Frank Derrick's Holiday of a Lifetime

by J. B. Morrison

  Everything was so American.

  12

  Frank must have looked at his family’s Los Angeles home a dozen times or more since Christmas on the computers in the library. He’d viewed the house from a satellite high above the earth and looked at it from 360 different panoramic degrees, walking virtually along the street, zooming in close enough to read the slogan on a jogger’s shirt and the number on the roof of a passing police car. The jogger and the cop car were always there every time he looked. When Laura drove Jimmy’s car onto Euclid Street, Frank felt like he knew it as well as the one on which he lived. The jogger and the cop car weren’t there and he hadn’t noticed before quite how many of the buildings were bungalows and in the online version of the street, Beth wasn’t standing outside the open front door of hers waiting for him. She was wearing a baggy grey sweatshirt and matching trousers. She was barefoot.

  Laura pulled the car up in front of the house and Beth came round to the passenger side of the car. She helped Frank out and she hugged him. At first he held back from fully reciprocating the hug, fearing that she might have been so thin from the cancer or the radiation that she would have fallen apart in his arms. When the plane had landed, he’d been concerned that he might not recognize Beth when he first saw her in the airport – what he was really most afraid of was that it would have been the illness that had changed her and made her unrecognizable. But, thankfully, she barely looked any different to when he’d last seen her, and she didn’t disintegrate in his arms.

  ‘How was the flight?’ Beth asked, still holding on to him.

  ‘It wasn’t too bad.’ Frank couldn’t help checking Beth’s head for signs of hair loss.

  Laura said hi to her mother and walked around to the back of the car.

  ‘I’ll get your bags, Frank,’ she said.

  ‘Thank you, Laura,’ Frank said, and then to Beth, ‘I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to her calling me Frank.’

  ‘I know,’ Beth said, finally releasing him from the hug but still with a hand on his arm. ‘I was Beth for a while. I’m Mom again now. Are you hungry? You must be exhausted.’ He looked at her face properly for the first time. She didn’t look particularly pale or drained.

  Laura walked by with Frank’s overnight bag over her shoulder and carrying his suitcase in two hands.

  ‘Don’t forget,’ she said to Frank. She gestured with a nod of her head towards the car.

  ‘What’s that?’ Beth said.

  ‘Just a minute,’ Frank said. He bent down and found the lever that tipped the car seat forward. He leaned inside and lifted the cat box out.

  ‘Dad?’ Beth said. ‘Tell me it isn’t Bill.’

  There was a meow from inside the cat box as though Bill was answering Beth. It was a short meow. He’d never been a particularly verbose cat but, like his expressionless face, his meows could sometimes speak volumes:

  Yes, it’s me. Who did you expect? Why does everyone keep asking if it’s me? Who did you all think it would be? And by the way, if Frank isn’t hungry, I certainly am. I’m starving. And exhausted? Why not ask me if I’m exhausted? I’ve spent most of the day in a plastic box. I’ve been shut in the dark with everybody’s suitcases and a hell of a lot of noisy dogs. So yes, let’s all go inside, shall we, so I can get out of this sodding box.

  Beth hadn’t been quite as thrilled by Bill’s surprise appearance as Frank had hoped she would be.

  ‘What were you thinking, Dad?’ she said. ‘Keeping pets is against the terms of our lease agreement. We could lose our home.’

  Frank apologized. He said that he’d thought that it would be an unexpected surprise for her. She said that she’d had enough unexpected surprises; what she needed was some dull predictability. He said that he really hadn’t known what else to do with Bill.

  ‘Catteries,’ Beth had said. ‘Cat hotels. A cat sitter? You could have paid somebody to come to your flat and feed him every day for however much it must have cost to fly him here. How much did it even cost?’

  Frank knocked £200 off the price of Bill’s plane ticket and rounded it down another twenty pounds, hoping a more moderate price tag would help his argument.

  ‘I wish you’d think things through,’ Beth said.

