Frank Derrick's Holiday of a Lifetime

by J. B. Morrison

  It took over an hour to drive to Griffith Park. They hardly spoke in the car because Frank was so tired. By the time they arrived at the observatory he was more awake. Laura parked the car and they walked back down the hill a short way so that Frank could have his picture taken with the Hollywood sign in the background. Laura stood back to fit Frank and the sign in the photograph. Frank was distracted by something and Laura called out, ‘Gaga! Say cheese!’ A nearby couple looked over, perhaps thinking that Lady Gaga might be at the Observatory. When they saw that Laura was talking to an old man, because of his long white hair and his eclectic clothing style, they weren’t entirely sure that he wasn’t Lady Gaga and so they took his picture just in case.

  Inside the observatory building, Laura bought tickets for the planetarium show and while they waited for the start time they walked around some of the observatory exhibits. They looked at the Camera Obscura’s 360-degree view of Los Angeles, trying unsuccessfully to find Euclid Street and the jogger or the passing police car that Frank had seen on the computers in Fullwind library. They watched the caged Tesla Coil spark and crackle and the gently swaying brass ball of the Foucault Pendulum – which Frank was convinced was the name of a Vincent Price film. When they were standing by an eight-foot glass model of the Milky Way he said to Laura, ‘It’s called the Mars bar in England.’

  Just before the planetarium show was due to begin Frank sat on a bench next to a bronze statue of Albert Einstein and Laura took their photograph. Frank said it would go with the Forrest Gump bench picture that Beth had taken on the pier and he asked if Laura knew of any other celebrity benches in Los Angeles? She said that there was a bench in downtown LA that featured in the film (500) Days of Summer but the grassy knoll where the bench was had been fenced off and closed due to state cutbacks. It was the first time that Frank had heard anyone use the phrase ‘grassy knoll’ when it wasn’t in relation to the assassination of President Kennedy.

  In the planetarium Frank sat back in the seat that, according to Laura, could have been the very same seat that James Dean had sat in in Rebel Without a Cause and he looked up at the screen on the ceiling of the inside of the dome. He thought that he might fall asleep. But once the show began he was completely captivated. It wasn’t just the lasers and the sunsets, the big bangs and shooting stars. The man giving the lecture, who reminded Frank of Troy McClure from The Simpsons, told the story so well. It was entertaining, funny and educational – even though, much like the minibus tour or the safety demonstration on the flight over, Frank would forget everything he’d learned as soon as Troy had stopped talking.

  After the show they went to the observatory cafe. In the queue for the cash register a woman heard Frank say the word ‘tomato’ to Laura and she asked him if he was Australian. He said he was from England and another woman in the queue sighed, presumably thinking that Frank was Hugh Grant, which is what Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man had told Frank would almost certainly happen to him when he was in America.

  They sat at a table and ate lunch and Laura gave Frank a chocolate bar.

  ‘What’s that?’ he said.

  ‘Try it.’

  He unwrapped the chocolate and took a small bite.

  ‘This is a Milky Way,’ he said. He overplayed his surprise, his face frozen and open mouthed. ‘It’s a Milky Way disguised as –’ he peeled the wrapper back to read it – ‘a . . . Three Musketeers?’

  He asked whether Beth had passed on everything that he’d taught her about how to best and most enjoyably eat chocolate bars. Laura shook her head.

  ‘For instance, with a Milky Way,’ he looked at the wrapper again, ‘or a Three Musketeers, you first bite the chocolate from the end. And then the same with the sides.’ He bit the chocolate from the ends and then the sides of the bar. ‘Then, carefully, try and get the top layer of chocolate off in one piece.’ He removed the top layer of chocolate. ‘You then roll the nougat into a ball.’ He rolled the nougat between his fingers like Plasticine and then he put it into his mouth.

  ‘That’s gross,’ Laura said.

  ‘I’ve made myself feel a bit sick now,’ Frank said.

  When his stomach had settled he told Laura the correct methods for eating other chocolate bars, including a Twix, a Kit Kat, an Aero, a Crunchie and a Bounty. He realized that with the exception of a Cadbury’s Creme Egg and a Walnut Whip, all his methods were the same and involved carefully removing the chocolate to expose the filling inside. His area of expertise suddenly seemed quite negligible.

