That was a jarring discontinuity with my memories of childhood: on a comparable Tuesday afternoon in 2005, say, the cars would have been purring past, an endless flow. The housing stock had changed, too. The timber-frame houses I remembered, each nestling in its half-acre of lawn, were mostly abandoned, boarded up and in various states of decay, or they had gone altogether, leaving vacant lots behind, as if they had been spirited up into the sky. A few had been replaced by squat poured-concrete blocks with narrow windows: the modern style, fortresses against hurricanes, each an integral block, seamless from its roof to its deep foundations.

The air was bright and hazy, and the wet heat settled on me like a blanket. I was soon sweating, and regretting my decision to walk. There was an unpleasant smell in the air, too, a stink of salty decay, as if some immense sea animal was rotting on the beach. But it couldn’t be that, of course; there were no animals in the sea.

At last I bore down on my mother’s house, my childhood home. It was one of the few of the old stock still standing. But it was surrounded by heaps of sandbags, all slowly decaying. Big electric screens shimmered around the yard, designed to keep the mosquitoes at bay, and on the roof a wagon-wheel home turbine languidly turned, barely stirred by the breeze.

And here came my big brother, around the corner of the house, large as life, paintbrush in hand. “Michael! So you showed your face.” Instant criticism, but what could you expect? John wiped his palm ostentatiously on his coveralls, leaving a silvery streak, and held his big hand out to shake mine.

I shook back, cautiously. John was a big man, built like a football player. He always towered over me. A couple of years older than me, he’s balding, and his brown eyes are hard, set in a broad face. My features come from my mother’s side, but where she was always tall, pretty, with gray eyes like smoke, I’m small, round-shouldered, dark. Intense, people sometimes say. I’m more like my uncle George, in fact. My mother always said I reminded her of England. I got her gray eyes, though, which looked good in the fleeting years when I was almost handsome.