Collecting Cooper (4 page)

“Excuse me,” the man says, and even though he’s in his midthirties there’s something about him that makes Cooper think of him as a kid, it could be the floppy hair hanging across his forehead, or it could be the corduroy pants twenty years out of date. “Have you got the time?”

“Sure,” Cooper says, and he looks down at his watch, and when he does a sharp cramp explodes in his chest. He jerks the briefcase into his body with enough force to pop it open. The contents spill
onto the driveway and a moment later he collapses next to them, every muscle and limb well beyond his control. The pain extends to his stomach and legs and groin, but mostly it’s his chest that hurts. The man lowers the gun and crouches down next to him, brushing his hair out of his eyes.

“It’s going to be okay,” the kid says, at least that’s what Cooper thinks he says, he can’t really tell, because at the same time a chemical smell wafts over him and something is pushed into his face and he can’t do a thing to fight it. It’s at that moment the darkness rushes in and takes him from his collection.

The sign says
Lost puppys for sail—$5 each.
It leans against the side of a brick wall held together by mortar and graffiti. The wall is two hundred meters closer to home than the police station. Leaning against that same brick wall in the shade it offers is a guy in a tattered blue shirt and tattered blue shorts and a hat made out of cardboard that came from a cereal packet. It doesn’t fit quite right but he doesn’t seem to mind. He hasn’t shaved in a while by the look of it and hasn’t eaten real food in about as long. I walk past him and he smiles and asks for loose change, only one side of his mouth moving when he talks, revealing teeth pointed and gray. All I have is the money Schroder gave me, and I give ten of it to him, hoping he’ll spend it on spelling lessons rather than beer. His smile widens and clean white lines appear around the corners of his eyes between all the grime, and I figure his last four months have been worse than mine.

“That gets you two lost puppies,” he says, arithmetic his strong point. “Take your pick.”

I don’t want a puppy, but I look anyway, turning left and right and not seeing any.

“They’re lost,” he reminds me, and tucks the money into his pocket.

I walk into the heart of the city, past office blocks with large glass doors and shops with large glass windows; banks and cafés scattered among them, even the occasional place of worship. Many of the buildings in the city are almost a hundred years old, some even older, the old English architecture looks fantastic when you’re in the mood for it, and it’s hard to be in any kind of mood other than a pissed-off one when the temperature is above a hundred. Most of the buildings are stained with exhaust fumes and soot from over the years, but the beauty of Christchurch isn’t in the architecture, but in the gardens. Christchurch isn’t known as the Garden City for nothing—there are trees almost on every street, the Botanical Gardens are only a few blocks away, and it breaks up the old look of the city more than the occasional modern hotel or office block being built. A couple of the shops still have Christmas decorations in the windows from a few months back, or they’re getting them up earlier this year. It’s creeping up to ten o’clock in the morning and the streets have never looked so empty. It’s as if in the time I was away the Ebola Circus came to town, but of course it’s nothing as scary as that; the heat is keeping people indoors. Those unlucky enough to be out and about are walking slowly to maintain energy, shirts and blouses damp with sweat, people carrying bottled water they’ve bought from the supermarket even though Christchurch has the best water in the world coming straight out of the tap. I cross the bridge going over the Avon River. The water level is lower than normal, and the trees lining the banks are drooping and look like they’re trying to dive in. There are a couple of ducks hidden in the shade of some flax bushes, and another duck floating along the water on his back, his head twisted backward, dark bloated flies swarming its body. I pass a four-wheel drive double-parked at a set of lights, forcing cars to swing out into the opposite lane to get past. The vehicle is coated in dirt, and somebody has written
I wish my daughter was this dirty
across the back window with their finger. I walk to the central bus terminal and get blasted by the air-conditioning. The terminal smells of cigarette
smoke and the electronic board displaying the departure times has had a brick or something equivalent thrown through it. I wait with ten other people for the next ride, a few of them helping to give a pair of lost tourists directions. For the first time in about twenty years I catch a bus in my own city. At the back of the bus a couple of school kids are rolling cigarettes and talking about how wasted they got last weekend, how wasted they’re going to get this weekend, their drunken antics a badge of honor for them. They use
fuck
as a noun, a verb, an adjective, their conversation littered with the word.

