Frank Derrick's Holiday of a Lifetime (24 page)

He looked along the beach and back in the direction from which he’d come and he considered his options. He could sit and wait until he felt strong enough to walk to the house; with a bit of luck the police would stop him again and this time he would accept their offer of a lift. He could find a telephone and ring Beth and ask her to come and get him but he didn’t have her work number. He couldn’t even call the house, the one phone number that he ever rang, because even if he could remember the number, Bill didn’t have the opposable thumbs to answer it.

Frank thought about hiring a bike and cycling back to the house. As it was the least sensible of his options so far he considered it in more detail, looking at the different kinds of bike outside the hire shop and wondering which would be the most suitable for him. He decided on a beach cruiser with high sit-up-and-beg handlebars shaped like a wishbone. The bike was painted in a green-and-khaki camouflage pattern, designed to blend into a different war than what was left of Frank’s chocolate-chip and cookie-dough trousers. The bike had a crossbar that was wider than any crossbar on a British bicycle. It looked more like the petrol tank on a motorbike.

Frank put his hand in his pocket for his zip-up document pouch and his hand came out the other side. He looked down at the tips of his fingers sticking out from the bottom of the trouser pocket. He had obviously cut the bottom of the pocket off back at the house and the pouch had fallen out. He started to panic, wondering where it had fallen out. Had it dropped onto the floor before he’d left? Or was it somewhere between Beth’s house and the whittled tree stump where he now sat? His passport was in the document pouch with his money. He should turn back now. Retrace his steps on Santa Monica Boulevard and hope that he could find it. Maybe a kind soul would have already handed it in to a shopkeeper who would have written out a ‘lost wallet found’ sign and stuck it in the shop window. He felt the other pockets to be certain that he had lost the document pouch. In the breast pocket of his shirt he found Laura’s business card. It had been through the same wash and spin cycle as the shirt and Frank couldn’t read the address or the telephone number. He looked along the beach where they’d quadricycled. ‘Up that street and over a bit,’ Laura had said and she’d pointed. Frank didn’t know how far ‘over a bit’ was, of course, and she may have meant up that street and over a bit in Phoenix or in New Mexico, but the journey in the back of the quike had at least felt shorter than the walk from Euclid Street and so Frank decided to see if he could find Venice Slice and his granddaughter.

22

If Frank had brought his map with him he might have found a shorter route to Venice Slice than the Ocean Front Walk that ran alongside the beach bike trail and, once he’d crossed beaches from Santa Monica to Venice, he wouldn’t have needed to be concerned with looking like a tourist. In amongst all the men with no teeth, the fire eaters, sword swallowers, sand sculptors and pavement artists, the bodybuilders with skin the colour and texture of clementines, the huge men riding tiny bicycles, the tattooed and the pierced, the hippies, the stoners, the acid casualties and the Vietnam vets, the drummers, the three-stringed-guitar players, street pianists and those dancing to the music inside their own heads; in his cut-down cargo pants with one leg longer than the other, his bright red airline socks, one of which had completely disappeared into his shoe, and his long white hair and shirt of many colours open to the waist and flapping in the breeze behind him like the cape of a superhero, Frank looked like he’d lived here for years.

If he’d opened the map out on the sand of Venice Beach and started asking people for directions they would have thought he was another street-performance artist. When he got home, if he knew the right thing to type into the Internet, he would probably find a video of himself: ‘Guy Can’t Fold Map Back Up’, ‘World’s Oldest Hippy’ or ‘Lost Australian Dude’. It would be his Native American YouTube name, his SiouxTube name. He might even end up in one of the Venice Beach boardwalk murals.

As he walked past another tattoo parlour or medical marijuana store, somebody called out, ‘Gerry Garcia man!’

He turned to see a young man in baggy jeans with holes in the knees smiling broadly at him. Until he’d seen the man smile Frank had thought Gerry Garcia might be a Spanish insult. He returned the smile and walked on, wondering what a Gerry Garcia man was. He’d already been walking for forty-five minutes looking for a landmark, a frozen yoghurt stand or a basketball court that was recognizable from the quike ride, but everything was new to him.

