The Extra Ordinary Life of Frank Derrick, Age 81

by J. B. Morrison

  ‘Old people are always dropping money, Francis. Comfortable trousers –’ he put his trilby on – ‘deep armchairs. Come on. Graham has a metal pin in his leg.’

  In the lift on the way down John took the metal detector out of the shopping basket.

  ‘Here,’ he said, offering the detector to Frank. ‘Try it on my Prince Albert.’

  ‘No thanks.’

  John switched the detector on. The sound it made as it repeatedly detected the metal floors, walls and ceiling of the lift seemed deafening in such an enclosed space. Frank put his fingers in his ears until John switched the detector off. Both men were laughing. Frank presumed it was because of the drugs and he imagined he would be stopping off on the way home to buy chocolate bars that his false teeth weren’t up to but his drug-addled mind told him he could eat.

  John carried the metal detector out of the lift on his lap and into the reception area where Graham was talking to the family of one of the residents; he had his back to Frank and John. As Smelly John passed behind him, he flicked the metal detector on and it buzzed and whooped like it had found the Treasure of the Sierra Madre inside the leg of the warden, who Frank was really starting to feel sorry for.

  They went along the corridor to the lounge. John in his wheelchair with the metal detector pulsing on his lap and Frank pushing his ladies’ shopping basket with its wheel squeaking and sticking to the carpet. It would have looked good filmed from behind in slow motion. If it had been the first Sunday of the month, Alice would have been in to play music hall tunes on the Greyflick piano and she could have stopped playing when they burst through the lounge door like cowboys.

  27

  Putting everything back in the shed was like packing a suitcase at the end of a holiday – somehow it didn’t all seem to fit – even though he’d got rid of a lot of ivy, sold a garden fork, and put a lot of stuff in the dustbin. Also, he now had all the things he’d brought down from the flat for the yard sale to fit in the shed as well.

  While he was putting everything back in the shed, Albert Flowers turned up again to ask Frank about putting everything back in the shed. He also enquired about the colour of the bollards.

  ‘Sunflower Yellow,’ Frank said.

  ‘White is the more traditional colour.’

  ‘I didn’t have any white.’

  ‘There is quite a bit of paint on the grass.’

  ‘It wasn’t quite as non-drip as it said it was on the tin.’

  ‘Perhaps you could cut the grass.’

  ‘I don’t have a lawnmower.’

  ‘I could give you the name of a very good gardener.’

  ‘I’m short of finances at the moment.’

  ‘He’s very reasonable.’

  ‘I’m very short of finances.’

  And it went on like that for a while.

  ‘Well, if you could tidy the garden up a bit, that would be helpful.’

  ‘I’m doing it now. I was doing it when you stopped me to ask me about it.’

  And so on.

  When Flowers had gone and Frank had finished repacking the shed, he put six new batteries in the metal detector. It beeped and a display he didn’t understand lit up at the top of the handle. He thought about what he might find buried beneath the ground. The earliest remains ever found in Fullwind-on-Sea were from the Bronze Age – when there was more Fullwind and less sea. Perhaps he’d find some bronze. There had been a Roman bathhouse fairly nearby. Romans were always leaving gold coins around. Surely some loose-trousered Roman OAPs had dropped a few quid before taking a bath.

  Frank didn’t know how powerful the metal detector was. It looked more like an expensive toy than it had when he’d seen it hanging on the wall of CASH 4 STUFF. It had worked fine on the armchairs at Greyflick House and on Graham’s gammy leg but would it pick up anything that had been buried under Frank’s garden a thousand years ago? He couldn’t help feeling some excitement about what might lie under the soil or the subsoil of his garden. Even if it was just a few coins dropped by the builders when they were building the flat in the 1950s.

  Frank wondered what had led to the metal detector being taken into the pawnbroker’s. Had its owner dug up such a great fortune as a result of the detector that they’d decided to not be greedy and give it to the shop to let someone else have a go? Or had the metal detector been such a failure at detecting metal that the only way it was ever going to find any treasure for its owner was if they sold it?

