The Extra Ordinary Life of Frank Derrick, Age 81

by J. B. Morrison

  ‘People tend to keep things in the same place in their kitchens,’ she said.

  While Kelly was in the kitchen, Frank sat back in his armchair and continued to make excuses for the mess.

  ‘I was in a traffic accident,’ he called out. Without his false teeth in, his speech was slurred. She probably thought he sounded as drunk as he looked.

  ‘I know,’ Kelly called out from the kitchen. ‘Do you have milk and sugar?’

  Frank wondered if she was making a comical reference to his accident.

  ‘Just milk, thank you.’

  While the kettle boiled Kelly came into the living room and picked up all the dirty plates and cups.

  ‘I haven’t had the chance to tidy up,’ Frank said.

  ‘That’s all right,’ Kelly said. She took the dirty dishes out to the kitchen. Frank wanted to get his teeth from the bathroom and flush the toilet but he was still feeling lightheaded and thought he might fall over again. She came back in and picked up the DVD cases from the carpet and put them on the table.

  ‘I’ll leave these for you to put away,’ she said. ‘In case you have a system.’

  He had a system.

  Frank’s alphabetised DVD collection was the only properly organised part of his life. It had taken him quite a while to do. Mainly because he’d spent so much of the time doing impressions of the actors in the films as he rearranged them – from cockney Michael Caine in Alfie to posh Michael Caine in Zulu.

  Kelly brought Frank a cup of tea and put it on the table next to his armchair. She sat down on the sofa and took a wad of A4 notes out of her bag.

  ‘Let’s have a look at your care plan.’

  While she read through her notes she asked Frank how he’d been feeling since he’d come home from the hospital, if he felt he was managing and if there was anything in particular he needed help with that hadn’t already been arranged with his daughter.

  Frank said he couldn’t think of anything.

  ‘I’ll have a bit of a tidy and make your bed and you see if you can think of anything else in the meantime,’ Kelly said.

  While she was out of the room, Frank sat and looked at his reflection on the blank TV screen. He looked like Howard Hughes. It had taken ten years and millions of dollars for Howard Hughes to end up looking like that, Frank thought. And he had managed it without trying, in less than a week for no money whatsoever.

  He could hear Kelly in his bedroom, singing quietly to herself. He heard her shutting the wardrobe door and drawing the curtains and then what sounded like her fluffing the pillows, and although it was obviously unlikely because there were two walls between them, Frank thought he felt a waft of air as she flapped the quilt into place on his bed. She sneezed three times, there was a ten-second pause when Frank imagined she was trying to stifle a fourth sneeze and then she sneezed again. On her way back to the living room she flushed the toilet.

  ‘I think the pollen count is high today,’ Kelly said when she came back into the living room.

  After she’d checked again that Frank was definitely all right and safe to be left alone, she started to collect her things together to leave.

  ‘I can go to the shops for you on the way here next time, if there’s anything you need,’ she said, while Frank signed a time sheet to prove that she’d been there. His broken-armed signature looking like an unconvincing forgery, the ink lines wavering up and down the page like the polygraph of somebody telling an enormous lie. She put the time sheet back in her bag.

  ‘I’ll see you at the same time next week, Mr Derrick.’

  ‘Yes, thank you. It will be you again, will it?’

  ‘Yes,’ Kelly said. ‘Me, I’m afraid. Every week for the next –’ she took a diary out of her bag and flipped a few pages over – ‘twelve weeks.’

  She told him to ring the care company if he had any questions or if there was something in particular he’d like her to do on her next visit. She put her diary and the rest of her paperwork back in her bag, said goodbye and left.

  Frank was surprised how sorry he was to see her go. The flat felt emptier than it had before she’d arrived. Was it always this quiet? He switched the TV on to fill the silence and to get rid of his reflection.

  While he watched a mother and daughter on television in matching fleece tops lose money selling their family heirlooms at an auction, Frank wished he’d had his teeth in so that he could have talked more freely while Kelly was there. He wanted to tell her that he was usually a lot funnier than this. He wanted to apologise about the mess again. And he wanted to say that if she was going to be coming here every week from now on, she was going to have to start calling him Frank because he hated it when people called him Mr Derrick. It made him feel like he should be working with Basil Brush.

