‘Hello,’ Frank said. He started to get up and the woman quickened her pace slightly as she walked towards the boy. Frank settled back into the chair.
‘I’m Beth’s father,’ he said, and then, thinking that the woman was closer to Laura’s age, ‘Laura’s grandfather.’
The woman put a protective arm around the boy’s shoulders.
‘Hi,’ she said.
‘I’m on holiday. Vacation.’
And now what? Frank thought. Jimmy Stewart impression? ‘Right,’ he said. He looked at the sun and mimed wiping the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. He looked at an imaginary wristwatch. ‘I should go in now. Beth will be wondering where I am. It was very nice to meet you.’
The woman said goodbye and wished Frank a pleasant stay in America. After a struggle Frank managed to get up from the chair. When he was confident that he wouldn’t keel over, he went inside. Beth was standing by the phone writing something down.
‘I just met some of your neighbours,’ he said.
‘Oh, which ones?’
‘A small boy. Mexican, I think. And his mother.’
‘She’s nice. What did they say?’
‘Nothing in particular. I think they wondered who on earth I was and what on earth I was on about.’
‘We’ve all been there, Dad.’
Later, when Laura would have been on her way back to Silver Lake from Pasadena after dropping off Jimmy’s car, Frank went and got the two photo albums out of his suitcase. It was only after Frank had checked the case onto the flight at Heathrow that it had occurred to him that he could have just brought the photographs and left the albums behind. It would have made the suitcase a little lighter to carry. He brought the photo albums over to Beth where she was crouched down by the open front door, tying string to Bill’s collar. The cat turned his head awkwardly away to look back at Frank with his neutral Switzerland of a face:
This again? What am I now? A dog? A ferret?
Beth and Frank didn’t hide Bill from the neighbours this time as he reluctantly stepped out of the house. They left the security light on and they sat squashed close together under its halogen glow and waspish buzz on the doorstep watching Bill unenthusiastically plod across the grass.
Frank passed Beth the first photo album.
‘I remember these albums,’ she said. She wiped the fine layer of dust from the red tartan cover with her palm and turned to the first page and the picture of Laura taken in the hospital on only the second day of her life, with her tiny hand looking like it had been modelled from pink Plasticine, holding on to Frank’s finger like old clay. Beth let out an almost broody ‘aah’ and continued to make appreciative noises with every new photograph as she watched her daughter growing up a year and a page at a time in this slo-mo flip book, from baby to princess and ballet dancer and then to her shy and moody teens. When the pictures ended on her sixteenth birthday with Laura glaring at the camera and refusing to say cheese, Beth said, ‘Why do they stop?’ She turned the blank pages, expecting to find more pictures.
‘You stopped sending them to me,’ Frank said. ‘I thought that Laura didn’t like having her picture taken any more.’
Beth thought about it for a second.
‘That’s true,’ she said. ‘I’m sure I could fill these pages for you though.’
Beth passed the photo album back to Frank, exchanging it for the second one. She wiped the dust from the cover. The pictures in the second album were arranged in no particular order. They were taken at different times, in colour and black and white and there were also a few Polaroids. There were a number of photographs taken before Beth was born. One of Frank and Sheila standing outside the church on their wedding day with other members of the family, whose names Frank couldn’t remember when Beth asked, and one of Frank and Sheila in a hotel bar on their last holiday together in Portugal.
‘Everything in this picture is brown,’ Beth said. ‘The clothes, the furniture, the curtains, you and Mum. Oh, I loved that doll,’ she said, forgetting about all the brown in the picture because of another photograph of herself at the top of a slide holding onto a doll that was almost as big as she was.
‘It’s probably still in the loft,’ Frank said.
‘Really?’
‘I’m one of those hoarders from the television programmes,’ Frank said.
‘Bill!’ Beth said. ‘Twins.’
The two kittens in the picture were identical, although Ben was already more animated in the photograph than Bill would ever be in real life. Beth angled the photo album up at Bill sitting under the tree. ‘You look so young,’ she said to the cat, who stared back über blankly.
