When Beth had announced that she was moving to Los Angeles ten years ago, she had reassured Frank that it was only twelve hours away. She would be back to see him soon and often. She would telephone at least once a week, write regular letters and, when Frank had set up his computer account at the library, they could exchange emails and eventually they would even be able to talk face to face over the Internet via webcams. Beth had joked that Frank would probably see more of her than he had when she was living just fifty miles away and he would soon be sick of the sight of her. She’d said that it took longer to travel to Scotland or Cornwall than to Los Angeles and Frank had joined in by making his own joke about how it would probably be cheaper too, because he didn’t want his daughter to feel guilty about going to live so far away.
Frank knew that the flight to England might only take twelve hours but there would be a two-hour journey through heavy LA traffic to the airport and another few hours for check-in and security, a couple more hours in customs, passport control and waiting by the baggage carousel at Heathrow, plus three or four hours in a taxi or on delayed, overcrowded and dirty trains and rail-replacement buses from Heathrow to Fullwind to take into account. By the time they arrived they’d be exhausted and jetlagged and it would be almost time to leave again. And Frank knew that the plane ticket wasn’t really cheaper than a train to Scotland or Cornwall. He knew all of this but he didn’t want to hold Beth back. He didn’t want to be her anchor.
For her first six months in America Beth was a tourist. She sent Frank postcards and letters folded around photographs of her, Laura and Jimmy at Disneyland and Universal Studios, window shopping on Rodeo Drive or posing with their hands and feet in the cement prints of the stars outside the Chinese Theatre. She sent Frank a picture of them cycling along the beach at Santa Monica, with the sun glistening on the Pacific behind them, the water the same vivid blue as the sky so that it was difficult to be sure where one ended and the other began. Frank knew that the charity shop, the mini supermarket, the poorly stocked library and the brown tide bringing seaweed, carrier bags, nappies and tin cans onto the hard stones of rainy Fullwind-on-Sea would be almost impossible for Beth ever to think of as a holiday destination again.
Every year she sent Frank a new photograph of Laura, taken on or around her birthday and Frank put them all in a photo album that his wife Sheila had started when Laura was born. Frank had taken over the job when Sheila’s illness meant that she couldn’t remember how to perform the simple task and also because her not knowing who these strange people in the photographs were upset Frank. There were times though, right up until just before Sheila’s death, when Frank would sit with her and they’d look at their photo albums together. Sheila would place her fingers on the unfamiliar faces behind the protective plastic and Frank would detect the tiniest spark of recognition. It was as though her fading memory was stronger in her fingers, in the same way that they were more susceptible to the cold on a winter’s day.
In the album’s first photograph of Laura she was only a day or two old. She was perched awkwardly on Frank’s lap in the hospital with her tiny hand wrapped around his finger, and Frank had watched his granddaughter growing up in the birthday photographs. At first she was desperate to have her picture taken, excited and showing off in her ballerina dress or fairy princess costume or cuddling her latest favourite doll or soft toy. In her early teens she became more camera shy and reluctant to smile and then in her mid-teens she was determined not to smile at all, not wanting anyone to see the braces on her teeth and hiding her face with her fringe, or ‘Laura’s bangs’, as Beth had written on the back of the picture taken on her fifteenth birthday. After her sixteenth birthday, the photographs had stopped. Frank presumed that Laura was now too cool, too self-conscious or too busy with boys to have her photograph taken by her mother any more. Or perhaps there was nowhere left in Santa Monica that still printed photographs. Next year Laura would be twenty-one and Frank wondered whether the birthday photographs would resume again now that she was officially an adult and in charge of her own photographic destiny.
In the ten years that Beth had been away she’d visited England twice. The second time was five years ago when she, Laura and Jimmy had stayed not far from Frank, in a guesthouse that made Fawlty Towers seem welcoming. After a week and a half of drizzle, jigsaw puzzles and only three television channels, they went back to America. Beth said that the next time they would have to stay for longer to make the exhausting journey more worthwhile.
At the end of their stay in Fawlty Towers, Beth had repeated the same promises to Frank that she’d made when she’d first left for America. She said that she would be back soon and she would write and she would phone. Frank asked her to at least make sure that she rang him as soon as they were safely home, no matter what the time of day or night, as he would worry otherwise. He’d presume the plane had crashed or that they’d been mistakenly arrested for drug smuggling. Beth forgot to ring. Just as she had always forgotten to phone when she returned home after visiting Frank when she still lived in England. Frank would watch the phone, waiting for it to ring until eventually he wouldn’t be able to wait any longer and he would call Beth, who would apologize for having not rung, saying she was exhausted from the fifty-mile drive back to Croydon. So Frank knew that it was unlikely that she would ring him after a five and a half thousand-mile journey home to LA and it would be he who would have to ring her.
When Frank had been run over by a milk float on his eighty-first birthday, he’d spent three days in hospital before returning home with a broken toe and his arm set in plaster at an angle like a boomerang. Frank knew that Beth felt awful for not flying back across the Atlantic to look after him so soon after her last visit but he didn’t want to be her anchor again – or, in this case, her boomerang – and as a compromise Beth arranged and paid for a care worker to visit Frank once a week for three months to tidy his flat and do the washing-up and to scratch the itch inside his plaster cast and keep him amused until he was fit and well again. During that time Beth had phoned more frequently, perhaps out of guilt as much as concern, but by the time the plaster cast was off she was phoning less and less often and soon it would be Frank who would have to phone her.
When Beth had first moved to America, Frank had phoned Beth all the time, often getting the time difference wrong and waking everyone up or interrupting their dinner or breakfast or catching them all as they were just going out the door to work or school or a mall. Sometimes Beth’s husband, Jimmy, would answer the phone and even though in person they got on so well, somehow over the phone neither man would really know what to say beyond things like ‘How are you?’ and either ‘Is Beth there?’ or ‘I’ll get Beth.’ If Laura picked up the phone, when they first moved to America she would answer with an excited ‘Helloo, Gaga’ – her name for Frank, from when she had been too young to pronounce ‘Granddad’ – followed by a breathless commentary of all the things that she’d been doing at school and the names of her new friends and so on. After she’d turned thirteen Laura was less verbose, her mind elsewhere, and then in her mid-teens she would simply say hello and then call out, ‘Mom!’ Frank would sometimes mistake her voice for Beth’s, even though Laura was already more American-sounding than her mother and he listened to her growing up on the telephone in the same way that he’d watched her do in her birthday photographs.
Since Halloween, Laura had kept Frank updated on Beth’s progress via email. She would assess her mother’s mood, her sleep patterns, appetite, frame of mind, energy and outlook. She’d told Frank of the success of the lumpectomy and how Beth was coping with the prospect of weeks of radiation therapy. The emails hadn’t stopped Frank worrying but they had helped him worry a little less.
In her emails Laura always referred to her mother’s cancer as ‘Lump’. Even after surgery when the lump had been removed, dissected, pathologized and incinerated as medical waste, Laura continued to refer to her mother’s cancer by the nickname that she’d given it. She sa
id that it was important to give your enemies a name and that somebody famous – ‘Jesus or some other guy’ – had said something clever about it. Later on she’d emailed Frank again to say that she’d got the quote wrong but it was from JFK: ‘Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.’
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.
Frank Derrick's Holiday of a Lifetime Page 2
