Frank Derrick's Holiday of a Lifetime (12 page)

Frank drifted back in and out of sleep for a while and then he got out of bed. His legs ached and they felt stiff. He sat on the edge of the bed and pulled the bottoms of his pyjama trousers up and looked for swelling and redness. No blood clots. Just his usual pale chicken legs. He stood up, slowly, not wanting to lose his balance and fall over in an unfamiliar room. He walked over to the dressing table. It was 8.15 a.m. in New York, London and Berlin. In Paris it was already five in the afternoon.

He lifted a few slats of the venetian blind and the sun shone in his eyes, a ray of warm Schadenfreude as he imagined what the weather might be like at home.

He opened the bedroom door slowly. Even though he was in his daughter’s home he felt like a trespasser or an unwelcome guest. There was nobody in the living room. The blow-up bed had been deflated and folded into a shape that would never fit back inside the drawstring bag that it had come from. There was a folded quilt and a pillow on the deflated bed and on the top of it all Bill was fast asleep and purring. He could hear the sound of Beth or Laura in the kitchen, duetting with Jon Bon Jovi. There were no other sounds of life in the house. The sun shone through the living-room window. Frank didn’t ever want to go home.

He walked to the doorway of the kitchen.

‘Good morning,’ Beth said, almost singing the words and incorporating them into the song playing on the radio. ‘Tea? Unless you’d prefer coffee?’

‘Could I have coffee please.’ If Beth offered him breakfast he would ask for eggs over easy and a stack of pancakes. ‘I’ve just remembered,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a present for you. It’s in my case.’

‘As long as it’s not another cat,’ Beth said with a smile. Then, more serious, ‘It’s
not
another cat, is it?’

‘Just a minute,’ Frank said and he went into Laura’s bedroom. He came back to the kitchen with the two boxes of Matchmakers. He gave them to Beth. She was almost overcome.

‘Thank you, Dad,’ she said. ‘I’m so glad you’re here.’

She hugged him again, not releasing him from the hug for a long time and Frank made no effort to escape. He tried to recall if she had always been so tactile. It annoyed him that it made him feel even the slightest bit uncomfortable.

‘And there’s something for
you
on the table in the living room,’ Beth said. ‘From Laura.’

Frank went into the living room and sat down at the small table.

‘There’s an unscheduled grocery trip because of Bill,’ Beth called out.

He picked up the pile of stapled-together sheets of A4 paper from the table and looked at the front page. The first page was a title page with
‘Frankie Comes to Hollywood’
across the centre.

Beth came in with the coffee and she sat down at the table next to Frank. He flicked through the pages of the itinerary that Laura had made. There was a page for each day and each page had a film-related title and a paragraph or more of related facts or trivia. Frank read the beginning of today’s page out loud.

‘
The Sting:
Drive to Santa Monica Pier and the beach – Visit Paul Newman’s grifter home and discover what it’s like to be in Tom Hanks’s shoes. Movies filmed at these locations include:
The Sting
,
Forrest Gump
,
Hancock
,
Bean
,
Elmer Gantry
,
Rocky III
,
Iron Man
,
Hannah Montana:
The Movie
. Dinner at the Cheesecake Factory.’

‘That’s all going to be with me, I’m afraid,’ Beth said. ‘The official tour guide will be looking after you tomorrow.’ Frank looked at her. He was alarmed that Beth might have actually hired a professional tour guide. ‘Laura,’ she said to reassure him. ‘They’ve been great at work,’ she said, ‘but there’s one less paycheck coming in now so I don’t want to push my luck. I feel terrible, Dad, I’m really sorry, but Laura still has some vacation time left. She’s going to show you the sights for a couple of days while I’m at work and also while I’m at my follow-up.’

‘What’s that?’ Frank said.

‘Follow-up care,’ Beth said. ‘I have to go to see the doctor and check that everything is okay and so on.’

‘Everything
is
okay,’ Frank said, ‘isn’t it?’

‘Oh yes. Although the side effects have been worse now the radiation is over. I was warned that might happen but it still caught me out. Tiredness, mainly, but that won’t last. I hope. Anyway, forget about all that, I’m yours in the evenings and from the weekend onwards. We can do the less exciting stuff together, although I’m sure Laura has something planned for us.’ She gestured at the itinerary.