  Starting over by the shed he made his first sweep of the ground. The metal detector beeped steadily to signal nothing was there yet. He moved the metal detector across the grass.

  He could hardly claim to be bored any more.

  If he ran through the village kicking bollards over and changing the names on road signs, it would just be mindless vandalism. He couldn’t remember a time when he’d been so busy. He hadn’t had time to open his junk mail for ages. Anybody passing by who looked through the gaps in the hedge at the front of his garden would have presumed that Frank had finally found himself a hobby. Just as Hilary had found a way to pass whatever time she had left by spying on her neighbours and Trims His Lawn with Scissors, Washes His Car Too Much and Picks up Litter had all found something to fill the end of their lives with. Even Albert Flowers with the Villages in Bloom competition – which surely Frank was going to lose for Fullwind by the end of today – and all the women in the charity shop. Frank appeared to have a hobby at last. He’d never been so busy and yet so retired.

  The metal detector made a whooping sound. He moved it back over the ground till it whooped again. He moved the detector back and forth in shorter and shorter sweeps until he’d found the source of the noise. He lay the detector on the ground and started digging, first with a sharp kitchen knife and then with a soup spoon. About an inch down he found a hairgrip.

  After an hour of detecting metal Frank’s arm was killing him. It was getting dark. The garden was covered in holes and divots. He’d found two hairgrips, a battery, a bulldog clip, a front-door key that didn’t fit his front door, a broken drill bit, the tiny screw from the left arm of his old glasses, five pence in very small change and a round silver-coloured name tag engraved with the name BILL.

  Feeling he might be on a roll, Frank went indoors and wrote his CV. He gave himself a posthumous promotion from bus conductor to bus driver and ‘thesaurusised’ switch-board operator to telecommunications facilitator. Under the title HOBBIES AND INTERESTS he wrote, Impressions (Michael Caine, James Stewart, Tommy Cooper, and the Prime Minister). He might stand a better chance of being given a job if he made himself sound like he’d be fun to work with.

  The next morning he typed the CV out on one of the library’s computers, adding Sea Evacuation Survivor to his list of experience to pique any potential employers’ interest enough to at least ask him about it, leading to a story of adventure and heroism – complete with impressions of Churchill and Hitler – that would end in him getting the job.

  He printed five copies of the CV, gave one to the librarian and left the library – immediately regretting not mentioning his DVD alphabetising skills.

  In Fullwind Food & Wine Frank bought a small amount of shopping. He looked at the prices and at the nutritional information on the packaging but hadn’t paid enough attention to Kelly to really understand what any of it meant. At the counter he bought two scratch cards and a lottery ticket, using numbers from film titles – 3 Days of the Condor, The Magnificent 7, 10, 12 Angry Men, Catch 22 and Summer of ’42.

  ‘Speculating,’ he said to the man on the checkout and gave him a copy of his CV.

  In the charity shop he planned a robbery.

  He pictured himself being lowered by his accomplice – he was going to need an accomplice – through a gap in the polystyrene ceiling tiles to open the glass cabinet at the centre of the shop and steal the oriental vase. In the morning the old ladies would open the shop and not notice the cabinet was empty for hours or even days. And then they’d wonder whether t
he vase had ever even been there in the first place, presuming they were losing their marbles and consulting their American Ron leaflets.

  Nobody would be expecting a robbery in a charity shop.

  Frank could walk up to the counter with his hand in the gun pocket of his jacket and quietly demand the cash from the till. The old ladies would give a description of Frank to the police. He just looked like an old man, they’d say. They all look the same to us. Although, they’d pause and say, there was something vaguely familiar about him. And after the police had left, like Donald Sutherland at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, they’d point open-mouthed at the My Little Pony on the toy shelf.

  Frank browsed for a while before putting a brooch in his pocket and leaving the shop. If there was a line, it was stretched out across the threshold of the charity shop and he’d just crossed it.

  28

  The bus trip to CASH 4 STUFF was even more stressful than usual. Frank struggled to get both his tartan shopping basket and his kid’s scooter onto the bus and then to the seats at the back without taking somebody’s eye out with the scooter or dropping it on somebody. He felt like a Buckaroo! mule.

