The Extra Ordinary Life of Frank Derrick, Age 81

by J. B. Morrison

  ‘Five hundred pounds.’

  ‘Oh,’ Frank said. He was expecting it to be a lot more. ‘Could I borrow that please? Five hundred pounds.’

  The man took Frank’s details and read a long list of terms and conditions out at cattle-auctioneer speed and said he’d call Frank back in ten minutes.

  Frank waited by the phone.

  Frank had never been very good with money.

  When Sheila was alive she’d always paid the bills. Sheila opened and read bank statements and checked till receipts against the contents of shopping bags before leaving the supermarket. Frank didn’t open his bills until the print on the front of the envelope was red and he didn’t open his bank statements at all. He screwed up till receipts without looking at them. He never looked at the prices of things in shops. He had less idea what the price of a pint of milk or loaf of bread was than a High Court Judge.

  Without Sheila around, Frank very quickly dug a hole for himself and filled it up with worthless charity shop bric-a-brac and 16mm films he couldn’t watch. And then he jumped into the hole. So when the phone rang and the man from Instant Spondulicks told him his application had been denied, Frank wasn’t surprised. He put the phone down and watched the news. It was another pensioners/geriatric ward/dementia/poverty/mugging special. He turned off the TV, did seven press-ups and went out on his scooter.

  Frank sped along Sea Lane, flying past Trims His Lawn with Nail Scissors and Washes His Car Too Much. He skidded by Picks up Litter, blowing a chocolate wrapper out of reach of her spiked stick. On the slight downward slope leading to the shops he really picked up speed, his tiny wheel lights flashing, the handlebar tassels blowing in unison with his long silver white hair. Everyone he passed stopped and turned their heads to watch him fly past.

  ‘What’s the matter? Never seen an eighty-one-year-old on a scooter before?’ Frank shouted and laughed.

  Not really.

  Frank couldn’t quite get the hang of how to take both feet off the ground without the scooter toppling over and he didn’t even make it up to the one mile an hour needed to turn the wheel lights on. He carried the scooter most of the way to the shops, just like all the other parents did with their children’s scooters.

  He leaned the scooter against the window of the charity shop and went inside. There were two customers in the shop, both of them waiting to pay at the counter. Frank browsed. He picked up a piggy bank and lightly shook it but it made no sound. He looked for hallmarks on the bottom of a snuffbox and the back of a ladies wristwatch. The other customers paid and left the shop and Frank went over to the counter.

  ‘I was wondering about the card in the window,’ he said to a woman sticking small price labels onto packs of Christmas cards. ‘Help wanted.’

  ‘June,’ the woman called out. ‘Gentleman here looking to help out.’ She looked at Frank. ‘June will be able to help you.’ She went back to labelling the Christmas cards.

  ‘Thank you,’ Frank said.

  He heard high-pitched laughter coming from behind the curtain in the storeroom. There were a lot of different members of staff who worked in the charity shop. He was rarely served by the same person twice. And other than the Chuckle Brothers tribute act who drove the shop’s delivery van, he’d never seen any male members of staff. Working here was going to be like travelling to the big Sainsbury’s and back, over and over again for eight hours every day.

  ‘I won’t be able to work on Monday mornings,’ he said to the woman behind the counter.

  ‘June will be able to help you,’ she said. ‘June,’ she called out. ‘Gentleman can’t work on – when did you say?’

  ‘Mondays.’

  ‘Can’t work on Mondays,’ she called out.

  ‘Mornings. I can work Monday afternoons.’

  ‘Mornings. Gentleman can’t work mornings.’

  ‘Monday mornings. Just Monday mornings.’

  Frank waited. Customers came and left. He started to wonder whether June existed. He thought that if he pulled open the curtain between the shop and the storeroom, June’s skeleton would be sitting in a rocking chair.

  ‘I’m just looking for a bit of extra income,’ Frank said to fill the awkward silence. The woman nodded and carried on pricing Christmas cards.

  Frank looked around. He wondered whether there were any coins in the oriental vase inside the glass cabinet at the centre of the shop. When he was working here, he’d open the cabinet and stick his arm inside the vase and find out.