  ‘I know,’ Frank said. ‘You’re right. I never do.’ Which wasn’t true. For two months he’d thought about Bill running around Beth’s garden, chasing a ball of wool and bothering all the American mice – Mickey, Minnie, Jerry. What he hadn’t thought through was that there might be no fence around the garden or that Bill wouldn’t be allowed in the garden because of the terms of Beth’s lease agreement. Beth took a deep breath, she held it for five seconds and when she exhaled, the anger seemed to leave her body. It looked like a method that someone had been paid an hourly fee to teach her.

  ‘Well, obviously there isn’t anything we can do now,’ she said. ‘Bill is here. We’ll just have to keep him indoors and hope he doesn’t pee on everything.’

  They agreed to start the holiday over again. Beth made Frank go outside, she shut the door and then opened it and welcomed him into her home as though he’d just that minute arrived. She hugged him and even though the cat box was already in the house she pretended to be surprised to see it.

  ‘And you brought Bill with you!’ she said.

  She led Frank to the sofa and they both sat down.

  ‘Shall I make coffee?’ Laura said, slightly weary at the lame display from two generations of old folks. ‘Or tea? Mom’s bought English Blend.’

  ‘Could I have a cup of coffee please?’ Frank said. Beth looked surprised by his request, perhaps because she didn’t remember him ever liking coffee, and she was right, but Frank didn’t want to be seen as an unadventurous Englishman abroad with a suitcase full of PG Tips, pork pies and Union Jack clothing. Laura made the coffee and Frank pretended to like it. Bill was less tactful, impolitely staring at the saucer of soy milk when Laura put it on the kitchen floor in front of him:

  Soy milk! Not even soya. What the hell is soy milk?

  Laura found a plastic paint roller tray and filled it with torn-up strips of newspaper and, like Frank, Bill must have been avoiding going to the toilet on the plane too, because he immediately filled the makeshift litter tray. And then he drank the soy milk.

  Beth showed Frank where the bathroom was and Laura’s bedroom, where he’d be sleeping. He was surprised how small the house was. There were two bedrooms, a bathroom, a living room and a tiny kitchen. The front door of the house opened directly into the living room. With the door open you could watch the TV from across the street. There was a small tree on the grass to the side of the house. The house was detached and from the outside it looked like a children’s painting: a front door with a window on each side and a tree. It reminded Frank of the prefab that he’d lived in with his parents after the war.

  They all sat together in the living room. They watched TV and then Frank told them about his flight, about the food and the films and Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man and the woman with the make-up and hair at the cargo building and how a Milky Way was a Mars bar. He asked what the time was in England and Beth said that it was about four in the morning and when she saw that Frank was struggling to keep his eyes open, she suggested he should go to bed. Laura took Frank’s suitcase and overnight bag into her bedroom for him. Frank said that he would have been fine in the living room sleeping on the sofa or the floor. But it had already been decided. Laura was going to sleep on the air bed in the living room. She often stayed up late watching TV anyway. Frank had said all right but only if Laura was really sure; he said that he would be happy to sleep in a tent in the garden and Beth called out from the living room, ‘Let’s deal with one lease agreement violation at a time, Dad.’

  Frank said goodnight to Laura and closed the bedroom door, then took a few things out of his overnight bag and his pyjamas out of the suitcase. He put them on and went to bed. Even though he was incredibly tired he couldn’t get to sleep. It was almost time for the
first aircraft of the day and time to get up back at home. He listened to the sound of Laura pumping up the air bed in the living room until she was breathing heavily in sync with the foot pump. Soon Frank couldn’t distinguish between the two sounds as they eventually soothed him into a deep sleep.

  Euclid

  Frank woke up the next morning with no idea what the time was or even if it was the morning. He was incredibly hungry. His stomach rumbled. His four clocks were over on the dressing table on the far side of the bedroom, like the New York, London, Paris and Berlin clocks on the wall of a city bank or advertising firm. He was in Laura’s bedroom. Bette Davis was looking at him from the opposite wall above the row of clocks. It was a framed poster advertising bourbon whiskey. Bette was smiling with a cigarette on the go.

  He listened for aeroplanes. Nothing. He heard a car drive slowly by outside. There was a radio playing somewhere in the house and a female voice quietly singing along with it. He couldn’t tell if it was Beth or Laura.

