‘What’s that, love?’ the woman said. She had a lazy eye, maybe two – Frank wasn’t sure, as he found it as difficult to look at her as she did to look at him. When she spoke to Frank she appeared to be looking down and to her left, like one of the broken dolls in the ‘everything 20p’ basket at the back of the shop.
‘I’ll take all three cases, thank you,’ Frank said, and then, referring to the blank address label attached to the suitcase, he said, ‘A suitcase that has never been on holiday. It’s like the toys in Toy Story.’
‘Toys?’ the woman said.
‘Toys really want to be played with. Perhaps it’s the same for suitcases.’
The woman didn’t answer. Frank gestured towards the shop’s DVD shelf where both his copies of Toy Story had originally come from. The woman looked in the shelf’s general direction.
‘It was on one of the DVD extras,’ Frank said. ‘It might have been on the director’s commentary. Suitcases want to go on holiday. It didn’t actually say that. It was about toys, but maybe it’s the same sort of thing for suitcases.’
Frank realized that the woman didn’t know what he was talking about. She probably didn’t even know what a DVD extra was, or that there was anything other than the actual film itself on a DVD. Or she knew that it was in there somewhere but she couldn’t navigate her way through the DVD menu.
Frank presumed that he would one day live up to this stereotype. He was eighty-two. He was probably ten years older than the woman behind the counter. He was bound to start forgetting things soon, or at least stop learning anything new. But, so far, technology wasn’t his nemesis. He could operate all the remote controls in his flat, the buttons were normal-sized and when the batteries ran out he could replace them the right way up. He had an email account at the library and often used the Internet there. Typing the pin number into a debit card machine didn’t terrify him so much that he couldn’t remember what the number was. He still paid all his bills by cheque but that was more to do with his financial ineptitude and lack of thrift, which was a gift that he’d had since he was old enough to be given pocket money. But he could easily find his way through a DVD menu or around the worldwide web like a teenager. Sometimes Frank felt like he was a method actor preparing for his role as an eighty-two-year-old man. A much younger man dressed in an old-man suit and prosthetic make-up so he could walk around town to see how differently people reacted to him. Like Dustin Hoffman in a dress and wig researching for the part of Tootsie.
He paid the woman with the 20p eyes and she put the luggage together, fitting the overnight bag into the smaller case and the smaller case inside the large one, like they were Russian dolls.
‘Are you going anywhere nice?’ she said and Frank wasn’t sure whether she was talking to him or the matching set of luggage.
Frank had thought that because the large suitcase was empty he’d be swinging it about like Rita Tushingham’s handbag, windmilling it along Sea Lane like a clown’s prop or a gymnast’s ribbon. But it was surprisingly heavy with the other bags inside and by the time he’d reached the library, less than fifty yards away from the charity shop, he’d already changed hands three times. His mind may have been rehearsing for the role of a man in his eighties but his body didn’t need the practice. Frank felt like he was carrying two corpses: him and the one in the suitcase.
Outside the library, Fullwind’s nativity scene was set up in a glass-fronted box on a wooden plinth. Last year somebody had stolen the baby Jesus and there was a new Messiah in the manger this year and a new padlock on the box’s glass door. Mary and Joseph and the three wise men were still the same wooden figures that had been used in the Fullwind nativity scene for as long as Frank could remember. They were of a similar age and condition to the angel that sat on the top of his Christmas tree every year. Frank’s angel had a leg missing and the wings had been replaced with two triangles cut out of a cereal box. The angel was as much a traditional part of Christmas as gluttony, sloth and the Queen’s Speech.
Getting the plastic tree and the box of decorations down from the loft was one of Frank’s least favourite annual chores. In the winter the loft would be the coldest place on earth and in the summer it was the hottest; it was like a thermos flask. The cardboard box containing the decorations would be covered in a thick layer of dust and even though its contents were always exactly the same, every year the box felt a bit heavier. Last year Frank was halfway down the ladder with the dusty box above his head when it upended and dropped tinsel and glitter onto his head and a glass bauble onto the carpet below, where it broke into a thousand pieces. Frank was vacuuming up wafer-thin slithers of bauble for ages and there was still glitter and tinsel in his hair and on his cheeks over a week later. The sarcastic man who worked behind the counter of Fullwind Food & Wine had asked him if he was in a glam rock band.
