Frank Derrick's Holiday of a Lifetime (28 page)

When Jimmy had arrived that morning he’d shaken Frank’s hand and called him sir and asked how he was feeling today and while Jimmy waited for Beth and Laura to finish getting ready he sat on the sofa next to Frank, the two men like ghosts of a Christmas past. Aside from the grey streaks in Jimmy’s beard and the absence of paper hats, neither man had changed greatly in the years since the photograph that had mysteriously found its way into Frank’s photo album had been taken. Jimmy lightly joked with Frank, asking him if he had any more walks around town planned. Frank said that Beth had hidden all of his shoes.

When Beth and Laura appeared in the living room they were both impatient to get going, as though it had been they who had been waiting for Jimmy. Before they left, Beth hung back in the doorway and hugged Frank.

‘Are you sure you’ll be okay?’ she asked. ‘I feel terrible leaving you. I don’t have to go, shall I stay?’

‘You have a great time,’ Frank said. ‘And forget about me. I’ll still be here when you get back.’

‘Should I get that in writing?’

‘Once you’ve gone I won’t even open the door,’ Frank said. ‘Even if there’s a fire.’ Seeing the concerned look on Beth’s face, he thought that she might actually not go to Universal Studios if he didn’t say, ‘There
won’t
be a fire.’

He stood on the grass in front of the house in his airline socks and he waved until the car was too far away to tell if anyone inside was waving back but he carried on waving just in case. When they were gone he stayed outside for a while and listened to America waking up. To the sounds that were now familiar to him. The perpetual hum of traffic on a distant highway or from the street’s air-conditioning units. He might never find out which. There was also the sound of birds that he hadn’t yet seen. Who knew, maybe there were no birds at all and the tuneful whistling was being fed through speakers hidden in the well-kept front yards and in the trees that lined the street. There were some other more local traffic noises. Mailmen and milk trucks, Postman Pat and Benny Hill in cooler uniforms and a honk of a fire truck speeding to a towering inferno or a backdraft. Perhaps none of it was real. None of it except for Frank, the only person in the audience, and also the star of the movie, just like Jim Carrey in one of the first films that he’d watched as part of the Reunion Project.

Frank felt Bill down by his feet, rubbing his nose against his leg. Bill’s holiday was over too and he made no effort to escape through the open front door. As he nuzzled Frank’s shin he pivoted his head to look up, hopeful that Frank had forgotten or not seen that Beth had already fed him once this morning. Frank looked down at the cat. He could never be in a movie, he just didn’t have the range of facial expressions.

Our work here is done, Francis. Shall we go back inside and pack?

Frank closed the front door and went into Laura’s bedroom and lifted his suitcase up onto the bed. He opened the case and removed anything that he hadn’t unpacked yet and he began packing to go home. He folded his trousers and shirts and put them all in the case. He packed his flip-flops with the soles like Liquorice Allsorts and took the four clocks down from the dressing table – New York, London, Paris and Berlin. He removed the batteries and laid them on a towel in the suitcase and folded the towel over the top of them. He didn’t want to put them in his hand luggage and have to explain why he was travelling with so many clocks again. He took the socks out of the drawer and the cardigan and the bright shirt out of the wardrobe and put them in the suitcase. When he removed the shirt from the wardrobe it was like switching off a light.

He laid his camouflage pants on the bed and put the cutoff legs back in place below the knees. There were a few inches of material missing as a result of his gradual trimming of the trousers. He put the legs in the wastepaper basket, folded the shorts and put them in the dressing-table drawer and closed it. If he left something behind that meant that he was coming back. He looked through the two photo albums on the bed and, before putting them in the suitcase, he removed the photograph of him and Jimmy asleep on the sofa at Christmas. He took the shorts back out of the drawer, slipped the photo into the back pocket and put the shorts back in the drawer.

He packed any toiletries that he wouldn’t need and left his pyjamas out on the chair with his clothes for tomorrow. He was going to wear the sweatshirt with the planets on the front that he’d bought at the Griffith Observatory because he wanted to look like a tourist when he arrived at Heathrow, a visitor in transit who was just passing through. He put Laura’s business card that smelled of a spring meadow in the inside pocket of the suitcase along with the piece of paper from the Zoltar machine that told him that his wish had been granted. He hoped that it had. He closed the case and looked at the address label. The suitcase had finally been on holiday and it would be happy about that. Soon the suitcase would be reunited with the smaller case that Frank had so cruelly left behind alone while he took the rest of the family on holiday.

