I raise my eyebrows. My memories of the Nicaragua affair are trickling back. The Hague ruling: a recollection like a scratch on a wooden board. In November 2012, Samuel continues, he and all his friends from school and the neighbourhood joined the demonstrations, shopkeepers shuttered their businesses. Then they marched all over again when the government issued licenses to foreign companies. Yielding to pressure, the platform was abandoned, discarded out on Johnny Cay.

I’m amazed. What can I add if I never knew anything about it?

‘But wait a minute,’ he interjects. ‘How can you be Raizal if you don’t speak Creole? How long has it been since you’ve come to the island?’ He scrutinises me for something that might suggest I’m not just blowing hot air. I haven’t been back in eight years, I explain, but I never spoke Creole in the first place.

‘A lot has happened here since the ruling.’ He gives me a sidelong glance. ‘People put stickers on their cars, in their shops, on their motorcycles, We don’t accept the ruling, No to The Hague, I won’t abide – haven’t you seen them?’

‘Yeah, in the supermarket, actually.’ I go quiet in the face of my dealer’s enthusiasm. I’d never considered the impact of that loss on something so apparently simple as day-to-day life in San Andrés. ‘I think I’m going to have more questions, but I don’t want to make you late for work,’ I say at last, scratching my head and crossing my arms. I don’t know how to hide how naïve I feel.

‘Don’t worry,’ he says, cavalier, and adds ‘I’m going to quit that job in no time’. He keeps making conversation, doesn’t want to leave. ‘So what do you do?’

‘Me? I’m just living these days. I left my job in Mexico not long ago.’

‘Oh, you lived in Mexico? How was that? Mi wuoy, that city’s really “pesada”, isn’t it? “Chida”?’ Samuel teases, imitating Mexican slang, and I can’t help but burst out laughing, mostly because it’s the first time I’ve heard someone say ‘mi wuoy’ in years.

‘Yeah, it’s pretty pesada, Sami,’ I chime in readily. ‘I got tired of it.’

‘Have you been in Mexico this whole time? You talk sort of like a cachaca,’ he blurts. I feel like he’s the adult version of a kid in my kindergarten class, Jackson, who didn’t speak a word of Spanish; he too couldn’t sit still and once left me a crab claw inside my desk.

‘Hey, suave, vale, suave,’ I exclaim instinctively, waving a hand in the air, and he cracks up at the sudden rough-and-tumble San Andrés inflection that invades my speech. ‘Ah, yo hear? Respect, man! I’m no cachaca,’ I insist, improvising a hodgepodge of English and Spanish.