The Extra Ordinary Life of Frank Derrick, Age 81

by J. B. Morrison

  He squeezed the dainty yellow rubber gloves Kelly had left behind after the food clear-out onto his not-so-dainty hands and washed the kitchen floor with a mixture of washing-up liquid, water and white vinegar. He felt as though he was cleaning up a crime scene. Which, in a way, he was. Once he’d finished cleaning he cut an onion in half and left one half in the kitchen and the other in the living room. It was something he’d seen on daytime television. Apparently, it neutralised bad smells. He sat down in his armchair, exhausted and with a strange craving for fish and chips.

  That night, sometime between the last plane of the day landing and the first plane of the next day taking off, Frank suddenly woke up. He reached over to the bedside table for his glasses and his watch. It was almost 3 a.m. And he needed to go to the toilet. He tried to put it out of his mind and go back to sleep but the need was too strong. He could just piss the bed. It was almost expected of him. There had to be a few perks other than a bus pass and a free TV licence. Maybe when he was eighty-two . . .

  He climbed out of bed and made his way down the hall to the toilet. He shut the toilet door and flicked the light switch. The bulb fizzed for a bit and then popped, leaving him standing in the darkness with his pyjama trousers around his ankles pissing on the floor – or the wall, the ceiling, the window, who knew, maybe even into the toilet; he couldn’t see. Unable to do much about it while his bladder was still half full, or half empty – depending on your outlook on life – Frank finished pissing. Every time he heard the sound of liquid hitting porcelain or splashing into the water in the toilet bowl he attempted to steady his aim but it was surprisingly difficult in the dark, half asleep and left-handed.

  He pulled up his pyjama trousers. They were wet. He went to the kitchen to get a light bulb so that he could assess the damage. The kitchen drawer was full of free energy-saving light bulbs given to Frank by Age Concern, the Government, the Green Party and three different electricity companies. There were another ten in the cupboard. It was all very lovely for the environment but in a flat where all the light fittings were for old-fashioned bayonet bulbs, the screw-fit bulbs were as useful as a kitchen cupboard full of chocolate teapots.

  He thought about taking a bulb out of the table lamp in the living room and using that, but replacing a bulb at three in the morning in the dark with pissy pyjamas and his arm in plaster would probably be impossible. He’d end up falling into the toilet, pulling the tiny curtain away from the window as he tried to stop himself. He’d knock the bottle of bleach from the shelf onto his head and end up with his leg stuck in the U-bend of the toilet while his hair gradually turned blond. He would have to wait until either he lost enough weight to flush himself down the loo or until he was discovered dead, like a West Sussex Elvis.

  It would be Kelly who would find him. In a worse condition than if she’d found him in a bath of children’s bubbles. His body – or at least part of his body – would have been in water for a lot longer. A situation exacerbated for an extra twenty-four hours by yet another bank holiday.

  While everyone else was cleaning their cars, doing DIY, Morris dancing or chasing a cheese down a hill, Frank would be standing in a toilet pickling his leg.

  He decided to go back to bed and clean up the mess when it was light. The piss would have dried by the morning. It would be sticky and unpleasant but he’d cleaned up Bill’s piss enough times in the past. It would be almost nostalgic.

  The next few days flew by with the usual heady mix of cold-calls, daytime television and junk mail. On Thursday, Frank washed the toilet floor and climbed on his stool ladder to answer the question, ‘How many one-armed octogenarians does it take to change a light bulb?’ It’s one. But it’s difficult. Boomtish.

  On Friday, he went to Fullwind Food & Wine and bought four tins of cat food. He bought three DVDs and a china mantelpiece dog hiding inside a china mantelpiece fedora hat from the charity shop and went to the library to look at Kelly’s Internet photograph. While he was in the library he gave two people Sioux names – Farts in Libraries and Too Old to Be Reading Children’s Books. On the way home the handle broke on his bag for life, sending tins of cat food rolling into the road, which was when he remembered he was tired of metaphors and also that he didn’t have a cat any more.

