The Extra Ordinary Life of Frank Derrick, Age 81

by J. B. Morrison

  ‘The tanker smelled awful. Oil.’

  ‘It must all have been so frightening,’ Kelly would say again.

  ‘In a way, I suppose it was but I remember on the tanker they had a big gun and the crew let the boys look through the gun’s sights. That was exciting. I suppose they were just trying to distract us. They were probably more scared than we were. We were taken back to Scotland and eventually we went home on a train.’

  Kelly would ask how many people died and Frank would say, miraculously just one.

  And Kelly would look as though she was about to cry.

  ‘A child?’ she’d say.

  ‘A member of the ship’s crew.’

  And Kelly wouldn’t be pleased somebody had died but it would seem less tragic that it was a grown-up.

  Frank would tell her how some children would leave the country again on a different ship a few weeks later and that it would sink and that many of the children died.

  ‘That’s awful,’ Kelly would say and she’d look at the photograph in the book. ‘Which one are you again?’

  Frank would point to himself in the photograph.

  ‘I sometimes wonder how different my life would have been if I’d made it to Canada.’ And he’d put the book back on the shelf next to the one about Egypt with the Sphinx on the front cover.

  This was Frank’s war story and he wanted to tell it to Kelly before he forgot it. He needed to keep his mind active. He was going to read the newspaper and do the crossword and eat fruit and learn Spanish and play the drums. He’d keep doing all the Ron stuff too – checking the time and saying the date out loud every day.

  In the living room, where everything was in sharper focus than it had been for some time because of his new Belgian architect’s glasses, he slam-dunked yesterday’s date into the bin and turned over a new month on his abandoned dogs calendar. Dog of the month was a mongrel, not a terrier; he’d lost his bet with himself. Then he noticed he’d accidentally turned over two pages and had skipped a month. He turned back a page. June’s dog was a terrier after all. A small handbag dog with a stupid face. And then he paused. He turned the calendar page to July. July’s dog was a mongrel called Royston. ‘Royston is a loveable scruff,’ it said beneath Royston’s picture. He was doing that tipping his head at an angle and arching his eyebrows thing. He didn’t look like any obvious political leader from the twentieth century. Frank looked at the calendar.

  There were thirty-one days in July.

  No bank holidays.

  And no red crosses.

  Frank felt sick.

  21

  Hello, Beth,

  I hope you, Jimmy and Laura are all well.

  I am sorry I haven’t telephoned but you know how I always get muddled up about what time of day it is there. Is it morning now? There. You see. I’m such an old fool. And then the cost of long-distance calls has rocketed over here. I sometimes feel it would be more economical to jump on a plane than to pick up the telephone. On that subject, I do hope you will be able to come over soon. I do miss you all.

  The plaster cast (is that what you call it over there?) has finally come off. The nurse who removed it tried to convert me to God. Can you believe it? I managed to escape with my atheism intact. At least the itch has gone.

  My arm has still been giving me quite a lot of pain, though, and I am still quite unsteady on my feet. The accident may have knocked me further sideways than I liked to think. Despite my initial protests the care visits have been invaluable. I think I would have struggled on my own. As much as I love to remain independent perhaps it would be an idea to extend the home visits. Just two or three more weeks or so until I’m back to my usual 93 per cent.

  Give my love to Jimmy and, of course, to Laura. She must be a proper grown-up little lady now.

  Love

  Dad

  Frank sat back in the library chair and wondered how emails worked. He imagined his email travelling at thousands or millions or even billions of miles an hour down a phone line to the nearby coast and then under the sea, from the English Channel into the North Atlantic to America and then on through more cable across the country to arrive in his daughter’s computer in Los Angeles. He wondered whether the email had arrived yet and when Beth would reply. He could come back later and check. But the library closed at noon on a Saturday. If he went and looked at an atlas and plotted the route his email might take through a long cable from Fullwind-on-Sea to LA, would Beth have replied by the time he came back to the computer? It was unlikely. In spite of all his claims of ignorance about time zones Frank was reasonably sure Los Angeles was eight hours behind Fullwind and Beth wouldn’t be sending emails at three in the morning.

