The single thread of spider’s silk was now a full web. He thought that he was going blind. He took his glasses off and wiped them on his shirt to remove the blurriness but when he put the glasses back on his vision was just as blurred. He wiped the glasses again. He saw spots. Sheila used to get migraines. He missed her so much. He was going to start feeding the birds again when he got home. There was a ringing in his ears that he hadn’t noticed before. He would write the names of the birds on the calendar. He had fierce heartburn and his mouth was watering. He felt like he’d been eating Opal Fruits. Made to make your mouth water. He’d sung that jingle in the garden with Beth. Up ahead he thought that he saw Laura driving towards him in Jimmy’s black sports car. Patrick Bergin! he suddenly thought. That was the name of the actor in Sleeping with the Enemy, and then his vision changed from emo to goth and he collapsed like a Glasgow tower block. When he hit the ground, a nearby bicycle fell over. LA’s butterfly effect.
23
There was no hot water bottle and there were no planes overhead to tell him what time it was. He looked for the smoking Bette Davis and his four clocks on the dressing table: New York, London, Paris and Berlin, but they weren’t there. He couldn’t see the foam finger and he didn’t feel like number one of anything at the moment. Although lying flat on his back on the pavement – no, on the sidewalk – he felt marginally better than he had when he’d been walking. It was a relief not to be moving. He waited for his life to flash before him. Eighty-two years was a long time. Would it take longer to flash by than if he’d died ten years earlier or would his life montage flash by really quickly? He waited to see himself being born and growing up and meeting Sheila and Beth being born and Laura and Smelly John and the women in the charity shop and on the bus to the big Sainsbury’s. He’d watch himself make all his ill-considered and ill-conceived mistakes all over again until today’s final spectacular blunder before he was reunited with Sheila like dead Leonardo DiCaprio and old Kate Winslet on the sunk Titanic at the end of the film.
The sky was so blue and everything seemed so still. It wasn’t as dark as he’d thought it was. There were sounds and a siren, this time increasing in volume. Frank looked up at the man looking down at him. Was this God? He really should have been more patient with those missionaries on his doorstep. Or was this an out-of-body experience? He looked up at his departing soul looking down on his empty body like he was scrolling through the streets of Los Angeles on the computer in the library when he was still alive. He was confused. Where was the tunnel, where was the light? The man looking down at him had such a friendly face. Concerned but smiling. It was a reassuring face. He had a beard, like God’s, but not so white. The few white hairs in his beard were the only real signs that he had aged in the five years since Frank had last seen Jimmy. He was holding a cell phone to the side of his friendly, smiling, concerned, and yet reassuring, face.
‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘I’ve found him.’
24
Beth would later tell Frank how she had rung three times in half an hour with no answer and so she’d left work and driven back to an empty house. She’d found the sunscreen on the desk and the half-sandwich and the document pouch containing Frank’s wallet and passport on the floor of Laura’s bedroom. On the bed there was a map of Los Angeles, a pair of flip-flops and the legs from Frank’s cargo pants. Beth had panicked. She didn’t know what to think. Frank hadn’t left a note, just a series of random clues. There was a pen next to a pad of paper on the living-room desk with the sunscreen. Surely he would have left her a note. She checked the other rooms, looking under the beds and, for some reason, inside the washing machine. All she found was one of Frank’s wet socks and the smell of a spring meadow. At least he’d used fabric softener.
Beth searched outside. There was nowhere to hide in the space. She looked up at the branches of the tree because you never really knew with her father. She knocked on her neighbours’ doors and asked if they’d seen him. The Mexican woman said that she’d met him the day before but had not seen him since. Beth walked up and down the street, not wanting to go too far in case she missed Frank returning to the house. She looked in gardens and called out his name as though she was looking for a lost cat or a dog. She was so worried about Frank that she hadn’t noticed that Bill wasn’t there either.
