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airport—Sapphire Island not doing any such thing. They won’t hire many workers from this island either, they’ll bring skilled labor in from outside. All they will do is pave over our land, and ruin our waters, and develop all the life out of Long Pond Cay.”
    â€œBut we’ll fight them!” I said.
    Grand lifted his chin as he drove through the darkness, and his beard jutted again. “Oh yes,” he said. “We’ll fight.”
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    The petition took over our lives for a few days after that. Everyone who was against the Sapphire Island development took to the roads, or hovered outside shops and restaurants, collecting signatures and arguing. The list of signatures grew longer and longer. The blond American put together a separate petition for the boat people, because they weren’t Bahamian citizens. He specially wanted to find boat owners who were scientists or experts in pollution, so that they would be offering the government advice worth taking seriously. You could see him buzzing round the harbor every day from boat to boat in his grey inflatable dinghy, with his equally blond wife.
    The news of the petition even reached Nassau, and a reporter from one of the newspapers came out for the day to interview Grand and Mr. Ferguson and the rest. She had a camera, and she came to the house and took pictures of Grand and Grammie in among the banana trees on the farm. It was a good year for bananas; we were going to have a handsome crop. She wanted to have Lou and me in the pictures too, but Lou got very upset and was on the edge of having a seizure, so I took him away.
    Lots of people didn’t agree with Grand and his friends, and some just didn’t seem to care. “Don’t ask me, man,” said one young man coming out of the liquor store. He was a dude, with a big gold chain round hisneck. “I ain’t signing no petition. What I care about Long Pond Cay? I never go near that end of the island.”
    Grand couldn’t resist arguing with people like that, trying to make them face responsibility, and sometimes he succeeded in shaming one of them into adding his name to the list. But he never got far with Mr. Smith, the father of my friends Kermit and Lyddie, who was firmly in favor of Sapphire Island and any other kind of development. Whenever they passed in the street, Mr. Smith would lean out of the window of his cab and call, “Opportunity, Mr. Peel! Got to face the future! Can’t let opportunity pass our children by!”
    Grand would mutter crossly to himself, “Opportunity for who?”
    When they had almost as many signatures as they felt they could get, Grand and the other organizers managed to persuade someone in government to see them, and they flew to Nassau again. Grammie drove him to the airport in the truck, and Lou and I went too. “Good luck, Grand,” I said in his ear as I kissed him good-bye. “Please save Long Pond.”
    Grand smiled at me. “You save those bananas from the birds, and I’ll see what I can do,” he said.
    But I couldn’t save the bananas, though it wasn’t the birds I had to worry about.
    The morning after Grand left, Lou and I went up early to the farm, to scare birds and do some weeding. We took sandwiches and water, so we wouldn’t have tocome back for a while. The farm’s a big piece of cleared land about fifteen minutes’ walk from our house, with a fence round it to keep the goats out. It’s in a kind of broad hollow, where the soil is good, though there’s scrubland all round it. Nobody lives nearby, so it has to be checked every day to make sure we get the things that are ready to be picked, before the birds do. We had two sacks with us for the tomatoes, because they were doing really well; Grammie got a great price for them at the market.
    The path to the farm winds about a bit, through scrubby bushes and big trees, and Lou was running ahead of me. I was