Pigeons quarrel over crumbs of fast food on the table beside me, French fries, meat clinging to chicken bones, scraps for the invaders. When did all these pigeons flock to the island? They peck at each other. A big, dishevelled black one asserts himself, fluttering to the ground with a large morsel in his beak. There’s a tourist nearby, an older man sitting alone and observing the pillage, baffled as I am, glancing around to see if no one’s really going to do anything to stop the parasitic claws from scrabbling around the tabletop. An apathetic employee appears and starts to clear the disposable plates and cups once the birds have had their fill. She walks away without cleaning up. More customers are filing in. I stare off towards to the beach, following the whiff of marijuana.

The North End didn’t exist when any of my grandparents were alive. My thoughts wander towards the shore, towards the scenes of bikini-clad girls taking selfies and washing off their suntan lotion in the water, and then I hear ‘Baruq!’ – a shout that jostles me into my father’s story of Syrian-Lebanese migration.

‘All right!’ I exclaim. ‘Hey, Livingston!’ It’s Nard, coming from New Point. Juleen must have told him my surname.

‘How things, how things?’ Nard holds out his hand. The handshake comes naturally to me now: the finger-tug, the fist-bump. ‘How’s life treating you, Baruq? I was just thinking of you, and bam! here you are. How’d it go with you and Rudy the day of your tour?’ He speaks with Maa Josephine’s hard r’s.

‘Good!’ I’m surprised he knows we’d gone. ‘I hadn’t been out there for a long time, you know. It helped me reconnect. Now I’m hearing duppies and everything.’

‘Ah, wuoy! Must be this island that drives people crazy, parce. So you’ve started seeing ghosts!’ He scratches his head. ‘What are you doing around Fort Montero? I was just talking to Juleen – lots of chaos getting in and out of Barker’s Hill, yo don’t know!’ His last exclamation is in Creole.

‘I don’t know, actually,’ I say. ‘What’s going on? Fort Montero? That’s so funny.’ We haven’t seen each other since the rundown, but he talks to me as if we’re old friends, and I like it. It’s clear that Rudy has told him a thing or two about my ‘spiritual crisis’.

About the fort, Nard means that this area eventually came into the possession of a single family of mixed, naturalised mainlanders. It was after the Intendancy fire that these plots appeared, at a stroke, under family domain. Then the old mangrove swamp was plugged with the sand they’d dredged up for the international pier.