He went into the living room and watched TV. He was still tired but he felt so much better than he had the day before. He had probably recovered enough to have gone to Universal Studios but he’d been happy to exaggerate his limp and feign a bit of extra discomfort and pain for the sake of the greater good and for the future of his family. For love even.

In the afternoon Laura rang. She had to shout above all the excitement going on around her.

‘We’re having a blast,’ she said. ‘Mom and Dad are on the
Revenge of the Mummy
ride.’

‘Is that one not for you?’ Frank said. ‘Too tame?’

‘No way. It’s terrifying. I let them ride it alone.’

Frank said that he was surprised that Laura could be afraid of anything and she said that she wasn’t and that
The Mummy
was one of her favourite rides. Frank wasn’t the only one taking one for the team.

‘I wish I was there,’ Frank said. ‘But at least the ticket didn’t go to waste.’

‘One of them still did,’ Laura said.

Laura had been confident that Jimmy would be going to Universal Studios all along and so she’d bought four tickets. Frank could have gone after all. His martyrdom had been unnecessary. Laura said something about Scooby Doo walking towards her and then she told Frank that she loved him and the line was cut. After Frank put the phone down he realized that Laura had just called Jimmy ‘Dad’. Frank probably wasn’t the number one Dad on Euclid Street any more but he didn’t mind relinquishing the crown, and until Laura found a boy or a man who wasn’t an idiot, at least his Number One Granddad title was still safe.

It was early evening when Frank was woken from a sofa doze by the engine of Jimmy’s black sports car. It was followed by the nagging ding-ding-ding that told the driver a door was open or a seat belt was unfastened and then Frank heard the expensive South Korean clunk of the closing car doors and the short beep-beep of the central locking. He sat up straight on the sofa to greet everyone and when Beth came in she couldn’t hide her relief at finding him still there. Laura and Jimmy came in behind Beth. Laura was carrying a large Spider-Man toy under her arm.

‘I won you something,’ she said.

She held the plush superhero out to Frank. It was four feet tall and so overstuffed that the blue legs were straining at the seams. Laura placed the obese superhero on the sofa next to Frank. She couldn’t bend the legs and Spider-Man had to stand bow-legged and awkward with his fat arms out at his sides as though he was ready to quick-draw a pair of pistols.

Jimmy helped Beth cook and after dinner everyone showed Frank pictures from the day on their phones but they were too small for him to really appreciate. Beth promised that she would have some printed and she would post them to him to fill the empty pages of his incomplete Laura birthday photo album. Laura didn’t ask to see the photo albums and Frank was relieved as he didn’t want a day that had clearly been filled with laughter to end in tears. He was still unsure whether Laura hadn’t already looked through the photo albums anyway.

Frank was also glad that Beth didn’t tell Laura and Jimmy about the landlord or the five thousand pounds. He would tell Laura himself on the phone or by email in the future when it would become an amusing anecdote once he’d had a little time to forget some of the details and add a few new ones. It was so much easier to lie electronically.

After Jimmy had insisted on washing up the dishes and reconfigured the cutlery drawer, he said that he had an idea and he went out to the car and came back with a tablet computer. He transferred the photographs taken on his phone onto the tablet.

‘I need to get one of these,’ Frank said as he swiped his way through the pictures. Jimmy showed him how to get onto the Internet on the tablet. Frank looked up Fullwind on a map and zoomed in on his street and on his flat, hoping to see himself walking back from the shops or Bill sleeping in the long grass by the shed. He switched to the satellite view of his flat and thought that he could see that there were slates missing from the top of the building and that all the cold-calling roofers that he’d sent away from his doorstep had been right all along.