  The computer pinged.

  Hi, Dad,

  I’m still always surprised to receive an email from you. I guess I’m as dumb as all those people who expect their dads should still be sending telegrams or Morse code or something.

  I’m afraid we’ve been having a rough time of it lately. Jimmy’s contract fell through. He’s devastated, to be honest. He’d worked so hard for it. He feels kind of cheated and let down, I guess.

  That’s good news about the cast (same name here). Did you get anybody to sign it? I hope you kept it. And well done for not joining the Church. You’d find it a lot harder to resist here. Everybody believes in something here, or says they do at least. I am sorry that you are still finding things tough though. Is there any financial support we could get for you from the Government or the council? We’re just in such a spot here right now. I feel terrible saying that. What kind of a daughter am I? Let’s both think on it for a while and see if we can come up with a solution.

  And I promise I will ring, maybe tomorrow.

  No, really, I will call you this time. You’re not the only one who forgets the time-zone differences.

  I hope that this whole situation with Jimmy will somehow sort itself out and we’ll be able to come and visit. Maybe after Thanksgiving.

  And yes, Laura is certainly one little lady.

  All our love

  Beth xx

  Frank replied.

  Hello, Beth,

  I wasn’t expecting to find you up and about.

  Please forget what I said about the home visits. I’ll be fine really. I was making a lot of fuss about nothing. It’s far more important that you try and get back on your feet again (no joke about broken toes or metatarsals intended there). Let’s talk on the telephone very soon. Although these emails back and forth have been almost like a conversation. It would be great to see you when things sort themselves out and I’m sure they will. Maybe after Thanksgiving, as you said.

  Give all my love to Jimmy and Laura.

  Dad x

  Maybe after Thanksgiving. When was Thanksgiving? Wasn’t it just the American name for Christmas? He was on the Internet in a library. If only there was some way of finding out.

  Thanksgiving. Christmas. Kelly Christmas. The words were like recommendations updating themselves to Frank on an online shopping site – if you like Thanksgiving, you may be interested in Christmas, shoppers who’ve looked at Christmas have also looked at Kelly Christmas.

  Frank found himself on the Lemons Care website.

  Kelly was still waiting for the temperature to show up on her thermometer. Still smiling for the camera in her shiny blue uniform.

  At the top of the page he clicked on ‘What Does it Cost?’ Which took him to a page that was much like all the other ‘What Does it Cost?’ web pages for services aimed at the elderly, in that it did everything to avoid providing an answer. Frank read between the lines:

  Lemons Care recognises that everybody is different.

  If we tell you how much it costs now . . .

  Our visiting care service is arranged around your individual needs and requirements.

  . . . then you might decide you can’t afford it.

  We want to understand your unique circumstances . . .

  We want to see what you can realistica
lly afford . . .

  . . . and we like to take the time to meet the person we will be caring for and their family before discussing exact costs.

  . . . and then try and get you to pay for a bit more.

  To ensure we get it right from the start, we like to begin each new Lemons Care relationship . . .

  We want to be able to talk you into paying for it . . .

  . . . with a visit to you and your family at your home.

  . . . in an environment with a closed door and, hopefully, stairs . . .

  We can then discuss the exact help that you need.

  . . . so that you can’t escape.

  Please call our 24-hour hotline to talk to one of our care advisors and to arrange a home visit.

  Frank left the library and went to the shops. He was walking with a slight limp and his boomer-arm had come back. If there was the slimmest chance that Jimmy’s contract hadn’t really fallen through and Beth had been playing a wonderful joke on him and had really been in the country all along, having already flown over to surprise him, Frank didn’t want to be caught out like someone being videoed playing rugby or bungee jumping out of a helicopter while claiming incapacity benefit. So just in case Beth leapt out from behind a bush with a box of cookies, a model of the Empire State Building and a new dementia leaflet, he faked a limp and held his arm like it was still in plaster.

