Last night he’d dreamed that he was involved in a game of chicken with Jimmy. They were both driving towards the edge of a cliff when Frank’s shirt somehow got tangled around the handle of his car door and he couldn’t get the door open. Just as he was about to drive over the cliff, Frank woke up. It took him a moment to realize that the dream wasn’t familiar because it was a recurring one, but because it was a scene from Rebel Without a Cause. Now he wondered if the locked car door aspect of the dream had been a premonition or a form of déjà vu.
In the real world, of course, Frank wouldn’t have even known how to start the car. He’d never learned how to drive. It was one of those things that he’d always meant to do, like getting a professional shave. What was it that people said about learning to drive? It takes one lesson for every year of your life before you were ready to pass your driving test? Frank would now need eighty-two driving lessons. Not only could he not drive but he also couldn’t change a tyre or put petrol in the car either. He didn’t know how to light a barbecue or set up a snooker table. He couldn’t grout or glaze, fire a rifle or put up a tent without help. If there genuinely had been something wrong with Jimmy’s car he would have been of no help.
He brought a chair over from under the table and sat down at the living-room window. Bill was next to him on the window sill and the two of them watched, waiting for Beth to return. Passing drivers might have thought that Bill was stuffed if his otherwise fixed stare hadn’t followed them as they drove by the house.
Since arriving in America, Bill hadn’t exactly seen the sights but he’d been stroked by Beth and Laura more times than Frank had ever managed. Frank and Bill had been living alone together as a couple for so long that there was very little physical contact between them any more. Laura would tickle Bill’s belly and wave her hands around in front of his face for him to try and pat with his paws. He’d never been so fussed over. Bill probably didn’t want to go home either.
After fifteen minutes at the window, Frank started to feel himself getting cramp in his leg and he left Bill to keep a lookout while he went for a short walk to stretch his legs. In the kitchen he filled the kettle. He was developing a taste for coffee and wondered if he would still like it when he got back home, or if it would turn out to be one of those holiday drinks like ouzo or grappa that became undrinkable when the holiday was over. He took a cup down from the shelf and opened the cupboard above and looked at the neat rows of tins. Sleeping With the Enemy. That was the name of the film that he’d been trying to remember. He would have to wait until he got back to Fullwind and the library before he could find out the name of the actor who tidied the kitchen cupboard and straightened Julia Roberts’s towels so terrifyingly in the film.
There was a calendar on the kitchen wall. On the last day of his holiday Beth had written ‘Dad goes home’ in red pen. He wondered how she’d felt when she’d written it and tried to detect traces of relief or sadness in the pen strokes and check for hidden asides in invisible brackets: (thank God) or (at long last).
While the kettle boiled he switched the TV on to drown out his internal monologue that seemed desperate to discuss going home. On the local news a freak hailstorm had covered a small area on the other side of Los Angeles in a layer of what looked like snow. Children were having a snowball fight on an outdoor basketball court while their parents were interviewed on camera in the foreground. The freak weather was so unusual that the children had to wear oven gloves and plastic carrier bags taped over their hands to pick up the snowballs because they didn’t own any gloves. Frank looked out of the window. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.
He watched the rest of the news and a few advertisements with their speedily read terms and conditions that invalidated all the claims made that preceded them. There was an advert for ‘senior assisted living’ in a luxury retirement beachside home that showed a lot of very happy retired people walking around the gardens and sitting by fountains and under palm trees. A full calendar of events and activities was promised for the residents. T’ai chi, bridge, chess and opera. Movies, fitness and computer classes, mini golf, dog shows, makeovers and chair volleyball. There was a pool and a sauna. Frank thought of Greyflick House with its armchairs in a circle and the smell of school dinners and everyone looking bored. Even though Greyflick House was less than a quarter of a mile from the beach, the sea view was obscured by a housing estate and an incinerator.
Frank thought about his flat. He pictured prospective buyers being shown around and criticizing his furniture, turning their noses up at the smell that he’d left behind and laughing at the bedroom wallpaper that Sheila had chosen and spent over a year talking Frank into putting up. He thought that perhaps nobody had been round to view the flat at all because the building was wrapped in crime-scene tape and the garden was full of television-news camera crews while a long line of police and concerned members of the community spread out across and all the way along Sea Lane, conducting a fingertip search for clues to Frank Derrick’s whereabouts. Frogmen were suiting up. Putting on their flippers and spitting into their goggles, preparing to drag the pond on the green behind the library.
He saw himself in the near future, pushing a shopping trolley full of old TV sets past a KFC or saying the words, ‘Big Issue’ to passing shoppers ignoring him outside the big Sainsbury’s. He’d steal shoes and a winter coat from a cardboard box left on the pavement by the door of the charity shop and find past-its-sell-by-date food in the bins behind Fullwind Food & Wine.
He switched the television off, made a cup of coffee and walked around the house. There were items of furniture and books and pictures in the living room that he recognized that Beth must have brought with her from England. The living-room desk was a present from Frank and Sheila when she’d first moved into her own home in Croydon.
