The Second Chance Café in Carlton Square

by Lilly Bartlett

  ‘Okay, I won’t worry… But you will have everything delivered?’

  ‘Carina mia, you should listen to the great Ravi Shankar. “Worry is the enemy of love.”’

  Yeah, well Ravi wasn’t about to open his café without any coffee. ‘I don’t need to love coffee, Pablo, I just want to make sure it’s delivered in time.’

  His smile makes the Mona Lisa look like an open book.

  ‘Well, anyway, Lou and Joseph should be here soon,’ I tell him, checking my phone. ‘Can I get you a cup of tea while we wait? Sorry there’s no coffee. That’s why you’re here!’

  ‘I am fine, thank you.’ He runs his index fingers along his eyebrows, in case a hair has dared to move out of place.

  ‘You probably don’t drink tea,’ I say.

  ‘I am Italian.’ He couldn’t sound more insulted by my offer.

  All right, steady on, Pablo, I’m only suggesting tea.

  He goes back to staring at his reflection and I go back to panicking.

  This sounded easy when I first thought of it: open a café, train kids to serve good coffee, tea and food. Now I’ve got the café. I’ve got the kids, when they turn up. There’s just the small issue of the coffee, the tea and the food.

  The catering company that’s supplying the Gaggia is also supplying Pablo. The days of sprinkling a few granules into hot water are long gone. Now, everyone supposedly wants fancy coffee from the other side of the world. If it’s not harvested from an Indonesian cat’s poo or a Thai elephant’s dung or from a tiny volcanic island visited by Napoleon (though presumably not pooed by him), they don’t want it.

  I can’t see Auntie Rose and her ladies enjoying coffee that’s already gone through one digestive tract before it gets to theirs. But obviously I needed help, so I’ve got Pablo.

  I’ve asked him to stick with Italian coffee, which pleased him down to the ground. Ha ha. Ground. Get it?

  At least it’s starting to look more like a café than a boozer in here, with all the furniture painted in mismatched pastels and the chairs covered in flowered oilcloth (thanks to Mum). Out of respect for old Carl, Elsie and history, I’ve left the booths stripped back to the bare wood, but we ended up staining the ugly rough floorboards throughout. Now they look like ugly rough stained floorboards, but no one will notice as long as there’s lots of foot traffic.

  ‘Yo, am I late?’ Joseph calls as he saunters through the door in front of Lou. ‘It was ten o’clock, yeah? Wassup, I’m Joseph.’ He pumps Pablo’s hand. ‘You’re the coffee dude? Sick job, bruv.’

  He’s still in his brother’s suit and tie, which makes it seem odd that he’s speaking like that and flicking air snaps at us.

  ‘Lou, Joseph, this is Pablo. He’s our coffee consultant.’ I’ve got to bite down my smirk as I say this, but, really, it’s a bit over the top, isn’t it?

  ‘How come you’re dressed like an undertaker?’ Lou asks Joseph, assessing him from beneath her blue fringe.

  Joseph clearly doesn’t think much of Lou’s dress sense either. ‘Yo, this is how professional people dress. Take lessons from the master.’ He straightens the fat knot on his tie. ‘No-hopers need not apply.’

  Lou doesn’t shift expression but shoves her hands into her sweatshirt pockets.

  ‘Besides, I dress like a professional because I’m the Professor,’ he says.

  Lou scoffs. ‘You can’t give yourself a nickname, you muppet.’

  ‘Do you two know each other already?’ They shake their heads. ‘Really? Because I usually like to know someone for at least ten minutes before ripping into them. You can both wear whatever you want, as long as it’s clean and presentable.’

  It’ll be hard enough training them without enforcing a dress code too. I don’t care if Joseph wants to look like an undertaker or a professor or a circus clown, frankly.

  ‘We can start whenever you’re ready,’ I tell Pablo.

  He tears his eyes away from his reflection to say, ‘So now we begin. Today I will open your eyes and your hearts. You will learn to love the coffee, to speak its language, to listen as it whispers its secrets to you. It will dance for you, it will caress you, it will transport you to another world. There is a sacred bond between the barista and his machine. You love it and it will love you back. But only after you have mastered the bean. Today we begin the journey together.’ He aims his prayer hands at each of us and bows.

