‘I can’t remember. It would have needed bleeping out on the television though.’
Frank remembered exactly what Beth had said but he didn’t want to repeat it in front of his granddaughter. He could remember it like it was yesterday. Beth picking herself up from the grass, swearing and kicking the still-spinning back wheel of the fallen bike.
‘Thank God there was no one else around because your grandmother and I would have looked like the worst parents in the world, trying not to laugh at our crying and possibly injured child because she’d said a rude word. Two rude words.’
‘I though you couldn’t remember what she said,’ Laura said.
‘I remember the amount, not the actual words.’
‘She still sulks,’ Laura said. ‘For America now but she still sulks. And she swears.’ She tutted. ‘She’s a terrible mother.’
Beth was five feet away.
‘And here she comes,’ Laura said.
‘What’s that?’ Beth said.
‘Frank was telling me about how you used to fall off your bike. And what a potty-mouthed child you were.’
‘Any rude words I used must have been picked up from somewhere,’ Beth said. ‘And it certainly wasn’t Mum.’
Frank held up his hands to protest his innocence. Beth put a drink can in one of his outstretched hands. She gave another drink to Laura and sat down. They opened the drinks. Frank looked out at the sea.
‘What’s on the other side?’ he said. ‘If you swam and kept on going where would you eventually end up?’
‘Hawaii,’ Beth said.
‘Where your people come from,’ Laura said, gesturing at his shirt with its elaborate fruit-and-flowers pattern. Her sarcasm was even sharper with a hangover. Frank looked down at the shirt. Laura and Beth laughed.
‘Don’t you like it?’ Frank said.
‘It’s great, Dad,’ Beth said.
‘It’s like it’s rebelling against the pants’ desire to not be seen,’ Laura laughed and Frank looked at his camouflage cargo pants.
‘They are a bit ridiculous, aren’t they?’ Frank said. ‘I don’t know what I was thinking. I was blinded by all the pockets.’
When a circle of drummers started loudly banging plastic oil drums and dustbin lids close by Laura held her head in her hands as if she was in pain.
‘How are you enjoying being twenty-one?’ Beth said.
‘I will never drink again,’ Laura said. ‘One more reason why it isn’t a happy number.’
‘Have you told Dad about happy numbers?’ Beth said.
Laura took her hands away from the sides of her head. She told Frank how there were happy numbers and unhappy numbers and twenty-one was unhappy.
‘Recreational math,’ she said.
‘Right,’ Frank said.
‘Okay,’ Laura said. ‘So, you pick a number and then square each of that number’s digits, add the answers and repeat. Keep doing the same until you’re left with one and that means the number you started with is happy. Eighty-two is a happy number.’
‘Is it?’ Frank said.
‘Yes,’ Laura said. ‘To find out if it’s happy, you split the two digits of eighty-two so you have an eight and a two. With me so far?’
‘Yes,’ Frank said.
‘Multiply the eight by itself, which is sixty-four, and multiply the two by itself, which is four. Still with me?’
‘I think so.’
‘Add those two answers together, sixty-four plus four equals sixty-eight. Do the same again. Separate the two digits of sixty-eight and multiply. Six multiplied by six is thirty-six and eight multiplied by eight is sixty-four. Add them together and that gives you a hundred. Now split the one hundred into single digits. One, zero and zero. One multiplied by one is one, zero multiplied by zero is zero, and the other zero multiplied by zero is zero. You’ve reached your final answer of one. Which means that eighty-two is a happy number.’
Frank didn’t say anything.
‘I’ve got a headache now,’ Beth groaned and put a hand on her forehead.
‘If you apply that equation to twenty-one you’ll never reach the number one. So that makes it unhappy,’ Laura said. ‘I’ve got to wait until I’m twenty-three for my next happy number.’
Frank said that he thought that he understood but Laura didn’t believe him and she explained it again, this time drawing the sums in the sand with her finger which didn’t really help as the sand was too fine and dry to read what she was writing.
‘When is my next happy number?’ Frank said.
Laura thought about it for a while and then she said, ‘Ninety-one. Mom’s is unhappy too.’