The bus driver barely fits in behind the wheel and there is no obvious sign where his forearms end and his wrists start, and his head seems to come straight out of his shoulders, his neck engulfed by the fat of doughnuts past. We drive past a large group of teenagers with shaved heads all wearing black hoodies and jeans and looking like they’ve all just come from court and getting ready to do something that will send them back. I watch the city and see nothing dramatic has changed; a couple of new buildings and altered intersections, but for the most part it’s identical to how it was before; those who don’t look defeated by it are those doing the defeating. On the outset of my prison stay, four months seemed like a long time for me, and it seemed like time on the inside would come to a standstill while on the outside it would fly by. Now it looks like I haven’t missed a thing.

Clouds of smoke erupt from behind the bus and add to the smog stain that’s building on the back window. The bus pulls over every few minutes and the numbers on board shrink and grow. By the time we hit the suburbs there are only two other people onboard besides the driver. One of them is a nun, and the other is an Elvis impersonator decked out in full Elvis-Vegas-style sequins, and I feel like I’m in the middle of a setup to a joke. The folder Schroder gave me stays on my lap—unopened—the entire time. It has a green cover that is held closed by two rubber bands that I flick with my fingers every now and then. It takes a little under thirty minutes to reach the bus stop closest to home, and it’s a five-minute walk from there that takes me eight in this heat.

Normally this time of year you can’t go fifty meters without passing somebody mowing lawns or planting flowers, but the weather has pushed those activities to the end of the day when the heat has died down, so I walk the distance to my house in relative silence. Ninety-nine percent of my neighborhood is identical to how it was before. The remaining percent is made up of recently subdivided properties with brand-new homes. The sun bakes all of it, me included, and Schroder’s money has almost turned to soup by the time my house comes into view.

I’ve never been more pleased to see it. Part of me was sure I’d never see it again, that the only way I’d be leaving prison was in a body bag after being shanked. It’s a three-bedroom house with a black, concrete tile roof and gardens that are tidier than I’ve ever had them. My parents have been looking after the place. I find the key they hid along the side of the house for me. I head inside and it certainly feels like coming home. It’s a lonely house but it’s nice to be in a room that doesn’t have concrete walls. The fridge is stocked with fresh food and there’s a vase of flowers on the table with a
Welcome Home
card leaning against it. I call for my cat. He doesn’t show up, but there’s a half-empty food tray on the floor, so my parents have fed him this morning. I sit the flowers outside before my hay fever kicks in. While I was in jail my house was broken into but nothing stolen, the window they smashed has been replaced. I leave the file on the table and take a long shower, but the feeling of prison remains on my skin no matter how hard I scrub it.

When I get out I examine myself in the mirror. I haven’t seen myself in four months. I’ve lost weight. I jump on the scale and find I’m almost ten kilograms lighter. My face is thinner, and for the first time ever my stubble is coming through gray in places, matching the gray coming through around my temples. Great—I’m on my way to looking like my father. My eyes are slightly bloodshot too. This is how I used to look last year when I was drinking.

I put on some summer clothes and feel more relaxed. I want to go and see my wife more than anything. Bridget has been in a care home for the last three years. She sits in a chair and stares out at
the world and doesn’t speak and hardly moves and nobody really knows for sure how much of her is still alive. There has been progress—or at least a hope of progress. The accident that nearly killed her left her with broken bones and torn flesh and in a coma for eight weeks, it punctured her left lung and shattered vertebrae and people tell me she was lucky to live. My daughter wasn’t so lucky. Nobody ever tells me my daughter was unlucky enough to have died. People hardly mention her anymore.

Schroder’s money will only get me about halfway there. Instead I have to wait for my parents. I don’t have a car—it was damaged in the accident last year that led to my conviction. My parents wanted to pick me up today but couldn’t. They visited me twice a week every week while I was locked away, but the day I’m due out they’re busy, Dad with an appointment with a specialist at the hospital to fix the kind of prostate problems men get when they get to Dad’s age, problems I’m hoping they’ll cure with a pill by the time I get to sixty.

