Every year I’d say it, always able to forget that the balminess and the clear skies were transient guests, small birds that would soon fly back to their real home. The fog crept up on you. Perhaps it is a measure of the human capacity for hope, or for self-deception, that I was able to believe the weather might, for once, that year, be different. By mid-September you could lose sight of your own feet on the coastal paths, and when the rains came, they did not mess around: they swung in hard. The idea of holding any kind of lesson outside was ridiculous. And that year I did not suggest it. I called no wam-bam. My copy of Lord of the Flies lay on the floorboards of my bedroom by my slippers, unread, its pages curling in the damp, gathering a musty smell like everything did if kept for more than a few days away from daylight. The island was a sponge, the sea seeping into the corners of every house.

I took my malaise to Margaritte next door; how could I ever have explained this strange wave of melancholy to Dr Bishy? Tuesdays were my evenings with Margaritte. I drew the curtains while she lit a stick of incense with shaking hands, the glow of the match revealing the thinness of her long white hair. We’d settle down opposite one another at the green-baize-topped table, as if we were going to do something as innocuous as play a hand of poker. We’d have a glass or two of Margaritte’s home-brewed wine, swap the news that so often fell through the gaps between our generations, and then, almost as an afterthought, she would read my palm and deal out my future.

She knew what troubled me. Everyone was going. Everyone had gone. All four of my childhood friends and then, that year, my little brother, Paul. He didn’t even wait for the return leg of the August ship, the last ship of the year, the one you were supposed to take for long-time leaving if you didn’t want to tempt fate. So desperate was he for the possibilities of the mainland, that he took the first ship in April, the day after his twenty-first birthday. Mum and Dad, inexplicably, said nothing to make him stay.