On my last day on the island I walked up the hill to Leonard Cohen’s house and back down past the port, around the headland, just in time to catch the setting sun. Pomegranates and prickly pear. I was seven months pregnant; inside my belly, a different sort of sun. Over the ramparts the sky blazed and then softened into colours I can’t remember, couldn’t photograph. In the dark I counted cannons and took the cobblestones slowly, worn smooth as glass. Fallen flowers scuttered at my feet. Bougainvillea caught in donkey shit. Earlier that day I swam in the sea, by the cave, surrounded by families and languages. ‘You’re having a baby,’ a boy in the ocean said to me. I felt at home, and far from it.
