Postcard from... the Kelso Hotel

By Fiona M Jones:

I have seen these stairs in one of many dreams: old-carpeted and awkward, all in different directions and never a full flight together. Hardly a room shares floor with another as you climb a little, step down, turn to find yourself above an entryway or down in a strange narrow yard recently wooden-decked. You find yourself neither indoors nor outdoors between high white windowed walls, followed by an archway too low now for horse-drawn gig but surely never meant for a door.

In my dreams every building is like this: old and idiosyncratic, mazelike, defying rectangular expectation, atticked and cellared and easy to get lost in—as though in books or dreams or ancestry I lived in such places and can never quite get used to architecture that makes sense.

It comes almost as a surprise that the hotel rooms boast space and light and all mod cons, and ensuite shower and a huge TV. One single mid-ceiling beam leads me to wonder if this once stood as two smaller rooms. The corded-casement windows are the oldest feature inside, but younger than the building itself by two or three centuries at least.

Noise from the small hotel bar filters up through the floor, but Kelso is a quiet town and the mild revelry of its Saturday night dies down early. From the street below our casements the last late vehicles rattle over cobblestones before night deepens into peace. We are staying one night here in Kelso, and it is not enough. We have walked beside the river, visited one restaurant, sampled a local micro-bar—and already we start planning our return.

***

Fiona M Jones is a creative writer living in Scotland. Fiona is a regular contributor to Folded Word and Mum Life Stories, and an irregular contributor all over the Internet. Her published work is visible through @FiiJ20 on Facebook, Twitter and Thinkerbeat.

Unreal estate No.01: Shruff End

Illustration: Katrina Gelze

By Anna Iltnere:

In the first of a new series of essays on seaside houses from literature, Anna Iltnere, founder of the Sea Library on Latvia’s Baltic shore, takes us to Shruff End from Iris Murdoch’s novel The Sea, The Sea. Each essay will be about a different house, illustrated by the artist Katrina Gelze. Next week, we will also publish a companion interview to this essay with Miles Leeson, director of the Iris Murdoch Research Centre at the University of Chichester. 

“What madman built it?”
– Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea, 1978

“My imagination lives near the sea and under the sea,” Iris Murdoch said in 1978. She had never lived by the sea herself, but water played a big role in her books and her life.

A passionate swimmer and with characters who are thrown into water by her pen, Iris Murdoch was fascinated by the sea. Shruff End is one of the seaside houses of her mind, enlivened in her book The Sea, The Sea. 

“Water had a quickening effect on Iris Murdoch’s imagination,” writes Olivia Laing in her book To the River, “for her novels brim over with rivers and pools and chilly grey seas.”

Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1919, as the only child of a singer and a civil servant. When Iris was a few weeks old the family moved to London. She would go on to study philosophy and wrote 26 novels, before being diagnosed with Alzheimers disease in 1997. Iris Murdoch died in 1999 aged 79, her brilliant mind relentlessly erased by dementia during the last two years of her life.

Iris Murdoch’s book The Sea, The Sea was published in 1978 when she was 59, was her nineteenth novel and the one which brought her the Booker Prize. The story is about a retired middle-aged actor, playwright and director Charles Arrowby, who leaves glittering London and moves to a house by the sea to write his memoirs. None of his plans work out, and his memoir evolves into a riveting chronicle of the strange events and unexpected visitors that disrupt his world and shake his oversized ego to its very core.  

“Strange novel”, writes Philip Hoare in RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR. “Faintly ridiculous” admits Olivia Laing, but this tragi-comic drama sinks in, and you become soaked in its story just as Shruff End remains forever dampened by the mysterious sea.

The House

Shruff End is a fictional house on an unidentified English coast. Charles Arrowby buys it in a fever of haste, selling his big apartment in Barnes, London, by the Thames. The sea-house takes most of his savings, but Arrowby imagines living simple, hermit days here, far away from his previous life on the London stage. But this dream that has come true soon turns into a strange nightmare, and Shruff End has its own role in the gripping story.

Shruff End is perched upon a small promontory, not exactly a peninsula, and stands on the very rocks themselves. “What madman built it?” Arrowby wonders. The facade, looking out onto the road, is “not in itself remarkable”, but in its lonely situation is strangely incongruous. The house would scarcely attract notice in a Birmingham suburb but all alone upon that wild coast it certainly looks odd. “Exposed and isolated,” writes Arrowby about his first impression. He falls in love with it.

The house is a brick, ‘double-fronted’ villa, with bay windows on the ground floor and two peaks to the roof. From the upper seaward windows the view is almost entirely of water, unless one peers down to glimpse the rocks below. From the lower windows the sea is invisible and one sees only the coastal rocks that surround the house, elephantine in size and shape. “How huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life,” Charles Arrowby writes of the view. 

