ANN

I liked to watch her face breaking through the surface in the pool, the big blue pool at the club where I played every day during summer holidays. Helena, my grandmother's housekeeper, sat beneath the coloured parasol, while I swam with Luke, and the other children who lived on the refinery camp: swam, and ran about on the hot concrete, and threw coins in the water and dived down to find them, and jumped from the tall diving board.

From there I could see the refinery, the burning lilac flame. I could see the dark green places full of clumps of bamboo. I could see the shimmering lake and the brown bank where vultures made a black crowd. Before we hit the water, we yelled out our names or the name of someone famous who we'd like to be. Sometimes we screamed because the diving board was a skyscraper and the pool below a faraway city. Helena would look up from her bible and say, "Stop that noise, be quiet." And we'd stop for a while, but then someone would throw a coin into the pool, or push someone in, and we'd start shouting again. This would go on all day, until we were told to come in for lunch, or it was time to go home. By afternoon, my skin was wrinkled like an old person's.

I knew Ann was older, by at least three years. Mostly, she sat, in her orange bikini, in a wrought-iron chair, her legs propped on another chair, reading a book. Sometimes, she walked to the edge of the pool, made a steeple with her hands and dived in. Or she swam to the other side, or to the other side and back again. But she never stayed in the pool for long. If we were playing in the deep end, she swam in the shallow. And if we were playing in the shallow end, she swam where the water was deep.

Her name was Ann Sanchez. I would never have spoken to her if I hadn't found her necklace. I was looking for a tencent piece when I saw it lying on the grate at the bottom of the pool. I knew it didn't belong to any of us. When I held it up, it sparkled in the sun. Someone said I should keep it. I didn't know what to do. Luke thought I should ask Helena or take it home and ask our mother.

Then I saw her standing by her chair. One hand made a shade over her eyes, the other held on to her hip. Her skin shone like liquorish.

"Hold on a minute," I said to the others, and climbed out of the water. She wrapped a towel around her waist and walked towards me. When I asked if the chain was hers, she looked in the cup of my hand and cocked her head like a bird.

"I've been looking for that for the longest while."

Her voice was soft, tinkling and gentle, like the voice of a stream if a stream could speak. When I dropped the chain into her hand, her full mouth grew wide in a smile, and I thought how large her teeth were. I was about to go back to the shallow end when she asked where I was from.

When I told my mother I had met a girl called Ann at the pool, she asked, as they always ask in Trinidad, if I knew the family name. Sanchez, I said. My mother and grandmother spent the whole evening talking about the Sanchez family they had known when my mother was a child.

So I heard about Mona with the Coca-Cola figure who won a competition for the most beautiful girl in South Trinidad. I heard about Mona's uncle, a teacher who never got married. I heard about her father, who was killed in an automobile accident, and how her mother tried to kill herself by hanging from a light fitting, but someone heard the chair fall, and the rope broke because it was old and frayed. I heard about her mother's lover who lived in Barbados and how he took all her money and threw it away in running a failed fast-food restaurant. This is what happens in Trinidad. You say one name and, next thing, they're talking about the family for hours.

Everyday while the other children played, I sat with Ann. We talked about all sorts of things: music, fashion and film stars. Sometimes I talked about Ireland. I talked about the town where we lived and the rainy beach with coppery rocks. I told her about my father and how he couldn't come to Trinidad because he was starting a new job in a textile company, and that he played drums in a jazz band. Ann said music was good for the soul. She could play the piano up to Grade 4.

She had never had a boyfriend and didn't want to get married until she was at least twenty-five. Her older sisters lived with her mother in London, and they were already talking about getting engaged. She had been to England three times and hoped one day to study music at the Royal College of Music in London. She wanted to compose music for musicals and films. When she talked about this, she moved her hands a lot and her words came in a rushing, energetic way. She liked reading novels, too, novels by Charlotte and Emily Bronte. When she said she wanted to walk on the English moors, walk and walk until it was so dark you couldn't see anymore, I said, it's much too cold. Ann said she couldn't care less if it snowed.

Sometimes we sat on the steps and dangled our legs in the water, or we lay on towels by the side of the pool. We lay on our fronts and faced each other so our words fluttered over the grass. Or we lay on our backs with our arms by our sides and our words went up and seemed to get stuck in the thick, hot air. Sometimes we kept our eyes closed and didn't talk at all.

Ann went home for lunch, but every now and then, when her stepmother, Rosa, was away, and her father, Dr Sanchez, was working at the hospital in Port of Spain, she stayed at the club. Helena said it was okay to go up to the snack bar with Ann. We ordered hamburgers or hot dogs and fries and sweet drinks and brought them back to the table and ate them under our parasol.

One day, we were lying by the pool and Luke was sitting on the diving board eating an ice cream. Ann said she didn't like ice cream but she liked chocolate, especially English chocolate.

I said, "Maybe I can send you some when I go back."

Ann opened her eyes.

"I can put them in one of those special padded envelopes. Mars bars, or Milky Ways, Galaxy, whatever you like."

Ann sat up, and her back made a curve like a bow. She said, "When are you going back?"

I said I wasn't sure but probably sometime soon. I said it in a casual way.

Ann walked to the edge of the pool and dived in. I watched her shape glide through the water to the other side and thought of an arrow passing through air. Then I thought how quickly the summer had passed and how, if I could only wind it back like a movie, I would wind it back to when we met.

That day we went home early. Over lunch, Luke and I listened to my mother and grandmother talk about all the things we had to do before we left. The guava jelly, pepper sauce and pastels had to be made. We had to visit relatives in the city and drive east to see the old house and take pictures of it before it fell down. We had to see the dressmaker, the dentist, a dying aunt I'd never met. There was so much to do. Luke rolled his eyes, and I knew, that like me, he didn't want to do any of those things.

Suddenly Helena was clearing the table, and my grandfather was going to rest. I was thinking about the book I had borrowed from Ann, and wondering if I should read in the verandah or beneath the mosquito net, when my grandmother said, "Why don't you invite her for tea?"

"Who?"

"The Sanchez girl," she said, as though to say, who else could it be? "The Sanchez girl you see at the pool."

So, I rang Ann from the old black phone in the hallway. I said, "Listen, why don't you come for tea?" And she laughed because she was going to call and ask if I wanted to come and have supper at her house. She was going to call, but thought that maybe she should leave it until later, because all now we might be having a rest and she didn't want to disturb us.

"Ann," I said, "you come here because they would all love to meet you. I've been talking about you so much; they can't wait to meet you. It's Ann this and Ann that. And they want to know about your family!"

So, she said yes, but not yes in a way that was polite; she said yes as though it was the most important thing in her whole life.

I was hanging around the kitchen waiting to lick the bowl from the sponge cake when my grandfather came home. He said something about the lazy men on the refinery and how they were only good for two things: making love and dancing. My grandmother made a sshhh sound and put her finger to her lips. In the back room, Helena cleared her throat. I wondered what she thought when she heard him talking like that. I wondered if she hated him, and that, if she did, maybe he should be careful, because Helena knew things my mother and my grandmother didn't know.

Sometimes, when the sky was red, as if the sun had been bleeding, we walked by the long grass and the shimmering lake and Helena told me stories about a terrible woman with a hoof for a foot, and how she took away your soul while you slept. If she took away your soul you might have to spend your whole life looking for it.

"This what make some people restless," she said. "They looking for their soul."

I asked her if that's what made Grandpa that way; that maybe he was trying to find his soul. Helena said no, and then she looked at me in a way I will never forget.

"No,...