Frank Derrick's Holiday of a Lifetime (25 page)

He’d always expected that it would be Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, pneumonia or a stroke which would be the name of his downfall. Diabetes, maybe, heart failure, osteoporosis or some new strain of flu. A peanut stuck in his throat, even. But not this. He hadn’t anticipated that popping out for a walk and getting lost would be the cause of his demise. If someone had stood at the front of a church and said that this was what he would have wanted, it would have been untrue.

Frank hadn’t written a will. Of course he hadn’t written a will. He hadn’t quite got around to it. He’d left no instructions for how he should be buried or cremated or where his remains should be scattered. He hadn’t asked to be buried at sea or fired into space in a rocket. There was no Frank Derrick exit-music playlist. Something loud, he now thought. One of Laura’s favourite bands. Loud enough to literally wake the dead. He hated the idea of Beth having to choose between an oak or an elm coffin or to be made to feel like the worst person in all the world by selecting the cheaper option of a chipboard veneered casket with only ‘brass-look’ handles.

He worried about what would happen to Britain’s largest mantelpiece zoo. Would it be bulldozed and paved over with the rest of his flat, like the Venice Beach canals in whatever year that was? He couldn’t remember. His worldly goods might not be worth a great deal but he would have liked to have known that they might at least have formed the basis of a new charity-shop window display. Even Smelly John had left a will and all he had were a few old punk rock records, a postcard and some small hats. Frank wished that he had a pencil and a piece of paper so that he could write something now. He didn’t have a lot to bequeath but he could at least say goodbye to Beth and Laura and write down his name for whoever discovered his exhausted, sunburned skeleton.

He wasn’t doing so well at thinking positive thoughts.

Frank had been walking for such a long time now. He was panting like a puppy in a locked car and the waves of nausea had become more frequent and turbulent with every step further into the unknown. The streets that had looked so mathematically and geometrically mapped out on the computer in Fullwind library felt like a maze. He wondered how long jetlag took to really establish itself. Could he be experiencing the symptoms this far into his time in the new time zone? His mouth was watering and he felt sick. He was having difficulty concentrating, he was lightheaded and he was disorientated and anxious. The clumsiness was already there before he’d left the house and the muscle soreness had just become more pronounced. Would he feel this way until he reset his body clock by going home? As lost and alone as he currently felt, the thought of going home was still one he didn’t relish.

He’d walked onto a street that looked like a dead end. He turned back and started walking in the direction that he’d just come. His inner compass had been shaken up and stamped on and someone was holding a magnet over it. He had no idea where he was going at all now. Another man was walking towards him and he decided definitely to ask for help but, before he could speak, the two men had bumped into each other. There was a sound of breaking glass.

‘What the fuck.’ The man, who Frank could now see looked as crazy as he probably did, was staring wildly at him. ‘You smashed my drink. Now what you gonna do?’

Frank looked at the brown paper bag on the ground and the broken glass at the open end. There was a trickle of yellowish liquid.

‘I’m sorry,’ Frank said.

‘Are you going to pay for my drink now? Is that it?’ The man was very close to Frank. He had hair the colour and texture of a scouring pad and a face that was also purple and grey. The man smelled of cheese.

‘I’m sorry,’ Frank said. ‘I don’t have any money.’ He put his hand in his pocket and out through the other side. It seemed to confuse the man, who looked at Frank’s fingers that he waggled through the hole in his pocket like the ‘Sooty in the nude’ joke that he used to do for Beth when she was a child. The man with the pots-and-pans face said something unintelligible and shook his head; he might have spat and then walked away. Frank did the same, in the opposite direction and as fast as his tired, blistered feet would allow. He turned the corner and crossed the road, trying to put some distance between him and the angry man. Even in his disoriented state Frank knew that he was being scammed and the broken bottle was full of something the same colour as whiskey that may have started life as whiskey but wasn’t whiskey any more and the man had bumped into him on purpose. Years of practice with people on the phone and at his front door attempting to sell him walk-in baths and Jesus had hardened him to grifters.

