‘You remember our new brother?’

They laughed.

‘Come to see Dad.’

They laughed again. ‘Dressed like that?’ Laughing.

‘Fishing.’

‘Fishing, ah.’ Laughing, speaking in English sometimes.

‘Hanging about at the back of the hotel like a sick seagull.’

‘He’s bag, glassing on the ground.’

Some of the things they said I won’t repeat. Rude just like the old women at home. Worse. The two men on board weren’t saying a thing, just grinning as if they had cut faces.

The only thing you can do in this kind of situation is go along with it. Ela was being told by all of them what was in my heart, and she knew people well enough to know their observations wouldn’t be wrong. I’d been planning a declaration, but it was all out of my hands in a way. I couldn’t look at her to see how she was taking it, not in front of all those ones with eyes all round their heads. As a distraction I opened the bag, handed round cigarettes, but this did nothing to keep them quiet.

Ela went home to sleep. I went to sit with her father, who was sousing fish in coconut. Later, back at the house with Ela and her family, I disembowelled the shore bag, putting everything out on a log step for them. I left the little bottle of scent where it was because it was impossible. It was an announcement. I had crabs in my throat.

Then I did. I gave it to her before all those flickering eyes and flicking eyebrows. Old eyes, young eyes, kids’ eyes. Well, why not? The worst that could happen was that her uncles and cousins would throw me in the sea and not even wait to hold my head under.

Ela didn’t smile like the postcard girls. Much less. Her eyelids drooped as her smile formed, but the thing is that the eyelids would lift a little, and when they did you knew that she saw only you – or whoever the smile was meant for. That’s how I felt. It was a moment, a witnessed moment. Then she kissed my cheek and went about dabbing the grandmothers and aunties behind the ears. And dabbing the bad boys. And the cousins of the bad boys.

‘I don’t know,’ she said on the way to the work lorry. So I waited. I had no words, nothing to offer, no promises I could make except those that I knew would have been made to her before, by bastards. Why should she trust me to be different? I was a stranger. For all she knew I could be married, could have a tribe of kids already, all over the world. ‘My life has been full of mistakes so far,’ she said.