‘The canvas?’
‘At your arm.’
‘My arm? Oh. Yes.’
Frank took his jacket off. He’d forgotten how easy it could be. His arm did feel lighter, the nurse was right there. Maybe not helium-filled but definitely lighter. But it also felt stiff and like somebody else’s arm. He thought he could still feel the cast. When it was first removed Frank noticed the skin on his arm was flaky and the smell nearly knocked him off his chair. Where was the religious metaphor in that? The next time someone knocked on his door to discuss the hereafter, Frank was going to ask them.
Before Frank had rolled his sleeve up as far as his elbow Pat said, ‘No. Sorry.’
‘No?’
‘It’s not that I can’t do it. It’s that it will look bad. Your skin is too thin. Too loose.’
‘Too loose?’
‘May I?’ Pat said. He peeled off his black disposable surgical gloves, rolled them into a ball and threw them at a bin and missed. He was not as good as Kelly at slam-dunking rubber gloves. She was the Harlem Globetrotters compared to Fat Pat. He gently took hold of Frank’s arm and turned it around. The depiction of Hell and Hades tattooed on the backs of Fat Pat’s fat hands at odds with the softness of their touch.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. He let go of Frank’s arm. ‘Maybe a few years ago.’
Frank looked down at the flaky, loose-skinned smelly canvas and wondered if he had enough strength in his arm to pull on the short chain between Pat’s nostrils to tear his nose off.
‘Sorry,’ Pat said again.
Frank put his jacket back on and left the tattoo parlour, washing his hands before he went. If he’d had a tail it would have been between his legs. Still, Fat Pat couldn’t be the only tattoo artist in town. Frank would go somewhere else or do his own tattoo.
He walked along the High Street. The chicken shops were opening now. Men in white paper hats were sweeping the pavement outside their shops, moving the rubbish along the High Street one shop doorway at a time, playing pass the filthy parcel all the way to the pile that had built up at the end of the street outside a closed-down electrical shop. Seagulls swooped down and fought over bits of leg, wing and breast. Parked or abandoned dumped cars were whitewashed in seagull droppings.
When Frank was almost at the end of the street, he stopped and took his hand-drawn map out. Greyflick House was in this general direction but there was no detail or scale. He put the map back in his pocket and turned a corner on to a side street. He walked until he was in the middle of a housing estate. Recently it had been on the news when the whole estate had received an antisocial behaviour disorder and been placed under a 7 p.m. curfew. It was at the opposite end of the news to the colourful overpriced beach huts story. The beach huts were the skateboarding dog to the housing estate’s suicide bomb.
Frank heard sirens nearby. They were the fourth set of sirens he’d heard since leaving Fat Pat’s. In Fullwind the sound of sirens meant that somebody had the window open and the TV up too loud during Midsomer Murders or Marion at number eight had had another fall and pulled the panic cord in her bathroom.
At the centre of the housing estate there was a children’s playground – two tied-up rusty swings and a graffiti-covered slide. A small group of teenage boys were sitting on bicycles smoking and spitting, spitting and smoking. Multi-tasking. Don’t catch their eye, Frank thought. They might also have a cave in Worthing.
The boys were playing music on a phone. Angry music. Swearing, shouty, angry music. ‘Granddad!’ one of the boys called out.
Frank knew his only grandchild was female and in America and so he kept walking, slightly quicker, not looking back. He heard the sound of an empty drinks can landing on the ground nearby.
‘Fucking old twat!’
He put his hand inside his jacket so that they might think he had a gun. He wasn’t used to not having his arm in plaster and it felt more natural to hold it at an angle. A dog barked. One of the boys shouted at Frank again. He looked around for CCTV cameras but there were none. He wondered who they would get to play him in the crime show reconstruction. Some old sod in a wig. There were two dogs barking now. Wasn’t that one of the red Indians in Dances with Wolves? Someone dropped a mattress out of a window of one of the flats. The dull thud as it hit the ground stopped the dogs barking for a moment. Then they were off again. Woof woof. Bow wow wow. More dogs joined in. The mattress sent up a cloud of dust and hopelessness.
