Frank stopped to tread water and get his breath back. He turned to see how far sideways the current had taken him. He could see the roofs of the brightly coloured beach huts and the word CAFE painted in large white letters on the roof of the café like the top of a police car. He didn’t know why it was written so big on the roof or who it was written for.
He started swimming again. He could see a ship in the distance. If he swam for long enough, the current might pull him massively off course until he was in the same place where the Dutch liner had been torpedoed. If he turned back and swam to the shore then, he might be able to start a new life somewhere new. Ireland or Scandinavia. He could just keep on going until he found his way to Canada, where the Dutch ship was heading for, to see how different his life might have been if he’d grown up as a Canadian.
He carried on swimming. He was like a finger on a map in the library or an email on its way to Beth. What time was it in LA now? Had anybody ever swam that far? Would the time difference mean he would get there before he left? He could just keep going until he ran out of water, like Tom Hanks running in Forrest Gump.
Frank was tired now. He began to doubt whether he’d left himself with enough energy to swim back. He’d seen Ethan Hawke do that in Gattaca a couple of days ago as part of his DVD marathon. Was there anything to swim back for? Once he made it back up the stones, over the wall and along the alleyway, what was there waiting for him? He was Morgan Freeman at the end of Shawshank Redemption, he was James Stewart on a bridge in the snow in It’s a Wonderful Life, and Phil Daniels riding his scooter up and down Beachy Head in Quadrophenia. Frank was Harrison Ford about to take a ‘leap of faith’ into mid-air as Indiana Jones or over into a waterfall in The Fugitive. He was Patrick Swayze coming back for a final dirty dance with Jennifer Grey. He was Frank Derrick swimming back to Fullwind.
Although he hadn’t really swum that far at all – Sheila would have laughed at such a paltry distance – it had seemed like a very long way to swim back. When he reached the shore he was too tired to notice the slimy seaweed beneath his feet again. He didn’t hear the air bladders in the seaweed – Albert Flowers could have told him this particular seaweed was called sargassum – popping like bubble wrap as he stepped on them. As he walked the last few feet, the waves hit the back of his legs and he struggled to stay upright. He collapsed exhausted on the stones and sat shivering and panting, his false teeth almost chattering free from his gums.
After five minutes he stood and walked back along the beach to his pile of clothes, he put his glasses on and got dressed. He would have attempted Sheila’s beach towel trick, but he hadn’t brought a towel. Or clean underpants. Smelly John would be turning – probably with laughter – in his grave at the thought of that. It made Frank smile, picturing Smelly John laughing, slapping the arms of his wheelchair and upsetting all the other residents in the lounge of Greyflick House.
Frank wondered what the time was. He suddenly felt busy. As though there were a lot of things he needed to be getting on with. Places to go, people to meet. He had no idea what, who or where any of them were, but he had a definite feeling of purpose.
He pulled his trousers on over his wet swimming trunks. He put the rest of his clothes on and stood up. He put his hand in his trouser pocket and felt the five pence in small change, the hairgrips and the stolen brooch. He took them all out of his pocket and walked closer to the sea. He threw the coins at the water, hoping to skim them, but they disappeared under the water. He waited for the next wave to come in, looked for a calm stretch of water, and then he threw the brooch. It bounced six or seven times across the surface of the water Dam Busters style.
He clipped his long wet hair back with the hairgrips and looked at Bill’s name tag. He turned it over in his hand, held it for a moment next to the scar from Beth’s kite string, and then put the name tag back in his pocket. He picked his shoes and socks up, and, carrying them at his side, he walked barefoot up the stones, as though they were carpeted, or his feet were made of shoes.
The bus to the big Sainsbury’s was empty at this time of day. Frank made a mental note of that for future reference. He took the bus all the way to its final destination. The driver opened the doors and Frank walked past the supermarket entrance to the warehouse building behind.
He wondered whether he would still be there. It had been such a long time. When the woman came through the swing doors and put the plastic crate onto the counter, Frank wondered whether the only friend he had left in the world would forgive him, or even recognise him. And how would Frank know if he did? Would he be able to read anything from his cut-out from a magazine poker face?
But as the woman opened the door of the plastic crate and he looked at Bill, for only the second time ever, he found that he could:
I’ve bloody missed you, you silly old fool.
Epilogue
Frank was sitting at the window of his living room. He’d just named a man walking by ‘Man Walking By’. In the living room there was a new calendar and a new set of stray dogs. Frank didn’t know the breed of this month’s dog and it didn’t look like anyone from the Second World War that he could mimic. The dog’s name was Ollie. Frank presumed that Stan had been run over.
There were now twenty-five giraffes on the mantelpiece. Probably more than there were left in the wild and definitely enough to be described as a collection, if he ever got round to advertising them on the Internet.
