Frank Derrick's Holiday of a Lifetime Read online

  For Holly

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  Euclid

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The Extra Ordinary Life of Frank Derrick, Age 81

  The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules

  The Little Old Lady Who Struck Lucky Again!

  The Time of Their Lives

  PROLOGUE

  An eighty-two-year-old man wearing a pair of Desert Storm camouflage cargo pants, with long white hair that ended halfway down the back of what was – even at an airport where all day flights arrived bringing passengers back from holidays in Hawaii and Acapulco – an incredibly loud shirt, was walking towards the check-in desks. He was carrying a large suitcase in one hand and an overnight bag in the other, both with a pattern like that of a stair carpet in a country hotel. Despite the abundance of pockets available in his trousers his passport and plane tickets were clenched between his teeth, like a dog with a newspaper.

  Frank Derrick’s suitcase was the only one in the airport that wasn’t on wheels and he kept tripping over all the other wheelie cases, like a pedestrian who’d accidentally wandered onto the M1. In the queue for the check-in desk Frank caught his breath, got the feeling back in his arm and wiped the dribble from his passport.

  ‘Good morning, sir.’ The woman behind the check-in desk smiled. ‘Los Angeles?’

  ‘Yes,’ Frank said. He gave her his passport and ticket and she entered some information into a computer.

  ‘I’m going to visit my daughter,’ Frank said, ‘and my granddaughter, to help her with her reunion project.’

  ‘That sounds like fun,’ the woman said and she asked Frank to put his suitcase onto the conveyor belt by the side of the desk.

  ‘Did you pack the bag yourself?’

  Too exhausted from carrying the case to think of an entertaining and witty answer, Frank simply said, ‘Yes.’

  The woman strapped a paper label around the handle, the conveyor belt started moving and the suitcase disappeared through a set of rubber curtains like a coffin in a crematorium. For the moment at least Frank hoped that it would be mistakenly loaded onto a flight to New Zealand or blown up by the police in a controlled explosion.

  It felt good to be free of the heavy baggage, and not just the suitcase but everything that he was leaving behind at home in Fullwind-on-Sea, including his actual home and the village itself. Frank said goodbye to the woman, picked up his hand luggage and started walking towards passport control, the departure lounge and America.

  1

  HALLOWEEN

  Frank’s daughter, Beth, had once told him that she always dreaded receiving an unexpected phone call that began with, ‘Is that the daughter of Francis Derrick speaking?’, and although it was less likely to happen the other way around, there was a serious tone in Beth’s voice that told Frank that it was going to be one of those phone calls.

  ‘Now, Dad,’ she said, ‘I don’t want you to worry,’ which naturally made him immediately worried. ‘It sounds more dramatic than it necessarily is. Maybe you want to sit down, though. Are you sitting down?’ The longer Beth took to reach her point the more worried Frank became.

  ‘I’m sitting,’ Frank said. ‘What is it?’ He sat down.

  Beth paused, preparing herself to say something that, clearly, she found difficult.

  ‘There are two things I need to tell you. I wish I could give you the option of choosing which you want first, the good news or the bad news. But I’m afraid they’re both fairly bad. Oh God,’ Beth took a deep breath, ‘I’ve made myself too nervous to tell you either of them now.’

  ‘Beth,’ Frank said, trying to appear calm and in control and not sound as desperate as he was to find out what was troubling his only child so far away from him on the other side of the world, ‘what is it?’

  ‘Jimmy has left me and they’ve found a lump.’

  It was such a lot of information delivered in such a short and almost poetic sentence that Frank wasn’t sure that he’d heard what Beth had actually said correctly and yet he didn’t want to ask her to repeat it. He was sitting down but he felt as though he was standing. He had the sensation that the room was moving and he thought that he might throw up. He needed to say something. He should at least ask what kind of lump and where it was. When Frank’s wife Sheila was alive she always dealt with Beth’s medical emergencies, the grazed knees and the calamine lotion, thermometers and plasters. Sheila knew where the dock leaves grew when Beth had fallen into a field of stinging nettles and how to remove a splinter without Beth even noticing. What would Sheila say now?

