Applewhite was saying, in a silky, unctuous voice: “I feel that we are at the end of the age. Now, I don’t want to sound like a prophet, but my gut says that it’s going to come in the next year or two. I could be off a few years, too.”
Astrid had read in yesterday’s paper that Applewhite a few years back had gone to Mexico, paid a fee, and been castrated. She found herself respecting the sheer physical courage of the man.
Applewhite and his cohorts apparently kept an American five-dollar bill in their pockets at all times for some reason. All the cult members did. This seemed like an intriguing fact to Astrid. She watched with Sykes for a few more seconds, then went back to the big stainless sink and jerked the cold water spigot back on. That was the downside of America, the violence bit, with a few people like Applewhite—cloying in their amiableness and yet murderous to the core. But you had them in England these days, too, didn’t you?
Astrid decided to say something conversational to Sykes, something to demonstrate that she wasn’t insensitive to the spectacle of a mass, stupid suicide, wasn’t below vapid, even prurient interest in it, provided a certain perspective held. She turned two of the stove gas burners on, and they whispered on with a faint “pa” sound. She said to Sykes, gamely, “Never join a religion less than a thousand years old, I say.” She felt a slight pinch in her tummy. “I believe in Buddha, myself.”
Sykes didn’t say a word or look. He pulled his office door closed. Astrid felt like an idiot. She said, not very loudly, “I don’t mean I believe in him.” But Sykes wouldn’t have heard a thing.
When the water boiled, Astrid dropped five tea spheres in each pot. She enjoyed watching them float like little scalding suns as the pekoe orange color bloomed around them. She gave each pot a stir with a wooden spoon. It was 7:45—the recovering Flōters of the meeting, mostly first-withdrawal survivors, would be upstairs hemming and hawing by now, asking the same faintly critical question they already knew the answer to: “Who’s the tea-maker this week?” They bloody well knew who the tea-maker was.
But try to get one of them to volunteer and make tea.
Astrid felt modicums of pleasure and pride as she delivered the pots of tea. She forgot about the zoo and Atwell’s Opticall text. Serve and recover. She marched each pot upstairs, one at a time, to the room where the meeting was held. When she walked in, a few of the regulars smiled her way.
“Ah, Astrid, my dream love,” said a homeless man, Burt, speaking in a wry tone made spitty and wet by his missing teeth. “You are one I want to marry.”
“Hello, Burt,” she said.
It usually didn’t bug her that the other addicts would do nothing to help her, but today their inaction seemed churlish. Everyone in her FA group knew she was on the cusp of second Flōt withdrawal, a trial few recovering Flōters survived.
And Astrid made things difficult for those who tried to help her. She would have been bothered had they attempted it, and she would have tried to co-opt every task herself. And by god, if there were lamps on at the zoo, Atwell or no Atwell, she knew now she was going to have to turn them off herself. I’ll do that, as usual. Sure. I always do the bit that needs done.
Need help, Astrid?
No, she always said.
I can do this. I can do almost anything.
the problem with people like marcus
ASTRID CLUNKED EACH POT ON A HEAVY TABLE. She put out the sugar and Smile and milk. She quickly dealt out a couple cylinders of Jaffa Cakes, organizing them in two concentric circles on a pretty, ancient piece of Wedgwood she had found in the basement. In the center of the plate was a bucolic scene of a shepherd and shepherdess cuddling by a brook-side while a dairy cow and two lambs looked on. On the rim of the plate were wildflowers—a light purple marsh-mallow, a butter-colored primrose, tight white coils of Irish lady’s tresses.
Next, she put out a small plastic tray with a pink and yellow Battenberg. One of the Indigent fellows who still slept rough, Ed, who’d come to London from Galway in the early ’20s and claimed that the homeless were suffering from a contemporary, secret holocaust in London (“the Watch are killing thousands of us, I tell you!”), almost immediately cleared half the plate of Jaffa Cakes, stuffing more than a few into his reeking coat pocket. Astrid said nothing.
Then she remembered her orange-freq. She’d better find out exactly what Atwell wanted. Must be more than zoo lights. Later though—the moment the meeting ends. The guv wouldn’t mind that.