It’s too hot to head back outside, and ironically, after four months of wanting nothing more than to come home, I’m hit with an incredible sense of boredom. I stand at the kitchen sink and stare out the window. Though tidy, the backyard looks tired, the heat having drained much of the life from every living thing planted out there. My cat, Daxter, comes in and gives me a sad look, then comes back in a minute later with a bird in his mouth. Daxter is an overweight ginger cat who, for a piece of food, will be your best friend. He puts the bird on the floor next to my feet and steps back and meows at me. I don’t know whether to tell him off or cuddle him. I do the latter, then toss the bird into the garden recycling bin outside.

Like I knew I would, and like Schroder knew I would, I turn my thoughts to the folder with the green cover and rubber bands—a folder full of death. It couldn’t hurt to look. Schroder’s hoping there is something I can see that nobody else can. It’s unlikely, but possibly I can offer a different perspective. Plus I have a mortgage to pay and nothing in the way of job prospects. I pick the file up from the dining table and carry it to the study.

The heat is bad—not as bad as earlier this morning when Adrian set fire to his mother, but still hotter than he’d like. People complain about the heat. His mum did. She complained and screamed until the pretty-colored flames melted her tongue to the roof of her mouth and then she couldn’t scream anymore. People like to walk around complaining that it’s too hot and six months ago those same people walked around complaining it was too cold, and people, he knows, just can’t be pleased. Adrian doesn’t like the heat, but he isn’t making a fuss about it. He knows you just have to be careful enough to stay in the shade and drink enough water. If you don’t you can get skin cancer or your skin gets old quickly and gets blotchy and he doesn’t like the idea of that. When he gets too hot he sweats, which makes his clothes stick to him and makes him itch, and he hates itching, because his are the kind of itches that he can never quite get to, they travel as he scratches at them, forcing him to chase them with chewed-up fingernails, which roughs his skin and makes him bleed.

He doesn’t know how to work the radio in the car so he can’t
hear the temperature on the news. He wishes he could. He loves to listen to music, any kind of music as long as it’s not that heavy metal stuff you rip your throat up trying to sing along to, or worse, hip-hop. For twenty years he never heard a single song, a life without music, only sad, lonely humming from some of the others he lived with. When music came back into his life, he just didn’t get it. It was like all the rules had changed. Even records and cassette tapes had been replaced with songs you listened to on a computer, and he barely even knew what a computer was let alone how to use one. He listened and adapted to the new styles and now he hates to be without it. His favorite is classical. As a kid he never liked classical music. He used to have a paper route, and he’d save his money, and he was always spending it on cassette tapes. He used to collect them. He liked bands and he liked solo artists, but he didn’t like women singers that much. Every week he would spend his pay on another tape, building his library of music. All those bands and artists are in the past and didn’t date well, but classical music stays the same forever, and now he can’t fall asleep without listening to his tape player.

The car stereo isn’t the only thing not working. For air-conditioning he has to make do with having the window down. He doesn’t have a driver’s license and isn’t sure he’d pass the test if he tried. The thought of it makes him nervous. He could have every piece of information memorized, he’d know in the little diagrams presented if the blue or red car had to give way, he’d know how much tread your tires needed, how much alcohol you could drive with in your blood, but if he sat in front of an officer who watched him trying to complete that test, it would be like a magician came along and made his answers disappear. It would be worse trying to pass the physical part, the part where he had to drive through town with somebody next to him, judging every move he made. He knows he’d only manage a few hundred meters before throwing up all over himself. No, he doesn’t need a license as long as nobody ever pulls him over, and there’s no reason anybody should. He’s a careful driver, and the body in the trunk isn’t making any noise.
He just wishes he could get the air-conditioning to work. He isn’t sure whether it’s his fault or the car’s. The car is at least ten years old—surely not everything can be working right on it. The same goes for the radio.