The Property Manager: You'll never rent again...

by NS Thompson

  I am suffering an emotional hangover. The heady thrill and rush of last night has left way for a gnawing, empty feeling of futility. John Myer and Sandy Moorebank are just two of thousands of child abusers. My actions might have saved a few kids. A handful. Maybe even your son Harry. That makes me feel better. But it’s happening all day, every day, every-where and I am powerless to stop that, aren’t I?

  Killing them was too good for them. They should have suffered long and hard. Months and months and years of torture.

  I look in the mirror and see a nobody. A man who has nothing in his life other than you. You are out of a job. We need to get out of this place and start again.

  I am terrified now that I will be implicated in the whole mess. I’ve done something wrong. Forgotten something. Maybe someone saw me there last night. Saw my car?

  Shit. John Myer’s car is still in his reserved car- park. If Jacinta reports him as missing or goes to the surgery it’ll all blow up today. My fingerprints are no-where. Not on the scalpel or the syringe or the computer or doors. Hang on, if they are to believe that Sandy injected John’s neck, her thumb-print would be on the syringe.

  Are my prints on the disgusting pornography? With a sick to the guts feeling, I suspect they will be. I didn’t wipe the pages down. Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!

  The code I used to disarm the alarm was yours. 1967. The year you were born. That must be a personal code. That can be traced to you. I’ve fucking screwed up, haven’t I? I’ve put you, the only person I care about, in the firing line. Idiot! I’m a bloody idiot! Have you given the code to anyone else? I doubt it. Maybe they’ll think Dr Myer used your code as a cover, to pin the blame for Sandy’s death on you. Oh God, I’m raving and unravelling. I’m going to come over now to see you. I’ll make a confession to you. I’ll explain how much I need you. Together we’ll just disappear.

  5:15 p.m

  Dear Grace,

  I am dead. The pain that have been feeling for the last half an hour has consumed me and eaten out my heart. I’m numb. I feel like I’m floating above myself, having an out-of-body experience.

  I almost wasn’t going to bother making this final entry in the journal but after the amount of time and love I have invested in this journal, I feel it must be written.

  I sit here in my car, in the street running parallel to yours. Birch Road. I brought you there, remember? I gave you that beautiful house to live in. I did that because I loved you from the start. I still love you. To the end.

  What I have seen this afternoon, I see with new eyes. I don’t have tears because they’ve all dried up and turned to salt in my brain.

  You are not a whore. I am sorry for lumping you in with the filth that has skulked about this town. The Moorebanks, the Four-toed Sloth and the like.

  I saw Andrew Cox’s truck outside your place as I drove past. An explosion of anger just blew like a fuse in my head and then I was dead. My brain kind of imploded on itself and I knew that there was no more anger. No more desperation. No more hope. It was over for me.

  I still set up my stupid computer, peering into your life again, like the sad, pathetic man I am and I’ve been watching you sitting on the end of your bed, crying your heart out telling that man, Andrew Cox, that you are carrying his baby. I have a lump in my chest like a ball of fire. It’s swirling around but not burning. I should have been angry but I wasn’t. I tried to draw on my reserve of hatred for him and discovered that it was empty.

  He was drunk. He is drunk. He has wiped himself out this afternoon on whisky and beer at the hotel. He told you this. But through his slurred speech and awkward embraces, he told you he had come to you this afternoon to give you his life. He has asked you to accept him and forgive him for all the weakness and pain he has put you through. His marriage is over.

  He has promised to cherish and adore you. His eyes were filled with tears.

  After looking into the eyes of pure evil last night, I could see the difference. His eyes spoke the truth and your tears spoke of your deep affection and need to have this man in your life.

  He is a man who has been living a lie in his life but also a cold, malicious woman who he is better off without. Amanda is his Vickie and I am man enough to wish him well rid of her. Vanquish the Vultures, I say!

  You are a good mother. You are a good person, if somewhat silly sometimes.

  Every time you have fallen into his arms, I have wanted to kill you. Now, having killed, I realise that is a fate I could never hand you.

  I was riding a triumphant wave last night and for most of today. I believed that I was truly blessed. The light around me has gone. I’m in the shadows again. Always in the shadows.

  To be a good father, you have to have known one. To love someone deeply, you must have been loved deeply. Gracie, I have to be honest with myself and say that I have never been loved. I am unlovable. I am a weak, unattractive specimen of humanity that the world could do without. Perhaps my father never died but left because I was such a disappointment to him. Why else would my mother have been so evasive about him? She did not love me. She owned me. She controlled me. I was her pet. Vickie did not love me. I was a front for her frightful lesbian behaviour. I was her “husband” on paper only. I lied to you. I never, ever slept with her. She wouldn’t let me touch her. I have only ever copulated with whore-bags like that Moorebank trash. I was a father for twelve years and again it was only on paper.

  I never tucked her in to bed or read her a bedtime story. I’ve watched enough films to know how it is supposed to go. Your warmth and affection with your boys – even your arguments – are filled with unconditional love. I have never been on either end of that.

