‘Hello?’ Kelly called out from the bottom of the stairs. ‘Mr Derrick?’
She came upstairs and into the living room.
‘Good morning,’ she said. ‘How are we feeling today?’
‘I can’t speak for you but I feel like I’ve been run over by a milk float.’ It wasn’t a rehearsed line but he had planned on saying something witty. He was pleased that Kelly had set the gag up for him.
‘You seem a lot livelier today,’ she said. She took her anorak off and hung it over the back of the chair by the window. The nosy neighbours on the other side of the road would already have started talking about how they’d just seen ‘that young woman at the window of Frank Derrick’s flat again’. ‘She’s taken her coat off.’ ‘And it isn’t his daughter. I think she’s got her own key.’ Hilary, the head of the Neighbourhood Watch who lived directly opposite, would have made a note in her ‘incidents’ book.
Kelly put a small paper bag on the table next to Frank’s armchair.
‘Your painkillers,’ she said. ‘How does the foot feel?’
‘It still hurts quite a bit.’
‘Hmm.’
She took a cushion from the sofa and put it on the carpet in front of Frank’s armchair and told him to rest his foot on it.
‘How are the headaches?’ she said. ‘Is the high-pitched ringing still there?’
‘It’s more of a beeping now. It sounds like a lorry reversing inside my head. This vehicle is reversing. This vehicle is reversing. I keep getting the urge to put the bins out.’ This was a line Frank had rehearsed. He’d tried it out on Bill a few times earlier in the morning, in a voice that was supposed to be Groucho Marx or Woody Allen but sounded more like Kermit the Frog. The reaction on Kelly’s face was a more satisfactory one than Bill’s deadpan stare.
‘I’ll go and get something for that toe,’ she said. ‘Have you got an ice pack? Shall I put the kettle on?’
She didn’t wait for him to answer either question and went out through the hall and into the kitchen and filled the kettle.
‘Some of the food in your fridge is a long way past its sell-by date,’ she called out from the kitchen, possibly with her head actually inside the fridge.
‘Those dates are more of a guide,’ Frank called back.
The kettle started to boil. Kelly raised the volume of her voice. ‘These sausages are so old they’ll be back in date again in a couple of months. Can I throw them away?’
‘I suppose so. They are only of sentimental value. They aren’t worth anything without their original packet.’
Kelly came into the living room with a bag of frozen peas wrapped in a tea towel. She crouched down in front of Frank and put the towel-wrapped pea parcel on his toe.
‘How does that feel?’ she said. ‘Not too cold?’
‘No, it’s fine. Thank you.’
She went back to the kitchen. ‘Have you been spring cleaning?’ she said. The kettle was making a lot of noise now and she raised her voice with it.
Frank looked around the living room. His dust and cobweb collection was definitely ruined. He was going to need a new hobby.
‘Not particularly,’ he said.
‘It’s very tidy,’ Kelly called out. ‘You’ve left me hardly anything to do.’ She was now practically shouting to be heard above the sound of the kettle. ‘I can see my face in the sink.’ It was like she was talking from inside a wind tunnel. ‘And the kettle. Are you after my job?’
Of course he wasn’t. He was years past retirement age, he had one arm in plaster and he’d look ridiculous in her shiny blue uniform.
Kelly brought a cup of tea in and put it on the table next to Frank. She took half a packet of custard cream biscuits out of her bag and put them next to the tea and then she went off in search of any housework that Frank might have left her. She wiped the draining board in the kitchen and remade Frank’s bed, sneezing a few times as she flapped the quilt into place. She ran water from the rubber shower attachment around the already spotless bath and turned the soap round in the soap dish so what remained of the logo was the right way up. Kelly came back into the living room and rearranged the cushions on the sofa, picked up the crumbs from the custard cream Frank had just eaten, and washed up his empty cup.