He stopped to rearrange his airline socks and a woman a lot younger than him, but with hair just as white, offered to paint his portrait on a grain of rice for fifty dollars. She was standing behind one of the tabletop street stalls that lined the beach side of the boardwalk and she held her open palm out across the table to show Frank the rice that his face would be painted on. He couldn’t even see the grain of rice. He said no thank you and started walking again.

His legs hurt now. His calves were stiff and his knees sore. When he’d bent down to adjust his socks it felt as though he was stretching his calves to the point where they might actually snap. His back was stiff too and he knew that when he finally sat down the change of position was going to be difficult. The discomfort of standing up again would be even worse. So he carried on walking.

He was thirsty and the only person on the boardwalk without a bottle of water. He hadn’t eaten anything other than half a sandwich and he was feeling hungry. Shops and stalls taunted him with their offers of ice-cold drinks, frozen yoghurts, ice creams and foot massages. He thought of his wallet lying on the living-room floor or in the hands of the local cops as they passed it around the station, laughing at his passport photograph. When he remembered that his Smelly John punk postcard was also lost, it made him feel physically sick. He regretted not turning back to look for it now. Why did he always make such bad decisions? A man cycled by wearing a Princess Leia bikini and a short fur coat. He was probably once a lost tourist. The boardwalk seemed very crowded and dangerous all of a sudden. Some of the more colourful free-spirited beach eccentrics had started to just look mad. Even without any money or a passport, Frank was nervous about being robbed. He walked past another row of tabletop stalls: a badge maker, jewellery, candles too ornate to be lit and a man making model aircraft and bicycles from drinks cans.

When he reached the outdoor beach gym he saw a small crowd had gathered to watch bodybuilders lifting their own weight in iron. Frank had at last found his landmark. A similar, smaller outdoor gym had been opened a year ago in the park on the edge of Fullwind but it was rarely used other than as a place for the bored local teenagers to sit and smoke cigarettes.

The beach gym was surrounded by a blue metal fence. A line of people stood outside the fence and watched the half a dozen men and one woman working out. It reminded Frank of the zoo. When Beth had gone to buy drinks on Sunday she’d said that she was going to ‘the cafe over by Muscle Beach’. This was the closest that Frank had been to knowing where he was. He’d walked too far but if he turned around and walked one or two streets along he would be close to where Laura worked.

He went back along the boardwalk until he reached a gap between buildings and walked through it onto a short but wide pedestrian marketplace, where a man tried to sell him some falafel. He went past a cafe, a sunglasses shop and a bicycle-and surfboard-hire shop until he was on a larger street. He took the business card out of his shirt pocket and tried to read the salon address. He looked up at the buildings for a street name sign to match the smudge on the business card but only saw signs for tattoos and piercings, more sunglasses and bike rentals.

If the street looked familiar to Frank it was from the cinema again. Orson Welles had filmed a famously long opening tracking shot here for
Touch of Evil
which Frank was unwittingly retracing as he made his way along Windward Avenue, dipping in and out of the pillared archways to look in shop windows, hoping that the next tattoo parlour or sunglasses shop would be a hair salon and pizza parlour.

At a large crossroads the word ‘VENICE’ was strung between buildings in individual unlit neon letters. From Frank’s point of view, the letters were in reverse like an ambulance sign. The sign marked the original Gateway to Venice Beach. Before the canals had been filled in and paved over in 1929 he would have been underwater or onboard a gondola. He was convinced that this was the street where Laura worked and decided to follow it a bit further but it soon became more residential and it seemed less likely that he would find the hair salon. He’d lost track of time. How long had he been walking for? When did he leave the house? Two hours ago? Three? He had four clocks on Laura’s dressing table but no wristwatch. He thought that it might be getting dark. Or cloudy. If there was a hailstorm Beth might see him on the news and come and rescue him. He flipped the shades up on his glasses and gained an hour of daylight.

