Night of the Animals (24 page)

ASTRID TRIED TO HURRY UP, AND A METAL POT
lid slipped from her hand and clattered on the floor. She made a big point of rinsing it off. Sykes, the Rest's caretaker, was in his room, watching her every move, tonight as every night she was tea-maker.

She knew that her guv at the constabulary, Chief Inspector Bobby Omotoso, wouldn't mind if she needed a few extra minutes to respond to this sort of freq. To her guv, Astrid's being an abstinent, reformed Flōter suggested a noble destiny hard to find at the outmoded constabulary, and he tended to indulge her. She'd once spent a few years working at the Houston Police Department to boot, as part of an Interpol Prime exchange program. The experience put a bright Texas star above Astrid's name in the guv's mind.

“You will be something big someday,” he once opined, answering a question Astrid hadn't asked, and sounding as if
he
ought to know its answer. “But how am I supposed to know what? How?”

A stout, overburdened Anglo-Nigerian from a family that practiced Yoruba religion, the guv was also fascinated by Ameri
can policing methodologies and their implied moralistic bents. He felt Astrid's Texas experience made the whole constabulary look better.

“
Hugh-Stone, Texas
, I'm sure, is London's future,” he'd once said to a quietly chagrined Astrid. “There's not all this English
depression
. And you
know
I've an uncle in Houston. And now, can you tell me how many officers would be scheduled to neuralzinger-range practice at once? I am trying to picture these astonishing training days in my head.”

“I think, erm, about ten per subdistrict. And there were about five subdistricts having a go at once, guv.”

“Impressive. That's firepower! We send, what . . . two at a time? How are we going to win against the republicans, like that?”

Astrid glanced behind her and looked at the door where the caretaker was pretending to watch a tiny SkinWerks screen—god knows how he, as an Indigent, could afford it—he'd sprayed over his tremoring, skinny forearm. Astrid knew his telly-watching was partly an act. He was just waiting for her to try to pocket one of the church's own teaspoons, or to burn the place down. They went through the same thing every week. The sobriety of FA members meant nothing to the suspicious Sykes, who may well have been a Red Watch informant. Henry IX, it was said, generally tolerated FA and other older self-help fellowships, but that didn't mean he trusted them. If they kept English souls out of the suicide cults, and cost no Treasure, he would endure them. Meanwhile, people like Sykes stood ready to inform on them for the slightest sign of sedition.

Sykes shook his head, pretending to be outraged at whatever rubbish he was watching on his stingy-small screen; he met Astrid's eyes with his own for an awkward second, then turned back to his flesh-telly.

“Lights,” she whispered to herself. It was surely not a big problem.
It was an odd one, however. But what if it was a B&E?
^*
Then what?

She realized that she'd forgotten to get out the artificial sweetener, a product called Smile invented in the 2030s. It came in tiny dissolving sheets you pulled from a pastel-green dispenser, and it tasted like bitter orange-blossom honey. The Flōtheads loved it. She bent down and reached far back into the cupboard, but there was something in the way.

She had to slide out a small, obstructing wooden box. It was a strange old thing she'd noticed before, designed to resemble a ship—the HMS
Victory
—with a profile of the famous yellow and black vessel painted on each side. She looked at it more closely. There was a tiny, rusty little padlock on it. The lock unclasped when she instinctively pulled on it. Broken, she thought. Figures. She threw open the box.

There was a miniature bottle of Bacardi rum—half-empty. There was a likely unplayable, century-old audiocassette tape with
BOB MARLEY
scrawled in pink on its label. There was also a large bag of Bassetts Jelly Babies, torn opened. Someone had eaten all but the black currant jellies, and those were smashed and decomposing. The Smile was there, too, in the wrong place, its minty-green dispenser pried open, with only a few sheets left.

“Weird fucks,” she said. “Who does this shit?” She picked up the bottle and turned it in her fingers. It was tempting, but she knew it was far too little to do anything but torture her. Only Flōt would scratch the itch she felt. (And Sykes was watching, of course.) She grabbed the Smile, closed the box, and shoved the HMS
Victory
back into its cupboard.