Before she left she put the frozen peas back in the freezer and hung the tea towel on a hook on the kitchen door. She made Frank another cup of tea while they shouted at each other between rooms, then she gathered her things together and Frank signed her time sheet while she put her anorak on in front of the window – as though just for the neighbours’ benefit. Frank gave her the signed time sheet. His signature still looked like a lie detector printout but he was getting used to his cast and it was now the polygraph of somebody telling just a small fib. Kelly put the time sheet in her bag, said goodbye and left.
When the front door closed Frank went over to the window. He sat back from the glass so that she couldn’t see him if she looked up. He watched her climb into the car and remove the On Call sign. She started the engine and Frank heard the sound of pop music and then the bump and grind of the car’s gears as he watched her drive away, almost taking another bollard with her.
The flat seemed empty and quiet again. But somehow not as empty as before. It was as though she had left something behind this time. Not just the custard creams and the paper bag with Frank’s pills in it. Something else.
5
Frank had fifteen telephone cold-calls in the next three days. He thought it might be a record. He dealt with them in different ways. Politely saying no thank you, hanging up without saying anything, pretending he didn’t speak ze Eengleesh, and, on the fifteenth call, saying, ‘You’ll have to talk to my wife’, and then putting the phone on the sofa next to his sleeping cat, who purred into it for five minutes while Frank went to the toilet.
On Friday, Frank busted out of Alcatraz.
It took forever to get ready. Trying to thread his boomer-arm into the sleeve of his jacket was a reverse Houdini act that deserved a bigger audience than just one vague-faced cat. Frank cricked his neck putting his arm into the sleeve of the jacket. Then he got his fingers stuck in a hole in the lining. When the jacket was finally on, he got the zip stuck halfway up. And then he had to go and sit down in the living room until he got his breath back. Somebody should have been filming it all in black and white accompanied by a man on a piano. Next week he would swing from a broken clock hanging on the front of a tall building and let a wooden house fall on top of him while accompanied by a live pianist.
He realised that he would probably have to wear the jacket and the plaster cast underneath for the rest of his life now. It was an ugly blue jacket with a broken zip, torn lining and a missing detachable hood, and he’d never liked it. At least the blue canvas matched his navy deck shoes. You never knew when Tatler magazine might take your photograph.
Frank hadn’t worn anything on his feet other than his red slippers since the accident. He started with the right foot first, which was difficult because of his dodgy arm but at least the right shoe fitted comfortably over his foot. The left one was more complicated, as though it was from a different-sized pair. He untied the shoelace and opened the shoe out as wide as possible and even then it was still a tight and painful squeeze. The laces were so stretched out that they were too short to tie. Frank stood up.
‘We shall go to the ball,’ he said to Bill, who had at no point raised a paw to help. He hooked his bag for life over his boomer-arm. Bag for life. It was hardly a bold guarantee for the charity shop to have printed on its canvas shopping bags, considering the average age of its customers. Frank took a look at himself in the hall mirror and after deciding, yes, he looked awful, he picked up the walking stick the hospital had given him, bribed the guards, let Bill out and limped off down the path. He stepped around the bollard that somebody had tipped over on the grass outside his flat, promising himself he’d pick the heavy lump of concrete up as soon as the plaster cast was off.
It
was the first time he’d been outside with the walking stick and he hadn’t worked out how to walk with it yet. Did he lean on it? Or sweep it in front of him like a blind man? Frank had walked up and down the hall with the stick, he’d tried out a few different limps, and he’d swung the stick around the living room like Charlie Chaplin. A broken table lamp and beheaded china swan would both testify to that. Using it as it was intended, however, was another matter. Perhaps he could dance his way down Sea Lane, throwing the stick in the air and catching it at the end of a pirouette like Fred Astaire. He hoped a couple of cheeky kids would run past blowing raspberries and calling him a wanker, so that he could wave the stick at them and shout, ‘Why, I oughta.’
It wasn’t even a great stick. Frank would have preferred one with a dog’s head or a crystal ball for a handle, a jewel-encrusted cane or a stick with a mosquito preserved in amber for a handle like the one that Richard Attenborough had in Jurassic Park. He would have liked a stick with a hidden sword inside or at least one that doubled up as a seat in case he got tired on the way to the shops. Frank’s walking stick was a boring functional rubber-tipped aluminium thing with a right-angled plastic handle and a PROPERTY OF WEST SUSSEX HEALTHCARE TRUST sticker.
