There was the hand I’d seen resting on Rebecca’s shoulder. The fingernails must be long and brown by now, the pale head now transformed into a small skull with a stray grey lock. I was so overwhelmed that my surroundings faded out for a moment. It was just the grave and me, gazing at Jerry down below. I could feel my eyes wide, wide open, and I may have breathed a faint ‘Aah!’ through parted lips. Then I laughed, laughed hard, ‘But what di hell is dis…?’, glanced all around, stirring, coming to, smiling like someone who senses a trap, looking for Juleen, overcome with laughter, or the gap in the teeth of the guru cook or the spectre of Lynton himself. Nothing. This is the work of a duppy who escaped the swamp, I thought, teasing myself, squeezing my eyes shut. It’s insane, all of this. I stood motionless for a few seconds, staring at the stone, the long coffin-shaped mound and carved flower crowning the inscription. J. H. LYNTON. I didn’t even know what his middle name was, this tall, warm man with Irish eyes, but I can hear his accent, an accent of humidity and bagpipes, of ports and candles, I see the Catholics, the same ones who used indentured contracts in the Americas to flee the Anglican Church. That’s how their parents, or their grandparents, or their great-grandparents, once disembarked on some bustling port, maybe in Dominica – hadn’t they? That’s how they’d got to Jamaica, so Jerry would become a Kingston man, from Blackwater River, and so he’d leave and sail to another island and leave his name in a courtyard and in a people.

Immersed in the film of it all, I heard something strike the ground: thump! I jumped back and jerked my head to the right: a breadfruit falling from the sky! I laughed. I looked up and saw that enormous tree was heavy with large fruit, so large they buckled the branches, huge and round as soursops. It would have been pretty funny if one had hit me on the head, for example. I looked at it and all around me again. I can’t remember which song was playing. Shouts and laughter scattered out from the rundown pot. I would have stayed there longer, contemplating the breadfruit, coarse and green, if Juleen hadn’t come over to tell me it was time to go.

‘A breadfruit fell,’ I informed her, pointing like a little girl.

‘Oh yeah? You guain teik it?’ I picked it up before she’d finished her question. ‘But that’s a breadfruit of the dead – my grandmother never let me eat fruit that grows in cemeteries,’ Juleen added when she saw me looking towards the grave.

‘Really? But this isn’t a cemetery, it’s just one dead guy. Besides, my great-great-grandfather’s been dead too long…’

‘Your what? You’re crazy,’ she exclaimed, shaking her head and raising a teasingly solemn hand into the air. I burst into uncontrollable laughter, clutching the breadfruit to my belly.