for one in front of the TV.

Frank stepped over the DVDs and walked into the hall and down the stairs, with Bill following behind, weaving between Frank’s legs to undertake and overtake and almost trip him up.

At the bottom of the stairs Frank picked up the day’s post. The junk mail was plentiful at this time of year and it all had a seasonal theme. Thermal underwear catalogues, warm cardigans and fleece pyjamas, Christmas stocking-filler gift ideas, bed-socks, anti-slip over-shoes and SAD lights. At some point in his life Frank had neglected to tick a box on an order form and now everybody had his address. There was another free pack of charity Christmas cards that he had no one to send to and a leaflet from the Government containing helpful but often contradictory tips for surviving the winter. ‘Keep moving’, ‘stay in one room’, ‘wear a hat in bed’, ‘eat a hot meal’, ‘keep your spirits up’, etc. He put the leaflet and the Christmas cards on the bottom stair and picked up an envelope. It had a US stamp and was addressed to Frank in Laura’s handwriting. He opened the envelope and took out a greetings card. ‘Happy Thanksgiving’, the card said above a cartoon picture of a smiling turkey with surely little to be smiling about or giving thanks to at this time of year. The card was signed ‘Beth and Laura’, both names in Laura’s handwriting.

When Beth had announced that she was moving to Los Angeles ten years ago, she had reassured Frank that it was only twelve hours away. She would be back to see him soon and often. She would telephone at least once a week, write regular letters and, when Frank had set up his computer account at the library, they could exchange emails and eventually they would even be able to talk face to face over the Internet via webcams. Beth had joked that Frank would probably see more of her than he had when she was living just fifty miles away and he would soon be sick of the sight of her. She’d said that it took longer to travel to Scotland or Cornwall than to Los Angeles and Frank had joined in by making his own joke about how it would probably be cheaper too, because he didn’t want his daughter to feel guilty about going to live so far away.

Frank knew that the flight to England might only take twelve hours but there would be a two-hour journey through heavy LA traffic to the airport and another few hours for check-in and security, a couple more hours in customs, passport control and waiting by the baggage carousel at Heathrow, plus three or four hours in a taxi or on delayed, overcrowded and dirty trains and rail-replacement buses from Heathrow to Fullwind to take into account. By the time they arrived they’d be exhausted and jetlagged and it would be almost time to leave again. And Frank knew that the plane ticket wasn’t really cheaper than a train to Scotland or Cornwall. He knew all of this but he didn’t want to hold Beth back. He didn’t want to be her anchor.

For her first six months in America Beth was a tourist. She sent Frank postcards and letters folded around photographs of her, Laura and Jimmy at Disneyland and Universal Studios, window shopping on Rodeo Drive or posing with their hands and feet in the cement prints of the stars outside the Chinese Theatre. She sent Frank a picture of them cycling along the beach at Santa Monica, with the sun glistening on the Pacific behind them, the water the same vivid blue as the sky so that it was difficult to be sure where one ended and the other began. Frank knew that the charity shop, the mini supermarket, the poorly stocked library and the brown tide bringing seaweed, carrier bags, nappies and tin cans onto the hard stones of rainy Fullwind-on-Sea would be almost impossible for Beth ever to think of as a holiday destination again.

Every year she sent Frank a new photograph of Laura, taken on or around her birthday and Frank put them all in a photo album that his wife Sheila had started when Laura was born. Frank had taken over the job when Sheila’s illness meant that she couldn’t remember how to perform the simple task and also because her not knowing who these strange people in the photographs were upset Frank. There were times though, right up until just before Sheila’s death, when Frank would sit with her and they’d look at their photo albums together. Sheila would place her fingers on the unfamiliar faces behind the protective plastic and Frank would detect the tiniest spark of recognition. It was as though her fading memory was stronger in her fingers, in the same way that they were more susceptible to the cold on a winter’s day.

