Bev Braune: Leading phrase: "Summer is a small time"

I find myself on an older Jamaica, the 40s or 50s, by a wooden colonial-style house. I'm a little girl and then a young woman very quickly. Now I'm walking along a Kingston foreshore the colour of ripened fruit. I see a woman with a face of strained honey and I ask her if the house is still open (even at this late hour). I'm dressed in summer-draped clothes over shorts and 1960s-style swimming costume. The woman takes me to the house without asking questions.

Inside, it seems all made of stairs of plantation mahogany. I can feel myself ascending but I can also feel the floor boards give, as if moveable or made of two sets of flooring, giving under my feet. From the warm brown-elbow curve of its banister I can see the landscape far away below through the windows (one of those latch-switching push-up-and-down types). I like this stealing about in these spaces of clean polished wood. But I'm not alone--the owner of the place, an anxious woman with a pressed-in face who doesn't look me in the eye complains about me to her young companion. She's complaining that the house is open but not "open to visitors" in this season because summer is a "small time". I apologise and leave, walking towards the sea-front.

I turn left (I'm the girl again in a frock). I turn left from the white-gabled house with the fired-up sea riding its back, with the sea-light straining its banisters. Around the corner, a different street. I see a tall strong man, very tall and splendid with height and frames of muscles. His skin is as fresh oil out of the ground, carrying two tar-painted poles that he single-handedly throws across the road with such force the poles skid across the ground together and then lie very still against the wall that ends the barrier of black road in front of an industrial workshop, its windows black-grimed; inside, a clean draughtsman's table. In this old shop without sun or wind, the draughtsman lets me see his hand, just the fingers that hold the red pencil, the kind editors use to draw borders we shouldn't cross.