We’re Raizals, different Raizals. There’s no black blood in this family, my grandmother always said. I never understood that. Our English – what English? – was the British kind, and it was the slaves who were black. But despite her insistence, my cachaco cousins teased me all the time. Nappy hair, they’d heckle – it’s here in my journal. Broom-head, steel wool. I never liked them or their straight hair, their easy hypocrisy when they spoke. When I was born, my mother told me once, my grandmother said that my hair and other features couldn’t possibly have come from her side; they had to be from some long-lost black Andean relative, someone forgotten on my mother’s side. Yeah, sure.

Here it is, the part I wrote about school. I was right: I was in rough shape when I got to Bogotá. I enjoyed it at first. The novelty and variety outshone the city’s harshness.

There are 120 students in my school. It’s the best one here, but I’m sure I’ll be screwed when I make it to the mainland. I’m no good with numbers, and although I’m better than average with words, it’s not like there’s much rigour in our Spanish or English classes. I can’t make it through a single book. The only books I’ve liked are short stories that happen to be set in places that make sense to me, like the sea and the sky in Jonathan Livingston Seagull or the cell in Mientras llueve. Otherwise we read summaries of novels, at most, which is all you need for the exam. Spelling dictation is fun because of how the teacher – he’s from Cartagena – acts out the pronunciation of irregularly accented words, trying to help us remember where the hell the written stresses go.

I also found a bunch of those dictations in my notebooks, the occasional note from a friend, drawings. The name, in cursive and block letters and different colours, of the boy next door I worshipped in silence, a redheaded kid from an Arab family, until he moved to Isla Margarita. Stickers from the lunches we ate at break. I never knew what a wafer biscuit was supposed to taste like or how crispy crisps really were until I ate them in Bogotá. Here, everything was stale, soggy, damp.