‘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.
Frank told him that he wanted to accept his offer. The landlord asked Frank to sign the letter of agreement that he’d given to him with the cheque and to post it in the stamped, addressed envelope that he’d provided. In the letter Frank agreed that he would vacate the flat within three months. The landlord said that he would transfer the money into Frank’s bank account straight away and he told him to tear the cheque up. It was just for show. It was like a huge stunt cheque presented to a charity by a supermarket on a telethon. If Hilary, the head of Fullwind’s Neighbourhood Watch, had been at her window opposite Frank’s flat yesterday, she might have taken a photograph of Frank and the landlord, each of them with a hand on the cheque. She could have given the photograph to the local newspaper to go under the headline ‘Local Man Makes Huge Mistake’.
4
Frank wrote a list:
Book flights.
Get passport form.
Passport photos.
Post form.
Buy suitcase.
Dollars.
He added a separate list of ‘essentials’ to the main list. On this sub-list he included any toiletries, sun creams, holiday clothes, sunglasses, maps and so on that he needed to buy. He put the items on the list in order of importance, and the most urgent items, or those that might take longer to get, like his passport, he underlined in red felt-tip pen. He wrote ‘AMERICA’ in capital letters at the top of the list and folded it in half. When he was on the free bus to the big Sainsbury’s the next day, he realized that he’d left the list behind. He should have written ‘Take list’ on the list.
Invariably, Frank would be the only man on the bus to the big Sainsbury’s. All the other passengers were female and over seventy and they would giggle and whoop with laughter and generally react to any man who got on the bus as though he were Colin Firth in a wet shirt. Today was no different. Frank made his way through the sea of sniggering bus women and sat down at the back where it was empty and he tried to make himself invisible. He stared out of the window and thought about America and how different it must be to Fullwind. He imagined neon signs and skyscrapers, long cars on long streets with no bends or turns for hundreds of miles. He thought about policemen with guns, swivelling their nightsticks, and of kids on street corners shooting basketball hoops and knocking the tops off fire hydrants. He thought about Beth and Laura sitting next to him in a yellow taxi, his daydream only slightly marred by the thought that it might be too cramped for the three of them in the back of the taxi and he would have to sit on the jump seat facing in the wrong direction, which always made him feel car sick. He looked out of the bus window at the passing West Sussex streets and imagined that the free bus was a yellow taxi and he was with his family as they made their way along Mulholland Drive and Melrose Avenue, streets that he wasn’t entirely sure actually existed outside of the many films and television shows that he’d seen them in or in the lyrics of songs that he’d heard on the radio. He wasn’t even sure that the taxis in Los Angeles were yellow or if they had jump seats.
When the bus reached the big Sainsbury’s, Frank waited for all the mad women to get off, which seemed to take forever. He walked to the front of the bus, exchanged a cor-blimey-women-eh? eyebrow raise
and nod with the driver and then got off.
At the cashpoint machines outside the big Sainsbury’s he checked his bank balance. The £5,000 was already in his account and the bank had immediately reduced it to £4,963.67 in overdraft fees. He needed to move fast before the bank took it all. He walked into the supermarket and through to the in-store travel agents at the far end of the vast shopping space. Fifteen minutes later he’d booked his flights – thirteen days in Los Angeles. Not a week or two weeks or the more traditional ten days, but thirteen days in Los Angeles because the flights were slightly cheaper that way – and he was walking triumphantly to the photo booth at the front of the superstore. There was a man inside the booth cleaning the glass.
‘Won’t be a second, mate,’ he said to Frank.
‘There’s no hurry,’ Frank said, although he hoped the man wouldn’t be too long. He was currently the only person waiting to have his picture taken and he didn’t want to have to rush his passport photographs because there was a queue of people behind him tut-tutting and looking at their watches. If he posed for his pictures under any kind of pressure he’d end up with a passport photograph of somebody who looked like they were under some kind of pressure: such as a drug smuggler or a terrorist.
