Frank Derrick's Holiday of a Lifetime (7 page)

‘Is that Laura?’

‘Hi, Frank.’

‘Happy New Year.’

‘Is it? Thanks.’ He could hear the television. There was laughter and applause, singing and gunfire, a heated argument in Spanish and a fitness instructor counting loudly between intakes of breath. He presumed she was switching channels.

‘I thought you’d be out tonight celebrating,’ Frank said.

‘It’s my least favourite night of the year, to be frank. Frank.’ With the pause between frank and Frank, she obviously knew that she was making a joke, but with her polygraph-baffling voice it was hard to be sure. ‘I don’t like being dictated to when I should be having fun,’ she said.

‘Oh, neither do I,’ Frank said. ‘What are you doing instead?’

‘Just watching TV.’

‘What’s on?’

‘Nothing.’

‘I watched that last night.’

‘Disappointing, isn’t it? I won’t watch it again.’

‘Neither will I. Not till next New Year’s Eve at least.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Is your mother there?’

‘She’s asleep. Do you want me to wake her?’

‘Oh no. That’s all right. It isn’t midnight yet there, is it?’

‘Not yet.’

Even when she was a child Beth would always insist on staying up until midnight on New Year’s Eve. When she was yawning and nodding off she would force herself to stay awake until the twelve chimes and then she’d be fast asleep in seconds and Frank would carry her up to bed; so now Frank was worried.

‘Lump has worn her out,’ Laura said. She switched off the television or muted the volume and the gunfire and the singing, the laughter and applause stopped abruptly. ‘I just sent you an update.’

‘The library’s closed,’ Frank said. ‘I’ll have to read it in a couple of days. What did it say?’

‘Brief synopsis?’ Laura said. ‘Have you seen
Roman Holiday
?’

‘The film? Yes.’

‘You know how Audrey Hepburn is in love with Gregory Peck even though she’s a princess and he’s a journalist and at the end she’s smiling at that press conference but she just seems so sad?’

‘I’m not sure. Yes. I think so.’

‘Mom’s a bit like that at the moment. There’s an under-current of Audrey melancholy to her.’

‘I see. At least I think I do. You mean she’s unhappy?’

‘And happy at the same time. You won’t need to read the email now.’

‘And how are you?’ Frank said. He thought that he might have already asked but he worried that Laura might begin to resent her mother for having the monopoly on everyone’s sympathy. There was little chance of that, though, as Laura shrugged Frank’s enquiry off with her usual nonchalance.

‘I’m about to miss this movie, that’s how I am,’ she said.

Frank asked her to wish Beth a happy new year and they said goodbye. Before Laura put the phone down Frank heard the volume of the television go back up and what sounded like the crackling and warped opening music of an old black-and-white movie.

He went into the kitchen and made a cup of tea. While he waited for the kettle to boil he looked out of the kitchen window. The rain was overflowing from the guttering that ran along the underside of the roof. It needed fixing but that wasn’t his problem any more. Homelessness, or at least the notion of it, was surprisingly liberating.

For the next two days Frank packed and repacked his suitcase, laying his clothes flat in the case and then taking them out and replacing them rolled up. He tried a combination of shirts and trousers laid flat at the centre of the case and pants and socks rolled up and inserted around the edges. He wanted to fill the suitcase enough for him to have to sit on it to shut it, but he didn’t have enough clothes that he wanted to take. He hadn’t realized how many woollen products he owned. Would he need a jacket or a coat? Was it going to be too hot for socks?

He filled in the suitcase address label and wondered what would happen if his suitcase was lost and eventually returned; would he still be here to accept it? Would the address on the label even exist? He probably should have been packing the flat up to move rather than for a holiday but he carried on packing and repacking. He bought a pair of Desert Storm chocolate-chip and cookie dough camouflage cargo pants from the charity shop that many people would have said he was too old to wear, which was exactly why he bought them, that and the six pockets: side, back and halfway down the legs of the trousers. Frank thought that he would need extra pockets in America, for his passport and his money. He bought some flip-flops with soles like Liquorice Allsorts and some new socks and underpants in the big Sainsbury’s and, just in case six pockets weren’t enough, he bought a zip-up travel document pouch. It was difficult to choose the right clothes for a Californian summer holiday in the midst of an English winter. Like shopping for food just after a big meal, and Frank wasn’t sure if anything he bought was suitable.

