‘I want a second coffee,’ he said.

‘You got it.’

I was proud of my capacity to provide for him because I had not actually dispensed any cash last night. He nodded, and unleashed me into the world.

The sky had been uncovering inscrutable new blues and the walk to the coffee place was washed with sweet warm light. Someone on some street had put a deckchair on the corner, then a neighbouring house had added a large candelabra, a pile of bricks and an old dresser whose smudged mirror had cracked. Now the streets were filled up with free goods and easy pickings, a hard rubbish week that had crossed no councillor’s desk.

I felt like a neighbourhood man, someone who might at any moment acquire plants and kids and cars. This was the exact kind of person who was liable to mouth something that caused us headphone-wearers to stop and say ‘Huh?’, but despite the friendly weather, we all kept to ourselves, the friendliest of all possible outcomes.

‘What’s Brunswick going to look like in a billion years,’ I said when I got home.

‘Good question,’ said Dan, took the coffee from my hand, looked at me briefly, nodded, and sat back down at the kitchen table.

He looked deep into his phone; I could tell from the colours it was just a gossip site. I kept looking at him, to show him that the conversation was still going, but he was busily pretending that I wasn’t in his line of sight.

‘For instance,’ I said, ‘it might look exactly the same, or completely different. And those are just the two most extreme possibilities.’

He looked at me. I didn’t say anything. He looked back at the phone.

In fairness to Dan, we had officially reserved the kitchen table as our ‘reading space’, not our ‘conversation space’, a zoning designation that had predated our move. Over the eighteen months in which we’d shared this home it had remained one of our most popular and comfortable decisions. But could it not be argued, on this particular day, that I had ventured out last night exactly on his say-so, had now brought him a coffee, and could expect a debrief? I pictured Lachlan and Chris L two suburbs over, in their unimaginable apartment, a shiny concrete void, doing whatever they did with their own Sunday mornings. Maybe the American would even skulk out of Chris L’s room, his linen shirt still more attractively rumpled.

I went and showered, wetting and drying, came back downstairs, and caught Dan coming out of the kitchen.

‘About last night,’ I said, moving boldly towards him.

He squinted at me. ‘Oh no,’ he said.

‘Oh yes,’ I said.

He was frozen in the doorway.

‘Did you have a good time?’ he said.

‘No,’ I said, and leaned in. ‘It was so embarrassing. You know I don’t want to be friends with Chris L. You don’t even like him.’

‘So?’ he said. ‘We’re stuck with him.’