Fossils, page 23
All the corridors and rooms at the police station were painted a pale grey colour. There were no windows and all the light came from long bulbs high in the ceilings. There was nothing on the walls except for a few information posters. There was one near to where Sherrie-Lee was sitting, the one with the lady with scars on her face, telling how she hadn’t worn a seat belt because she didn’t want creases in her shirt. Sherrie-Lee wondered if she was a real person, this lady in the poster. The scar looked real. She looked down at her own hands, the shortened, bitten nails and the nail beds red and swollen. She clenched her fists to hide them.
She had waited in a lot of different rooms. Side rooms. Waiting rooms. Rooms at the side of things. There had been three different ones in the last four or five hours. She had waited in them alone or with the calm voice of an adult, measured and reassuring her. Explaining everything that was going on. You’d think she’d be used to waiting by now. All the days she had waited in the van. But when she waited alone in those extended minutes, which inflated and billowed out like sails, her impatience rose, pushed to its limits. It felt to Sherrie-Lee that life was going on in all the other rooms. In all the rooms that she waited next to. It was just like existence always felt to her, like it was all going on elsewhere.
The questioning had gone by in a haze. She drank two cups of hot chocolate from paper cups and told the ladies everything she knew. Marion was really nice, not like a copper at all. Sherrie-Lee told how she’d been kidnapped by Robyn and how he belonged to an animal rights group that she went along to also, and how he wasn’t really vegan because he ate meat and chicken-flavoured crisps and how he had kept her in his van all this time and said the money was for the animals, but it wasn’t really. And then, towards the end of the interview, how she’d had to go to the toilet in a bucket and how he’d made her write the ransom note, and where he lived and probably lots of other things too. But as soon as they came out of the interview room, into the chipped white light of the corridor, all of the things she had said seemed to fade away.
Marion went over to the front desk and asked if the mother had arrived yet. She didn’t catch what the other lady said, but it must have been how her mam wasn’t coming to get her, because Marion turned round to her smiling, and said that there’d been a change of plan, that she was going to drive her home herself, in a police car. And then she asked her, How does that sound? Sherrie-Lee had said, Alright in response, or she thought she had. She thought about her heartbeat, about how many beats she had already used up and about the day when she will have used all of them up, the full quota, and whether her heart will just stop or if it will slow down for the last thousand or so beats, and whether she will feel it all happening. She slipped her right hand inside her jacket and felt for her heartbeat.
It was beginning to get dark as they pulled up outside her house, Marion turned to her and said, Looks like the press are here.
They both looked out for a few moments. The press didn’t look like much to Sherrie-Lee. Just a man in a brown jacket, taking a photo of the police car with his phone. Don’t worry, Marion said. I’ll go talk to him. You go ahead and get yourself inside.
She opened the front door of her house. The light was on in the hallway and there was a pile of the free newspapers that were delivered every week by the front door. Grace was walking from the kitchen, into the hallway and towards the stairs.
Ooh, look what the cat dragged in, she said when she saw her. Thought you’d been kidnapped. She didn’t smile, or look pleased to see her, Sherrie-Lee noticed. Instead, Grace stood on the third step and swung over the banister to get a good look at her. So, where’ve you been then?
Sherrie-Lee shrugged and asked, Where’s Joshy?
Autismo’s where he always is. She nodded her head towards the front room and then took off up the stairs, two at a time, calling out, Mam, Sherrie-Lee’s back.
Sherrie-Lee went in and sat next to Joshy in front of the TV. He was watching some idiot talk show. A man in a bright blue suit and a red tie was talking to some woman with long blonde hair and lots of makeup on, about which were their favourite airports and which were the worst ones.
What yer watching this rubbish for, Joshy? Shall I find you something better?
She sat back on the sofa and flicked at the TV with the remote. She felt Joshy move in closer to her and she put her hand on his shoulder and patted it. There was a new stain on the sofa, near to where her legs were. It was a dark grey colour so it was hard to tell what had made it. It was the shape of Italy. Joshy sat the way he always sat on the sofa, with his legs folded to his left side and the thumb of his left hand wedged into the folded joint at the back of his knee so that only his four grubby fingers were visible. Black lines of dirt showed under each of his overlong fingernails. One or two flecks of white spotted each nail. She took in all the familiar details of him, taking comfort from each of them. She would have liked to hug him, a long, big hug, but Joshy didn’t like that kind of thing. She would have liked to hold him close and breathe in that warm, slightly sweet smell he always had. Just to keep everything at bay, all the loneliness and heaviness. The whole empty drabness. She thought about how she had always sensed that she and Joshy had been born into the wrong life, that they were meant to be somewhere else. But maybe everyone felt like that. Maybe you just had to get on with it.
The blue plastic toy figure that had been pushed behind the bars of the gas fire and never retrieved was still there. Sherrie-Lee had forgotten all about it and only now recognised its familiar position. Head down, nose-diving into a fire that was never lit, its blue legs sticking up like some dead, forgotten creature.