Putting the decorations back in the loft after Christmas was an equally joyless task, and the box and the dismantled tree would often sit in the hall way beyond the twelfth day of Christmas, sometimes until after Easter. Frank had only bothered getting the tree and the decorations out of the loft this year because the fairy lights that he draped around the tree on a table by the living-room window would keep the neighbours from calling the police to kick his front door down because they thought that he might have died.
Frank walked along Sea Lane with his suitcase. He was now holding it in front of his chest in both hands like a squirrel holding an acorn on the front of a birthday card. He could see his flat as soon as he turned the corner, towering above the bungalows that led up to it and continued after it. At this end of Sea Lane Frank’s first-floor flat was the closest thing to a skyscraper. Most of the other multi-storey buildings on Sea Lane had long ago been demolished and replaced with two, three or more bungalows. Once he was out of it, Frank’s flat would probably suffer the same fate.
Sea Lane’s Christmas decorations were subtle – a wreath on the front door or a sprig of holly on the gate. There were no flashing lights or inflatable snowmen, no novelty Father Christmases tied to the chimneys, not a single singing Rudolph or dancing Santa in any of the immaculately kept gardens.
Frank wondered what the decorations were like in America. He imagined teams of reindeer pulling sleighs, driven by life-size and lifelike Santa Clauses along fake snow-covered streets and a brightly lit Christmas tree standing tall in the centre of town, tall enough to make the one in Trafalgar Square look like a Bonsai. The Santa Monica nativity scene probably consisted of a full-sized stable with actors and a real donkey.
Frank tried to remember the names of Father Christmas’s reindeer: Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Donner and Blitzen – what were the others? How many reindeer were there? He knew Rudolph wasn’t actually one of the original reindeer. He thought of turning back and going into the library to look it up on the Internet. He thought how the Internet had not only ruined the simple pleasure of a family passport photo but it had also spoiled the fun of trying to remember the names of Christmas reindeer.
Frank made it home and through his gate and safely into his flat without meeting any of his neighbours. He was happy to tell the travel agent, the man cleaning the photo booth and the woman working in the post office that he was going on holiday but he didn’t want to have to explain to any of his neighbours why he was carrying a suitcase. Had he been on holiday? Why wasn’t he tanned? Was it cold where he’d been? Hadn’t he been yet? Where was he going? Why was he carrying a corpse?
Luckily, most of Frank’s neighbours were indoors. It was too cold for ‘Washes His Car Too Much’ to wash his car or for his next-door neighbour ‘Picks Up Litter’ to use her spiked stick to pick up litter, and the grass didn’t grow in the winter so there was no need for Trims His Lawn With Nail Scissors to live up to his Sioux name.
Frank opened the suitcase on his bed. He took the two smaller bags out and started looking in the wardrobe for holiday clothes. Laura had said that it was sunny on Christmas Day. Frank needed some more suitable clothes.
The last time he’d been on holiday it had rained sideways for a week and he’d worn the same thick jumper and raincoat for the whole holiday. He took his least warm-looking clothes out of the wardrobe and put them in the suitcase. He had no idea what he would be doing when he got to America. He didn’t know if he’d be going out to restaurants with his family or whether they’d spend the whole time on the beach. He put a couple of plain white shirts and a few ties in the case and he took his two flowery shirts out of the wardrobe.
The shirts were so loud and brightly coloured – a mess of flowers, fruit and shapes, like the combined designs of an art class of primary schoolchildren – that without them his wardrobe was like a party after all the fun people had left. It was the wardrobe of a man Frank didn’t want to go on holiday with. He took everything back out of the suitcase except for the two flowery shirts, closed the case and made a mental note to add ‘clothes’ to his holiday list. He would also add ‘travel pillow’, ‘travel plug’, ‘Matchmakers’ and ‘Bill?’
