Paul Cleave - Collecting Cooper

Adrian’s real mother never visited him at all since he left home twenty-three years ago, not since the incident with the cats. He has two mothers, the one who abandoned him when he was sixteen, and the one who abandoned him three years ago when his home was closed down. Both were hard women. Both left him to fend for himself. Both he holds in contempt, as well as loving them fully. His original mother died eight years ago. Nobody told him it had happened, and he only found out when he was released. He has no idea if she died being the same person he remembered her being when he was a kid. He doesn’t even know how real his memories are, whether they’re true accounts of their relationship or whether they faded and twisted over time. He knows he was sad when he found out about her. He had it all planned-a trip back home, a knock on the door, his mother would hug him and everything would be okay. Only back home wasn’t home anymore, it still felt that way until he knocked on the door and a stranger answered. The stranger was a man in his fifties, he had bought the house years earlier and knew nothing about Adrian or his mother, but the neighbors next door were still the same. So it was from next door that he got the news his mother had died, and he broke down and sobbed, the old lady there doing her best to comfort him. His mother had died of a brain embolism. He doesn’t know what that is, what causes them, but was told an embolism is basically a ticking time bomb inside your head that can go off at any time. His mother’s had gone off while she was standing in line at a supermarket. The checkout aisle was the last thing she ever saw. One second she was alive and the next second she wasn’t.

He went to the cemetery to see her. It took him over an hour to walk there from town. A priest, Father Julian, helped him find her grave and had stood with him, answering Adrian’s questions about God, promising him if he had any more he was free to return at any time. Adrian didn’t have much of an opinion about God. The Preacher-the man who ran the halfway house-tried to convince Adrian that God was somebody worth having on your side, but Adrian already knew God wasn’t on his side, otherwise he’d never have been put into that coma all those years before. Adrian returned to the grave a few months ago only to learn that God wasn’t on Father Julian’s side either, because, for all his worshipping and loyalty, Father Julian had been murdered. Adrian has never fully understood what irony is, but he thinks that may have been it. A new priest had taken his place, much in the same way a new mother had taken his original mother’s place.

His second mother’s name was Pamela and he met her the first day he came here to live. He doesn’t know when she became more a mother figure to him than his nurse, and he guesses, just as he thinks Cooper would guess, that it happened because he was still very young. She insisted he call her Nurse Deans, and never Pamela, and the couple of times he accidentally called her mum he was locked downstairs in the basement, each time for one full day and night. She was never cruel to him over the years, just strict, and the times she had to hit him, or as they both grew older have one of the orderlies hit or restrain him, he knew were for his own good. He didn’t like it, but the abuse was the only way to fix whatever was wrong with him and make him a better person, and they sure spent a lot of time trying to make him better. She never saw him as a son and he never forgave her for not visiting him in the halfway house. After all their years together she made it seem as though she had never cared.

He hated the halfway house and three years. . three years were just too many. He wanted to come back here. The problem was he couldn’t. He would go to the hospital and wait for Pamela Deans, he would hide in the parking building across the road, other times shadowed by a tree in the park opposite, and he would watch her, always wanting to approach but always too nervous to do so.

Then one day everything changed.

Adrian learned how to drive.

He was petrified the first time he got behind the wheel of a car, but soon that grew into mere nervousness, which itself became excitement. His teacher, Ritchie, was not an experienced driver himself, but he certainly knew more than Adrian. Ritchie was older than him by twenty years and lived out at the Grove for five of them before it was shut down. There was a lot Ritchie had done that Adrian never would-he’d been married, he had children, he’d had the same job for over fifteen years teaching people how to play the guitar. He tried teaching Adrian too, but the guitar had five strings too many for him to figure it out. But he had taught him to drive. In the end it was one of the most fun things he had ever done. They laughed a lot as he learned, and there were a few shrubs and letter-boxes that became victims, but at no other time has he ever felt so much at peace as he did with his best friend talking him through braking and steering, teaching him the art of changing gears, an art that needed to be so precise in the beginning because any mistake would stall the car. He even learned how to pour in petrol and fill the tires with air.

Learning to drive brought about his freedom. With freedom he could do whatever he wanted, go wherever he chose. It opened up an entire new world of possibilities. It gave him access to Grover Hills, to the people who hurt him, it gave him access to a new life, and what he wanted the most from his new life was to be just like his old life-minus the Twins.

So that was the plan. He would live at the Grove again, and Nurse Deans would look after him. He just had to make sure the Twins weren’t going to be there to hurt him.

A few years before the Grove shut down, the Twins had left. It was pretty easy to find out where they lived. It was a beautiful moment showing up at their house last week, and it was the first time he ever killed anybody. Boy, he was nervous. So nervous that he almost dropped the hammer. He got through it. He clubbed them both to death, and then he took their car. They weren’t ever going to need it again.

He wanted to live here, he wanted Grover Hills to be the way it used to be now that the Twins were dead, and he wanted Nurse Deans to live here with him.

Only she didn’t want to.

He moved what he owned out here but quickly became lonely. His best friend had met a woman and their friendship had taken a backseat to the new relationship. Adrian was jealous of them and happy for them at the same time, but not happy enough to ask them to join him out here. He wishes things had gone differently. Being back here he can clearly remember the good times, and there were many. He remembers some of the killers that came to stay, young men and women who weren’t fully aware of what they had done, or so they pretended, but sometimes at night they would tell him in detail and their stories would take on a life, he could see the details through their eyes, both sickening and exciting him. Some were so vivid he could almost lay claim to the memories and call them his own.

After hearing them, he would go back to his room and work on his comics. He was getting better at them. No matter what the story was he had heard, he would draw that scenario. He would put himself into the killer’s shoes, he would imagine he was the one swinging the ax or holding the knife, and the victims he drew were always the eight boys who had hurt him all those years ago. As he drew them, he could feel himself killing them, and it was magnificent.

But then the orderlies and nurses started to find his comic collection. Each time they would destroy it and he would be sent into the Scream Room. He wouldn’t be allowed pencils or paper anymore, but there was always a way to get some, and he’d start over again with the new stories until he lost those too.