  18

  On Monday people all over the country were enjoying a lie-in. They’d woken up, stretched, groaned, sighed and then realised it was a bank holiday and turned over and gone back to sleep. It was a great feeling. Similar to the sensation they’d felt the night before when the theme tune to Last of the Summer Wine or The Antiques Roadshow had just started to make them feel nauseous until they remembered there wasn’t actually any work or school in the morning.

  For Frank it was just another day. Just like any other Monday before his accident. Back when there was no Kelly to mark the day out as different. There wasn’t even a party in an old people’s home celebrating the end of a war to go to. The war was still on.

  Frank was in the kitchen. The woman in the flat downstairs was looking after her grandson for the day. After the success of his previous world record for kicking a ball repeatedly against a wall, somebody had bought him a whistle for his next world record attempt. Frank was picturing what he’d like to do with the boy’s whistle when he thought he heard Kelly’s voice.

  ‘Mr Derrick?’

  It was coming from the bottom of the stairs.

  ‘Are you in?’

  Frank stepped out into the hall. He was confused. Was this it? Had he forgotten to tear a date off his calendar? Had he lost a day? Was today tomorrow? He stood in the hall until Kelly appeared on the landing at the top of the stairs. It was mufti day for the home-care industry. Instead of her usual shiny blue uniform she was wearing jeans and a bright orange hooded sweatshirt with the picture of a monkey on the front. She had the hood pulled up over her head. The hood had monkey ears.

  ‘Get your bucket and spade,’ she said. ‘We’re going to the beach.’

  ‘Isn’t it a bank holiday today?’

  ‘Yes,’ Kelly said. She clapped her hands. ‘Exactly. Get your shoes on. We’re going to the seaside.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘What do you mean “but”? Come on.’ She dragged the word ‘on’ out to emphasise the urgency.

  ‘Is it jacket weather?’ Frank said.

  ‘Who cares? Bring one just in case.’

  Frank took his jacket off a coat hook on the landing wall and thought about the twenty minutes it was going to take him to get it on. Kelly held her hand out, Frank gave her the jacket and she helped him put it on – even Houdini must have had an assistant.

  ‘I feel guilty making you lose out on your day off,’ Frank said.

  ‘I’ll tell you what,’ Kelly said. ‘If it makes you feel better I won’t come tomorrow. I’ll have a bank holiday Tuesday. Agreed?’

  Frank nodded. He didn’t want her not to come tomorrow but he would deal with that then. He reached for his walking stick hanging on the same hook the jacket had been on.

  ‘Do you need that?’ Kelly said. It wasn’t really a question. Frank left the stick on the hook.

  Frank hoped the neighbours were watching as he climbed into the little blue car. He hoped Hilary was writing all the details down in her incidents book. He hoped she’d seen him follow Kelly down the path without his stick. He wanted Hilary to see Kelly open the passenger door of the car and adjust the seat, moving it back to give him more leg room. He hoped that Hilary had made a note of how Kelly had passed him the end of his seatbelt and told him to mind his fingers as she shut the passenger door and walked around the car to climb in next to him. As Kelly pulled the car away from the grass verge, Frank wanted her to knock some bollards over, turn the stereo up really loud and toot her horn, just in case people hadn’t seen them.

  Kelly pressed a switch to open Frank’s window. ‘Let me know if it’s too windy,’ she said.

  He looked out of the window and let the wind blow his long hair across his face. He clo
sed his eyes. Passers-by could have been mistaken for thinking someone was taking their Afghan hound out for the day.

  Frank hadn’t been in the front seat of a car for a long time. He’d been in the back of taxis and the back of an ambulance and he’d been on the bus to the big Sainsbury’s a lot, but the bus driver had never let Frank sit next to him up the front.

  As they drove down Sea Lane it occurred to him that he hadn’t been in this direction along the road for ages. When he left his house he always turned left, towards the charity shop, Fullwind Food & Wine or the chemist, to the library or the bus stop. He was like one of those Tibetan monks he’d seen on a documentary who only walked in a clockwise direction. He’d almost forgotten why the road he lived on had been given its name. Sea Lane’s Sioux name.

