Fossils: A Novel - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Alison Armstrong is a writer of prose and plays. She grew up in the North of England and has worked as a cleaner, waitress, painter and teacher, as well as developing her writing career. She won a Northern Writers’ Award for short fiction in 2017, a Literature Matters Award from the Royal Society of Literature in 2020 and an award from Arts Council England in 2021. Her poems, essays, and short stories have been published in magazines and journals. Fossils is her first book.

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The light came down or across, dazzling in all directions at once, so that in the blink of an eye or in a glance, first this way and then that, it was impossible to see clearly to maintain an impression of how it all was and then hold it to any kind of realisation. On top of that there was a wobble in the eye, a focus floating away in the aqueous mechanics of vision.

At each aisle she moved into, she noticed him. The security man, appearing at one end or the other. He was onto her. You could just about bet on that. She hovered in the photography aisle, looking at the photo frames with happy smiling people already framed into them, trying not to look for him. Trying to be calm and hold it together so he would see that there was nothing going on here. Just a girl thinking about buying a photo frame. There were a lot to choose from. Wooden ones, metal ones, others that were just all glass. The perfect teeth repeated in each frame depressed her. It was as though identical smiles had been stamped onto each person. This is how to smile, they seemed to echo. This is how to be normal. She dared a backward glance across the length of the aisle to where she thought the security man might be. Streaks of light rose and fused together in the tremor of her vision. Not there. She directed her gaze back towards the frames and studied them. She forced herself to count three details about them before looking for him again. All the sizes of each style were together, big to small running from left to right. There was not one single person not smiling in those frames. That was three ticked off. Her mind turned back to the security man, holding off the moment when she would look again for him. She didn’t want to look anxious and give the game away. You had to keep an eye on them. That is when they grabbed you, when you lost track of them. Collaring you out of the blue. She looked along the length of the aisle.  Yep. There he was again. She couldn’t tell if he was looking at her, she didn’t dare to look at him for long enough. I’ll be for it now, she said, inside her head, with her reluctant-reprimanding voice. Been coming a long time, Missy. Missy is what her nan used to call her. She had taken to using it whenever she needed to give herself a talking to. There were not many people in the shop, that had been the problem. And a kid in the shop on a school day, that had been another. She had stood out too much. Rookie mistake.

Spotting a shop assistant in her white uniform, she walked over to her. The woman turned to smile at her as she approached. Hello. Can you tell me where the deodorant is?

It’s over there by the door, she said, pointing in that direction. Perfect. Sherrie-Lee knew very well where it was, but she was just hoping that she would point over there, so the security man could see.

Thank you. She smiled a big grateful smile. She could turn on the charm when she needed to.

She walked across, pausing at the lines of roll-ons and sprays, so he’d slow down, thinking he had more time. She was sure he was following, and then—one, two, three—she was out the back doors, quickening her step.

Four doors down was the stone entrance to the bank. She turned to go in so she could look back discreetly. The security guy was nowhere in sight.

Inside the bank, the air was cool and still, despite the high vaulted glass roof. She looked up at it and saw that beyond the glass was another roof, protecting it, shading it from the outside.  She let her eyeballs roll back in her head, her eyelids close. It’s what she did when she tried to make herself feel relaxed. Make an outward show of it, trick it into being real. There was a queue of about six or seven people. She joined it, with no more intention than giving herself time to rest, time to think of what to do next. She felt the plastic casing of the eyeshadow trio in her pocket and thought about getting rid of it somewhere, just in case. When she was second in line, she’d pretend she’d got tired of waiting and leave. Any shenanigans with trying to follow her or catch up with her would be over by then. She didn’t have an account here. Had no account anywhere, in fact, unless her mother had one for her and hadn’t told her. She doubted that. These days, her mother could barely hold it together to complete a shopping list. But maybe that was unfair, sometimes she surprised her.

Why was she constantly stealing stuff? Stuff she didn’t need. It was the habit of it, the need to keep it practiced. A kind of skill for life, like they talked about at school. You never knew when you were going to need it.