I crossed the yard to where I’d been told the toilet was. I looked at myself in the mirror as I washed my hands: white as a sheet. I scanned the monitor over the sensor: everything was fine, so it wasn’t my blood sugar. The reflection of my pale face seemed to reveal two hundred years of white men, their skin – and then those women’s presence in my broad jaw, wide nose. But I’m so pale. The generic bathroom and artificial light anchored me to reality somehow. I felt a surge of impatience, suddenly longed to go back to Sarie Bay so I could think. I took in my expression of pointless reproach: had my grandmother ever cooked rundown stew? My father always said she had. My parents liked it, I remember, but fish soup was their favourite. No, my grandmother didn’t speak Creole, of course, just ‘British English’. Her father was Catholic, her grandfather Jamaican: had he spoken Jamaican Creole? And what did the three colours of the flag mean to them, the anthem I’d memorised at school? What did they see in all this? Questions? Answers? Nothing? What do I see?

I smoothed my dishevelled hair and checked my glucose again. One hundred and ten. I emerged into the hallway again, thinking of Juleen’s story about her exhumed grandmother.

Damp, salty gusts blew into the long corridor of the university’s only building, ringed by foliage, little gardens lined with little stones. The darkness of the rest of the building and the yard pulled me back into the real and wonderful night I was having, and the wind – what hadn’t that wind touched before touching me? Why would this breeze care, being eternal, about one less or one more skin it gets to embrace? For me, it made all the difference. I walked lightly, as if nudged along by the wind.

Before me, next to some parked motorcycles, as if it had materialised out of thin air, I saw a tombstone. This was the traditional way of burying the dead, in the yard – only so that motorcycles can zoom right over the remains, I thought. I heard a soft roots reggae in the distance, languid and lazy, legalise it, yeah, yeah, and don’t criticise it, yeah, yeah, weed everywhere. I was trapped by the sobriety of the black-lettered inscription, which looked like it could have been carved yesterday. I wanted to see what those bones had once been called, how long they’d been buried in Lickle Gough, in the middle of the paña university yard. I read. My brow furrowed. I read again, again. He was a foreigner. I felt a hot rush from chest to throat, my whole body ecstatic. There it was, the name I’ve been repeating for days now, carved in stone.

J. H. Lynton

Born in Blackwater River, Jamaica,

The day of our Lord Jan. 13th, 1870,

Died in the year of 1949,