The yeasty smell of unwashed bedlinen, salve on childish bruises. Unrazored beneath the arms, unplucked, unmoisturised. On the deck, she sits with one ankle hooked over the other and eats croissants, stale since Tuesday morning, slugging coffee black because the milk has turned to yellow curds.īeneath her dressing gown, she is bloody with mosquito bites.
The day is hot – white summer, restless with foreign birds. She watches men with rubber shoes and litter-pickers moving down the beach, scooping up the glutinous shapes with pails and trenching shovels, dumping them down. She has been in her dressing gown since the previous evening, sharp with yesterday’s deodorant, caking of toothpaste in the corners of her mouth.
They are Californian and a long way from home.įrom the back porch, Nicola watches the clean-up for the best part of the afternoon. They are a sign of a change in worldwide migration patterns, rising sea levels, El Niño. They are the result of global warming, of toxic-waste disposal. People argue amongst themselves, message links to articles back and forth. The provenance of the jellyfish remains a mystery. Certainly not what you’d expect, coming up for a long weekend, is it, Cathy?’ – ‘Actually, Tim, I think you’ll find a group of jellyfish is called a “smack”.’ One photograph makes it into the local paper, another fills five minutes on a regional morning show: ‘And in local news, a shoal of jellyfish has been causing consternation for tourists at one of the more popular pleasure beaches. Bringing their phones down to the beach, they snap pictures, send them into nature shows. People claim they are poisonous – Sea Nettles, Lion’s Mane, Portuguese Man of War. A saturation, leeching down into the earth. Drowned in air, they break apart and bleed their interiors. They are translucent, almost spectral, as though the sea has exorcised its ghosts. The ocean empties, a thousand dead and dying invertebrates, jungled tentacles and fine, fragile membranes blanketing the shore two miles in each direction.
The jellyfish come with the morning – a great beaching, bodies black on sand.
The following text is an extract from the story “Smack”, taken from Julia Armfield’s debut collection Salt Slow, published by Picador, which was nominated for the 2019 Sunday Times/University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year Award.
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