‘My dad said he lived in San Luis, but I don’t know exactly where. And what about her, Josephine? Where did Rebecca live?’

‘Little Gough. Jeremiah lived in Little Gough and then she lived in different places with her daughters, all those little girls and no little boys, because of the magic, and because he got together with another woman, a black woman!’ – a joking tone now – ‘but the marriage got him lots of land. My grandmother said that’s why Jeremiah married Miss Becca when he came over from Kingston, her daddy married her to Jeremiah because he was a foreigner – that way she didn’t have to marry one of her cousins!’

She looks at me and laughs. There weren’t many people in San Andrés back then, so now it seems to me that Rebecca really must have been bored in that photo. And that Jerry was good-looking. Josephine smooths her large hands over her skirt again, and I look at her closely, trying to see myself in her, in the entire contents of her body, in her memory, which has just granted me a place that no city ever could have done.

‘You know much more about my family than I do. I only just found a photo of the two of them at home,’ I venture, hoping I’ll get to show it to her.

She cuts in. ‘Ah, so dem show up! Se te aparecieron. The witchdoctor wants something!’ She cackles and claps, mischievous now. I can almost see the elegant obiá whispering into Josephine’s ear. ‘You got to listen, not everybody’s looking for their dead.’ She takes a deep, slow breath, eyes cast down. She’s got me thinking, though the biscuit still has my mind fixed on the photo. Dem show up, I repeat to myself. I can’t feel my blood sugar dropping anymore.

‘You pass everything onto your kids,’ says Josephine, sighing, peeking into the pocket where she’d kept the little cake, ‘and if you’re not happy, you pass that on, too, and the kids are left with questions, like you, mama.’

I’m speechless for a moment. My mother glimmers into my mind, bathing me in the ocean, the flat waters of Cocoplum Bay, as my father cooked on the beach. I remember my father seething with frustrations, spending money on the son of his young lover, my mother weepy, battered, jealous. I turn towards Ma’s oval eyes. My throat tightens.

‘Lots of things get inherited, don’t they?’ I murmur. ‘Then you make the wrong decisions and the problems come…’

‘No-uh! No such things as problems!’ Josephine tickles the air as she speaks. ‘There’s only a problem if your memory can’t fix what it’s already got, if it can’t learn from your mistakes.’ She gives herself a little rap on the head, her tight white curls.