Way to go, guys. You’ve kept me locked up for a week, I’m only allowed outside tied to a rope. I’ve been subjected to the most insipid rom coms ever made and a really tedious pop music nostalgia fest and now you’re showing me pictures of my dead brother. What’s next? Water boarding?
On the next page of the photo album there was a picture of Frank, Sheila and Beth sitting together on a brown leather sofa.
‘Where’s that?’ Beth said.
‘It’s your place in Croydon.’
‘Is it?’ Beth held the album closer to her and up to the porch light and tried to bring the blurred photo into focus or see the rest of the room from a different angle like on a ludicrous crime show. ‘That is an ugly pair of curtains,’ she said.
‘How about the sofa?’ Frank said. ‘I slept on it after your mum passed away. I stayed with you a few times, do you remember? Because my flat felt so empty and I couldn’t seem to sleep at all. I’d never noticed all the noises it made. I thought it was in mourning too.’ He apologized to Beth for being so frivolous about such a sad time. ‘It is surprising how noisy a place is when you’re on your own though.’ He looked at the photograph again. ‘Your sofa wasn’t the best place to solve my sleep problems. It was too short for me and the leather made me sweat buckets.’
‘Stop criticizing my furniture,’ Beth said.
‘You just called your curtains ugly.’
‘Curtains aren’t furniture.’
‘I apologize. To you and your sofa.’ He remembered how Laura would come downstairs really early in the morning when he slept there and she’d try to wake him up so that he could watch television with her. Beth would have told her to not wake Granddad up and Laura would have to find subtle and clever ways to accidentally wake him. She’d turn the television on really loud or pretend she had a cough.
‘She sat on the carpet next to me and ate a bowl of cereal right by my ear,’ Frank said. ‘Until her crunching or the snap, crackle and pop had accidentally woken me up.’
Frank had watched a lot of early morning cartoons with Laura around that time and the first half of the same two or three films over and over again.
Talking about Project Wake Up Gaga made Frank want to tell Beth about Laura’s latest scheme. How could she be anything other than moved or pleased? Surely she would be proud of what her daughter was trying to achieve?’
When Beth looked at the picture of Sheila in her swimming costume, taken in the garden in Fullwind she said, ‘Was she ill then?’
‘I think she was,’ Frank said. ‘But we didn’t know yet. Do you remember how she always used to get everyone’s names wrong? She knew so many people called what’s his name and thingamabob. And her stories where every noun in the story was “thing” had been going on for years. The thing on top of the thing was stuck under the thing and so I had to use the thing. I somehow knew exactly what she was talking about, though. We had a private language. She was the only one who spoke it and only I could understand it. I just thought it was more of that. Until the senior moments that she joked about became more frequent. She must have known she wasn’t well before any of the rest of us did.’
‘She still looks great,’ Beth said. She touched her mother’s face on the photograph. ‘I hope it’s genetic.’ She looked at Frank and he knew that she was afraid he might think that
she was talking about the Alzheimer’s rather than looking good in a swimming costume.
‘I know,’ Frank said to show that he understood.
The last photograph in the album was Frank on the short brown leather sofa under the dreadful curtains. Jimmy was sitting on the sofa next to him. They were both asleep and wearing paper Christmas hats. Frank now knew why Laura had asked him to pack photographs, ‘bring memories,’ she’d said. He’d certainly done that. And not just of ice cream soda and the Radio Times. When Beth looked at the pictures of her mother and father together Laura may have been hoping that Beth would have been reminded of her own happier times with Jimmy. But looking at Jimmy in this last photograph, the two men on the sofa asleep in their Christmas hats with their arms folded and their mouths wide open, Frank realized what Laura had meant when she’d called him her secret weapon. Beth watching Jimmy’s favourite films or listening to his music and eating his food was one thing but if there was really any truth in the theory that women married men who reminded them of their fathers, then maybe Beth’s father would remind her of her husband. Photographs of Jimmy would be powerful enough but Frank was the real thing. He was Jimmy in 3D. The second time that Frank heard Beth sniff he realized that she was crying.