‘Oh great, thanks,’ Beth said. ‘How many years do I have to wait to be a happy number again?’
While Laura worked it out Frank told them both about the toys that weren’t played with and suitcases that had never been on holiday. The formula was simpler and he didn’t need to draw it in the sand. He didn’t mention Jimmy’s unopened action figures who’d never seen any action though. He didn’t want to admit to snooping around the house and going into Beth’s room, or, until she cut his shirts up and put his toys in storage, ‘Beth and Jimmy’s room’.
‘Sixty-seven,’ Laura said. ‘Your next happy number, Mom.’
‘I demand a recount,’ Beth said.
When the drum circle became too much for Laura’s hangover, they quadricycled back along the beach. On a stretch of the trail that was wide enough to not cause a traffic jam Frank and Laura swapped places and Frank pedalled. It was hard work but it felt good to not be a passenger for a change. After they’d cycled about fifty yards he felt like he’d completed his second marathon in as many days.
Later, at the house, Beth and Laura disagreed over who should drive Jimmy’s car to Pasadena for its service. Laura said that it would make more sense if she kept it for another day and then Beth could drive the car to work the day after and meet Jimmy for lunch. Frank imagined that Laura would have somehow made sure that the lunch took place in a candlelit restaurant, where she would arrange for a violinist to stand by their table and serenade them with familiar songs from their past before a man selling single red roses showed up. After the candlelit dinner – which would be in a Chinese restaurant – two fortune cookies would appear with the bill. In one cookie the message would say that Love would find a way and in the other fortune cookie there would be a ring. By this time it would be late and Jimmy would have had too much to drink (in Frank’s imagined scenario he’d forgotten that Jimmy was practically teetotal) and he wouldn’t be able to drive Beth home and they’d have to book into a hotel. Frank thought that he might have been right in the first place when he’d believed that Laura had deliberately Sound of Music’d the car.
Beth said categorically no and Laura begrudgingly agreed that she would drive the car ‘all the way to Pasadena’ after work the next day, when she’d be ‘so tired from work that she’d probably crash it’. She’d have to take a detour through ‘the heaviest traffic known to man’ to Silver Lake where she would meet a couple of her friends who ‘would be massively put out’ but would then follow her to Pasadena in their car. Laura would drop the little black car off with Jimmy and then drive ‘all the way back through the heaviest traffic known to man’ to Silver Lake in her friend’s car. Laura would then go out for a drink with her friends and they’d give her a lift back home. It was, Laura said, with one final attempt to change Beth’s mind, such an overcomplicated ass-about-face way of dropping the car off that she might not be back to say goodbye to Frank before it was time for him to go home or, if she was back in time, she might not recognize him as he would have grown such a very long beard by then.
‘It’s up to you, Mom,’ she said.
‘It’s okay,’ Beth said. ‘You can take the car back.’
19
Laura drove to work in Jimmy’s car the next morning leaving Beth time to spend the whole day with Frank. They looked at the newspapers together over breakfast. At lunchtime,
they went round to the side of the house and to the rear of the building where, leaning against the wall, next to a bright green child’s bicycle, there were two folded garden chairs with toothpaste stripes the same colour as the fringed awning on the beach quadricycle. Beth brought the chairs over to the tree on the grass of the communal front yard and leaned the chairs against it. She put a blanket on the grass.
‘Open the chairs out, Dad,’ she said and went inside to get the picnic. ‘And mind your fingers.’
Frank picked up one of the chairs and struggled to unfold it. It was a simple task but Beth had undermined his confidence and made it seem more complicated or hazardous than it was. He still hadn’t managed to unfold the first chair by the time Beth came back with a tray full of food. She put the tray down on the blanket.
‘Here.’ She held out her hand and Frank passed her the chair. Beth opened it out like an origami swan and put it on the grass next to the blanket. She did the same with the other chair and they both sat down.
Beth had dusted off a teapot that sat unused at the back of the kitchen cupboard and she’d brought out two teacups on saucers and a jug of milk. Not soy or half and half but milk from a plastic carton with a picture of a mooing cow on the label.
