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 left 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.
She started sloshing old tea sediment out of the pots. She turned the pots upside down in the sink and looked at the thousands of dark dots that formed a layer on the sink bottom.
Sykes’s telly was broadcasting the news. Astrid found it hard not to listen. A homemade video of the cult leader Marshall Applewhite was being discussed. Astrid turned off the spigots and stepped closer. She found the Heaven’s Gate business compelling, but in a detached, academic way. She felt a bit jealous of police who got to deal with the suicide cults. She pushed the caretaker’s door open gently.
“Mind if I watch?”
Sykes glared at her, fuming, but then he said, “Of course not.”
A woman with long, widely set eyes was being interviewed. A caption read that she was a cult expert who worked for one of King Harry9’s new mental health institutes. She was saying, with visible anger, “People get drawn into these thought systems a step at a time. The person is never told at the outset what the bottom line is going to be.” One of the cult’s infamous videos came on. Applewhite was dressed in a sparkly silver tunic of sorts, hair shaved short, with a shimmering purple pleated curtain behind him. Total freakstyle, Astrid thought. Her practical-minded mum—who had nonetheless moved earth and sky to send Astrid to independent schools as a child—would have called him a tosser.