Frank Derrick's Holiday of a Lifetime (26 page)

‘It was hot,’ he said. He put his hand in the pocket and poked his fingertips through the hole. ‘I cut the pocket off by mistake. I kept the legs.’

‘I saw,’ Beth said. ‘I’m not sewing them back on.’

‘What if there’s another war?’

‘
Really?
’ Beth said. ‘You’re cracking jokes?’ She shook her head with exasperation. ‘Where the hell were you going?’

‘Nowhere. Anywhere. I wanted to surprise my granddaughter at work. It seemed a lot closer in the car and you are always asking me if I’m getting enough exercise.’

‘Don’t try making this my fault,’ Beth said.

Frank said, ‘I’m sorry. I just went for a walk. Like Captain Oates.’

‘Who the hell is Captain Oates?’

‘You remember. You did it at school. He was the Antarctic explorer who famously went out for a walk?’

Beth thought about it. ‘Wasn’t he also famous for leaving a note?’ she said.

‘I think he actually just told everyone he was going out,’ Frank said. ‘I really wasn’t planning on being out long enough to leave a note. I was interrupted by the police and so I walked a little further. Once I was at the end of the road, I just kept going.’

‘You’re not Forrest Gump, Dad,’ Beth said. ‘And what? The police?’

Frank wanted to tell her how, coincidentally, as he’d been walking down Santa Monica Boulevard, he had imagined that he was Forrest Gump.

‘They were very nice,’ Frank said. ‘They offered me a lift back to the house.’

‘And you didn’t take it! Jesus, Dad, the police.’

‘I’d only walked about ten yards by then and they had a more urgent call on the radio.’

Beth put her face in her hands. She couldn’t bear to hear any more.

‘And I guess you didn’t use sunscreen?’ Beth said, taking her hands away from her face.

Frank considered lying but Jimmy had shown him his red nose and forehead in the mirror.

‘When I saw the sea it looked so inviting,’ Frank said. ‘Did you find my wallet? And my passport?’

‘Yes, I did. You don’t get out of going home that easily.’

‘Do you want me to go home?’ Frank said.

‘At this precise moment – yes.’ Beth sighed heavily. ‘No, of course I don’t want you to go home.’

She asked him where he’d walked exactly and he tried his best to tell her, but once he’d left Muscle Beach he really had no idea.

‘I’m not very good with directions,’ he said.

‘You don’t say.’

There were raised voices and the sound of urgency nearby. People in different-coloured uniforms rushed by the cubicle. Frank had been in hospitals before but it was somehow more exciting here. He imagined gunshot wounds, gangland hits and drive-bys. When the controlled hubbub had passed, Beth and Frank looked at each other.

‘I didn’t know you had numpties in America,’ Frank said.

‘We didn’t until last Monday.’

Jimmy came back with coffee and Laura arrived shortly after. She appeared from behind the hospital curtain like the child in the supermarket photo booth. She saw Beth and Jimmy having coffee together and smiled in a carefree way that she hadn’t managed since her ninth or tenth birthday. She turned the smile to Frank and nodded. He thought that surely she didn’t actually believe that he would have gone missing deliberately for the sake of her project. Laura answered his question when she walked over and kissed him on the head and whispered something about ‘taking one for the team’ before opening the black bowling bag that she was holding. There was a picture of a skull wearing a Marlon Brando biker hat on the front of the bag and when Frank looked inside he expected to see a bowling ball.

‘Bill?’ Frank said.

‘What?’ Beth said.

Laura opened the bag to show Beth and then Jimmy, who was perhaps most surprised of all as he didn’t even know the cat was in the country.

‘I found him down the street,’ Laura said. ‘I wasn’t sure it was him. I guess it isn’t the only stars-and-stripes cat collar in LA. But look at his face.’ She opened the bag again and Bill looked up. He made no attempt to escape from the bag.

To be honest, it’s good to get out without being tied to a piece of string. What is this place? It smells like a hospital.

The doctor came back and asked to speak to Beth. Laura quickly closed the bag.

‘If he tries to escape, call security,’ Beth said to Laura before following the doctor into the hall. ‘And I’m not talking about Bill.’

Laura sat down with the bag on her lap. She opened it again.

