‘Oh sure, right, none whatsoever… I know how that goes.’ Then a dancehall song starts up and stops us in our tracks.

‘Wat is dis?’ I ask, confused, recognising island Creole in the lyrics.

‘You don’t know them? They’re the guys right over there.’ Juleen gestures, shaking her braids and sashaying halfway into the road.

I see two tall men with radiant ebony skin, broad shoulders and thick beards. They’re joking over the fact that their own song has come on and are dancing slowly as they walk. A crowd starts to form around them and they briefly disappear from view. ‘Hety and Zambo, gyal, yo no know dem?’ There are lots of well-known people I’ve never heard of, which is inexplicable to many. Not only now; I’ve always been like that.

Even in school, I knew fewer people than average. Some islanders must struggle to match names to faces, must find it even harder to associate that information with the role played by someone who everyone else seems intimately familiar with. I don’t know who’s who: I could repeat the person’s full name as if it rang a bell, but no. I still can’t access the noosphere – I laugh to myself. The database of everyone’s ideas about everything. That’s true for all of us returning exiles, of course: we’re clueless. Maybe it’s just that I’ve never been in on the gossip, I don’t know who anyone is, and now no one knows who I am either – although if I stay, I guess it won’t take long for me to become just another part of the island landscape, a habitué of anywhere, a public figure with information on file in popular memory. No weakness, no weakness, comes the catchy chorus of the song that makes me want to move my body from the inside out. The artists have come for this, to talk with the people who’d lit the fire earlier; they’ll be here a little longer, Juleen says.

Everything about these men and women, from their eyes to their ideas, their hair, their every muscle, seems to have been extracted from some steadier material. In some eyes I meet, I sense a force of attraction running through their veins, filtered through a heritage of resistance. They’re also sheltered by the fortune of ending up all jumbled together in this geographical accident. I have an impressive cove-side view of Providencia, but also the image of the shallow exposed bays of the seahorse – and of something I learned this afternoon about the very first residents of Henrietta.