‘Shall I be mother?’ Frank said, reaching for the teapot.
‘Be careful, it’s hot.’
‘I don’t know what I’ll do without you,’ Frank said. ‘I’ll be burning myself and pinching my fingers.’
When he sat back in the chair he spilled hot tea on the back of his hand. He didn’t cry out and he wiped his hand on his trouser leg, hoping that Beth hadn’t noticed, validating her constant need to warn him against the dangers he posed to himself.
They sat under the tree and drank tea from teacups and ate white bread sandwiches as though they were in the same exaggerated Hollywood version of England as the postcard images of Smelly John, the red telephone box and the London policeman.
Frank very rarely sat in the garden at home. One of his neighbours would always appear and start talking to him while he was trying to read the paper or lose himself in his own thoughts. He’d not seen any of Beth’s neighbours since he’d been here. Perhaps it was a neighbourhood where everyone ‘liked to keep themselves to themselves’, which – with present company excepted – sounded to Frank like utopia.
He flipped the shades down on his glasses and watched the sun flickering between the branches and twigs of the tree. There was the gentlest of breezes and a helicopter hovered somewhere in the distance. A car horn sounded and a bird was singing a tune that sounded familiar, possibly from one of Laura’s Reunion Project mix tapes. Frank wondered whether Laura had enlisted the help of local wildlife in her project. Now that he thought about it, he had noticed Laura yesterday whistling one of the mix-tape songs in an absent-minded, but probably deliberate way.
Frank and Beth talked about how Sheila used to feed the birds in their garden.
‘It was the first thing she did every morning,’ Frank said. ‘Go outside and top up all the bird feeders she had hanging from the trees. We didn’t own our own house but we had about six different bird houses. I think they were eating better than we were too. I was jealous of that robin.’
‘I remember writing any new birds we saw on the calendar,’ Beth said. ‘You called her the Bird Mum of Alcatraz.’
‘I did, didn’t I,’ Frank said. ‘I’d completely forgotten that.’
When Sheila became too unwell to feed the birds, Frank had tried to take over the job but he would forget, or there was never enough food, and one by one the birds stopped coming to the garden. The pigeons and seagulls stayed but they were more annoying than welcome.
‘The only birds I get in the garden now are Bill’s murder victims,’ Frank said.
Beth put some sunscreen on her arms and her face and then handed the tube of cream to Frank.
‘Put it on your arms and your face at least,’ she said.
Frank put too much of the sunscreen on. Beth stood up and leaned over him to rub the cream into his face. She sat back down. ‘Don’t you have any short pants?’
Frank looked at his trousers. He was wearing a beige pair of what Laura had described as ‘old guy’s comfortable pants’. The waist was elasticated and the pockets Velcroed shut. He looked at Beth who was putting sunscreen on her legs. She was wearing frayed denim shorts that might once have been a full pair of jeans.
‘There’s a time in a man’s life when it’s better for everyone if he keeps his skin under wraps,’ Frank said.
They sat outside for almost an hour. They talked about other gardens that they’d sat in in the past. At their homes in Croydon and Fullwind and on holiday in cottages on Hayling Island and the Isle of Wight. They talked about ice cream sodas and dandelion and burdock, which led on to Tizer and Tango and singing the R White’s Lemonade jingle. They sang a few more old TV jingles and then tried to name all the birds that Sheila had fed in their garden: blue tits and coal tits, robins, jays and magpies, blackbirds and nuthatches. Beth wondered whether families in Britain could still be divided into those who got their TV listings from the Radio Times and those who got theirs from the TV Times. Frank said that yes, he thought they could be and that he and Bill still lived in a Radio Times household. Frank remembered the photo albums that he had in his suitcase. Laura had asked him to bring family photographs with him and he’d forgotten all about them. He hoped that she wouldn’t mind him showing them to Beth first. He told Beth and they agreed to look at them a little later on.
When Beth went inside to get some cold drinks and to make a couple of work phone calls she said, ‘Do you want to stay here?’
‘I should probably go home eventually,’ Frank said. ‘The charity shop will go out of business.’
