Paul Cleave - Collecting Cooper

The girl Adrian loved stood up in front of the class and spoke about Beethoven. Adrian didn’t know much about Beethoven except that Beethoven had cut his ear off, though Katie didn’t mention it in her speech and he wasn’t sure why, but she did say the composer had gone deaf, and cutting your ear off would certainly make that happen. Halfway through the speech some of the kids started laughing. Mrs. Byron told them off. Mrs. Byron was the kind of teacher who was always telling people off, the kind of woman who looked like she may have been born at the age of forty. Katie slowed down and carried on, then the laughing began again, and then she started to cry. She ran out of the room. Adrian wanted to go after her. He thought it would be an amazing gesture and she would have to love him back. The coward living inside of him wouldn’t let him. He hated that coward. He wanted to kill it, but didn’t have the courage. Not then-but he decided in that moment he would at least try to fake it.

When lunch came he went up to the boy who had started the laughing.

“I want you to leave Katie alone,” Adrian said.

“You what? Fuck you, you’re kidding, right?”

“I mean it.”

The boy, his name was Redmond but everybody called him Red, was holding a rugby ball that he was about to start throwing with his friends. Redmond was one of those fat kids with fat cheeks who later on in life would call himself big-boned. “You mean it?” Red said, then pushed a fat finger into Adrian’s chest. “Little Aids,” he said, because that’s what they called Adrian, “doesn’t want us teasing his girlfriend.”

“She’s not my girlfriend.”

Red pushed him again, only this time one of Red’s friends had knelt down behind Adrian, so when he moved backward he tipped over, the ground knocking most of the fight out of him, the rest being knocked out a moment later when Red jumped on top of him, punching him hard twice in the stomach, and then rubbing his face in the dirt. There was nobody to help him. Other students started to come over to watch. Including Katie. A couple of the bigger girls brought her over. Adrian looked up at her. He tried to smile at her but couldn’t. He was in too much pain, and he was using all of his effort just to keep his bowels in check.

“He’s not your friend is he?” asked one of the girls, a big girl, one of those rapidly growing girls with big jaws and mean eyes and curly hair. It was common at school that if you grew faster than the majority you became a real bastard.

Katie didn’t say anything.

“Because if he’s your boyfriend, then you’re about to be on the ground next to him,” the girl added. “That’s your future.” They were deep words for a thirteen-year-old girl.

Everybody fell quiet as Katie thought about her future. “He’s. . he’s not my boyfriend,” Katie said.

“Then who is he?”

“I don’t know. Just some. . some loser in my class,” Katie said-there were tears in her eyes but they didn’t fall.

“A what?” the girl asked.

“A loser. A loser,” Katie said.

Adrian can still remember it, word for word. He doesn’t have problems with those memories, only with the ones he’s developed over the following years. That day he fell out of love as easily as he fell into it, or at least that’s what he thought at the time. His life at school got worse. The girls began to tease him as much as the boys. Katie became popular. To her credit she never teased him directly. Sometimes he’d come home with a bloody nose and grazed elbows and knees and his mother would call the school and complain, and the following day the bullying would be worse. Bullying was like that, the more you complained the bigger the problem became, the teachers never able to do anything about it. His classmates took any chance he had of becoming a confident student and squashed it. It was months after Katie called him a loser that he learned the only way to find happiness was to take it from somebody else.

He also knew how.

In the morning, while his mother was making him breakfast, he would go into the bathroom and urinate into a plastic bottle that would hold half a liter. He would screw the top on really tight. The bottle would be warm when he put it in his school bag but cold by the time he got to school. He would take one of his many moments of isolation between the taunts and the beatings, and he would go into the locker rooms and unscrew the plastic bottle and pour the contents into the bags of anybody who hurt him. There was a time, about a week into it, that he had to pour it over his own bag so the others wouldn’t think it was him, but he diluted it with so much water that it wasn’t really that bad and he took the things out of his bag he didn’t want damaged. If he couldn’t pour it into their bags, he’d pour it into their desks, over their uniforms while they were in gym class when he could manage it. He lasted a full month before he lost the courage to continue regularly. By then there were too many people watching out for the Urinator as he was called, with a promise from the principal that the Urinator would be expelled. It didn’t matter, because by then school was nearly over for the Christmas holidays. He carried on when they went back seven weeks later, not as often, only once or twice a term. He never soaked Katie’s bag, but he soaked some of the other girls’ bags. The occasions lessened. Once a month became once every three months. Then only a couple of times a year.

It all ended three years later when he was sixteen. He doesn’t know the boy’s name who walked in on him during the act, he was pouring his urine through the grill holes of another boy’s locker, a boy who had walked past him the day before in the corridor and slapped him in the face for no reason. In that moment of being caught his future flashed ahead of him, it would start with his mother finding out, he would be expelled, he would carry the Urinator name with him wherever he went. He was old enough to know his astronaut fantasy wasn’t going to pan out, young enough to have no idea what he wanted to do in life, and old enough to know that whatever dreams he would have were now over. The boy stared at Adrian, said nothing, and then walked away.

The rest of that afternoon was the worst. He couldn’t concentrate in any of the classes. He thought the teachers were giving him a funny look. He kept waiting for somebody to bring a message for the teacher, asking for Adrian to be sent to the principal’s office. The school bell rang and it was time to go and still nothing. When he got home, every time the phone rang he knew it was going to be the school talking to his mother, that expulsion was next, but the call didn’t come.

If the first day was bad, the second was by far much worse. He didn’t eat breakfast that morning. He felt sick all day. On recess breaks and during lunch he would sit in the bathroom with his stomach holding what felt like a bucket of water.

It was the third day the boy came for him. He didn’t come alone. They took him at the end of the school day and dragged him into a park. Together they held Adrian down and tied him up. They didn’t kick or punch him, not in the beginning, and when he was securely bound they stood around him in a circle and they all pissed on him, eight of them in total. It splashed over his skin and ran down his body. It pooled beneath his back and buttocks and soaked into his clothes. They strapped a stick in his mouth so he couldn’t form a seal with his lips. They aimed for his face, it streamed into his eyes and burned them, it rained onto his tongue and felt like acid at the back of his throat. He gagged and coughed and spluttered and it stuck in his throat and he felt like he was drowning. It felt like it lasted forever. When they were done they laughed at him and one of the boys kicked him in the head. The kicking caught on the same way fads tend to sometimes, because then another boy did it, and another. Soon they were all kicking him, and when he finally blacked out, their laughter followed him into the darkness. He dreamed of Katie. He dreamed of better times.