  The woman in CASH 4 STUFF wasn’t interested in the stolen brooch and it was only after Frank had demonstrated the scooter’s lights by scooting back and forth across the shop that she offered him a fiver for it.

  ‘Is that it?’ the woman said.

  Frank reached down into the shopping basket and started taking out his 16mm film collection. He felt sick again. When he was up on the stool ladder with the top of his head inside the loft space, he’d thought of Morgan Freeman in The Shawshank Redemption, opening his penknife, appearing to consider hanging himself before carving his name and the words ‘was here’ into the wood below the ceiling. How would anybody ever know Frank had been here? He didn’t even own a penknife.

  Frank had reached up into the loft and slowly dragged the heavy box towards him and removed the film boxes a few at a time. Climbing up and down the steps to place them in the hall below. He’d sat down on the carpet and looked at the film boxes, some were flat, square and card-board, and others were round silver tins. Was he ever realistically going to get to watch any of these films or show them to anyone? He didn’t even have a projector.

  He piled the films on the counter of CASH 4 STUFF. The woman turned away and started typing something into a computer.

  ‘What would somebody who bought them watch them on?’ the woman said.

  ‘A sixteen-millimetre projector.’

  ‘Do you have one of those?’

  Frank looked around the shop, sure that they would have at least one film projector for sale. There were piles of DVD players and four or five different video game systems for watching films on but no projectors.

  ‘I don’t myself. No,’ he said.

  ‘Hmmm,’ the woman said and carried on looking at the computer.

  ‘They’re collector’s items,’ Frank said. ‘Retro,’ he added, remembering what the woman had said about his DVDs.

  The woman turned back from the computer. She started opening one of the film tins.

  ‘Careful,’ Frank said, and then, slightly less hysterically, ‘they can unravel.’

  The woman opened the tin. ‘Just checking there are actually films inside and not just empty tins,’ she said, and closed the tin.

  ‘I’ve brought a gas bill,’ Frank said. He showed the woman his bus pass again and a red gas bill.

  ‘They’re going to cut you off, you know,’ she said. ‘Is this why you’re selling everything?’

  Frank said yes, because he was ashamed of what the truth might say about him.

  One afternoon during a game of Battleships in the lounge of Greyflick House, Smelly John had pointed out which residents he thought had dementia and what their symptoms were. Frank had felt bad about laughing about something that had taken his wife away from him, and he hated to think that he would have sat there laughing after giving Sheila the name Can’t Remember What A Cup Is or Thinks Her Husband Is Trying To Poison Her, but he joined in with John anyway, giving everybody in the lounge Native American names. Gets Famous People’s Names Wrong, Walks at an Angle, Sees Things That Aren’t There, No Interest in Personal Hygiene, Misery Guts, Goes Walk-about in the Night, Easily Distracted, and then there was one man who Smelly John said liked to undress in public and had lost his sexual inhibitions, thinking all the young female relatives and visiting health workers and nurses found him attractive. Was that Frank’s dementia too? Thinking he was Peter Stringfellow?

  He left CASH 4 STUFF with an empty shopping basket and with £75 and a stolen brooch in his pocket. He went to see Smelly John where he made a nonsensical joke about Schrödinger’s shopping basket and while John was in the toilet he stole half his dope.

  29

  Kelly’s eleventh visit was perfect. She arrived ten minutes early with a lemon meringue pie and Frank immediately gave her the day off. She sat next to him on the sofa and together they ate pie and watched Singin’ in the Rain.

  For ‘approx. 103 mins’ the phone didn’t ring. Nobody tried to sell Frank insurance or a doorbell. No one knocked on the door to talk about the afterlife, no roofers called to give him quotes he hadn’t asked for. There were no unexpected cockney Art Garfunkels at the window ruining the bit where Gene Kelly sings in the rain. Whenever Frank watched the film from now on, this would be what he would think of. Sitting with Kelly eating lemon meringue pie. This would be his Director’s Cut.

