Bean Curd and Peach Melba

Every Thursday without fail the man in the hat ate bean curd and hard-boiled eggs, two, with dry toast and Peach Melba jam. He drank pulpy orange juice sieved through cheesecloth and then poured into a cocoa cup, the type his mother fed him mashed up eggs in when he was little, or littler. After this eggy repast he would go for a shirt jaunt, usually in shirtsleeves and pea green Wellington’s, and sort out the day’s itinerary. He allowed himself one cigarette, filter-tipped Cameo, menthol being cooler on the throat, smoking like a man about to be hedged down by a firing squad. He exhaled through his nose, a web of smoke issuing from each hole, and inhaled through his mouth, the cigarette tamped between his lips like a baby’s pacifier. When he’d finished the cigarette, which generally took 27 inhales and an equal amount of exhales, he would snub it into the pavement like a bug, ash and filter paper sticking to the bottom of his Wellington.