  When Laura went to the restroom (Frank was already picking up the language) he watched her walk away and then he turned to look out of the window of the cafe at the hills and the sky the colour of Laura’s T-shirt and at the Californian sunshine and the Hollywood sign, and he thought about his place in the universe, trying to remember what Troy McClure had told him that was, and not for the first time since he’d arrived in America he wondered how he was ever going to get on the plane back home.

  When she came back, Laura tipped three chocolate bars onto the table: a Butterfinger bar, a Hershey and something in a bright orange packet with the word ‘Reese’s’ in yellow lettering across the centre. Frank still felt a bit sick and didn’t want to eat any more chocolate but he opened the wrapper of the Hershey.

  ‘Hmm. There isn’t much I can teach you with this,’ he said. ‘You could melt it in front of a fire or freeze it and smash it with a hammer, I suppose. Let me get back to this one later on.’ He put the Hershey bar to one side on the table and tore open the Reese’s wrapper. He took out one of the two peanut butter cups and examined it, turning it around in the palm of his hand as though he were pricing up a diamond. ‘I think what we have here is a cupcake,’ he said. And he stuffed it into his mouth whole.

  The peanut butter was incredibly salty. He moved his mouth from side to side. He took his glasses off. He looked a bit unwell.

  ‘You don’t have a peanut allergy, do you?’ Laura said.

  Frank held his open palm up and shook his head. ‘Just a minute,’ he said. He swallowed the last of the gooey peanut butter and he sat back in his seat.

  ‘Silly old sod,’ he said.

  They went to the gift shop where Frank bought a sweatshirt with planets on the front for himself, an Albert Einstein doll for Beth and a cat collar with stars and stripes on it for Bill. He said that Laura could have anything in the shop that she wanted. She chose a pencil. It was the cheapest thing on sale.

  Before they went back to the car Frank posed for a picture by the James Dean statue and then they drove back towards Hollywood. Laura asked Frank if he was too tired to go to the cinema but he knew that she’d already bought the tickets and even though he was sure that if he’d closed his eyes for a second he would have fallen fast asleep, he insisted that he was wide awake and that he was really looking forward to seeing Rear Window in a cinema for the first time.

  The film was introduced by an enthusiastic young man who told the equally enthusiastic audience about the making of the film and its more recent restoration; then, after a long round of applause, with whooping and loud cheering, the audience fell silent and the film began.

  James Stewart’s name appeared on the screen and everyone cheered and applauded again. Laura nudged Frank.

  ‘Do your impression,’ she whispered.

  The audience cheered once more for Alfred Hitchcock’s on-screen director’s credit and then there was absolute silence as they watched the film.

  After twenty-five minutes, Hitchcock made his cameo appearance winding up a clock in the apartment opposite James Stewart’s and the audience in the cinema cheered and applauded. At the end of the film they clapped again. Some people stood. Everyone stayed until the credits for the film and also for its restoration had both finished and the house lights were switched on.

  On the drive back to Santa Monica Frank told Laura how much he’d loved seeing the film in a cinema. He’d watched it so many times on television. It was one of his favourite films – which sh
e already knew as it was the reason why she had bought the tickets. He told her that when he was stuck in his flat after being run over by the milk float he would sit at his living-room window and pretend to be Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window. He was still too shy to demonstrate it when Laura asked him to.

  He thought about the cinema that he’d always planned on building in his garden back at home. He decided that if he went back to Fullwind – if he went back – he would definitely start building the cinema. He wanted his garden cinema experience to be like the one he’d just been a part of.

  If someone had stood up and made a rabble-rousing speech before a film in England and if the audience cheered every time an actor’s name appeared on screen Frank would have found the enthusiasm phoney and annoying; people would have complained to the cinema management, but it was different here. The man introducing Rear Window, Troy McClure in the planetarium, the minibus tour guide, even the voice on the sat nav. Frank loved everyone’s sense of show business.