The pale buff-coloured blinds, which hang in almost every room, are “in excellent condition”, with glossy wooden toggles on strings, silk tassels, and lace fringe at the bottom. When these blinds are drawn down, Shruff End, as seen from the road, has a weird air of complacent mystery.

The bricks are dark red. The back of the house has been horribly “pebble-dashed” against the weather. “Little do they realise how ardently I look forward to those storms, when the wild waves will beat at my very door!” Charles Arrowby is rather exalted in the first pages of his memoirs: “What a paradise, I shall never tire of this sea and this sky.”

Mr Arrowby lives entirely on the seaward side of the house, upstairs in his bedroom and what he calls his drawing room, and downstairs is the kitchen and a small den next to it known as “the little red room”, where there is a fireplace. On the other side of the house are the the book room, where he has put the crates of his still unpacked books, and the dining room, where he stores his wine. 

The chief peculiarity of the house, and one for which Charles Arrowby can find no rational explanation, is an inner room found on both floors.They are rooms with no external window, but lit by internal window giving onto the seaward rooms. These two “funny” inner rooms on two floors are extremely dark. Throughout the book they seem to be a rib-cage containing the soul of the house. 

The house is “mysteriously damp”, its floor is “curiously damp”. The large – and damp – larder is full of woodlice. “Is it conceivable that the sea could be rising up through a hidden channel under the house?” Charles Arrowby prises up some linoleum in the hall, and replaces it with a shudder. There is a salty smell, he observes. At the end of the book he tries to get rid of the house, and admits that no one seems to want to buy the place, “perhaps because of the dampness, perhaps for other reasons”.

The sea becomes a canvas for Mr Arrowby’s own inner demons. “It is after tea and I am sitting at the drawing-room window watching the rain falling steadily into the sea. There is a terrible grim simplicity about this grey scene. Apart from an iron-dark line at the horizon the sea and the sky are much the same colour, a muted faintly radiant grey, and expectant as if waiting for something to happen. As it might be flashes of lightning or monsters rising from the waves.” 

One morning he does see a monster rising from the waves, while the sea also mysteriously and repeatedly unties the rope that he ties to the shore to help himself get out of the water after his daily swims. It provides one of the most quoted lines from the book: “Time, like the sea, unties all knots.”

The house starts to play tricks on his mind. Is the house haunted? He asks about a poltergeist in a nearby bar. “Any house might be haunted,” someone answers. At first it is a vase that falls down and is smashed to pieces. Then – a mirror. And then there’s a face he sees in the window at night. Or was it moon?

Shruff End seems to have not only its own ghost, but also its own climate, independent from the weather outside. It feels cold even on warm days. One day Arrowby comes in from the brilliant light outside and the air in the house seems grey and thick. The house is gloomy, and there are strange sounds too, or perhaps it is just the bead curtain clicking in the draught from the open door...

“The house was still acting up, but I felt by now that I was getting to know its oddities and I was more friendly towards it,” writes Arrowby. “It was not exactly a sinister or menacing effect, but as if the house were a sensitized plate which intermittently registered things which had happened in the past – or, it now occurred to me for the first time, were going to happen in the future. A premonition?”

When Mr Arrowby puts Shruff End up for sale and runs back to London, he moves to “a peculiar miserable derelict” new flat. If he ever wanted to live as a hermit, retired from the world, then this – he concludes – would be a far better habitat. “It is oddly enough easier to write here, amid all this cramped chaos, than in the open spaces at Shruff End.” 

In the end, he hadn’t been able to concentrate in a house by the sea. 

“Throughout the book water runs like a spell or a curse. The sea of the title is not just a background or vista, it is a character,” writes Daisy Johnson in the introduction of a special edition of The Sea, The Sea. It was published by Vintage Books in the summer of 2019 to celebrate the 100th birthday of Iris Murdoch. 

***
About the author: Anna Iltnere is the founder of the Sea Library in Jūrmala, Latvia. On the Sea Library website you can read reviews, interviews and, of course, borrow a book.

Katrina Gelze’s website

In Imagination's Lighthouse

By Ian C Smith:

Wind a heavyweight hullabaloo, surrounded by sea-surge, nothing dislodged on my reconnaissance, I stare back at a chill of harboured currawongs beady-eying me here in this receptor of my life’s heat.  I eat plainly, snooze through three-hourly blocks wrestling gothic dreams, jot notes of memories, some of venery, deceit, the sordor of trodden tinsel, consult an old Oxford dictionary, read. Welcome guests, a rhapsody of writers, Boland, Erdrich, Robin Robertson, conjure me to lower their thoughts to my heart recalling scenes from my kaleidoscopic past; seeing flying fish in calm conditions before later plunging through cavernous crescendos of swells coursing the Indian Ocean; collapsing in an Aden market, coming round to fanning by Arabs in an outrage of heat, gentle contrast with tempests girdling our globe here in this citadel at Forty Degrees South.

