The Extra Ordinary Life of Frank Derrick, Age 81

by J. B. Morrison

  Graham climbed the last step and placed John in his wheelchair. Between puffs and pants Graham asked Frank if he’d signed in. He said yes and the warden went back to his office to pass out. Frank and John went along the corridor towards the lounge.

  ‘Don’t you find it a bit degrading?’ Frank said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Having to be carried up and down stairs.’

  ‘I don’t,’ John said. ‘But he does.’ Frank held the lounge door open and John wheeled himself in. He parked himself in his usual spot. Frank sat down at the table opposite.

  ‘Mouse Trap or Jenga?’ John said.

  Frank said he didn’t mind and John combined both games by using his Jenga skills to carefully pull the Mouse Trap box from the middle of the pile of board games on the shelf. ‘Will your cat be okay?’ he said, pausing halfway through removing the lid from the Mouse Trap box. ‘With all these mice?’

  Frank looked down at the cat box he’d just put on the floor by his foot.

  ‘It’s empty,’ he said.

  Even with his red tartan blanket and his favourite ball of wool inside, Bill hadn’t liked getting into the cardboard cat box. He hissed and spat and meowed swear words, showing his teeth and pulling the first easy-to-interpret facial expression that Frank had seen in all the eight years that he’d known him. On the back of Frank’s hand there were three scratches. Probably not deep enough to ordinarily scar but, as he had so cleverly pointed out himself, at his age, every cut was a scar.

  Of course, Kelly could have been stung by a wasp or eaten a nut; everything seemed to at least run the risk of containing nuts these days. She might just have had a bad attack of hay fever or been in a room plagued with dust mites. A number of things could have made her sneeze, her eyes watering and her throat feeling like she was gargling razor blades and chewing on a stinging nettle. It was the doubt that made Frank climb up on his stool ladder and almost break his other arm trying to reach far enough into the loft to get the cardboard box with the air holes and the lid that folded together to form a handle.

  Bill must have guessed something was up when Frank had scooped his breakfast out onto the saucer from a square tin. A square tin! The expensive cat food came in the square tins. Why so posh all of a sudden, Frank? What’s going on? Is it someone’s birthday? Have we finally won the lottery? And what’s this? Rainbow trout in sauce flavour? On a Tuesday morning. Wait a moment, Bill would have thought. Something is definitely a bit fishy. And it wasn’t just the rainbow trout. And that box. Bill had been in it two times before. One time somebody cut his balls off and the other time he came home with his head inside a plastic funnel. He certainly wasn’t getting in that bloody box again without a fight.

  Frank tried to calm Bill down by telling him that he’d come back and get him in a couple of months’ time when Kelly’s visits were over. He convinced himself that Bill would still be at the dog and cats home then. When people were choosing which cat to adopt they tended towards the more unusually patterned cats and those with characteristics that matched the names written on the signs above their cages. Black cats called Sooty and white cats called Snowy, black cats with white feet called Sox, ginger cats called Ginger. Tortoiseshell cats called Tortoise. Bill was a plain-looking cat. A plain-looking cat called Bill. Who wants a plain cat called Bill? A dog, maybe, but a cat?

  Often when people came into the Diamond Dogs and Love Cats Dog and Cats Home looking for a cat they left with a dog. The photographs of homeless dogs hanging on the wall in the reception area of the large building behind the big Sainsbury’s were enough to make people change their minds from cat to dog at the last minute. Dogs had an unfair advantage over cats. In the reception photographs they were all doing that thing where they tip their heads at an angle to convey sadness, arching their eyebrows – or at least the illusion of eyebrows, that lumpy bit above their sad take-me-home-with-you eyes. A picture of a sad-eyed dog on an animal-charity brochure made people actually use the stubby free biros for what they were intended for. What did cats have? One face. Frank’s Nazi poodle would stand a better chance of adoption than most cats.

  Frank told the young woman in the reception of Diamond Dogs and Love Cats how he’d become too old and infirm to look after a pet any more. He exaggerated his frailty in the same way he’d done for Kelly to make her keep opening the key safe every Monday.

