The Extra Ordinary Life of Frank Derrick, Age 81

by J. B. Morrison

  Frank picked up the tweezers. He moved his face close to the mirror, cleared a gap in the steam of the glass with his hand and, mostly by luck, took hold of one of his nostril hairs. He pulled sharply on the hair and it popped out. Frank’s eyes watered and he felt a sneeze on its way. He braced himself and when the sneeze didn’t come he felt as disappointed as it was possible to feel about pretty much anything. Getting hold of another nose hair proved more difficult and frustrating, like threading a needle on the deck of a North Sea ferry. Once he had hold of a hair, he pulled more slowly. The hair seemed very long. It was like he was unravelling a jumper. The hair popped free and this time he did sneeze, banging his head on the mirror. He decided a few nostril hairs at his age was not the end of the world.

  Frank turned off the taps and looked at the bath and then at his arm. He wondered if there was such a thing as a dry bath. He unhooked one of the carrier bags from the tap and started wrapping his plastered arm in it. Then, keeping the bag in place by holding his arm against his body, he picked up the parcel tape. Obviously he couldn’t find where the tape started. Obviously that was going to happen. He took his right arm away from his body to unpick the tape and the carrier bag fell on the floor. Reaching out to catch it he knocked the soap into the bath water. Next week he would swing from a broken clock and let a wooden house fall on top of him.

  Eventually, Frank managed to wrap his arm in the two carrier bags and hold them in place with the brown parcel tape, which he then had to tear using his teeth, which, of course, were in a glass, leading to a further delay. But eventually, with his teeth in, he managed to chew through the tape. It was all screwed up and stuck to itself and when he was finished his arm looked like a present wrapped by a drunk dad on Christmas Eve.

  He climbed carefully into the bath. The water was now tepid. He wished he’d bought one of those rubber mats the home mobility catalogues were always trying to sell him, as he was terrified of slipping and falling, knocking himself out and drowning. He thought about how long he might lie in the bath undiscovered, but then realised that it wouldn’t be that long as Kelly would be here soon. She’d open the front door and call out his name, wondering why he wasn’t answering. And then she’d search for him room by room until she saw the steam from the bathroom. Frank didn’t want Kelly to be the one to find him dead, his body even more wrinkly than it was already, lying in a bath of Matey.

  Frank stood in the bath, he turned the hot tap back on to warm the water up and then he sat down. He looked at his feet sticking out of the water by the taps. His toenails needed cutting. Even if he owned a pair of left-handed scissors he would never have the strength required to cut through his thick toenails. The last time he’d cut them he’d used garden secateurs. It was the closest thing to gardening they’d ever been used for. He let his feet submerge out of sight under the bubbles and he washed himself with his expensive soap.

  Frank didn’t spend a long time in the bath. He didn’t want to fall asleep and go through the same scenario of being found by Kelly – doubly embarrassing by not even being dead. He climbed out of the bath and dried himself. Getting the carrier bags off his arm proved just as difficult as getting them on and he had to tear through the plastic and the parcel tape with his teeth. Once he’d freed his arm, his plaster cast was wet anyway.

  He dry-shampooed his hair. Without a brush to brush the dry shampoo properly into his hair he looked like he’d been sandpapering the ceiling.

  He went into the bedroom to get dressed. His clothes were laid out on the bed. He needed new underpants. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d bought any. Or even if he ever had. Sheila had not only worn the trousers in the relationship, she’d also bought the pants.

  Buying underpants would involve a trip further into town. They probably sold them in the charity shop but underwear was on his list of things he wouldn’t buy second-hand. Socks were another. He didn’t mind wearing dead man’s shoes but not dead man’s socks or pants.