  My skin is itching and crawling with invisible insects. My disease is trying to crawl out of my body. I thought that I had absolved my sins by taking the lives of that vermin last night but I think they have infected me. I’ve tasted blood and as soon as I saw your lover arrive tonight, I was consumed by the desire to do to the two of you what I did to the two of them last night and then and then like a nuclear bomb it was all gone. Evaporated.

  I feel like Judas. I have betrayed you. I have tried to destroy what you love. I thought I could destroy you….or at least that relationship with Andy Cox but I destroyed myself. I have become a creature. A Gollum.

  Sarah is calling me, telling me to let you be. I can hear her sweet little voice.

  You and Andrew Cox have created a life. If I was to come in there and strangle the life out of you, I would be taking an innocent child’s life. I would in that moment become the same monster that Dr John Myer was. If I was to ram my car into Cox next time I saw him on the street and pretend it was an accident, I would be doing what Sandy Moorebank and my mother did and that is – denying a child the right to know his or her father.

  I would be no better than them.

  All this time I have loved you. I have been eaten up with fury over your burgeoning relationship with the married man. The truth is I have made no impact on your life at all.

  I am forty-four years old. I have no family. I hate my job. The only glimmer of excitement or colour in my life has been since you arrived in Babylon.

  And now you are pregnant to a man you seem to truly love and if I were to review my footage with honest eyes and ears, I might see that he is a man returning your sentiments as nobly as he is able to at this time in his life.

  He has chosen to evict himself from his home and his wife but I guarantee you the repercussions will not be pleasant. You will have to stand strong together to withstand the cruel and vengeful winds that will be blown your way.

  What have I done? Why does everything I do always mess up? I am a loser. A liar. A man who soils himself with prostitutes because REAL PEOPLE TERRIFY ME!!!!

  I am an alien. Not human. I don’t feel emotions properly. I don’t relate to people properly. I don’t do anything at all properly. As a child I was teased because I was different. I got called a faggot, a geek, a freak and a weirdo. The girls laughed and told m
e I looked like a camel’s rectum. I didn’t understand jokes and I didn’t understand why I was always the punch-line. I’ll come clean and tell you that I haven’t been going to the doctor in Bowral to check my cholesterol. I go to a shrink who medicates me enough for me to pass as a normal human being. His diagnosis changes with every visit. I’ve had bipolar, I’ve been a sociopath, a paranoid schizophrenic and now the good specialist believes it is simply a rare personality disorder that I am suffering from and none of the other things. He really has no idea.

  I suspect the new medication given to me in April, has not agreed with me.

  I blame my mother. This wasted life is her legacy. She made me who I am!

  This town has sapped me of any will I had to live. Our local doctor was a paedophile who murdered my daughter. Her mother was a junkie hooker that sold her little girl for prescription drugs. My ex-wife was a demented sexual freak. My boss is a con-man. Most of my tenants are scumbags.

  I loved you Gracie because you were a beautiful fantasy. You were a real woman. You aren’t perfect. You’re scarred and flawed. You committed adultery. You drink too much. You are hopeless with money. You don’t discipline your children enough. But you know how to love with all your heart and it must have been that that I sensed when you came into my office that windy May day. You love those boys even when they wear eye-liner and black nail polish. You love little Harry. Who couldn’t?

  And what breaks my heart but heals it in the same instant, is that you really love this man, Andrew Cox.

  I am watching you stroke his hair as he lies on the bed beside you. You are in your blue and white flannel pyjamas. My favourites. Have you been in them all day or are you retiring early? Are you feeling unwell?

  He is almost asleep. His wife has rung three times looking for him and your son has diverted the calls away from you, covering for you. He senses that you need this man, too.

  I wrote this journal for you. It was written with the best intentions and I wanted you to see that I loved you so much that you were in my thoughts every day. I had no other way of expressing myself.

  I have nothing to live for now. You are lost to me.

  I will take the Babylonian way out and terminate my lease on life. I can’t even smile at the pun.

  Grow old with this man. Give him all the love I wanted from you for myself. I am selfish and broken. I can see now that you are too good for me.

  You must read this journal. That is my only one last wish. It is the only way my life will have had any impact on you. Perhaps you will see yourself for the person you are in its pages. I’m sorry for the bad things I have written. As I have said, it was only ever with the best intentions. I think of my daughter and know that there is so much perversion and sickness in people. Your only crime has been to love another man, passionately and with all your heart.

  I must stop. I can feel the tug of the black hole, like a dark magnet pulling me to oblivion.

  It is finished.

  I will take this book down to your door. I will give you my laptop as well. It has all the footage saved on it. I’ll put my password in the front cover of the journal. It’s only proper that I give it to you. I wouldn’t want it falling into the wrong hands. I will knock firmly on the door until you open it. I’ll hand them to you and wish you a good and long life and then I will come back to this car, drive down to the National Park and be done with it all. I will hang myself from the tree closest to where my daughter had her brief life snuffed out. Maybe something better awaits me on the other side but I doubt it. I am pretty firm in my belief that we are all just fertilizer.

  If you need to show this book to the police, it will completely exonerate you of my crimes.

  I’ve looked into your life, now you can look into mine. I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me.

  Love James Michael Thorn.

  Property Manager