  ‘It’s probably for the best,’ he said, putting his plaster-cast arm on the reception desk. ‘I’m eighty-one.’ He tilted his head at an angle and arched his eyebrows like one of the sad-faced puppies on the wall.

  The woman behind the desk got Frank to fill in a form.

  ‘What’s your cat’s name?’ she said.

  ‘Bill.’

  ‘Bill? That’s an interesting name for a cat.’

  ‘There used to be another cat called Ben.’

  The woman didn’t seem to understand. ‘Bill and Ben,’ Frank said. The woman still seemed confused. ‘The Flowerpot Men. Flobadob ickle Weeed.’

  The woman now knew Frank was obviously not well and decided the best way to deal with him was by talking to him like she would a puppy or a kitten.

  ‘Now you leave Bill with us,’ she said. She opened the cat box and took Bill out. ‘Don’t you worry about a thing.’ She opened the door of a transparent plastic crate, put Bill inside and closed the door. She wrote ‘Bill’ on a white card and slotted it into a space on the door of the crate. The woman made a short phone call asking somebody to come and collect the crate and she handed the empty cardboard cat box back to Frank. It was the first time he’d held the box without it shaking violently since he’d taken it out of the loft. All the way to the bus stop Bill had tried to escape, attempting to claw his way through the cardboard. And then on the bus he continued to struggle and fidget inside the box, making it shake and rattle on Frank’s lap so much that all the old women giggled and whispered to each other, presumably about Frank’s penis.

  A man came through a pair of swing doors into the Diamond Dogs and Love Cats reception. He picked up the plastic crate and walked back through the doors. Frank could see the start of a corridor and he heard dogs barking. When the doors closed the barking increased, presumably because of the arrival of a cat. Frank imagined Bill being taken along the corridor, with pit bulls and Rottweilers on either side, snarling and barking abuse and throwing spunk at him like he was Jodie Foster.

  The woman behind the reception desk looked up from her desk and was surprised to see Frank still there. She smiled.

  ‘That’s everything,’ she said.

  Frank took the empty cat box and left. He tried to reassure himself that at the end of the corridor of angry and dangerous dogs it would be like Greyflick House. Boring sometimes, but not so bad. All the cats would be sitting in different armchairs, drinking tea from green teacups, watching television or singing along with the songs of the 1940s. One of them would be called Smelly Cat – like the one from Friends – yes, Frank had seen Friends – and Bill would go over and sit with him and they’d play Kerplunk!

  If only, before the swing doors had swung closed, he hadn’t seen Bill’s face through the back of the transparent plastic crate. It was the same blank expression as always, but for the first time Frank understood exactly what it was that Bill was thinking.

  Judas.

  John shook the dice in his hand for ages and threw it across the Mouse Trap board.

  ‘Another one has bitten the dust,’ he said.

  ‘Another what has what the what?’ Frank said.

  John did a brief Hitler moustache and salute. He pointed at the over-made-up German woman’s empty armchair.

  ‘It’s the second death this year. The BBC will be doing an undercover investigation soon.’ He set up the Mouse Trap board. Frank was already contemplating disappointment for the end of the game when the trap inevitably didn’t work properly.

  There were half a dozen other residents in the lounge, watching television, reading or dozing off. A
t least one man looked dead. He looked the least bored. Being dead was the only thing preventing him from pulling up FOR SALE signs, kicking over concrete bollards and changing the sign on the front of the building to Greyfuck House.

  ‘I remember when this was all fields,’ Frank said. ‘Shall we go out?’

  ‘You’ve just got here.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Let’s go out. For a change.’

  ‘I’ve set the board up now.’

  ‘We should definitely go out.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I don’t know. Fresh air? People?’

  ‘There are people here. I don’t particularly like people.’

  ‘Neither do I. The sky, then. There’s a lot if it out there. Clouds. Birds. Flowers. Trees.’

  ‘I’ve got a tree outside my window. I can see a tree any day I want.’