  It was a hot day and Frank took his jacket off, pulling his arm carefully out of the sleeve and screwing his face up as though it still hurt. In a way he hoped somebody – Beth and Jimmy and Laura, an incapacity benefit-fraud investigator, Hilary the head of the Neighbourhood Watch or whoever – was watching. Somebody to applaud his skills as an actor.

  He checked his bank balance at the cashpoint outside Fullwind Food & Wine. There was £33.90 in his account. He had overdue electricity and gas bills to pay and he was out of tinned spaghetti. By not starving or freezing to death he was living beyond his means. And, more pressingly, his time with Kelly was almost up. And he wasn’t quite ready for that yet.

  A slight breeze blew his hair. Perhaps it would be the start of a freak cold snap. The coldest summer in history to follow one of the hottest springs. If the temperature dropped below zero for a week, Frank would receive a heating allowance from the Government. Maybe even enough for another home visit. He went into Fullwind Food & Wine and bought £3.98 worth of shopping and a scratch card, hoping it would be snowing when he came back out.

  At two o’clock in the morning Frank couldn’t sleep. He got out of bed, put his teeth in, drank a glass of water, tried to clear his throat of the last forty years, picked up the phone and called the Lemons Care 24-hour hotline.

  ‘Lemons Care. How may I help you?’

  ‘Hi,’ Frank said in an American accent. Not as broadly American as his Ron impression, but like someone from the UK who’d gone to live in America and was gradually taking on the accent – like Catherine Zeta-Jones or Lulu. ‘I’m ringing about my father. I hope it’s not a bad time to call. It’s five after six p.m. Over here where I am. In LA in America.’

  Frank pretended to be his own imaginary son and told the woman on the phone the kind of things he presumed his actual daughter must have told her to get a list of their prices without them first sending somebody around to assess his needs in person. He said he was thousands of miles away in Los Angeles and couldn’t make it over. He talked about his Father’s accident and asked what services might be available for such an old guy like that.

  The woman asked a few questions and told Frank the various options and levels of care they could offer.

  ‘That sounds ideal,’ Frank said, and then, almost as an afterthought – as though money was no object – ‘What would be the ballpark cost of that?’ He wasn’t sure exactly what ballpark cost meant but it was something he’d heard Beth and people in movies say before.

  After the woman had told Frank what it was going to cost he thanked her and said he would be in touch. And then he went back to bed to dream of a freezing cold summer, winning the lottery or selling his kidneys.

  He was up again before the first Sunday flight to Alicante. He put on Sheila’s old scarlet anorak, Kelly’s yellow rubber gloves and Beth’s pink scuba mask and snorkel and he went out into the garden. Any of Frank’s neighbours up early enough to see him in his strange outfit must have thought, ‘Somebody hasn’t been following Ron’s advice about the importance of eating a healthy diet and keeping physically and mentally active.’

  To take his mind off his money problems Frank was going to build his cinema.

  Before tackling the ivy that held the contents of the shed captive he first had to get through the spiders and cobwebs that hung like a net curtain across the doorway. He wasn’t afraid of spiders but he didn’t want to be picking cobwebs out of his hair for hours or swallow one and getting caught up in that whole time-consuming and inevitably fatal cycle of having to swallow a bird and a cat, dog, cow and so on. So he zipped up the anorak, put the face mask on, pulled the anorak hood over his head, put the snorkel in his mouth, and, feeling hot and claustrophobic, breathing heavily through the snorkel, he attacked the arachnoid curtain with a stick.

  This was how the Odeon Empire started. An old man with a dream and a shed. An old man with a dream, a woman’s anorak, some rubber gloves, a child’s scuba-diving mask and a shed. And a stick.

  As the cobwebs cleared he was already planning the programme for the premiere night. It had a theme. He was going to start with a showing of Ice Cold in Alex followed by Some Like it Hot. Classical music would play quietly between films and Frank would serve ice cream and microwaveable popcorn. He didn’t have a microwave oven but he could buy one and, until he found a projector, he’d show the films on DVD. The audience would have to sit on garden chairs until he got some proper seats.