  Kelly was almost as bad at driving as she was at parking. The poor condition of the road didn’t help and the car bumped in and out of potholes. The road really was in an awful state, Frank thought. It was all the big lorries. The road was never built for the amount of traffic that drove up and down it, and not at the speed they travelled either – everyone ignoring the twenty-mile-per-hour signs and driving at fifty over the white ‘20’s painted on the road surface.

  When Frank and Sheila first moved to Fullwind, it was a quiet village with hardly any traffic. There were no pavements and so they walked in the road. Occasionally, one of them would call out ‘Car!’ and they’d both step close to the verge and wait for the car to pass. The driver would wave and say ‘thank you’ as they drove slowly by. Now everyone drove as fast as they could, without indicating or caring whether they ran a couple of elderly pedestrians over.

  Frank didn’t say any of this to Kelly. It would make him sound old. Even though she knew how old he was. It was practically the first thing she saw when she took his file out every Monday – just below his name, Frank Derrick. ‘Age: 81’. She typed his birthday into the key safe every week. She knew exactly how old he was. But ever since his thirties or forties Frank had felt uncomfortable about his age. It was the same when he was fifty and he really hated it when he turned sixty. He surely should have grown out of it by his seventieth birthday but he didn’t like that either. And then it was just as bad when he was eighty. Frank had a fairly childish attitude to growing old. Don’t buy him a numbered birthday card or one with a hilarious joke inside about how he was so old that – blah blah blah – because he won’t appreciate it.

  So Frank kept his thoughts on the condition of the road to himself. He didn’t complain about everyone’s lack of driving skills – Kelly’s included, Kelly’s in particular, especially when she took both hands off the wheel to open a packet of sweets or to adjust her hair – because he wanted her to think he was cool. Not like her other bald old gentlemen, who Frank imagined wouldn’t know who Madonna or the Arctic Monkeys were and would have asked, ‘The sex what?’ when Smelly John talked about the Sex Pistols. Frank didn’t want Kelly to think that he was an old fart. He didn’t want that to be his Sioux name. As they drove by the red triangular Elderly People sign, he hated the idea that it had anything to do with him.

  The buildings at the southern end of Sea Lane were as single-floored as those at the north end, but the nearer they drove to the sea, the wider, longer and more elaborate the bungalows became, the larger the gardens and grander the outbuildings. The more like a Monkees song. There was more lawn for the weekend squire to mow, more roses for Mrs Gray to feel proud about. Bigger garages for bigger cars. There were a couple of swimming pools. The closer your house was to the sea the more it was going to be worth, and if you had a sea view, even more so. When Frank and Kelly reached the beach they’d walk past a row of beach huts that had been on the news after someone had painted them in bright colours, plumbed in electricity and running water and advertised them for sale as beach-front studio apartments.

  Kelly parked the car on the nearest road to the beach – when they returned to the car later there would be a note under her windscreen wipers politely asking her to kindly not park there, the words ‘kindly’ and ‘politely’ both underlined to show they meant neither – and they walked along the alleyway that led to the sea.

  The high walls on either side of the alley were built from beach stones and the mortar or cement that held them together was green with what Frank presumed was either moss or something to do with the seawater. Because of the high walls it was quiet in the alleyway, like being in a subway between busy roads and Frank had the urge to shout out to see if his voice would return as an echo. He wanted to at least stamp his feet.

  He could smell the sea. He could smell the seaweed and the tar melting in the sunshine on the driftwood and the cuttlefish bones. He thought he could smell vanilla ice cream and the heat from the running engine of the ice cream van – one smell filtered through another to create a new one – but he presumed it must be a memory, because unless they’d built a road since the last time he was here, there was no access to the beach for an ice cream van. He listened out for ‘Greensleeves’.

  They walked out of the alleyway into a salty coastal wind and Frank wished he had slightly shorter hair as it whipped him about the face. They walked to the low stone wall that ran alongside the path and they saw the sea. The tide was halfway up the sand about fifty yards away. Far out to sea a speedboat bumped up and down in the water. From this far away the water was blue. Up close it would be either green or brown.

  They climbed the three stone steps that took them over the wall to the top of the hill of stones. Frank felt unsteady on the uneven ground; Kelly took hold of his arm and they made their way down towards the sand.

