A few minutes later, I watched him push back his chair, carry his tray to the trash, and scrape the remains of his dinner from his plate. But this time I didn’t hurry away. Instead, when he approached the door, I lowered my umbrella, concealing myself behind it. I stayed still until Clive exited the Little Sweet, walked to the end of the block, and turned the corner. Then I followed after him.

I kept my distance, clinging to the shadows cast by shop awnings, clutching the umbrella, white-knuckled, ready to hide my face should he turn around. He walked north on Nostrand, passing storefronts that would, in the months to come, become intimately familiar to me: Health-wise Pharmacy. US Fried Chicken & Pizza. Immaculee Bakery. Red Apple Nails. Winthrop Hardware. I slowed my pace, letting the distance between us lengthen. KBB Shipping. Beulah United Church of God. I followed Clive for over an hour as he turned right, left, right again, heading in no particular direction, at least as far as I could discern, down the rain-sweetened streets. Finally, he made his way to a residential area not far from where we’d begun, block after block of midrise buildings, their exteriors sand-colored brick zigzagged with fire escapes. In the middle of a block, Clive turned and walked up the steps of a building that looked like all the others. He reached into the pocket of his windbreaker and took out his keys. He fumbled a bit with the lock.

I hadn’t planned what I did next. I didn’t even realize I was doing it until it was done, until the shout—“Gogo!”—had left my lips and was coming back to me as an echo off the wet bricks and the soft night air.

I tucked into the shadow of a plane tree as Clive Richardson whipped around.

“Who’s there?” he called out. The street was empty, silent. “Who said that?” He stood frozen halfway through the door. “Leave me alone! Do you hear me? Leave me alone!”

He let the door slam shut behind him and was gone.

GOGO

IT WAS THE WIND. It was someone on the next block yelling, “No, no, no!” It was a dog barking. There are any number of explanations for what he heard: a voice, which surely wasn’t a voice at all, calling that name. In the days that follow, he is vigilant with himself. If he catches his mind spinning during his shift, he turns the radio to a Christian station and brings his focus to the words of the sermon. On his nightly walks, when he notices his pace growing frantic, he forces himself to slow down. In the apartment, he busies himself: he wipes down the stove, gives his teeth a long brushing rather than his usual cursory going-over. He even strikes up a conversation with Cecil, listening attentively as his roommate recounts the surprising turn of events from the variety show he watched the night before—a magician was beaten out by a unicyclist for a spot in the grand finale. He nods as Cecil delivers a speech that he has clearly been working out in his head for some time about what makes the show so entertaining; it has to do with the apples-and-oranges comparisons the show requires. How ought one to measure the talent of a contortionist against that of a stand-up comedian? Who is more impressive, a one-in-amillion ventriloquist or an excellent opera singer? Anything to crowd out the voice. Gogo. It is not the first time he has heard his name on the wind, there and then gone. He knows where it can lead, and he does not want to go back there.

The voice is mostly dormant in the daylight, so that each day he thinks he has conquered it. But at night it resurfaces, the darkness so thick with it he could choke. Gogo. Again and again he tells himself he did not hear what he thinks he heard. After all, how could it be? He hasn’t been Gogo to anyone in a long, long time.

IT WAS the first day of second grade and Clive Richardson’s grandmother had buttoned his pink uniform polo all the way to the top. They sat together at the kitchen table, where his grandmother had prepared a breakfast of fried jackfish and bakes and bush tea in blue enamel cups. As he ate, Clive tugged at the collar. His grandmother, who ate her fish in big quick bites, grabbed his hand and held it.

“None of this fidgeting.”

He nodded. Things were like this with her, prickly and wonderfully firm. She removed her hand and they continued eating.

“You will make some nice friends today. Good boys.”

It was a habit of hers, this way of speaking, as if the future were not in doubt; as if she were merely waiting for it to come along and cooperate. It had been less than a month since he had come to live with her, and as he sat in her kitchen, with its lacy white curtain fluttering against the open window and its smell of allspice and everything in its place—the yellow jug of oil beside the stove, pink beans soaking on the counter, margarine in the dish with the rosebud border on the table—it was still a new, miraculous comfort to be in the care of an adult who was so firmly in command and in possession of such a clear-eyed vision of what ought to happen. He would go to school and make nice friends. He wanted this very much. But he was unsettled, too, because he worried that even his grandmother’s oracular proclamation would not be powerful enough to bring about something so unlikely, for he was seven years old and had never had a friend. Not really. Only if you counted Vaughn, who called him “Big Man,” but Vaughn was his mother’s special friend, so he knew he didn’t really count. There was also Jeremiah, who lived down the street from his mother’s house, but Jeremiah was simpleminded and it humiliated Clive that one of the only people he might count as a friend was simpleminded, so he did not want to count him.

“Y-y-yes, Gran,” he said.

She cupped his cheek with her palm. “You a good boy, Clive.” With these words, too, he sensed her trying to speak something into being, to wrangle the loose threads of the past into a neat and orderly present.

Clive had come to live with his father’s mother when his mother departed for Saint Thomas to find work. His father was dead, a fact that did not make him sad because he did not remember him. This troubled him, because he was four when his father died, and he did have memories of being four. He remembered getting nipped by a black and white goat, and how his mother spanked the goat on its backside like a naughty child. He remembered Claude Félix, the old fisherman with clouds in his eyes who walked the streets of the village at sundown, stopping at his customers’ houses to deliver parcels of fish wrapped in brown paper; he remembered the evening his mother told him that Claude Félix had gone to his eternal rest. But he had no memories of his own father or his death, and so these other memories filled him with shame.

On the day of his mother’s departure, she packed his things into half a dozen Goody Mart bags and one of her friends drove them across the island from Bendy Harbour to his grandmother’s house in the Basin. She opened the front door when they were still coming up the road. She crossed her arms and stood in the doorway.

“This how you bring my grandchild to me? With he possession all in disarray?” she said when they were standing on the porch in front of her.

“I need the suitcase, Nella.”

“How silly I be! You need the suitcase.”

“How I’m supposed to get on the plane without one?” his mum snapped.

For what felt like forever, his grandmother stood there, her arms crossed, and looked at his mum with eyes as blunt as wood.

“Convenient you not taking he with you, then, or what would you use for he luggage?”

For weeks his mother had spoken heavily of her impending departure, as if their separation were a thing over which she had no control. Now he understood this wasn’t the case. She could take him. She wasn’t. What a fool he was, no better than Jeremiah.

His mother knelt beside him and squeezed him tightly. “Mama will miss you so, my love.”

His body went rigid. He couldn’t let go. Finally, his grandmother pulled him away, uncurling his clenched fingers from around his mother’s neck. She held him fast against her as his mother got into her friend’s car and drove away. When the car disappeared from view, he began to sob. His grandmother patted his back. “Come, now,” she whispered, and led him inside. When he had exhausted himself from crying, she changed him into an old nightshirt that had belonged to his grandfather and tucked him into bed. When he awoke in the middle of the night, aching and confused, she brought him into the kitchen and fixed him a warm bowl of the most delicious pepper pot he’d ever tasted.