Frank Derrick's Holiday of a Lifetime (21 page)

Frank put too much of the sunscreen on. Beth stood up and leaned over him to rub the cream into his face. She sat back down. ‘Don’t you have any short pants?’

Frank looked at his trousers. He was wearing a beige pair of what Laura had described as ‘old guy’s comfortable pants’. The waist was elasticated and the pockets Velcroed shut. He looked at Beth who was putting sunscreen on her legs. She was wearing frayed denim shorts that might once have been a full pair of jeans.

‘There’s a time in a man’s life when it’s better for everyone if he keeps his skin under wraps,’ Frank said.

They sat outside for almost an hour. They talked about other gardens that they’d sat in in the past. At their homes in Croydon and Fullwind and on holiday in cottages on Hayling Island and the Isle of Wight. They talked about ice cream sodas and dandelion and burdock, which led on to Tizer and Tango and singing the R White’s Lemonade jingle. They sang a few more old TV jingles and then tried to name all the birds that Sheila had fed in their garden: blue tits and coal tits, robins, jays and magpies, blackbirds and nuthatches. Beth wondered whether families in Britain could still be divided into those who got their TV listings from the
Radio Times
and those who got theirs from the
TV Times
. Frank said that yes, he thought they could be and that he and Bill still lived in a
Radio Times
household. Frank remembered the photo albums that he had in his suitcase. Laura had asked him to bring family photographs with him and he’d forgotten all about them. He hoped that she wouldn’t mind him showing them to Beth first. He told Beth and they agreed to look at them a little later on.

When Beth went inside to get some cold drinks and to make a couple of work phone calls she said, ‘Do you want to stay here?’

‘I should probably go home eventually,’ Frank said. ‘The charity shop will go out of business.’

Beth tutted and picked up the lunch tray and went indoors. Frank pulled the shutters down on his glasses; he closed his eyes and returned to his American daydream from a day or so ago. He pictured himself now living in the beachside retirement home that he’d seen advertised on the television. He was sitting on the balcony drinking a Martini, watching the beach volleyballers and surfers on the sand below. He looked at the sea in the distance. It was even bluer in his mind’s eye. A plane flew across the cloudless sky. ‘You’ll never get me up in one of those,’ he said to the other retirement-home residents on the balcony with him and they all laughed hysterically and a little wearily because Frank was the home’s joker. Old Man Packing Bags was there and there was a married couple whom Frank had named Laughs All The Time and Smiles Every Day and two women whom he called Jane Fonda and Brigitte Bardot. All the men on the balcony, Frank included, Frank especially, were dressed in Hawaiian shirts and Bermuda shorts. The women wore flowery summer dresses and sun hats or green croupier visors.

When the Californian sunshine became too much for Frank, he’d go and sit under a palm tree or take the elevator down to the swimming pool. It was kidney-shaped, next to a smaller heart-shaped hot tub. Everyone was either relaxing around the pool or in the water on lilos and inflatable alligators, drinking cocktails or dive-bombing each other. Frank wondered if he had enough money left for a return trip to America. From the moment he stepped through the airport security scanner at LAX in a few days’ time until whenever he came back again would just be holiday taint.

He sensed that he wasn’t alone any more. He opened his eyes expecting to see Beth with cold drinks but, instead, there was a small boy, about six years old; Mexican, he thought. He was standing over by the bright green children’s bicycle staring at the old guy in his garden. Frank smiled to reassure the boy that there was no stranger danger here.

‘Hello.’ The boy didn’t answer and Frank looked around for his parents. ‘Is that your bicycle?’ The boy’s trance held. ‘My daughter – Beth,’ Frank pointed at the house. ‘She’s the lady who lives here. She had a bike a little like yours. She was a terrible cyclist when she was your age though. I imagine you’re a lot better than she was. I see you’ve taken the stabilizers off already.’

The boy didn’t say anything but he was checking Frank out, looking at his long hair and his convertible sunglasses. Frank playfully flipped the sunshades up and down.

