Free Frank Derrick's Holiday of a Lifetime by J.B. Morrison

his holiday was still on. Whenever the phone rang, he was afraid to answer it in case it was Beth with more bad news or the landlord asking for his money back because nobody had viewed the flat for almost a week. But it would just be more silent phonebots, telesales reps and market researchers wanting just a few minutes of his time.
    There was one last email from Laura, reminding Frank not to mention the Reunion Project to Beth. She also asked if he could pack any old photos of the family and requested that he ‘bring memories’. She ended the email by telling Frank that she was excited about seeing him and that he was her ‘secret weapon’.
    The night before he left for America Frank was unable to sleep. He still didn’t really believe that he was going. If he did manage to fall asleep, he half expected to wake up to find that he’d been having a dream more complex than Judy Garland’s in the
Wizard of Oz
. And he’d still be stuck in boring old monochrome Fullwind-on-Sea, looking up at the bedroom ceiling that needed painting, in his bed surrounded by Beth and Laura, Jimmy, the funny-eyed woman from the charity shop and his landlord, all looking at him with the identical freeze-framed features of his cat.
    He closed his eyes and tried to picture Beth and Laura at the airport in Los Angeles, their faces wet with tears of joy and happiness. They were holding a sign with his name on. He thought about hamburgers and about popcorn, drive-in movies and cycling along the beach beside the blue sea with the equally blue sky above. He could almost feel the sun on his face just thinking about it, even though his flat was freezing and the bedroom window was etched with frost. He opened his eyes and looked over at the clock on the bedside table; it was the one and only time that he’d ever set the alarm and he’d tested it about ten times, terrified that it wouldn’t go off. He thought about checking it once more to be sure. He turned over in bed and closed his eyes again, and even though it wasn’t due for hours yet, he listened out for the first aeroplane of the day and thought that tomorrow it could be him up there.

7
    480,000 flights on 84 airlines, serving 184 destinations, take off from and land at Heathrow Airport every year. Seventy million passengers pass through the airport, an average of 191,200 a day, all watched from hundreds of different angles by over ten thousand CCTV cameras, relayed to a vast wall of monitors in a security-camera control room, where, finally, there was something worth watching.
    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.
    As he walked through the airport, sidestepping and tripping over wheelie suitcases, a text message would be circulating around Heathrow’s other security staff telling them to come quickly to the control room and have a look. Someone would suggest ordering a pizza or some popcorn. It would have been a good time to steal a plane or smuggle a few hundred cigarettes through customs.
    When Frank had almost reached the safety of his check-in desk, a small child riding a tiger-skin suitcase with a face and ears for handlebars ran over his foot, and other passengers in the queue stifled their laughter in various different dialects. An Albanian woman laughed out loud. Frank would probably now be as popular a comedian in Albania as Norman Wisdom.
    The woman behind the desk checked Frank and his heavy suitcase in. She strapped a paper label around the handle and sent it on its journey through the rubber curtains. Frank was seriously considering not collecting it when he arrived in LA and leaving it to circle round and round on the baggage carousel indefinitely.
    He walked towards security. Without