Astrid knew she would not be able to relax now. The zoo was normally the single bit in the royal parks that the constabulary never worried about, especially at night. Being on call for the zoo
was normally tantamount to a free night. The zoo staff did safety drills, of course, semiannually—but these posited daylight emergencies. There was already a built-in guard, of sorts, an Indigent night keeper with a small apartment fashioned into the old Reptile House. Astrid had met him once, long ago. Dawkins. A strange, very fat young gent with a narrow head and obsessed with a passé steampunk magazine called
Hiss
. He was, she'd heard, weirdly possessive of the Reptile House.

And now this.
Lights on at the zoo?

She counted out ten Typhoo tea-spheres and set them aside on the counter. They were about half the spheres needed for a pot, but tea's price was up to £20 a box. She touched her fingertips to her brow again—an Opticall-related tick many experienced. Before FA, she had been getting sloppy on the job, she remembered, and not handling her Flōt too well. And there had been a sexy man in Houston, too, a topiary shop manager with full lips and long thighs, a man who was as cleverly tidy about pouring an orb of Flōt as he was with fica shrubs. Astrid had wanted to impress him—and look what happened. She'd disgraced herself in Texas. So here she was, several years into a second chance, back in Blighty. Was she getting sloppy again?

If Astrid knew that Omotoso thought well of her, and even took advantage of that a bit, she also knew he was under pressure this year from the constabulary's overly promoted and overtaxed senior commander, Derek Brown, who was in turn being monitored carefully by the Royal Parks Advisory Board and the Red Watch, and even, it was said, by Harry9's secretive Privy Council. In the past year, ministerial scrutiny had trained upon what it considered the Royal Parks Constabulary's general obsolescence and Commander Brown's poor leadership.

The luminous Jasmine Atwell, on the other hand, had an ambition and intelligence that forced her supervisors to pay attention
and work the details, and she was exactly the kind of earnest, whip smart PC the constabulary needed. The trouble was, no one like Atwell ever wanted to stay with the “Parkies.” From the paddleboats at Hyde to the cardinal click beetles at Richmond to the pelicans at St. James, there was little drama and not one iota of policing glamour. If a constable was lucky, she might one day get to arrest a molester of the swans. (Through the twenty-first century, most of the smaller regional and specialist British police forces had been absorbed by London's Met or obviated by the Red Watch—“national policing,” all the rage in America, had become the order of the day in the UK, too, with an added Windsor crest.) There was much talk of shuttering the parks constabulary. With half the officers pulling sickies half the time, and the Home Office police forces and the upper echelons of the Red Watch picking off new, freshly trained probationers, it was in trouble, and every day a little more isolated from mainstream policing.

All this accentuated Astrid's own feeling of being cut off from any connections, human, animal, or otherwise, with second withdrawal's anger searing nearly every thought. She hadn't been touched by any lover in at least a year, and she suffered almost nightly insomnia, typically waking at 5:00
A.M.
and finding herself unable to sleep again.

Among FA members, second withdrawal was often simply called, like the last minute in a football match, “The Death,” and it was always suffered in isolation because no one could handle it, and users inevitably went back to Flōt.

Or killed themselves.

But Astrid knew isolation, and it hadn't killed her yet, had it? She'd grown up in Bermondsey with a single parent, somewhat overprotected, her mum her only source of kisses, hugs, or real love as a child. The two had remained profoundly attached until recently (her mother suffered from an Alzheimer's-like syndrome, caused
by a virus called Bruta7). But long before the neurodegenerative disorder, their relationship felt, as Astrid grew older, increasingly musty, restrictive. During Astrid's time in Houston, she felt as if she were, in this universe, wretchedly sui generis—a freak of aloneness. She'd spent thousands of dollars on international calls to her mum, and on Flōt.

The aloneness almost felt genealogical to Astrid. Her mum was herself the product of a one-night stand between an Indigent barmaid and a mysterious man who came from somewhere up north. She never met her grandfather, but like so many of the men in her family—like so many men of the twenty-first century, really—he was said to have been ravaged by alcohol and Flōt. She never met her own father, either, and her mother would say almost nothing about him. “He's not worth the air it takes to verbalize what I'm saying now,” she once told a young Astrid. “But your grandfather—he was special.”

“What do you mean, Mum?”

