He came in after the six o'clock news. I knew the time exactly becase they had read the weather and they predicted rain. He lay down on the floor near the glass doors that face the pool and he didn’t move.

I stare at him, a bundle of dirty, discoloured rags smelling of ancient urine, with long dark legs tucked in a foetal position. I couldn’t see his face because he had pulled a sort of hood over his head. In fact, I didn’t even know if he were breathing and that really gave me a start. I mean, what if he were dead? What would I tell Susan? A black man walked into our house after the six o'clock news and lay down and died on the Persian rug?

I tiptoed to where he lay. His robes had been full and lustrous once. Now the threads barely held together. There were ulcerated wounds on his legs that coiled like ravenous snakes devouring themselves. His belly was distended tight as a football. He was breathing, not evenly, but in little shudders, like a child who cries and cries, then cannot cry any more.

I touched him. There were no muscles in his legs, which were like two long burnt sticks projecting from a dying fire. 'Water?' I whispered.

From beneath the layers of robes, there was a flutter of movement. He was shaking his head. He was saying no.

Well, that took me aback. Here's this man, this African, who arrives in my living room just after the news, who collapses in a corner and then doesn’t want any water. Sustenance, I thought. What do you feed a man if he's starving? We use the microwave and Susan usually prepares ahead. She's on a Middle Eastern kick at the moment so there was Afghan lamb and Turkish dumplings in the freezer but I knew that wouldn’t do. I knelt next to the man and lifted him so his head rested against my shoulder into the skull of his face. 'Soup.'

This time he nodded and as he did so he opened his eyes. I suppose they seemed large because the rest of his face was so thin, wasted to a point like a triangle. You see them all the time on TV, those faces, the big-headed children with hunger-shrunken frames, the mothers' withered breasts hanging slackly to their waists, the men who move like skeletons. And the eyes that do not blink but stare at the camera, at the person behind the camera, the well-fed European, the image of the prospect of hope.

He was so light in my arms, I could have carried him like a baby.

Bed, I thought, he should be lying down. Then I pictured our bedroom. The sheets were sprinkled with bouquets of roses and the pillows were ladled with lace like dollops of frothy white cream. Even the curtains wore ribbons. Susan said it was for summer, it answered the light. I looked at the man. 'I'll get you upstairs,' I said.

I remembed my mother mashing vegetables for my siblings. I boiled up the leeks and pumpkin and carrot, and pureed them with chicken stock. I found a Beatrix Potter spoon with a mouse dressed in a pinafore and I took it upstairs with a cup of weak tea.

The man rested against the clouds of white lace and linen, dark as a shadow of suffering, real as the six o'clock news. He smiled at me. At least, I think it was a smile. He drew his lips back over his teeth, which were extraordinarily white, and large, and perfect. It did something to his eyes and they lost their passive watchfulness. He appeared to see properly for the first time.

'Nathan,' I said, meaning me.

His words were foreign, incomprehensible. He could have been saying 'Yes,' or 'please', or 'Help me'. He may have been telling me his name, or about his family, or his homeland. His voice was mellifluous, flowing with gentle persistence while I settled myself on the bed and began to feed him. He wanted to talk more than to eat. He wanted to tell me about himself and I, not understanding, smiling, nodding, spooned nourishment in the pauses of his story.

Afterwards, I watched him sleep, lids flickering from the nightmares endlessly behind his eyes. He was a young man, but starving had aged him, his youth savaged by its clear, sharp lines. His shoulders were broad and once he must have carried weight, and flesh and muscle. Perhaps he herded cattle. Perhaps he stood witth the cattle by the river at sunset, and watched water birds arise, and hears the grass singing in the wind. There may have been no more in his days that that.

I did not look forward to washing him. Or to Susan arriving home and asking why there was an emaciated African in our matrimonial bed. His smell had decreased, or perhaps I noticed it less.

I thought of the Celine Dion CD I'd ordered which Susan had promised to pick up. There was the wine to decant and the salad to dress. I thought of it as I sat on the bed and watched my visitor breathe.

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