  While Frank searched for the right words, Beth in-undated him with technical details, symptoms, prognoses and Latin terminology. She talked about the wonders of modern medicine and some of the best doctors on the planet, about early diagnosis, expected full recovery and how different things were nowadays and thank God that she had medical insurance. Beth told Frank that a month or so after the lump from her breast was removed she’d have a few weeks of radiation therapy to eliminate any remaining cancer cells.

  ‘Radiation therapy?’ Frank said. It sounded so violent.

  ‘It’s just an X-ray, Dad,’ Beth said. She continued to play down the severity of the disease, as though Frank was the one who needed comforting. She told him about increasing survival rates rather than decreasing death rates and least-invasive surgeries and how the tumour was smaller than a nickel.

  ‘How big is a nickel?’ Frank said.

  ‘Around the same size as a ten-pence piece. I think.’ The conversation took a bizarre but welcome turn as they tried to determine the comparative size of different British and American coins. ‘They’re operating on Monday,’ Beth said.

  Frank couldn’t work out when that was. He had forgotten what day it was. He tried to factor in the time difference in his calculations.

  ‘The day after tomorrow,’ Beth said, picking up on Frank’s loss of bearings. ‘I’ve been scared to tell you.’ She paused. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Me? You shouldn’t be worrying about me,’ Frank said. ‘I mean, how are you? Are you okay?’

  ‘Apart from the break-up of my marriage and the cancer?’ Beth said and then she apologized for being flippant and blamed that on her daughter Laura. ‘She’s been keeping my spirits up by making tasteless jokes about it all. They do say that laughter is the best medicine.’

  They’re wrong, Frank wanted to say. It isn’t the best medicine. A year and a half ago on his eighty-first birthday, he’d been run over by a milk float. It was travelling at five miles an hour and he’d ended up beneath it covered in milk and eggs. It should have been hilarious. But it didn’t help with the pain. All the other things that Beth had just explained to him and that he had already forgotten or not understood because they were in Latin or American or medicinese: he hoped that those things were the best medicine. Medicine was the best medicine.

  ‘How is Laura?’ he said.

  ‘She’s fine, Dad. Actually, she genuinely has been great. With both things.’

  ‘Both things?’

  Frank had forgotten about Jimmy. They weren’t equally bad pieces of news
. Not to him at least. Neither was good but one of them was clearly far worse than the other.

  Frank had always liked Jimmy. He was the first of his daughter’s boyfriends that he had liked. Up until she’d met Jimmy, Beth appeared to be attempting to break some kind of bad boyfriend record. Frank had wondered whether she was doing it as an act of rebellion against something that he or Sheila had done. Had they been too strict with her? Was it their fault that in her teens Beth dated so many self-centered, boorish, rude, slovenly and thoughtless boys? She went out with petty thieves, racists and two drug pushers in the same way that other girls were attracted to blond boys or nerds. Jimmy was a whole different set of Seven Dwarfs by comparison. He was charming, helpful, humble and polite, conscientious, affable and kind. He was more faithful than Lassie. Jimmy had been a better father to Laura than her actual father, who hadn’t stayed around long enough to witness Laura’s first picture being taken in the hospital. Laura’s father had left before the first ultrasound scan. Frank had agreed never to speak his name, but David might have been Beth’s worst bad boyfriend. He was at least her last.