  ‘It is a charity, you realise?’ the woman behind the counter said.

  Yes, of course it was. A charity shop. Voluntary. What an idiot. He was trying to get a paid job in a charity shop.

  ‘June will be out in a moment,’ the woman said. But Frank was already edging towards the door.

  ‘Actually, I should be going. I’ve just remembered, I . . .’ He couldn’t think of a single thing he could pretend that he should be doing. ‘I’ll come back. Thank you.’ He walked out of the shop, picked his scooter up and went next door to Fullwind Food & Wine and asked if they had any jobs.

  ‘You’ll need to drop off your CV,’ the man at the checkout said.

  ‘My CV? Oh, yes, of course,’ Frank said. ‘I’ll bring it in later.’ He asked the man for two scratch cards.

  ‘You have to speculate to accumulate,’ the man behind the checkout said and looked pleased with himself as though he was the first person to have ever said it. Frank left the shop, picked his scooter up and carried it home. He passed Picks up Litter, Washes His Car Too Much and Trims His Lawn with Nail Scissors. These were people who’d planned their retirements. Frank didn’t own a car and his lawn was too long for scissors and covered in foam stuffing and rubbish that was too big to fit on the end of a pointy stick. Here were retired homeowners with fully paid-up mortgages and private pension plans. They probably knew where and how they’d be buried – Simple, Classique, Superb or Royale. They didn’t need to write a CV. Who over the age of seventy had ever written a CV?

  Frank came from a time when you just had a job. You went to school. You left school. You got a job. He’d had a lot of different jobs in the past but never one that he felt defined by, though. Not a tinker or a tailor or a soldier or a sailor. None of the prune-stone occupations. What would he put on his CV? What would the sarcastic young cashier at Fullwind Food & Wine make of Frank’s list of imaginary-sounding jobs for companies that no longer existed? Bus conductor for London Transport. Switchboard operator for the Gas Board. Television repairman for Radio Rentals. Frank might as well put down that he worked as assistant scrivener on Jupiter.

  The sarcastic man and the checkout he worked on would eventually be on that list too. With every new self-service checkout point that opened in the big supermarket they both edged closer to obsolescence. The same applied to the women in the charity shop and the milkman who ran Frank over – he and his battery-powered vehicle were dodos too. And the nurse who sawed his plaster cast in half and told him about God – surely a machine or a computer could do both those things too.

  When he was almost home, a young woman whom Frank might have named Walks Five Different Dogs walked towards him. As he stepped aside to let her and her five different dogs pass, she stepped aside the same way. The dogs became instantly disoriented, walking in different directions and wrapping their leads around Frank’s legs and around his scooter. The dogs were all barking and the dog walker was apologising, trying to calm the dogs down so she could unravel their leads from Frank’s legs. He felt like a maypole. And it was June. The dog of the month was a terrier. There were three Kelly visits left before July – the month of Royston the-flea-bitten-mange-infested mongrel.

  On Friday, Frank wrote ‘Yard sale Today 12 Noon’ on a piece of paper and stuck it on his gate.

  Albert Flowers had given him the idea. Instead of putting everything back in the shed, he’d sell it. He cleared the more obviously unsellable stuff out of the way. He moved the ivy into a pile beside the shed, along with the
rotten carpet, the bedside table, the red tartan shopping basket and the sun loungers. He stuffed the perished cardboard boxes into the dustbin and, when nobody was watching, threw the Wellington boot into the overgrown bush that ran along the fence between his garden and the one next door. He leaned the ladder up against the shed. Everything else – the rusty garden tools, the golf balls, the picture of the boat, the TV aerials and remote controls – would be for sale.

  Frank stood the decorator’s table upright and locked the legs in place, pinching his fingers in the hinges. He’d originally bought the table to wallpaper Beth’s bedroom. There were still paste marks along both sides of the table. He hadn’t measured the room and had bought too much wallpaper. When he’d finished the room there were three half-rolls left; the pattern was still as good as new from years kept in the darkness of the shed. The only other time Frank could remember having used the table was to put food on for one of Beth’s birthday parties.