  He’d had a dream that he was in a taxi, returning home from the airport. It had been snowing and then it had rained and Fullwind was covered in an uneven layer of dirty grey slush. As the taxi drove through the village, Frank noticed changes. Apart from everywhere looking like the inside of a broken snow globe, the charity shop was now called Poun-daMental! and the nativity scene had been the victim of a barn burning. His flat was gone. In its place was a huge Tesco superstore.

  He reached across to the bedside table for his glasses but there was no bedside table there. He needed to go to the toilet and he really had to eat something soon or he thought he might throw up. He lay on his back to take the weight off his empty stomach and looked up at the square tiles of the false ceiling above. He pictured a bank robber moving one of the tiles to one side to hide a bag of money or drugs in the roof space, like in a film.

  Frank drifted back in and out of sleep for a while and then he got out of bed. His legs ached and they felt stiff. He sat on the edge of the bed and pulled the bottoms of his pyjama trousers up and looked for swelling and redness. No blood clots. Just his usual pale chicken legs. He stood up, slowly, not wanting to lose his balance and fall over in an unfamiliar room. He walked over to the dressing table. It was 8.15 a.m. in New York, London and Berlin. In Paris it was already five in the afternoon.

  He lifted a few slats of the venetian blind and the sun shone in his eyes, a ray of warm Schadenfreude as he imagined what the weather might be like at home.

  He opened the bedroom door slowly. Even though he was in his daughter’s home he felt like a trespasser or an unwelcome guest. There was nobody in the living room. The blow-up bed had been deflated and folded into a shape that would never fit back inside the drawstring bag that it had come from. There was a folded quilt and a pillow on the deflated bed and on the top of it all Bill was fast asleep and purring. He could hear the sound of Beth or Laura in the kitchen, duetting with Jon Bon Jovi. There were no other sounds of life in the house. The sun shone through the living-room window. Frank didn’t ever want to go home.

  He walked to the doorway of the kitchen.

  ‘Good morning,’ Beth said, almost singing the words and incorporating them into the song playing on the radio. ‘Tea? Unless you’d prefer coffee?’

  ‘Could I have coffee please.’ If Beth offered him breakfast he would ask for eggs over easy and a stack of pancakes. ‘I’ve just remembered,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a present for you. It’s in my case.’

  ‘As long as it’s not another cat,’ Beth said with a smile. Then, more serious, ‘It’s not another cat, is it?’

  ‘Just a minute,’ Frank said and he went into Laura’s bedroom. He came back to the kitchen with the two boxes of Matchmakers. He gave them to Beth. She was almost overcome.

  ‘Thank you, Dad,’ she said. ‘I’m so glad you’re here.’

  She hugged him again, not releasing him from the hug for a long time and Frank made no effort to escape. He tried to recall if she had always been so tactile. It annoyed him that it made him feel even the slightest bit uncomfortable.

  ‘And there’s something for you on the table in the living room,’ Beth said. ‘From Laura.’

  Frank went into the living room and sat down at the small table.

  ‘There’s an unscheduled grocery trip because of Bill,’ Beth called out.

  He picked up the pile of stapled-together sheets of A4 paper from the table and looked at the front page. The first page was a title page with ‘Frankie Comes to Hollywood’ across the centre.

  Beth came in with the coffee and she sat down at the table next to Frank. He flicked through the pages of the itinerary that Laura had made. There was a page for each day and each page had a film-related title and a paragraph or more of related facts or trivia. Frank read the beginning of today’s page out loud.

  ‘The Sting: Drive to Santa Monica Pier and the beach – Visit Paul Newman’s grifter home and discover what it’s like to be in Tom Hanks’s shoes. Movies filmed at these locations include: The Sting, Forrest Gump, Hancock, Bean, Elmer Gantry, Rocky III, Iron Man, Hannah Montana: The Movie. Dinner at the Cheesecake Factory.’

  ‘That’s all going to be with me, I’m afraid,’ Beth said. ‘The official tour guide will be looking after you tomorrow.’ Frank looked at her. He was alarmed that Beth might have actually hired a professional tour guide. ‘Laura,’ she said to reassure him. ‘They’ve been great at work,’ she said, ‘but there’s one less paycheck coming in now so I don’t want to push my luck. I feel terrible, Dad, I’m really sorry, but Laura still has some vacation time left. She’s going to show you the sights for a couple of days while I’m at work and also while I’m at my follow-up.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Frank said.

