Sheila Armstrong
Falling Animals
The following extract is taken from ‘Falling Animals’ by Shiela Armstrong. Used with permission of the publisher, Bloomsbury Publishing.
The swimmer dives from the rocks into the freezing water and explodes like a depth charge. A few heartbeats later he surfaces, gasping, shaking the water from his face.
From the beach, Oona watches her grandson tread water, panting as he waits for the cold shock to pass. There are leapers and there are creepers, he once told her: those who get it over with in one go, and those that creep into the water, step by step, letting each part of their body adjust. She herself has always believed that change will come, one way or another, but there is no need to leap headfirst into uncertainty.
She counts her steps as she walks along the beach and breathes deeply, letting her chest fill up with the tight chill before the heat of the day arrives in earnest. Her grandson keeps pace with her, erupting out of the water in a butterfly stroke then disappearing again. These Sunday-morning swims have become a ritual for the two of them, ever since her heart began to flicker and gasp last year. The doctor prescribed a palmful of drugs, her grown children prescribed a regime of fruit and yoga; these weekly walks are the compromise, a way of keeping the peace.
Further up the beach, a white van passes parallel to her, weaving around lumps of cast-out seaweed and scribbles of driftwood. She tries to get the driver’s attention, points towards the darker, firmer sand that would give the tyres a better grip. But the driver ignores her and continues towards the narrow path up the cliffs, the wheels throwing up fountains of grey powder. Oona shakes her head at this recklessness. She often sees cars lodged in the sand, wheels spinning, especially in the summer when tourists try to drive straight down on to the beach and instead get caught in the dunes. She watches them heave and struggle, and if the mood takes her, she calls for one of the oyster farmers to pull them out. If not, she leaves them arguing in her wake.
Up on the cliff, a handful of caravan roofs are glinting in the sun, and the car park will soon fill up. The village beyond is still shaded – cold, draughty buildings that spiral away from the seafront like the whorl of a shell; at its centre, a café, a pub and a small supermarket arranged around an empty green. Most of the other shops remain shuttered, even years after the worst of the recession. The docks that used to swarm with fishing boats are empty now, and the thick fug of salt and blood has long faded. A newly opened motorway sweeps north and south to the main destinations, cutting the village off like a dried-up oxbow lake.
But it is summer now and in summer the tourists still manage to wriggle in, as inevitable as rats to a barn. The caravan park fills up, tents sprout like cabbages, and the half-empty housing estate on the hill bursts into life. In warm weather, the beach is black with people, and even on cold days there are swimmers in thick robes and too-loud voices, their hair shaggy with salt. The handful of guesthouses are bursting at the seams and the buses that stop on the cliff seem to disgorge more and more people each day.
Oona finds it disconcerting: she might walk from one end of the village to the other without seeing a single person she knows. She has lived in the village for seventy-odd years and knows it by heart: every scrap of the ground, every rumour and fireside story, every branching of bloodlines, witnessed every triumph and every loss. The politicians talk about tourism as the life force of the community, but as she sees it, they manage perfectly well for nine months of the year without strangers tramping and littering and shrieking and letting their dogs shit everywhere.
But she has the beach to herself, for now, another reason she insists on coming so early; they will be home by the time the children arrive to dig furrows and trace their initials in the sand. She lengthens her stride to step over the wet splatter of a lion’s-mane jellyfish, red veins fanned out like the spokes of an umbrella. There was a time when a jellyfish cast up on the shore was an interesting thing, worth a poke with a stick, but the last few years the water has been seething with them, the beach glowing electric-blue with man o’ wars. They ride on the warm-blooded storms that nip and change the coastline, and the newspapers proclaim doom and gloom. But there were worse storms when Oona was growing up, storms that washed whole buildings into the sea. Her own mother had the roof blown off the farmhouse when she was a child, and there were worse heatwaves then too, summers so hot her skin blistered off her back. But nobody wants to hear it: her children and grandchildren roll their eyes at her and predict the end of the world.
She raises her hand to salute as the coastguard’s helicopter passes in another slow loop, then heads back towards the distant inland airport. A training exercise: it is too early in the day for there to be a kayaker caught by the tide or a child stranded on an inflatable raft. She glances out to sea to check on her grandson, finds his yellow hat and black goggles amongst the white horses. In the water, he surfaces to reorient himself against the distant mountains, then dives under again.
She is almost parallel with the lumps of iron appearing from the retreating tide when she sees it. A pair of gulls start up from the dunes at her approach, screeching in annoyance, and she angles her path towards the dark shape they were investigating.
Falling Animals by Sheila Armstrong is published by Bloomsbury on 25th May 2023.
Sheila Armstrong is a writer from the northwest of Ireland. Her first collection of short stories, How To Gut A Fish, was published in 2022. Her writing has been listed for the Society of Authors Awards, the Irish Book Awards, the Edge Hill Prize, the Galley Beggar Press Prize and the Kate O’Brien Award. She is an Arts Council Next Generation Artist. Falling Animals is her debut novel.
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Image Credit: Ruth Medjber