My Grandfather retired at sixty-seven, returning to Jamaica to live with his brother in the parish of Manchester. Alton ‘Marga’ McGregor, from over the way, was sixteen at the time, and looking a little pocket money, knocked their door. Soon enough, he was doing yard jobs— tying up the goats at dusk, that roamed the twenty acres of surrounding land, swaddled with twisted citrus trees and giant prickly pears; sweeping the yard, feeding the dozen mutts their breakfast, ferrying empty glass bottles down to the convenience store— things like that. On Friday evenings the brothers would invite him for dinner and a cold Red Stripe, all three watching wrestling on satellite, before walking back home gone midnight in the pitch black through a cacophonous wall of cricket chirps, beneath drifting satellites.

I first met Marga when I was twelve, during my first trip to the island, visiting my Grandfather for my summer holidays. Though the lanky, muscled, dark-skinned native was a little suspicious of the brown, chubby, foreigner, arriving with his Walkman and DC skate shoes, he soon accepted me. He taught me the names of the local birds, and how to lure a John Crow from his towering lair. He taught me how to whistle with my fingers, and how to chat up local gyal (and tell which were virgins). We mixed cement in the hot sun, bandanas wrapped around our heads like pirates, listening to Spragga Benz, lining cinder blocks for the brother’s pigeon coop. I’d perform precarious skateboard tricks, and we’d sit, impersonating Chris Tucker, my Grandfather teasing the cool air with his homemade kite half a mile in the cloudless sky.
One Sunday a month, my Grandfather would drive us three down to a hamlet called Goshen. He’d bought a house there, perched on a hill in the middle of nowhere— a real fixer-upper, needing year's worth of TLC. We’d bundle into his gold Nissan for two hours, to paint the walls and chuck out rotting furniture, and prune the sun-withered trees— olives and mangos mainly. The local land was harsh and arid, yet a large pond at the end of the dirt track would come and go between the unrelenting rains and the heat. My Grandfather, who died three years later, never saw the house completed. It was twenty years until I was to see it again, myself.

As promised, Marga met me at the airport and drove me to his home. He fried some snapper that he’d caught that day, and we washed it down with bottled, icy Guinness, reminiscing about the old days before he was a father, and I was a husband. Apparently, the hurricane had passed quickly through Manchester but had decimated Goshen.

In the morning he presented two motorbikes from under a tarp, wearing a pretty boy suit that he’d had tailor-made for the occasion. With my heart in my throat, I rode nervously alongside him, fragrant air rippling against my face, zig-zagging down the highway, onwards to the past.