‘Shut the bloody fuck up!’ a woman shouted from a window of the flats. ‘Get in here, you little shit!’ another woman from a different window called. It was just like Oliver! In a moment barrow boys and flower sellers would high-kick their way through the estate singing. The dogs barked louder. Frank thought of Bill being taken along the corridor of the dog and cats home.
‘I said shut the fuck up,’ one of the cast of Oliver! called out again. Two of the teenage boys curve-skidded their bikes to a halt in front of Frank. If this had happened one day later he would have made a quick getaway on his scooter. These punks would never have caught him as he sped off, leaving them behind shielding their eyes from dust and the flashing lights of the scooter’s tiny wheels.
‘Where are you going?’ one of the boys asked. He smelled familiar. It was a sickly sweet smell, like a perfumed bonfire.
‘Nowhere,’ Frank said.
‘Nowhere where?’
‘Nowhere nowhere.’ He resisted the urge to say ‘so good they named it twice’.
‘Where’s that?’
‘What’s in the bag?’ the other boy said and spat something disgusting out from between his teeth. Frank remembered where he recognised the smell from. It was the smell that came from John’s padded envelope.
‘Films,’ Frank said.
‘What films?’
This is like another Mini Mental Examination, Frank thought. Paper-folding next.
In his carrier bag he had some DVDs for Smelly John. John said the only films left on the Greyflick DVD trolley he hadn’t already seen had been put there by Graham to wind him up. When he heard the Friends of Greyflick volunteers wheeling the trolley through the dull brick-walled corridors every Friday John knew there was nothing on it for him.
‘All they had to offer me last week were both Zulu films,’ John said. ‘And that one about the bouncing bombs. The one with the dog, Francis. The dog with that name.’
Frank had put Jurassic Park, Muppet Treasure Island and The Goonies in a carrier bag for Smelly John. He hoped he hadn’t missed any hidden racist subplots in any of his film choices.
He told the boys the titles of the films.
‘Blu-ray?’ one of them said.
‘Just normal DVDs.’
‘How much money have you got?’
What, in the world? Frank thought. Or on me? Although they both amounted to the same thing. Let me see. Today is Thursday. My pension goes into the bank today. Although this week was a bank holiday so it might be a day late. Council tax came out of the bank this month. That may have put me into the red again which will mean more bank fees. The scooter was £8.00, three tins of spaghetti, bread, milk, a couple of other things, the taxi to the hospital, and a very poor cup of tea from a vending machine in the hospital. I think that’s everything.
Frank pulled the change out of his pocket.
The boys looked at the coins in his open palm and laughed and one of them spat on the ground. He wasn’t as good as his friend at spitting and he got a bit of gob on his chin. Frank wanted to take a tissue out of his pocket and wipe it off. The boys spun their bikes around and rode off.
‘I’ve just been mugged,’ Frank told Smelly John when he got to his apartment at Greyflick House. He was out of breath and a bit shaken from the experience. And perhaps a little disappointed that the boys hadn’t given him much of an anecdote. They could at least have punched him or actually stolen something.
‘What did they take?’ John said.
‘Nothing. Should I call the police?’
‘No. I don’t want them coming round here.’
‘Why would they come round here?’
‘If you call the police, you’re here, you’re the victim, so they’ll come round here and then they’ll go through my stuff.’
‘Why would they go through your stuff?’
‘Seriously, Francis? Seriously? Do I need to answer that?’ He wheeled himself over to a chest of drawers, opened the top drawer and took out a padded envelope and passed it to Frank.
‘It helps with my spasms,’ John said. ‘Look.’ He held his hand out for ten seconds. ‘See.’
‘Is it drugs?’ Frank said.
‘Herbs.’
‘Illegal herbs?’
John shrugged.
‘Where do you get it from?’
‘Mother Nature, Francis. Via Amsterdam.’
‘Jesus Christ.’
‘Would you like to try some?’