The single thread of spider’s silk was now a full web. He thought that he was going blind. He took his glasses off and wiped them on his shirt to remove the blurriness but when he put the glasses back on his vision was just as blurred. He wiped the glasses again. He saw spots. Sheila used to get migraines. He missed her so much. He was going to start feeding the birds again when he got home. There was a ringing in his ears that he hadn’t noticed before. He would write the names of the birds on the calendar. He had fierce heartburn and his mouth was watering. He felt like he’d been eating Opal Fruits.
Made to make your mouth water
. He’d sung that jingle in the garden with Beth. Up ahead he thought that he saw Laura driving towards him in Jimmy’s black sports car.
Patrick Bergin!
he suddenly thought. That was the name of the actor in
Sleeping with the Enemy
, and then his vision changed from emo to goth and he collapsed like a Glasgow tower block. When he hit the ground, a nearby bicycle fell over. LA’s butterfly effect.

23

There was no hot water bottle and there were no planes overhead to tell him what time it was. He looked for the smoking Bette Davis and his four clocks on the dressing table: New York, London, Paris and Berlin, but they weren’t there. He couldn’t see the foam finger and he didn’t feel like number one of anything at the moment. Although lying flat on his back on the pavement – no, on the sidewalk – he felt marginally better than he had when he’d been walking. It was a relief not to be moving. He waited for his life to flash before him. Eighty-two years was a long time. Would it take longer to flash by than if he’d died ten years earlier or would his life montage flash by really quickly? He waited to see himself being born and growing up and meeting Sheila and Beth being born and Laura and Smelly John and the women in the charity shop and on the bus to the big Sainsbury’s. He’d watch himself make all his ill-considered and ill-conceived mistakes all over again until today’s final spectacular blunder before he was reunited with Sheila like dead Leonardo DiCaprio and old Kate Winslet on the sunk
Titanic
at the end of the film.

The sky was so blue and everything seemed so still. It wasn’t as dark as he’d thought it was. There were sounds and a siren, this time increasing in volume. Frank looked up at the man looking down at him. Was this God? He really should have been more patient with those missionaries on his doorstep. Or was this an out-of-body experience? He looked up at his departing soul looking down on his empty body like he was scrolling through the streets of Los Angeles on the computer in the library when he was still alive. He was confused. Where was the tunnel, where was the light? The man looking down at him had such a friendly face. Concerned but smiling. It was a reassuring face. He had a beard, like God’s, but not so white. The few white hairs in his beard were the only real signs that he had aged in the five years since Frank had last seen Jimmy. He was holding a cell phone to the side of his friendly, smiling, concerned, and yet reassuring, face.

‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘I’ve found him.’

24

Beth would later tell Frank how she had rung three times in half an hour with no answer and so she’d left work and driven back to an empty house. She’d found the sunscreen on the desk and the half-sandwich and the document pouch containing Frank’s wallet and passport on the floor of Laura’s bedroom. On the bed there was a map of Los Angeles, a pair of flip-flops and the legs from Frank’s cargo pants. Beth had panicked. She didn’t know what to think. Frank hadn’t left a note, just a series of random clues. There was a pen next to a pad of paper on the living-room desk with the sunscreen. Surely he would have left her a note. She checked the other rooms, looking under the beds and, for some reason, inside the washing machine. All she found was one of Frank’s wet socks and the smell of a spring meadow. At least he’d used fabric softener.

Beth searched outside. There was nowhere to hide in the space. She looked up at the branches of the tree because you never really knew with her father. She knocked on her neighbours’ doors and asked if they’d seen him. The Mexican woman said that she’d met him the day before but had not seen him since. Beth walked up and down the street, not wanting to go too far in case she missed Frank returning to the house. She looked in gardens and called out his name as though she was looking for a lost cat or a dog. She was so worried about Frank that she hadn’t noticed that Bill wasn’t there either.