  With the things from the shed on or next to the table, Frank went inside and looked for anything else he might be able to sell. A tea set, some wine glasses, a few books, a table lamp, a carpet sweeper and a bread bin. He sorted through any videos that he’d replaced with DVD copies. In spite of no longer having anything to watch them on, and owning the films on DVD, he still hated the thought of parting with the tapes. He emptied all the free light bulbs out of the kitchen cupboard into a bag and took them out into the garden. He found a pack of unused Christmas cards given to him by a charity and he put them on the table. He filled his charity coffee mugs on the table with charity biros and wrote ‘10p each’ on a piece of paper next to them. If he had had more time and a jug he would have made lemonade to sell like they always did at the yard sales in films.

  At 11.50 a.m., he put on a green kitchen apron because it had a pocket on the front. He thought of Kelly in her monkey shirt. He filled the pocket with change, took his place behind the decorator’s table and prepared for the rush.

  He soon realised he wouldn’t last long behind the counter of Fullwind Food & Wine or the charity shop. Customers are idiots. The general public are annoying. Nobody at his yard sale wanted to pay full price for anything. They all thought they were in a back-street Istanbul bazaar.

  ‘Fifty pence? I’ll give you twenty pence.’

  ‘What’s your best price? Come on, a pound for the lot.’

  And the questions.

  ‘Do you have any clubs?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Just the golf balls?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s clubs I’m really after. How much for the balls?’

  ‘Ten pence each.’

  ‘I’ll give you fifty p for the whole box.’

  ‘Is it just videotapes? Any DVDs?’

  ‘Just videotapes.’

  ‘I don’t have a video recorder any more.’

  ‘Does this lamp work?’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  ‘You think so? Can I see?’

  ‘We’d have to go inside and plug it in.’

  ‘Can I take it home and bring it back if it doesn’t work?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘A bread bin.’

  ‘Do you have any bayonet-fitting light bulbs?’

  After three hours the videos were gone and Trims His Lawn with Nail Scissors had bought a garden fork – he was convinced the tea set on sale was one that he himself had given to the charity shop, which it was. But he bought it anyway. Hilary, the head of the Neighbourhood Watch, came in for a look around but didn’t buy anything. The man who took the lamp home brought it back because it didn’t work.

  When Frank took the sign off the gate and shut up shop there was £26.19 in the pocket of the apron. £3 of that was the float he’d started out with. It hadn’t been a great success. Not enough people had come. There was probably sport on television or it was too hot to be shopping. He should have made the jug of lemonade. He had eighty-one years’ worth of lemons. He just needed a jug.

  24

  A man around the same age as Frank boarded the big Sainsbury’s bus and walked the gauntlet to the back. The doors closed, the bus started moving and Frank watched the man’s face silently screaming for help through the back window like a poster for an Edvard Munch retrospective.

  Frank was in the car behind the bus. The car radio was entering its fifth minute of shouted advertising. Frank hated adverts. He particularly hated the loud ones. He could find the mute button on his television remote control blindfolded as if he was a marine cleaning his assault rifle. The loud television adverts weren’t aimed at him anyway. He wasn’t missing out on any great offers or miracle cures by turning the sound down. The adverts hoping to address what was missing in Frank’s life – freedom from debt and incontinence and help getting up and down stairs – were more softly spoken. The adverts being shouted from the car radio were for hair gel and mobile phones, pop records and yogurt. Frank didn’t mind them today, though. To be honest, he couldn’t really hear them because of the song going round and round in his head.

  Sitting in the front seat.

  Kelly and me.

  D.R.I.V.I.N.G.

  Frank watched the bus in front pull away and the hula dancer on the dashboard of Kelly’s car started dancing again. The Nurse on Call sign next to the dancer was flipped over like a Shop Closed sign, even though, taking Frank on this car journey, she was technically on call. She turned a corner into the low mid-morning sun and Frank screwed his eyes up. Kelly reached over and pulled the sun visor down for him.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said.

