Paul Cleave - Collecting Cooper

Footsteps. A floorboard creaking. A lock disengaging and then a door opens. Somebody approaches her. She can hear breathing. She tries to talk but can’t. She thinks of her parents, her friends, her boyfriend. She thinks of the old man at the café and she makes a promise to herself that if she gets out of this alive she’ll never help anybody again.

“Drink.”

It’s a man’s voice. The pressure is removed from her mouth. There has to be something she can say to get out of this. Something she can say to make him let her go.

“Please, please,” she cries, “please don’t hurt me. I don’t want to be hurt, please, I’m begging you,” she says, the tears soaking her face. She doesn’t think she’s ever cried so much. She knows she’s never been this frightened. This man is going to do bad things to her, and she’s going to have to live with what he’s done to her, it will haunt her and make her insane. The person she was is about to die.

But she will get through this. She will survive. She knows that because, because. . this was never meant to happen to her. It’s not possible her life is about to end. It doesn’t add up. Doesn’t make sense. She cries harder.

“Please,” she says.

The plastic neck of a bottle is pushed against her lips.

“It’s water,” he says, and he tips it up. It pours into her mouth. She hates him, but the thirst is overpowering and she accepts the drink. He pulls it away before she can swallow more than a few mouthfuls.

“There’ll be more soon,” he says.

“Who, who are you? What are you going to do with me?”

“No questions,” he says, and the pressure is back on her mouth, some form of tape. “You’re going to need to keep your strength,” he tells her. “I have something very special planned for you over the following week,” he tells her, “and you won’t be needing these,” he adds, and she feels a blade slip beneath her clothes and he starts cutting them away.

The dust from the exercise yard clings to the hot air. Flies and mosquitoes are trying to use my neck as a landing strip. Giant concrete walls separate me from the sounds coming from the other side where men are ticking through life, kicking a football or playing cards or getting stomped on. Cranes and scaffolding are off to the right, workmen creating additions to a prison that can’t keep up, dirt and cement dust hugging the air like an early winter’s fog, so thick the details are hard to make out, could be a stampede of cows just came through, could be a stampede of prisoners are trying to escape. My clothes smell stale and feel stiff; they’ve been folded and jammed inside a paper bag for the last four months, but they’re sure as hell more comfortable than the prison jumpsuit I worked, slept, and ate in. Sweat and confinement is still on my skin. Heat is radiating up from the blacktop pavement into my feet. When I close my hands, I can feel the metal and concrete walls that would isolate me from the world the same way an amputee can feel a phantom leg. My last four months have been all about isolation. Not just from the world, but from other prisoners too. I’ve spent day after day surrounded by cells full of pedophiles and other pieces of human trash that couldn’t be thrown into the general population for fear of having their throats ripped open. Four months that felt like four years, but it could have been worse. I could have had my teeth smashed out and made to play fetch-the-soap every night. I was an ex-cop in a concrete-and-steel world surrounded by men who hated cops more than they hated each other. I felt nauseous being surrounded by child molesters, but it was the better alternative. Mostly they kept to themselves, spending their days fantasizing about what it was that got them arrested. Fantasizing about getting back to that life.

The prison guards watch me from the entrance. They seem worried I’m going to try and break back in. I feel like a character in a movie; that lost guy who wakes up in a different time and has to grab somebody by the shoulders to ask them for the date, including the year, only to be looked at like they’re a fool. Of course I know the date. I’ve been waiting for this day ever since I got thrown inside. My clothes are a little bigger because I’m a little smaller. Prison nutrition is malnutrition.

The nine o’clock sun is beating down and forming a long shadow behind me. In most directions it looks like there is water resting on the surface of the ground, a thin pool shimmering in the heat. The blacktop grabs at the soles of my shoes as I walk across it. I have to hold my hand up to my face to shield my eyes. I’ve been out of jail for twenty-five seconds and I don’t remember a day as hot as this before going in. I haven’t seen much sun over the last four months and already my pale skin is starting to burn. The longer I was trapped behind those walls behind me, the further away this particular Wednesday seemed. Prison has a way of fooling with time. There are a few cars around belonging to visitors, and one has a guy leaning against it staring at me. He’s wearing tan pants and there are dark rings in the armpits of his white shirt and he’s lost a bit of weight since the last time I saw him, but the buzz-cut hair is still the same, and so is his expression, of which, lately, he seems to have only the one. I can smell smoke from something big burning far off in the distance. I close my eyes against the sun and let it warm my skin, and then burn, and when I open them again, Schroder is no longer leaning against the car. He’s covered half the distance between us.

“Good to see you, Tate,” Schroder says, and I take his hand when he reaches me. It’s hot and sweaty and it’s the first hand I’ve shaken in a long time, but I can remember how it goes. The prison food didn’t rot all of my brain away. “How was it?”

“How do you think it was?” I ask, letting go.

“Yeah. Well. I guess,” Schroder says, summing things up. He’s just looking for words and not finding them, and Schroder won’t be the last. A couple of exhausted-looking birds fly low past us, looking for somewhere cooler. “I thought you could do with a lift home.”

There’s a white minivan waiting near the entrance, the bottom half of it covered in dirt, the top half only marginally better. There’re a couple of other guys released today sitting onboard, both have shaved heads and tattoo raindrops streaming from their eyes, they’re on opposite sides of the van staring out opposite windows wanting nothing to do with each other. Another guy, a short, powerfully built man with all the fingers on his right hand missing, turning his fist into a club, is swaggering out from the prison, his arms puffed out to the side to encompass his large chest and even larger ego. He stares at me before climbing into the back of the van. I give it a week tops before they’re all back in here.

Four of us are getting released today and I wasn’t thrilled about the prospect of spending twenty minutes in a vehicle with any of them. I’m not exactly thrilled about spending time with Schroder either.

“I appreciate it,” I tell him.

We head over to his dark gray unmarked police car that’s covered in dust from the drive out here, making all the letters on the side of the tires stand out. I climb in and it’s hotter inside. I play around with the air-conditioning and get some of the vents pointing in my direction. I watch Christchurch Prison get smaller in the side mirror before disappearing behind a large belt of trees. We hit the highway and turn right, toward the city. We drive past long paddocks with dry grass and barbed-wire fences. There are guys in those fields driving tractors and whipping up clouds of dirt and wiping the early-morning sweat from their faces. Away from all the construction and the air is clear.