  3

  It was pitch-black when Frank woke up on Tuesday. He had no real idea how long he’d been asleep or what time it was. His watch was over on the bedside table, which seemed like a hundred miles away. He decided to wait until he heard the first aircraft taking off from Gatwick and flying over his flat. That would be around 5 a.m., which felt like an acceptable time to get out of bed. He didn’t want to give himself any extra empty daytime hours to fill. It was hard enough as it was.

  By the time the day reached about 6.30 p.m., other than waiting for his dinner to digest, there was very little reason for Frank to stay up. He’d started going to bed so early that it was often still light outside. He had to buy thicker curtains from the charity shop to stop the sunlight keeping him awake.

  Frank lay in bed waiting for the aeroplanes and thought about the extraordinarily dull dream he’d woken up from. In the dream he was in the queue at a supermarket checkout. There were no aliens or supermodels in the dream. The shopping in his basket didn’t talk to him or chase him down the road. It was hardly a dream at all.

  The only real clue to it being a dream was that he was young in it. His shopping basket didn’t feel so heavy that he had to put it on the supermarket floor and gradually nudge it along with his foot every time the queue moved nearer the tills. He wasn’t wearing slippers. In the basket there were four cans of lager. No tinned spaghetti or soft and easy to digest meals-for-one. There was perhaps one other clue that it was a dream: it was the sense that there was somebody waiting for him at home to help put the shopping away. Frank placed the basket on the counter and the cashier looked at the cans of lager, then looked back at Frank and said, ‘Party?’

  And then Frank woke up. The dream had ended.

  But he still felt young.

  There was nobody to help unpack his shopping.

  But he still felt young.

  Frank had discovered the secret of eternal life.

  He just had to stay in bed.

  Providing he didn’t get out of bed to creak and crick and groan and limp and fart and cough and wheeze and splutter and wobble his way to the bathroom he could stay young. As long as he didn’t see his face in the bathroom mirror or his teeth in a glass by the sink he could stay young.

  Providing he didn’t get out of bed, or simply move too quickly, or go to the bathroom, or breathe in too deeply, or bite into a hard toffee or listen to music radio or watch television after 7 p.m. on a Saturday. He could stay in bed and be young forever.

  He counted six planes pass overhead and wondered where they might be going to or coming from. He wondered if he’d ever fly in an aeroplane again. And where would he go? He didn’t have a valid passport any more. Weren’t they free for people of his age? He made a mental note to find out. He already had his free TV licence and bus pass. Even though there was nothing on television and nowhere to take the bus to. The older he got the more free access he had to things that he was too old to take full advantage of. A seventh aeroplane flew over. He closed his eyes and tried to get back to his dream. He was almost asleep again when the doorbell rang.

  It would be a slow and difficult walk down the stairs to answer the door. And so, seeing as he wasn’t (ever) expecting anybod
y, he decided not to bother answering it. He closed his eyes. The doorbell rang again. He sighed and decided that he might as well at least get out of bed. He started to move and noticed a numb feeling in his legs. Like a cat had slept on them. Was this it? Is this how the end begins? Numbness in the legs? Spreading up the body. Paralysis and then death? Then he remembered that he did have a cat and it was sleeping on his legs. He shook the cat onto the floor and stood for a moment with his good hand resting against the wall, until he got his balance. When had feeling dizzy all the time started? Before or after the milk float accident?

  He followed the cat into the kitchen, creaking and cricking and groaning and limping and farting and coughing and wheezing and spluttering and wobbling behind him.

  In the kitchen he took a tin of cat food out from the cupboard under the sink and struggled to get it open. Even with the electric opener it wasn’t easy to open the can with one arm in plaster. He looked down at the cat.

