“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.”