His face comes back at me that night. Troubled bloodshot eyes, a broken front tooth. In retrospect, I realize I’d been lucky. He could have taken the truck. The keys had been in the ignition and he could have been long gone before I got anywhere near him. So why hadn’t he? Enough basic humanity not to abandon a woman alone in the desert? Or had there been others, hidden away in the darkness – too many to climb into the truck without being heard? Or did it all just come down to a question of priorities? How close to starvation do you have to be to choose food over transport? I close my eyes, but his image remains. I’ve never seen this man before yet he seems so familiar to me. Something in his face strikes a chord. Then I realize it’s not those hawkish features literally, but the expression in them. It’s that look of fear and desperation I’ve seen before. I’ve seen it in the face of a Mexican boy holding an empty gallon water bottle by the side of the road, I’ve seen it in the eyes of people staring out of the windows of green immigration buses, and, God knows, in Temerosa, I get to see it every day.

13

A brand-new Chevy Silverado, unusually clean and polished for the area, draws up outside the cabin early Tuesday afternoon. My visitor is a lanky man of about fifty years old wearing denims with a pronounced crease down each leg and a pressed shirt cinched at the collar by a jewelled flag with two strands of black leather hanging from it.

‘Mrs Coleman?’ he queries as I open the door.

‘Yes, hello?’

There’s an initial look of surprise at the bare feet and cracked black toenails courtesy of a recent Emmy makeover, but he swiftly recovers.

‘Jeff Hogan, ma’am.’ He removes his hat. ‘Your neighbour down the way.’

I’d been in the middle of a kitchen blitz, a weekly attempt to quell the anarchy of the tinned-can cupboard and impose a more militarized discipline on open packets of spaghetti, which most of the time tend to slouch untidily against the walls of the cupboard like soldiers on the verge of desertion. Every surface is covered with packets of cranberries, bags of flour and rice all waiting to be re-stationed, so it’s with some reluctance that I shake his proffered hand and invite him in.

‘How nice. I didn’t know we had a neighbour.’

‘Fifteen miles north-east, just past the turning to Fishsprings. You’ve probably seen it. Beautiful place, view over the Patagonia Mountains. One of the finest properties around.’

I murmur something appropriate. I have no idea what Jeff Hogan’s business is with me, but I have a sinking feeling it’s not going to be over nearly quickly enough.

He stands awkwardly in the kitchen. ‘So, now, would Mr Coleman be in?’