Full of Sound and Fury

I once heard a tale told by a man with a deep lisp, on a train, travelling between towns. I have no idea how true it was. I’m not going to pretty it up or give it a proper or interesting narrative form, with scenery and drama, because it’s not my story to tell. All I can do is try to remember the essential skeleton of it, the things that happened to its characters. It went something like this:

An insecure, disabled, and menopausal woman who is afraid to lose her looks and her figure in desperation sleeps with a profoundly brain-damaged man and teaches him how to satisfy her sexually. In this way she feels she can continue to feel desirable for many years to come. For his part, he is the survivor of a recklessly dangerous suicide attempt on a motorway, which landed him with multiple injuries including traumatic brain damage; he is a drug addict and former petty crook incarcerated on trumped-up charges, abused by the penal system and highly institutionalised in his habits.

When the practical realities of this relationship start to surface and hit home — the fact that the woman has no income and her hapless partner is on disability benefits which he tends to squander, being unable to budget for himself — she attempts to teach him elementary budgeting. Both the woman and her partner are highly dependent on drugs to ease their pain and sustain their lifestyle. Frustrated with his lack of progress, she turns instead to her ex-boyfriend, whom she had previously leaned on for support.

The woman becomes very much dependant on the goodwill of her ex-boyfriend but she rapidly uses all that up by being deceitful and manipulative with him. She’s somewhat used to getting her own way with him by using his sexual suggestibility against him; he is himself at this time very socially withdrawn, vulnerable and isolated, for unstated reasons. She gets periodically stoned and makes false promises to her ex, lying that her relationship with the drug addict is over and done with and that she would welcome her ex back into her life after six months, when her STDs had cleared up. They begin having phone sex and, ostensibly, planning a future together.

The ex-boyfriend helps her out for a spell, until he realises that she was not sincere in her promises, and realises what a godawful clusterfuck of her life this woman is making. He starts to back out of any commitments in horror. The woman mounts a moral argument, making a decision to be faithful to her brain-injured partner, and withholds any further sexual favours or talk of reuniting with her ex. She persists however in attempting to emotionally manipulate him into providing for her.

He is by this point unwilling to fund her mid-life crisis and feels that she would drag him down with her financially and emotionally if he let her manipulate him further. He steels himself against the way she tugs on his heartstrings, and reminds himself that she had been the one to break it off with him, several times over. She had chosen to be exactly where she was.

Already touched by his own mortality several times over and entirely at peace with God and death, the woman’s ex vanishes into the night, ghosting her.

What becomes of the characters beyond this point is unknown. I can’t recall their names, and the speaker was so scant on description that I’m left with no impressions about their appearance or mannerisms. Some details may be plain wrong, but this is how it sounded to me. There is no hero in this narrative, just as there is no villian. It was only in the end a tale told by a stranger with a lisp, on a train, travelling between towns.