Frank Derrick's Holiday of a Lifetime (3 page)

Frank put the Thanksgiving card back in the envelope, He was eighty-two years old. He had to scroll down to the very bottom of the drop-down menus on the auction websites that he’d registered on to find his year of birth. He was almost too old to be considered alive or at least to be using the Internet. Even the private health and insurance companies had stopped sending him special offers for free health checks or ‘full body MOTs’. Medically he was a write-off. He was uninsurable. An accident waiting to happen, whether it was falling down the stairs or being run over by another milk float. The Grim Reaper had more than just a scythe. He had an armoury larger than North Korea’s. Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, pneumonia or a stroke, so many natural causes; Frank was probably carrying something around with him already. Diabetes or heart failure, osteoporosis, or perhaps he’d die from something mundane such as the flu or a septic finger. Maybe he’d choke on a peanut because there was nobody there to stand behind him, wrap their arms around his waist and squeeze. Frank wasn’t one of those people who, when nearer to the end of their lives, cheerfully accepted their fate. Frank wasn’t unafraid of dying: it terrified him. He wasn’t ready for it and he doubted that he ever would be. He wasn’t prepared to meet his maker. He didn’t even believe that one existed. But he would have dropped down dead right now if it meant that Beth would never be ill ever again.

Even though she had assured and reassured him that everything would be fine, and in spite of how well the surgery had gone and how rose-tinted she made the prognosis sound, ever since Halloween, his daughter’s illness had never been far from Frank’s mind. And when he managed to forget about it for a while, there it was in the plot line of every soap opera and in news stories on the television and in the papers. It haunted his dreams, both at night and during the day. In spite of everything he’d been told to the contrary and regardless of all the medical opinion and secondary medical opinion from doctors, surgeons and oncologists, he couldn’t stop himself from thinking that his daughter was going to die before him.

He looked at the silhouetted figure through the frosted glass of the front door. He didn’t hurry to open it. Whoever was on the other side of the glass would have seen him too and they wouldn’t be going anywhere until they’d at least tried to sell him something: a stair lift or a burglar alarm, or until they’d had the opportunity to offer to landscape his garden, repoint his chimney or steal his pension. He unhooked the chain and opened the front door.

It was Frank’s landlord. Frank had only met him twice. Once when he’d moved in twenty-four years ago and this was the second time. When the landlord spoke he mumbled. It was difficult to understand what he was saying. He sounded like he had too many teeth or had been stung on the tongue by a wasp. The landlord shook his hand and, in a voice that was similar to Frank’s impression of Marlon Brando in
The Godfather
– an impression that he’d dropped from his repertoire after almost choking to death on a small ball of cotton wool – he made Frank an offer he couldn’t refuse.

3

Frank lay in bed wondering what the time was. He looked over at the alarm clock and tried to bring its numbers into focus. He thought if he could tilt his head to just the right angle he would be able to see the numbers through his glasses on the bedside table next to it, but he couldn’t. The first movement of the day to reach either his glasses or the clock was always the most difficult. It was worse than getting out of a deckchair opened out to the last notch. The first move of Frank’s day was an activity that would be better suited to the afternoon when his joints were fully warmed up. He looked at the clock again. If he got out of bed too early, the day just seemed to go on forever. The last thing he wanted to do was to get up too early. Usually Frank would wait until he heard the first plane from Gatwick flying over above his flat. It would then be around 5 a.m. and he’d get up.

He rubbed his eyes and one more time tried to bring the alarm clock into focus. The cheque that his landlord had given him was on the bedside table next to the clock. Frank had put it there the night before in case he was burgled, even though he knew that to anyone without a bank account in the name of Frank Derrick the cheque was just as worthless as everything else in the flat.

On the doorstep yesterday morning, when Frank had first looked at the cheque – which the landlord hadn’t let go of, as though he was Chris Tarrant on
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
– he’d looked at the pound sign, the number five and the five zeros that followed and he’d wondered how his vacating his dull two-bedroom flat could possibly be worth half a million pounds to anyone. He understood that house prices had rocketed and that he was living on one of the most sought-after roads in one of West Sussex’s retirement hotspots. With the flat empty the landlord, who already owned the flat downstairs, would be able to knock the whole building down and build ten bungalows in its place, but half a million pounds?

