Frank Derrick's Holiday of a Lifetime Read online

  Laura was wearing black again, different clothes but the same colour. On the drive to Hollywood, Frank asked her if she was a goth. The question surprised Laura. It sounded so unusual coming from the mouth of her eighty-two-year-old grandfather that she didn’t notice a red light and nearly drove into the car in front.

  ‘Am I a goth?’ she said. ‘Wow. No, I’m not a goth.’

  Frank loosened his grip on the passenger seat, which he’d squeezed tightly when Laura had slammed on the brakes.

  ‘An emo, then?’ he asked.

  Laura turned to look at Frank. The extent of her grandfather’s knowledge of youth subcultures had caused her to temporarily forget how to drive. The lights were now green. A driver behind honked their horn.

  ‘I’m not an emo either,’ she said, remembering where the accelerator pedal was and moving forward. ‘I don’t really like labels.’

  ‘Wait till you get to my age,’ Frank said. ‘You’re really going to hate it. Pensioner, OAP, the aged, the elderly –’ a moment of silence passed while Frank thought, before continuing – ‘old codger, geriatric.’

  ‘Old timer,’ Laura joined in.

  ‘Past it,’ Frank said.

  ‘Senior Citizen.’

  ‘Wrinkly.’

  ‘Old coot.’

  They both were silent, thinking up synonyms.

  ‘Old fart,’ Laura said.

  Frank pretended to be offended.

  ‘Now that’s just rude.’

  Laura parked the car in a mall car park and they walked to Hollywood Boulevard. Outside the Chinese Theatre Frank looked at the hand-and footprints of the film stars in the cement and he couldn’t get over how so many great people had all stood or knelt in this one small area of the world. And now here he was too. He put his feet in the prints left by his favourite actors. He almost refused to believe that they could all be genuine and suspected that at least some of the prints might have been created by lookalikes in borrowed shoes, like the people dressed as movie superheroes posing for tourist cameras and handing out flyers outside the theatre.

  Laura left Frank alone to marvel at the prints in the cement while she went to a kiosk to collect tickets for the ‘Homes of the Hollywood Stars Luxury Minibus Tour’.

  When she came back Frank said, ‘People had smaller feet in the old days.’ And then he remembered that he was from the old days too.

  The driver and guide on the minibus tour, Robert something-unpronounceable, which was possibly a made-up name, was a working actor. He said so a number of times during his ‘Homes of the Hollywood Stars Luxury Minibus Tour’ patter. One day, he said, he would put his hands in the wet cement outside the Chinese Theatre and have his name cast in brass at the centre of a terrazzo star on the Walk of Fame on Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street.

  Jack Nicholson. I worked on a movie with a friend of his. Great guy. Is anybody here going to Universal Studios? Look over there, right in the heart of the San Fernando Valley. There are sixteen cities within the city of Los Angeles . . .

  Robert something-unpronounceable-and-possibly-made-up showed them the houses of the rich and famous. Some of them were so large and extravagant that Frank thought they couldn’t possibly be real. He thought that up close the houses would turn out to be half or a quarter the actual life size and if anyone genuinely lived there they would need to duck to enter through the front door. Or perhaps the buildings were hollow balsa wood shells or two-dimensional pictures like the huge billboards that he’d seen by the side of the highway. He saw no people going in or coming out of any of the houses on the tour to give him any idea of scale and disprove his scepticism.

  Robert knew a lot about the homes of the stars and during the tour he also sang songs, told jokes and played snatches of related movie and TV theme tunes through the bus’s stereo. Outside a house that had been built on the site of the home that James Stewart had lived in for almost fifty years, Robert demonstrated one of a number of his impressions.

  ‘It’s not as good as mine,’ Frank whispered to Laura.

  ‘Go on, then,’ Laura said.

  Frank shook his head. ‘No.’

  ‘Go on,’ Laura said. ‘Show us your Jimmy Stewart.’

  ‘I haven’t warmed my voice up,’ Frank said.

  ‘Yeah, sure.’

  Robert passed blurred photographs around the minibus of some of the stars that he’d ‘papped’ while driving past their homes and he rated them out of ten for how normal or ‘nutso’ he thought they were.

