She heard Burt whisper moistly, “What’s that mean? What’s ‘con-tex’?”
Right beside her was Tom P., who had been carefully dropping bits of tobacco into his old Golden Virginia rolling machine. Tom put the device on his knee and sat up, as if he had been misbehaving while a schoolmarm intoned facts. Astrid was swept with stomach-churning self-consciousness. Why did she always have to sound so stiff at FA meetings? she asked herself miserably. But she went on, she had to: “Oh dammit, how do I put this? You all know I work for the Royal Parks Police. I have a staff of twelve PCs and three sergeants who cover the Hyde and Regent’s parks. Well, my Opticall panels are going off even tonight and I just can’t answer this time, and I don’t think I’ll ever go back to work again—I’m packing it in. I feel as though I want to act out, if you understand?” She looked down into her hands, and opened and closed them into limps fists. “There are lights on—at the fucking zoo. The zoo! I need to tell you about that. Does that make sense?”
Tom leaned forward in his chair, and twisted to one side. He looked directly at Astrid with a strange expression, raising his eyes and gritting his teeth, and then it struck: a magnificent, darkly pneumonic, arse-splitting fart. It was loud and proud, though poor Tom instantly turned crimson.
“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.”