It hadn’t been the first time that Frank’s landlord had suggested that he should move out. His rent arrears reminders often came attached to details of more affordable, smaller flats nearer the town centre that Frank might be interested in: something on the ground floor or with a lift and without a garden, as it was obvious to anyone who’d seen the long grass and the weeds that Frank had no interest in gardening.

When Frank’s eyes had eventually focussed on the comma after the five and the full stop after the first three zeros, he saw that the cheque was for five thousand pounds and not five hundred thousand, hardly a life-changing amount. Unless the timing was right of course; if it came at the right time in your life, like now,
now
was the time that five thousand pounds could really change Frank’s life. He was overdrawn at the bank, he had unpaid phone, gas and electricity bills: the next cold winter could finish him off. With five thousand pounds he could have paid off all his outstanding bills, he could have had the heating on in more than one room in the winter. He lay in bed looking up at the ceiling. It needed painting. So did the walls. He could have decorated the whole flat with five thousand pounds. He could have got the hot water boiler fixed or have bought a wider-screen television – he’d had to move his armchair closer to the screen to be able to read the subtitles of all the Scandinavian crime shows that he’d been watching lately. He could have had laser eye surgery with five thousand pounds and the TV could have stayed where it was. With five thousand pounds he could have built the home cinema in his garden shed that he’d always dreamed of. The next time a roofer or landscape gardener rang his novelty doorbell to offer their services Frank could have given them a heart attack by saying yes.

Of course, if he had accepted the five thousand pounds he was being offered to move out of the flat, then he would have had to move out of the flat. Catch twenty-two. There would be no point fixing the roof or landscaping the garden, no use turning up the heating or widening the television if he wasn’t there to appreciate it. And besides, weren’t all these repairs and renovations the landlord’s responsibility anyway?

There was a distant rumble and as it grew louder and closer Frank started to get out of bed. Whether he took the sound of the aeroplane passing over his flat as a sign or simply felt that it was time to get up didn’t really matter. He’d already decided what he was going to do long before it had even been cleared for take-off.

It was ten o’clock at night in Santa Monica when Frank took his address book out of the desk drawer to look up Beth’s telephone number. It was the only number that he ever actually dialled. The majority of Frank’s phone calls were incoming and cold. Calls that came from withheld numbers in warehouses on industrial estates. And yet still he could never remember Beth’s number. He found it in the book and dialled.

‘Hello.’

‘Elizabeth,’ Frank said.

‘Hi, Dad.’ She sounded tired and a bit irritable.

‘I hope I didn’t wake you.’

‘Just snoozing.’

‘Now,’ Frank said. ‘I’m not expecting you to pay. I should probably get that out of the way first. But I’ve been thinking . . .’

Frank rattled through a series of advance codicils and preliminaries on the way to making his point, just as Beth had done when she’d called him at Halloween. But she’d been preparing Frank for bad news; her preamble was a warning of scenes that some viewers might find upsetting. Frank’s preludes were a jovial ‘fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride’ warning before a funfair thrill.

‘I can get a taxi from the airport and stay in a hotel, obviously,’ he continued. ‘I wouldn’t get in the way and you could carry on as normal. Just for a couple of weeks and obviously not until after your treatment is finished. What do you think?’

Beth didn’t answer for such a long time that Frank wondered if they’d been cut off.

‘If you want me to, of course,’ Frank said.

‘Dad,’ Beth said, ‘I’m not really sure what it is you’re talking about.’

‘I was thinking that I could come over. To see you.’

‘Right,’ Beth said. Frank had hoped that she would have sounded more excited.

‘I’m going to organize it all myself. You won’t need to do anything.’

‘Right,’ Beth said. ‘You’re coming here?’

He could feel rainclouds gathering above his parade. He put up his umbrella and continued.

‘I thought that I could be there for Laura’s birthday.’

There was another really long pause before Beth answered.

