Frank Derrick's Holiday of a Lifetime

by J. B. Morrison

  ‘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.

  ‘It says here that the obligatory Rocky III training montage was shot here. Perhaps they’re filming now.’ They watched the joggers until they were out of sight.

  Beth put a hand under her armpit. Frank had noticed her do the same thing on the pier. He wondered if she was checking for new lumps or to make sure that the lump was definitely gone. He wanted to ask her whether it had hurt or if it still did but he was also reminded of when she was very young and he had tried to teach her to make armpit fart sounds. No matter how many times Beth had tried, with her hand pushed tighter and tighter into her armpit as she flapped like a one-winged rooster, she couldn’t produce an audible raspberry. The harder she tried and failed the angrier it would make her, which, in turn, would make Frank laugh more uncontrollably, until Beth would storm out of the room sulking and he would eventually have to go and apologize. Beth couldn’t waggle her ears or flare her nostrils either or play a pop tune by opening her mouth and slapping herself on the cheeks and she soon realized that the only way that she would ever follow in her father’s footsteps was by standing on his feet and holding onto his hands while he walked her around the room.

  ‘Do you think you’ll get divorced?’ Frank said.

  It was an unexpected question, somewhat out of the blue and possibly one that nobody had asked her yet. It at least distracted her from ‘Lump’ as she considered it for a while. ‘I don’t really know,’ she said. ‘I might have the grounds but I don’t have the willpower at the moment. Jimmy’s American, I’ve got dual nationality, we were married in the UK but we’re both US residents, there’s a child – an almost twenty-one-year-old child – but still, it’s complicated, Dad. There’s no pre-nup and I’ve got enough admin to do at work as it is.’

  Beth could see that Frank didn’t know what a pre-nup was, or possibly admin either and she explained about pre-nups, giving him a few recent famous multi-million-dollar celebrity examples.

  ‘Me and your mother didn’t have one of those,’ Frank said.

  ‘I think you and Mum were pre-pre-nup.’

  ‘Not that we had anything that was worth arguing over anyway. I do f
eel sorry for the rich and successful. Do you want me to talk to him?’

  ‘Jimmy? Dad, God, no, of course not.’ The idea seemed to horrify her.

  ‘Thank Christ for that,’ Frank said. ‘I wouldn’t know what to say.’

  A speedboat overtook the joggers and bounced along the water behind the pier.

  ‘It’s like watching an episode of Baywatch,’ Frank said. ‘Was that filmed here?’ He pretended to consult the itinerary.

  ‘Actually yes,’ Beth said. ‘Just along the beach a bit. Did you want to go there? You might meet Pamela Anderson. She sometimes comes out of her hut and saves a drowning child in slow motion.’ Beth smiled in the same way that Frank had done when he’d claimed never to have seen Big.

  ‘I could shoot him, if you like?’ Frank said. ‘I understand you can buy a gun in Woolworth’s over here.’

  ‘Yes, shoot Jimmy for me,’ Beth said. ‘Thank you, Dad. That would be a great help.’ After Frank didn’t answer for ten seconds, just for clarification, Beth said, ‘I’m joking, by the way. Don’t shoot Jimmy.’

  ‘Maybe you’ll get back together instead,’ Frank said.

  ‘Wow, Dad. You should be a marriage guidance counsellor.’

  ‘What’s the pay like?’

  Beth laughed and she put her hand on Frank’s leg.

  ‘It’s good to see you,’ she said.

  They sat together watching more joggers and beach gymnasts and the speedboat making its return trip along the water. When Frank started to get cramp and backache Beth helped him up and they walked slowly back to the car and drove along the coast to meet Laura for an early dinner.

  At the restaurant Beth paid a man dressed like a snooker player to park the car and they went inside where a waiter showed them to a table on the patio overlooking the marina and the yachts and powerboats. A different waiter introduced himself as Curtis and he took their drink orders. Frank ordered a beer, justifying his choice to Beth, who hadn’t questioned it, by saying, ‘I am on holiday.’

  Beth asked Frank if the sun was too bright for him and if he wanted to swap places with her or go and sit inside instead.

  ‘I’m fine here, thank you,’ he said. He hated being fussed over by everyone but Beth. ‘I was hoping to go home with at least a little bit of souvenir sunburn.’

  Laura arrived. She was dressed in black from her shoes to the sunglasses perched on top of her head. She said ‘hi’ and sat down. Curtis came back and Laura completed her look with a black iced tea and then they all ordered food. Frank had a California omelette, which came with avocado, mushrooms, onions, tomato, garlic and shallots, Jack Cheddar and Swiss cheese. There was a slice of orange on the side of the plate. Frank had never seen fruit on the same plate as an omelette before and he thought that possibly it could have fallen from another customer’s dessert as the waiter had walked by. He wasn’t sure whether to eat the orange, squeeze the juice onto the omelette, or leave it on the side of the plate because it was just there for decorative purposes. It might not even have been sliced from a real orange.

  Beth asked him whether he was feeling any of the effects of jetlag yet and he said that he didn’t think so. When he was in the library researching deep-vein thrombosis, he’d read about the symptoms of jetlag: the indigestion, constipation and diarrhoea, the nausea, the loss of appetite, the difficulty in concentrating, the feeling disorientated, anxious and irritable, the memory problems, the clumsiness, the lethargy, the lightheadedness, the confusion and the headaches, the muscle soreness and generally feeling unwell, and he’d concluded that he might not notice if he even had jetlag. It would be as different to how he normally felt as Christmas Day was to every other day of the year.

  ‘What would you be doing now? If you were at home?’ Laura asked.

  ‘What day is it?’ Frank asked.

  ‘Tuesday,’ Laura said.