  ‘I’m not very good at being retired, am I, Bill?’ Bill hadn’t seemed such a stupid name for a cat when Ben was still alive. ‘I should be playing golf or gardening.’ The tin of cat food slipped from the magnet of the opener and it dropped on the floor. Frank bent down to pick it up, groaning on the way down and again on the way back up. ‘I could be on a round-the-world cruise now, or brewing my own beer. I should have at least put my name on the waiting list for an allotment. Although, from what I hear, if I joined one now I doubt I’d make it to the top of the list in time to grow anything. Eh, Bill?’

  Bill looked up at Frank, pulling the only face he had available. Bill’s expression was exactly the same when he was waiting to be fed as it was when he was filling his litter tray. It was like a paper mask, cut out from a magazine and attached by two rubber bands hooked over his ears. It was the same unfathomable blankness when Frank let him out into the garden in the morning as when he came back in again in the evening. Bill’s face gave nothing away of what he’d been up to all day. There were no clues as to whether he’d been chasing mice or birds or what territory he’d marked or which other cats he might be dating. Frank had seen both versions of Doctor Dolittle a number of times, he knew the words to some of the songs, he could probably even speak rhinoceros or chat to a chimp in Chimpanzee, but he still had no idea what it was that Bill was trying to say. Which, on this occasion, was:

  To be honest, Frank, I couldn’t really give a shit about the quality of your retirement. Just make my fucking breakfast.

  Frank opened the cat food and scooped the foul-smelling meat onto a saucer. He took a cup out of the cupboard, put a teabag in it, poured in the milk, flicked the kettle switch on and made his way slowly downstairs to get the newspaper. The stairs had always creaked but now he wasn’t sure how much of the creaking was the stairs and how much was him.

  There were two silhouetted shapes on the other side of the frosted glass of the front door. Not fully awake yet he opened the door to two young men wearing suits and smiling broadly. The same two men who had rung his doorbell ten minutes earlier and had either come back or not yet left.

  ‘Good morning,’ the young man on the left said. ‘Could we ask you one very quick question?’

  Without waiting for an answer, the one on the right said, ‘How do you feel about all the death in the world?’

  Frank was ill prepared. He hadn’t made notes. He wasn’t dressed. He hadn’t even had a piss yet. What time was it? At least seven aeroplanes.

  He stood on the doorstep not listening, nodding every once in a while and alternating his short responses between ‘Yes’, ‘Of course’ and ‘I see’, and looking anxiously up the stairs behind him as though he might be burning his breakfast or be in the middle of something important he needed to get back to. He wished he had his watch on so that he could look at it because the two men on his doorstep really weren’t getting the message.

  They showed him their little fan club magazine. On the cover there was a drawing of a tiger in a garden or a forest with trees and flowers that didn’t exist in the real world. The tiger was playing with some children. Everyone in the picture looked so fantastically happy. The two young men carried on talking and Frank nodded and looked anxiously back up the stairs some more. He really needed to get back to his important meeting.

  Frank wondered if he had enough strength in his body to make a fist and punch both men until they went away. Would that prevent him from spending his afterlife in paradise? Would it stop him from playing with all the smiling tigers and the happy children in the garden? He didn’t even know whether that was part of what they believed in. Would they turn the other cheek if he punched them? Was that one of theirs? He’d been given a ton of their little magazines over the years but had never actually read one. He made a mental note to look them up on the Internet next time he was in the library. Yes, Frank knew how to use the Internet. He could send emails, too, and he knew how to use a mobile phone. He could send you a text message with a smiley face at the end of it if he wanted to. Not that there was anybody for him to send a text message with a smiley face to, and there wasn’t really anyone other than his daughter to email. His inbox on the library’s computer was just another way in for the stair and bath lift people.

  While the two men continued to talk he wondered, if he could make a fist, would he actually use it to punch anybody ever again? It wasn’t that he particularly wanted to punch anyone – not even present company excepted – it was just that he wondered whether punching someone was one of the things he would never do again. Like running or going on a bouncy castle, or chewing gum or eating corn on the cob. He needed to make a bucket list. He’d seen a film about it.