After the blow, then wreath of cloud whiteout, three small dead sharks in my kelp-covered cove, casualties of net fishing.  I couldn’t see the fish factory for its floodlights, heard its thrumming, an invasion force before the clamorous wind chased it off.  Electronic communication limited to a forsaken spot away from comforts, also limited, sand, not sea-wyf, at scratch of day in my bed, I ritualize chores; bonfires of rubbish, smoke waft evocative, brew tea thinking of Alexander Selkirk, neither of us patient sufferers of fools.  Seldom speaking, I sometimes shout, sing, trim wild whiskers, resemble a derelict castaway by Robert Louis Stevenson, that tubercular tale-teller who sought the faraway. Imagination in solitude salves wounds that can never heal, invisibly stitching emblazoned banners torn in battles past.   

***

Ian C Smith’s work has appeared in, Amsterdam Quarterly, Antipodes, cordite, Poetry New Zealand, Poetry Salzburg Review, Southerly, & Two-Thirds North.  His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide).  He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island, Tasmania.

Podcast: Trees a Crowd

By Sara Bellini:

Trees a Crowd is a podcast that celebrates nature, people that love nature and the relationship between human beings and the natural realm. If you appreciate when someone can identify a wren rather than just calling it a bird, and your eyes light up at the thought of Yorkshire national parks, this is the podcast for you. Think David Attenborough without the telly but available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Tune In and Overcast.

From February 2019 actor and artist David Oakes has been interviewing people whose job is “inspired by or devoted to the natural world”: scientists, creatives, environmentalists, conservationists, gardeners and sometimes nature itself. “Everyone is working for the natural world but everyone’s agenda is completely different.” 

Why is nature so fascinating and how does it benefit us? How do human beings relate to their ecosystem? Why is it so important to protect the wildlife? David Oakes and his guests discuss these questions during one-hour-long episodes, twice to four times a month, mostly but not exclusively in the UK. Featured topics are: the dawn chorus, horticulture, carbon footprint, Yorkshire sheep, Inga alley cropping in Sierra Leone, Manta Rays in the Maldives, agricultural laws and Extinction Rebellion. 

“Perspective is increasingly key to all aspects of life, but perhaps never has it been more important in terms of our interaction with nature. With our society and technology growing so rapidly, we are capable of causing a huge amount of destruction, but we also now have the technology to limit, or even reverse, the damage it has caused. As Harry* suggests, running up a Devonian Tor or being penned in by trees or mountains helps us reimagine ourselves not purely as a construct of a human society, but as a continuing part of a natural ecosystem, of a natural justice.”

Have a listen, go for a walk, plant a tree.

*Harry Barton, chief executive of the Devon Wildlife Trust (Trees a Crowd, 07th October 2019)

Crossing Brooklyn Bridge

By Anna Evans:

And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.
– Hart Crane

I have been dreaming I am in New York. Looking out across the harbour to where the bridge begins and ends. With a paperback of poems to carry as I walk, walk across thee. Waiting for the sun to set, I follow the steps upwards to the bridge where time spans like birds in flight. 

From the book an image draws fragile in my hands. Without looking down I know on the cover is the bridge, pastel coloured and simple. The suspension of wires dominates the view, dark lines crossing over. The lines that cross from the centre outwards, to the bricks of Brooklyn. Birds fly distant, the kinds that children draw, shaping the letter m for movement. Through the middle rising upwards a vertical blue like crayon marks, shading to where the sky and water meet ascending; to the blue of distance that throws outwards and upwards. Joining the impossible like a bridge from shore to shore. The city in the distance marked in pink, as it might look in the morning light. It contrasts with the black lines of iron girders, and the steps leading onwards to the bridge. 

I know that inside the book is an inscription that reads To A. neat and precise with just one x to mark the spot. In your room the books in stacks surround us. The books like bridges: we take turns to select one and read out the first line. I pick up the book of poems saying I want to read it. And so, you take the book, write just inside the cover and give it to me. I never read further than the first poem or skim a few lines here and there. Still the words reach out and form a trail I must follow, in endless rivers crossing the land and all the flow of words that clogs them. Books that don’t belong to anyone, that stay with us for a time. 

I sit down and read, imagining that I look to where your arches end and the point at which the shadow forms. I read: Under thy shadow by the pier I waited / Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.