‘Passport?’ the man said.
‘Yes.’
‘Holiday?’
‘America.’
‘Nice,’ the man said.
‘I’m going to see my daughter.’ He wanted to tell somebody, anybody, everybody. ‘And my granddaughter.’
‘Nice. All done,’ the man said. ‘You can see your face in that.’ He picked up his cleaning equipment and held the tiny curtain open for Frank. ‘Don’t forget to say cheese.’
‘Thank you,’ Frank said. ‘The last time I used a photo booth the pictures were sepia.’
He was exaggerating but photo booths had definitely changed in the past fifteen years or so. No wonder some people his age didn’t renew their passports. Getting passport photos used to just involve sitting down, selecting grubby curtain or white wall, inserting your fifty pence and hoping for the best. These days it was like being in the cockpit of the Space Shuttle.
Frank sat on the round stool and looked at his reflection in the glass. He wondered whether he should have tied his long white hair behind his head in a ponytail. He brushed it away from his eyes and tucked it behind his ears. He needed to raise the stool. He stood up and spun the stool and sat back down. He needed to lower the stool. He stood up again and spun the stool in the opposite direction. He was too low now. He decided to hover above the stool slightly. Like he would have done if it was a public toilet. He took his glasses off. Now he couldn’t read the instructions. He put them back on.
There were a number of buttons, onscreen options and various diagrams. Next to the screen there were four pictures of a woman’s face, three of them with a red cross in the corner and the word ‘WRONG’ above them and one picture with a green tick and ‘CORRECT’ above it. Frank thought the woman looked miserable in the picture with the green tick. Cheer up, he thought, you’re going on holiday. He knew that he was going to find it hard not to smile if he thought about why he was having his picture taken. He would have to try and think of something else when he posed for the photographs.
At the bottom of the photo booth’s glass screen it said: ‘Please ensure this glass is clean before taking your photograph.’ As a man had just done that for him Frank put coins into the slot and posed. Trying not to smile but also not frown. Face forward, neutral expression, no smiling, no raised eyebrows, face and ears uncovered, no comedy moustaches. Frank tried to emulate ‘Laura age fourteen’, or ‘Bill whenever’. The machine beeped, counting down – three, two, he wondered whether the man cleaning the machine had been joking about saying cheese, one.
‘Cheese,’ Frank said. The flash surprised him and resulted in a startled Charles Manson photograph. And he’d forgotten to remove his glasses. The machine asked him whether he wanted to accept or decline the picture. He declined. He had three chances.
He posed again. He sensed a change in the light somewhere in his peripheral vision to his left. He turned his head and saw a small child holding back the curtain and peeking inside. Underneath the four pictures of the woman it said, ‘No other people in the photograph. No head covering unless worn for religious beliefs or medical reasons.’ The small child was almost in shot and she was wearing a woollen hat, although it was unclear whether her reason for wearing it was religious or medical.
The child stared at Frank. This happened a lot. Usually on buses or in shopping queues. It made Frank uncomfortable and he always felt under pressure to entertain. The urge was often intensified when the staring children would point at him and say, ‘Look, it’s Father Christmas’, or Gandalf or Dumbledore. More than once an entranced child had embarrassed its parent by asking, ‘Why has the man got lady’s hair?’ Frank envied them their licence to say whatever they wanted to say.
‘Hello,’ Frank said. ‘Are you looking for the Wizard of Oz?’ The child stared. Frank smiled. ‘I’m getting some photographs done for my passport. I’m going to visit my daughter and my granddaughter.’
A woman’s voice called out, ‘Samantha, come on.’
The girl let go of the curtain leaving Frank alone.
When Beth was a child, Frank would often go into Woolworth’s with her to have their photos taken. Just for fun. They would smile and frown, have their hair in their eyes, cover their ears, stick their tongues out or pull their jumpers up over their heads. He imagined that people didn’t do that any more. Because of the Internet and mobile phones. He didn’t want to be one of those old people who believed that sort of thing. But he knew that it was probably true.
