It’s just after seven. The mood of the day is starting to coalesce over the houses, hot, no clouds, faint breeze. The pale purple sky will slowly darken into its vivid midday blue. Nothing on the docket for today. From the balcony, I look out towards the house across the street, its façade so similar and so different, covered in metal bars, like a city building.

The little white cubes of the complex have just started deflecting the first amongst infinite rays of sunlight; to cut the breeze, as always. I’ve fantasised about simply scooping up my own house-cube and swivelling it forty-five degrees to the left, so that the doors and windows can let out the bad dreams, as the native saying goes, with the help of the wind and the headlong sun. The electrical appliances I don’t yet have would last even less, the mirrors would blotch more quickly with those green stains, my books would mildew faster. Would the salt eat away at us faster, too? Who knows. In any case, this has always been a lost cause, I think. I feel more Caribbean than ever, less from the city than ever, that horrible, horrible city.

With the day wide open ahead of me, I’ll enjoy the expanse of the house, return to my loose papers. I leave the balcony, trailing my fingers along the stained white walls. I thought I’d have all the time in the world to remodel. And I do. But I’m still engulfed in laziness. I take in everything around me. The scratched tiles, some chipped, after so many clunks and footsteps; the ceilings with their slight imperfections and unevenness, leak damage touched up with putty, more smudges of white paint, blue paint, white. On the stairs, the long wooden handrail is wounded by my dogged scampers up and down, dragging pencils into them as a child; in the bathrooms, the sinks and toilet bowls are nicked from repairs to the plumbing; on the walls are sections of raw concrete and drill perforations. Everything, really everything, needs to be fixed. Or everything can just stay exactly as it is. I wish the genie would materialise out of his magic lamp to shine the house with a single wish and reward its perseverance by buying it yet more time. For now, I won’t be that genie. I’d rather take it in this way, learn its tricks, discover it all over again.

Last week I had to get someone to disassemble a satellite dish that kept banging against the roof, keeping me awake for a couple of breezy nights. I feared it would be ripped clean off by the northern winds and leave a hole in a neighbour’s roof if I didn’t remove it myself. I haven’t been able to get the rubbish collectors to take the huge metal disc, and although I’ve been offered unconventional options for getting rid of junk, I’d hate to find my dish discarded in the undergrowth the next time I walk around Duppy Gully, as I did two days ago, or around Big Pond, the central lagoon. So here it lies in the back room, temporarily but indefinitely prostrate beside the old TV sets.