‘It must have cost a fortune to fly a cat over from the UK,’ Jimmy said. Frank said that Bill had paid for his own fare. He told him that he was one of those fat cats they’re always talking about on the television. He asked Jimmy if fat cats were a thing in America and Jimmy said that he thought that they had pretty much invented the term.

Frank looked at Laura. She’d opened the bag as wide as possible on her lap and she was stroking Bill like Donald Pleasance in
You Only Live Twice
. His granddaughter’s genius was far from evil but the way she’d been dictating her mother’s sights and sounds and even the food that she’d been eating for the past few weeks in the hopes that it would remind her of her estranged husband was certainly a form of genius. And now that the family were at least temporarily back together it seemed as though her master plan might have worked.

Frank didn’t know where the Reunion Project began and ended any more. He couldn’t distinguish between plan and fate, accident and design. How much of what had happened today had simply been serendipity – which, incidentally, was the title of one of the films that Laura had selected, with its story of a separated couple trying to get back together – and how much had been set up by Laura? Was there another secret itinerary for Laura’s eyes only? Frank began to doubt whether coming on holiday had been his idea at all. It seemed just as likely that Laura had hired the landlord or an actor to play the landlord and turn up at the door with a cheque, purely to get Frank over to America with his photo albums and his memories and ultimately to get himself lost. Laura had given Frank her business card and talked about him having his hair cut and she’d pointed out where it was that she worked. Was that all intended to plant in Frank’s head the idea of going to the salon? Perhaps Venice Slice wasn’t even anywhere near where Laura had pointed and she’d done so just to make sure that Frank would definitely get lost. He was certain that he remembered her playing ‘walk’ in last night’s game of Scrabble: Eleven points, between ‘wife’ and ‘luckiest’. And then there was today’s page of the itinerary:
Home Alone 2: Lost in New York
. She’d got the name of the city wrong but, otherwise, who was this black-clothed sorceress? Even the chocolates that Frank had brought over from England for Beth were Matchmakers, of all the chocolates available in the world. Had Laura somehow engineered the Christmas Day phone call to take place after eight o’clock just so that it would lead to Frank bringing some suggestive candy with him? And had Laura’s entire master plan, the music, the food, the films, the Scrabble and the chocolates all been leading up to this, her pièce de résistance, getting Jimmy to save Beth’s father’s life?

Of course not.

But Frank watched her stroking Bill inside the bowling bag and he doubted that he had ever been quite so proud of an evil supervillain in his life.

Beth came back and she said that Frank had been dehy drated and he’d fainted, there was a small bump on his head and his legs felt like jello (Frank’s words, he was really fitting in), but otherwise he was fine and would soon be free to go home. Frank asked if she meant home or
home
and when he questioned whether he would still be able to go to Universal Studios or not Beth looked as though she was counting to ten before she said:

‘You’re not going anywhere, buster. Consider yourself grounded.’

Which was more than ever exactly what he wanted. He wanted to stay on the ground.

Half an hour later, they left the hospital with Frank in a wheelchair. In the car park Jimmy said goodbye. He shook Frank’s hand and, when he turned to walk back to his car, Beth stopped him and said, ‘You’re probably hungry.’

Laura must have felt like throwing the bowling bag with Bill inside high up into the warm Californian evening air.

25

It had taken longer to get out of the car park than it had to drive back to Euclid Street. If Frank had known how close the hospital was to the house, he would have fainted earlier on in his walk. He could have been ambulanced to the emergency room, been checked out and given the all clear in time to walk back to the house without Beth knowing that he’d even left.

It was after 10 p.m. when they arrived at the house. Frank leaned on Jimmy as they walked from the car to the front door and, once inside, Beth took Frank straight to bed like a child at the end of a long journey. He closed his eyes and drifted in and out of sleep, catching brief sounds of talk and hushed laughter coming from the living room. He wanted to get out of bed just in case he was missing something but he just didn’t have the energy.