  Lou’s mouth hangs open. ‘Mate, it’s only a hot drink.’

  She sounds challenging, but I can see the flash of humour in her expression. I wonder how many people look that closely, though?

  Pablo puts his hands over his heart. ‘It hurts me to hear these things. If you do not trust the process, the machine will not dance for you. It will not share its secrets. I cry for the bean.’

  Puhlease. He’d never cry for the bean. He couldn’t stand the puffy eyes.

  At two hundred quid for Pablo’s instruction, that machine had better dance for us. It doesn’t have to win Strictly, but it should at least give us a tango that would make Len Goodman proud.

  Pablo steers us to the Gaggia. Its buttons, knobs and handles are just as intimidating as when I last looked at it. ‘Have you ever made coffee before?’ he asks.

  Lou says, ‘Only instant. That Nescafé’s not bad.’

  Pablo shudders for his whole culture. ‘I don’t mean…’ He closes his eyes in pain. ‘… freeze-dried coffee. I mean proper espresso. THIS is real coffee.’

  With a dramatic wave of his hand – actually, you can assume everything Pablo does is going to be dramatic – he pulls several sacks of beans from his satchel. Looking faintly orgasmic as he inhales from the first sack, he says, ‘Smell the potential. Do you smell it?’

  ‘I smell it,’ Joseph says with a noisy sniff.

  The beans do smell delicious, and I’m sure Pablo has a process, but I’m anxious to get to the part where coffee comes out of the little metal spout. We can’t serve our customers coffee smells.

  But Pablo will not be rushed. He explains all about the proper grind, steam temperature and exactly how many grams of beans go into each shot. I’m starting to nod off when, finally, he wants us to touch the machine.

  He demonstrates. ‘It is not that difficult,’ he says, grinding the beans. Then he spoons the grounds into the filter, levels it off and tamps it down. He does this all with the kind of precision that makes the space shuttle look easy to launch. And we haven’t even started on the milk yet.

  We try copying him.

  ‘Like this?’

  ‘No, carina mia, like this.’

  ‘Like this?’

  ‘No, no, try again, like this.’

  ‘Like this?’

  ‘No, like this.’

  ‘Like this?’

  ‘No, like this!’

  We go on (like this) for two hours. Pablo looks like he’s about to risk those puffy eyes having a little sob in the corner, but finally we manage to coax out something that tastes like espresso.

  By the time Pablo leaves, we’ve made enough coffee to fuel an army marching into battle. He’s promised to return if we need him, like an over-caffeinated Nanny McPhee. And I get the feeling we will need him. I wouldn’t say the Gaggia and I are friends yet, but we’ve got a tentative understanding.

  ‘Well, that was fun,’ Lou says, shrugging into her sweatshirt. ‘Let’s be sure to do it again sometime.’ She pretends to stab herself in the tummy.

  ‘We aren’t finished yet,’ I say. ‘We have to practise. Don’t we want to be sure we can do it when we actually open?’

  ‘Yeah, Lou, don’t be so lazy,’ Joseph says. ‘I’m here for you, boss.’

  ‘You don’t have to call me boss.’

  ‘We can always keep some Nescafé out back,’ Lou suggests. ‘Honestly, it doesn’t taste bad.’

  Don’t think I haven’t thought of that. ‘Hopefully we won’t need it. Lou, do you want to be the customer or the barista first? We’ll take turns taking the orders and making
and serving the coffee. You remember how Pablo did it?’

  ‘I do!’ Joseph says. ‘I’ll go first. Can I? I can be first, yeah?’

  Lou shrugs. ‘Knock yourself out.’

  I’m intrigued and a little scared by her. She seems so self-contained, older than her seventeen years. I know she needs this job – she said so in her interview – but the question is: why? Does she just need the money like any other normal teenager, or is there something else?

  I know it’s still early days, but already the differences between them are stark. Joseph’s got all the enthusiasm and Lou’s probably got all the skill. I just hope they draw even by the time we open.

  Joseph goes behind the bar to wait for instructions. ‘Lou, pretend you’re a customer,’ I say, ‘and order anything we’ve practised today. Joseph, treat Lou like a real customer, not like Lou, okay?’

