The 24-Hour Café

by Libby Page

  Hannah

  She has served hundreds of other kids like them before. That’s how she thinks of them now – kids – even though in reality they are probably in their twenties – not that much younger than her really. The distance between them seems vast, though. Hannah tries to remember the last time she was out at 1 a.m. for any other reason than work. If she doesn’t have a late shift at the café or a gig she prefers a quiet night at home, watching Netflix and relishing being in bed early. Her teenage-self would have been ashamed of her for favouring unflattering pyjamas instead of going out clothes. She can’t remember the last time she went ‘out out’. The thought of a club filled with sweating bodies and music that is not for listening to, but only for drowning out drunken voices, makes her shudder.

  As she watches the group she remembers moving to the city for the first time nine years ago. Suddenly the exhaustion, the disillusion and all the years fall away and she is twenty-one again and Life with a capital L is just about to start.

  *

  She drags a suitcase behind her down the station platform, filled with as many clothes, books and records as she can carry. One wheel is broken and juts out in a different direction to the others (she recalls her mother’s words: ‘If you fill that suitcase any more you’re going to break it’). Together, Hannah and the bag make a swift but wobbly path through the crowds, as though drunk.

  ‘Let me take that for you, Hannah,’ says her father, reaching for the suitcase, but she pulls her arm away.

  ‘I’ve got it, Dad, stop worrying.’

  He throws a glance at her mother that Hannah tries to ignore. She doesn’t need to look at her mother to know her face is pink and swollen. It has been that way since last night – their last meal together as a family. Hannah’s father reaches for her mother’s hand. They walk like that, hand-in-hand behind her as she makes her way to the train. As usual, Hannah took longer to get ready than she thought, so she takes quick, long strides down the platform, listening to the tapping of her mother’s heels as her parents struggle to keep up with her.

  Across Hannah’s shoulders is slung her purple guitar case, its solid weight knocking against her back with the pace of her strides, reminding her of the years of singing lessons and drama classes that have led her to this point.

  ‘Knock’em dead’: she recalls the words of Josephine Wagner, the director of the performance arts degree in Cardiff that Hannah finished just over a month ago. It was their final day and Hannah remembers looking across the hall of young women and a handful of men as Josephine said, ‘You are all going to be stars.’

  For the first time Hannah had wondered whether there was enough space out there for all these newly fledged stars. Standing among the brilliance of her course mates and friends, she felt her own brightness dull to a faint imperceptible glow. Perhaps she should have thought about it before – the reality of her future – but somehow she never had. Not really, not with any clarity. Her judgement was clouded by well-worn clichés and inspirational phrases that she lived off as though they were food. It would all work out. Hard work would pay off. If she wanted it enough, she would make it as a singer, just like she had decided when she was nine years old. Everything would be OK.

  The image of Josephine Wagner crosses her mind again as her phone buzzes in her pocket. It’s a notification from the WhatsApp group of the seven other friends from her course who are heading to London. Four are already there; three are on the same train as Hannah. Clara, Becky and Amy are her closest friends and will be her new flatmates when she arrives in London. A month ago they spent a weekend in London visiting endless flats until they found one they could afford and that wasn’t too damp or dark or above a chicken shop. It is tiny, but it will be Hannah’s first flat in London so she doesn’t care.

  ‘Where are you?’ the message says, ‘We’ve saved you a seat! Don’t miss the train! And we’ve got cava! London, here we come!’

  She feels her confidence returning. It’s like a surging force that flows through her body and fills her up, making her stand taller. It’s the same feeling she gets when she is on stage or perched on a stool with her guitar on her lap, her lips parted in the second before she starts to sing. It’s a confidence instilled by years of stage school, then a drama degree, countless gigs in pubs and village halls, and endless instructions from Josephine and others to ‘smile’ and ‘own your own space’.

  She readjusts her guitar on her back as she reaches coach C.

  ‘This is my coach,’ she says, stopping and turning back to her parents.

  ‘We could have driven you, you know,’ her mother says, ‘You could have taken more of your things that way. And we would have been able to help you settle in.’