  ‘It’s got a bag of dog shit in it.’ Frank knew that John wasn’t going to give in. ‘If I owned this place, there’d be a swimming pool,’ he said. He threw the dice.

  ‘It does mean there’s a vacancy,’ John said. Gesturing again at the empty armchair. ‘You should apply.’

  ‘I’ve already got an armchair,’ Frank said. He knew John was talking about the empty flat. He was always trying to get him to move into Greyflick House. In spite of all his punk rock bravado, his rebellious ways and his mischief-making, John was lonely. Lonely John. That was his Sioux name.

  ‘Not the chair. The apartment.’

  Frank moved his plastic mouse along the board. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said.

  ‘It’s a nice apartment. Much better than mine.’

  ‘I’ve got a flat.’

  ‘Apartment,’ John corrected him. ‘A ground-floor apartment. No more stairs, Francis.’ He shook the dice in his hand for a long time.

  ‘Why don’t you take it, then?’

  ‘I like riding the lift.’

  ‘The lift is always broken. Are you going to throw that dice or not? It’s irrelevant anyway. I could never afford the rent.’

  ‘Have you got any savings?’ John said, and finally released the dice onto the board.

  Frank laughed. ‘No. I haven’t got any savings.’

  ‘Then let the Government pay. Take a little something back, Francis.’

  ‘Is that how you manage?’

  ‘Me?’ John said. ‘A black man in a wheelchair? They’d pay me to live here.’ He was suddenly distracted by something on the table. ‘Bastard,’ he said. He started sorting through the Mouse Trap pieces. ‘Bathtub, seesaw. Bastard.’

  ‘What is it?’ Frank said.

  ‘He’s stolen the diver.’

  ‘What? Who has?’

  ‘And the marble.’

  ‘Who has?’

  ‘Graham.’

  ‘Why would he do that? Are you sure? Perhaps you’ve just lost them.’

  John just kept shaking his head and repeating the word ‘Bastard’ over and over again. ‘The racist bastard.’

  The thought of John losing one of his marbles would later make Frank think about why Beth had sent him a leaflet about dementia. He’d presumed it was just something they did in America like Stranger Danger or Thanksgiving. But what if she’d noticed telltale signs when they spoke on the phone. Was it something he’d be aware of himself? She might have even seen something before she moved away. Perhaps it was the reason why she moved. He needed a bigger leaflet.

  17

  The skies above Frank’s flat were quiet. He’d been lying awake in bed for what felt like a long time. He could feel the heat of the early morning sun coming through the bedroom window and he could see light between the threads of his new thick curtains. And yet he hadn’t heard a single plane yet. He wondered if the world outside had ended, or changed somehow. When he got out of bed and went downstairs to get his newspaper, would the headlines be about a terrorist attack, an alien invasion, or just another volcanic ash cloud grounding all flights? On page four or five, would he read about a Spanish air traffic controllers’ strike or a French baggage handlers’ dispute? This month’s edition of the village newsletter was due. Maybe it would arrive on Frank’s doormat with a story about the United Nations declaring the skies above Fullwind-on-Sea a no-fly zone in retaliation for heavy-handed tactics towards its civilians over the state of their gardens and how it might affect their chances in the Villages in Bloom competition.

  ‘Maybe nobody wants to travel anywhere today, Bill,’ Frank said, and then remembered that Bill wasn’t there. Even though he thought he could still feel the weight of the cat on his legs. It was the same phantom sensation people sometimes experience after having a limb amputated, or how a nurse had told him he might feel when his plaster cast was eventually removed.

  Frank had had a restless night. Before going to bed he’d watched another television crime reconstruction show. In the programme a man in his seventies was filmed on CCTV being punched in the face by a gang of eleven-year-old girls. Then an old lady let a man into her home to phone his sick mother and he stole the old lady’s handbag and pushed her down the stairs. There was also a report about a gang of bogus workmen travelling around the country, tricking their way into the homes of pensioners to investigate a gas leak following an explosion nearby. Once inside, they would steal any money and valuables they could find. Next, there was a general round-up of other unsolved crimes and an appeal for witnesses who might have seen a man in the Manchester area who liked to kick the walking sticks away from the elderly. The programme finished with another reconstruction. In this one an elderly man was tied to a chair with a skipping rope, then burned with a cigarette and whipped with the plug from his electric fire until he gave up his debit card pin number. Before the final credits, the show’s presenter told everyone not to have nightmares. That night Frank had a nightmare that he was tied to a chair and whipped with an electric plug.