  Five years after David’s departure, Beth had brought Jimmy home to meet her parents and he’d seemed so perfect. It was impossible for Frank not to feel relieved. Jimmy brought flowers for Sheila and he gave Frank a bottle of what looked to him like very expensive wine (the bottle was dusty). Almost a year after Sheila had died, Jimmy asked to speak to Frank in private. He addressed him as ‘sir’ as though they were in a movie and he asked for Frank’s permission to marry his daughter. Frank was overjoyed and he’d said yes of course and Beth and Laura, who had been eavesdropping in the hall, came rushing into the living room. Jimmy, who bought and sold wine for a living but rarely swallowed any of it himself, opened a different equally expensive-looking bottle and they raised a toast to the future Mr and Mrs Brooks. Beth said that Frank wasn’t losing a daughter but was instead gaining a son. The thought hadn’t crossed Frank’s mind until then but once it was there he couldn’t get rid of it. Soon after the wedding, tired of the constant travelling back and forth to America to get his US passport and visa stamped, Jimmy moved permanently to Los Angeles, taking Beth and Laura with him and Frank lost his daughter all over again. Ten years later, it appeared as though he might lose her forever. And he’d lost his son too.

  It was because Frank liked him so much that Beth had waited until two months after Jimmy had left to tell Frank how they’d been gradually drifting apart for the past year. Sometimes, if she didn’t feel that there was any benefit to Frank knowing it, Beth would keep bad news from him. She hadn’t told him when Jimmy’s mother had died, for instance, or when Laura had been arrested for underage drinking. She wanted to protect him from things that wouldn’t affect him directly and that he would otherwise never have any way of finding out. She had even battled with her conscience before telling Frank about the cancer. Could she go through surgery and a month of radiation without telling her father? Would she be able to carry that secret around with her, if not for the rest of her life, for the rest of his?

  Beth had planned on eventually telling him about Jimmy but the more time that went by the harder it would have become. If she hadn’t found the lump it was possible that she would never have told Frank about Jimmy leaving and Frank could have lived the rest of his life blissfully ignorant of the fact that charming, helpful, humble and polite, conscientious, affable and kind Jimmy, whom he liked so much, didn’t live there any more. But two pieces of bad news delivered together seemed somehow to lessen the blow of them arriving individually.

  ‘Does Jimmy know? About the . . .’ Frank was afraid to say the word out loud. He’d been just as reticent in naming Sheila’s Alzheimer’s; even now he talked about how she wasn’t herself and he referred to her forgetfulness, as though she just needed to go back into the room where she’d forgotten everything and she would instantly remember it all.

  ‘No,’ Beth said. ‘He doesn’t know.’ Frank thought it was likely that she was never going to tell Jimmy.

  ‘Where is he now?’ Frank asked.

  ‘He’s staying at his brother’s in Pasadena.’

  ‘Is that far?’

  ‘About an hour’s drive.’

  ‘Right.’

  Frank was no wiser. Beth had often talked about the terrible traffic in Los Angeles. How far was an hour’s drive? Five minutes’ walk? He felt that he should be contributing something to the conversation, at least asking questions, but once again he felt lost.

  ‘Is Laura okay?’ he said, his default question.

  ‘She’s fine.’ Beth’s default answer.

  On any other day, Frank would have been devastated at the news of Jimmy’s departure from the family but for now he could only focus on his daughter. She told him to promise not to worry and she wouldn’t hang up the phone until he did. Frank promised, however meaningless that promise was. Because he would worry. Beth told him that she loved him and they said goodbye. When she hung up, Frank listened to the phone line. There was a second or two of nothing and then the short loud boop of disconnection, followed by silence and the crackle of the static and dust in the wires of Frank’s ancient phone that he’d had for so long that he didn’t realize he was still renting it from British Telecom. The basic £30 plastic phone had so far cost him over £750. Almost a minute passed and then he put the phone down.

  2

  THANKSGIVING

  Halloween seemed to go on for days. Frank sat in the dark watching television with the sound down, ignoring his doorbell ringing from dawn till dusk with people trying to trick him out of his treats. It carried on right the way through November.

  Dong-ding – ‘Do you need a gardener?’

  Dong-ding – ‘Did you know you’ve got a few loose slates on your roof, mate?’

  Dong-ding – ‘Can I interest you in boiler cover?’

  Dong-ding – ‘Have you considered an emergency twenty-four-hour call-line neck pendant?’

  Dong-ding – ‘Are you happy with your mobile provider?’

  Dong-ding – ‘Have you thought about Jesus today?’

