Chapter Five - Crime and Punishment

‘Where's home?’ Lorrie asks Frank, meaning where's home for you Frank? And he knows this is what she means.

Frank points outside the coffee-shop window, and more specifically at an ordinary looking car, in a not so ordinary shade of yellow.

‘It isn’t what you might call a proper home’ Frank says

‘But I feel more at home in that car than I do in the house where I grew up, which consequently, is where I still live - if you don’t count my car - but I really think you should count the car, there’s Listerine and everything in there, there’s a shelf with one book on it, I keep trying to read it, Crime and Punishment, and it’s not that it’s bad, because I think it’s incredibly good, what I’ve read so far anyways, it’s just I wish from time to time maybe there was even a blank page to look at, because it wears me out, and that’s usually when I go running, and so you see, I never really get so far through the book, and then I have to start right back at the beginning again, and you know something else? There are too many people with names beginning with R in that book, but maybe that’s a Russian thing, maybe I’ll meet a Russian one day who will tell me that’s completely normal, and maybe they’ll shout at me for my tired concentration and make me finish the book. I think I need this kind of intimidation to be perfectly honest. I do enjoy the running though, and I thank Dostoevsky for that’

Lorrie is smiling as she says,

‘It’s a nice thing how a stimulus that was meant to provoke a certain frame of mind can provoke something completely different in someone, but hey, at least when you're provoked to do something you know that you're still moved by it in some way. Dostoevsky would probably be adequately satisfied by your taking up of running, really. And to have a book-shelf all in the name of one book, well now that's quite grand isn’t it - perhaps you’d find it easier to finish reading Crime and Punishment should you surround yourself with works of lighter weights of fiction, that way you’re not singling out the novel you believe will destroy you so evidently, because right now it seems you’ve made it your enemy, and you are quite literally, running away from it!’

‘You really kinda are something else, dyou know that?’ Frank says to Lorrie

‘In your shades and all your agile beauty and even in how you faint and the endearing way you aggressively made friends with Peter there, and me, how you were with me, letting me hold your hand even though you knew what that could mean. You remind me of a girl I never met, who could be described as being somewhere between Dick Tracy’s Tess Trueheart and Juliette Lewis in Natural Born Killers, and before you even say it, I know you’ll tell me that you don’t agree’

But Lorrie pipes up and says,

‘I only disagree because I can’t agree with a thought that is so personal to you, but I like your frame of reference, and would like to see your home now please, the one you keep on wheels’