  Shaking the ghost of Bill onto the floor, Frank sat up on the edge of the bed, put his glasses on and looked at his watch. It was 6.30 a.m. He’d hoped it was later. Apart from anything else, getting rid of Bill had given him even less to do. There were going to be at least two cat-food tin opening-shaped holes in his day. And then there was the time he spent letting Bill in and out, filling and emptying his litter tray and disposing of any dead mice and birds that Bill had brought into the flat. And who was he going to talk to now?

  He went downstairs and picked up the newspaper, two red energy bills and the first junk mail of the day. He made a cup of tea and read the day and the date out from the top of the newspaper and announced the weather forecast in the voice of Ron the marbles man. These were all things he normally shared with Bill. Now he was just a lonely old man talking to himself.

  After breakfast, Frank took all the cat food out of the cupboard and put it into the cardboard cat box with the tartan blanket and the ball of wool. He got Bill’s basket and cat-litter tray and took everything downstairs and out to the garden shed.

  When Frank and his wife had first moved into the flat, the shed was going to be their cinema. It was Frank’s dream. His retirement plan. He was going to soundproof the shed and lay red carpet and buy matching red cinema seats from a salvage yard. He would install a screen and a surround-sound system and he’d stand at the back of the cinema and show films on a projector. He started buying 16mm films and looking for seats, carpet and a suitable projector. When the cinema was finished he’d sell tickets to the neighbours and all the new friends he and Sheila had made in Fullwind. Sheila would be the usherette, tearing the tickets, showing people to their seats and selling ice creams and soft drinks between reels.

  Frank made drawings of how his cinema would look. He browsed the small ads sections of newspapers and looked in specialist film magazines for films and old cinema fixtures and fittings. He made lists of the movies he wanted to show and of the name he was going to give to the cinema – The Roxy, The Regent, Frank’s Picture Palace, Frank and Sheila’s Movie House, The Garden Odeon, etc. All the time he was planning
his cinema Frank filled the shed with garden tools and summer outdoor furniture and things that were too large or too heavy to fit through the square hole into the loft. Soon there was no room in the shed for a single flip-back cinema seat and what with the convenience of DVDs, televisions bigger than cinema screens, home-movie systems, Sheila’s death and not making any new friends in Fullwind, Frank never got round to making his dream come true.

  He dragged the shed door open, battling against the ivy that had a stranglehold on the door and everything inside the shed. It had grown upwards through the floor and came in through knotholes in the wooden sides of the shed. It snuck in under the roof and prised the glass away to get in through the window. The ivy wrapped itself around garden tools and deckchairs. Threading itself through the rungs of an old rotting stepladder at the back of the shed. It was like The Day of the Triffids – a film on the programming schedule for the doomed cinema. Frank feared that if he ventured too far inside the shed, the ivy would take hold of his arms and legs and drag him in to finish him off with its poisonous stinger.

  He slotted the cat box, the basket and litter tray in between the cobwebs and the spiders’ webs and shut the door.

  In Fullwind Food & Wine Frank bought a large yellow sponge, a pack of cheap cloths, some white vinegar and an onion. Back at his flat he got down on his hands and knees – something else that was difficult with one unbendable arm, but nowhere near as hard as getting back up again – and he reached under the bed in Beth’s room. Using the knitting needle that Kelly had scratched his itch with, he flicked what was left of the dead mouse until it appeared from under the bed. He picked it up between the tips of his thumb and forefinger and put it in a black rubbish bag.

  Frank vacuumed any carpets where he thought there might be cat hair, and with the sticky side of some parcel tape wrapped around his hand, he got back down on his knees to pick up any cat hair that was left behind.