  It was an entertaining tour. Frank liked the way Robert pronounced certain words – ve-heer-cle, the-ay-ter – and he enjoyed the jokes and the celebrity gossip and all the facts and figures about the houses that he would forget the minute that he climbed out of the ve-heer-cle when the tour was over.

  Elvis Presley’s first home, blah blah blah, an acre and a half of land, blah blah, fifty-one million dollars on the market right now. Where are you guys from? England? I’ve got Scotch ancestors.

  Robert stopped the bus outside the gates of the vast Greystone Mansion for more statistics.

  Fifty-five rooms, forty-six thousand square feet, sixteen acres. He reeled off a few of the films that had been shot there. National Treasure, X-Men, The Muppets, Ghost-busters, Batman and Robin, There Will Be Blood, The Witches of Eastwick, Dead Ringer.

  ‘I love that movie,’ Laura said.

  ‘Is that the film with two Bette Davises?’

  Laura nodded. ‘We should definitely go there tomorrow.’ She took out her own copy of the itinerary. She unfolded it and wrote, ‘Visit Greystone Mansion’ in black (naturally) pen.

  Robert drove on.

  The Osbournes, did you guys see when Sharon threw a ham over the wall? Tom Cruise, Frank Sinatra, guess who lives here now? Thirty million dollars, the oldest home in Beverley Hills, Shirley Temple lived here from the age of five until her late teens. Lana Turner, gangsters, murder, sex, scandal, George Clooney, Madonna’s real estate? More like unreal estate? Opulence. Extravagance. Decadence. Who here is a fan of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air? That’s right sir, the actual house. Any fans of Neil Diamond on the bus? Sweet Caroline, ba ba da. Rodeo Drive, here you go now, ladies, Coco Chanel, diamonds, Prada, the Pretty Woman hotel over there, one night is over ten grand, how are you guys from Germany at the back there?

  When the tour was over everyone applauded Robert. Laura tipped him. Frank offered to give her some money but she refused to take it. They went to a diner nearby and Frank ate a burger, disappointed that the portions weren’t quite as enormous as he was planning on telling everyone in his post-holiday anecdotes.

  ‘I might start my own tour when I get home. The homes of the stars of Fullwind,’ he said.

  ‘Does anyone famous live there?’

  ‘There’s the woman in the charity shop with the lazy eyes.’

  He attempted to demonstrate by staring into two different distances.

  ‘Ow,’ he said. He took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. ‘That must hurt, doing that all day.’

  ‘Who else is famous in Fullwind?’ Laura said. ‘Apart from the woman with the googly eyes?’

  ‘Eyes Facing South-West,’ Frank said. ‘That’s her Sioux name.’

  ‘Is she Native American?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  Frank told Laura about Washes His Car Too Much, Picks Up Litter and Trims His Lawn With Nail Scissors and all the other people he’d renamed after seeing Dances With Wolves on television.

  ‘What’s my Native American name?’ Laura said.

  He thought for a while.

  ‘I don’t know yet. I’ll let you know when I think of it. You can’t rush these things. You don’t want to end up with the wrong name.’ He shifted in his seat. ‘For my tour I think I’ll have to make my luxury minibus more luxurious. My back is killing me.’

  Frank found Laura very easy to talk to. Their shared love of films made the age gap immaterial. Frank asked about her job and Laura took a business card out of h
er pocket and passed it across the table. In gothic text at the card’s centre it read: Venice Slice – Laura, Junior Stylist.

  ‘The journey to work must be a nightmare,’ Frank said. ‘All the way to Italy and back every day.’

  ‘Ha ha,’ Laura said. ‘It’s near Venice Beach,’ she said. ‘That’s California. We do haircuts and pizza slices.’

  ‘In the same place?’ Frank said. ‘Isn’t that unhygienic?’

  ‘I eat there all the time and it hasn’t done me any harm,’ Laura said, and she tilted her head and her mismatched eyes seemed to fall sideways inside her skull in a more accurate Eyes Facing South-West impression than Frank’s earlier attempt.

  He handed the business card back.

  ‘You can keep it,’ Laura said. ‘In case you ever need a haircut. Or a pizza.’