As he walked along Sea Lane, Radios Three and Four wafted through the open windows of pretty bungalows. He could smell seaweed used as fertiliser on gardens in preparation for the upcoming Villages in Bloom competition. A single prop aeroplane flew overhead, birds whistled and wood pigeons were doing that ‘poo poo poof’ thing they do.
It all reminded Frank of the Monkees’ song ‘Pleasant Valley Sunday’. He found himself humming it. Yes, Frank had heard of The Monkees. It wasn’t all Vera Lynn and Max Bygraves. Frank had also heard of the Arctic Monkeys, although he probably didn’t know any of their music.
At the end of Sea Lane a couple of half-sized bungalow FOR SALE signs were uprooted and lying on the ground. Another white stone bollard was tipped over on its side. When Frank went into the charity shop everybody was talking about the crime spree that had swept through the village the night before. Three short-arsed FOR SALE boards had been uprooted and almost a dozen concrete bollards, including the one outside Frank’s flat, had been tipped over – causing havoc among the village’s woodlice community – and the road sign on the corner of Renis Crescent had been altered. It was worse than South Central LA out there.
All the old dears in the charity shop were doing their Miss Marple impressions.
‘It’s kids,’ one old dear deduced as she priced up some cardigans.
‘Definitely kids,’ another Miss Marple, restocking the Dan Brown shelf, agreed.
‘Kids,’ a customer at the counter paying for a knitting pattern said.
Everyone agreed. It had been the same in the queue for stamps at the post office next door.
‘Kids,’ a man queuing for a stamp said.
‘It was kids,’ the woman working behind the security glass said.
Only the lone voice of an old dear trying a nightie on behind a curtain in the corner of the charity shop was keeping an open mind until there was at least a little more evidence. ‘It’s probably kids,’ she said from behind the curtain.
Why was it always kids? Frank thought. Why do the young have the monopoly on mindless vandalism? Why can’t the rest of us smash up a phone box or graffiti a park bench once in a while? Why did it always have to be kids?
The woman paying for the knitting pattern read his mind and had the answer.
‘They’re bored,’ she said.
Bored. Ha. Really. Bored. They didn’t know the meaning of the word. Frank could teach them something about boredom. What did the young have to be so bored about? They had slides and swings, they had computer games, football and kiss chase. They could run and jump, skip, hop, somersault and cartwheel. They could make fists and punch each other. They could chew gum. They had their own television channels and virtually all the radio stations. They had the Internet and bicycles, mobile phones and skateboards. If kids were so bored they should try and spend a couple of hundred afternoons in a row sitting on their own watching repeats of Murder She Wrote. Then we’d see what they’ve got to be so bored about. It was the elderly who should be smashing things up.
If Frank pushed the charity shop’s greetings card carousel over right now, nobody could really blame him. He could dropkick the tall glass cabinet at the centre of the charity shop to the floor and jump up and down on the supposedly valuable oriental vase the shop kept locked up inside it like it was the Pink Panther diamond. Not a judge in the land would say that he hadn’t been provoked. He’d show them what boredom does to you.
The next time he went to see Smelly John he was going to bang on all the doors of the sheltered housing block where he lived and run away. He was going to get in the lift and push all the buttons – ground and first. He was going to jump up and down in the lift until it got stuck between floors and the warden had to call the engineer out.
As soon as everyone stopped nattering about the crime spree and let Frank pay for his ornaments and DVDs he was going to push over some bollards. He’d wait until the estate agent had been round the village replanting the FOR SALE signs and then he was going to pull them all up again.
Hilary was going to need a bigger incidents book.
Frank paid for his mantelpiece ornaments and DVDs. He’d bought an egg cup, a fish and two small china giraffes. He now had twelve giraffes. If he bought enough of one thing, he thought, it became a collection and somebody in Japan or America would buy it. He’d bought two DVDs – The Great Escape and Gattaca, both of which he already owned copies of.