While he was in the supermarket he went back to the travel agents and picked up some more Californian holiday brochures. He sat at home and stared at pictures of Disneyland and Universal Studios, the Hollywood sign, Griffith Observatory and the billboards on Sunset Strip. He looked at photographs of the Chinese Theatre and the Egyptian theatre and at the beaches of Venice and Santa Monica, where Beth and Laura had cycled. Where better to go to escape reality than Hollywood? When he’d turned the knob on the gas fire so many times to unsuccessfully get it to light that he felt blisters forming on his thumb and his forefinger, he gave up and went to the library instead because it was warm there and he could look at the seating plan for his flight on the Internet one more time. He worked out where the emergency exits and the toilets were and he imagined who he might be seated next to and what the food would be like and what inflight movies would be showing.

Frank had seen a lot of movies but he’d never seen an in-flight movie. At least there wouldn’t be any films about air disasters. Ever since he’d booked his flights, every film he watched seemed to have a plane crash or hijacking in it. They’d taken the place of the cancer stories on his TV. There were bombs on planes, snakes on planes, engine fires and failures, planes crashing into mountains and the passengers eating each other. And then there were the air-crash documentaries, the planes landing on rivers and on busy freeways on the news and the drunk-pilots and lost-luggage stories. Last night Frank had watched a report on the news about deep-vein thrombosis on long-haul flights. Like a lot of other things – the flu, cold weather, hot weather – as an eighty-two-year-old, Frank was in the at-risk group. He typed ‘DVT’ in to Google images on the library computer and almost fainted onto the keyboard. After adding ‘flight compression socks’ to his holiday shopping list he read the latest email from Laura.

Frank didn’t know if the traces of Princess Diana were positive or not. He sent a short reply to ask her and left the library and went over the road to the chemist and then to Fullwind Food & Wine, but neither shop sold flight compression socks. In the charity shop the angle-eyed woman, whom Frank had given the Sioux name of Eyes Facing South-West, suggested that he might try wearing a pair of pop socks instead. She went over to one of the shelves and brought back a packet.

‘They’re new,’ she said and she put the pop socks on the counter. ‘They haven’t been worn.’ On the front of the packet it said
5 Pairs 15 Denier Knee-Highs – colour nude
above a picture of a woman’s crossed legs. ‘Would you like to take them?’

Frank nodded and Eyes Facing South-West picked up a pile of brown paper bags.

‘They’re made for women,’ she said – she had such a loud voice, though Frank hadn’t noticed it before – ‘but I’m sure that doesn’t matter.’ She rubbed the paper bags together to free one of the bags. ‘My husband worked on the oil rigs and he used to wear my tights to keep himself warm.’

Frank just wished she would stop talking or at least turn the volume down and put the women’s socks in the bag so that he could leave. He felt like he was buying a dirty magazine. After he’d paid and left the shop, just as the door was closing, he was convinced that he heard high-pitched laughter just like on the bus to the big Sainsbury’s.

In the second week of January, a man arrived in a van and hammered a FOR SALE sign into the grass verge outside Frank’s flat. The sign was twice the height of most of the other FOR SALE signs outside the bungalows on Sea Lane even though it advertised a property that was at least half the price. Frank had presumed that the landlord would be selling his flat to be demolished to make way for more bungalows or developing the property himself and he was surprised to see the sign. It would also mean that he would now have to answer a lot of annoying questions every time he saw one of his neighbours.

‘Are you moving?’

‘Where are you moving to?’

‘What’s the asking price?’

And so on.