  Another thing Smelly John had said after Frank’s accident was, ‘I hope you were wearing clean pants. Always wear clean pants, Francis. My mother used to say that all the time. In case you get run over. Were you wearing clean pants, Francis?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Which was the simple answer. Frank had been wearing clean pants when he was run over. Or at least right up until the point when he was run over, which was when his clean pants became dirty pants

  Somewhere at the beginning of Frank’s hospital trip a member of the NHS had removed Frank’s pants. Somebody else had washed them and they were returned to him in the carrier bag with the pint of milk when he left the hospital. Frank went commando in the ambulance home and left the pants in the ambulance with the milk. Two weeks after the accident a padded envelope arrived in the post containing his underpants with a West Sussex Ambulance Service compliments slip. At least they hadn’t sent the milk. Yet.

  Frank put on the newest-looking pair of underpants he could find. He had thought about putting them in the boiling water with the tweezers to give them a new lease of life but there wasn’t time to dry them and he worried that Kelly might notice that his flat smelled of boiled pants.

  He put on his best pair of trousers and took the plastic and cardboard stiffeners and pins out of his latest charity shop shirt, making sure he removed all the pins this time. He buttoned the shirt and looked at himself in the mirror. Yes. Awful. Frank had had a lot of conversations with the man looking back at him from the mirror. Sometimes he didn’t speak to anybody else for days. Frank would pull faces at him and the man in the mirror would mimic him. It was a good Frank Derrick impression.

  He took off his glasses and twisted them to make them a bit straighter. He put them back on. They were still askew. He tilted his head slightly to compensate, as though he was straightening a painting on a lopsided wall. He wished he had his new glasses. They should arrive in two to three weeks, Spencer had said.

  Spencer was the optician who’d come round a few days ago to give Frank his free eye test. He wore incredibly thick-lensed glasses in the same way that all barbers have baldheads. As Spencer followed Frank up the stairs and into the living room Frank tried to remember everything he’d said on the phone when he’d booked his free eye test.

  ‘This shouldn’t take too long,’ Spencer said.

  This is a free eye test, Frank told himself.

  ‘This is a nice flat,’ Spencer said.

  I am not in a shop.

  Spencer set up his equipment.

  ‘Great natural light,’ he said.

  This is my home.

  ‘Have you lived here long?’

  I will not be made to feel obliged to buy anything.

  ‘South-facing garden?’

  I will not provide my bank account details.

  ‘My wife would love this wallpaper.’

  I will not get sucked into buying any glasses.

  ‘This won’t take too long.’

  I will have the advertised free eye test and ask for a copy of the prescription and then I will order some glasses from the Internet for less than half the price.

  ‘You have great hair.’

  After twenty minutes of reading letters off charts, staring into various bits of machinery and having air puffed at his eyeballs, Frank found himself trying on glasses. A further twenty minutes later Spencer was putting an order into a folder for a pair of glasses that would make Frank look like a Belgian architect and also for a half-price pair of matching sunglasses. If he checked his bank account he would have found that he was now £19.85 overdrawn. A bank computer was already calculating a fine and a fee and typing a letter to him, the letter would put him a further fifteen pounds in the red.

  Frank slapped his face with aftershave and it stung. He felt something soft brush his leg. He looked down. Bill had woken up and was standing by his feet waiting to be fed.

  ‘What do you think?’ Frank said and he pulled his best-man-in-a-mail-order-catalogue pose. He looked at Bill, ho
ping to work out what he was thinking. It should have been easier than usual as it was only one word.

  Poof.

  Frank fed Bill and let him outside and then went back upstairs into the living room to wait for Kelly. On the floor by his armchair he’d placed three photo albums with tartan covers. They were full of family photographs. The albums were arranged at different angles to each other. It had taken him ten minutes to make them look like he’d simply left them there like that without any thought. At five to eleven he pressed play on his CD player, he sat down in his armchair and tried to make himself look as much like a fan of Madonna as it was possible for an eighty-one-year-old poorly shaved idiot in a flowery shirt to be.

  At first Frank thought Kelly had a new car when she parked the big white vehicle opposite. In spite of its greater size it was obviously easier to drive than the little blue one. She didn’t bump the bollards or crunch the gears. There was no stereo in this car. Kelly wasn’t singing along or nodding her head to music. The news could be on, of course. Or the weather, or an advert, or even a song that Kelly didn’t like or know the words to.

