‘It’s very flowery. Shall we start?’
Ten minutes later, Kelly was sitting on the linoleum kitchen floor. She’d taken her shoes off and her legs were tucked beneath her. She had her head halfway inside the fridge.
‘I think this might be ham,’ she said. ‘Can you remember buying ham?’
‘Not recently.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Not recently.’
Kelly came out from inside the fridge. She handed Frank an open packet of what was probably ham. ‘I’m sorry. What did you say?’
Today’s game of Chinese Whispers would be played with one contestant inside a fridge and the other contestant sitting on one of those stools that has a pointlessly short fold-out ladder beneath it. He would be dressed in a loud shirt with one tight-fitting sleeve and one loose. Like a man who has been working out, one arm at a time, and the gym has gone out of business at the halfway point.
‘It’s ham, I think,’ Kelly said. ‘Do you think it’s ham?’
Frank had no idea. He dropped the ham-not-ham-maybe-ham in a black bin liner with the blue Scotch eggs and furry cheese triangles, with the grey potatoes and the rusty corned beef tin with the broken key.
‘I may be saving your life today,’ Kelly said and went back into the fridge. Without coming back out she passed Frank a fish finger and a soggy cucumber. He dropped them both in the rubbish bag. ‘How was your bank holiday?’ she said from inside the fridge.
‘It may possibly have been my most eventful bank holiday ever.’
‘Should these even be in the fridge?’ Kelly came out holding a box of Oreos.
‘It’s my daughter. She keeps the tomato sauce in the fridge as well. And the jam – or the jelly. She’s sort of American. I can never find things after she’s been to visit. She puts everything in the fridge.’
Kelly looked at the sell-by date on the box of biscuits and worked out that Beth’s last visit must have been quite a while ago. She didn’t want to offend or upset Frank by drawing attention to it.
‘Maybe I should put them back in the fridge,’ she said.
‘No, throw them away,’ Frank said. ‘She’ll probably bring some more with her next time she’s over. I might accidentally have told her they were my favourite biscuits. I don’t actually like them that much.’ Frank held his hands out to signal to Kelly that she should throw the biscuits across the small kitchen for him to catch. With one arm folded at an angle and the other held out straight in front of him it was more Tai Chi than baseball. Kelly leaned over and dropped the box of soft biscuits into the rubbish bag instead.
She sat up on the kitchen floor, pulled the yellow rubber gloves off, rolled them together in a ball, and threw them up and over, into the kitchen sink. As she started to get up from the floor, Frank wanted to jump off his stool ladder and offer his hand to help her up. He wanted to take his flowery shirt off and Sir Walter Raleigh it onto the puddle of melted freezer ice on the kitchen floor so that she could step on it and not get her feet wet.
But even if he could have got the shirt off in time he probably would have felt dizzy and dropped on top of her like the sack of potatoes she’d thrown away at the start of the food clear-out. The potatoes were so old, grey and wrinkly that when Kelly tipped them into the rubbish bag the symbolism had almost been too much for Frank.
Kelly unfolded herself from the kitchen floor, standing up gracefully like a ballet dancer. Frank got up from his stool ladder, steadying himself against the cupboard door. He wondered how far past his sell-by date he was.
‘Why was your bank holiday so eventful?’ Kelly said, answering something he thought she hadn’t heard because her head had been in the fridge when he’d said it.
‘I meant compared to normal. Bank holidays don’t feel like holidays any more. They’re just Mondays with ever so slightly different television and a less frequent bus service.’
‘That’s a shame,’ Kelly said. She shut the fridge door and tied the rubbish bag in a knot and when she left she threw it in the dustbin. The only food in the flat now were the seven tins of cat food in the cupboard under the sink.
But Kelly had never looked in the cupboard under the sink. She had also never looked in the room next to Frank’s bedroom, where she would have found a wicker basket with a red tartan blanket inside and an orange plastic tray filled with torn pieces of newspaper, Sunday supplements and a picture of a poodle with a Hitler moustache. Kelly would have seen the beginning of an unravelled ball of wool that, if she followed it under the bed, would have led her to half a dead mouse and a fur ball.
