SMOKE, the cat, announces his arrival as he hits the driveway, staccato small mewls, getting louder as he approaches my little office just off the garage. A year-and-a-half ago, when we first got him, from the RSPCA - whence we always source our pets, unwanted strays of no specific breed, just like us - we theorized he had a job "outside". He'd be gone when we woke up  and wouldn't return until after we'd got back from picking kids up ourselves; it was only when he stayed home, totally chilling, for the last half of that first December that we realised he really goes to school; when the children started vanishing for the day again in January, he went back to school, too.

His mewling gets louder and he comes through the garage door and bounces into my office, finishing his report of the events of the day. He half-crouches on the ground, looks at my desk, compresses his body; I hardly notice the release but, a moment later, he is on the desktop; it's as if he willed himself there, as if no one could prove he actually jumped. He snakes between my printer and keyboard, pats the mouse half-inquisitively, half to demonstrate he knows the difference, and sits at my right, staring directly at me. I look from him to the computer screen; his gaze never leaves my face. I turn and give him my full attention.

"You realise," he says, "it's a year today you've been writing online." I glance up at where the calendar used to be in my old office in Trinidad

WALKING INTO the upscale neigbourhood of Fairways from the Saddle Rd, passing under the raised gate that goes down from dusk to dawn, you feel like a Polish Jew returning to the Warsaw ghetto. The walls get higher as streets become more secluded. (The real measure of Trini exclusivity: no one can hear you screaming for help.) I thought of my pardner Gregors’ asking the manager of a Jamaican resort why the walls were 16 feet high. “Because,” the manager replied, “they sell 12-foot ladders in the hardware.”

In one of Port of Spain’s wealthiest neighbourhoods, where driveway gate light fixtures cost more than many people would spend on drawing room suites, the older, tastefully-designed homes can no longer be admired because they cannot be perceived: their garden walls are now higher than their eaves; and topped with razor wire, coiled closer than the breadth of a human hand: no would be intruder can pull himself up-and-over without being sliced-and-diced; pass your butter bread over such a wall and it comes out the other side as a sandwich loaf.

The newer homes, regretfully,

HEAT ON HER eyelids made her look up from the single typed page in her lap, which she was going over one last time, quickly; she would have to take the podium by the end of the hymn - "Morning Has Broken", the Church of England classic that had come into Trinidad’s Catholic church via Cat Stevens; her husband, though a cultural Muslim vegetarian, also preferred Cat Stevens to Yusuf Islam. She squinted: the bright light that passed unfiltered by the stained glass in the church window was blinding. The ancient school child’s joke came to mind.

In the old joke, the priest was celebrating Mass in the vernacular, but still with the old Latin incantations, half-singing the liturgy. He was consecrating the host when the acolyte looked out of the stained glass window and, chanting solemnly like the priest, sung out, in high-and-low tones, as though it were part of the service, “Father, Father/ Look through the win-dow/ It have some-body/ Thiefing your co-co-nut”. The priest in the joke

HEAT ON HER eyelids made her smile, even as she was emerging from deep sleep. She always left the drapes open on nights before holiday mornings: she loved to be awakened by gentle sunlight and then remembering she didn’t have to get up. She would get out of bed, draw the curtains closed, glance at Roger, asleep on the far, shaded sided of the bed, and close her eyes again with deep pleasure; everyone else simply had extra sleep: she enjoyed hers.

She lay between sleep and wake, even gladder this morning than