Fossils by Alison Armstrong

Author:Alison Armstrong
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Saraband
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

17

Sherrie-Lee woke to the sound of roadworks, somewhere off in the half-distance. The continuous thread of the noise, not loud enough to have woken her up, but noticeable immediately in the first moments of being awake. The noise rumbling, dulled and swallowed into the ground. It made her, in the half-light of waking, seem remote and distinct from herself. She sat up and felt numbed, listening to the sound, which was also not loud enough to be immediately annoying. In this darkened room, she thought how it was the quiet that she liked here. There was a special comfort in silence. You could just be yourself in it. She traced her finger along the pattern in the bark cloth of the sofa, the orange and brown bobbled lines. She noticed dirt on the skin between her fingers and licked and rubbed at it to remove it. She laid down on the sofa with her head hanging over the side and observed the familiar stain on the carpet by the edge of the sofa. It was paler than the rest of the carpet, as though the colours had been partly drained from it. It was like the shape of a dog’s head seen from the side, a proper dog’s head, with a proper snout, not like a bulldog or a pug. A snout even an old dog could breathe through. She wondered if the noise was getting louder, if the rumbling was getting nearer, or if that was just the impression made by its continuation. All the furniture was old – not just old, but ancient like the room of an old person. She got up and turned the TV on to drown the roadworks’ noise, pulled out the poster she had been doing, and picked out a red gel pen to finish colouring in the bubble writing, trying to colour with all the lines going in the same direction so it would be neater. A blob of gel had dried at the nib. She scratched it off with her teeth, tasting the metal of the pen tip, so that when she brought it to the paper it wouldn’t scratch through her poster. The tip of her tongue poked out of her mouth as she concentrated on the colouring. When she was done she held it up and read it to herself. Stop Killing Bees. Underneath she had drawn a spray canister of insecticide inside a circle with a big red cross over it. She wished she was better at drawing and that her bubble writing didn’t look all uneven and straggly.

*

A couple of times while waiting for Bob to come home, she’d imagined the conversations they would have together. All the thises and thats they would talk about. And sometimes, while they were having an actual conversation, she would try to say something to trigger the exact same conversation that she’d imagined them having. Only it never worked out like she’d imagined, and the real conversations would seem disappointing in comparison.

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