“Just shut it,” Astrid said in a stage whisper. Beauchamp’s expression didn’t change. He seemed content to be spoken to in this way—as if used to it.
“The public’s safety is the priority here,” she said, “followed closely by the welfare of your animals. Isn’t that what you would expect, or is there something else you’re after?”
Turning toward the reporters, Astrid cleared her throat. “Listen!” she shouted. “Right!” There was, at least, a modicum of quiet. A great array of lights immediately turned upon Astrid, making her squint. “People, I need you to please get into your gliders and other vehicles. And I would appreciate it if you didn’t quote me. The Met’s public affairs department will be handling questions from here on out.”
There was another pause, then a gruff voice, a journalist’s, called out, “On your bike, Mrs. Plods!”
Several reporters guffawed, but one of them responded to the first, saying, “Why? Why insult the officer, you lot of shite-for-brains? You’ll ruin it for all of us.” But his tone was ambiguous, even sardonic.
“Hang on,” said another. “This isn’t a restricted area, is it? I’m my own gaffer, and I’ve got a bloody press card—we all do, I should think. Not even the king can stop us.”
“Careful!” someone with a gulping, frog-like voice warned. “Sedition!” he stammered. “You’re up . . . you’re up . . . you’re up to your ears in it.”
“Shut it, you fecking royal tool,” another responded.
“Harry9 can suck my eyes!”
Astrid felt panicked by the open defiance in the air. She didn’t grasp the sense of bitter irony the reporters all seemed to possess.
“I,” she started to say. She felt her heart skip and then flutter and jerk into an awkward gallop. For a moment, the edges of her vision grew cottony and white, and she thought she was going to faint.
“God damn it,” she seethed, not quite inaudibly. She was furious at her weakness, her wilting under pressure, but unable to summon that anger and bring it out where it might have been useful to her. The rage seemed to knock her heart back into a normal if fast cadence, but she still felt overwhelmed. She could not think of a time when she felt more scrutinized.
“There are bloody animals out!” she spluttered. “Are you half soaked?”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Animals shanimals. We ’eard that one already.”
“The major incident alarm’s on,” she said. She tried hard to soften her tone but felt beyond control, too, as if steering an air-bike with its handlebars abruptly pulled off. “You—you lot need to protect yourselves. There’s a mobile control room will be arriving here presently. Do you understand, people? You’re standing in the hot zone. We’re all in danger. You’ve got your press freedoms, but you’re at your own risk.”
Astrid felt, for a moment, a sense of feeble power.
“We heard you, officer,” said an older woman reporter with short white hair. “But we’ve had it with being cowed. We’re sick of it. There’s something very, very funny going on here. The Watch will be here and start neuralpiking us just as soon as the animals do anything to hurt us. We’re supposed to—”
“We can’t protect you if you stand out here,” she said.
They were looking at her more seriously now. They seemed to respect her assertiveness, inept or not, although it was clear they wouldn’t roll over for her. As her eyes adjusted to the light of the cameras, she began to see some of their faces. Many were different from what she would have imagined. The parks police rarely dealt with rank-and-file grunts behind the automedia, and Astrid never had. Their eyes gleamed with an unexpected perspicacity, and their faces wore expressions of genuine concern. It made her think of how the news supposedly used to be, in the days of “investigative reporting” (the term had fallen into disuse) and long-form magazine journalism, a kind of probing rough-literature that had vanished with the Property Revolts.
These autonewsers looked grubbier than the stereotypes. The men seemed to be wearing the same sort of stolid nuplastic-fiber jackets and organum-blend shirts that her male colleagues bought from M&S. The women reminded her of herself on her days off: hastily made up, dressed almost uniformly in off-the-shelf black crylon garments. Some wore their hair back with the same crooked multibarrettes and “living” bio-fiber-hairbands she used. Everyone appeared either just wakened or indeed, half-spiring. She had always figured that the scruffy journos from Canary Wharf who occasionally appeared at her Seamen’s Rest FA meetings were exceptions, not the rule.
A few of the reporters started glancing around, scrutinizing nearby hedges and trees. One of them, a white-haired warhorse in an old-fashioned Barbour wax coat with frayed cuffs, hunched slightly, then began lumbering around, spinning a bit, and nearly falling down until he completed a full 360-degree inspection.