20
Home Alone: 82-year-old Frank Derrick is accidentally left behind when his family goes on vacation. After jumping on beds, eating ice cream and watching gangster movies, Frank has to protect his house from a pair of dumb burglars by setting a series of traps with hilarious consequences. Will Frank save the house and the day? Will he get his family back?
Frank waved goodbye to Beth and Laura and watched them drive off together in Beth’s car, missing them already, as people used to say here. He wished he could tie a ball of string to them both and pull them back to the house. He hoped that Beth was all right. He’d hated to see her so unhappy. A few tears were an understandable reaction to seeing the old photographs but then she’d started to really cry; she was sobbing and shaking and Frank had never felt so useless. There was hardly even enough room on the doorstep for him to put a comforting arm around her.
Frank had seen Beth cry as a child but only once as an adult. It was after Sheila’s funeral. Beth had been so calm and organized up until then, helping Frank arrange everything, paying for death certificates and breaking the bad news to distant family members and friends when he couldn’t bear to tell another person. Beth had kept her composure before and during the service, and even when the coffin disappeared behind the crematorium curtains, she simply bowed her head. It was only afterwards in the crematorium car park when the other mourners had set off for the wake that Beth had finally broken down. She’d wept uncontrollably, shivering and making almost inhuman sounds that terrified Frank whose immediate instinct had been to look around for Sheila. Luckily, Jimmy had been there. And he said all the right things. Frank was on his own last night. Bill was there but he didn’t help. The two of them watched helplessly while Beth let it all out, rocking back and forth on the doorstep with her hands holding on to her knees. Between sobs she took deep gasps of breath that sounded so desperate and vital that Frank wondered if he should call an ambulance and, after what seemed like an eternity but was probably less than a minute, the sobbing stopped and she was crying at a less alarming level and then she began to settle. She was silent but for a few last, deep, deliberate breaths. She apologized and then almost laughed as she said, ‘I’m an unhappy number living on an unlucky street.’
This morning, Frank had been desperate to speak to Laura alone so that he could inform the project leader that the latest phase of her plan had spectacularly backfired and perhaps all the subconscious reminiscing might actually be making Beth unhappier than she already was. He wanted to ask Laura about the photograph of him and Jimmy on the sofa in Christmas cracker hats too. He’d been puzzled by the picture. It wasn’t just because of its devastating effect on Beth but because he had no recollection of it ever being in the photo album.
Beth had been quite chirpy this morning, rushing about the house, getting ready for work and making sandwiches for Frank. She’d asked him a number of times if he was sure that he’d be all right on his own all day and she told him to make sure he ate the sandwiches and to drink lots of water. She left a tube of sunscreen on the living-room desk in case Frank wanted to sit outside and she reminded him to sit in the shade under the tree if he did and to put the door on the latch or take the keys outside with him. He asked her if he could wash some of his clothes as he had run out of clean shirts and Beth quickly showed him how to use the washing machine. She put a box of washing powder on top of the machine and said that she would ring him when she was on her lunch break to check that he hadn’t locked himself out or flooded the house.
‘If I’ve locked myself out, I won’t be able to answer the phone,’ Frank said.
‘Change of plan,’ Beth said. ‘Don’t lock yourself out.’
She called out to Laura who was in the bathroom to hurry up, as though she was driving her to school rather than work, and then they were both in the car and Frank hadn’t had the chance to speak to Laura alone.
Without them there the house suddenly seemed so quiet, as though they’d taken all the world’s sounds away with them. He put on one of Laura’s mix-tape CDs and sat at the table and looked at books that Laura had strategically placed around the house. Books that Beth and Jimmy had shared, Beth reading a chapter and then passing the book to Jimmy or vice versa, one of them always slightly ahead of the other in the story, like Fullwind was in relation to Los Angeles.