While Frank and Jimmy were online, Beth and Laura cleaned Bill’s plastic pet carrier inside and out. Beth laid a special absorbent pad that she’d bought from the pet store on the floor of the box like a carpet and put two herbal cat treats inside the box to see Bill through the long flight. Laura shadow-paw boxed with Bill and got him to chase a toy mouse around, gradually leading him closer to the opening of the pet carrier until she put the mouse inside the box. Bill was cautious at first but he soon followed the mouse inside. He stayed in the box for a while, sitting on his new carpet and sniffing the herbal treats. If he became acclimatized to the box now, whoever had to put him in there tomorrow might end up with fewer scratches on their hands than Frank had two weeks ago, particularly as they were in a city where nobody owned any gloves.

Frank didn’t want his last full LA day to end. He wanted all the shows on TV to be interrupted by a newsflash. He waited in vain for a strike at the airport or an eruption in Iceland.

Jimmy pumped up the air bed for Laura. He inflated it so quickly that if he hadn’t been such a genuinely humble man, he might have been accused of showing off. He was, in fact, one of the few people that Frank had met in the past twelve days who wasn’t a show-off.

‘I’ve been playing the drums at my brother’s,’Jimmy said, barely out of breath. ‘This is my kick-drum leg.’

When Jimmy left he said goodbye to Frank and he hoped that he would see him again soon. They shook hands and it wasn’t something that he would ordinarily do, but Frank put his other arm around Jimmy’s back and patted it. Jimmy hugged Laura and walked to the front door with Beth.

‘You could stay,’ Beth said, halfway to the door, but Jimmy, ever the gentleman, said:

‘I should go.’

Beth nodded. There was an awkward moment where neither of them knew what to do next. Jimmy held out a hand as though he was expecting Beth to shake it and she took his hand and seemed to pull him towards her. Their embrace was awkward at first, as though they’d forgotten the shape of each other’s bodies and how well they used to fit together but then they settled.

Laura cupped her hands around her mouth like a loud-hailer and whispered to Frank, ‘It’s so romantic.’

When Frank went to bed he didn’t expect to sleep.

27

They drove along Euclid Street, stopping at the first junction to let a jogger cross. Frank looked at the logo on the jogger’s shirt and thought it might actually be the same jogger that he’d seen on the computers in Fullwind library. Being captured on an Internet camera with a potential viewing audience of the whole world was no doubt regarded as fame these days. At the end of the street they turned the corner onto Santa Monica Boulevard and Frank counted down the streets, 12th, 11th, 10th and 9th before they turned onto 8th Street, which, for superstitious reasons or a mathematical error, was called Lincoln Boulevard.

They were in Beth’s car; she was driving and Laura was in the back with Bill next to her in his box. Bill hadn’t wanted to get into the box but now he was there he seemed fairly calm and he wasn’t banging around inside or trying to bite his way to freedom any more.

On a short detour along the coast, Frank looked out at the sea one last time. It was bluer than ever. They drove past the old men playing chess, the gymnasts, joggers and cyclists and a t’ai chi class. Before they reached Muscle Beach they turned the corner. It was possible that they went along some of the same streets that Frank had been lost on but nothing looked familiar to him until he saw the sign sticking out from the front of a building with its picture of a pair of scissors cutting through a pizza. It was the same image that had been printed on Laura’s business card until Frank had put it through three or four wash-and-spin cycles. Beth pulled over in front of the salon to drop Laura off for work and for one last bonus event that Laura had arranged for Frank before Beth drove him to the airport. Laura and Frank got out of the car and Beth went to look for a parking space.

Everything in the salon, the walls, the floor, the ceiling, the chairs, the washbasins, the fixtures and fittings and the clothes of the staff, were black. Frank felt like a man who’d gone to a wake mistakenly thinking that it was a fancy dress party.

‘This is my grandfather Frank,’ Laura said and everyone said hi. ‘And these are all the guys who work here,’ she said, sweeping her hand in front of her like a bored magician.

There were three members of Venice Slice staff other than Laura. A man with a beard the same as Zoltar the fortune-teller’s was washing combs in a sink, another man named Henry was sitting on a high bar stool chewing a stick of red liquorice and a third man with sideburns in the shape of fish skeletons brought Frank a bottle of mineral water from a glass-fronted fridge, unscrewing the cap with the same hand that he was holding the bottle in. He introduced himself as Oscar.