Big fish, little pond

Let me explain,

The thing about Trent Janson was, in this life, you couldn't hope to meet a bigger piece of shit. We all knew it. By 'We' I mean the entire town. The man was a drunk, a womaniser and a misanthrope. Imagine a creature that had grown too big for its enclosure like some hideous fish in the viewing tank of a Chinese restaurant. A fish that eats everything in its path, including the other fish, including its own waste. A fish that has become so big it can barely move anymore. And that will give you some idea of what Trent Janson was like.

Janson had three wives and more than a few mistresses. In regards to women, I’d heard him say a number times in the pub, "if it drives, floats or fucks....rent it mate. Save yourself the trouble".

With the men of the town, he'd caused numerous grudges that vivisected the community like hairline fractures. He had many enemies and detractors.

Several years ago he punched out the high school English teacher at the parents night. Generally speaking, he treated people very badly, even some of his closest cronies.

You know the old saying, don't shit where you live? Janson was one of these people who never could grasp that concept. For some reason, he was just hellbent on shitting all over his own nest.

God knows how many illegitimate children he fathered over the years. Genetic influences aside, at least his unclaimed offspring escaped his parenting techniques. His legitimate children, he methodically turned into horrible versions of himself.

In business, Jenson had a well-established reputation for been unscrupulous and underhanded. He had the restaurant on the main street-his original business-and over the years he had bought up a number of local properties. He had a hand in the duplex development down south, the one that caused so many issues with the environmentalists. He owned the caravan park, a construction company and rumour has it, he was a shareholder in the whorehouse near the river. From the outside, there was nothing to this place. An oversized shed with a dirt car park out front and some Christmas lights in the window, but as a business, it must have been profitable. They never had less six girls working there at one time. From what I understand, he had relations with many of these young women over the years. Hence all the illegitimate children and overturned lawsuits. 

The first time I met Janson, I got my arm pumped and my hand crushed in the handshake Johnson is known for. Even in that short exchange of words, the handshake aside, I could feel the hard press of man's character in action. His need to dominate and crush other men. The enjoyment he took in judging his effect on the room in the reaction of those around him. 

From the way I understand it, towards the end, he seemed determined to piss everyone off, like he enjoyed rubbing everyone's face in his dog shit, bigger than life personality. They said he hadn't mellowed with age. I was told the magnification of his already larger than life personality was a result of ageing, of virility slipping.

He had his face plastered all over a billboard in town. On the side of the pharmacy. You know those photo advertisements real estate people put up? "A face you can trust!" There was something insidious about having him watching over us day and night.

Occasionally somebody's kid might take to this billboard with a can spray paint, painting an obscenity or an obscene symbol on his face. Last summer, a white penis appeared near his mouth. Janson had the image replaced before the end of business that day. As far as the gossip goes, the offending teen was tracked down and discipline by the local cops. A murder wouldn't have been more speedily dealt with.

Then Johnson died. Just like that. Never assume people are a fixed entity, they are not. They change. Their allegiances shift.

At a dinner party, after his death, I listen to a group of his established detractors agree that he was ‘misunderstood’. That he actually ‘did a lot for the community’. That while you couldn’t exactly describe him as a saint in recent years,  he was still a son of the community. They’d all gone to school with him. He was emblematic of town in a way: tough, resilient and shaped by isolation.

These hypocrites. They absolutely hated Jansen in the flesh. I'd seen it many time. As soon as he left his stool at the pub, to go off to the toilet, they’d be tearing strips off him. They were too scared to do it to his face but they couldn't resist the opportunity once he was out of earshot. And when he returned? It was all smiles and 'Ah there he is! Speak of the devil!'.

And now? Down at the beach pub, they put a colour photograph of Janson up behind the bar. What kind of bullshit was this? A photograph of the man they used to timidly mock. And then the entire town turned up at his funeral. They were all there. They stood by the graveside while the priest prattled on, sombre faces, their eyes cast down into the hole as his casket was lowered, their hands clasped.

After he died, I started seeing Janson everywhere. Not physically and not like a hallucination in a movie. Life isn’t like that, is it? Our ghosts are really just the past refusing to go away. Some nasty bit of business that lives inside the brain and which we can't reconcile or digest. A fish bone hooked in your throat. I’m a teacher myself. I live in a house with another teacher. After his death, I would wake up every morning at 3 am. Bang! Just like that. I’d come awake, surfacing in my room, the objects in the room becoming tangible as my eyes got used to the dark. I’d look at my phone, see the numbers illuminated on the screen. 3 am. Every morning it was like this.

And there was no way I could get back to sleep. I tried everything. I took a pill before I went to sleep in an attempt to get in a solid eight hours but that didn't work either. No matter how tired I was, at 3 am, I would find myself wide awake. Usually, I’d go outside and sit on the veranda.

Morning after morning the same thing. And inadvertency I'd start thinking about Janson. And of course, all these interruptions impacted on my daytime activities. I’d be half asleep in the classroom which is not acceptable. I'd be literally falling asleep on my feet. You know how that kind of deep fatigue affects your ability to work? It is impossible to keep focused, the world swimming before your eyes. You simply can’t function. Sleep deprivation only increases the sense that the past has broken its banks and had sluiced into the here and now. The muddy waters advance, coming under the door, covering your ankles, your knees and soon you have retreated to the roof of your house. Or you run outside and climb the branches of a tree outside in the yard.

