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.”