Hart Crane looked out from his window on Columbia Heights in Brooklyn, compelled by a changing view of the bridge. A vision to chase in symbolic form, in language. I look to find the author in its solid lines, in all its transient footsteps. To see him address the other side and set these bridges in motion. And the bridge moves as we walk. Its solid lines make stillness and motion combine. Iridescent, it sets in motion each day past; as though night and the fall of morning were gone already.

Waiting for night to fall, the dark comes quickly, and in crossing the city changes from the red and pink of dying lights, across purple-blue; to see the bridge come alive and the city melt in its shadow. I walk across moving through the crowds of people posing for photographs; there is no solitary view of the bridge, no chance to stand and look across. 

In the centre, two domed arches from which a series of wires are suspended in grid-like lines drawn against the sky. They are not so much imprisoning as uplifting, reaching high across the city. I walk taking blurry impressionistic pictures, city lights of many colours. Buildings that reflect one another, incandescent and blurring away into hazy distance. Becoming ghostly, they question solidity. Walking the bridge, it lives in motion. The wires suspended in black lines to draw you upwards. The view of the bridge that comes from walking. 

With you he walked across, hand in hand, in rapture. From this moment: these bridges in motion. Always crossing, from what is past and present, to what is on the other side. 

⁎⁎⁎

Walking across as sunset came and went. The sudden descent of darkness and the changing colours of the lights; the endless streams of traffic passing. When everything that lies below becomes murkier and more uncertain. The bridge measures out the distance between each wire, and our eyes fix on a series of lines laid out as far as the eye can see across the unfathomable reaches of water.

As darkness falls the wires suspended are lit with fairy lights that twinkle, that dwindle into distance, even as the darkness seems more engulfing. It saturates the sky above and draws upwards from the dark constant of the river below. And above and below are where the bridge remains suspended. Its very tautness and the precision of its measurement are carefully weighted against the depths; yet still the depths remain and seem ever closer. It is there in the way it joins across a gulf, a chasm; by its very joining it projects our thoughts to what lies below. 

In the night you dance exhilarated holding hands. Dancing over the bridge, uplifted. Like the bridge you are indestructible. The bridge is more than just a bridge. The bridge is life. In rapture you seek to say what daunts, what sinks under river water. To look upwards, where wires close in, suspending thoughts from city to city, from river bank to sea shore. So that for a moment you are flying, though you may always believe in falling. 

The water dark and obscuring. The bridge brings a shape and form to what is unfathomable. You must believe that there is a way to say it, that the bridge is possible. That you can write a message in a bottle and throw it carelessly to the currents, in waves. The bridge that cuts you off, unreachable, lost at sea. Your meaning obscured when you wanted to make visible another world just beyond this one. The bridge transports in metaphor, to carry across, from one side to the other. You leave only your words. While somewhere there are those that fall between the gaps, who find the unknown in the measured reason of the bridge.

While I have been crossing the bridge, darkness has come and changed the world as we see it. Each day, the same adjustment. From the solid mass of stone, soar two great arches, the strength of steel wires, thick and twisted, to iron girders bordering the edges, and thinner wires reaching out grid-like, touching the blue true of the sky, the billowing clouds, the coming light. The light that is always coming. There is colour and a sense of the city all around. Impressions gather like scattered lights and solid lines of steel. 

I am always imagining endings. That I might look down to the river and see your message in a bottle, transcending time. The past is there and waits for us to cross. Now the book leads me to the bridge. Crossing over, crossing back to what came before. A bridge to my past self, wherever time has placed you.

Across the vast silences like the river flowing, ever-flowing. When things changed, and each moment was already lost, unreal. 

I sometimes think we were never present; we were already looking back. You once wrote of me as a silhouette receding against the sky. Was it always so? I find you here again as I pick up the book and read onwards. I am free to cross the bridge and look back across the city, that expanse of time that is past. Is there a chance then, that when you read this you may say, that is not how it was, that is not what I said, that is not how it was, at all?

***

Anna Evans is a writer from Huddersfield in the north of England, currently living in Cambridge. Her interests are in migration and literature, cities and movement, and she has completed an MA in ‘Writing the Modern World’ at the University of East Anglia. She is currently working on a project on place in Jean Rhys’s early novels, and you can follow her progress through her blog, And The Street Walks In.

Letter from Eritrea

By Alex Walker:

I pass under the white awnings of the coffee shop, grateful my walk has come to an end. The air in Asmara is thin – this small capital sits on a plateau 7600 ft above sea level – I am out of breath and in need of a coffee. Fortunately for me, Africa’s only ex-Italian colony still serves delicious macchiatos, made with the strong, dry Arabica beans of neighbouring Ethiopia. The letters of the sign outside are in the style usually seen on the side of Vespa motorbikes. 