‘Wouldn’t you prefer it if I looked into it for you first?’ she said. ‘The flight isn’t cheap.’ She sounded so weary and for once Frank selfishly hoped that it was because of Lump.

‘I want to do it myself,’ he said. ‘Of course, I know you’ll probably want to speak to Laura about it first.’

There was another long pause before Beth answered. It was like a satellite interview on the news.

‘Laura will be thrilled, Dad. But do you even have a passport?’

‘Yes.’

‘A valid one?’

‘I’ll renew it.’

‘Travelling all that way, though? On your own?’

‘It will be an adventure. I’ll be like Michael Palin.’

‘Michael Palin always has a huge film crew with him,’ Beth said. Frank detected the hint of a light, if somewhat resigned, humour in her argument. ‘Aren’t you afraid of flying?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Frank said.

‘The seats are very close together on planes now, you know; you’re not young any more, Dad.’

‘I know that. But I’m shorter than I once was.’

There was another long pause and then Beth asked the five-thousand-dollar question that Frank had been dreading.

‘How are you going to pay for it?’

He had hoped that he could email her later about his surprise lottery win or the old bank account that he’d thought he’d closed down years ago that had built up thirty years’ worth of interest. It was so much easier to lie electronically. If he told Beth the truth, she would only make him tear up the landlord’s cheque after pointing out the elephant in the room – the homelessness elephant.

‘Premium Bonds,’ Frank said.

‘What?’

‘I won some money on the Premium Bonds. Not a huge amount but just enough for a holiday.’

‘Do they still have those?’ Beth said.

‘Yes, of course.’

‘And you won?’

‘Yes. I forgot that I still had them, to be honest.’

‘How much did you win?’

‘Five thousand pounds.’

‘Really?’

‘It isn’t all that much.’

Unless the timing is right.

‘I really didn’t think they existed any more,’ Beth said.

‘They do. It took me ages to find them after the letter arrived. I had to turn the whole flat upside down.’ The more detail Frank added to the lie the more he began to believe it himself; he just needed to make sure that he stopped before he went too far and introduced an alien invasion, a romance or he broke into song. ‘They’d fallen down the back of the drawer in the kitchen,’ he said. ‘There was a coffee stain on the envelope but the Premium Bonds are all right. I cheered when I found them. I frightened the life out of Bill.’ Involve Bill, Frank thought. His star witness. All three wise monkeys in the form of the world’s most inscrutable cat. Try cross-examining that, Perry Mason.

Beth was so used to Frank’s get-rich-quick schemes that it was difficult for her to see this as anything different. He was always sending emails or leaving excited messages on Beth’s answering machine about a horse running with the name ‘Beth’s Chance’ or a jockey named Derek who was riding a sixty-six-to-one outsider called Lucky Francis.

Last year he’d bought a digital camera and every day for a month he’d taken pictures of charity shop bric-a-brac, ornamental wildlife, decorative plates and metal serving trays and eggcups that he insisted were silver rather than simply silver-coloured. He’d attached the photographs to emails and sent them to Beth, freezing her Internet connection for hours because the files were so large.

‘Well,’ Beth said. ‘I suppose. I mean, I’m going to need to look at my planner.’ She translated for him, ‘My calendar.’

‘Of course.’

‘I can’t just drop everything.’

‘I wouldn’t want you to.’

‘It is a very long way, Dad.’

‘It’s only twelve hours,’ Frank said, unknowingly using one of Beth’s own arguments from ten years ago.

Before she could change her mind or ask him to fax the Premium Bonds letter to her, Frank talked her into getting her planner now and deciding on suitable dates. He knew that he would still need to show her proof that he was serious, either a copy of his plane tickets or him standing on her doorstep in Santa Monica, before she fully believed that he was really coming. He hoped that she wouldn’t remember that he’d cashed his Premium Bonds in years ago to pay the rent that was long overdue on the flat that he was about to give away and also that he didn’t drink coffee.

He said goodbye and opened his address book again and for the first time in a long time he dialled a different number to Beth’s.

It was very early in the morning but the landlord answered, his mumbled voice seeming easier to understand over the phone, as though he was talking through a kidnapper’s voice disguiser on its reverse setting.