There were no other signs of life on the street now. He looked up at the sky, thinking about waving at the Camera Obscura or Google Earth. If the right person was watching he could take off his shirt and semaphore an SOS. He came to another crossroads. There was a white-painted church building on the corner opposite him. He regretted turning away so many religious evangelists and Bible thumpers from his doorstep back at home. If he knocked on the door of the church to ask for sanctuary or a lift and they slammed the door in his face it would be a form of karma. When he reached the church he found that it had been converted into apartments.

He stopped and consulted his inner compass. If he turned left he would be heading back towards Euclid Street or at least in that general direction. He walked up the street; it was shorter than the one he’d left and there was either a school playground or an empty car park at the end of it.

He brushed his cheek with the back of his hand. He had the sensation of a hair tickling his face. He picked at it with his thumb and forefinger and tried to focus his vision on the hair, his eyes facing south, west, north and east, but he couldn’t see it. He brushed at his face again and pushed his bottom lip up over his top lip and blew. The hair was still there. It felt like the single thread of a spider’s web that he’d walked through on his garden path on a muggy day. While he’d been concentrating on the hair Frank hadn’t noticed a man walking towards him. He was walking a lot faster than Frank and in ten seconds their paths would meet. He had to decide quickly whether to ask for help or cross over to the other side of the street to avoid him. Frank assessed, judged and stereotyped the approaching man. He marked him out of ten like a gymnast or a ballroom dancer, giving him points for threat, risk and danger. When they were a few yards apart Frank was about to say hello when the man stepped off the sidewalk and crossed the road, quickening his pace away from Frank, having himself assessed the risk of the crazy-looking old dude with the long white hair and peculiar clothing, breathing heavily, staring wildly in all directions and hitting himself repeatedly in the face, and given Frank a perfect set of tens.

Frank continued to the end of the street and turned right at the playground. It was deserted but for a dog running around the perimeter of the fence trying to work out how to escape. Frank knew how he felt. He heard a siren far off in the distance and listened to it drop in volume. The cavalry weren’t coming. He was alone. He stopped by the playground fence. However fiercely independent, proud and stubbornly bloody-minded he was, he had to admit it. He was lost. He could walk the streets of Los Angeles for days and never find his way back to Beth’s house. He’d miss the trip to Universal Studios that he had been so looking forward to, even though on Santa Monica Pier he’d claimed that a revolving door made him dizzy in order to avoid riding on a children’s merry-go-round. He might even miss his flight home. He was the baggage handlers’ dispute or Icelandic eruption that he’d wished for. He spoke to the dog behind the fence and the dog growled and started barking. Frank moved quickly away.

He’d heard horror stories about people just like him being picked up by the police when they were found aimlessly walking where they didn’t belong, lost and confused with no identification. They ended up in institutions for years protesting their sanity, never to be seen again by their distraught families, who, years later, would still be out searching for them, printing leaflets and keeping their bedrooms on hold in case they ever returned. Frank might end up in an asylum or sleeping on the beach where he would need to find his signature boardwalk eccentricity, whether it was cycling up and down in a gold bikini or plucking a one-stringed banjo. When you’re surrounded by crazy people the best way to make yourself invisible and to stay safe was to stand out and, based on the reaction of the man who had just passed him, Frank was already halfway there.

Halfway there. Time to turn back. Swim back to the shore where there’s a towel waiting for him. Sheila.

His whole body seemed to be oozing clammy sweat now and his skin was itching. He hadn’t put on the sunscreen when Beth had told him to and his skin would soon be as red as the airline socks, which had now completely disappeared inside his shoes. There was a blister forming at the back of the heel of his right foot and he’d been walking with a limp since passing under the Venice sign.

He tried to think about something positive. He thought about the beachside retirement home from the TV and the sun setting over the sea while he drank Martinis on the balcony. Old Man Packing Bags had started a conga around the pool and Frank took the elevator down to join on to the back of it as they snaked their way around the pool, picking up more pensioners along the way, high-kicking and shouting ‘hey’ and ‘la la la la’ on their route between the palm trees and around the fountains in their Hawaiians and Bermudas. Assisted living. That was what he needed right now.