It is busy, but an undaunted waitress shows me to a spare chair on a table with some other customers. I sit down to read and regain my breath, but struggle to focus amidst the muted scream of frothing milk and the buzz of conversations in Tigrinya. As people come and go, a smartly dressed man sits down opposite me. Back straight, he sips meticulously at an espresso. I can tell he is watching me, perhaps surprised by the sight of a westerner in a state that guards its own isolation. 

“Is your book factual?” he eventually asks.  

I tell him it’s about Eritrea and questions follow: what does this author say? what sources do they use? is it well referenced? 

He tells me he had been a history teacher. He does not seem angry, but concerned. I’ll tell you something about Eritrea, he says. 

“In the 1930s Eritrea and South Africa were the most developed nations in Africa. They called this city ‘Piccola Roma’. Do you know what that means? Little Rome.”

For the Italian colonists Asmara seems to have presented less an opportunity to create a miniature Rome than a modernist reimagining of it. The wide road that forms the artery of Asmara is lined with giant palms disproportionate to the number of people that walk beneath them. Walking along it you will pass four grand cinemas and come eventually to the famous ‘Fiat Tagliero’ building – a now-disused petrol station in the stylised shape of a majestic plane. It is said to be one of the finest examples of Italian futurism in the world. 

Asmara is quiet now – many people leave, if they can, and the country is undoubtedly poor. The subtext of my companion’s comment is clear. It was the British who treated Eritrea as the spoils of war when they defeated the Italians in 1941: dismantling factories, removing parts of the railway line, demolishing a naval base, and so on. There is no vitriol in his comment, only a desire to be clear. He tells me how much fun he had with British teachers in the 90s – a brief period of peace and optimism sandwiched between the protracted struggle for liberation and the brutal border war that followed.   

How old do you think I am? My new friend asks with a knowing smile. I guess early 40s. 

I am wrong, he is 55 – “but I look young, I have fought in two wars – it keeps you fit,” he laughs. 

***

Alex Walker recently finished a masters at The LSE in Political Theory. Before that he studied at the University of Oxford, where he wrote for various student publications. He currently lives in London and is interested in deliberative democracy and citizen participation.  

Alex on twitter

The Way(s)

By Ashley Moore:

You are a fraud for entering the cathedral without hiking boots. A fraud for arriving without a sweat-stained backpack you haven’t been lugging along northern Spain’s Camino de Santiago for weeks on end. Nevermind that you recently put your own sweat and tears into 110 kilometers of the Peruvian Andes, or that you finished your first fourteener there at Abra Mariano Llamocca pass, or that you do not need a cathedral at the end of the journey to know that these long-term treks are their own type of religion, one that relies on a fanatical belief in your own two feet: no horses, no mopeds, no cheating. You will recognize the all-too-familiar zealotry of the wanderers as your own, but in Santiago you still feel like a day-tripper, a fraud.

You know the stories of The Way secondhand, some of them from the plane ride in. How modern-day pilgrims begin the trek solo only to form impromptu families that are just as quickly dissolved when hikers decide on their own pace, their own personal Caminos. The camaraderie in the communal songs sung as payment for dinners at the low-cost albergues many trekkers overnight in, how these same people may never encounter each other again. The time and space that the walking provides, the transformative, even spiritual, effect of the voyage on religious and non-religious pilgrims alike. You feel the energy pulsing beneath their fluorescent-colored all-weather outdoor gear, the triumph of the body and mind over the weeks of walking, a mixture of joy and sadness that the journey has been completed, but is also at an end, as they make their way to the final stop of the trek: the Cathedral of Santiago of Compostela.

From the outside, the cathedral feels tiredly familiar. There is a part of you, having seen so many of these, that has bored of this mixture of architectural styles, the ages of renovations running into and over each other, the 11th century Romanesque and the 18th century Baroque, the masterfully crafted yet predictable stone reliefs of Biblical scenes adorning nearly every surface of the structure’s façade. Inside, you expect more of the same. 

Maybe it’s the way the light changes as you move out of the sun and into shadows, which are only ruffled by the flicker of dozens of candles and the smoky incense wafting from some unknown source— the nearly two-meter tall, gold-sheened Botafumeiro hanging unused above the altar. Maybe it’s all the tragedy, that emaciated Jesus, limp upon the cross, an especially foreboding skull staring directly at you from beneath his punctured feet. Or perhaps it’s the knowledge that at this very moment, you are looking at the silver case in the underground crypt that holds the bones of St. James. 

Here, deep inside the cathedral, you and the brightly-colored pilgrims are all frauds. This place belongs to the true believers, whose energy seems to puncture and slice through the gloom. Theirs are not the glad smiles of the hikers, but the fervent conviction of bent knees on stone floors, of clasped hands held so tightly against bent heads that it almost seems as if you can see the blood beating through the wrist veins. 

