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

home with a broken toe and his arm set in plaster at an angle like a boomerang. Frank knew that Beth felt awful for not flying back across the Atlantic to look after him so soon after her last visit but he didn’t want to be her anchor again – or, in this case, her boomerang – and as a compromise Beth arranged and paid for a care worker to visit Frank once a week for three months to tidy his flat and do the washing-up and to scratch the itch inside his plaster cast and keep him amused until he was fit and well again. During that time Beth had phoned more frequently, perhaps out of guilt as much as concern, but by the time the plaster cast was off she was phoning less and less often and soon it would be Frank who would have to phone her.
    When Beth had first moved to America, Frank had phoned Beth all the time, often getting the time difference wrong and waking everyone up or interrupting their dinner or breakfast or catching them all as they were just going out the door to work or school or a mall. Sometimes Beth’s husband, Jimmy, would answer the phone and even though in person they got on so well, somehow over the phone neither man would really know what to say beyond things like ‘How are you?’ and either ‘Is Beth there?’ or ‘I’ll get Beth.’ If Laura picked up the phone, when they first moved to America she would answer with an excited ‘
Helloo, Gaga
’ – her name for Frank, from when she had been too young to pronounce ‘Granddad’ – followed by a breathless commentary of all the things that she’d been doing at school and the names of her new friends and so on. After she’d turned thirteen Laura was less verbose, her mind elsewhere, and then in her mid-teens she would simply say hello and then call out, ‘Mom!’ Frank would sometimes mistake her voice for Beth’s, even though Laura was already more American-sounding than her mother and he listened to her growing up on the telephone in the same way that he’d watched her do in her birthday photographs.
    Since Halloween, Laura had kept Frank updated on Beth’s progress via email. She would assess her mother’s mood, her sleep patterns, appetite, frame of mind, energy and outlook. She’d told Frank of the success of the lumpectomy and how Beth was coping with the prospect of weeks of radiation therapy. The emails hadn’t stopped Frank worrying but they had helped him worry a little less.
    In her emails Laura always referred to her mother’s cancer as ‘Lump’. Even after surgery when the lump had been removed, dissected, pathologized and incinerated as medical waste, Laura continued to refer to her mother’s cancer by the nickname that she’d given it. She said that it was important to give your enemies a name and that somebody famous – ‘Jesus or some other guy’ – had said something clever about it. Later on she’d emailed Frank again to say that she’d got the quote wrong but it was from JFK: ‘Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.’
    Frank put the Thanksgiving card back in the envelope, He was eighty-two years old. He had to scroll down to the very bottom of the drop-down menus on the auction websites that he’d registered on to find his year of birth. He was almost too old to be considered alive or at least to be using the Internet. Even the private health and insurance companies had stopped sending him special offers for free health checks or ‘full body MOTs’. Medically he was a write-off. He was uninsurable. An accident waiting to happen, whether it was falling down the stairs or being run over by another milk float. The Grim Reaper had more than just a scythe. He had an armoury larger than North Korea’s. Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, pneumonia or a stroke, so many natural causes; Frank was probably carrying something around with him already. Diabetes or heart failure, osteoporosis, or perhaps he’d die from something mundane such as the flu or a septic finger. Maybe he’d choke on a peanut