Frank Derrick's Holiday of a Lifetime Read Free Page A

sure where one ended and the other began. Frank knew that the charity shop, the mini supermarket, the poorly stocked library and the brown tide bringing seaweed, carrier bags, nappies and tin cans onto the hard stones of rainy Fullwind-on-Sea would be almost impossible for Beth ever to think of as a holiday destination again.
    Every year she sent Frank a new photograph of Laura, taken on or around her birthday and Frank put them all in a photo album that his wife Sheila had started when Laura was born. Frank had taken over the job when Sheila’s illness meant that she couldn’t remember how to perform the simple task and also because her not knowing who these strange people in the photographs were upset Frank. There were times though, right up until just before Sheila’s death, when Frank would sit with her and they’d look at their photo albums together. Sheila would place her fingers on the unfamiliar faces behind the protective plastic and Frank would detect the tiniest spark of recognition. It was as though her fading memory was stronger in her fingers, in the same way that they were more susceptible to the cold on a winter’s day.
    In the album’s first photograph of Laura she was only a day or two old. She was perched awkwardly on Frank’s lap in the hospital with her tiny hand wrapped around his finger, and Frank had watched his granddaughter growing up in the birthday photographs. At first she was desperate to have her picture taken, excited and showing off in her ballerina dress or fairy princess costume or cuddling her latest favourite doll or soft toy. In her early teens she became more camera shy and reluctant to smile and then in her mid-teens she was determined not to smile at all, not wanting anyone to see the braces on her teeth and hiding her face with her fringe, or ‘Laura’s bangs’, as Beth had written on the back of the picture taken on her fifteenth birthday. After her sixteenth birthday, the photographs had stopped. Frank presumed that Laura was now too cool, too self-conscious or too busy with boys to have her photograph taken by her mother any more. Or perhaps there was nowhere left in Santa Monica that still printed photographs. Next year Laura would be twenty-one and Frank wondered whether the birthday photographs would resume again now that she was officially an adult and in charge of her own photographic destiny.
    In the ten years that Beth had been away she’d visited England twice. The second time was five years ago when she, Laura and Jimmy had stayed not far from Frank, in a guesthouse that made Fawlty Towers seem welcoming. After a week and a half of drizzle, jigsaw puzzles and only three television channels, they went back to America. Beth said that the next time they would have to stay for longer to make the exhausting journey more worthwhile.
    At the end of their stay in Fawlty Towers, Beth had repeated the same promises to Frank that she’d made when she’d first left for America. She said that she would be back soon and she would write and she would phone. Frank asked her to at least make sure that she rang him as soon as they were safely home, no matter what the time of day or night, as he would worry otherwise. He’d presume the plane had crashed or that they’d been mistakenly arrested for drug smuggling. Beth forgot to ring. Just as she had always forgotten to phone when she returned home after visiting Frank when she still lived in England. Frank would watch the phone, waiting for it to ring until eventually he wouldn’t be able to wait any longer and he would call Beth, who would apologize for having not rung, saying she was exhausted from the fifty-mile drive back to Croydon. So Frank knew that it was unlikely that she would ring him after a five and a half thousand-mile journey home to LA and it would be he who would have to ring her.
    When Frank had been run over by a milk float on his eighty-first birthday, he’d spent three days in hospital before returning