  He put the card in the front pocket of his shirt.

  ‘How is your project going?’ Frank said. ‘Are you still brainwashing your mother?’

  ‘I like to think of it as heart-washing,’ Laura said. ‘But yes, the Reunion Project is still on. You know, on the first night you were here,’ she said, ‘we watched the last ever episode of Friends. I remember Mom and Jimmy watching it when it was first on TV and Mom crying and Jimmy hugging her. I teased them at the time. That movie we saw last night? A bad movie. But one of their favourites. And you know how those waiters sung happy birthday to you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Frank said.

  ‘Mom arranged that for Jimmy once. On his birthday. He had banana cheesecake.’ She shook her head. ‘I’ve had to sit through a lot of really cheesy movies. But somebody has to make Mom realize that she and Jimmy belong together. Neither of them is going to make the first move otherwise. Mom’s too proud and Jimmy’s too polite. He won’t make the move even though he really wants to.’

  ‘You still see Jimmy?’ Frank said.

  Laura nodded. ‘And he’s been round to the house a couple of times. When Mom’s out.’

  ‘And Beth doesn’t know?’

  ‘No. Please don’t tell her. Although Jimmy does have the annoying habit of tidying up when he’s round. Mom’s noticed that but she hasn’t worked it out that it was him. He’s always liked things to be tidy, which was great before because Mom and I both hate housework. I seriously worry about what a dump we’ll be living in, in a few months’ time. We’ll be under a foot of dust and won’t know where the vacuum is. Mom definitely noticed it was tidier after last time Jimmy’d been round. A picture was straightened up and some books were put away, the CDs were back in the right cases and the chairs mysteriously parallel with the table. She thought we had a poltergeist. Rather than believe that I could possibly have tidied up she’d sooner believe in ghosts. It was like we’d been burgled by chambermaids.’

  ‘Does Jimmy know about your project?’

  ‘No way,’ Laura said. ‘He’d be horrified.’

  Frank didn’t know what to make of it all. He wasn’t sure if it was a good or a bad thing. Should he be telling Laura off?

  ‘Why did Jimmy leave?’ he said. ‘He did leave, didn’t he? I don’t really know why they separated. I didn’t want to pry too much. Did they argue? Is one of them to blame? I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be asking you all this. It’s probably upsetting.’

  Laura shrugged. She didn’t seem upset at all.

  ‘I wish they had argued, to be honest. They did argue a bit but mostly without actually saying anything. The silences were worse. I used to go and sit in my room because it was too quiet. If one of them had stormed out of the house or they’d thrown a few pots and pans at each other, it would have been better. Exciting at least. I’m joking. But no, I don’t think either of them were to blame though. Scratch that. Both of them are to blame.’

  A thought occurred to Frank.

  ‘Does Jimmy still not know that Beth has been ill?’

  Laura shook her head.

  ‘And you haven’t told him?’

  ‘It’s up to Mom,’ Laura said. ‘I don’t want it to be the reason why they get back together. I don’t want Jimmy coming back because he feels sorry for Mom. She doesn’t need a nurse. He definitely would have been there in the hospital with her. Even if she didn’t want him there. But I don’t think Mom wanted to feel like she was helpless without him and to admit that she needed him, holding her hand in the hospital and passing her Kleenex when she was all teary. Keeping Lump to herself was even a bit selfish. If that doesn’t sound dumb?’

  Frank thought about the time that he’d spent by Sheila’s hospital bed holding her hand and how he would have felt if she’d kept her illness a secret from him. For a long time Sheila had done exactly that. She did it out of kindness to Frank. Maybe Beth was doing Jimmy a favour by not telling him. Frank had hated going to the hospital. He’d grown used to, but was never ever comfortable with, the smells and the sounds of sickness and cure, the miracles and the normality. He always felt like he was getting in the way of the nurses and was forever apologizing and standing up when they came to the bed to check her blood pressure or take yet another sample. And yet when he left the ward to go to the toilet or to get a cup of tea from the machine or a breath of fresh air with all the smokers hooked up to bags on wheels outside the hospital, he felt so guilty. When he left the hospital in the evening, he was glad that the strict visiting hours had given him an excuse to be able to leave. He’d take the bus home and sleep alone, knowing that he might never lie next to his wife again. Even though she’d always complained how he was hogging the bed and she’d sometimes kick him because he was keeping her awake with his repertoire of snores: the ‘pig with asthma’ and the snore that sounded like somebody dragging an old cooker down a garden path. His ‘snorgasbord’, Sheila had called it.