Kelly hadn’t seen the cat food, the wicker basket, the blanket, the orange tray, the wool, the fur ball or the dead mouse. If she had, she would have started to put two and two together. And even though she didn’t know that Frank had a cat and had never actually seen Bill in person, her throat would itch, her eyes would start streaming and she’d sneeze uncontrollably, because Kelly was allergic to cats.
11
Weekends were almost as pointless for Frank as bank holidays. It seemed like a very long time ago that he’d last thanked God it was Friday or felt sick when he heard the theme music to Last of the Summer Wine because it reminded him he had to get up early in the morning for the start of a new week of work. It was a feeling he still had for a long time after he’d retired, but now it was just music.
When Frank’s daughter was a lot younger she would experience the same sick dread in her stomach when she heard the theme tune at the start of The Antiques Roadshow, telling her it was time for bed because she had to be up early for school. Frank wondered whether she still felt the same when she heard the tune now that she lived in America. Was The Antiques Roadshow even on the television in America? Frank thought about ringing Beth to find out. They hadn’t spoken for a while. It would be a good excuse. Or at least an excuse. He’d been thinking about her ever since the fridge clear-out. He felt bad about throwing the biscuits away and had even contemplated fishing them back out of the dustbin. He wondered how much more American she would sound now. He probably wouldn’t recognise her voice at all soon. She’d call him on the phone and he’d think it was another recorded-voice robot trying to sell him incontinence products and he’d hang up.
What was the time difference in Los Angeles anyway? Frank could never remember. Was it eight hours earlier there or eight hours later? She’d probably be out at a drive-in movie or eating a popsicle in a mall or something. He’d either be waking her up or interrupting her dinner or her breakfast just to ask her an unnecessary and expensive long-distance question about a TV show she probably wouldn’t remember.
Last of the Summer Wine and The Antiques Roadshow were just part of the never-ending loop of repeats for Frank now. Nauseating Sunday-evening dread was available at any time and on any day of the week. Both shows were probably on now. He switched the TV on to see. Yes, there they were.
On Saturday morning a boiler insurance robot rang. Frank sussed it was a recorded voice straight away and immediately hung the phone up. An hour or so later he was so bored that he tried calling the robot back.
In the afternoon he fell asleep watching a war film. As he dozed off he tried to recall which accent he’d spoken with during the war – the posh one or the cockney one. When he woke up, the war was over. He presumed the Germans had lost again. He looked at the clock, wiped the dribble from his chin and swore to himself. This unscheduled siesta would probably mean he was going to wake up an hour early tomorrow morning and have to find even more meaningless activities to fill the extra daytime with.
He watched the football results even though he’d never really liked football. He listened to the man reading the results and tried to guess what the score was by the tone of his voice. He hoped that Forfar were playing East Fife and that they’d beaten them 5-4, but they were playing Cowdenbeath and it was nil-nil.
12
On Sunday the first plane of the day took off later than during the week, giving Frank a lie-in he had no use of.
He fed Bill and went downstairs to pick up the newspaper. The thickness of his Sunday newspaper was the only thing that marked Sunday out as different to any other day of the week. Today’s newspaper was thicker than ever. He thought he might have to make three trips to carry it all up the stairs. He would have left the supplements and brochures behind but he needed it all to use for substitute cat litter. Today Bill would be shitting on actresses and fashion models, pissing on opera reviews, gadget catalogues and ‘28 Colour Pages of sport’.
In the afternoon Frank opened some of the junk mail he’d accumulated that week. He picked up the first envelope from a pile on the kitchen table. In the envelope there was a glossy A4 brochure. Seventeen pages of customer testimonies and photographs of smiling old people riding stair lifts like they were in Disneyland. Weee! On the front cover of the brochure a television presenter attempted to smile his face in half. Losing the use of your legs looked like such incredible fun.