‘I really don’t want to be a burden,’ Frank said. ‘You should carry on as normal and just pretend I’m not here. I’ll be all right on my own. I doubt that Laura wants to spend her holiday time with a daft old man.’

‘That’s
why
she’s taking the time off, Dad,’ Beth said. ‘To spend it with a daft old man and you are
not
a burden. Except when you say you’re a burden. That’s the only time that you’re a burden.’

After breakfast they drove to a nearby grocery store. Beth’s car was larger than Jimmy’s black sports car but it was still small and Frank’s expectations for enormous American houses with acres of land and cars as long as trains had not yet materialized.

At the grocery store Beth bought cat food, a litter box and a carton of whole milk for Bill. The litter box had a filtered lid and a cat flap at the front end. At the store’s checkout there was a man around Frank’s age who packed their groceries into bags. Frank was both glad that he no longer had to work and at the same time envious of the man for still having a job. When Frank had retired it hadn’t been entirely voluntarily. He hadn’t been ready and he still felt fit and well enough to do his job. It simply happened because it was officially time. He was sixty-five years old and he was withdrawn from circulation like an old pound note. Frank and the man packing the groceries exchanged nods, acknowledging each like passing Volkswagen Beetle drivers. Beth gave the man a tip and they left.

When they got back to the house, Frank had to keep lookout while Beth snuck the cat-litter box in like a boyfriend at a college dorm. They fed Bill and Beth covered the sofa with a bed sheet and closed all the doors to confine the cat to the kitchen and the living room, in case he decided to mark his new territory. Ten minutes later Bill had christened his new toilet and was asleep in the living room on the pile of bedding.

After a small lunch they went back out. They drove along Santa Monica Boulevard, counting down the streets as they crossed them – 12th Street, 11th Street, 10th and 9th Streets. Frank asked why Euclid Street wasn’t called 13th Street.

‘It must be superstition,’ Beth said. ‘I don’t know why the name Euclid though.’

They drove across Lincoln Boulevard, between 9th and 7th Streets. There was no 8th Street.

‘Is eight an unlucky number as well?’ Frank said.

Beth looked in her rear-view mirror. ‘Perhaps they lost a street. Or miscounted.’

Frank thought that he could see the ocean at the end of the road up ahead. He lifted his clip-on sunglasses to see if it was the same shade of blue that he knew from Beth’s photographs. If anything it was bluer.

‘Euclid Street is still the thirteenth street,’ he said. He flipped the clip-on shades back down. ‘It isn’t on the signs but it is still the thirteenth street. People make the same mistake with buildings when they don’t have a thirteenth floor because it’s unlucky. They think they’re getting off on the fourteenth floor but they’re still actually getting off on the thirteenth.’

‘Maybe that explains the year I’ve had,’ Beth said.

They passed 2nd Street and turned onto Ocean Avenue, every new road now sounding to Frank like the title of a song.

‘There’s no First Street either,’ Beth said, noticing it for the first time in the ten years that she’d lived there.

She parked in a large car park and they walked onto Santa Monica pier. The pier was as familiar to Frank from cinema and television shows as Euclid Street was from the maps on the library computers. They went into the Looff Hippodrome building where there was a carousel. Steam organ music played on the merry-go-round’s calliope and Frank couldn’t help tapping his hand on his leg in time with the music.

‘I think this is where Paul Newman lived in
The Sting
,’ Frank said. He took the folded itinerary out of his trouser pocket and looked at the page for today. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It is.’

He looked for the door at the back of the building where he half expected to see Robert Redford on his way to see a hungover Paul Newman breaking a block of ice in a washbasin.

The merry-go-round stopped and a few tourists climbed off.

‘Do you want to ride a wooden horse?’ Beth said.

‘Oh, no thank you,’ Frank said.

‘I think there’s a goat if you don’t like horses.’

‘I get dizzy in a revolving door these days.’

They watched the merry-go-round turn again for a while and then walked along the pier. Outside the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company restaurant Frank sat on the bench and put his feet into the huge
Forrest Gump
running shoes that were stuck to the floor. Beth tried to take his photograph with his digital camera but the batteries were flat, so she took one with her phone instead. Frank felt the strongest urge to do his Forrest Gump impression but he managed to resist in case it was misinterpreted as racist – or worse. In the amusement arcade there was a Zoltar fortune-telling machine like the one in the Tom Hanks film,
Big
. Inside a glass-fronted case Zoltar was wearing a gold turban with a red feather in it, he had pirate’s hoop earrings and there was a necklace of solid plastic around his neck. Beth fed a dollar bill into the machine.