  There was, of course, always a risk that once Frank had cleared the cobwebs and started cutting away the ivy he’d discover they were the only things holding the wooden building up and it would collapse on the grass like a clown shed. But that sort of glass-half-empty thinking didn’t build Hollywood.

  It took him over an hour to cut through the ivy with a pair of rusty garden shears with handles that kept crossing over each other and pinching his fingers. But eventually he liberated the rotting stepladder and the deck chairs. With three piles of ivy on the grass, Frank was exhausted and took a long lunch break.

  In the afternoon he began clearing the rest of the shed, finding things he didn’t know he’d lost and things he’d kept without knowing he’d ever owned them or why he would have hung on to them in the first place. He wondered whether somebody else had been using his shed for their attic overflow. Virtually everything he found was rusty or broken or incomplete. The lawn took on the appearance of a post-apocalyptic boot fair.

  When Kelly arrived the next day, it looked like it was chucking-out time at the boot fair. The cars, the punters and all the good stuff was gone and all that was left were rusting garden tools, two short lengths of hosepipe, one Wellington boot, three half-rolls of wallpaper, a carrier bag stuffed with carpet remnants, a red tartan shopping basket with a squeaky wheel and the frames of two sun loungers. She stepped over a collapsed damp cardboard box and around three tins of paint the damp box had failed to contain. She walked through the layer of foam stuffing balls – chewed up and spat out by foxes or rats that had once lived in the shed – now covering the lawn like confetti.

  Frank wasn’t up at the window doing his James Stewart impression and didn’t see Kelly arrive. He was in the shed working on his Richard Dreyfus. At the moment he was concentrating on the scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind when Dreyfus appears to be losing his mind as he builds a model of the Devil’s Tower from the contents of his garden having failed to do so with mashed potato and shaving cream. Frank had emptied the contents of the shed into the garden. He just needed to get everything up the stairs to build his Devil’s Tower.

  Kelly sidestepped a bedside table with a
buckled top and a carrier bag of television aerials and remote controls. The shed door was open halfway and she could hear sounds of movement coming from inside.

  ‘Frank?’ she called out quietly, slightly fearful of what the response might be. ‘Are you in there?’ She was as close to the shed as she could get without moving anything out of the way. Down at her feet there was a cardboard cat box, a basket and a litter tray and Kelly felt her nose itching and she thought she was going to sneeze.

  The sounds of movement coming from inside the shed stopped. The door opened and Frank stepped out.

  ‘Ta Dah!’ he said. He was breathing heavily and sweating, wearing the red anorak and the yellow rubber gloves. He was either dragging or being attacked by a decorating table. He coughed and brushed his hair with his hand. Dust, cobwebs and bits of leaf fell from it.

  ‘I hope you’ve brought your hairbrush,’ he said.

  He waited for Kelly’s laughter or applause but it didn’t come.

  ‘You shouldn’t be doing this,’ she said. ‘You’ve just recovered from a serious accident.’ She shook her head with dismay and walked off, climbing over the junk in the garden. She kicked a burst football out of the way and went in the open front door.

  Frank dropped the decorating table flat on the grass and a lump of dried wallpaper paste bounced off and hit him on the cheek, making it smell even more of wallpaper paste than it already did.

  He wanted to wave a magic wand and put everything back in the shed. He wished he’d just sat at the window impersonating James Stewart. He kicked the same burst football across the garden and went upstairs. Kelly was in the kitchen filling the plastic washing-up bowl with warm water.

  ‘Go and sit down,’ she said. He went into the living room and sat in the armchair. Kelly came in and put the bowl of water on the table next to him. She was walking far too briskly for such a small flat.

  ‘Are you going to take the anorak off?’ she said. He thought of Janice. He looked at Kelly, with a face like an abandoned puppy. He didn’t know. What did she want him to do? Should he take his anorak off? He was waiting for instructions. He didn’t want to upset her any further by doing the wrong thing. Her face told him he should take off the anorak. Kelly took it from him and draped it over the back of the sofa. Frank awaited further instructions.