An instinctual urge to join them comes suddenly, unbeckoned, with the speed of a tsunami. A natural disaster that cannot be predicted or charted like a hurricane, one that has no tornado season or government-installed alarms. The kind of thing that comes from a deep upheaval of earth and rock and water producing a wave, 20-meters high, threatening to smash into you and all these years of agnostic exile. 

You stand there too long— not transfixed in awe, but immobilized by the shock. 

You leave the crypt but not the feeling. Near the altar, you find walls covered in washed-out medieval scenes of horses, scallop shells, and eight-sided stars. The faded blue and red hues complement the 3-D geometry of the marble floors. You reach out to touch the cream-colored shells painted onto those walls, the same shells that pilgrims have gathered along the Galician coast for centuries as proof of their completion of The Way. You pull your hand back before you can disturb the art and turn, only to find Christ – dead again on the cross – and another Christ – still dead – in the arms of Mary and his disciples. Amid the gold and the marble and the lacquer that turns his face pallid and frail, Jesus always seems to be already extinguished here. 

You finally begin to come back to yourself. No living God could ever call this place home, his love abandoned by his people, no apologies for the burnt stakes or bombed hills, the altar boys or unwed Oklahoma girls secreted off to abortion clinics in order to be married in white, the “rehabilitation” of same-sex attraction. God was forced out of this place a long time ago. All that remains here are the red robes and starched white shirts of the men who ran him out. Them and their relics: the kneecaps and femurs and severed heads of saints and apostles. All the church’s evidence, stamped and approved by its own authorities. An autohistory on repeat, slowly calcifying under the pressure of time into something that they can call proof. 

You do not want their evidence. You want to join the believers, to feel the conviction of your youth. You want to kneel. It’s an ache, a fundamental need to know the communion with God you once felt in prayer, that otherworldly plane of being you’ve only ever been able to replicate in meditation. You want to believe not just in that God of your youth, but in the only living things in this place: his people. 

Garish gold angels look down on you from the altar. More smoke hovers near the winged pipes of the organ, the Botafumeiro impotently hanging, so heavy and so high. The candles, you notice, are all electric, activated by slipping coins into slots, as if this were an arcade. Behind them, the severed saints’ heads are hidden away in gold-sheened boxes, kept behind intricately-designed bronze bars, in the shadows, off-limits, and, for all you know, long-ago turned to no more than dust in their beautiful encasings. 

You won’t kneel, but you still talk to him, unconsciously, the way you’ve always talked— like old friends, apologizing for the time it’s taken to get back in touch. You tell him it’s been so long that it’s almost like he doesn’t exist. You ask him where he went, why he didn’t call. You probably cuss at him, and then apologize for cussing, and then thank him for forgiving the cussing and the doubt. You tell him you’ve missed him, that it hurts to see him there – it always hurts to see him there – all locked up in the stones they’ve carved him into, bleeding in eternal enameled submission to their image of him. 

You know it’s unlikely and that there may well be a special circle of hell for this kind of thing, but you still ask him to come with you, wherever he is. You want the pilgrims to find him living in the sunsets along the Camino, the same way you thought you saw him in that baby sheep that wouldn’t stop following you outside of Yanama as you made your way up that 5000-meter pass in the Andes, in the few minutes that Salkantay’s peak broke free of the cloud cover at the exact moment you made it to the top. You want him to live in the impromptu harmonies of the pilgrims’ amateur songs, in the urge they have to sit a few days out, to stay in one place for long enough to sing new harmonies and form new families. You want him to be found along all of The Ways.

Outside, you are relieved by the brightness of the sunlight and the glad chaos of the fluorescent-tinged tourism. In the large, flat square that opens out before you, cameras click and selfie sticks abound. You rejoin the wanderers, none of you frauds. You take your own photos of 11th-century doorways so short that they only come to your shoulders and notice that the large, centuries-old stones at your feet seem to be opening out as the waters and winds of time work them over. There, among the gaps, are the modern-day bronze versions of the ancient seashells that have marked the Camino’s path for everyone who’s ever walked this way. At the windows of the cathedral, and even along the walls, young green leaves seem to burst right out of the stone. Maybe someday they will be bushes or trees. You wonder how they managed to sprout there, how deep their roots can go before the marble starts to crack. You wonder how long they will be allowed to grow. 

***

Originally from Oklahoma, Ashley Moore is a writer, editor, and educator based in Bayreuth and Berlin. She is a fiction editor at SAND literary journal and teaches at the University of Bayreuth. Her flash fiction was chosen for Wigleaf's Top 50 Very Short Fictions of 2018 (selected by Manuel Gonzales), and her other prose can be found in The Rumpus, Hobart, Monkeybicycle, and other publications.

