Last night Juleen zoomed east down all of Harmony Hall Hill. I sat up straight behind her, following the seahorse’s rippling spine, skirting wooden houses with old-style porticos and gardens full of flowers I recognise but can’t name. I saw cayenne pepper plants, bougainvillea in several colours, and all sorts of other blooms, bright and outlandish. Tiny mangos spilled onto both sides of the road; farther down was a jumbled bed of June plums and red mombins. At the speed we were going – ninety kilometres an hour, the dial read – we were pummelled with the scent of ripe fruit. Salt, too, as we descended. I started to see some enormous land crabs, white and blue, skittish as always.

Mexican Hill, as the mainlanders call this area, has a steep slope that a few young guys were racing down on rickety bicycles, even at that hour. Suicidal. I thought back to my conversation with Maa Josephine, still immersed in it, and seized on Juleen’s presence to dig deeper.

‘Hey, do you know anything about the obiás?’ I asked, trying to sound offhand. My friend was born and raised in the Barker’s Hill neighbourhood and had told me, not bothering to conceal either her pride or her frustration, that people mixed less with mainlanders there than in other native areas.

‘And why are you going around asking about that now?’ She slowed down as we approached a speed hump and we both jolted up on the seat.

‘I heard about it… I think maybe my mum went to see one once.’

‘I’ve never gone,’ Juleen said thoughtfully, speeding up a bit. ‘But lots of people from the church do, since there’s a famous one in Providencia now…’

‘So my mum told me something weird. She said she’d brought a blank sheet of paper and the obiá dotted it with a drop of blood from her fingertip, and then he held the paper close to a candle so the flame would heat it up. And she said that suddenly a tree of life started to appear on the paper and… and I don’t remember the rest of the story.’