When Frank pulled the alarm clock that had somehow found its way into the bed and under the pillow out from under his face, he saw that it was 11 a.m. and that he’d been asleep for over twelve hours. He’d woken up with a plan of action that was so clear that he must have been dreaming it. He was going to tell Beth about the landlord and the cheque and how he’d used it to pay for his and Bill’s airfares and as a result he only had a couple of weeks left before he would have to vacate his flat. It was so simple and he felt like a fool for not having told her the truth in the first place. Although he did consider how he might put a spin on it all to somehow make it sound just a little more positive. The flat was too large. He didn’t need the rooms. He wasn’t interested in the garden. The stairs were becoming difficult. If he filled his mouth with cotton wool he could adapt his discontinued Marlon Brando impression and reintroduce it as an impression of the landlord and repeat everything to Beth that the landlord had said to him. He could make it a funny story. He lay in bed rehearsing his script, just as he thought Troy at the planetarium and Robert on the Hollywood minibus tour must have done before going public with their presentations. Even the waiter at the Cheesecake Factory had probably practised reading the flavours and the specials in front of his mirror at home before coming to work. If Frank had to break the bad news to Beth he could at least make it entertaining. If only he had some video clips and music prepared.

He climbed out of bed – and not since his accident with the milk float had getting out of bed felt more like climbing – and he began his descent from the mattress to the floor. As soon as he put the weight of his body on the ground, pain ascended through his ankles to his shins, his calves, his knees, his thighs and hips as though it had been stored overnight in the rug, building up intensity the longer that he slept. The blister on his heel had grown. His right foot had gone up a shoe size. There were also blisters on the balls of both feet and when he touched his nose he knew that it was sunburned. There was an indentation on his cheek from where he’d slept for the past half an hour on his alarm clock.

He got dressed. He pulled a T-shirt over his head and noticed that his arms hurt too. He didn’t know why his arms hurt. They just seemed to be joining in. He slowly put his trousers on like he was dressing a wound. He picked his wallet up from the dressing table and took out the landlord’s cheque and put it in his trouser pocket. After a short glance in the mirror, which he regretted, Frank opened the bedroom door. He opened it with the same uncertainty as his first morning on Euclid Street. He didn’t know whom or what would be on the other side. Anger and recrimination or all’s-well-that-ends-well smiles and laughter. A round of applause perhaps.

He hadn’t heard anyone leave. Jimmy could still be here. All three of them might be sitting in the living room waiting for him to appear. But the living room was empty. He went into the bathroom. When he came out, Beth was waiting for him. She didn’t look angry.

‘How are you feeling?’ she said.

Frank looked around the living room.

‘Where are the stairs I fell down?’ He visibly wobbled.

‘You’d better sit,’ Beth said. She took his arm and led him the few steps across the room to the sofa. He winced with each step.

‘I’m all right,’ he said.

‘Sure. You look great. America’s next top model.’

She helped him onto the sofa. He groaned involuntarily as he sat down. He was out of breath just from walking to the bathroom and across the room.

‘Are you hungry?’ Beth said.

‘I’m not sure. Not yet. I am thirsty. Could I have some English Blend?’

Beth went into the kitchen and made him a cup of tea. She pulled a small side table over and put the cup on a saucer on the table. Frank tried to forget about his own condition and assessed Beth’s. She was wide awake so he marked her sleep pattern eight out of ten. Her appetite he also gave an eight (she was eating a banana) and he scored her an eight for her energy levels as well. Her outlook seemed good and her mood was almost definitely Sandra Bullock: evidence of Jimmy’s recent presence in the house – that and the straightened picture above the living-room desk.

‘We’re a bit late for the tar pits,’ Beth said. She picked up the itinerary and sat on the sofa next to Frank and read the day’s entry out loud:

‘
Volcano:
Beth and Frank go to the La Brea Tar Pits. Natural asphalt that’s seeped up through the ground over thousands of years and preserved the bones of animals trapped in the tar. Movies filmed at these locations include, and are possibly only:
Volcano
and
Last Action Hero
(although
Last Action Hero
was actually shot in a stunt tar pit elsewhere, so just
Volcano
then). Today’s Fact: The La Brea Tar Pits is a tautology and literally means “the the tar tar pits”.

Beth said that she hadn’t really wanted to go. She’d been once before with Jimmy – which explained why Laura had included it on the itinerary – but she hadn’t enjoyed it that much and it was a long drive.