“He knew things. He was from some deeper England—deeper and wilder and a bit scarier.”

“Couldn't be scarier than now,” Astrid had answered.

Her clever mum had read literature at Durham, worked as a freelance subeditor at a WikiNous research office in Islington, struggling against ghastly odds to prevent herself and her only child from getting reclassified Indigent. Unlike almost everyone they knew, they went to church, Catholic church, no less, every Sunday morning, to the nearly empty black-bricked Our Lady of La Salette & St. Joseph, in Melior Street. She prayed hard as a child, too, crunched into the pew, clutching the cultured-pearl rosary from her gran in Galway.

Once, as a teenager, her mother had caught her rummaging through the chest of drawers in her bedroom. The thing that devastated Astrid more than anything about that day, as she grabbed
at pillowcases and rectangles of cedar, was what she
couldn't
find in her mum's chest. There were no old photographs, no documents, no locks of hair. All she located of interest was her gran's rosary and a brittle old paperback titled
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
. And nothing else. Just pants and socks and wood and torment.

“Tell me,” she had screamed at her mum, tears streaming. “Tell me! Where the fuck is he? Who is he?”

Her mother's face screwed up. “He was a drunk, my love. Your dad was, and your granddaddy was, too. That's it, unvarnished.”

Her mother sat down on the bed. She softly wept.

“I'm sorry, my lamb,” she said, her voice muffled. She sat back up, wiping away a string of snot, and she clasped both of her daughter's long, cold hands. “But your grandfather—he wasn't
just
a sot. He was quality, Astrid. An uncommon one. I . . . er . . . I don't know where he was from, exactly—Shropshire? Something north of the Thames, anyway. And I don't even . . . I don't
even
know his name. But he was charming, said Grandma, and crazy.”

Instead of her father, it was the excruciatingly delivered image of her “north of the Thames”
grandfather
—as a kind of paranormal, benighted inamorato, half an aged poet, half a mental patient—that stuck with Astrid. She could hardly have been more primed to meet a certain night visitor to the zoo.

ASTRID PULLED THE SPIGOTS WIDE OPEN ON THE
faucets. The noise of the water splashing into the empty sink was stupendous, like a tropical storm on a tin roof in Bali.

She noticed that Sykes had stood up now in his “office,” as he called it, and begun watching her again.

“Something the matter?” Astrid asked. It was an aggressive thing to say, and she immediately regretted it.

Sykes was a dispirited-looking, head-wagging Indigent with a yellowish complexion. He rarely uttered a word, but he watched that SkinWerks panel in his room with the door left partially open. He was always there when Astrid showed, but if Astrid so much as glanced at him, he averted his eyes and pushed the door closed an inch or two, often using the arm with the panel blaring off it. A few minutes later, Astrid would notice that the office door was opened even farther.

“I heard a noise,” Sykes said, almost snarling. The fact that he said anything at all took Astrid by surprise.

She spluttered, “Oh, well, the sinks? You mean the sinks?”

Sykes shook his head, his nostrils flaring ever so subtly. “No, it sounded like a little bird.”

“That's my orange-freq. They're very loud. That's all.” Astrid hesitated. “I'm a kind of a police inspector, believe it or not. I'm ‘on call' tonight—sort of. It's my eyes—and my ears—right? That's all.”

“An inspector!” Sykes sat back down and pushed the door to, almost shutting it. “Tsh. Inspector!”

Through the window on the door, he gave Astrid one of his especially opprobrious looks. He possessed a few of them—a don't-waste-our-water stare, don't-make-excessive-noise, don't-burn-down-the-Rest-with-your-fellow-solunauts'-noxious-cigarettes, don't-keep-secret-birds. And above all, there was a don't-lie-about-your-job glower.

Sykes turned up the volume on his telly, so loud the sound from the SkinWerks panel distorted a bit.

The grumpy Sykes had a thing against FA, it seemed—after all, the fellowship comprised people who were, by definition, admitted misfits, colonizing the “community rooms” of half London's churches and missions, messing up their kitchens, fiddling with their stoves, borrowing and occasionally stealing (Astrid felt sure he believed this) their limited supply of old, crooked, stained teaspoons, ad nauseam. She wondered if Sykes had a problem with the tipple himself, and was sublimating his self-hatred, or with women.