  ‘Is the tide coming in or going out?’ Kelly said.

  ‘That depends on whether you’re an optimist or a pessimist.’

  ‘An optimist.’

  ‘Now,’ Frank said, ‘is the beach the glass? Or is the sand beneath the water the glass? Or perhaps France is the glass. Are you French?’

  ‘French? No.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ Frank said. He suggested they buy a guide from the café for a more accurate tide report. ‘If they still sell them,’ he said. ‘I expect they have a tidal text message service now. Or an app.’ Yes, Frank knew what an app was, although it wasn’t a word he’d ever used before. This was the very first time. He was trying very hard to be the Fonz. ‘Or we could see how soft the sand is and work it out from that.’

  ‘You’re very wise, Frank,’ Kelly said.

  ‘And a little bit Morecambe.’ Frank waggled his glasses up and down like Eric Morecambe and the left arm of the glasses came away in his hand and the rest of the glasses fell onto the stones.

  Kelly picked the glasses up.

  ‘I’ve bought new ones,’ Frank said. ‘I’m waiting for them to arrive.’

  Kelly unwrapped the insulation tape from the glasses. She put her hand in the pocket on the front of her sweatshirt and pulled out a small first-aid kit. It was as though she’d been expecting an accident to happen. She took a roll of fabric sticking plaster and a pair of nail scissors out of the first-aid kit and taped Frank’s glasses together. She gave the glasses back to him, he put them on and they walked down towards the sand.

  Frank had to tread carefully so as not to fall on the uneven stones. When he used to come here with Sheila he’d walk barefoot across the stones as though the beach was carpeted or his feet were made of shoes.

  When they reached the sand, it was still wet. Frank guessed the tide was on its way out. Kelly took off her shoes and without discussing it, they started walking towards the sea.

  The nearer they got to the water’s edge the softer and wetter the sand became and the footprints they left behind were deeper, until the sand was so soft and wet their footprints didn’t look like footprints at all, just momentary smudges, quickly swallowed up again by the sand.

  They walked past pools of clear-looking water left behind by the tide and Frank wished he had the strength to lift up one of the slippery seaweed-covered rocks to find a crab underneath so
that he could pick it up to frighten Kelly and show her what a tough guy he was.

  All over the beach there were little coils of sand, worm castings left behind by burrowing lugworms.

  ‘I always used to think they were actual worms,’ Kelly said.

  ‘They’re left here by postmen,’ Frank said. ‘When they run out of red rubber bands.’

  They stopped at the water’s edge. Frank pointed out to sea. ‘There’s an old church out there. When the tide was low you used to be able to see the top of the spire.’

  They both watched the gentle waves come in, hoping to see the spire.

  ‘I can’t see it,’ Kelly said.

  ‘Maybe the water is deeper than it used to be,’ Frank said. ‘Or it’s sunk into the sand. I know the shore was further away then than it is now. People say they used to be able to hear the bell, tolling beneath the water. Usually at night.’

  Kelly shivered. ‘That’s quite scary.’

  Frank picked up a small flat stone and attempted to skim it across the water, using his right arm. The stone flew sideways and then almost back the way it came, landing on the sand behind him. Kelly suggested they should go to the café before Frank killed a child.

  When they were back at the beginning of the hill of stones, Kelly lifted her feet one at a time to brush the sand off the soles of her feet and slip her shoes back on. She had a small tattoo on her left ankle. A flower. Frank decided it was more impressive than anything in the Villages in Bloom competition.

  On the way back up the stones Frank said, ‘I know it sounds daft but I think I recognise that tin can from about ten years ago. Over by the breakwater.’ He pointed at a rusted fizzy orange can.

  ‘Groyne,’ Kelly said.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Frank said. ‘Over by the groyne.’

  ‘You’ve taught me something, Mr Derrick.’

  Frank was only half joking about the drinks can. He genuinely thought he recognised and remembered it. He wondered, if he looked around for longer, whether he would find a stone that looked like his face and another that looked like Sheila’s. Still there underneath the groyne where they’d left them on the beach all those years ago.