  Frank was at the hospital with Sheila when the doctors and consultants had run out of miracles and then there were just different shifts of overworked nursing staff keeping her comfortable until the inevitable. Frank stayed with her then because he didn’t want to miss the awful moment that he was both dreading and at times looking forward to. He’d wished that he could have taken Sheila home while she remembered who he was. While she would still think that he was rescuing rather than kidnapping her. When finally it was all over, it wasn’t all over. He still had to tell everyone and get the death certificates so that he could remove her name from their joint bank account. He then had to choose the right flowers, even though he knew nothing about flowers, and pick a coffin from a catalogue, selecting the colour and the type of wood before choosing suitable music to accompany the coffin’s entrance into and exit out of the crematorium chapel. He also found a humanist minister to conduct the service because Sheila would have hated for religion to play a role in her death, after she’d managed to avoid it for most of her life.

  Frank thought of all of that and, in spite of how dreadful it had all been, he would have hated to have been denied any of it. Perhaps if Laura did manage to bring her parents back together, it wouldn’t be too late for Beth to tell Jimmy about her illness without it immediately breaking them apart again.

  He asked Laura if she worried that her plan might somehow end up making things worse. She said she had to try.

  ‘But do you honestly think it could work?’ Frank said.

  ‘This is Hollywood,’ Laura said. ‘Of course it can. I’m going to create a happy ending for Mom and Jimmy. Are you in?’

  ‘Am I in?’

  ‘Will you help me?’

  ‘I don’t know. How?’

  ‘You’ll think of something.’

  The waitress came and cleared their table and asked them if they wanted anything else. Laura asked for the check. When the waitress came back Frank insisted on paying for the food. Laura had to help him choose the right banknotes.

  ‘They all look the same to me,’ he said. He smiled at the waitress, who looked like she might have been an actual Native American, and he was horrified that she might have thought that he was referring to her when he’d said that all the money looked the
same. The waitress took the money and went away again. Frank wondered what her name was. When she brought the change he saw the badge on her uniform: Debbie.

  In the evening, when Beth was back from work, the three of them sat at the living-room table and played Scrabble. While Beth was deep in thought, looking for a word to play, Laura said to Frank, ‘What age did you meet Grandma?’

  ‘What age? I can’t remember. I’m not good with numbers and dates.’ Frank counted years in his head. ‘I imagine I was probably around your age. Although this was the early 1950s, so we were both already practically middle-aged.’

  ‘That doesn’t make any sense,’ Laura said. ‘If you were middle-aged when you were twenty, you would have died when you were forty. Unless you’re a vampire. You’re not a vampire, are you?’

  ‘I’m not a vampire,’ Frank said. ‘I did say I wasn’t good with numbers. We left school a lot younger, though, and went straight to work. Average life expectancy was about seventy or thereabouts. If you lived to a hundred you’d get a telegram from the Queen and it would be on the news. These days everyone expects to live until they’re at least a hundred and fifty. I’m sorry, I seem to have got a bit sidetracked. What was the question?’

  ‘Was Grandma your first love?’ Laura said.

  Frank blushed. ‘I suppose she was.’

  ‘And your last?’

  ‘Well, I don’t want to count my chickens, so I can’t say for sure quite yet.’ Beth looked up from her letters at Frank. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Let’s say yes.’

  ‘So you and Grandma were made for each other? Soulmates and life partners?’ Laura said.

  ‘You do become very close to someone after forty years,’ Frank said. ‘I don’t think either of us would leave the room without telling each other where we were going. Even if it was just to go to the kitchen or the toilet.’

  Beth looked at him again. She was either surprised at how candid her father was being or waiting for him to be quiet because she couldn’t concentrate on finding a good Scrabble word.