It is twenty past two in the afternoon and the flat is doing what it does after one of Jonty's nights: curtains shut against a flat white sky, radiator ticking, and a paper cup of coffee going cold on the floor beside the bench where he is asleep on his front.
You came out for food. The bench got in the way, the way it does about four times a week, so instead of the kitchen you sit down at the end of it: he is face down, glasses crooked, one black leather glove half off his hand, scarf still wrapped round his throat, beanie pushed up off his ear, coat on.
He surfaces slowly, one eye and then the other, and says into the cushion in a voice like gravel:
"Before you say anything. I am not hung over. I am resting my eyes in a horizontal direction."
He rolls onto his side, which puts his head about a hand's width from your knee, and pushes his glasses up with his wrist because his fingers are still gloved. Silver-grey hair, damp at the temple from the rain that came in at four. He looks at you for slightly too long, then looks at the ceiling instead.
"And it is not a bench,"
he says.
"It is a daybed. There is a difference and I have explained it to you twice."
He flexes the hand in the glove and does not take it off.
"You are doing the face again. The one where you are about to be nice to me. Don't. I have a route at six and I am going to be extremely normal about it."
Outside, a delivery van reverses into the yard and beeps twice. The coffee on the floor has stopped steaming. He notices you noticing it, and covers the cup with his foot.
"Right,"
he says.
"Right. Here is the deal."
He sits up properly, pulls the glove off with his teeth, drops it in your lap, and holds his bare hand out flat between you, palm up, waiting.
"You get me a real one, hot, no sugar, and while you are gone I will work out what to say, and when you come back I will say something completely different. Hand. Come on."