February turns into March. The sun rises noticeably hotter now. In the hills, one or two rogue cacti sprout early flowers. Work progresses on the town. Duval splits the crew into two groups. Half remain on the boarding house, the other half begin to strip out the rest of the smaller cabins. Duval is out of town much of the time, collecting supplies and returning at the end of the day, his pickup weighed down with sheets of drywall, slabs of stone, endless lengths of wood and rusted tin for the roofs.

When he’s not around, the atmosphere in the town is noticeably less strained and whilst I’d be hard pushed to describe the relationship between myself and the workers as close, they’ve got used to my pottering around the building site. In an effort to keep one step ahead of what’s going on, I spend many an illuminating evening boning up on Infestation, Insulation and Ventilation from You Can Do It! The Complete B&Q Step-by-step Book of Home Improvement. Then there are the eight-inch-thick catalogues of fixtures and fittings picked up from the hardware store. For every wall plate, for every switch, for every plug or cupboard handle, there is a multitude of choices. You can buy any of them apricot with antebellum roses, you can buy them with intricately carved eagle heads, you can buy them in patriotic red, white and blue or with dramatic Arizona landscapes glazed over their concave surfaces, but the one thing you cannot do is buy them plain bloody white.

I’ve invested in a small camera from Wal-Mart and everywhere I go, I photograph stable doors, the shape of a window, the roof of an old barn so I can copy the details. More and more frequently, though, like a third-rate spy doing reconnaissance on a newly discovered military base, I find myself levelling the Olympus’s powerful zoom at the town from behind the trunk of an oak tree or a strategic boulder – not because I want to catch the workers sneaking an extra break, but because the Mexicans are camera shy and it’s only through subterfuge of this kind that I can keep some kind of record of progress. Every week I pin up ‘before and after’ photos and occasionally I get a sickening feeling in my stomach that if buildings really are women, then renovating the whole of Temerosa is going to be as tough as taking a group of abused and battered housewives and restoring them to their prom-night innocence.