  She was out of the car a few minutes earlier than usual. The clock in the car was probably fast. Or maybe there wasn’t a clock in the car either. She’d had her hair done. No geometrically spirit-levelled fringe any more. But not the same as in her Internet photograph either. And she’d put on a few pounds as well. And a few years. She walked differently. If his Belgian architect’s glasses had arrived, Frank would have been certain that this wasn’t Kelly. Although even without the glasses he knew that this wasn’t Kelly.

  He watched her cross the road and he started to panic.

  The doorbell rang.

  He decided he wouldn’t answer it.

  It rang again. For longer this time. There was a knock as well.

  Just wait, Frank thought, she’ll go away.

  The doorbell rang a third time. She wasn’t giving up. She knocked again.

  There was a minute’s silence, just Frank’s heavy breathing as he waited for the doorbell to ring again or for her to leave. And then the phone rang. Frank jumped and squealed like Bill did when he trod on his tail. He made his way across the room and picked up the phone. He was scared to speak straight away.

  ‘Hello?’ he said.

  ‘Is that Mr Derrick?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Your care visitor is outside. She says you aren’t answering the door.’

  ‘Oh. Er, I was in the bathroom.’

  ‘If you could let her in.’

  ‘Oh right, er, yes. There’s a key safe.’

  ‘I’m afraid she may not know about that. Could you make it to the door, do you think? Are you on the ground floor?’

  ‘The first.’

  ‘Ah, right. Would you be able to make it down the stairs, do you think?’

  ‘Yes, all right. I’ll answer the door now.’

  Frank hung up the phone and made his way down the stairs. He could see the shape of the care worker in soft focus through the frosted glass of his front door. It wasn’t soft enough. He opened the door.

  ‘Mr Derrick? I’ve been waiting for five minutes.’

  Frank took a step back. He couldn’t remember seeing the woman’s photograph on the Lemons Care website, which wasn’t surprising. She wasn’t the face of the company. Michael Aspel would have pulled out of presenting the Miss Care Worker contest in disgust.

  ‘Yes, I’m sorry,’ Frank said. ‘I was in the—’

  ‘Is the bell broken? I could hear it ringing.’ She spoke so firmly it was more like quiet shouting.

  ‘Yes, sorry, I—’

  ‘Well, come on. Let’s get on with it, shall we? I’ve already lost five minutes.’

  This was more like it. This was what he’d been expecting in the first place. This was who his dirty protest had been intended for. Robin Williams in a dress. Margaret Thatcher in a bad mood. He wanted to freeze time so that he could go upstairs and make a mess, throw some food on the floor and do a big shit in the toilet and not flush it. He would have to email his daughter and tell her. He’d have nothing to hide now. The woman followed him up the stairs, almost knocking him over and climbing over him. He felt under pressure to speed his walk up and nearly tripped up. They went into the living room.

  ‘Why don’t you sit down?’ she said. It felt like an order or a threat.

  ‘My name is Janice.’ Frank didn’t care what her name was.

  She walked over to the stereo and switched it off. She picked up the photo albums. ‘Let’s get these out of harm’s way. We don’t want to trip over them, do we?’ She put the albums on the bookshelf where they didn’t belong. ‘How have you been managing, Mr Derrick?’ She took his file out of her bag. ‘Have you been going to the toilet successfully?’ She talked down to him as though he was the stupidest child in the world. ‘Are you clean? How long has that toe been broken?’

  ‘I—’

  ‘It should be healed by now.’

  ‘I think it—’

  Like Kelly’s, Janice’s questions were all rhetorical but, unlike Kelly, Janice had absolutely no interest in Frank’s answers.

  ‘Can you walk?’

  ‘I—’

  ‘You should be walking by now. What’s that smell? Are you clean?’ If she asked him whether he wanted a bath he was going to jump through the window. He wondered whether he could pick up enough speed to break the glass. She asked more questions. Not leaving Frank enough space to answer before she asked the next question. She pointed at his plaster cast. ‘Shouldn’t that be off?’ She stuck a thermometer in his mouth before he could answer.

