They plummet off the escarpment along a steep spiral of broken bitumen. Franny’s driving becomes only marginally fastidious through the hair-pin switchbacks. Millie reacted with mock horror, straight out of the Wes Craven School of dramatic screaming, exacerbated by her particular point of view over the roads crumbling edges.

They were trying not to listen to Franny’s crap, but Franny’s crap was pervasive. This time he was banging on about a dream he had the night before, and there are not many subjects more boring than that. Fearing for their strange sons’ sanity, Franny’s parents had talked him into seeing a psychologist who asked him to describe his dreams. To the dismay of his fellow journey-persons, both generally and currently, this is his latest thing.

“I was running through a long tunnel and all of a sudden that guy who plays Sil in the Soprano’s, you know Steven Van Zandt, jumped out of nowhere with a huge black plastic bag and began chasing me. I kept running until Tony Soprano appeared out of hole in the ground and shot Sil. Hey, did you know that Steven Van Zandt plays lead guitar in Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band.”

“Who is Bruce Springsteen, when he’s at home?” Millie said.

Since starting with the psychologist, he had been assailing anybody who will listen, with the minutiae of his less than heartbreaking sessions. His description of the therapist alone made her sound terrifying, but the other shit about him is truly the sort of thing that you can’t un-hear. He has taken it upon himself to continue the psychoanalysis outside of business hours, and to an audience. He’d make a half-way decent stand-up comic but for the toxic banality of the subject matter. To irritate further, he regales them with recovered memories, plainly bullshit with this group. They grew up with him and know, in garish detail, the narrative of each other’s lives.

Jace insightfully once said that Franny was a like contagion. Once you were in sneeze distance from him, you became infected. From then on there had been a great many jokes revolving around this concept. Josey swore blind she had taken up medicine for the sole purpose of finding an antidote. Ash had sardonically commented, he was so ravaged by the disease, he had lost the will to live. It was a decidedly ambivalent relationship but everybody put up with Franny, he was just part of them, part of the organism. They’d all been Franny’d one way or another.

By now, there had been a non-stop barrage of Franny verbiage since they left town and everybody was already weary of it, and wondering what possessed them to invite the boring fucker. They love Franny but in small doses. It’s a transport issue – Franny is the only one currently with a car; Jace’s old groaner having rather inconveniently shot a push-rod straight through the crankcase. For those who have not witnessed such an event, it’s not pretty. Jace all but cried for the sheer violence of his car’s demise. Ash, who was a passenger at the time, merely groaned with an existential despair.

“Any chance of you shutting-the-fuck-up Franny?” Ash suddenly yells over the road noise, the shitty car stereo and Millie squirming around and groaning uncontrollably in the back. Millie’s restlessness was only marginally less irritating than Franny’s.

Everybody called Franny, Franny; even his parents. He objected to it and so, in protest, ignored the nickname completely until someone actually wanted to convey important information, and has to revert to ‘Francis’ temporarily. Apart from those rare occasions, the protest had fallen on deaf ears. It’s entirely possible that the nickname was payback. If that were so, it would be for Franny’s incessant hyper-active gasbagging and propensity for life threatening escapades.

“Who’s up for a bit of badinage?” He would suggest when everybody was shit-faced and couldn’t think of anything worse. This was because one, they were shit-faced and two, the badinage invariably ends with somebody maimed, if not for life, for an amount of time that is not considered cool. There was always something with Franny; ‘badinage’, for instance, was code for let’s go out and do something really stupid. He later spuriously cited as support for his feckless activities, the fact that President Lincoln, upon meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe, declared “So this is the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war?” This apocryphal sound-byte was later recorded in The Evening Star or The Morning Grits or something. The rag’s ludicrous assertion, implied the President was referring to the ‘badinage’ between two character’s in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, to wit – “He turned deadly pale when he saw the writing, but still preserved his composure, and finished the playful warfare of badinage which he was at the moment carrying on with a lady opposite…” Franny arbitrarily deduced, the word suggested rather more than mere playful banter and thus ‘badinage became a component of the Franny lexicon. Nobody bothered to question Franny’s many preposterous historical assertions because he was interested in history to the point of obsession; particularly of the military variety. He played imaginatively, if not joyfully, with the hearsay aspects of historical veracity.

Franny, to this day had a lovingly reconstructed scale model of the barely remarked upon, but significant Battle of Carrhae of 53BC. It was in his parent’s garage, vehicles had been exiled to the front yard. His father, a week-end carpenter, helped with plans and construction. To anybody who cared to hear it, Franny pointed out, this was the battle that led to the end of the Roman Republic and the rise of empire. For the benefit of those who had not yet dropped him, he further explained the appointing of Rome’s first emperor was the result of a foolhardy venture into Persia by Crassus, the richest man in Rome at the time. The whole empire thing was due to this blowhard’s magna hubris by failing to notify the Senate of his intentions before de-camping. He promptly lost several of Rome’s illegally purloined legions along with his own life at Carrhae. As ill-judged a venture as any seen before or after. It was a disastrous defeat for Rome and the ensuing humiliation brought about civil war until, after the pre-requisite number of refusals and a garrotting or two of other pretenders, Julius Caesar was miraculously turned into the first Emperor. Hail Caesar.

During the construction of the replica he asked his father to make swords and shields for the group. They fought fierce battles in his backyard where Franny would perch on the septic tank and imperiously instruct his legions in the guise of no less a mentor than Pompey himself. He always favoured the brave underdog. There were often causalities; Josey had her arm in a plaster cast for many weeks due to one gruelling campaign, and even Franny himself, fell prey to an ambush as a result of a treacherous coup d’état, perpetrated by his own centurions, and had to spend several days in bed.

In fact, his many absences from school at this juncture - known as his heroic period – though reported to be the result of chronic jaundice were in truth, ‘battle fatigue’ as a result of fiddling with the minutiae of antediluvian carnage in the garage. This was quite understandably followed by a convalescent sojourn, for post-traumatic stress disorder.
His parents loved this strange, bright spark of a child as if he were an exotic gift. He was indeed pleasing to the eye. He had inherited his father’s sandy blond hair and slim, agile carriage. His face still showed the handsome lines of his childhood and he never failed to have an adoring boyfriend in the wings. His parents weren’t entirely at his beck and call but a harsh remonstration was always tempered by an assertion of unconditional love. You know the sort of thing – It is not you I fail to love, but your behaviour. Regardless, he seemed not to be spoiled. A good but erratic boy, occasionally given to outbursts of energetic unreason and unfathomable melancholy; was the appraisal of one of his teachers, necessarily confined to summary.

He came out to his friends and family as soon as he was aware of the inclination. It met with little consternation or even surprise. There were never any secrets or obfuscation on that score, nor any association made between his sexual preference and his occasional lapses into sadness. They took him to a gaggle of shrinks and mendicants, prescribing pills and unfathomably, on one occasion, a diet. None of it constrained the unique form of irresolute exuberance that seemed to erupt from they’re son. His was a form of madness that was entirely forgivable and, for the most part, endurable.