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.

Rudy called me on Saturday morning, which intrigued me. He invited me on a field trip of sorts, a two-hour walk around the Botanical Garden, Duppy Gully and the lagoon. I told him yes without a second thought. But I couldn’t have imagined I’d stumble into another shoal of ghosts.