On New Year’s Eve, Frank stayed awake until midnight. He watched Big Ben chiming on television, the crowds counting down in Trafalgar Square and Edinburgh – ‘five, four, three, two, one’ – and then the firework display, and he took the Sellotape off the top of the wine again while everybody on television sang ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and then he went to bed because, as he discovered, no matter how hard you try, you can’t link arms with a cat.
When the first plane of the year flew overhead he got out of bed. Once the giddiness had passed and he didn’t think he was about to fall into the wardrobe again, the stiffness took over. Sometimes he felt so comfortable in bed that he wondered why he ever got up. It was always bound to be a disappointment. The stiffness was in his hips and his knees, and in his shoulders and at the base of his spine. His first steps of the day were like walking with somebody else’s legs. And not new legs. Charity-shop legs from the ‘everything 20p’ basket at the back of the shop.
Frank was envious of Bill. He’d got up at the same time as Frank but he was already on his way down the hall to the kitchen as though he’d been doing warm-ups in his sleep. Though, of course, Bill might have been hiding his pain or discomfort behind his unfathomable cryptic clue of a face.
Frank went to the toilet, then he fed Bill and let him out into the garden. His joints were gradually warming up and his bones creaked less on the way back up the stairs than they had on the way down. By midday, he would have built up enough kinetic energy to get him through the day. By two o’clock, he’d be bored. All charged up with nowhere to go.
He rang Beth to wish her a happy new year. Even though it was still last year in America and the holiday taint wasn’t quite over.
‘Hello?’
Frank had realized in recent years that Beth was more amused and even flattered when Frank mistook her for Laura than Laura ever seemed to be when she was mistaken for her mother, so when he wasn’t sure which one of them had answered the phone he always asked the same question.
‘Is that Laura?’
‘Hi, Frank.’
‘Happy New Year.’
‘Is it? Thanks.’ He could hear the television. There was laughter and applause, singing and gunfire, a heated argument in Spanish and a fitness instructor counting loudly between intakes of breath. He presumed she was switching channels.
‘I thought you’d be out tonight celebrating,’ Frank said.
‘It’s my least favourite night of the year, to be frank. Frank.’ With the pause between frank and Frank, she obviously knew that she was making a joke, but with her polygraph-baffling voice it was hard to be sure. ‘I don’t like being dictated to when I should be having fun,’ she said.
‘Oh, neither do I,’ Frank said. ‘What are you doing instead?’
‘Just watching TV.’
‘What’s on?’
‘Nothing.’
‘I watched that last night.’
‘Disappointing, isn’t it? I won’t watch it again.’
‘Neither will I. Not till next New Year’s Eve at least.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Is your mother there?’
‘She’s asleep. Do you want me to wake her?’
‘Oh no. That’s all right. It isn’t midnight yet there, is it?’
‘Not yet.’
Even when she was a child Beth would always insist on staying up until midnight on New Year’s Eve. When she was yawning and nodding off she would force herself to stay awake until the twelve chimes and then she’d be fast asleep in seconds and Frank would carry her up to bed; so now Frank was worried.
‘Lump has worn her out,’ Laura said. She switched off the television or muted the volume and the gunfire and the singing, the laughter and applause stopped abruptly. ‘I just sent you an update.’
‘The library’s closed,’ Frank said. ‘I’ll have to read it in a couple of days. What did it say?’
‘Brief synopsis?’ Laura said. ‘Have you seen Roman Holiday?’
‘The film? Yes.’
‘You know how Audrey Hepburn is in love with Gregory Peck even though she’s a princess and he’s a journalist and at the end she’s smiling at that press conference but she just seems so sad?’
‘I’m not sure. Yes. I think so.’
‘Mom’s a bit like that at the moment. There’s an under-current of Audrey melancholy to her.’
‘I see. At least I think I do. You mean she’s unhappy?’
‘And happy at the same time. You won’t need to read the email now.’