  He’d only been here for a few days but he liked America a lot and he liked the people. He wished that he’d come over sooner. He was really enjoying himself. He hadn’t seen enough of Beth yet but that would change tomorrow and it had been great to spend time with Laura. She didn’t seem embarrassed to be seen with him, even when he was showing off with chocolate.

  Frank looked out of the car window at his new favourite city. He liked how the freeway they were on was as wide as any of the roads in Fullwind were long and the way that every new road sign reminded him of the cinema or television or somebody famous: Long Beach and Sacramento, Cloverfield, Century City, Palm Beach and Sunset Boulevard, Rosa Parks, Kennedy, Franklin and Roosevelt, and his favourite: Christopher Columbus Transcontinental Highway.

  He liked the way everywhere they went seemed to have been a movie location at some point. He liked the impressive-looking tall office blocks and the apartment buildings of Downtown LA that they’d driven past even though he couldn’t help being reminded of the Croydon skyline that Beth and Laura had travelled so far to get away from.

  As he watched it all pass by he started to feel a bit carsick. He was nauseous from the chocolate and the peanut butter and from the popcorn and the bucket of soda in the cinema that had both at last lived up to his expectation American-size wise. But he was also giddy from everything that had happened in the past few days. Like a child he was tired but he didn’t want to ever go to bed in case he missed something. His brain was sparking and fizzing like a Tesla coil. He stared at the road ahead until the nausea passed. When they were back on Euclid Street, Laura parked the car and Frank thanked her for such a great day. She switched the engine off and turned to face him.

  ‘Listen, Frank. Jimmy might be here.’

  ‘What?’

  Laura took a deep puff from her inhaler. Frank didn’t even know that she had asthma. She shook it and took another puff.

  ‘He wanted to bring me something for my birthday. I told him to just get me some wine and flowers and bring them round. I neglected to tell him that I would be out and Mom would be in. I thought if she saw him on the doorstep with flowers and a bottle of expensive wine, she’d think they were for her and invite him in. It would be a start. They’d have to say something to each other. Even if they argued or if Mom threw the flowers in his face or hit him over the head with the bottle, at least it would be a start. If he’s here, you should talk to him.’

  ‘Me?’ Frank said. ‘What?’ The car had stopped moving but his motion sickness had returned. ‘I don’t think I should interfere.’

  ‘You definitely should.’

  Laura opened the car door and climbed out before Frank could protest further. She’d spoken in such a hurry and left him no space for excuses. He considered locking all the doors and staying in the car until it was time to fly back home. He liked Jimmy and he wanted him and Beth to be together again and he wanted Laura’s project to be successful but this wasn’t in any of the brochures or on the itinerary. Right now he felt like he’d been ambushed in the middle of his holiday and Jimmy’s sudden appearance felt like an outbreak of legionnaires’ disease in the hotel pool.

  Frank slowly followed Laura to the house. She was already inside before he stepped onto the grass. He wondered if he should tell her that she’d forgotten to lock the car doors. Maybe it would be best if he stayed here and guarded the unlocked car. When he went into the house, the living room was empty apart from Bill. He’d made no attempt to escape while the front door was open. In just a few days of being confined to the indoors Bill had become institutionalized. Frank could hear voices coming from Beth’s room. She was talking to Laura. He hoped that he hadn’t heard crying.

  On the living-room table there was a bunch of flowers wrapped in cellophane. Frank had no idea what type of flowers they were. Next to the flowers there was a bottle of wine. On the label it said, ‘Laura’s Red’. He wondered if Jimmy had had the wine specially labelled and bottled or if it was just a happy coincidence. He picked up the open card from the table next to the wine.

  Happy birthday, Laura. This is Laura’s Red.

  What a fortuitous find.

  It’s a 2010 union of Cabernet Sauvignon,

  Merlot, Malbec and Shiraz.

  It’s got black pepper, herb and dark fruit flavors.

  Jimmy appeared to be selling the wine to Laura rather than giving it to her as a birthday present. He’d signed the card: ‘All my love, Dad’. Frank didn’t understand the significance of the flavours or of the wine’s year but he thought that Laura would like it because it was in a black bottle.