He rejected his first photo, almost shocked at how non-photogenic he was, and posed for another. His second photograph was better – not perfect by a long way, he still looked like an old man sitting on a telescopic stool in a supermarket – but he didn’t want to risk taking a third and final photograph in case he ended up back as startled serial killer in a suicide vest again.
He selected ‘accept’ on the screen in front of him and the machine offered him the option of postcard versions of his face or a sheet of stickers, which he contemplated for a moment; he thought it would be good to cover Fullwind in Frank Derrick stickers, but he declined and selected ‘passport photographs’. Seconds later his digital prints were waiting for him. He didn’t have to stand by the booth while his pictures developed, struggling to get them out from behind the small metal bars before all the people queuing up to collect their own pictures saw his photographs and laughed at them. He didn’t have to waft the soaking wet strip of photos all the way home until they were dry. His five identical photographs were printed and bone dry almost before he could open the tiny curtain.
Frank took the bus back to Fullwind. He went into the library and logged on to his email account to send his flight details to Beth. Now it was real. He was going to America. There were seventeen emails in his inbox. Fifteen of them were spam and the other two were from Laura. The subject title of the first one was ‘Lump’.
Hey, Frank,
Mom says you’re coming over.
I can’t wait to see you.
Mom’s mood today 8/10.
I think that’s because you’re coming.
I’m looking at tourist attractions now.
Peace out.
L
The subject title of the second email was ‘Reunion Project’. Frank opened it and read the three short enigmatic sentences.
I don’t think Mom’s sadder moods are all Lump’s fault.
I’ve had an idea.
More soon.
L x
On the way out of the library Frank asked the librarian whether they had any books on Los Angeles.
‘I’m going to America to see my daughter and granddaughter,’ he said. ‘That was my granddaughter just now.’ The librarian looked around. There was nobody else in the library other
than herself and Frank. ‘On the computer,’ Frank said. ‘She sends me emails.’
The librarian looked on her computer for LA books. Five minutes later, Frank left the library with a book on San Francisco and crossed the road to the post office where he asked for a passport renewal form.
‘Holiday?’ the woman behind the counter said with her back to Frank as she looked for the form.
‘I’m going to California,’ Frank said.
‘Lucky you,’ the woman said.
‘To visit my family.’
The woman in the post office would tell the postman, who would tell the paperboys, who would pass it on to the roofers and the window cleaners, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, charity collectors and political canvassers, who would tell the librarian, who already knew, and the librarian would tell the gardeners, who would send the news along the grapevine to the trick-or-treaters and the knock-down-gingerers. Eventually Frank’s backwards doorbell would ring and he’d answer the door to somebody telling him how Frank Derrick was going to America to see his daughter and granddaughter and he’d say, ‘Yes, I know. Isn’t it wonderful?’
5
CHRISTMAS
There were no aeroplanes on Christmas morning. The skies were deserted. No birds sang a dawn chorus outside his window and there were no traffic sounds from Sea Lane below. No postmen or milkmen whistled. There were no paperboys. No hopeful roofers. Everyone was taking the day off. Even Bill, who was on top of Frank’s trousers, which were draped over a chair next to the wardrobe at the end of the bed, was having his Christmas lie-in.
For Frank, Christmas Day was very much a busman’s holiday. If it wasn’t for the thicker television guide and the tree in his living room he could have mistaken it for just another ordinary day.
He climbed out of bed. His first step was like the first step of an astronaut back on earth after a three-month space mission in zero gravity, and he felt dizzy and fell sideways, only stopping himself from falling over completely by putting an outstretched hand on the wardrobe. The permanently ajar door temporarily closed and in the kitchen the door of the oven opened. It was the flat’s butterfly effect. He pulled open the curtains, the left one snagged and another plastic curtain hook fell from the rail and onto the floor.
Frank Derrick's Holiday of a Lifetime Page 3