‘And how are you?’ Frank said. He thought that he might have already asked but he worried that Laura might begin to resent her mother for having the monopoly on everyone’s sympathy. There was little chance of that, though, as Laura shrugged Frank’s enquiry off with her usual nonchalance.
‘I’m about to miss this movie, that’s how I am,’ she said.
Frank asked her to wish Beth a happy new year and they said goodbye. Before Laura put the phone down Frank heard the volume of the television go back up and what sounded like the crackling and warped opening music of an old black-and-white movie.
He went into the kitchen and made a cup of tea. While he waited for the kettle to boil he looked out of the kitchen window. The rain was overflowing from the guttering that ran along the underside of the roof. It needed fixing but that wasn’t his problem any more. Homelessness, or at least the notion of it, was surprisingly liberating.
For the next two days Frank packed and repacked his suitcase, laying his clothes flat in the case and then taking them out and replacing them rolled up. He tried a combination of shirts and trousers laid flat at the centre of the case and pants and socks rolled up and inserted around the edges. He wanted to fill the suitcase enough for him to have to sit on it to shut it, but he didn’t have enough clothes that he wanted to take. He hadn’t realized how many woollen products he owned. Would he need a jacket or a coat? Was it going to be too hot for socks?
He filled in the suitcase address label and wondered what would happen if his suitcase was lost and eventually returned; would he still be here to accept it? Would the address on the label even exist? He probably should have been packing the flat up to move rather than for a holiday but he carried on packing and repacking. He bought a pair of Desert Storm chocolate-chip and cookie dough camouflage cargo pants from the charity shop that many people would have said he was too old to wear, which was exactly why he bought them, that and the six pockets: side, back and halfway down the legs of the trousers. Frank thought that he would need extra pockets in America, for his passport and his money. He bought some flip-flops with soles like Liquorice Allsorts and some new socks and underpants in the big Sainsbury’s and, just in case six pockets weren’t enough, he bought a zip-up travel document pouch. It was difficult to choose the right clothes for a Californian summer holiday in the midst of an English winter. Like shopping for food just after a big meal, and Frank wasn’t sure if anything he bought was suitable.
While he
was in the supermarket he went back to the travel agents and picked up some more Californian holiday brochures. He sat at home and stared at pictures of Disneyland and Universal Studios, the Hollywood sign, Griffith Observatory and the billboards on Sunset Strip. He looked at photographs of the Chinese Theatre and the Egyptian theatre and at the beaches of Venice and Santa Monica, where Beth and Laura had cycled. Where better to go to escape reality than Hollywood? When he’d turned the knob on the gas fire so many times to unsuccessfully get it to light that he felt blisters forming on his thumb and his forefinger, he gave up and went to the library instead because it was warm there and he could look at the seating plan for his flight on the Internet one more time. He worked out where the emergency exits and the toilets were and he imagined who he might be seated next to and what the food would be like and what inflight movies would be showing.
Frank had seen a lot of movies but he’d never seen an in-flight movie. At least there wouldn’t be any films about air disasters. Ever since he’d booked his flights, every film he watched seemed to have a plane crash or hijacking in it. They’d taken the place of the cancer stories on his TV. There were bombs on planes, snakes on planes, engine fires and failures, planes crashing into mountains and the passengers eating each other. And then there were the air-crash documentaries, the planes landing on rivers and on busy freeways on the news and the drunk-pilots and lost-luggage stories. Last night Frank had watched a report on the news about deep-vein thrombosis on long-haul flights. Like a lot of other things – the flu, cold weather, hot weather – as an eighty-two-year-old, Frank was in the at-risk group. He typed ‘DVT’ in to Google images on the library computer and almost fainted onto the keyboard. After adding ‘flight compression socks’ to his holiday shopping list he read the latest email from Laura.
Subject: ‘Lump’.
What’s up, Frank,
Lump has had a particularly spiteful couple of days. Mom says she’s tired but she’s too tired to sleep and she’s been moping about the house like a grounded teenager.
Frank Derrick's Holiday of a Lifetime Page 5