The sugar cake rejoices in my bloodstream: the scene of a sinuous tunnel, a furious oscillation that sends me floating and tosses me into the fractal of a seahorse, a larger one, a smaller one, larger, smaller, multi-coloured hippocampi, slavery wasn’t like that here, it wasn’t so cruel – the voice of a Rebecca? Mothers aren’t made of paper; they’re handfuls of unverifiable memories. So I’m the breath of a prosecutor traveling backwards on the hands of a clock until I come to a clearing. So who was her father, who was her mother? The distant hand sealing the paper. There’s a party with a Dick, a Deptford, an alias Richard Bowie, and mandolin music. We’re up above, hands and feet in black and white, pinned to a palm tree, to the fractal of the palm, we fly into the next and bring down coconuts, we carry endless sacks, sweating rivers and oceans, loading them onto a schooner, the fractal of a schooner, which sets out towards the horizon and disappears, returns, the empty sacks returned to be filled. And Rudy, his face and his tranquil eyelids appear before me, gigantic, and I hear the swaying voice, explaining how the stick brandished for torture is the same one that administers the remedy. There’s a repetitive mandolin riff and the clack of a jawbone, I see the path through the garden, the little mangos and many breadfruit of the dead, an enormous bright green pile, their skin gleaming, a mountain made of individual fruits that fit perfectly together, I study every corner, every angle of the hexagon and they fill me, they absorb me completely between the milky pulp and my heart, where I hear the beat of a bass handcrafted out of an upside-down metal wash basin, a ‘bass tub’. My heart races to the rhythm, I’m on a plantation, thousands of coconut trees, I’m skating around the curves of the palm’s rough trunk and I fall into the water. I swim, I swim through the sweet belly of the seahorse, the current is freezing and it dizzies me without drowning me and I step out onto the shore of the lagoon. I’m levitating, naked, silent as a ghost; let no one see me or they won’t understand what I am or where I come from. Here comes the bus, rickety as every foreign model, but there’s a Charlie, a Dummorea, a Serphin. And here are their faces, their broad noses, thick hair, mysterious eyes, tight mouths, sad hearts. See how they dance to brighten their spirits, how they dance, their bodies floating now, transformed into rays of light. I dance in the past, in another universe I get to visit in the magic that Maa’s hand works through the sugary bread, a magic that condenses time for me to touch. In this room, I see the faces I saw when I was growing up, Juleen’s, and the curious faces of my Swedish neighbours expelled by OCCRE, I jump, jump without moving a single centimetre, back to the island, I’m climbing the slope of the Cove, always looking through the window, the window sometimes high up, sometimes low down. They study me, look for me, look at me, they touch me with their thousands of eyes, the people with those faces where I find my jaw, my swaying hips, the blood swirling in my veins, a Judy, a Heny, a torrent of other people’s memories, a port on the hot coast of that side of the ocean, a terrible ocean that brings death and hope and the agony of childbirth. A lightning bolt crackles through me and brings me to a sudden halt in a crook of that captivating maze, the breeze pushes me into the cemeteries, I feel trapped and tremble in a tomb, where there’s a tiny island, a tinier island, and another island that’s tinier still, I leap onto it, we leap and it expands into infinity: who inhabits me, who’s calling me? Gyal! What are these strokes of fate? Is it the sugar talking? I don’t know if I’m mute or speaking aloud, if my throat hurts because I’ve never used it before or if I’ve just screamed louder than ever. Crack! Jerry is playing: there he is, looking just like he looks in the photo, but he smiles and winks at me. Raaf, ruuuum, croooch, I hear reproaches and protestations and, the music stops, my muscles buckle, my eyes close… time, the arrow, the prison, the stew of time, a cake from Mission Hill and Lickle Gough and Bowie Gully. A lightning bolt declares a thunderclap, I fall, I’m falling now –