‘I hope I’m not stopping you from doing anything. Did you want to ride your bike? Just pretend I’m not here.’ The boy remained silent and still. ‘I’ll be going home in a few days. On an aeroplane.’ Frank didn’t know if the boy could understand what he was saying. He looked over at the front door, hoping for Beth. He wished that he’d listened to his Spanish-language tape before recording the Sex Pistols over it. If he mimed an aeroplane with his arms out at his sides like wings would it be patronizing, even for such a small child? It might even be mistaken for a Leonardo DiCaprio impression. ‘If my home is still there, of course. I think I might have given it away. My
casa
,’ he said, remembering one of the few Spanish words that he knew. Frank had lowered his voice conspiratorially. ‘I haven’t told my daughter yet, and I don’t think she’ll be too happy about it when I do, but I don’t want to upset her because she’s just getting better after being ill. I just want her to be well again. I’m sorry, I’m going on a bit, aren’t I? Perhaps I should let you get on with what you’re doing and go back to my siesta.’ A second Spanish word; Frank was more fluent than he realized. He flipped the shades on his glasses down and closed his eyes but he could still feel that the boy was staring at him. He opened his eyes to see him still standing there and so he carried on talking as though he was having a conversation with his cat. ‘I thought I might not see her again, which terrified me, if I’m honest. But she’s better now. Although Laura, that’s my granddaughter, Beth’s daughter – she’s the lady who dresses in black, but don’t ask her if she’s a goth; I made that mistake – Laura thinks that Elizabeth misses Jimmy. He’s the man with the . . .’ Frank realized that he didn’t know what Jimmy currently looked like and so couldn’t describe him. ‘Laura is trying to get her mum and dad back together again.’

Frank was mercifully interrupted by the door of one of the bungalows behind Beth’s house opening. A woman came out.

‘Hello,’ Frank said. He started to get up and the woman quickened her pace slightly as she walked towards the boy. Frank settled back into the chair.

‘I’m Beth’s father,’ he said, and then, thinking that the woman was closer to Laura’s age, ‘Laura’s grandfather.’

The woman put a protective arm around the boy’s shoulders.

‘Hi,’ she said.

‘I’m on holiday. Vacation.’

And now what? Frank thought. Jimmy Stewart impression? ‘Right,’ he said. He looked at the sun and mimed wiping the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. He looked at an imaginary wristwatch. ‘I should go in now. Beth will be wondering where I am. It was very nice to meet you.’

The woman said goodbye and wished Frank a pleasant stay in America. After a struggle Frank managed to get up from the chair. When he was confident that he wouldn’t keel over, he went inside. Beth was standing by the phone writing something down.

‘I just met some of your neighbours,’ he said.

‘Oh, which ones?’

‘A small boy. Mexican, I think. And his mother.’

‘She’s nice. What did they say?’

‘Nothing in particular. I think they wondered who on earth I was and what on earth I was on about.’

‘We’ve all been there, Dad.’

Later, when Laura would have been on her way back to Silver Lake from Pasadena after dropping off Jimmy’s car, Frank went and got the two photo albums out of his suitcase. It was only after Frank had checked the case onto the flight at Heathrow that it had occurred to him that he could have just brought the photographs and left the albums behind. It would have made the suitcase a little lighter to carry. He brought the photo albums over to Beth where she was crouched down by the open front door, tying string to Bill’s collar. The cat turned his head awkwardly away to look back at Frank with his neutral Switzerland of a face:

This again? What am I now? A dog? A ferret?

Beth and Frank didn’t hide Bill from the neighbours this time as he reluctantly stepped out of the house. They left the security light on and they sat squashed close together under its halogen glow and waspish buzz on the doorstep watching Bill unenthusiastically plod across the grass.

Frank passed Beth the first photo album.

‘I remember these albums,’ she said. She wiped the fine layer of dust from the red tartan cover with her palm and turned to the first page and the picture of Laura taken in the hospital on only the second day of her life, with her tiny hand looking like it had been modelled from pink Plasticine, holding on to Frank’s finger like old clay. Beth let out an almost broody ‘aah’ and continued to make appreciative noises with every new photograph as she watched her daughter growing up a year and a page at a time in this slo-mo flip book, from baby to princess and ballet dancer and then to her shy and moody teens. When the pictures ended on her sixteenth birthday with Laura glaring at the camera and refusing to say cheese, Beth said, ‘Why do they stop?’ She turned the blank pages, expecting to find more pictures.

‘You stopped sending them to me,’ Frank said. ‘I thought that Laura didn’t like having her picture taken any more.’

