As the second eldest, I was old enough to be aware of how difficult the situation was for my mum, and so I was the quietest. Sometimes, the person who is the best behaved receives the least attention and is the most overlooked. I tried to be good, not causing my mum any more grief, but in doing that I tended to make myself disappear. At home in England I was often subdued, but when we went to Jamaica I felt carefree and happy and able to express myself in a completely different way.

One night, desperate for the loo, I stepped on a giant slug and it squelched between my toes in long green tubes. I think that’s the night I became a soprano. After that, I made myself a salt path every night to dispose of them. As young, first time tenants, we had no idea that we could complain – we had to pay the whole term’s rent up front, so we had no leverage at all. God, it was awful, but we loved having our independence.

“Night-soil is such a sanitising term, as if done by owls. As if when then day comes, the soil disappears.” My mother was making stew dumplings. Balls of light dough were spooned into boiling water, the pot covered with a lid.

She snapped the book closed, put it on the fridge, screwed the Marmite a bit too aggressively tight and put a doily over the jam. “It is difficult to describe now, but you felt like you were seen as a one-dimensional being, as if you had no roots, no culture that could give you depth or complexity. When you did something unusual, it was simply luck, and you would soon be exposed as the fraud and thief you really were.”

“Was it not perhaps a kind of inferiority on your part that was in fact not the fault of the English?”

My mother sighed. “It probably played a role. But if inferiority is a given and you want a healthy country, then the elimination of that inferiority must be part of everybody’s plan, not the naked intensification thereof.

“You must have no illusions about this: those people are masters at the art of belittling. They loosen in you a weathervane of hate. They decapitate you with one sentence, with a single adjective sink deadly poisonous teeth into you. You fight futilely for your life . . .”

But I struggle to tell her how I grew up. She says she can only know me if she can hear how I lived as a child, stories, incidents. Jesus, then my brains freeze. My youth to me is one gigantic noise of fighting, anxiety and shouting, seeing corpses in the street . . . so she wrestles with the gaps in the story of my life, sometimes she jokes about the fridge under my heart . . .

Maa ek sal jou sê: What keeps me with her is she is so fuckin’ dependable. Jirre, I can depend on that woman, verstaan?