Frank left the charity shop and went next door to Fullwind Food & Wine. He bought a small loaf of sliced bread, three tins of spaghetti and a pint of milk.
‘You’re not going to win Ready Steady Cook with this lot,’ the man on the till said. It was just like Frank’s dream. A dull trip to the shops with a sarcastic smartarse at the checkout counter. He should be waking up any second now.
Unlike in his dream, though, he definitely didn’t feel young. If anything he felt slightly older than usual. Frank left the shop and headed back home, where no one was waiting to help unpack his bag for life.
Back at the flat he stepped around the fallen bollard on the verge.
‘Kids,’ he said to himself and walked through the gate into the front garden where a man was standing looking up at the roof, sucking his teeth and shaking his head.
Frank imagined drawing his sword from the inside of his hospital walking stick, shouting ‘en garde!’, and running the roofer through. Then he realised that he’d left the stick in the charity shop. He’d also forgotten to get cat litter for Bill.
6
A year ago, for Frank’s eightieth birthday, his daughter had sent him a birthday card from America. In the envelope with the card there was a leaflet about preventing dementia. Again, he would have preferred a book token but, well, you know.
There was a cartoon drawing of an old man on the front of the leaflet. He was doing a crossword in a newspaper. In the cartoon the old man had the end of his pen between his teeth and he was deep in thought about something – presumably one of the clues in his crossword. Above the picture it said: Use Them or Lose Them. Americans, eh. They were talking about the old man’s marbles. He needed to use them or lose them.
The leaflet talked about the importance of a healthy diet and regular exercise, of keeping physically and mentally active. Play a musical instrument, the leaflet said. Learn a foreign language. The next time he was in the charity shop Frank had bought a Spanish language cassette. When he got back home he realised that he didn’t have anything to play it on. He had no idea whether forgetting he didn’t have a cassette player was a sign that he was losing his marbles. There was nothing in the leaflet about it. He decided not to let it worry him too much. If a cassette player came up for sale in the charity shop Frank would buy it. And if a saxophone or a banjo or a drum set appeared in the shop,
he’d buy that too.
Inside the leaflet there was another cartoon drawing of the American marbles man. Let’s call him Ron. That sounds a bit American, doesn’t it? Ron was sitting in his house now. His apartment. Ron was sitting in his apartment. There was an apple on the arm of his chair (healthy diet) and a tennis racket leaning against the side of a table next to the chair (regular exercise). He was keeping mentally active by reading a book.
On Ron’s wall there were two clocks and a calendar. He was wearing a big wristwatch. Being aware of the date and the time would help keep dementia at bay, the leaflet said.
On Frank’s kitchen wall there’s a free calendar from a stair-lift company and hanging in the living room there’s one for a stray dog charity. He also has one of those tear-off block calendars on the living-room desk. Every morning he tears off the previous day’s date and says the new date out loud. He walks downstairs and picks up the newspaper, buried amongst all the charity begging letters and offers for walk-in baths and stair lifts – Frank can still get up and down the stairs, a lot slower now, since the accident, but he can still do it. Every morning he picks up the newspaper from the bottom of the stairs, looks at the top of the front page next to the lottery numbers and the little picture of a shining sun or a fluffy rain cloud, and he reads the date out loud. Occasionally he reads it out in a Glaswegian, Liverpudlian or cockney accent. Or a comic American one, like the one Ron the dementia marbles man might have.
But now and again Frank wonders whether he’s already torn yesterday’s date off the calendar and it’s now showing tomorrow’s date? Or what if he thought he’d torn yesterday’s date off but hadn’t actually done so, and the calendar was still showing yesterday’s date? Which he now thought was today’s? Or what if the paperboy hadn’t actually been today and Frank had picked up and was now reading the date from yesterday’s paper? There were no answers to any of these questions in the leaflet. He decided to not worry too much about it.
The Extra Ordinary Life of Frank Derrick, Age 81 Page 3