Beth thought about it for a second.

‘That’s true,’ she said. ‘I’m sure I could fill these pages for you though.’

Beth passed the photo album back to Frank, exchanging it for the second one. She wiped the dust from the cover. The pictures in the second album were arranged in no particular order. They were taken at different times, in colour and black and white and there were also a few Polaroids. There were a number of photographs taken before Beth was born. One of Frank and Sheila standing outside the church on their wedding day with other members of the family, whose names Frank couldn’t remember when Beth asked, and one of Frank and Sheila in a hotel bar on their last holiday together in Portugal.

‘Everything in this picture is brown,’ Beth said. ‘The clothes, the furniture, the curtains, you and Mum. Oh, I loved that doll,’ she said, forgetting about all the brown in the picture because of another photograph of herself at the top of a slide holding onto a doll that was almost as big as she was.

‘It’s probably still in the loft,’ Frank said.

‘Really?’

‘I’m one of those hoarders from the television programmes,’ Frank said.

‘Bill!’ Beth said. ‘Twins.’

The two kittens in the picture were identical, although Ben was already more animated in the photograph than Bill would ever be in real life. Beth angled the photo album up at Bill sitting under the tree. ‘You look so young,’ she said to the cat, who stared back über blankly.

Way to go, guys. You’ve kept me locked up for a week, I’m only allowed outside tied to a rope. I’ve been subjected to the most insipid rom coms ever made and a really tedious pop music nostalgia fest and now you’re showing me pictures of my dead brother. What’s next? Water boarding?

On the next page of the photo album there was a picture of Frank, Sheila and Beth sitting together on a brown leather sofa.

‘Where’s that?’ Beth said.

‘It’s your place in Croydon.’

‘Is it?’ Beth held the album closer to her and up to the porch light and tried to bring the blurred photo into focus or see the rest of the room from a different angle like on a ludicrous crime show. ‘That is an ugly pair of curtains,’ she said.

‘How about the sofa?’ Frank said. ‘I slept on it after your mum passed away. I stayed with you a few times, do you remember? Because my flat felt so empty and I couldn’t seem to sleep at all. I’d never noticed all the noises it made. I thought it was in mourning too.’ He apologized to Beth for being so frivolous about such a sad time. ‘It is surprising how noisy a place is when you’re on your own though.’ He looked at the photograph again. ‘Your sofa wasn’t the best place to solve my sleep problems. It was too short for me and the leather made me sweat buckets.’

‘Stop criticizing my furniture,’ Beth said.

‘You just called your curtains ugly.’

‘Curtains aren’t furniture.’

‘I apologize. To you and your sofa.’ He remembered how Laura would come downstairs really early in the morning when he slept there and she’d try to wake him up so that he could watch television with her. Beth would have told her to not wake Granddad up and Laura would have to find subtle and clever ways to accidentally wake him. She’d turn the television on really loud or pretend she had a cough.

‘She sat on the carpet next to me and ate a bowl of cereal right by my ear,’ Frank said. ‘Until her crunching or the snap, crackle and pop had accidentally woken me up.’

Frank had watched a lot of early morning cartoons with Laura around that time and the first half of the same two or three films over and over again.

Talking about Project Wake Up Gaga made Frank want to tell Beth about Laura’s latest scheme. How could she be anything other than moved or pleased? Surely she would be proud of what her daughter was trying to achieve?’

When Beth looked at the picture of Sheila in her swimming costume, taken in the garden in Fullwind she said, ‘Was she ill then?’

‘I think she was,’ Frank said. ‘But we didn’t know yet. Do you remember how she always used to get everyone’s names wrong? She knew so many people called what’s his name and thingamabob. And her stories where every noun in the story was “thing” had been going on for years. The thing on top of the thing was stuck under the thing and so I had to use the thing. I somehow knew exactly what she was talking about, though. We had a private language. She was the only one who spoke it and only I could understand it. I just thought it was more of that. Until the senior moments that she joked about became more frequent. She must have known she wasn’t well before any of the rest of us did.’

‘She still looks great,’ Beth said. She touched her mother’s face on the photograph. ‘I hope it’s genetic.’ She looked at Frank and he knew that she was afraid he might think that she was talking about the Alzheimer’s rather than looking good in a swimming costume.