  ‘I used to be able to do that,’ Frank said during the scene where Donald O’Connor runs up a wall, does a somersault in the air and lands on his feet.

  Kelly smiled. ‘Really?’ she said.

  ‘Did you know,’ Frank said, ‘Donald O’Connor spent three days in hospital after filming this bit?’

  ‘Wow,’ Kelly said.

  ‘He said it was like being run over by a milk float.’

  ‘A milk float? Can you imagine such a thing?’

  ‘I know. Hollywood, eh.’

  They paused the film while Kelly made them both tea and then Frank continued with his DVD commentary.

  ‘Gene Kelly filmed this in one take,’ he said during the film’s title song-and-dance routine. ‘There was a water shortage in town on the day. The script was written to go with the songs, you know. It was the original jukebox musical. I’m not entirely sure what a jukebox musical is, but I remember hearing someone say it on the television.’

  ‘How do you know all of this?’ Kelly said.

  ‘I have a lot of free time –’ Frank lifted his foot and grimaced in a show of pain, ‘since the football injury.’

  Near the end of the film when Gene Kelly tells the theatre audience that it’s Debbie Reynolds’ character who is the real star and she starts crying, Frank said, ‘She had to rub onions in her eyes, you know.’

  After the film Kelly washed the cups and plates and put the triangle of leftover lemon meringue pie in the fridge next to the unopened Oreos, strawberry jam and tomato sauce.

  Just before she left, Kelly said, ‘Take care of yourself. Because I won’t be here to take care of you soon.’

  30

  There were dark clouds over Fullwind on Tuesday morning and it looked as though it might rain. Frank hoped it would. He was going to walk to the shops as Gene Kelly, jumping in puddles and hugging lamp posts. He would stand under the leaking gutter outside the charity shop and sing his heart out until Maureen – Fullwind’s police community support officer – stopped him and told him to go home.

  He had the feeling he might be on a roll again. Two of the numbers on his lottery ticket had come up and when he was getting ready to go to the shop to collect his winnings, he’d found a pound coin in the torn lining of his blue jacket.

  With a black collapsible umbrella in his pocket Frank set off for the shops. Disappointingly, there was no rain, just the dark clouds and a wind strong enough to have blown his umbrella inside out and snapped the material from
the spokes if he had tried to open it. On certain days, Fullwind was very much the West Sussex village’s Native American name. If Gene Kelly had been singin’ in the Fullwind rain, he would have spent half the film chasing his trilby along Church Road.

  Frank went into Fullwind Food & Wine. He gave his lottery ticket to the man behind the counter who fed it into a machine. The machine did its thing, clicking and whirring, checking the numbers and working out Frank’s prize.

  Frank and Smelly John had often talked about what they would do if they won the lottery. John was going to Spend! Spend! Spend! He was going to buy a speedboat and a helicopter. He was going to live on an island in the Caribbean and surround himself with dolly birds and drink champagne out of a shoe.

  ‘We have a winner,’ the man behind the counter said. He opened the till and gave Frank his lottery spoils. Catch 22 and The Magnificent 7 had won him £2.40. It was such a small amount that it felt worse than not winning at all. He was almost embarrassed to accept it and couldn’t even be bothered to work out how many extra Kelly minutes it would buy him. He left the shop and immediately broke his promise to Smelly John to spend his lottery cash on a Beverley Hills mansion with an enormous art deco cinema in the garden by going next door to the charity shop and blowing it all on a small china owl.

  On the way home, Frank almost bumped into a phone box while he was looking at the pavement for dropped coins. He checked inside the phone box for any money left behind, something he hadn’t done since he was a small boy. Frank wondered whether he would ever see Kelly again after next week, his twelfth day of Kelly Christmas (or eleventh if he didn’t include his terrifying hour with Janice). He started singing to himself. ‘On the first day of Christmas . . .’ And then he couldn’t get the song out of his head and he spent the whole day trying to remember how many swans-a-swimming there were, what it was there were nine of, and what those nine things were doing, and also how handy five gold rings would have been to him right now.