  ‘Where’s the vacuum cleaner?’ She was already out in the hall opening the cupboard and finding the vacuum cleaner herself. She seemed to know where it would be. It was as though she’d been round earlier and cased the joint, or had a particularly sensitive nose for seeking out household cleaning appliances. It was certainly big enough, her nose. Big. Long. Ugly. Like the Witch in the Wizard of Oz’s nose. Maybe Frank could click the heels of his slippers together.

  ‘There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.’

  Janice came back in with the vacuum cleaner, plugged it in and started aggressively hoovering the living-room carpet.

  ‘Up,’ she said, instructing Frank to lift his feet, and she hoovered under them. She carried on asking him questions but he couldn’t hear what she was saying above the sound of the Hoover. And it wasn’t easy to answer with the thermometer in his mouth. It was just like his boiling-kettle conversations with Kelly.

  It was nothing like his boiling-kettle conversations with Kelly.

  Janice finished hoovering and then went into the kitchen to noisily do the washing-up. It sounded like she was playing the drums in a hurry, trying to get to the end of the song before the rest of the band. Frank had had the thermometer in his mouth for a long time now. If he didn’t have a temperature before she arrived, he most certainly had one now. Janice came back in and removed the thermometer and looked at the reading.

  She looked at Frank. It was the first time she’d stood still for longer than two seconds since she’d arrived.

  ‘You’d be a lot more comfortable with shorter hair, you know,’ she said. ‘We can get somebody to come round.’

  She walked out of the living room and went into Frank’s bedroom, where she remade his bed, tucking the sheets and blanket under the mattress with hospital corners so tight that he was going to need to cut his way into bed. She came back into the living room with a glass of water and stood over Frank while he took his tablets.

  ‘Make sure you swallow them. Have you swallowed them?’ She took the glass away from him and took it out to the kitchen to wash it up and hurriedly play the drums some more.

  When she had left, it felt like a whirlwind had swept through his flat. There was an eerie silence. What had just happened? Had it even happened? Frank felt like he’d been beaten up. Like a victim on a crime reconstruction show. But h
e didn’t need or want a reconstruction and he was definitely going to have nightmares. Just half an hour with Janice had left Frank feeling exhausted, both physically and mentally. She’d set his recovery back at least two Kelly visits. And he hadn’t even asked her what he really needed to ask, ‘Where is Kelly?’

  When Hurricane Janice had died down and volunteers were sweeping up the debris and boarding up broken windows and the National Guard were chasing away looters, Frank rang Lemons Care.

  ‘I’m afraid Kelly has some sort of allergy,’ the woman on the phone said. ‘She does suffer with them. They can be quite debilitating. All kinds of things can set an attack off. Nuts, wasp stings, a high pollen count, cats, particularly cats. How was Janice?’

  16

  Graham wasn’t in his office in the reception of Greyflick House, so Frank signed himself in to the visitors’ book on the counter. Name: Frank Derrick. Visiting: John. Time in: 11 a.m. He walked to the lift. There was a ‘lift out of order’ sign taped across the door.

  He turned and walked a short way along the corridor and went through a fire door where he found Smelly John’s empty wheelchair at the bottom of a carpeted flight of stairs. Frank looked up and saw Graham, six steps up and breathing heavily, beads of sweat dripping down his face, as he tentatively made his way down the staircase with Smelly John cradled in his arms like his newly-wed bride whom he was carrying over a series of descending thresholds.

  ‘Francis!’ John called out and waved.

  Graham carefully moved down a step and stopped to get his breath back and readdress his balance. He bounced Smelly John in his arms to get a better grip, like you might do with a sleeping child or a heavy television you’ve just bought and are carrying home. Graham seemed a lot more concerned about dropping John than John did about being dropped. John was enjoying the ride. He would probably shout Stairs! when he got to the bottom.

  ‘The lift is broken,’ John said to Frank. He gestured to Graham with a nod of his head – ‘Hence.’ Graham took another step. ‘This is the third time he’s had to do this this morning.’ Graham must surely have been considering dropping John or at least throwing him at his wheelchair. ‘I keep forgetting things,’ John said.