  ‘It might already be Wednesday in England,’ Beth said.

  ‘You’d be mistaken for thinking that at my age it doesn’t matter,’ Frank said. ‘But if it’s Tuesday, Tuesday is over-seventies cocktails night at the village hall. I would have had a few Martinis by now. There’s usually some dancing, salsa or tango, a couple more Martinis, and then a fight in the car park before Midnight Blue Movies Club starts at the library: nothing too strong by today’s standards, more nostalgia than pornography, although it does attract a few perverts. But if it’s Wednesday, that’s my night off. Sod all happens on Wednesday.’

  Laura laughed and Beth sighed.

  After the main course Frank looked up and down the long list of cheesecake options. There were over thirty different types and he couldn’t decide which one to have. By the time he’d read the last one on the menu he’d forgotten what all the others were before it and he had to start again at the top of the list.

  ‘What time is your flight home?’ Laura said and Frank tried to remember until he realized that she was being sarcastic.

  He said that he’d only ever eaten cheesecake once before. It was a frozen one that he’d bought from Fullwind Food & Wine where they only had the one flavour. Cheesecake flavour. He’d been going through a period of eating almost exclusively puddings and desserts. Food had become boring for him. He didn’t really cook. He opened tins and heated up the contents. He ate spaghetti in hoops, letters, numbers and dinosaurs. Food manufactured for fussy children. But he still enjoyed desserts. So often he skipped straight to the mousses, ice cream, sorbets and caramel puddings, the lemon meringue pies and trifles.

  ‘Shall I pick one for you?’ Laura said and she chose a banana cheesecake. It arrived covered in whipped cream and slices of banana and again Frank was not sure where the food ended and the garnish began. He was too full to eat even half of the cheesecake and Laura leaned across the table and cleared his plate for him a spoonful at a time.

  After the meal Curtis came to the table with a Hot Fudge Sundae in a shot glass and a candle at its centre. He placed the glass on the table and lit the candle and he and the other waiters and waitresses started to sing ‘Happy Birthday’. It wasn’t Laura’s birthday for another five days but Frank mumbled along like he was in an English church. He looked at Laura who seemed to be singing happy birthday to herself but when the song reached the line with her name in, and Frank finally found his voice to loudly join in and sing ‘Laura’, Beth and the Cheesecake Factory workers sang ‘dear Fra-ank’ instead, and then quite a few of the other diners joined in for the final ‘to you’, complete with harmonies. In order to stop everyone from staring at him Frank blew out the single candle and accepted the applause. The diners returned to their meals and the staff went back to serving them.

  ‘Happy birthday!’ Laura said.

  ‘Yes, happy considerably belated or early birthday, Dad.’ Beth raised her glass of tap water.

  ‘I presumed it was for you,’ Frank said to Laura.

  ‘God, no way,’ Laura said. ‘I don’t like surprises.’

  Frank looked at the tiny glass with the lone candle, still smoking.

  ‘You’ll have to imagine the other candles,’ Beth said.

  ‘They’d certainly need a larger glass,’ Frank said.

  ‘And the fire department on standby,’ Laura said.

  Laura had to eat Frank’s birthday surprise and because he had never felt quite so full he wished that he’d worn his loose-fitting cargo pants. Beth paid for the meal, refusing money from Frank when he offered it. After they left the restaurant two snooker players brought both cars round to the entrance. Beth asked which car Frank wanted to go back to the house in.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t mind. Really.’

  ‘Come on, Frank,’ Laura said. She clapped her hands to hurry him up. ‘It’s not Sophie’s Choice.’ Beth shook her head. ‘Poor taste?’ Laura said.

  ‘Always,’ Beth said.

  Laura had to make Frank’s decision for him again and they drove back to the house in convoy, Beth and Frank up front with Laura following behind. They drove as near to t
he beach as they could so that Frank could see the pier at night with the lights on and he thought again how everything he’d seen since he’d been here had been like a movie. Today there had been the old men playing chess on the beach, the gymnasts, the people jogging and cycling along the boardwalk, the middle-aged couple on Segways, the woman on roller skates towing a chihuahua behind her on a skateboard, the man doing tai chi, the yoga class, the weightlifters and the beach volleyballers. They were all the movie’s background actors.

  Even the pier didn’t look real. The bright playschool colours of the Ferris wheel and the roller coaster and rides of the amusement park that had looked like an enormous Mouse Trap board game in the daylight were now lit up like a pinball machine. Frank thought that in a few days’ time, when filming on the pier was finished for the ‘dumb show’ that Beth was keen not to appear on, Hollywood Teamsters would arrive to dismantle the amusement park and the pier and they’d load everything onto trucks to be packed away in a props warehouse. They’d deflate the hills in the distance like Laura’s air bed and all the gymnasts, the beach volley-ballers and the Segway riders, all the street performers, trapeze artists and the old men leaning over the sides of the pier fishing for halibut, even the man with the Bluetooth and the cigarette; they would all go back to their day jobs in hotel bars and cheesecake factories.

  14

  Aviator: Drive to Hollywood Boulevard and the Chinese Theatre to see the footprints and handprints of the stars. Discover what it’s like to be in Tom Hanks’s shoes again and also his gloves. Followed by a ‘Homes of the Hollywood Stars Luxury Minibus Tour’.

  Movies filmed at these locations include: Gangster Squad, Forrest Gump, Twins, Italian Job (lame remake), The Aviator, Iron Man 3.

  Today’s Fact: The Chinese Theatre has changed its name three times: from Grauman’s Chinese Theatre to Mann’s Chinese Theatre and finally to TCL Chinese Theatre, which may be the least Hollywood-sounding of the three, but unlike all the other owners, they were at least actually Chinese.