Beautiful Place: A novel by Amanthi Harris

We are extremely pleased to present an extract from the new novel BEAUTIFUL PLACE by Amanthi Harris. Set in Sri Lanka, this is a novel about leaving and losing home and making family, about being oppressed and angry and wanting a better life. 

‘In quiet distilled prose, Amanthi Harris takes a moment of change we all experience and brings it into poignant, evocative focus. Her story resonates like a personal and deeply felt memory.’ —Preti Taneja

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The van followed the bay, passing through villages of houses with dark empty porches. Light shone deep inside in rooms where families had gathered to gossip and tease and worry and scold away the last hours of the night. Soon the van left the villages behind and the sea came nearer, blackly glistening past coconut groves of slanting trees silvery in moonlight. The van stopped at the edge of a grove and they stepped out to the roar of sea and cold rushing winds. Ria put on her jumper. High above her, the coconut trees swayed and bowed against a blue-black sky, the stars a dusty spray of sparkling white. 

“I’ll come back in two hours,” the driver said and gave Louis his card. “Hope you see some turtles.” 

“But where are you going?” 

“I’ll just be nearby – call me if you want to stay longer.” 

“You never said you’d be leaving us,” Louis protested, but the driver was already in the van. “Hey!” Louis cried, but it was too late, the van drove away. 

“How come there’s no one else here?” Ria said. 

“Maybe we’re too early.” 

“Or too late,” she replied. 

There was a glow through the trees from a thatch hut. They walked towards it. Over the door was a sign: ‘The Turtle Watch Museum’. An electric bulb swung from the rafters in the wind, dancing its glowering light over framed photographs of turtles lumbering onto night time beaches, digging in sand, or straining, legs splayed, squeezing out eggs. Louis read every sign, every caption, excited again. 

“This place is great – they’re a charity employing ex-convicts. They teach them about conservation.” 

“Ex-convicts?” 

“Good evening, sir-madam!” A short stocky man bounded into the hut and grinned at them. His eyes lingered on Ria. The man’s face was pockmarked and puffy, the skin yellowed and tough, the nose broken; eyebrows interrupted by the scars of old stitches. His smile though was joyful, unconnected seeming to the damaged features. 

“In our turtle watch we don’t steal turtles’ eggs – we’re not like the people down the road,” he told them. “Those people steal the eggs and grow turtles in tanks. Sometimes they eat the eggs. They’re very bad people, don’t ever go to their turtle watch, sir and madam.” 

“Where can we buy tickets?” Louis asked. 

“No need of tickets, sir – it’s all free at our turtle watch. You only pay if you see the turtles.” “Wow! That’s great!” Louis approved. 

“So let’s go and see if they come! This way, sir-madam!” 

The ex-convict came up beside Ria as they left the hut. 

“Sinhalese?” he murmured, his voice turned low and adult, a secret voice, brought out for the real conversation. She pretended not to hear. He pretended not to have spoken. 

“This way sir, follow me!” He darted away, become the happy child again. 

The ex-convict shone a torch ahead and they followed him, winding past coconut trees, their great hooves of trunks stamped in the ground. Ria took off her shoes and the sand was silky-cold and dry, slinking around her feet with every step. A half-moon cast its pale gleam over a wide empty beach. 

“No turtles yet, sir-madam,” the ex-convict declared, scanning the sea with binoculars. 

“When do the turtles come?” Louis asked. 

“It can be anytime, sir – soon, hopefully, soon! Dear God, please let there be turtles for sir and madam! Just keep watching the ocean. I will go closer and look for you.” 

He ran down to the water’s edge and strolled through the waves swirling idly in. He walked around a rocky outcrop and disappeared. 

Ria sat down on the beach, a sandy bank firm at her back. Louis sighed and sat down beside her. 

“Do you know anything about this place?” he asked. 

“No.” 

“Does your family ever come here?” 

“I’m not sure.” 

“You don’t know where your family goes?” 

“I know very little about them, it turns out.” 

There was no way on earth her family would have come to such a place – in the middle of the night, to look at turtles. 

“You should have asked Padma about this place,” he accused. 

“You arranged it!” she retorted. 

The ex-convict appeared on top of the rocks, walking a little unsteadily. He stood looking out to sea. The pale beam of his torch reached over the waves. 

“Something’s weird about this,” Louis said. 

Across the water, at the other end of the bay, lights shone in the town where life went on unknowing of them. It was the first time Ria had been anywhere so deserted in Sri Lanka, so far away from the places she knew, and everyone. The trees leaned over velvet rocks and the pale soft sand of a primal Sri Lanka, a pre-world of hushed dark beaches and a muted rocking sea sweeping the shore all through the night – long still nights, full of unknowable secrets. These were the beaches where war bodies would wash up, maimed and distorted after night-time abductions – even now, in peace-time, the abductions went on for different, more secret reasons. It seemed impossible to end the savagery; it seemed a part of the unreal beauty of the island, so spoiled and churning under the surface. 

