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Aston has helped Davies to escape from a cafe brawl and brought him back to his scruffy one-room flat nearby. The room is filthy and full of junk but as Davies' only alternative is sleeping rough on the streets during a rainstorm he finds it perfectly desirable. Davies overtly expresses his racist views when told that there is a family of Indians, or 'blacks' as he calls them, living next door. He also has obsessional fears of draughts, gas leaks, and ill-fitting shoes. His obsessions however can be seen as a consequence of his empty restless life, drifting without any home or friends from one doss-house to another, and without any need to socialise at all. He is a loner. He is nominally en route to Sidcup to collect his “papers” and establish his real identity, but it is clear that he will never arrive there. Aston fiddles throughout the play with the task of putting up a shed – a task that he never quite achieves. Mick, his brother, is the owner of the flat and a glib fatalist who dreams of converting the room into a fashionable penthouse apartment- throughout the play, he plays psychological games the hapless Davies, who he views with a complete lack of respect, switching rapidly between open hostility and unnerving friendliness in what seems like an attempt to keep the tramp as confused and uncomfortable as possible. It emerges that Aston has suffered from mental illness and received electric shock treatment from which he has not recovered – he has headaches all the time.