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

***

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.

***

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

9HDU

By David Cooper:

Outside, beyond the guanoed glass, was the place that I’d left two decades earlier. Each day, for three full weeks, I looked out to get a purchase on the city that, however long I’ve lived elsewhere, will always be fixed as home. Every so often, though, I adjusted my focus so that I could see the reflection of the room on the surface of the window. In the glass I was reminded that, behind me, my Dad’s failing body lay flat on a bed.

During those three weeks, I thought a lot about places. Inevitably, I thought about the places in which my Dad had spent his life. He’d always lived in cities. The first five years of his life were in Cardiff. Later on, he spent much of his twenties in pre-gentrified New Cross, just around the corner from Goldsmith’s. Nottingham, though, was my Dad’s city: the place that he spent most of his childhood and adolescence. Growing up, we listened to his stories of summer days spent fishing on the Trent and of Saturday morning meetings by the lions on Slab Square. In our house, the suburbs of Arnold and Mapperley, Carlton and Hucknall, were edenic elsewheres.

If Nottingham was a remembered place, Liverpool was an always-emerging present: the city where my Dad lived and worked for most of his adult life. Looking out of 9HDU, it was impossible not to worry about the politics of this place. Up here, from the ninth floor of the Royal, Liverpool seemed to turn its back on the rest of England. In the past, I’ve always felt a more-than-slight embarrassment with Liverpool’s narratives of exceptionalism. Yet, on 9HDU, unease was replaced by approval: I respected the city’s ambivalence towards establishment ideas of Englishness; I admired the apparent disinterest in the visions of Albion being pedalled by Rees-Mogg’s aristo-vaudeville act 200 miles to the south in the Palace of Westminster. Here, on the rim of the Irish Sea and looking towards north Wales, Etonian England seemed a long way behind us. But, of course, Liverpool is only ever semi-detached from the rest of the country and its political landscape. To the right, I could see the docklands whose transformation owed so much to European funding. Closer still was the shell of the new Royal. Originally scheduled to open in March 2017, building work on this hospital stalled early in 2018 as Carillion collapsed.

Sitting, hour after hour in a punishing plastic chair, I also thought about the relationship between the worlds inside and out. In the day, the contrast was marked. Indoors, 9HDU was a zone of measured hyperactivity. The nurses – countries of birth: India, Italy, the Philippines, Portugal – danced between the beds with choreographed care. The doctors – countries of birth: England, Nigeria, Sri Lanka – monitored, reflected and, recorded. This sense of activity was acoustic too. Throughout the day, the keynote was the rhythmical beeps of the dialysis machines scattered across the unit. As my Mum put it on Day 12: ‘you tune into their music after a while’. In contrast, the world outside seemed serenely still. Although we looked out across the city centre, we couldn’t – through a geometric quirk - see any road traffic from our vantage point on floor nine. From here, then, the city seemed a static space. Over time, we got our eyes in and began to read the undulations on the Mersey in the middle-distance. We had to work pretty hard, though, to pick out such surface movements. For the most part, the ward window provided a frame for a motionless panorama; an updated version of Ben Johnson’s acrylic painting of the city a decade on from its year as European Capital of Culture.

The dark, however, brought a reversal. Towards the end, we spent a few long nights alongside my Dad in the hospital. During ‘the hours of hush’, the strip lights were dimmed and 9HDU morphed into a soothing space. This strange stasis was juxtaposed with the dozens of dots flitting across the autumnal darkness outside. Looking down, tiny lights progressed slowly up the Mersey and out into Liverpool Bay. Looking up, more lights flashed as planes followed the arc of the river when coming into land in Speke. At night, we were reminded that this is, and always has been, a city of comings and goings.

9HDU seemed to be hermetically sealed. If I shifted the plastic chair into a particular spot, however, I could feel cold air entering the room through a gap around a window that, absurdly, could only be opened through the nurses’ use of a stained silver tea-spoon. For the staff working on 9HDU, that gap was a practical problem as well as a constant reminder that the new hospital remained not much more than an architect’s fantasy. The only solution, to prevent the cold from getting in, was to shut out the city by pulling across the disposable curtains. I felt differently, though. I wanted those curtains to be yanked back so that my Dad, lying flat on the bed, could see the spikes and sandstone of the city’s two cathedrals. I wanted the cold air to come into the room and to flow towards him.