Beth’s bedroom door was open and he went inside. The blind was closed and he switched on the light. It was the largest room in the house but still not particularly spacious. Beth’s clothes were draped on every available surface as though she’d been trying on a number of outfits before leaving in a hurry for a party. The double bed was unmade on one side and unslept-in on the other.
On what was technically the far side of the room there was a glass-fronted display cabinet. It took up almost the full length of the wall. Inside the cabinet there were various superhero action figures, all still in their boxes and wrapped in cellophane. They were arranged in the cabinet by size, character and movie franchise. They obviously belonged to Jimmy. Frank was reminded of the unplayed-with and consequently unhappy toys that he’d seen on the Toy Story DVD but also of his own collection of figurines on the mantelpiece at home. His mishmash collection was displayed with less care and attention to order and detail than Jimmy’s and was likely of considerably less financial worth. Above the cabinet there was a bookcase full of comic books and graphic novels arranged by size, the colour of their spines and then in alphabetical order.
There was an old-fashioned record player in the bedroom but no records. Frank wondered if it had ever been used, or if the turntable had never turned and was as sad about that as the still-boxed action figures were for having never seen any action.
Beth leaving Jimmy’s boxed superheroes and the comic books on display was like the actions of a parent of a missing child keeping the room of their lost loved one exactly as it had been left just in case the child should ever return. Beth had left at least one side of the bedroom untouched. And tidy too. It was like a shrine to Jimmy. She hadn’t put everything away or into storage and she hadn’t thrown his record player out of the window and Frank suspected that if he opened the sliding doors of the wardrobe he would find that she hadn’t cut all of Jimmy’s shirts up either. Frank wanted to ring Laura and tell her of the evidence that he’d found but she obviously already knew.
He switched the light off and came out of the bedroom. He went back to the window where he slipped into his James Stewart impression, reciting lines from Rear Window. The street
was too wide and there were trees in the way so he wasn’t able to spy effectively on the neighbours. If there was a romance or a murder taking place in any of the houses opposite he couldn’t see it. He looked at Bill on the window sill beside him and he thought that Grace Kelly had let herself go.
When Beth came back, cat beat man to the door to welcome her. Bill nuzzled at Beth’s legs and purred while she spoke gibberish to him in a high baby voice that Frank had always felt too self-conscious to use, even when he was completely alone with the cat. Frank called Bill in from the garden as though he was trying to get the attention of a waiter at the end of a meal. Beth crouched down to stroke Bill and he arched his back, pushing his face into her palm, his purr now like an idling steam tractor.
When Beth and Frank left a few minutes later, as they drove away, Frank saw Bill sitting at the window, watching.
‘Should I have moved him?’ Frank said. ‘Or shut the blind?’
‘If the neighbours haven’t noticed him by now they never will,’ Beth said.
They counted down the streets until they reached the Third Street Promenade and its shops. Beth was going to help Frank find a birthday present for Laura. He’d never given much thought in the past to what to buy either Laura or Beth for their birthdays or Christmas. When Sheila was alive she’d always made those decisions and Frank’s contribution had rarely extended beyond writing ‘and Dad’ on a card. In the years following Sheila’s death he would post a cheque for their birthdays and send another cheque at Christmas. If he had ever read his bank statements he would have seen that the cheques were never cashed. Frank treated his bank statements in the same way as his utility bills. He thought that if he didn’t open the envelopes then the contents had no real power.
They walked along the pedestrianized street – possibly the only one in LA – looking in shop windows and when they went inside one of the shops, Frank tried his best not to give off any signals of boredom. He’d never enjoyed shopping but he was glad to be spending time with his daughter. He would have been just as happy if they were getting their nails done or sitting in a beauty salon with their feet in a pool of fish.
They went into a movie memorabilia shop where he didn’t need to fake his interest in the things on sale. He looked at the posters and the signed photographs and action figures, and Beth seemed to become entranced, or at least distracted, by the rows of superheroes and villains.
When Frank had almost forgotten why they’d gone into the shop, he found a book that was written by Bette Davis. On the cover she was dressed in black and smoking a cigarette. Frank opened the book to the first page and he saw that it was signed.
‘I’m going to buy this,’ he said, a little too loudly and pleased with himself.
‘How much is it?’ Beth said.
Frank looked at the price. The difference in emotions from first discovering the book to seeing how much it cost was exactly the reason he didn’t open his bank statements.
‘That’s a lot of money,’ Beth said.
Frank thought about it. He asked Beth how many dollars there were to the pound. It was the third or fourth time that he’d asked her since his arrival. Almost as many times as he’d asked her what the time would be in England.
‘I’ve hardly spent anything since I’ve been here,’ he said. ‘And Laura must have spent a fortune on me this week.’
‘Well, it’s up to you,’ Beth said.
‘I’ll get it.’
At the counter a man in an old green cardigan told Frank and Beth that the book had been published not long after a book written by Bette Davis’s daughter.
‘That book was not particularly complimentary. Not the hagiography one might expect from one’s own child,’ the man said. He was American but he had more of an English accent than Frank. Frank wondered if it was just his work accent and whether the man took his English accent off with his cardigan when he got home.