‘Oh no,’ Frank said. ‘No. I don’t think so.’ But so that John didn’t think he was the kind of square who thought the roads were in a terrible state and everyone drove too fast, he said, ‘I almost got a tattoo today.’
And then, because the lift was working and it was a Thursday, they went down to the lounge for a glass of sherry and to disrupt the quiz.
20
Frank had just picked up the newspaper from the bottom of the stairs. He read the date out loud: ‘Saturday, the first of June.’ There would be a new calendar dog today. He made a sportsman’s bet with himself that it would be some sort of terrier. He looked at the weather forecast at the top of the newspaper. ‘Sunshine, occasional light showers,’ he said, in the style of an American weatherman, who sounded remarkably like Ron the marbles guy. Perhaps they were related. An incredible coincidence for such a big country.
While he was looking at the paper the postman pushed the day’s begging letters and catalogues through the letter-box. Frank watched the postman’s Hitchcock-esque silhouette through the frosted glass of the front door and waited for him to leave. The postman then started to push something else through the door – a padded envelope that was too big to fit through the letterbox. The postman pushed harder. Frank heard the postman swear and then he appeared to try and punch or kick the package into Frank’s flat. It stayed where it was. The postman started pushing again. The bubbles of the Jiffy bag popped and cracked like Frank’s ankles on the stairs in the morning. The envelope was stuck. The postman carried on pushing. Frank took hold of his side of the envelope and pulled while the postman pushed from the outside, until the inevitable happened and Frank fell backwards onto the stairs with the crumpled padded envelope in his hands. He stayed there and watched the postman turn and walk away, dropping red rubber bands on the path as he went.
Frank took the post upstairs and sat down at the kitchen table. He looked at the squashed padded envelope. He was thinking that inside he’d find some Dutch dope, a present from Smelly John, and he was unsure about opening it in case the police kicked in his front door the moment that he did. The address was printed onto a label and Smelly John didn’t own a typewriter, a computer or a printer. He looked for origins-of-posting clues next to the stamps but the date and place marks were too smudged. He tried to feel the contents of the envelope. Something hard. Harder than Smelly John’s cannabis or marijuana, or were those the same thing? Frank didn’t know. He was no fuddy-duddy but he wasn’t Cheech or Chong.
He wondered what could be inside the package. It wasn’t quite large enough to contain Frank’s milk, returned to him from the hospital after all this time. After shaking the envelope and then sniffing it, he did the only thing left to do in the situation. Frank opened the envelope. There were two soft-plastic glasses cases inside. Frank had completely forgotten about the glasses he’d ordered. There’d been so much going on lately. He really needed a secretary.
He opened the first case and took out a pair of sunglasses. He put them on the table and opened the other case and took out a pair of lightweight, semi-rimless, gunmetal grey glasses. He took his old glasses off – still held together with Kelly’s sticking plaster – and he put the new pair on.
They were half the size and weight of his old glasses. So light that he might forget he was wearing them and begin a hunt around the flat to find them. The glasses were made of titanium with scratch-resistant, anti-glare lenses. The only thing they had in common with his old glasses was the left side – what did you call those bits? – arms? The left arm of Frank’s new glasses was snapped off. Presumably by the force the postman had used to deliver them. Frank fixed the glasses with the same-coloured insulation tape as his old glasses and started changing his calendars.
He flipped over the previous day’s date on the calendar on the desk. Tore off the page, screwed it up and slam-dunked it into the wastepaper basket. It hit the edge but it went in. Frank’s basketball chops were somewhere between Fat Pat’s and Kelly’s.
He said the new date out loud.
He wasn’t going to lose any marbles.
Yesterday he’d bought a cassette player from the charity shop. It cost £5.50. He couldn’t afford it but he was going to learn Spanish. He just needed some new batteries. He’d asked if they had a saxophone or a drum set too but they didn’t. In the afternoon he completed half the easy crossword in the paper without looking at any of the answers printed at the back of the paper.