But here was its raw splendour, its secret night-time source, potent and untainted before it was lost in the world of people. 

“Why aren’t there any other tourists here?” Louis demanded. 

“Maybe they didn’t want to see turtles.” 

He made an exasperated noise and glanced at her impatiently. 

“It’s better like this, don’t you think?” Ria said. 

“It feels like a scam.” 

“I don’t see how. We haven’t given the guy any money.” 

“Everything in this country is a scam – that’s why my friends left, they’d had enough. It was always the same: hire cars, safaris, Buddhist temples – you name it, there was always a way they could con you.” 

“But we don’t have to pay unless we see turtles.” 

Louis jumped up, full of a new restlessness, a fierceness in him. “Hey!” he shouted to the ex-convict. 

The ex-convict spun round. 

“Where are your turtles?” Louis yelled. “Are they coming any time soon? I’m getting tired, I want to go home!” 

The ex-convict tensed, his round belly turned solid, thin legs locked. Like a fat sparrow, Ria thought. But dangerous. 

“I think I might just call the driver!” Louis taunted, waving his phone. 

The ex-convict scrambled down from the rocks and came running. 

“The turtles will come, sir! Just wait and see – just a few more hours. Madam – you tell sir, to wait a little!” he panted. 

“What’s it to you if we leave?” 

Louis stood taller than the ex-convict. He looked down with a cold angry smile at the ex-convict’s pitted fleshy face. Louis’ hair shone in the moonlight, swept back from his fine-boned face, the perfect lines of jaw and chin and lips. Ria looked away from that perfection, winning so easily above the beaten face below. Louis was so much stronger, so much luckier than the fat-sparrow ex-convict. Louis started to type a number on his phone. 

“No sir! Please sir, stay!” the ex-convict cried. “The turtles will come! You just have to wait – how can I know what time they will want to lay eggs?” 

Louis went on typing then put the phone to his ear. The ex-convict grew still, watching in silence – no more pleading, no more explaining about the turtles. The torchlight made his cheeks seem waxy and hard. ‘Tourists missing from Turtle Watch Beach’ – Ria could already see the headline. A small square of text with their names, ages and occupations and an inaccurate account of what had happened. 

“The driver will be back in an hour, let’s just wait till then,” Ria insisted. 

“Yes, wait!” the ex-convict agreed. 

“Maybe the turtles will come later,” Ria added. 

“Yes, later! The turtles will come later!” 

“Yeah, right.” Louis ended the call and sat down again, looking away. 

The ex-convict jogged away to a distant spot at the water’s edge. Ria sat down beside Louis. He didn’t look at her. She watched the sea alone, feeling his silence for the first time and him closed to her. He checked his watch. His arm touched hers and she felt the muscle hardness of him under the softness of cashmere, and he felt apart and other. He would always be other, separate from her; she would never truly know what he was thinking – why he had smiled at her that first afternoon on the veranda, why he had asked to join her for dinner. How did you ever know when you knew someone, when it was safe to allow that last private door inside you to open? She understood now why people had horoscopes read before marriages – even the arrangements of stars in their constellations were a comfort faced with the unknown of another’s mind. She watched the night-time sea surging in surly bursts onto the beach.

“The sea looks so different at night,” she said. 

The waves slicked back in an oily sweep, receding into themselves – another sea altogether from its joyful, spraying, sparkling, sunlit self, dazzling all day. 

“It looks so pure in the mornings,” she reflected. 

“You shouldn’t have undermined me in front of that guy,” Louis said. 

“What are you talking about?” 

“You should be on my side, not his.” 

“I didn’t want to antagonise him.” 

“It was up to us when we left. What could he have done about it anyway?” 

“I don’t know . . . He might have friends nearby. Or he might have a knife or a gun – who knows? I didn’t want to risk it.” 

“That’s crazy! You’re always so afraid of everything!” His eyes were a scornful pale glare in the tan of his face. 

She glared back at him. He turned away.

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PHOTO: Maxi Kohan

Amanthi Harris was born in Sri Lanka and grew up in London. She studied Fine Art at Central St Martins and has degrees in Law and Chemistry from Bristol University. As well as her novel BEAUTIFUL PLACE, her novella LANTERN EVENING won the Gatehouse Press New Fictions Prize 2016 and was published by Gatehouse Press. Her short stories have been published by Serpent’s Tail and broadcast on BBC Radio 4.

Beautiful Place - Salt Publishing (UK)
Beautiful Place - Pan Macmillan India
Amanthi Harris’ website