‘I wonder if they do stair lifts for cats,’ Frank said to Bill and put the envelope and the stair-lift brochure onto the cat litter pile. He picked up the next envelope. Don’t let a child die, it said on the front. Frank felt the shape of the free biro inside the envelope. He was already feeling guilty about what he was about to do. How many children’s deaths had he been responsible for because he hadn’t used the free pen to tick the £10 donation box? How many people had remained homeless, or died from heart disease because Frank hadn’t unfolded and filled the plastic bags that came through his letterbox with his old clothes and shoes? He either threw the bags away or used them as bin liners. He was a monster. Frank opened the envelope, trying to avoid any of the starving children’s staring eyes on the photographs inside. He took the biro out and put it in a mug with his other free charity pens, each one a further reminder of his lack of humanity. As was the charity mug he put them into.
Frank opened more junk mail for arthritis chairs and ocean cruises, for hearing aids that were so small he’d need new glasses to be able to see them. There were letters warning him the wiring in his home was out of date and about to burst into flames. Win a car! Adopt a monkey. Scratch these three numbers off and ring the telephone number. £2.50 a minute for your free gift. He put it all on Bill’s poo pile.
The penultimate piece of junk mail was from a funeral-plan company offering Frank four different ways to be buried – Simple, Classique, Superb and Royale, next to a picture of an elderly woman on the phone, presumably arranging her own funeral. She looked even happier about dying than the people who couldn’t climb stairs did about not being able to climb stairs.
The final piece of junk mail was from an optician offering free in-home eye tests for the over seventy-fives. Frank didn’t believe anything could be actually genuinely free. There was always a catch. He knew the small print would be full of terms and conditions about him needing to buy an expensive pair of glasses at the end of his free in-home eye test. He didn’t read the small print. There was too much of it and it was too small.
The left side of Frank’s glasses – what did you call those bits? Arms? The left arm of Frank’s glasses had been held together with yellow insulation tape since the accident and there was a scratch across the lens that he had grown so used to seeing that when he took his glasses off he thought there was something wrong with his eyes because he couldn’t see the scratch any more.
‘Carpe diem, Bill,’ he said, but Bill didn’t understand Latin. He took the optician’s letter into the living room and rang up to arrange a home appointment. It was the first time he’d ever made use of a piece of his unsolicited mail, other than tearing it into strips for cat litter or to carry a flame from the cooker in the kitchen to light the gas fire in the living room when he’d run out of matches. The woman who answered the phone at the optician’s sounded genuinely surprised that somebody was calling them rather than the other way around. Frank had cold-called the cold-caller.
‘So it’s just a free eye test,’ Frank said.
‘Yes.’
‘I won’t be made to feel obliged to buy anything?’
‘No.’
‘Or to sign anything or give my bank details?’
‘No.’
‘I won’t need to buy expensive glasses after my free eye test?’
‘No.’
‘So, to clarify. I will have the advertised free eye test and then I’ll ask for a copy of the prescription so I can order some glasses from the Internet for less than half the price?’
‘Yes.’
‘How much is this phone call costing me?’
‘Ten pence a minute.’
‘Thank you. Can I book an appointment then, please?’
‘Are you at home next week?’
‘Yes.’
‘Morning or afternoon?’
‘Yes.’
13
Kelly was singing to herself in the kitchen. ‘Kelly put the kettle on, Kelly put the kettle on.’ Even with two walls and a boiling kettle between them it was clear she had a lovely singing voice. If only Frank was in charge of television scheduling. Every week, she’d be the special guest halfway through his Saturday-night impressions show. Kelly would be his Elaine Page or Barbara Dickson. A pretty woman in a big dress with a lovely voice, in between the gags and sketches. Like on The Two Ronnies. Smelly John could be the other Ronnie. Corbett or Barker – Frank wasn’t that fussed.
‘We’ll all have tea.’ She came into the living room and put a cup of the tea she’d been singing about on the table and sat down on the arm of the sofa and asked Frank the usual questions – Was he feeling well? Was he eating enough? Had he been taking his medication? Frank just kept saying yes. It was an easy test. Even easier than the hospital Mini Mental State Examination. He would have to find more space on the mantelpiece for another cut-glass trophy.
