Hannah Tennant-Moore - Wreck and Order

“I’m glad I’m here, too.”

“Do you want a rum and coconut water? I’m going to get another one.” The yellow flecks in his eyes flash out a code that grants access to nothing.

I surprise myself by declining. I don’t want to turn the beach into a wavering backdrop for my somersaulting thoughts. “I’ll take one,” says the girl from Wales, drawing circles in the sand with her unpainted toe. She’s attractive in the way I normally envy — tall and large-breasted with uncomplicated, well-defined facial features. But right now I have blood in my veins and organs carrying out their discrete functions without complaint and muscles that carry me wherever I want to go. There is no problem with my body.

The Belgian girl puts down her book — a novel by a French writer I like — and asks me what I think of my president.

Confidence is the most important component to mastering a language, and now would be a fun time to have some. But I am far too shy to address the French-speaking girl in French. Like everyone else here, she speaks nearly flawless English. I feel cheated to be from the one country whose language, culture, and politics everyone else knows. Even after spending thirty hours alone on a plane, I cannot escape the place I grew up. Except when I was with Suriya. Her village is the only place I’ve ever felt truly displaced, free of context.

A group of Sinhalese teenage boys comes running down the sand and the Israeli jogs out to meet them. They laugh and high-five and do handstands and backflips in the shallow water. Nearby, local women dip their toes in the waves’ frothy wake, wetting the ends of their carefully pleated saris.

I spend the afternoon under the fan in my room, reading a pleasant food memoir borrowed from the guesthouse library — a lonely white girl, a wise black maid, biscuit dough and blackberry cobbler. At sunset, I return to the beach, empty now of families. Blue-green waves froth and crest like a whale’s open mouth, inhaling the sea and spitting it back out. Vigorous winds lift the saltwater into a tickly mist. I walk past the tourist strip, where couples sit with beers and surfers rinse off their boards. Around the bend past the surf break, the wind demands all the space in my head. The beach stretches endlessly, beige sand the wind has whipped into hundreds of small peaks topped by tiny, opalesque seashells. Sea grass clings to the steep slopes of the dunes and the waves are murderously huge and broad strokes of mauve and fuchsia are smeared across the high, flat sky. I want to walk on and on and on. But I don’t know if it’s safe. I turn back toward the surf break. I can just make out a tourist couple sitting on a towel. A man in a dhoti is walking in my direction, a brown smudge on blue air. I begin to walk back toward the tourists, taking my sarong out of my bag to cover up my bathing suit. The wind and waves are so loud that I must not really matter, there must not be any hurry. The wind whips the sarong above my head and plasters it against my face. I pull it back down and tie it around my chest. When I look up, the man is walking so quickly and purposefully toward me that I am suddenly running, my eyes fixed on the tourists, trying not to see the man who is growing larger and larger. I feel small and warm, not quite afraid. I reach the couple and plant my feet in the sand in front of them and feel the man behind me disappear.

Later, I ask an Australian woman who’s lived in this town for years if it’s safe to walk alone past the surf break.

“Definitely not.”

“Even during the day?”

“Never go there alone.”

“Have bad things happened?”

“I’ve heard of men trying stuff, yes. They hide in the dunes and watch for women walking alone. It’s not that they are bad men necessarily. It’s — our Western ways. Our insistence on always being so free.”

Silly woman, romanticizing the East, villainizing the West. But how lazy I felt as I wrestled with my sarong in the wind, and how good, and how free.

—

Lievin invites me to join his group for dinner. We fill up a long table at an outdoor café, ebullient with the nonsense of strangers pretending to be family. A young boy runs back and forth from our table to the kitchen, carrying copper pots so large we have to stand up to fill our plates. Whenever a curry is nearly depleted, the boy exclaims, “No more! All finished!” explodes into laughter, runs back to the kitchen to fetch another steaming pot. We tell the boy again and again how delicious everything is, we just can’t stop eating, please can we have a little more chili paste. We’re proud of our hunger for a world not our own.

After dinner, we walk to a café that has promised dancing. My Kingfisher beer comes in a twenty-two-ounce bottle. The waiters are teenage boys with red eyes, saggy grins, Bob Marley sweatbands. Lievin points out some cloth signs tied to masts of driftwood and spray-painted with the words “Dance! Drums! Fire! Beer!”—remnants of last weekend’s festival.

The Welsh girl tells me I was lucky to have missed it. “It was hell. The whole point of the festival was for Sri Lankan boys to grab white girls’ butts. The second we tried to dance, we were surrounded and accosted.”

“It was pretty gross,” Lievin agrees. “There was something in the boys’ eyes. Like they were crazed. Compelled by some demon to grab the girls’ butts.” I look more closely at Lievin as he continues. He has a little sympathy for the boys. Most of them had probably never gone to a real party before, let alone seen girls in short skirts. Lievin has been coming here for years and he’s never heard of a festival like this one; the locals’ idea of a crazy party typically involves ice cream cones and human-powered roller coasters, like the festival that came to Suriya’s village. But there will probably be a lot more drunken debauchery, now that the country has been rebuilt and tourism is picking up so much. The Welsh girl pulls me out of my chair. She’s singing along with Michael Jackson. My limbs are loose from the beer. I kick off my sandals and dance in my tiptoed, buoyant way, like I’m trying to take off and fly, as Brian once said. The Welsh girl rolls her body like an upright snake. “Let’s swim,” she says in my ear. We sprint down the beach until the tiki torch flames are orange sparks, pull off our clothes, and dive into liquid blackness. Ocean skinny-dipping: I’ve become just another drunken, debauched tourist. Shards of lightning gouge open a tiny purple wound of sky. Don’t worry; just be grateful.

We dry ourselves by jumping and flapping our arms, get dressed and walk back to the party. A large-bellied Sri Lankan man is standing next to our table, legs wide and knees bent as if preparing to lift something heavy. It takes me a minute to place him as the man who offered me a rum punch earlier. Avoiding his eyes, I take my bag off the back of the chair, where I’ve stupidly left it, and join the mess of bodies flinging themselves about with self-forgetful exuberance.

My friends for the evening get tired and decide to go back to the motel. I shout good night over the music, still hopping. Lievin lets his smile linger on me. I wave and turn into the music. Once the other tourists begin to wander off, I pick up my bag and shoes, bow to the orange moon being slowly flattened between two panes of endless darkness, and head off down the beach. The round man with the bling runs after me.

“Already leaving?”

“Yes.” I walk without looking up. He follows a few steps behind.

“Can I buy you a drink before you go?”

“No.”

“Good night then.” When I’m several yards away, he calls out, “Attendez, vous êtes belge?”

I stop and turn. The music is wordless now, a tinny hum over the murmur of low waves. “Non, je suis américaine. Mais je parle français.”