She rang Laura, who was in the middle of cutting somebody’s hair, to see if Frank was with her. Laura told her to call the police. Thirty minutes had passed since Beth had come home; after another ten, she rang the police. And then she called Jimmy. It took him just over an hour to find Frank. He’d been more than lucky. He’d tried searching the streets using an ordered system and by a process of calm elimination, but traffic restrictions and one-way systems had made that difficult and soon he was driving up and down the same streets again and again. He might have missed Frank completely if he hadn’t been so easy to spot. Even though he was partly dressed in camouflage, his shirt stood out like dandruff under a UV disco light, and Frank was walking. Jimmy had joked about that later, how Frank was the only pedestrian in the city, which had made him easier to find. Frank had thought that he’d seen Jimmy’s car and then he’d lost consciousness and fallen to the ground, knocking over a bicycle. It was the sound of the bicycle hitting the sidewalk that drew Jimmy’s attention to his father-in-law lying unconscious next to it.

Jimmy had known exactly what to do. He’d checked for any visible injuries. He’d loosened Frank’s belt and found an old cardboard box that he’d plumped up like a pillow to raise his legs off the ground so that he could direct the blood flow to his brain. Beth would later question whether Frank possessed such a thing. Jimmy had made sure that Frank’s airway was clear and he’d called 911.

Frank was already feeling a lot better by the time he was lifted into the back of the ambulance on a gurney and he enjoyed the ride to the hospital almost as though it was a planned part of his holiday. He’d never been inside a vehicle with a siren on before. He was surprised that it wasn’t a lot louder. He joked with the paramedics, one of whom was originally from just a few miles away from where Frank lived. When the paramedic said that Disney was right and it really was a small world after all, Frank agreed but said that he wouldn’t want to paint it. The paramedic, who had been born and brought up in Worthing and then lived in Manchester before moving to LA, spoke with a strange hybrid accent that reminded Frank of a Premier League football manager.

Jimmy followed the ambulance to the hospital and he walked by the side of the gurney as it was wheeled into the emergency room. By now Frank was feeling perfectly well and he’d begun to think that he was wasting everyone’s valuable time when they should be saving lives and buying and selling fine wines. He looked up at Jimmy walking beside him. He had hardly changed at all. Five minutes with a razor could literally shave off as many years. Frank tried to see himself in Jimmy’s features, to see if there was any truth in the theory about women choosing men who looked like their fathers. He imagined Jimmy without the beard, expecting to see his own face looking back at him as though he was wiping the steam from a bathroom mirror. He’d seen a television documentary a while ago that he thought touched on the subject of the whole daughter/father/husband thing. The only part that he could fully recall from the documentary was a panda that refused to mate with the other pandas but was sexually attracted to the zookeeper who’d raised it. The thought made him feel nauseous and faint again and he closed his eyes until the queasiness passed.

He was parked in a curtained-off cubicle and Jimmy stayed with him while the emergency-room staff took Frank’s blood pressure and his temperature and checked his heart rate. They talked to each other in abbreviations that sounded to Frank as if they were as made up by Hollywood as the people using them looked.

In between tests, Jimmy and Frank chatted like old friends and when a doctor came and spoke to Jimmy, thinking that he was Frank’s son, Frank didn’t protest. If he’d had another child, he would have been happy to have had a son like Jimmy. Jimmy suggested that they should wait until Beth arrived before the doctor gave a diagnosis. She should be here soon. When Beth arrived, it was with mixed emotions. Distress, concern, anxiety, bewilderment, anger, despair, relief, resignation, embarrassment, awkwardness and gratitude because Jimmy was there, along with the familiarity of having been in and out of the same hospital thirty times or more. She opened with a line that she must have thought of on the drive there about a truth universally acknowledged that all men were numpties and that her father was king of the numpties. Beth couldn’t thank Jimmy enough but she gave it her best shot. Frank looked for the warm glow of a rekindled flame in either of them. Jimmy offered to step out into the hall so that Beth could talk to Frank alone.

‘I’ll get some coffee,’ he said.

Beth sat down on the end of Frank’s bed.

‘I was hoping I wouldn’t be back here quite so soon,’ she said.

‘I’m sorry,’ Frank said. ‘I’m an awful pain in the arse, aren’t I?’

‘Yes, Dad. You’re an awful pain in the arse.’ Beth tried so hard to pronounce the word ‘arse’ in an English accent that she ended up sounding like a pirate. He saw that she was looking at his cut-down cargo pants.