He was determined to not lose any of his marbles. He wanted to share them with Kelly. He wanted to tell her about watching the first ever television broadcast and seeing the first man walk on the Moon. He was going to tell her where he’d been when he heard about Kennedy’s assassination and about coal deliveries and how he could remember a time when there was only one gas board, one electricity board and when the post and the telephone all came from the same company. He wanted to tell her about the rag-and-bone man and paraffin heaters and what it was like before decimal currency, explaining how five pence was one shilling and there were twelve pennies in a shilling and twenty shillings in a pound. He wasn’t ready to forget any of that yet.
Frank was going to tell Kelly how razors used to have only one blade and no batteries and tell her how long it took to make a phone call when you made a mistake dialling the number on a rotary-dial telephone. He’d seen so many great films that he wanted to tell Kelly about and many others he wanted to warn her against watching. Vertigo – good. Batman and Robin – bad. He’d tell her how there used to be an interval during films at the cinema and a short supporting film before the main feature. There was only one screen and you could smoke. He was going to get his collection of 16mm movies out of the loft and unroll a strip of film and hold it up to the light to show her a frame-by-frame scene.
Frank was going to turn his back, ruffle his hair, pop a pipe in his mouth and show Kelly his Harold Wilson impression. Then he was going to tell her who Harold Wilson was and how he’d been Prime Minister twice. He’d show her how people amused themselves before video games and the Internet. He’d pretend to pull her nose off and then remove his own thumb and throw it up in the air and catch it in a paper bag. He’d take his old calculator out of the kitchen drawer, put batteries in it and show her how to write the word BOOBS.
Frank had so much to tell her about before he forgot it all. There was a lot to share. His chocolate-eating methods, bayonet light bulbs and, yes, the war. Frank would take her to the library and get the big book off the shelf. Next to the one about Egypt. He’d open it up to page 49, point at the page and say, ‘That’s me.’
Kelly would look at the black-and-white photograph of a crowd of boys and girls dressed in their best clothes with parcel labels tied to their coats, on the deck of a ship, on the bow, leaning into the wind like Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio. The children were all smiling or waving at the camera, sticking their thumbs up like they were on their way to the zoo or the fun fair.
‘You were an evacuee?’ Kelly would say.
‘Seavacuee,’ he’d say. ‘We’re on a Dutch ocean liner there. We were
on our way to Canada when it was torpedoed.’
‘Oh no,’ Kelly would say. ‘How awful.’
And Frank would tell her his war story. About how they travelled by train to Liverpool and then boarded the ship. Three hundred and something children. He’d tell Kelly he was asleep in a cabin when the sound of bells woke him and he and all the other children had to put lifejackets on and get to the lifeboats. He’d start to remember it as he told the story. He’d remember how, because the ship was listing at an angle, they had to crawl along a corridor in the dark.
‘I was still wearing my pyjamas. They gave us blankets to wrap ourselves in. Grey. I remember the blankets were grey.’
‘You must have been terrified,’ Kelly would say. ‘How old were you?’
‘Eight.’
‘Oh my God.’
‘But I don’t remember feeling scared. Which doesn’t make sense to me now. It was a bit like a film, and sometimes I think maybe it was just a film that I’m remembering – Titanic or The Poseidon Adventure – and it never happened at all. When I try and remember it, it all happens in black and white, making me think perhaps it was a film. But I know there’s a passenger list with my name on in the National Archives or somewhere and somebody making a documentary once looked the list up, traced me and wrote asking for an interview about what happened. I said no. I wish I’d said yes. I could have shown you a video of it.’
Frank would tell Kelly how the children had been put into the lifeboats. The crew members had to swing the boats towards the ship and drop the children in one at a time.
‘And then all of a sudden we were told to get back off the lifeboat. I don’t know why. Perhaps the torpedo damage wasn’t as bad as they’d thought. So we got off the lifeboat and went to one of the ship’s lounges and then almost straight away we were told to get back in the lifeboats.’
Frank would tell Kelly how they were put back in the lifeboats and lowered into the water. Children were being sick because of the sea’s swell. They were unsure of what was happening. And then they were hauled up by ropes onto a tanker.
The Extra Ordinary Life of Frank Derrick, Age 81 Page 12