Frank had seen Kelly once since her final visit.
It was about three months ago. He was in the big Sainsbury’s when he saw her with Sean. They were holding hands, looking at baby clothes and toys. They both seemed very happy. Everything Frank had learned from watching Sherlock Holmes films told him that Kelly was probably pregnant.
‘Mr Derrick,’ she said when she saw him, and then she corrected herself. ‘Frank. You remember Frank?’ she said to Sean. Sean said hello. ‘You came back,’ Kelly said to Frank.
‘They don’t sell couscous in Fullwind,’ Frank said.
Kelly looked at the couscous in his shopping trolley and smiled. He knew she would also have seen the six tins of spaghetti.
‘Buy one get one free,’ he said.
She smiled again. Her super-straight fringe had gone and she looked more like her photo on the Lemons Care website. They talked for a short while. She asked Frank if he’d built his cinema.
‘Not yet. But I did find an old “Exit” sign on the Internet. At least people will know how to leave.’
‘You just need to find one that shows them how to get in now,’ Kelly said.
They chatted for a minute or so more and then said goodbye and went their separate ways into the vast superstore, bumping into each other again in the biscuits aisle and once more at the checkouts.
‘We must stop meeting like this,’ Frank said as he paid for his shopping before saying goodbye one more time.
He never did find out whether Smelly John was black, or white or neither. It didn’t make any difference to Frank. In spite of all the times he’d teased Beth with predictions of what he would one day become, he was no more a racist than Graham the Greyflick warden was.
The doorbell rang. Frank had recently reconnected it when he saw a second-hand bell for sale in the charity shop. He walked over to the stereo and turned the volume of the Sex Pistols CD down and made his way downstairs. He picked up the day’s post. There was even more junk mail today than usual. Somehow the stair-lift companies and charities all knew it was his birthday and they took the opportunity to personalise their begging letters.
There was a card from Beth. Inside the card she’d written how sorry she was that she couldn’t be there for his birthday and that she hoped to be able to make it over for Thanksgiving or after ‘The Holidays’. She was properly American now, Frank thought.
The latest edition of the village newsletter was already talking up this year’s Villages in Bloom competition. Fullwind had come fifth last year. Frank repainting each of the bollards outsi
de his flat a different colour – Eating-apple green, Moroccan pink and Duck-egg blue, like the ludicrously priced huts on the beach – it probably hadn’t helped. He picked up the newspaper. He didn’t read the date out aloud as it was his birthday and he knew the date.
Frank looked at the silhouetted shape through the glass of the front door. A roofer, perhaps, or somebody who wanted to talk about Jesus or guttering? Frank looked down at Bill.
‘I’m eighty-two,’ he said. He took the chain off the door. ‘Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough.’
Acknowledgements
Extra Ordinary thanks to Nicola Barr at Greene and Heaton, Natasha Harding and everyone at Pan Macmillan, to Holly and Jakki, to my mum and my sister. Thank you to Neil Witherow and Marc Ollington for reading the early versions and not telling me to go back to my day job (watching telly). Thanks to Jonathan and Justine at the Bookseller Crow in Crystal Palace, to Tim Connery, Les Carter and Chris T-T.
AUTHOR Q&A
J. B. Morrison
1. Do you know anyone who has been run over by a milk float?
Not so far. If I see a milk float I do keep a safer distance than I might have done before. I know what potentially – and yet hilariously – dangerous vehicles they can be now.
2. Why did you decide to make your protagonist 81 years old?
I was spending a lot of time with my mother, who was 81 at the time. Like Frank, she lived on her own in a first-floor flat in a small Sussex village. People were always telling her to get her roof fixed even though there was nothing noticeably wrong with it. She was getting a lot of junk mail too and annoying telephone cold calls. I wanted to write about that in some way.
3. Did you base Frank’s character on anyone you know?
Not really. I’m sure I will have unconsciously put bits of my mum in there, and also some of me. Mostly, though, Frank is a figment of my imagination.
4. Can you see yourself becoming like Frank as you grow older?
It’s fairly likely, if I’m not already like him. It was another reason I started writing the book. Realising how it wouldn’t really be all that long until I’d be a pensioner and I wondered about what kind of pensioner I’d be? Would I still be playing loud rock music and growing my hair long?
5. What music do you think you will be listening to when you are 81?
I imagine I’ll be listening to a lot of the same music that I listen to now. Which is also the same music I listened to when I was eighteen. It was one of my first thoughts before writing the book. How, just because Frank was eighty-one, he wouldn’t have to change the music he liked. Or that he wouldn’t be able or allowed to discover new music. In the sheltered housing complex in the book many of the residents would have been young enough to have been Beatles or Rolling Stones fans as teenagers. Some of the residents are actually younger than the Rolling Stones. A good real life example of this is that my mum’s favourite singers are Bob Marley and R Kelly.