‘The final chapter,’ the man said.
‘Spoiler alert,’ Beth said but the man continued.
‘It takes the form of a letter from Bette Davis to her daughter. It expresses her sense of betrayal at the book written by her daughter. The tension between mother and daughter was, I’m afraid, exploited to market both books. Do you have any daughters?’
Frank and Beth both answered yes in unison.
‘I have two sons. William and Benjamin. Shall I gift-wrap it?’ the man said.
Beth said yes before Frank could answer, guessing (correctly) that her father might be about to tell the man that he had once had two cats named Bill and Ben, until Ben was killed in a car accident.
The man wrapped the book. The folds and joins of the wrapping paper were perfect and he used the smallest amount of Sellotape so that it could barely be seen. When he handed the wrapped book to Frank the paper around it was as tight as the sheets on a hospital bed.
They left the shop and Beth repeated her concern that it had been a lot of money for a book. She said that she would be coming back to see whether the man had replaced it on the shelf with another ‘unique signed copy’. She asked Frank if he wanted to get an ice cream and when he said yes, she said, ‘Get me one too. I need to find a bathroom. I’ll have a single scoop Rocky Road.’
‘A single what what what?’ Frank said.
‘A single scoop Rocky Road.’
Frank repeated it to himself.
‘Wait until I get back, if you like.’
‘I’ve bought ice cream before,’ Frank said with what he hoped was casual bravado. In reality he was scared by the prospect. ‘What do I do?’
‘Go up and ask for the ice creams and give them the money.’
‘The same as at home?’
‘The same. If they’re a bit friendlier don’t let it freak you out.’
‘Should I give them a tip?’
‘Give them a couple of bucks. Do you have enough money?’
‘I think so,’ he said. He checked his pocket. ‘What was it you wanted again?’
‘Single scoop Rocky Road. Meet me over there.’
Beth pointed to a seated area and went to look for a bathroom.
Frank walked up to the ice-cream stall, repeating single scoop Rocky Road to himself along the way.
‘Yes, sir, what can I do for you today?’ a young man in a white shirt and black bow tie said.
Frank ordered two single scoops of Rocky Road.
‘That’s a single scoop two times?’ the man said.
‘Yes please.’
‘Two separate ice creams?’
‘Yes, thank you very much.’
The man asked what cones Frank wanted. He looked back to see if Beth was back yet but she wasn’t, so he chose the first one on the left.
‘Are you from Australia?’ the man said as he scooped the ice cream.
‘England,’ Frank said.
‘Whereabouts?’
‘Sussex.’
‘Sussex,’ the man said, unconsciously mimicking Frank’s accent. ‘Vacation?’ He then asked a question about ice-cream toppings and Frank still couldn’t see Beth so he said ‘yes’ to the vacation question and ‘no thank you’ to whatever the other thing the man had said was.
He walked over to the seated area with the ice creams and waited for Beth. There was a small crowd watching a man break-dancing. Beth came back.
‘How did you get on?’ she said.
Frank gave her one of the ice creams, noticeably pleased with himself.
‘The man thought I was Australian. I’m beginning to doubt my own past.’
‘Did you tip?’
‘I told him not to tie his shoelaces in a revolving door.’
‘That’s a very good tip.’
‘Thank you.’
They sat down on the edge of a man-made pond and ate ice cream, watching the break-dancer spinning on his head on a flattened-out cardboard box.
‘Let me know if you’re tired,’ Beth said. ‘We can always go back to the house.’
‘I’m fine.’
‘Okay, but if you are tired just say. Okay?’
‘Okay.’
The break-dancer climbed an invisible wall.
‘When I was in the hospital,’ Frank said, ‘after the accident, the doctor told me I had the heart of an ox, which I presumed was a good thing.’
‘Perhaps it depends on the ox,’ Beth said.
‘He said I had good blood too. They took so much of it when I was in hospital I was surprised I had any left. I had an arm like a heroin addict by the time I was discharged.’
Beth had been hearing her father’s stories for a lot longer than Laura but she would probably never fully get used to some of the things he said.
‘The same doctor described my facial injuries to a group of medical students by saying I looked like a wasp chewing a bulldog.’
‘I think you mean a bulldog chewing a wasp.’
‘That’s what I said. But the doctor said, no, definitely a wasp chewing a bulldog and he passed me a mirror. He was one of those laughter-is-the-best-medicine doctors you mentioned.’
‘Did I?’ Beth said.
‘You were talking about Laura and the way she dealt with illness.’
The break-dancer ended his routine and the watching crowd applauded. He folded up his cardboard dance floor and was replaced by a busker who plugged in an electric guitar to a small amplifier.
Frank asked Beth, if she didn’t mind talking about it, what had happened yesterday when Jimmy had come to the house. She said that he was dropping off a present for Laura and he hadn’t realized that she would be in.
‘He seemed more embarrassed than anything. He just wanted to leave the wine and the flowers and go.’
Frank Derrick's Holiday of a Lifetime Page 14