It’s good to see ya, Joshy, she said looking at him. A sad kind of smile on her face. The face she had on when she was determined to hold up both parts of the conversation.
Joshy kept looking at the TV. He didn’t say anything. It was nothing personal. When the TV was on, it just absorbed all his attention. That was all.
On the floor by the sofa was the tin that held Joshy’s fossils. She picked it up and put it on her lap. She moved the stones with her hand across the metal base of the tin. The metal had become dulled from all the years of stones grazing the surface, so that in the bottom of the tin you could no longer see your reflection. In the sides, which were less scratched, part of a chin could be caught. A mouth, the side of a nose. Fragments of a face. The stones made a scratching sound as she pushed them around inside the tin. She turned each of them over until she found the one genuine fossil. The one with the ammonite half-secreted away within it. She picked it up and turned it over in her hand, thinking about all the millions of years it had existed through. Feeling at its solid coldness.
Reading Group Guide
The author has provided these questions to inspire discussion at reading groups, based on some of the characters, themes and issues in the novel.
Why did the author choose to focus much of the narrative on the voice of a twelve-year-old?
What is the significance of the title, Fossils? How does it work as a metaphor for alienation?
Why is the scene in the art gallery significant?
To what extent is Sherrie-Lee suffering from climate/extinc-tion grief? Do you think this will become more common among young people as the climate crisis worsens?
In what ways do we see Bob/Lester becoming increasingly sceptical of Sherrie-Lee? How does he think of her by the end of the novel? Will the future bring them another meeting?
What does the future hold for Lester and Gina? Will they stay together?
How does storytelling function for Sherrie-Lee? Did you think this function halts at a certain point in the novel? Do you think she’ll continue telling stories in her future?
How important is the local library for Sherrie-Lee?
More than 4.3 million children live in poverty in the UK. How is Sherrie-Lee’s life affected by poverty?
What factors in Sherrie-Lee’s life contribute to her feeling ‘less than normal’?
Sherrie-Lee’s mum is present only twice in the novel – first as a voice from another room and secondly on TV screens behind a shop window. Why has the author presented her like this?
Why is the section with Robyn included in the book? What does it bring to the structure of the story?
How does the relationship between Gina and Sherrie-Lee develop?
How does Sherrie-Lee relate to the different members of her family?
How is truth presented within the novel? How does Sherrie-Lee perceive it?
Why is so much space given to dreams in the novel?
How does Sherrie-Lee regard her community? How does she regard wider society?
In what ways does the novel engage with political issues?
Interview with the Author
Q: Sherrie-Lee is compelling: she makes me think of the young generation fighting for climate justice, when adults have so far failed. Where did the inspiration for this character come from?
A: When I first started to work on this novel, I wanted to construct it partially as a frame story – but one that grounds storytelling in the contemporary mundane world rather than a quasi-mystical one. I wanted to fix it in the messy, incoherent experience of real life, and I tried out various scenarios before Sherrie-Lee came to me. The names Sherrie-Lee and Zadie refer to Scheherazade in the original frame story One Thousand and One Nights. Once Sherrie-Lee arrived (and she arrived fully-fledged), she took over the narrative. I thought she was entirely fictional, though I began to realise as I wrote that she reminded me of a girl I knew growing up, and another I once taught. Both had difficult home lives and were spirited characters, so, on a subconscious level at least, they are part of the inspiration. Sherrie-Lee’s sense of humour is characteristic of the community I grew up in. That came naturally and is an important part of her resilience. Her extinction grief is a kind of existential sorrow that is impossible to solve.
Q: Libraries are important in this story and crucial for Sherrie-Lee’s wealth of knowledge. She gets a great deal of security from them and from Claire, the librarian she meets. What role did libraries play in your childhood and growth as an author?
A: I can’t remember libraries in much detail from my childhood, and I was quite late to begin reading, though I remember the comfort of the reading corner in childhood classrooms. Libraries were important to me as a young adult as somewhere calming to go, somewhere warm, dry and comforting, and I still love them. They are among the few places you can simply pass time quietly alongside other people. You don’t bother anyone, nobody bothers you, you don’t have to spend any money – they are special places for these reasons alone. And, of course, the books. The selection on offer has been assembled over time, for the people who use the library. There is no need for libraries to promote the latest celebrity titles that bookshops feel they need to stock to survive. Claire is entirely made up, but a couple of months ago I heard on the radio someone recalling a fabulous librarian with blue hair, so I like to think that she exists somewhere, handing out books and conversation to Sherrie-Lees wherever she may be.
Q: Many different stories are threaded through this novel: Sherrie-Lee’s own stories, her deceptions, and the lies she has told other people. What role does storytelling play in Sherrie-Lee’s universe, and what role do stories play in our own?