6. Who is the inspiration for Kelly Christmas?
She’s entirely fictional, although because Kelly is the same age as my daughter, that hopefully helped me not make her completely unbelievable.
7. What would you say the themes of the book are?
Friendship and loneliness. A fear of mortality. I don’t think of it as a book about an old man but a book about a man who just happens to be old. The forty-year-old Frank Derrick wouldn’t have been a lot different to the Frank Derrick aged 81.
8. Do you have a favourite moment in the book?
Maybe when Frank goes swimming towards the end of the story, and the whole beach trip with Kelly chapter. I also like the epilogue. I’ve always loved epilogues in films where they tie up any loose ends and let the viewer know what happened to everyone in the story. ‘Jeff never did go back to college, Jimmy died in the Vietnam War saving his best friend’ etc. And then there’s all the Bill stuff of course. I enjoyed writing about Bill the most, even though he doesn’t really do anything.
9. What do you hope readers will take away from your novel?
If they’re entertained and amused and moved by it that would be nice. Perhaps they’ll telephone their parents or grandparents just to ask them how they are.
10. Do you have any favourite books or authors?
A lot of American and North American authors. Chuck Palahniuk, Kurt Vonnegut, Dave Eggers, Douglas Coupland, Cormac McCarthy and Brady Udall.
11. How did you become an author?
It was an accident. I had a fairly long career in pop music and wrote an autobiographical account of that. Having the book published was such a genuine thrill that I wanted to write more. I’ve been very lucky being able to somehow follow one pretty dream occupation with another.
12. What do you enjoy most about being an author?
When I really get into a writing flow and I can’t get things down quick enough. With my way of writing it doesn’t happen too often. It will usually be in a long section of dialogue when the conversation between two characters just takes over and it’s like they’re actually having a real conversation and I’m just writing down what they say. I also love it when I think of something that in a moment makes the whole story suddenly make sense.
13. Describe a typical day in your life.
I’m terrible at the whole getting up at five a.m., taking the dog for a walk, dropping the kids off at school, grinding my own coffee beans and then writing a thousand words before lunch thing. I haven’t got a dog and my daughter is twenty-seven, so that doesn’t help of course. I really have no discipline or routine other than getting up whenever I wake up, watching BBC Breakfast news roll over and over again and then going on Twitter. As an example, while I’m supposed to be writing this I’m on Twitter pretending I’m at the Q Awards. I do go swimming on Tuesday mornings. In the water I tend to come up with my best writing ideas, which is a bit inconvenient.
The Little Old Lady
Who Broke All the Rules
An incredibly quirky, humorous and warm-hearted story about growing old disgracefully – and breaking all the rules along the way!
79-year-old Martha Andersson dreams of escaping her care home and robbing a bank.
She has no intention of spending the rest of her days in an armchair and is determined to fund her way to a much more exciting lifestyle. Along with her four oldest friends – otherwise known as the League of Pensioners – Martha decides to rebel against all of the regulations imposed upon them. Together, they cause uproar: protesting against early bedtimes and plasticky meals.
As the elderly friends become more daring, they hatch a cunning plan to break out of the dreary care home and land themselves in a far more attractive Stockholm establishment. With the aid of their Zimmer frames, they resolve to stand up for old-aged pensioners everywhere. And that’s when the adventure really takes off . . .
Perfect for fans of The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.
THE EXTRA ORDINARY
LIFE OF FRANK DERRICK,
AGE 81
Born in London ages ago to his two parents, Frank and Jenny, J. B. Morrison is a musician and already the author of two novels – Storage Stories and Driving Jarvis Ham. Goodnight Jim Bob is an autobiographical account of his ten years as singer with punk-pop band Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine. That was when he was called Jim Bob. Like in The Waltons.
With Carter USM Jim Bob had 14 Top 40 singles and a Number 1 album. He played all over the world, headlined Glastonbury and was sued by The Rolling Stones. He’s also made a ton of solo albums and written the screenplay for a film. Plus he was in a musical, in 2010 at the Edinburgh Fringe.
Is there no end to his talents?
Yes. Everything not mentioned here. Don’t ask him to put up a shelf or cook you dinner. The shelf will fall off the wall and you won’t like the food.
To find out more about J. B. Morrison visit http://www.jim-bob.co.uk/ or say hello on Twitter @mrjimBob.
&n
bsp; First published 2014 by Pan Books
This electronic edition published 2014 by Pan Books
an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR
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www.panmacmillan.com
ISBN 978-1-4472-5275-7
Copyright © J. B. Morrison 2014
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The Extra Ordinary Life of Frank Derrick, Age 81 Page 22