She rang Laura, who was in the middle of cutting somebody’s hair, to see if Frank was with her. Laura told her to call the police. Thirty minutes had passed since Beth had come home; after another ten, she rang the police. And then she called Jimmy. It took him just over an hour to find Frank. He’d been more than lucky. He’d tried searching the streets using an ordered system and by a process of calm elimination, but traffic restrictions and one-way systems had made that difficult and soon he was driving up and down the same streets again and again. He might have missed Frank completely if he hadn’t been so easy to spot. Even though he was partly dressed in camouflage, his shirt stood out like dandruff under a UV disco light, and Frank was walking. Jimmy had joked about that later, how Frank was the only pedestrian in the city, which had made him easier to find. Frank had thought that he’d seen Jimmy’s car and then he’d lost consciousness and fallen to the ground, knocking over a bicycle. It was the sound of the bicycle hitting the sidewalk that drew Jimmy’s attention to his father-in-law lying unconscious next to it.
Jimmy had known exactly what to do. He’d checked for any visible injuries. He’d loosened Frank’s belt and found an old cardboard box that he’d plumped up like a pillow to raise his legs off the ground so that he could direct the blood flow to his brain. Beth would later question whether Frank possessed such a thing. Jimmy had made sure that Frank’s airway was clear and he’d called 911.
Frank was already feeling a lot better by the time he was lifted into the back of the ambulance on a gurney and he enjoyed the ride to the hospital almost as though it was a planned part of his holiday. He’d never been inside a vehicle with a siren on before. He was surprised that it wasn’t a lot louder. He joked with the paramedics, one of whom was originally from just a few miles away from where Frank lived. When the paramedic said that Disney was right and it really was a small world after all, Frank agreed but said that he wouldn’t want to paint it. The paramedic, who had been born and brought up in Worthing and then lived in Manchester before moving to LA, spoke with a strange hybrid accent that reminded Frank of a Premier League football manager.
Jimmy followed the ambulance to the hospital and he walked by the side of the gurney as it was wheeled into the emergency room. By now Frank was feeling perfectly well and he’d begun to think that he was wasting everyone’s valuable time when they should be saving lives and buying and selling fine wines. He looked up at Jimmy walking beside him. He had hardly changed at all. Five minutes with a razor could literally shave off as many years. Frank tried to see himself in Jimmy’s features, to see if there was any truth in the theory about women choosing men who looked like their fathers. He imagined Jimmy without the beard, expecting to see his own face looking back at him as though he was wiping the steam from a bathroom mirror. He’d seen a television documentary a while ago that he thought touched on the subject of the whole daughter/father/husband thing. The only part that he could fully recall from the documentary was a panda that refused to mate with the other pandas but was sexually attracted to the zookeeper who’d raised it. The thought made him feel nauseous and faint again and he closed his eyes until the queasiness passed.
He was parked in a curtained-off cubicle and Jimmy stayed with him while the emergency-room staff took Frank’s blood pressure and his temperature and checked his heart rate. They talked to each other in abbreviations that sounded to Frank as if they were as made up by Hollywood as the people using them looked.
In between tests, Jimmy and Frank chatted like old friends and when a doctor came and spoke to Jimmy, thinking that he was Frank’s son, Frank didn’t protest. If he’d had another child, he would have been happy to have had a son like
Jimmy. Jimmy suggested that they should wait until Beth arrived before the doctor gave a diagnosis. She should be here soon. When Beth arrived, it was with mixed emotions. Distress, concern, anxiety, bewilderment, anger, despair, relief, resignation, embarrassment, awkwardness and gratitude because Jimmy was there, along with the familiarity of having been in and out of the same hospital thirty times or more. She opened with a line that she must have thought of on the drive there about a truth universally acknowledged that all men were numpties and that her father was king of the numpties. Beth couldn’t thank Jimmy enough but she gave it her best shot. Frank looked for the warm glow of a rekindled flame in either of them. Jimmy offered to step out into the hall so that Beth could talk to Frank alone.
‘I’ll get some coffee,’ he said.
Beth sat down on the end of Frank’s bed.
‘I was hoping I wouldn’t be back here quite so soon,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry,’ Frank said. ‘I’m an awful pain in the arse, aren’t I?’
‘Yes, Dad. You’re an awful pain in the arse.’ Beth tried so hard to pronounce the word ‘arse’ in an English accent that she ended up sounding like a pirate. He saw that she was looking at his cut-down cargo pants.
‘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 sorcer
ess? 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.’
Frank Derrick's Holiday of a Lifetime Page 20