As I sat there, I thought about the wind moving towards us. It came over the Clywdian Hills and across the flatlands of the Wirral. It travelled over the Mersey and snaked through the city’s streets and alleys, squares and churchyards; it picked up pace as it headed past Lime Street and up London Road towards the Royal. I imagined that something of the city came with that wind as it crept through the gap and into 9HDU. The city flowed into the room, and into my Dad, as, at the last, he struggled to breathe back out.

***

Three months on, I spoke to my Mum on the phone one evening. It was getting dark outside but she told me that didn’t want to shut the curtains in the living-room at home. ‘We used to close them to tuck ourselves in’, she said, ‘but I can’t feel tucked in anymore’. Those curtains have remained open.

***

David Cooper is a Senior Lecturer in English (Place Writing) at Manchester Metropolitan University whose research concentrates on literary geographies. David on Twitter.

Am I Alone In Dreaming Of Rubble

By David Lewis:

I am walking through a blunt triangle of empty terraced streets, dominated by a long low red brick church, closed and boarded up; a hole in the boards allows local children to once again play in the church porch.  It is starting to get dark.

Twenty years ago, in a period of deep, isolated research, I began to have dreams about Liverpool.  I was studying the city’s churches, curious about how they define the city; how their spires contribute to the roofline, how their architecture dominates a street, how the city is changed on the date of their demolition.  I worked alone, spending weeks in the city’s Records Office poring over memoirs and old street plans.   Days were spent immersed in the stark and beautiful photographs of Liverpool in its Victorian prime, and in the dark and destructive 1960s when many of the city’s older churches were demolished.  I took many long journeys to find the sooty, bruised survivors, only to discover that this destruction was ongoing.  In some cases I arrived only days after the final clearance, to a raw slash in the urban landscape, a sense of wounded stone and dust settling.  I began to see all buildings as temporary, as part of a rolling history of the fabric of the city.  Lines began to blur. 

And I started to dream.  Carl Jung famously dreamed of the city; mine were more prosaic. They have always been short and in black and white, and fall into two categories.  In the first, I can see small details of the city - street corners, ruined walls, unnamed streets reduced to fields of rubble.  Some districts appear time and again; Edge Hill, Toxteth, Netherfield Road, places that have been in a radical process of decay and regeneration since the 1960s. I started to record the dreams as accurately as I could, in a staccato, notebook style.  Sometimes they help me remember more detail; in other cases they are all that is left of the dream. 

Unknown derelict dockland streets, ironwork, weeds, tall closed warehouses.  A steep cobbled street called St George’s Place, behind a railway station. Early morning. 

The dreams were fuelled by the photographs, but I came to realise that they were also reviving memories.  The Liverpool of my childhood was a city partly in ruins, and blitz-memories were still strong.  Older people talked of evacuation to north Wales, of nights in air-raid shelters, of bombers over the city.  The destruction continued after the war, when in a spurt of self-loathing the city demolished with a frenzy, and on car journeys to visit relatives in the northern reaches of the city I saw miles of cleared terraced streets.  In those days all gaps in the landscape were known as ‘bommies’, a word which meant bomb sites but also bonfires; urban folk memory overlapped urban function.  I had a recurring dream of a large square black building in the middle of a demolished city, a composite view of the boarded-up churches and barely-open pubs I saw on the disappearing streets of north Liverpool. 

In the other dreams, I see residential areas associated with my grandfather’s family.  Vincent Lewis was born in 1904, and grew up surrounded by family in the working-class streets of Liverpool 8.   As a child I knew many of the streets with family connections, and as an adult it was these places that began to appear in different dreams; sometimes in ruins, sometimes full of people, sometimes just streets of alleyways and tall brick walls. 

Cockburn Street in the early morning.  There are no cars and the street is deserted but I can see down another cleared street to the Mersey below me, gleaming silver.  Tall walls behind me. 

I came to realise that all these dreams, these blurrings of old photograph and old memory, are a creative response to the demolition of my grandfather’s city.  The books I have written on Liverpool are an attempt to understand and articulate the Victorian city that is gradually disappearing.  Yet the pace of urban evolution is so quick that one day all our familiar places will have gone or been radically changed and everyday memories, however commonplace, will have become history.  I still walk the vulnerable city as often as I can, exploring and recording amputated streets, stretches of cobble and redundant warehouses.  Often after these long walks I dream once more of the city in ruins, feeling now that our rubble dreams tell us more than we know.      