A: Storytelling is essential in Sherrie-Lee’s universe. It’s how she makes sense of the world, how she tries to control chaos in her life, and how she tries to control others. Channelling thoughts and feelings through stories is her defence mechanism. She reaches for stories when things are going wrong, and she tries to reorder her world by ordering narratives. She sees many of the problems around her as consequences of the lack of ‘proper’ stories. Perhaps she is recognising something in the human condition itself: that human beings are storytelling creatures who live by meanings. The tradition of storytelling is a manifestation of this. There is a political function in the way that stories accumulate through connection. People share stories to communicate meanings, but also to unpack myths (such as origin myths) that generally support the status quo. For instance, fairy stories often operate to deliver self-reliance. This is where we encounter and overcome our fears and demons, where we reach a state of self-possession, ready to take on the world. All cultures have these traditions.
For Sherrie-Lee, telling stories is one of the fundamental ways she overcomes her sense of alienation. For example, when she learns the stories (habits, particularities) of different birds, she recognises it as ‘finding a way in’ to connect to the natural world, the first step toward caring about wild things. This represents a general alienation that is part of modern life, and in many ways Fossils is an allegory of alienation and a yearning to connect.
Q: The characters Sherrie-Lee meets at the environmental group are often hypocritical and behave in the exploitative ways they claim to fight against. Is this a comment about real-world leaders?
A: Only Robyn is such a character. He is a bad person. It just happens that he is also an activist. He does not represent anything, but is just a character in his own right. This is not to deny the hypocrisy and corruption of those in power in real life – never has it seemed so acute as now, in the current state of affairs in the UK, but Robyn is simply an opportunist, a miscreant, seeking to make money out of the situation. He is a bad character who behaves erratically and says extreme things, but at times he says true things, too. There are other references in the book that ridicule and critique these hypocrisies – political, institutional, cultural. They are there to be picked up by readers, though the story itself is always the main thing.
Q: There’s a clear juxtaposition between Sherrie-Lee’s ability to be cynical about the adults in her life and the sincerity and drive she has in her desire for creating a better world. Was this something you felt you could only capture with a young protagonist?
A: I felt that a young protagonist could get across things that would sound naive for an older character, because this is the way much of the dominant political discourse frames it. Concern for the environment is sidelined – a strategy to silence ideas that don’t support what I like to call the charlatanismo of current politics. Absurd profits continue to be funnelled to the ‘right people’ while vulnerable groups are demonised. Most politicans have no will to protect the environment. Sherrie-Lee notices this and sees how powerless people are treated, and is frustrated and outraged by this. She sees it because she lives among vulnerable people herself.
All children and young people I have known want to create a better world. It is irrational not to want this, especially for children, before they become jaded. There is too much lip service paid to environmental concerns, functioning as a kind of balm. We are in denial, we refuse to engage with these problems effectively, and there is no political will in most parts of the world. When we hear of a green policy being implemented, however minor, I think we are comforted and allow ourselves to switch off. Sherrie-Lee sees this. Thank goodness for movements like Extinction Rebellion and Wild Justice, because they will make change possible.
I found while writing that a young protagonist could connect with the powerlessness and silencing of the natural world, because children are also powerless. So, although it was limiting in some ways to tell the story through twelve-year-old eyes, it also allowed an exploration of connections to those aspects of the world that lie at the margins of our experience. I am interested in what goes on in those spaces, at the margins – and what perspective is not limited in some way?
I know or have known people similar to characters in the novel and I wanted to give space to these voices, which I don’t often see depicted in literature.
About the Author
Alison Armstrong is a writer. She won a Northern Writers’ Award for short fiction in 2017 and a Literature Matters Award from the Royal Society of Literature in 2020. She lives in Lancashire. Fossils is her first book.
“Fossils … drew me in from the first page … Sherrie-Lee [is] a character whose voice is urgent and compelling. The prose bubbles and snaps with an energy that’s as changeable as its teen protagonist. Convinced she and her brother Joshy have been born into the wrong existence, Sherrie-Lee reaches out for companionship and care from the unlikeliest of sources, and in so doing, challenges our assumptions about the goodness of people. Sherrie-Lee is a girl trying desperately to escape her situation, who finds solace in the sharing of stories. But in seeking a new identity, she finds herself caught in a trap of her own making, with a lie that puts her in grave danger. This is a novel that tugged at my heart, with its blend of humour and wisdom and rage … a stunning, important novel about poverty and hopelessness, compassion and resilience.” Emily Devane
“Fossils, Alison Armstrong’s debut novel, is a moving and vivid piece of storytelling. With great skill, Armstrong captures the inner life of Sherrie-Lee, a young girl without a safety net who has been left to fall between the cracks. Sherrie-Lee’s exposure to darkness and the dangerous place she finds herself in is described in haunting, lyrical writing that is at all times compelling and frequently surprising.” Will Mackie, New Writing North
Copyright
Published by Saraband
3 Clairmont Gardens,
Glasgow G7 3LW
Copyright © 2022 Alison Armstrong
This edition 2022 in UK; 2023 in USA, Canada, and Australia
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without first obtaining the written permission of the copyright owner.
