Night of the Animals(87)

“Who cares about cleaning up tea? Are you all right, Astrid? I’m worried about you.”

“I’m all right, Tom, really. I won’t drink. I promise.”

The tightened skin around Tom’s eyes and mouth slackened a bit. He said, “I didn’t mean to be offensive, at the meeting and all. I’m just a grubby street Flōter, Astrid. That’s my bottom line.”

“No, Tom, you’re all right.”

“We don’t want to lose you, love.”

Tom scratched his neck, where he had a sort of soft-whiskered dewlap. “I’ve never seen you walk out of a meeting. We’re just teasing you a bit, you know. This isn’t some King’s Road meeting. We’re on the front lines. It don’t make us better or worse, but we’re what we are, aren’t we?” He looked down. A loud group of young West Ham United supporters, fresh-shaved and dressed in ironed vintage Ben Shermans, reeking of bergamot cologne, came storming around a building at the corner, across the street.

“Astrid, the pool—in Highbury. Didn’t I say you would feel better if you swam? It’s how I made it past second withdrawal. I’d see liquid ghosts, shining in the water beside me—water angels.” Tom had been the one who’d turned her on to swimming.

“Oh, I wish I could. You don’t know how badly.” It was true. In the pool at Highbury, she would melt away and still be herself, sort of, and sort of not, a creature not quite of the water and not quite terrestrial—and transcendently powerful. Whatever the sensations of Flōting and withdrawal were, swimming was their opposite.

The group of louts headed toward the stairway that led up to the railway platforms with angular panels of frosted glass and steel supports; they were slapping each other and jumping and laughing, like a pack of plump, pink terriers yanking against their leash to get out the door. They were off to what was left of the West End club scene. Tom began watching them quizzically.

“I’m not like those lot,” said Tom, pointing at the jack-the-lads. “And you’re not, either. We’re weaker than that. And that’s what makes us able to survive.” He seemed abstracted for a moment. “I don’t want to ‘take your inventory,’” he said, referring to an FA phrase meaning, roughly, unbidden moral examination, “but, Astrid, I think you’re close, you’re too close, to the Flōt again.”

Astrid winced at Tom’s words. They seemed bottomless in their paternalism—and she couldn’t get beyond that.

“Oh, piss off!” she said. “You old f*cking sot.”

There were DLR passengers coming down the steps now, and a few slowed down and glanced at Astrid. Rather than looking embarrassed or hurt, Tom appeared interested. He smiled gently. “I’m sorry, Astrid. I’ve put a spanner in the works all right.” He backed away even more, giving Astrid a full two or three meters of breathing space. “Let it out, Astrid, let it out. This is good.”

Astrid said, almost spitting, “I’ve got work to do.”

Tom rubbed his hands together. He gave a tight, overwrought smile of sympathy, showing his dark teeth. He said, “Yes, but let’s talk later, right?”

Astrid said nothing, and Tom turned away. Tom’s smile had collapsed, and he hunched over as he walked in a way Astrid had never seen before.

Tom stopped across the street, and with a nervous grin shouted an FA slogan: “Don’t leave five minutes before the miracle!”

Astrid frowned and stood there. She had heard the expression for eleven years. But it wasn’t enough any longer. “Where’s my miracle?” she asked herself. She felt as if she wanted to smash herself in the face.

The sky was slightly darker on this older side of London, despite the old skyscrapers and glimmering wine bars above the Thames’s water-condos, and you could see a few stars. The comet was supposed to be quite visible in the wee hours of the night, Astrid had heard. She wouldn’t mind seeing it, not at all. It wouldn’t be coming back, after all, until the forty-fourth century A.D., it was said, and by then England might be gone.

After a few seconds, she saw, to the east, a white splotch with a kind of smear beside it, but it didn’t impress her much, such was the city’s light pollution. Very strange, thought Astrid, if that’s it—like a celestial mistake. It was as if an old pencil rubber had been taken to a dark, glossy magazine page in a careless way, leaving a straggling blemish. Nothing special there, she thought. Maybe you had to be somewhere else in the world to see the comet truly, somewhere like California.

Astrid stayed where she was for a while, feeling righteous and cold and drowning in anger. She watched Tom walk across the street to a Tesco mini-grocery that had a few petrol pumps out front. Through the windows she could see Tom grab a blue handbasket and go to the little produce section. Tom lifted up a bunch of bananas and put them into his basket. A dark-haired store clerk who was arranging cantaloupes started pointing at Tom and telling him something and Tom looked befuddled. The clerk looked irate. Is this what happens? Astrid wondered. You stay sober for years and end up not being able to manage bananas? She did not want this life any longer.

She said aloud, “Tom, I am sorry, Tom.”





six





uniformity and its comforts


ASTRID SCAMPERED UP THE WHITE, REINFORCED cement stairs of her building. She owned an older ex-council flat in Haggerston, on a little street between the Regent’s Canal and a pocket park.