Frank hadn’t managed to read a book for a number of years. He seemed to have lost the concentration required and now he only browsed. It was the same with newspapers and magazines. He would read the headlines and look at the pictures and draw his own conclusions.
He wasn’t enjoying the music that he’d put on. It wasn’t music that he would describe as ‘good’. He turned the volume down and went into Laura’s bedroom to get his holiday shirts. He took them into the small utility area at the back of the kitchen. He couldn’t remember the last time that he’d used a washing machine and, like photo booths, they’d changed. He looked at the control panel on the front of the machine. There were three main knobs and various buttons and a display that was flashing a row of eights on and off like his DVD player at home. He had entirely forgotten the simple instructions that Beth had given him. When anyone tried to teach Frank something new or give him directions he would be listening but the information wouldn’t be sticking around for long.
He looked at the numbers and symbols on the washing machine control panel and compared them to those on the label on one of the shirts. Nothing matched. None of the words on either of the shirts’ labels were in English and what instructions there were on the front of the washing machine appeared to be in symbol form and hieroglyphics, apart from a few words that made little sense and appeared to be in the same dropped Scrabble board of American English as Beth’s job descriptions.
He looked around the kitchen for a manual. In the cutlery drawer he moved a spoon into the fork compartment to give Jimmy something to do if he came round. He eventually found the washing machine instructions and, after ten minutes, he thought that he’d worked out how to do a simple quick wash. ‘Don’t mix ColorSync,’ the instructions said. He looked at his shirts and he wondered how that was physically possible and he put them in the machine. He thought about putting some of Beth’s and Laura’s clothes in too, but he didn’t want to risk shrinking them or any of the colours of his shirts running. In spite of how little a goth or an emo Laura claimed to be, Frank doubted that she would be overjoyed if he dyed all of her black clothes yellow. He closed the washing-machine door and tipped some powder into the drawer.
He pushed the on switch, the machine clicked and whirred a few times, lights flashed, and it filled up with water. There was a moment of silence as though it wasn’t going to work and then the drum started to turn. Frank walked into the living room
feeling pleased with himself.
‘Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks?’ he said to Bill and then immediately apologized for having used the ‘D word’.
Before the first rinse Frank was bored again. He turned the music back up. He was listening to more Reunion Project music and looking at more books than Beth. He’d been watching the films and TV shows and was even wearing Jimmy’s aftershave; at this rate, Frank was in danger of falling in love with Jimmy himself.
He went and looked at the washing machine, staring at the dial to see if he noticed any movement as it went through its various cycles. With just his two shirts being thrown around inside the machine the shirt buttons slapped against the metal drum. He should have washed more clothes. Wasn’t there a drought in California? He felt guilty for contributing to it.
Frank missed having the company that he’d just started to get used to. Even Bill was asleep. He wondered how far it would be if he walked to the grocery store to ask Old Man Packing Bags if he wanted to go for a drink. He could quiz him on what it was like to be an old man in America. Did he have a pension and what happened if he got sick? Did he live in a retirement community with palm trees and crazy golf? How welcoming were they to old people from other countries? ‘Old Man Packing Bags’ could have been Frank’s Native American name, too, a few weeks ago when he was folding his clothes into his suitcase, and in a few days’ time it could be his name once again as he packed to go home. It made Frank want to hide his suitcase. He wondered whether it would fit through one of the ceiling-tile spaces. He went into the bedroom and started unpacking the case. He hadn’t wanted to trespass on any more of Laura’s personal space by using her wardrobe and chest of drawers and had left most of his clothes in the suitcase. He found the emptiest of the drawers and put in two pairs of socks and he hung a cardigan in the wardrobe. In amongst all the cool black clothes, the cardigan’s beige cable knit and brown leather-look buttons were like a parent waiting to pick up their children at a school disco but unpacking a few things made Frank feel less like his holiday was over. He thought about deliberately leaving the cardigan or the socks when he went home. Sheila always used to say that when Beth had left her jacket or her purse behind after visiting them it meant that she was coming back.
Frank Derrick's Holiday of a Lifetime Page 17