She started sloshing old tea sediment out of the pots. She turned the pots upside down in the sink and looked at the thousands of dark dots that formed a layer on the sink bottom.

Sykes's telly was broadcasting the news. Astrid found it hard not to listen. A homemade video of the cult leader Marshall Applewhite was being discussed. Astrid turned off the spigots and stepped closer. She found the Heaven's Gate business compelling, but in a
detached, academic way. She felt a bit jealous of police who got to deal with the suicide cults. She pushed the caretaker's door open gently.

“Mind if I watch?”

Sykes glared at her, fuming, but then he said, “Of course not.”

A woman with long, widely set eyes was being interviewed. A caption read that she was a cult expert who worked for one of King Harry9's new mental health institutes. She was saying, with visible anger, “People get drawn into these thought systems a step at a time. The person is never told at the outset what the bottom line is going to be.” One of the cult's infamous videos came on. Applewhite was dressed in a sparkly silver tunic of sorts, hair shaved short, with a shimmering purple pleated curtain behind him. Total freakstyle, Astrid thought. Her practical-minded mum—who had nonetheless moved earth and sky to send Astrid to independent schools as a child—would have called him a tosser.

Applewhite was saying, in a silky, unctuous voice: “I feel that we are at the end of the age. Now, I don't want to sound like a prophet, but my gut says that it's going to come in the next year or two. I could be off a few years, too.”

Astrid had read in yesterday's paper that Applewhite a few years back had gone to Mexico, paid a fee, and been castrated. She found herself respecting the sheer physical courage of the man.

Applewhite and his cohorts apparently kept an American five-dollar bill in their pockets at all times for some reason. All the cult members did. This seemed like an intriguing fact to Astrid. She watched with Sykes for a few more seconds, then went back to the big stainless sink and jerked the cold water spigot back on. That was the downside of America, the violence bit, with a few people like Applewhite—cloying in their amiableness and yet murderous to the core. But you had them in England these days, too, didn't you?

Astrid decided to say something conversational to Sykes, something to demonstrate that she wasn't insensitive to the spectacle of a mass, stupid suicide, wasn't below vapid, even prurient interest in it, provided a certain perspective held. She turned two of the stove gas burners on, and they whispered on with a faint “pa” sound. She said to Sykes, gamely, “Never join a religion less than a thousand years old, I say.” She felt a slight pinch in her tummy. “I believe in Buddha, myself.”

Sykes didn't say a word or look. He pulled his office door closed. Astrid felt like an idiot. She said, not very loudly, “I don't mean I believe
in
him.” But Sykes wouldn't have heard a thing.

When the water boiled, Astrid dropped five tea spheres in each pot. She enjoyed watching them float like little scalding suns as the pekoe orange color bloomed around them. She gave each pot a stir with a wooden spoon. It was 7:45—the recovering Flōters of the meeting, mostly first-withdrawal survivors, would be upstairs hemming and hawing by now, asking the same faintly critical question they already knew the answer to: “Who's the tea-maker this week?” They bloody well knew who the tea-maker was.

But try to get one of
them
to volunteer and make tea.

Astrid felt modicums of pleasure and pride as she delivered the pots of tea. She forgot about the zoo and Atwell's Opticall text.
Serve and recover.
She marched each pot upstairs, one at a time, to the room where the meeting was held. When she walked in, a few of the regulars smiled her way.

“Ah, Astrid, my dream love,” said a homeless man, Burt, speaking in a wry tone made spitty and wet by his missing teeth. “You are one I want to marry.”

“Hello, Burt,” she said.

It usually didn't bug her that the other addicts would do nothing to help her, but today their inaction seemed churlish. Everyone in
her FA group knew she was on the cusp of second Flōt withdrawal, a trial few recovering Flōters survived.

And Astrid made things difficult for those who tried to help her. She would have been bothered had they attempted it, and she would have tried to co-opt every task herself. And by god, if there were lamps on at the zoo, Atwell or no Atwell, she knew now she was going to have to turn them off herself. I'll do that, as usual. Sure. I always do the bit that needs done.

Need help, Astrid?

No, she always said.

I can do this. I can do almost anything.