‘Make a wish,’ she said. She stepped aside and Frank wished to himself that his daughter would never be ill again.

Zoltar’s hand moved over a crystal ball inside the glass case. His eyes lit up and his mouth moved up and down between his Salvador Dali moustache and his ducktail beard. He told Frank something about destiny not being about chance but about achievement and other stuff that Frank didn’t remember from the film. Zoltar’s script must have been updated with legal provisos and caveats, terms and conditions just in case anyone ever tried to sue the amusement arcade for a billion dollars for not making their wish come true. There was a glissando of musical notes and the machine released a piece of paper with Frank’s fortune on. Frank read it out loud.

‘Your wish has been granted.’

‘I hope it was a good wish,’ Beth said.

‘I wished that I was young again,’ he lied.

‘Don’t tell me or it won’t come true,’ Beth said. They walked away from the Zoltar machine and out of the amusements arcade. ‘Isn’t that how the movie ends?’ Beth said.

‘Thanks.’ Frank looked disappointed. ‘I was really looking forward to seeing it as well.’

‘Oh, God, I’m sorry, Dad.’

Frank smiled – the mischievous smile of a man who’d seen
Big
about twenty times. Beth gave him a soft punch on the arm and then she took hold of the same punched arm and they walked to the end of the pier. Beth bought ice creams and they stood together and looked at the ocean. It seemed so blue to Frank that he wondered what colour the sand beneath it was. Seagulls hovered close to the pier and Frank tightened the grip on his ice cream.

‘I’ve seen a lot of TV video mishap shows,’ he said.

One of the gulls swooped down to the surface of the water and came back up again with a fish in its beak. The anglers with their fishing rods leaning over the side of the pier watched the bird with envy as it flew away across the sea. Frank looked at the people down on the beach by the side of the pier. He watched a man run across the sand towards the ocean. As soon as he was in the water he dived and disappeared under a wave without stopping.

‘I think your mother would have liked it here,’ Frank said. ‘You’d be too young to remember but she used to swim out to sea for miles. There was no pier to stand on and watch her and I’d lose sight of her. Just as I’d be thinking of calling the coastguard she’d appear along the beach, not even out of breath, dragged almost to the Isle of Wight by the sideways currents. I was always terrified that one day she wouldn’t make it back.’

‘I do remember,’ Beth said. ‘It scared me as well.’

A sea breeze blew Frank’s long hair across his glasses; he pushed it away and hooked the hair behind his ear. He finished his ice cream and leaned into the pier rail and lifted his arms out at his sides.

‘No spitting over the side, Leonardo,’ Beth said.

A man stood next to them at the end of the pier. He took a pack of cigarettes from his trouser pocket, took out a cigarette and put it in his mouth. He searched his pockets for a lighter or matches. Frank wanted to show the man the nearby NO SMOKING sign and read him the health warning on the packet. He wanted to tell him to not spoil a lovely sunny day. He wanted to show him his daughter standing next to him. Tell the man what she’d been through. He wanted to force the man to smoke every single cigarette in the packet until he turned green and threw up and vowed never to smoke again, just as Frank had seen happen in a number of films. The man found a book of matches and attempted to light the cigarette but the breeze blew out the match. If he tried again Frank would blow out the next match himself. A blue light on the Bluetooth headset hooked onto the man’s ear flickered on and off. Frank wanted to reach over and screw the flickering bulb back in place like one of the fairy lights on his Christmas tree.

‘Shall we walk down to the beach?’ Beth said. She gestured towards a TV crew that had roped off an area nearby, setting up to film a scene for a TV show. ‘I don’t want to end up in that dumb show.’

As they walked away Frank thought about pushing the smoker over the rail and into the sea. He imagined the splash and the swooping gulls pecking at the man like he was Tippi Hedren, the blue light still flickering on and off on his ear.

They went back along the pier and walked down the ramp to the sand. After about fifty yards they sat down. Two joggers ran along the beach down at the water’s edge. Frank looked at the itinerary.