"But what if the water just keeps rising? Higher than the apex of the roof? Higher than the top braces of the tree you are in? The muddy, swirling water full of chewed up pieces of concrete and wood and washing machines and muck. What then? Will you just be swept away with the deluge? I mean, if we’re thinking about water as the past. Mistakes we make.....Or is it sleep? I am trying to illustrate this for you. I…..What I am trying to say is……."

At this point, I pinched the bridge of my nose and screwed my eyes shut. I just needed to take a break. When I opened my eyes again I was sitting in the principal’s office under harsh strip lighting, which didn’t make sense because I couldn't remember walking in here. It was just me and the Principal, the fan slowly rotating, stirring the papers on his desk.

And I realised that I was talking, explaining my recent problems with insomnia (and subsequent inability to focus at work) to my Principal, using this metaphor of the flooding landscape and being stranded on rooftops and, for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what I was actually trying saying.

Anyway, the Principal was looking at me with what could only be described as mounting concern. I moved my hand from my face and I didn't know what to do with it for a moment. My hand just hovered there in the space between my face and the desk. Then I rubbed my eyes and felt myself slipping again before regaining traction. Insomnia is like that, little slips, mental picnics off in the daisies.

Anyway, I straighten up and tried again, saying, "I….I...." But the Principal interrupted me and said, "Why don’t you take the rest of the day off?"

I saw Janson everywhere. Driving home, on the road leading into town, in front of the pub, his absence like a wound that just won't heal over. You cover it with bandages and the blood keeps on seeping through the gauze.

There were other reminders as well. Reminders which were grounded in reality. His son worked at the real estate company in town. I saw him from time to time. After his father died, the resemblance between father and son seemed to increase overnight. I know that's not possible but there it was: the jowls, the lack of space between his eyes, the eyes themselves, cold blue and the laugh. But alway with the humour of the oppressor. 

There was the billboard in town, the one with Janson's smiling face on it, looked down on the main street. Looking down on all of us.

The hit-and-run story lingered in the news for quite awhile. "Local man killed in a hit-and-run". It was the biggest thing that had happened in our community for a long while.

The evening it happened, the stupid bastard was in the middle of the road, snaking along the centre line. The irony was that the barman had confiscated his keys forty minutes before in exchange for one more drink. Ordinarily, Janson would have just driven himself home drunk. The man had crashed into his own front fence that many times, he’s stopped bothering to repair it.

I was stone cold sober when I came over the crest of the hill. I don't drink. Sure, I was driving a little fast but nothing reckless. There he was, stumbling along in the headlights, already half turning as the glare hit him. I hit the brakes, slid into him and basically scooped him up on the hood of the car. I saw his stupid face, thick-lipped and astonished, pressed into the windshield. I remember thinking, thank god he didn't go under the front bumper. He’s going to be all right. I applied more pressure to the brakes and the car snapped to a dead stop. That was a mistake.

He went flying off the hood and into the road. That must have been when he slapped the back of his head on the concrete. I didn’t see any of this. I got out, tried to help him but he pushed me away, swearing, saying he was all right before he staggered off across the golf course and into the night. He went home, passed out on his sofa and that was it, he never woke up. His wife found him stone cold in the morning. There was severe bruising to his brain.

I didn't tell anyone because as far as I was concerned, he just walked away and so I thought it would be all right. Isn’t it usually the case that drunks have a kind of superhuman resilience? That they roll with the punches?

I should have said something, I realise that now. Stupidly, I just thought it would go away. Two weeks went past and nothing, just me trying to get on with my life but not being entirely successful. There was no visible dent or marking on my car. There were no witnesses. They pieced it together from forensic evidence and because of a rumour that wormed its way on the tips of people's tongues, slowly through the town, into the Tops Cop's awareness. What about the new school teacher? Hasn't he been behaving strangely as of late? Is something was wrong with him? He seems ill at ease with himself.

I pinch the bridge of my nose and screw my eyes shut tight. And when I open them again, I am sitting in the little interrogation room down at the police station and the disturbing thing is I don’t even remember walking in here. The Top Cop is sitting across from me with another constable, both men have their arms folded across their bellies. And the Top Cop is saying, "You better come clean mate".

When I open my eyes, when the world swims back into focus, I notice the table between us is bolted to the floor and there is a one-way mirror behind the two cops. "Your story is all over the place," says the main cop. And I can't even remember what I have been saying over the past couple of hours. Has it been hours? Anyway, to clarify things, I started from the beginning.

The first day I walked through the gates was surreal. Just the noise of the doors and gates being locked behind you, as you go deeper through processing and into the prison, past guard posts and along enclosed walkways, one after the next, burrowing deeper and deeper in your new home. You keep reminding yourself that this is it, that you can't leave, but it just doesn't seem real. I got five years for manslaughter.

Prison is a mixture of long stretches of boredom, chess, reading, exercise and endless bartering with items from the commissary. Food, tobacco, fizzy drinks, pornography....Sometimes inmates will mess with you. They will play mind games just to pass the time.

Camilla came to visit me a few times. She'll sit there, telling me about things out in the world that have no consequence to me now. During her last visit, I told her not to bother coming back. I told her I just want to do my time and then we'll see what happens.

At night, when I can't sleep, I sit by the window to get some cold air. One night I heard a music festival in a field behind the prison. You could hear the crowd and the bands playing. It was weird to think that, several months before, I could have been in that crowd. 

I will speak to you later. As I said to Camilla, it is probably better if you don't come down. I hope you understand. 

In four and a half years, I will be out and we will talk then. 

Your son, Bobby