  ‘Follow-up care,’ Beth said. ‘I have to go to see the doctor and check that everything is okay and so on.’

  ‘Everything is okay,’ Frank said, ‘isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh yes. Although the side effects have been worse now the radiation is over. I was warned that might happen but it still caught me out. Tiredness, mainly, but that won’t last. I hope. Anyway, forget about all that, I’m yours in the evenings and from the weekend onwards. We can do the less exciting stuff together, although I’m sure Laura has something planned for us.’ She gestured at the itinerary.

  ‘I really don’t want to be a burden,’ Frank said. ‘You should carry on as normal and just pretend I’m not here. I’ll be all right on my own. I doubt that Laura wants to spend her holiday time with a daft old man.’

  ‘That’s why she’s taking the time off, Dad,’ Beth said. ‘To spend it with a daft old man and you are not a burden. Except when you say you’re a burden. That’s the only time that you’re a burden.’

  After breakfast they drove to a nearby grocery store. Beth’s car was larger than Jimmy’s black sports car but it was still small and Frank’s expectations for enormous American houses with acres of land and cars as long as trains had not yet materialized.

  At the grocery store Beth bought cat food, a litter box and a carton of whole milk for Bill. The litter box had a filtered lid and a cat flap at the front end. At the store’s checkout there was a man around Frank’s age who packed their groceries into bags. Frank was both glad that he no longer had to work and at the same time envious of the man for still having a job. When Frank had retired it hadn’t been entirely voluntarily. He hadn’t been ready and he still felt fit and well enough to do his job. It simply happened because it was officially time. He was sixty-five years old and he was withdrawn from circulation like an old pound note. Frank and the man packing the groceries exchanged nods, acknowledging each like passing Volkswagen Beetle drivers. Beth gave the man a tip and they left.

  When they got back to the house, Frank had to keep lookout while Beth snuck the cat-litter box in like a boyfriend at a college dorm. They fed Bill and Beth covered the sofa with a bed sheet and closed all the doors to confine the cat to the kitchen and the living room, in case he decided to mar
k his new territory. Ten minutes later Bill had christened his new toilet and was asleep in the living room on the pile of bedding.

  After a small lunch they went back out. They drove along Santa Monica Boulevard, counting down the streets as they crossed them – 12th Street, 11th Street, 10th and 9th Streets. Frank asked why Euclid Street wasn’t called 13th Street.

  ‘It must be superstition,’ Beth said. ‘I don’t know why the name Euclid though.’

  They drove across Lincoln Boulevard, between 9th and 7th Streets. There was no 8th Street.

  ‘Is eight an unlucky number as well?’ Frank said.

  Beth looked in her rear-view mirror. ‘Perhaps they lost a street. Or miscounted.’

  Frank thought that he could see the ocean at the end of the road up ahead. He lifted his clip-on sunglasses to see if it was the same shade of blue that he knew from Beth’s photographs. If anything it was bluer.

  ‘Euclid Street is still the thirteenth street,’ he said. He flipped the clip-on shades back down. ‘It isn’t on the signs but it is still the thirteenth street. People make the same mistake with buildings when they don’t have a thirteenth floor because it’s unlucky. They think they’re getting off on the fourteenth floor but they’re still actually getting off on the thirteenth.’

  ‘Maybe that explains the year I’ve had,’ Beth said.

  They passed 2nd Street and turned onto Ocean Avenue, every new road now sounding to Frank like the title of a song.

  ‘There’s no First Street either,’ Beth said, noticing it for the first time in the ten years that she’d lived there.

  She parked in a large car park and they walked onto Santa Monica pier. The pier was as familiar to Frank from cinema and television shows as Euclid Street was from the maps on the library computers. They went into the Looff Hippodrome building where there was a carousel. Steam organ music played on the merry-go-round’s calliope and Frank couldn’t help tapping his hand on his leg in time with the music.