‘Not having too much trouble washing?’
Frank wondered why she’d asked that all of a sudden. It wasn’t one of her regular questions. Did he smell? Piss and mothballs. TCP? Was it time to form a new double act with Smelly John? The Two Smellies?
‘Not really,’ he said.
Frank had been having trouble washing. His injuries and the need to keep his plaster cast dry made climbing in and out of the bath more trouble than it was worth. But he didn’t want to admit to it. ‘Although washing my hair has been a challenge,’ he said as a compromise. He held his plastered arm up. ‘Sometimes I’m sure I can still smell sour milk.’
‘Would you like me to wash it for you?’
‘My hair?’
‘Your hair. I could wash it for you.’
‘Oh. I –’ Frank was surprised how awkwardly teenage the idea made him feel. He felt his face reddening.
‘I could brush it for you at least?’ Kelly said, noticing he felt uncomfortable. Without waiting for an answer she brought the chair over from the window and motioned for him to sit down. She took a hairbrush from her bag and pulled a few strands of hair from its bristles. She rolled them into a small ball and put them in the wastepaper bin next to Frank’s armchair.
Kelly stood behind Frank. She smelled like the first rainfall on the pavement after a month of sunshine.
‘You have lovely hair, you know, Mr Derrick. Most of the other old gentlemen I see don’t have a lot left up top.’
It wasn’t the first time somebody had told him he had lovely hair. Women in particular would often stop him in the street or tap on his shoulder in Post Office queues and at bus stops to comment on it, to tell him how envious they were of his hair. A woman in Fullwind Food & Wine had once asked if she could touch it. It was one of the reasons Frank kept his hair long. The ladies loved it. And now Kelly thought his hair was lovely too.
He was less happy that she thought of him as old, even if he was a gentleman. In fact, he found he didn’t really like to think that there were other old gentlemen besides him. He wanted her to be his care worker exclusively. At least Kelly’s other old gentlemen were all bald. In the land of the bald the long-haired m
an is king, Frank told himself.
Kelly took hold of Frank’s long white hair as though it was the tail of a horse and started to brush it.
‘So, Mr Derrick,’ she said, in her best hairdresser small-talk voice. ‘Is there a Mrs Derrick?’
‘She passed away,’ Frank said.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Kelly said. She stopped brushing Frank’s hair. ‘I wasn’t thinking.’
If there was a Mrs Derrick, she was obviously either dead or estranged. The need for Kelly’s weekly visits should have been enough to tell her that. If there was a Mrs Derrick, she was either long gone or busy on Mondays. Unless Frank was Britain’s oldest-living bachelor or gay or Cliff Richard.
‘It was a long time ago,’ Frank reassured her. ‘That’s her.’ He nodded towards a framed photograph at the centre of the menagerie of china dogs, cats, giraffes and pigs on the mantelpiece.
‘Do you mind?’ she said.
‘No, of course not.’
Kelly picked up the photograph. She wiped the dusty glass with the end of her sleeve. It was a picture of a woman sitting on a blanket, sheltering from the sea wind behind a wooden breakwater on the stones near a sandy beach.
‘There was more sand back then,’ Frank said. ‘It’s practically all stones now. And they’re piled so high it’s an effort to get down to the sea. I sometimes forget how close by it is. I can smell the sea but I haven’t seen it for years.’
Kelly put the photograph back on the mantelpiece, rearranging the porcelain pigs standing guard on either side of it.
‘What was her name?’ Kelly said, and apologised once more for bringing the subject up and again for not dropping it.
‘Sheila,’ Frank replied, and again he said that it was a long time ago and she needn’t apologise. ‘She used to swim every day. It didn’t matter how cold it was. She was a very good swimmer. She had medals. Sheila taught me how to swim. I mean, I could already swim. But not properly. She showed me how to breathe. How to use my feet as well as my arms. I was never as good as her though. She could swim for miles. I tended to wade around in the shallow end for a while and then get bored.’
The Extra Ordinary Life of Frank Derrick, Age 81 Page 6