  There was a small rectangular mirror on the back of the sun visor and Frank checked himself out in it. Kelly had arrived today with a small glasses repair kit. She’d put a new screw in the arm of Frank’s Belgian architect glasses, using the smallest screwdriver in the world. She’d sprayed lens cleaner onto the lenses and polished them with a small grey piece of material.

  As they drove past Greyflick House, Frank looked up to see if Smelly John was at his window. He wanted John to see him in the car with Kelly. But the window was too far away – although Frank could see the carrier bag full of dog shit in the branches of the tree outside like a flag.

  Kelly turned another corner and Frank saw the 24-Hour Superstore sign. Past the sign, a bit further on and round to the right, was the Diamond Dogs and Love Cats building. Kelly stopped at the turning for Sainsbury’s to let a young family cross. The eldest of two children was carrying a cardboard cat box. Frank wondered whether Bill was inside. He tried to work out what sort of family Bill’s new family were, would they be right for him? If it was Bill in the cat box, Frank hoped he was going to a good home. He wanted to jump out of the car, stop the family and ask if he could see inside the box. Then he could quickly assess whether they were aware of their responsibilities as cat owners and that they knew a cat wasn’t just for Christmas, even though it was only June. The family crossed the road and Kelly drove along the superstore entrance road, past the petrol station and into the car park. There were two floors to the car park; the lower level was full and Kelly drove up the ramp and parked the car on the upper level.

  While she talked to a man offering to hand wash her car, Frank did his best to climb out of the passenger seat unaided and without crying out in pain. He’d woken up in the morning with an ache across the top of his chest and it hadn’t gone. At first he thought he was having a heart attack or a stroke. Almost immediately it crossed his mind that either of those things would require convalescence help. Was he actually pleased to have almost died in his sleep? He lifted his arms above the bedspread and said, ‘Hello.’ That was about all he knew about strokes – something about not being able to lift your arms and slurred speech. He didn’t seem to have had a stroke. Sitting up in bed and not toppling over onto the floor, he decided that he hadn’t had a heart attack either.

  He had probably been overdoing it lately. Just this week he’d lifted and painted heavy stone b
ollards, he’d emptied a garden shed, carried a scooter to the shops and back and been the maypole for five different breeds of dog. And then he’d held a yard sale. Not forgetting the seven press-ups. He’d never been so busy.

  Kelly said no thank you to the man offering to wash her car and Frank followed her across the car park. He wondered whether he was too old to wash cars in a supermarket car park. He tried to memorise the company name and telephone number on the man’s waterproof jacket so that he could ring them later and ask if they had any vacancies.

  ‘Six two three, four five five six,’ he whispered to himself, trying to remember the car wash company’s telephone number. ‘Three two five.’ But he’d forgotten the number by the time he was inside the large silver lift that took them down to the car park’s lower level. ‘Something Wash’ was all he’d seen of the name on the car washer’s jacket.

  Kelly put a pound coin into a lock and pulled a shopping trolley free from the trolley train. She pushed it backwards and forwards to check the wheels were okay and then walked with Frank through the doors into Sainsbury’s.

  Blade Runner.

  That’s what Frank wanted to say.

  It’s like Blade Runner.

  The shop was enormous. It stretched too far for Frank to see where it ended, if it actually ever did. He imagined its length being measured in football pitches and its height in double decker buses. At the centre of the store was a moving walkway leading up to a second floor that sold furniture, electrical goods and toys. The shop was very brightly lit and colourful signs hung everywhere, advertising deals, discounts and special offers. Music played in between the announcements, or the other way around. The adverts and customer service announcements were louder and longer than the music, just like the adverts on Kelly’s car radio. Frank didn’t mind. He had a new song.

  In the big Sainsbury’s.

  Kelly and me.

  S.H.O.P.P.I.N.G.

  ‘Clean up in aisle seventy,’ one of the announcements said.

  Seventy aisles! Frank thought. Sixty-seven more than where he usually shopped. And they were wide aisles, two double decker buses wide, wider than the whole of Fullwind Food & Wine. There was a deli counter and a fish counter. A butcher and a baker and probably a candlestick maker. At the in-store pharmacy a woman was sitting on a stool having her eyebrows plucked by another woman in a white coat.