Night of the Animals

by Bill Broun

  What made Astrid special was that she was one of a few hundred Flōters in the country who had managed, for now, to break the addiction.

  But only just. After eleven years dormant in FA, the dragon of second withdrawal was upon her. Astrid felt incensed it had come to this. She’d done what was suggested. Despite attending meetings semiweekly, volunteering often for tea duties, working with newcomers, relapse and death genuinely threatened her. She couldn’t sleep, her muscles hurt, and she endured a daily yearning to push her thumbs into her eyes and gouge out her prefrontal cortex. There were the Flōt cravings, too, of course—cravings that hooked up from the belly like a long silver claw.

  THE SEAMEN’S REST, operated by Methodists, was in a forgotten All-Indigent corner of the Isle of Dogs. It was a place she felt she’d consciously condemned herself to in London’s struggling Flōters Anonymō community.

  She heaved the two pots onto the steel sink counter.

  “One last time,” she said to the teapots. “Up there, you.” She was awake, and alive, and she hadn’t evidently topped herself yet. But she wasn’t doing tea-making duties again—ever.

  The FA meeting merely rented its space at the old Queen Victoria Seamen’s Rest, commonly called “the Queen Vic.” It was the biggest hostel for Indigent seafarers in Britain, but now it served more as an anachronism from the days when nonautomated ships deposited crews in the Docklands for shore leaves where brothels, barrooms, or the Queen Vic were the only alternatives for accommodation. It was a great, ramshackle pile of Portland stone and brick. Atop the Rest perched a three-foot-high statue of an eagle with a noble hooked beak and indomitable steel eyes. The figure was a little weird, but Astrid associated it with recovery. Eagles protected things, she’d think to herself.

  Astrid had left work for the evening a few hours before, and a sickening heaviness now squatted in her stomach. She was getting her bearings, and the continuous eeeeep! screech had receded in its power to annoy. “Can’t I get one night without an alert?” she said, a whine battling her low, thick voice.

  Her two orange-freqs that week had been about young aristocrats having sex at night in the Inner Circle rose garden at Regent’s Park, which struck Astrid as rather romantic, really. But couldn’t the constables deal with that by themselves?

  Taking a long breath, she tapped her eyebrow and called up the dismissed alert text: Hello Insp Sullivan! Possible to pls. Opticall me? Lamps on @zoo. Sorry! PC JL Atwell.

  The screaming stopped.

  The zoo. What?

  The new probationer—Jasmine Atwell. She was canny, too canny, thought Astrid. PC Atwell did everything by the book, and the upshot was extra work for everyone—at least until her regular sergeant came back from his latest weeklong sickie.

  Lights on at zoo? What did that mean? At the zoo? False alarms and security-lamp trips were nightly annoyances in the royal parks because of the homeless Indigents who used them to sleep rough. The constables on call at night were unofficially encouraged to pay little heed to the alarms until they invariably stopped. But one at the zoo? A bit odd, that, thought Astrid.

  Astrid was more dutiful than many of her colleagues, but she wanted to wait, this time, just a few minutes, before responding. She needed to calm herself. Her Flōt withdrawal hurt, and it made her feel bonkers. She felt stuck in a sort of cramped, curvilinear awareness with her mind as bare and dark and rubbery as the inside of a cracked tennis ball. Her heart pounded. The zoo! It wasn’t the English republicans shooting Mark 66 rockets at Hampton Court, right? It wasn’t even a purse snatch. Besides, she was also busy saving her own life, wasn’t she? To do that meant finishing two enormous, miserable pots of tea. That’s how FA worked. Serve and recover. A dozen fellow recovering Flōters, several drug addicts, an old-school alkie or two, and a few plain old psychic bomb-outs—nearly all Indigents—would be showing up within minutes, whinging about tea. Everyone, it seemed to her, complained that her tea was not made early enough, then complained about the tea itself.

  Tea done? Tea done? Ooooh, good girl, loovly, loovly—but it’s a bit thin, innit?

  a chest of drawers filled with tears

  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 American 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 c
urrant 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.

  the grumpy caretaker

  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 l
eft 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.