  ‘Yes, madam, what would you like?’ he says, imitating Pablo’s prayer hands.

  Lou thinks for a moment. ‘A half-caff double-shot no-foam fat-free latte.’

  ‘Boss!’ Joseph whines. ‘Tell her she can’t do that.’

  ‘Sorry, Joseph. She’s the customer. Did you write it down? Lou, that’s cruel.’

  ‘The customer is always right,’ she says.

  I go behind the bar to help Joseph, who’s starting to sweat. ‘Lou, find a table, please. Joseph will bring your order when it’s ready.’

  She looks doubtfully at all the pastel before scooting into a booth. ‘Those are nice.’ She takes one of Mum’s fancy teapots off the shelf above her head, turning it over to look at the maker’s name. ‘You’ve got a lot of these.’

  ‘More than twenty. They’re all my mum’s. She’s got a thing for old Staffordshire teapots. There’s not really room for them at home so she’s letting me use them to decorate in here. I’m not sure about using them for the customers, though. I’d hate to break one.’

  ‘Why have them if you don’t use them? You may as well sell them otherwise. They’re probably worth something. Have you checked? I could look online for you.’

  Alarm bells start ringing. I don’t want Lou valuing my mother’s teapot collection. What if that’s why she’s in trouble with the Old Bill? She might have been arrested for fencing fancy teapots. And I’ve plonked her right in the middle of another potential heist. ‘They’re quite fragile,’ I tell her. ‘I promised Mum we’d keep them on the shelf.’

  That’s a lie, but she takes the hint and puts the teapot back. Now I’m worried they’ll get nicked.

  Joseph finally gets the coffee right after the third go, but the whole order takes about ten minutes. Which is fine if we’re only planning to have one customer at a time in the café. ‘Good,’ I tell him. ‘We’ll work on that some more, okay? Go give Lou her coffee.’

  Carefully he carries the cup to her table.

  She sends him back for a spoon.

  ‘Certainly, madam, anything you want.’ He gives her the spoon with a flourish.

  ‘And a serviette? You’ve spilled a drop here.’

  He trudges back to the bar for serviettes. ‘Anything else?’ he calls.

  ‘No.’

  He brings the serviette.

  ‘Except sugar.’

  ‘Boss!’

  ‘Lou, thank you for making the important point that we’ve got to anticipate the customer’s needs. Now it’s your turn. Up here, please.’

  Joseph can’t stop grinning about their role change.

  ‘What do you want?’ Lou asks him.

  ‘That’s how you ask a customer for their order?’ I say. ‘I thought you said you were used to looking after people. Maybe you could be nicer.’

  ‘This is me being nicer.’

  ‘Then pretend you’re talking to Father Christmas. Be that nice.’

  ‘I’ll have the same as you,’ Joseph says. ‘Half-caff no-foam fat-free latte, only don’t make the coffee too hot and I’ll have a triple shot. I’ll just be over here when it’s ready.’

  He strolls to a table, brushes off the seat and sits down.

  Lou’s just about to start the grind when her phone starts ringing. ‘Yeah? Okay. No, don’t. I will.’ Hanging up she says, ‘I’ve gotta go.’

  ‘But we’re not finished yet. We’re still training.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but I’ve got to. Really, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Are you okay, Lou? You look a bit–’

  She rushes from the café.

  Frantic.

  ‘I hope she’s not going to do that all the time,’ says Joseph. ‘It’s hard to keep good help these days. But I can still get my coffee, yeah boss?’ He nods towards the Gaggia, sending me off to make my trainee’s half-caff no-foam fat-free not-too-hot triple-shot latte.

  Chapter 6

  I’m welling up again. This has been happening all the time lately. It doesn’t even have to be one of those appeals on telly about the plight of orphaned children. An M&S food advert will do it. I made the mistake of watching Four Weddings and a Funeral the other day and it took me hours to recover.

  Get hold of yourself, Emma, it’s only bunting. ‘A bit higher if you can,’ I tell Kelly.

  She stretches from the top step of the ladder. ‘I’m as high as I can go.’ She nails in the tail of the bunting. ‘Which means it’s as high as it can go. It looks good, Em.’ She climbs down. ‘Really good.’

