Night of the Animals(80)

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 f*cks,” 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.”