  He put the card back on the table and sat on the sofa waiting for something to happen. He suddenly remembered how tired he was. He couldn’t sit far enough back into the sofa to properly relax. His body was both heavy and weightless at the same time. Beth came out of her bedroom. She’d tied her hair back and removed her make-up and any evidence that she might have been crying. If Frank hadn’t understood before what Laura had meant by undercurrents of Audrey Hepburn, he knew now.

  ‘I should make dinner,’ Beth said.

  ‘I’m not actually all that hungry,’ Frank said, trying to help by not making her cook when she was upset. ‘I ate half a pound of peanut butter at the observatory.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ Beth said. She sounded as exhausted as he was. She sat on the sofa next to him and put her head on his shoulder. Frank listened to the sound of her breathing. He thought she might already be asleep.

  ‘How was it today?’ he said. ‘At the hospital.’

  ‘Everything is fine,’ Beth said. ‘I’m fine. Lump is gone. Do you mind if we don’t talk about it tonight?’ Frank didn’t know if she meant the follow-up care, Jimmy, or both, but either way, it suited him as much as it did Beth. ‘I’m knackered,’ she said. She tried so hard to find her old voice that instead she sounded like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins.

  The house was very quiet. Frank wondered what Laura was doing. He listened to Beth breathing next to him. He tried to detect an audible change in her breathing as a result of the radiation. Shorter or deeper breaths or a rasp or a wheeze. He didn’t know what to look for. He wanted to stroke her hair.

  ‘A woman at the observatory asked me if I was Australian,’ he said.

  ‘That stops after you’ve been here for a couple of years.’

  Laura came out of Beth’s bedroom. She picked up the flowers and took them into the kitchen and brought them back in a vase and put the vase on the table. She read the card and looked at the wine and then at Frank and her mother, who had now definitely fallen asleep on his shoulder. Laura must have been crushed by this failure of her project but then she smiled at Frank and shrugged as if to say, ‘Oh well.’

  Later on they ate pasta and salad from plates on their laps and watched While You Were Sleeping with Sandra Bullock. Frank was distracted from the story by constantly looking from the TV to Beth and trying to compare the actress’s mood with his daughter’s and hoping to see a likeness. After
the film they were all yawning and it was agreed that the day had nothing left to offer other than sleep and so they prepared for bed. Beth went to the bathroom to brush her teeth and Frank put his in a glass while Laura unfolded the air bed and prepared a place on the floor for Bill. When they were all in their separate rooms they called out goodnight to each other like the Waltons. Frank closed his eyes, the sound of Laura inflating the air bed like bronchial whale song eventually soothing him into a deep sleep again.

  17

  In the morning Laura couldn’t get the doors of Jimmy’s car to open.

  ‘You’re going to have to ring him,’ she said but Beth said that she didn’t want to.

  ‘I’m going to be late.’

  Frank watched from the doorstep as Laura tried to persuade Beth to phone Jimmy so that he could contact the car company and get them to unlock the car via their computer. He was thinking how much simpler things were when cars had keys, one for the door and another for the ignition, but he kept the thought to himself because he didn’t want to be that old person who said those old-person things. Laura would have joked about starting handles and a man walking in front of the car waving a red flag, then all his hard work namedropping David Bowie and the Sex Pistols would be for nothing. He watched Laura trying to open each of the car’s doors unsuccessfully and he couldn’t help thinking that he was witnessing another phase of the Reunion Project and that Laura had deliberately disabled the car’s computer somehow. Like a nun in a modern day remake of The Sound of Music.

  Still refusing to ring Jimmy, Beth offered to drive Laura to work in her car instead. She told Frank that she wouldn’t be long and he watched from the doorstep as Beth and Laura drove away along Euclid Street, which was actually 13th Street, and thought that, considering Jimmy’s obsession about things being in order, it must have made living on it something of a nightmare for Jimmy. When the car was out of sight Frank listened to the sound of the engine fading until the street was almost silent. A dog barked in the distance and he heard either a woodpecker or somebody hammering a picture onto a wall and the constant hum of traffic on a highway somewhere. Or it may have been an air conditioning unit in the house next door. Frank went back inside.