  Frank Derrick’s doorbell was the talk of Fullwind. The paperboys passed the news to the postmen, who sent a letter up to the roofers, who shouted it from the rooftops to the window cleaners below. Jehovah’s Witnesses spread the word to the charity collectors, to the political canvassers and the gardeners touting for business who, in turn, told all the trick-or-treaters and knock-down-gingerers. It seemed like everybody wanted to have a go on Frank’s doorbell.

  It was, to be fair, an unusual doorbell. The two notes of Frank’s doorbell were the same as those of the world’s most recognizable and popular doorbell – the ‘ding-dong’ of sitcoms and Avon ladies – but when everyone pressed Frank’s doorbell, the two notes ascended; they went up instead of down – ‘dong-ding’ – as though the bell was asking a question or as if it had an Australian accent.

  When the doorbell rang one morning at the end of November, Frank decided to ignore it. It would only be more door-to-door spam. He wasn’t expecting anyone. He doubted that all his neighbours would be waiting on the doorstep to sing him an early Christmas carol before presenting him with a huge hamper and an enormous card too big to fit through the letter box, signed by them and everyone else in Fullwind-on-Sea. And if it was carol singers, they’d be tone-deaf carol singers or local children who didn’t know the words. The same lazy local children who dong-dinged Frank’s doorbell at Halloween with the hoods of their sweatshirts pulled over their heads or stood outside the library on 5 November with a balloon in a pushchair.

  The doorbell rang again.

  ‘Perhaps it’s for you, Bill,’ Frank said. He looked down at his cat and the cat looked back with the same impossible-to-read expression as always. It never changed, whether he was happy or sad, indifferent, hungry, thirsty, full, bored, excited, angry, scared of a dog, chasing a mouse, coughing up a fur-ball; the same blank expression of Botoxed irascibility that, today, seemed
to be saying:

  Whatever, Frank. Just answer the door and let me out. Going to the toilet indoors is so bloody uncivilized.

  Frank sighed. ‘Dong-ding merrily on high, Bill.’ He walked across the living room, stepping over DVD cases that he was in the middle of putting into alphabetical order. Frank had a lot of DVDs and he’d made it as far as ‘I’ before he’d stalled for almost an hour to perfect his impression of Michael Caine in The Italian Job. With Frank’s impressions it could sometimes be as star studded as the red carpet on Oscar night in the living room. Michael Caine, Humphrey Bogart, James Stewart, Sean Connery and Roger Moore could all be there. Most of the time, though, the carpet wasn’t red; it was cream-coloured, more freshly so underneath the armchair and sideboard. And it was just Frank and his poker-winning-faced cat Bill – which hadn’t seemed such a daft name for a cat when Ben was still alive – eating their individual dinners for one in front of the TV.

  Frank stepped over the DVDs and walked into the hall and down the stairs, with Bill following behind, weaving between Frank’s legs to undertake and overtake and almost trip him up.

  At the bottom of the stairs Frank picked up the day’s post. The junk mail was plentiful at this time of year and it all had a seasonal theme. Thermal underwear catalogues, warm cardigans and fleece pyjamas, Christmas stocking-filler gift ideas, bed-socks, anti-slip over-shoes and SAD lights. At some point in his life Frank had neglected to tick a box on an order form and now everybody had his address. There was another free pack of charity Christmas cards that he had no one to send to and a leaflet from the Government containing helpful but often contradictory tips for surviving the winter. ‘Keep moving’, ‘stay in one room’, ‘wear a hat in bed’, ‘eat a hot meal’, ‘keep your spirits up’, etc. He put the leaflet and the Christmas cards on the bottom stair and picked up an envelope. It had a US stamp and was addressed to Frank in Laura’s handwriting. He opened the envelope and took out a greetings card. ‘Happy Thanksgiving’, the card said above a cartoon picture of a smiling turkey with surely little to be smiling about or giving thanks to at this time of year. The card was signed ‘Beth and Laura’, both names in Laura’s handwriting.