The first people to view the flat were a young couple. Frank’s neighbours came out and pretended to wash their cars, trim their lawns and pick up litter so that they could see who their new neighbours might be. Hilary, the head of the Neighbourhood Watch, would have created a spreadsheet and a wall chart.

The estate agent showed the young couple around while Frank sat in the living room watching television. When they came out of his bedroom Frank heard the man say to the estate agent that it would be a nice flat once all the clutter was cleared and Frank knew that he wasn’t talking about the dismantled Christmas tree and the box of decorations in the hall; he wasn’t referring to the DVDs and charity-shop ornaments on every available surface in the living room; he didn’t mean the giraffes and elephants or any of the ornamental animals in the oversubscribed ark on the mantelpiece; he wasn’t even referring to the mess in the garden, the cat litter tray in the kitchen or the junk mail at the bottom of the stairs. The man was talking about him. Frank. He was the clutter.

After that first viewing, whenever people came to look at the flat, Frank tried to make sure that he was out. He felt as though many of the people who came to look around were just being nosy and had no real interest in buying the flat. He thought that he recognized some of them from the village and they were only there to snoop around and to have a go on his unusual doorbell. So whenever a viewing was arranged he’d go to the shops or to the library to look at America online and read the latest email from Laura.

Frank was pleased that Beth was in a better mood. He was sure that was what ‘Sandra Bullock’ represented. He sent a reply to say how much he was looking forward to coming even though he was a little apprehensive about the flight. He joked about the last plane that he had been on, saying that the pilot wore goggles and the propeller had to be started by hand.

When Frank’s passport arrived the photograph was terrible. Worse than he remembered on the screen when he’d chosen to accept it. The man in the photograph didn’t even look that much like him. His skin was a greyish-green colour and it hung from his cheeks like the jowls of a drooling dog. He looked as though he was in some form of discomfort. Frank had been trying so hard not to show any emotion in his photo-booth pose that he looked like he had piles – and was he really that old? He held the passport open to show Bill.

‘Do I look like that, Bill?’ he said.

Bill seemed to be considering his answer, looking at the passport and then at Frank, the inanimate object that was always his face seeming to be asking the question:

Why have you got a passport? Where the hell do you think you’re going?

Frank picked up a silver-coloured serving tray and compared his reflection with the picture on the passport.

‘It’s like the passport of Dorian Gray,’ he said, and felt a little too pleased with himself for his pun and made a mental note to repeat the joke for Beth or Laura as he put the passport away in the desk drawer. On the calendar in the kitchen he wrote, ‘passport in desk drawer’.

As January headed towards February and Frank’s holiday, he became more and more paranoid; he was convinced that something would prevent him from going. He took more care walking down the stairs in case he should fall and he avoided eating anything that he might choke on. When he heard the sound of the first aeroplane above his flat in the mornings it had taken on a new meaning. It wasn’t simply a way of telling the time any more, it was also a sign that there were no Icelandic volcanic eruptions or baggage handler strikes today and his holiday was still on. Whenever the phone rang, he was afraid to answer it in case it was Beth with more bad news or the landlord asking for his money back because nobody had viewed the flat for almost a week. But it would just be more silent phonebots, telesales reps and market researchers wanting just a few minutes of his time.

There was one last email from Laura, reminding Frank not to mention the Reunion Project to Beth. She also asked if he could pack any old photos of the family and requested that he ‘bring memories’. She ended the email by telling Frank that she was excited about seeing him and that he was her ‘secret weapon’.

The night before he left for America Frank was unable to sleep. He still didn’t really believe that he was going. If he did manage to fall asleep, he half expected to wake up to find that he’d been having a dream more complex than Judy Garland’s in the
Wizard of Oz
. And he’d still be stuck in boring old monochrome Fullwind-on-Sea, looking up at the bedroom ceiling that needed painting, in his bed surrounded by Beth and Laura, Jimmy, the funny-eyed woman from the charity shop and his landlord, all looking at him with the identical freeze-framed features of his cat.