David Lewis has written five books of history/landscape/psychogeography about his native Liverpool and Merseyside.  He posts urban/rural images on Instagram - davidlewis4168 and mutters about the world on Twitter - @dlewiswriter

Letter to a Stranger

By Shawna Bethell:

The thing I didn’t tell you was that I met your brother on the ferry. He was looking for you. Your father wanted you home. To this moment, I’ve never told anyone that I met either of you. I felt it would be a betrayal of sorts, though I didn’t even know your names. But I knew your stories, two parts of a whole, none of us expecting I would cross both your paths. Yet I did, within a half-dozen hours or so. Harris is a small island, after all.

I was sitting alone on deck watching grey waters when your brother approached and asked to sit. Together we watched sleek arch-backed porpoises rise and fall as they swam alongside the ferry. We watched a low sweep of rock appear in the distance, growing until it became an island large enough for a port, a village and a road up the coast that would cross a narrow isthmus to another stretch of gneiss known as the Isle of Lewis.

Eventually, he started talking. Told me more than he probably should have about your family, but he spoke with earnestness, and I couldn’t help but listen. He had tracked you to that slab of stone sprawling in the distance and hoped you were still there. In time, we disembarked and as I walked away, he asked me to dinner. I declined and wound my way up the hill, unknowingly, to you.

It was later that evening, in a hostel full of travelers, when our paths crossed. I was rummaging in the kitchen when you came in and I asked you where to find a knife for my vegetables. You were a large man, with long blonde hair bound back by a leather cord and gold wire-rimmed glasses that framed blue eyes. From the leather sheath on your hip you pulled that gracefully thin filet blade with a round wooden handle and passed it to me. I still remember how caught I was by its elegance. Casually, you also opened the cupboard and offered spices from your cache saying I’d likely not find anything but salt and pepper in the communal kitchen. Then you quietly paced the cramped space, crowded with washer and dryer and Formica table, while I sliced in silence. When I returned the knife, you left.

That night, as a woman from Skye cranked open the window above our bunk and slept comforted by familiar cold air blowing in from the sea, I was left sleepless by the same damp chill, so I took my laundry back to the warm kitchen, made a cup of tea and sat down with my journal.

I hadn’t realized any one else was around when you walked in from the TV room and spoke. As before, you paced the perimeter of the room past the washer and dryer, along the counter and back before pulling out the chair across from me to sit.

You said you were from Finland and had worked a lucrative desk job as expected by your father until a few months before. Then, with no word to anyone, you left. You landed on the island and hired on at a fish cannery off the rocky shore. You said you liked the physical labor, liked the men you worked with. You said you weren’t planning to stay on the island, but had no plans to go back either. 

We talked a lot about family and expectations. I told you about the Midwestern United States, where people were rooted by generations of family loyalty, a pull so strong that I felt my choices in life were abdicated before I was old enough to know I had choices to make. I loved my family, but when I finally left the Midwest, it was with a sense of escape. I landed in a mountain town in the western U.S. populated with out-of-work miners, scientists, artists and travelers. It was a place where people accepted you as the person you presented yourself to be, and it was where I gained the freedom to be the writer I wanted to become.

In the dark early hours of morning, you put on your jacket and went outside, cigarette in hand, and through the window I watched the orange tip burn as you paced the walk out front. Shortly you returned, explaining you had to catch the ferry for work in only a few hours and needed to get some sleep. I don’t remember that we even shared a ‘good-bye.’ You just walked away through the drafty, concrete-block hallway, and I was left to pull my clothes from the dryer and stuff them into my pack. Then I followed the hallway to my own side of the dorm where I fell easily and unexpectedly to sleep.

By daylight you were gone and I caught a ride north, jotting a quick ‘thank you’ and tucking it into your spice cache before I left. We never did exchange names. It didn’t seem necessary, I guess. But I still think of you, and I wonder if your brother ever found you. I wonder if you ever went home. I did, eventually. For better or for worse. Sometimes, I’m still not certain. But that strange triumvirate of love, loyalty and obligation will call even the most wayward of us back.

Wherever you ended up, I hope you went there by choice and without regret. I hope you found the life you wanted. I wonder, though, if you ever knew, if either of you ever knew, if you ever talked about that woman you both happened upon, who carried two men’s stories back out to sea.

Shawna Bethell lives in the central Midwest of the US. Her work has appeared in the Denver Post, The Mountain Gazette, High Desert Journal, and This Land Magazine among other publications.