Even though there’s a figurative abyss amid all these different islands, the South, the West, the Club, the bush; even though its personalities may seem irreconcilable, a crack formed and widened at a single point along the arrow of time, when the open door of innocence was violated by excess.

The rattletrap we rode that day, I think now, will probably become a topographical reference for future generations, just like the American school bus abandoned at the entrance to the Gully has been for me.

We’ll give directions in relation to its final resting place, I imagine. It’ll seem so eternal that people will struggle to question its existence. What feels natural to us is never easily dislodged: like the need for ordinary commerce, like the crisis of a hospital that has run out of gauze, where placentas and amputated limbs rot in the open air. This has become normal to us. The impossibility of being born, or dying in peace, on San Andrés or Providencia is now a well-known fact – like the raw, untreated shit spewed along a distance of twenty Olympic swimming pools per day through a tube less than a kilometre’s distance from the coast.

After a while, we turned a corner and there was the sea again, the little shop with its little twins, and Lynton behind us.

‘It’s the same inside as outside, ramshackle, gone to nothing,’ I said into the wind, by way of conclusion, as I got off the bus.

We crossed the entrance to the university, which was deserted, except for a single hen prowling around with its long trail of multi-coloured chicks. Rudy wiped his forehead on a sleeve and dug the motorcycle keys out of his pocket.

‘Do you believe in coincidence?’ he asked suddenly, his voice almost mischievous. He removed his glasses with a theatrical flourish and cleaned them on his shirt. Without them, his eyes looked smaller, more tapered, set deeper into his coppery skin.

‘Why do you ask?’

Rudy mounted the motorcycle and started the engine. I got on behind him, adjusted my backpack and tucked my hair into my sweat-soaked hat.

‘Because’ – he lowered his voice and waited until we’d left the university and headed towards the road – ‘I have an answer for you. Or part of one, anyway.’ I saw him smile in the rear-view mirror, an offering he’d withheld this entire time. ‘I have the will of your great-great-great-great-grandfather, the slave owner Torquel Bowie,’ he sang. ‘I think a lot of things will make more sense to you once you read it.’

VI. THE PAPERS OF TIME

VI. THE PAPERS OF TIME