Night of the Animals(84)

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

The whole room exploded. A few people stood up, slapping their legs and doubling over. The chairperson of the meeting, a wintry-souled Glaswegian named Fred, started banging a tiny wooden gavel. “Oooo-kay! Oooo-kay!” he kept saying. “Let the laaaaaaaay-dee have her say.” But then Fred’s face broke into a helpless grin. He still banged the gavel, but no one, least of all himself, was able to pay attention to anything other than the complete hilarity of the situation.

Just then, a small, tightly built Indigent named Marcus, whom she didn’t care for, goaded, “Keep talking, Astrid. Keep it up!”

Astrid was mortified. She pretended to laugh, too, but the impulse had to be entirely, and not easily, faked. Here she had been trying to discuss an important issue in her life, one that involved economic security and moral impropriety and the society of peers and madness and depression, and she had lost the floor to juvenile crudeness. It seemed to her that with the stink had also come a total disillusionment with this meeting. She instinctively blamed people like Marcus—but part of her knew this wasn’t the problem. She was the problem. The zoo was the problem.

Fred said, “Go ahead, Astrid. You finish what you were saying, lassy.” A rivulet of milky tea had spiked out from beneath her chair; someone had knocked over a cup. She heard Louisa say, “Fuck! Get a tea towel! Get that stuff sopped up now!”

Astrid said, “I think that’s it. I said what I needed to say.”

“No it’s not, out with it,” someone said. “Please, Astrid.”

“Shouldn’t a copper be answering her Opticalls,” another person cracked.

“Hey, listen,” Astrid said, irritably.

The silence came on again. All the snickering ended—it was as if Astrid Sullivan was a scythe of sternness, mowing down every sign of good humor in the room. By the time she felt, after a long silence, that she might start in again about her job, and perhaps broach the more important subject of her deadened emotional life, Marcus jumped in, not even waiting for the traditional “thank you” FA members said after another member spoke.

Marcus said, “Me ex-wife is trying to keep me from seeing my kid, in little, sneaky ways.” Shaking his long brown hair mullet, and sniffing, he gazed around to see if anyone was paying attention.

Astrid could almost physically feel the room lighten up and take earnest interest in Marcus’s plight. “I bought the boy a bicycle, a three-wheeler trainer thing, and—I’m just going to say it—the two-bone bitch sold the bicycle on that OpticAuctions business!”

Everyone seemed stilled by the intensity of Marcus’s words; many bowed their heads.

“I’m sorry,” Marcus said, his Dublin brogue coming in. “I’m just angry. I know it’s not good but I hate her.” Several listeners nodded. Louisa put her hand on Marcus’s shoulder.

Astrid felt envious and sad about the Seamen’s Rest lot’s embracing of the hotheaded Marcus over her, then felt angry at herself for her jealousy.

Tom leaned close to her. He said, in a kind, low voice, “Astrid, I’m so sorry. Don’t mind us. You know an open meeting at the Seamen’s Rest isn’t necessarily the best place to bring up anything too personal; they’ll chew you up here. We love you, Astrid, we do. Let’s go have a chat after the meeting, OK?”

Astrid usually felt great affection for Tom, but at that moment she wanted to grab one of the pots of tea and dump it on his head. Instead, she smiled. Of course she smiled, and said distantly, “Thanks for the input.”

Never had she felt so convinced that she was ready to stop attending FA meetings, something she had never dared do since her first meeting in Houston in 2041.

“Arseholes,” she said quietly, tearing up.

Tom nodded, and said, “You’re right. But there are other meetings that are much more—you know—civilized and just, er, intelligent.”

She felt that, at last and unforeseeably, she understood something that had escaped her since 2041: FA’s problem is that it’s full of Flōters.





“where’s my miracle?”


ASTRID LEFT THE MEETING EARLY. ASTOUNDINGLY, it was the first time she had ever done this in eleven years of FA meetings. She was going to let the others clean up the tea. Fuck ’em! She heard old Tom calling after her as she walked outside; it was as though he knew something quite awful was happening to Astrid.

“Can I have a word, Astrid?” Tom was saying. “Wait up, girl!”

She pretended she didn’t hear and walked toward the wobbly old Docklands Light Railway station at Poplar. The rotting elevated walkways toward the crumbling skyscrapers of Canary Wharf, covered in 3D graffiti and louche adverts, always confused her, but apart from Canary Wharf itself—where half the offices were shuttered or tee-hee 5-5* dens—the DLR station was the one place within half a mile where one could find a quiet nook to make a private audio Opticall. An orange-freq’s flames were again whipping across her eyes, and new shrieking had begun. She felt an odd sensation, something new, as if the zoo itself were sucking her in, swallowing.

The area near the station displayed the usual roaring ugliness of a late midweek evening. Cartons of unsold market produce—brownish clementines, scores of lychees spanned with white mold—overstuffed the rubbish bins along with the day’s discarded food wrappers. She felt compelled to duck beneath a giant, purple holographic penis jutting from the station wall along with scads of other obscene 3D images and tags and Army of Anonymous–UK slogans. Spread around the entrances were splayed drink boxes of Ribena, Cokelager orbs, and Lucozade bags.