  I glance around my nearly-decorated café. It’s hard to remember what it was like when I first walked in here. That was just before the wedding, nearly two years ago, when I was searching for a loo option on Carlton Square to keep my in-laws from having to squat behind the bushes at the reception. It was nondescript from the outside – clearly an old pub but long unused as one – with a few tables and chairs scattered inside and only a Daily Specials blackboard to hint that it had recently tried to be a café.

  Not that I was thinking of being a business owner then. I’d had quite enough on my plate – an eat-all-you-like buffet piled with second helpings and a big fat bap teetering on top. Besides, I was still naïve enough to think that I could find a job to fit around my soon-to-be-born twins. Like I’d be able to stash them in my office drawer and take them out for a feed when I had my cup of tea for elevenses.

  But how was I supposed to get interviews, let alone go to them, when I didn’t even have time for a bath?

  They say people often invent things to solve a problem they have. If that’s true, then most inventors are probably new mothers.

  There I was, at the mercy of two very demanding people who were at least fifteen years too young to be left on their own. I wanted work using the degree I’d just spent five years studying for. And I was running 24-hour room service for the twins anyway, so I knew something about catering for tough customers.

  The idea came to me as Daniel and I sat at one of those outside cafés on the South Bank where you can people-watch for hours. Just a little further down the path along the river from the spot where he’d asked me to marry him, actually. Not that we were re-enacting an anniversary or anything. I guess we were just there enjoying being happy. The twins were still breastfeeding which, I’d only learn after the fact, were the easy days. Have boobs, will travel, that was my motto then. Now we need at least two bags full of gear for even the shortest of outings.

  I haven’t been to the South Bank since, come to think about it. I barely manage Uncle Colin’s pub now, and that’s just around the corner.

  Anyway, the children were snoozing, giving us precious minutes to enjoy the rare winter sun and even speak in full sentences. Daniel was just starting to wonder if it might be better for him to stay home so that I could put my degree to good use, when it occurred to me that instead of looking for a workplace to accommodate our family, I might be able to create one locally. And wasn’t there that old pub on the very square where we lived?

  It was just a whisper of an idea, but the more I thought about it, the more sense it started to make. Luckily the vicar who drinks at Uncle Colin’s has some inf
luence with our councillor, who also drinks there. Everyone’s better off not knowing the details about how he convinced the councillor to give us the pub’s lease. Let’s just say the vicar can be very persuasive when he wants to be. As an ex-con turned Godly, let’s also say I wouldn’t cross him.

  Now it really does feel like a café in here – cosy and welcoming. We don’t even need the lights on if it’s sunny. The big old-fashioned paned-glass windows all along the front flood the room with light that’s almost rosy. And when it’s dim outside, the opaque glass wall sconces cast a yellowy glow. Even before we’ve served our first slice of cake, it feels like a vintage tearoom. And once we start brewing the hot drinks, it should stop smelling like fresh paint.

  Mum and I went back and forth about the colours for the tables and chairs. She wanted pinks and blues to go with the flowered oilcloth she put on the seats. I’ve always been more partial to lilac and mint, so we compromised and used all the colours. It looks a little like Cath Kidston exploded in here, but the strings of bunting criss-crossing the ceiling and the different pastel patterns on the flags all add to its higgledy-piggledy welcome.

  Mum sewed that bunting herself. It was one of her contributions to the wedding (cue more sniffles). That and my dress, which had been hers, handmade by my gran.

  Kell peers at my face. ‘Are you crying?’

  God, what is wrong with me? ‘Just a little misty. I guess I’m overly emotional. This is starting to seem like a big deal.’

  ‘It’s not a big deal. It’s a huge deal! I’d be cacking myself if I were you.’ She picks up the bags that had the bunting in them. ‘It’d be one thing if I failed to keep the fishmonger’s going, you know, a hundred years of family history and all, but at least that would have had a good run till I killed it.’

  ‘Not helping, Kell.’

  She pulls out her hair tie to redo her ponytail. She’s got really nice hair – shimmery straight and light brown with a fringe that never goes wonky – but she always keeps it tied up. ‘And it’s not just about you, right?’ she goes on, as if I need reminding. ‘What about your trainees? You said yourself, the little bleeders need you. You can’t fail them.’