Beth tutted and picked up the lunch tray and went indoors. Frank pulled the shutters down on his glasses; he closed his eyes and returned to his American daydream from a day or so ago. He pictured himself now living in the beachside retirement home that he’d seen advertised on the television. He was sitting on the balcony drinking a Martini, watching the beach volleyballers and surfers on the sand below. He looked at the sea in the distance. It was even bluer in his mind’s eye. A plane flew across the cloudless sky. ‘You’ll never get me up in one of those,’ he said to the other retirement-home residents on the balcony with him and they all laughed hysterically and a little wearily because Frank was the home’s joker. Old Man Packing Bags was there and there was a married couple whom Frank had named Laughs All The Time and Smiles Every Day and two women whom he called Jane Fonda and Brigitte Bardot. All the men on the balcony, Frank included, Frank especially, were dressed in Hawaiian shirts and Bermuda shorts. The women wore flowery summer dresses and sun hats or green croupier visors.
When the Californian sunshine became too much for Frank, he’d go and sit under a palm tree or take the elevator down to the swimming pool. It was kidney-shaped, next to a smaller heart-shaped hot tub. Everyone was either relaxing around the pool or in the water on lilos and inflatable alligators, drinking cocktails or dive-bombing each other. Frank wondered if he had enough money left for a return trip to America. From the moment he stepped through the airport security scanner at LAX in a few days’ time until whenever he came back again would just be holiday taint.
He sensed that he wasn’t alone any more. He opened his eyes expecting to see Beth with cold drinks but, instead, there was a small boy, about six years old; Mexican, he thought. He was standing over by the bright green children’s bicycle staring at the old guy in his garden. Frank smiled to reassure the boy that there was no stranger danger here.
‘Hello.’ The boy didn’t answer and Frank looked around for his parents. ‘Is that your bicycle?’ The boy’s trance held. ‘My daughter – Beth,’ Frank pointed at the house. ‘She’s the lady who lives here. She had a bike a little like yours. She was a terrible cyclist when she was your age though. I imagine you’re a lot better than she was. I see you’ve taken the s
tabilizers off already.’
The boy didn’t say anything but he was checking Frank out, looking at his long hair and his convertible sunglasses. Frank playfully flipped the sunshades up and down.
‘I hope I’m not stopping you from doing anything. Did you want to ride your bike? Just pretend I’m not here.’ The boy remained silent and still. ‘I’ll be going home in a few days. On an aeroplane.’ Frank didn’t know if the boy could understand what he was saying. He looked over at the front door, hoping for Beth. He wished that he’d listened to his Spanish-language tape before recording the Sex Pistols over it. If he mimed an aeroplane with his arms out at his sides like wings would it be patronizing, even for such a small child? It might even be mistaken for a Leonardo DiCaprio impression. ‘If my home is still there, of course. I think I might have given it away. My casa,’ he said, remembering one of the few Spanish words that he knew. Frank had lowered his voice conspiratorially. ‘I haven’t told my daughter yet, and I don’t think she’ll be too happy about it when I do, but I don’t want to upset her because she’s just getting better after being ill. I just want her to be well again. I’m sorry, I’m going on a bit, aren’t I? Perhaps I should let you get on with what you’re doing and go back to my siesta.’ A second Spanish word; Frank was more fluent than he realized. He flipped the shades on his glasses down and closed his eyes but he could still feel that the boy was staring at him. He opened his eyes to see him still standing there and so he carried on talking as though he was having a conversation with his cat. ‘I thought I might not see her again, which terrified me, if I’m honest. But she’s better now. Although Laura, that’s my granddaughter, Beth’s daughter – she’s the lady who dresses in black, but don’t ask her if she’s a goth; I made that mistake – Laura thinks that Elizabeth misses Jimmy. He’s the man with the . . .’ Frank realized that he didn’t know what Jimmy currently looked like and so couldn’t describe him. ‘Laura is trying to get her mum and dad back together again.’
Frank was mercifully interrupted by the door of one of the bungalows behind Beth’s house opening. A woman came out.
Frank Derrick's Holiday of a Lifetime Page 16