  Eventually, the men stopped talking and Frank took their fanzine and closed the door. He was almost halfway up the stairs when he heard, ‘Vehicle reversing, vehicle reversing.’ He hadn’t put the bins out. He could still see the two men through the frosted glass. He didn’t want to open the door and give them a second go. Why did they always move so slowly? He waited until they eventually turned and dawdled down the path. But by the time they were finally gone, the dustmen were gone too and he would now have four weeks’ worth of uncollected rubbish at the end of the garden. The editor of the village newsletter would be writing him another letter to follow on from the one he’d sent last year suggesting that the village might have fared better in the Villages in Bloom competition if certain people, mentioning no names (Frank), had slightly greener fingers and slightly fewer old fridges in their front garden.

  There was only ever the one fridge.

  It was gone now.

  4

  For Kelly’s second visit it was like the Queen was coming.

  Frank had increased the square footage of the flat just by removing the dust from around the charity shop ornaments and nontiques on the mantelpiece and the sideboard in the living room. He’d put all the DVDs back in the right boxes and into alphabetical order without stopping to impersonate Michael Caine, and in the bathroom he cleaned the bath and sink and straightened the towels. He moved the pile of old newspapers and magazines from the floor next to the toilet into the cupboard in the hall and put one of those blue things in the toilet bowl. In the kitchen he wiped the outside of the fridge and polished the sink so that it was shiny enough for Kelly to be able to check the geometry of her fringe when she was filling the kettle. He polished the kettle. Frank vacuumed every room in the flat, even the kitchen and bathroom lino and then, before putting it away, Frank hoovered the Hoover.

  After cleaning the flat Frank began work on himself. He shaved for the first time since before the accident, starting with his old battery shaver until the battery ran out, catching the tip of his chin between the blunt foils, which was when he switched to the only other razor he had – a bright pink disposable women’s razor he’d bought in a packet of four from the charity shop to remove the bobbles from his jumpers.

  Frank combed the knots from his long, silky white hair that often made it hard for people to determine his age. Ha
ir that people had described as being Kenny Rogers hair.

  Richard Harris hair.

  Gandalf hair.

  Emmylou Harris hair.

  Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair.

  Apart from its white colour, Frank’s hair was the kind of soft, long hair you might expect to see on the head of a much younger man – or, more accurately, a girl.

  Sometimes he wore it tied up in a ponytail.

  Once, Frank was in the charity shop and some school-children were sniggering about something. Frank looked over and they turned away quickly. He went back to browsing the second-hand books and the school kids started laughing again. Frank saw their reflection in an old mirror. They were pointing at him and then at a shelf of toys and, in particular, at a pink My Little Pony with a rainbow on its arse and a long silver white mane.

  At least he wasn’t bald. Science would suggest that he should be. According to research a person with a balding father was two and a half times more likely to experience hair loss themselves. And Frank’s father had been very bald.

  Kojak bald.

  Yul Brynner bald.

  Sinéad O’Connor bald.

  Frank had once shown his friend Smelly John a photograph of himself standing next to his father and Smelly John had said, ‘Were you and your dad related?’ He followed up with a hundred old jokes about whether the milkman used to make a lot of home visits while Frank’s father was out at work. And how hairy was the milkman? And did Frank have a photograph of himself standing next to the milkman? Frank wasn’t looking forward to telling Smelly John the circumstances of his accident when he was fit enough to go and visit him.

  On Monday morning, Frank sat at the window waiting for Kelly. He’d combed his hair again. He’d dipped the comb in Brylcreem and parted his hair on the side. He looked like he was waiting to be picked up for church.

  At 11.15, when Kelly climbed out of her car, Frank limped across the living room and sat in his armchair and tried to look casual. He took a deep breath and felt a sharp pain in his ribs. He gripped the arm of his chair and clenched his jaw, sucking in air between his teeth like a roofer pricing up a job. His dentures moved. He’d run out of fixative powder and he needed to go to the chemist. He could have asked Kelly to get some for him but his vanity had prevented him from doing so. Maybe he would ask her today. He heard the front door open.