In the album’s first photograph of Laura she was only a day or two old. She was perched awkwardly on Frank’s lap in the hospital with her tiny hand wrapped around his finger, and Frank had watched his granddaughter growing up in the birthday photographs. At first she was desperate to have her picture taken, excited and showing off in her ballerina dress or fairy princess costume or cuddling her latest favourite doll or soft toy. In her early teens she became more camera shy and reluctant to smile and then in her mid-teens she was determined not to smile at all, not wanting anyone to see the braces on her teeth and hiding her face with her fringe, or ‘Laura’s bangs’, as Beth had written on the back of the picture taken on her fifteenth birthday. After her sixteenth birthday, the photographs had stopped. Frank presumed that Laura was now too cool, too self-conscious or too busy with boys to have her photograph taken by her mother any more. Or perhaps there was nowhere left in Santa Monica that still printed photographs. Next year Laura would be twenty-one and Frank wondered whether the birthday photographs would resume again now that she was officially an adult and in charge of her own photographic destiny.

In the ten years that Beth had been away she’d visited England twice. The second time was five years ago when she, Laura and Jimmy had stayed not far from Frank, in a guesthouse that made Fawlty Towers seem welcoming. After a week and a half of drizzle, jigsaw puzzles and only three television channels, they went back to America. Beth said that the next time they would have to stay for longer to make the exhausting journey more worthwhile.

At the end of their stay in Fawlty Towers, Beth had repeated the same promises to Frank that she’d made when she’d first left for America. She said that she would be back soon and she would write and she would phone. Frank asked her to at least make sure that she rang him as soon as they were safely home, no matter what the time of day or night, as he would worry otherwise. He’d presume the plane had crashed or that they’d been mistakenly arrested for drug smuggling. Beth forgot to ring. Just as she had always forgotten to phone when she returned home after visiting Frank when she still lived in England. Frank would watch the phone, waiting for it to ring until eventually he wouldn’t be able to wait any longer and he would call Beth, who would apologize for having not rung, saying she was exhausted from the fifty-mile drive back to Croydon. So Frank knew that it was unlikely that she would ring him after a five and a half thousand-mile journey home to LA and it would be he who would have to ring her.

When Frank had been run over by a milk float on his eighty-first birthday, he’d spent three days in hospital before returning home with a broken toe and his arm set in plaster at an angle like a boomerang. Frank knew that Beth felt awful for not flying back across the Atlantic to look after him so soon after her last visit but he didn’t want to be her anchor again – or, in this case, her boomerang – and as a compromise Beth arranged and paid for a care worker to visit Frank once a week for three months to tidy his flat and do the washing-up and to scratch the itch inside his plaster cast and keep him amused until he was fit and well again. During that time Beth had phoned more frequently, perhaps out of guilt as much as concern, but by the time the plaster cast was off she was phoning less and less often and soon it would be Frank who would have to phone her.

When Beth had first moved to America, Frank had phoned Beth all the time, often getting the time difference wrong and waking everyone up or interrupting their dinner or breakfast or catching them all as they were just going out the door to work or school or a mall. Sometimes Beth’s husband, Jimmy, would answer the phone and even though in person they got on so well, somehow over the phone neither man would really know what to say beyond things like ‘How are you?’ and either ‘Is Beth there?’ or ‘I’ll get Beth.’ If Laura picked up the phone, when they first moved to America she would answer with an excited ‘
Helloo, Gaga
’ – her name for Frank, from when she had been too young to pronounce ‘Granddad’ – followed by a breathless commentary of all the things that she’d been doing at school and the names of her new friends and so on. After she’d turned thirteen Laura was less verbose, her mind elsewhere, and then in her mid-teens she would simply say hello and then call out, ‘Mom!’ Frank would sometimes mistake her voice for Beth’s, even though Laura was already more American-sounding than her mother and he listened to her growing up on the telephone in the same way that he’d watched her do in her birthday photographs.

Since Halloween, Laura had kept Frank updated on Beth’s progress via email. She would assess her mother’s mood, her sleep patterns, appetite, frame of mind, energy and outlook. She’d told Frank of the success of the lumpectomy and how Beth was coping with the prospect of weeks of radiation therapy. The emails hadn’t stopped Frank worrying but they had helped him worry a little less.

In her emails Laura always referred to her mother’s cancer as ‘Lump’. Even after surgery when the lump had been removed, dissected, pathologized and incinerated as medical waste, Laura continued to refer to her mother’s cancer by the nickname that she’d given it. She said that it was important to give your enemies a name and that somebody famous – ‘Jesus or some other guy’ – had said something clever about it. Later on she’d emailed Frank again to say that she’d got the quote wrong but it was from JFK: ‘Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.’