Chapter Nine - 'The Cobra'

Frank and Lorrie had been driving for a while. It didn’t seem to matter where they were driving to.
They both had their reasons for wanting to carry on as they were, as abstract thoughts shaped in human form, or just humans thinking abstractly.

Frank and Lorrie weren’t so special as to be considered otherworldly, they had all the documentation and memories that said they were products of 1980s England, and problems of the very same place, only moved on to the second decade of the millennium, which I guess we should call the ‘teens’ only we find it hard to, because it doesn’t sound right recycling the name of the decade when it was that the First World War broke out.

In all his apparent distraction Frank had as a matter of fact been driving in the direction of his other home, the one he wasn’t driving in, the one where his mother lived, because it was her house, but their home.

Frank’s mother was a bad cook and her name was Irene. She suffered from ME and when at its worst she had lived practically in one room because of it. Frank’s dad was called Stewart and Frank hated him. Frank didn’t want to hate his dad, but sometimes you have no choice but to do just that, and when his dad left his mum Frank was glad, he just wished he could've given his dad back the genes he’d passed on to him, too.

Before Frank’s dad left his mum, Frank’s dad would call Irene ‘The Cobra’ because sometimes she’d be so ill that she had no energy to even stand upright, and so she’d have to crawl her way to the bathroom because of it. Sometimes Frank’s dad would even stand there and watch her whilst she’d be using all her strength to push herself along the carpet, and he wouldn’t help her, he wouldn’t even ask, and Frank’s mum would get burns from the carpet, and be crying along her way, not because of the physical pain, that was something she’d learned to cope with, but she’d be crying because her existence wasn’t that of a woman any more, but more that of an insect, a ladybird at best.

On the day Frank’s dad left the family home, he took all of Irene’s best clothes and jewellery with him, and said that as these things had been bought with his money it was only right he should take them back. He even said he had a certain woman in mind who could breathe some life back into them.

The woman was closer than anyone thought, and a twelve year old Frank looked on as his father drove away from the family home, with a woman he’d been told all his life to call his, 'Auntie Pam'