  ‘I know,’ replies Hannah, ‘But it’s a long way, you didn’t need to do that. And besides, my room is tiny, I’m not going to have space for that much stuff.’

  Hannah agreed to the smallest room in the flat on the basis that she would pay less rent. It only fits a single bed, a wardrobe and a chest of drawers but she doesn’t care. She doesn’t think she will spend much time in it anyway: she pictures herself exploring the city, attending shows, singing at the gigs she is confident she will line up, and partying with her friends in the clubs she imagines will be a million times better than those in Cardiff.

  Her phone buzzes again and an overhead announcement calls out her train and its departure time – two minutes from now.

  ‘I have to get on, the train’s about to leave.’

  She looks at her parents. Her father still holds her mother’s hand. Hannah notices for the first time that they have dressed up: her mother in a navy A-line dress with white polka dots and a pair of court shoes, and her father (who usually prefers jeans when he is home from work) in chinos and a blue shirt beneath his grey coat. There is one straight crease in her father’s shirt, across his chest; he has a way of ironing creases into his shirts, rather than smoothing them out. Both of her parents are flushed from the dash along the platform and her mother’s neat ponytail has come loose. Watching her parents standing there in their smart clothes waiting to see her off, their fingers locked together, Hannah feels her eyes begin to sting. She had been so excited to leave that she hadn’t really thought about saying goodbye. She had stayed at home during university, choosing to save the money and drive to Cardiff each day instead, so this is her first time leaving home.

  For the past three months Hannah’s bedroom wall has held a large calendar on which she has crossed out the days leading up to today – the day that she leaves. Last night her mother had come in to her room to help her pack and had stared for a long time at the calendar, a large circle drawn around today’s date. Hannah pictures the calendar still pinned to the wall, her bed neatly made and her wardrobe filled with empty clothes hangers.

  She puts down her guitar and reaches for her parents. They wrap their arms around her and the three of them stay like that for a moment, their small family held tightly in each other’s warmth and the smell of each other’s hair and the same washing powder they all use. Hannah realises she can’t remember the brand – she had never thought to properly look. With a sudden feeling of panic, she realises she won’t be able to pick it out in the supermarket (she would be too embarrassed to ask her mother for the name) when she shops for herself in her new home. Her clothes will take on a new smell. She puts her face closer against her mother’s shoulder and breathes deeply.

  ‘OK, I really have to go now,’ she says, pulling herself away from them. Her mother sniffs and pulls a tissue from her sleeve. Her father puts an arm around her shoulder.

  ‘Go get ’em,’ he says, his voice falsely cheerful.

  Hannah picks up her guitar and suitcase and steps onto the train. She doesn’t look out the window as the train pulls away and she heads through the carriage, following the sound of laughter and loud chatter.

  She would never admit it to the girls s
he is about to share cava with on the train, but right now this beginning feels like an ending.

  ‘Hannah!’ shouts a voice and Hannah waves, spotting her friends sitting around a table, suitcases stacked in the racks above them. They are noisy and giggly, and as she walks closer Hannah tries to ignore the sighs of a man in a suit sat just in front of them. There is an empty space waiting for her and this is her tribe. She smiles and Clara, Becky and Amy smile back, no hint of worry or sadness on any of their faces. They spend the journey drinking and talking about what they are going to do in London – the stages they will conquer, the things they will create. Hannah feels herself settle into the optimistic timbre of their voices. Everything will be OK. As the train clatters away from Cardiff they spill cava but don’t care – they barely even notice. There will be more to drink tomorrow. There will be more of everything tomorrow.

  *

  Hannah thinks back to her first few months in London. It had been hard to adjust, but she tried to keep her difficulties hidden. Hers was the faux confidence of a performer; she treated her own life like a show and found that her act of self-assuredness and optimism often convinced even herself that the feelings were real.

  She found a job at the Odeon on Tottenham Court Road, spending her days off attending auditions and trailing around bars handing out CDs of her music, asking if they had slots for a new singer. She banked the ‘no’s like an investment in her future: the more times people said ‘no’, the closer she must be getting to a ‘yes’.

  At first, she relished living in a flat with three of her friends, all performers like her. They ate when they wanted and went out most evenings when they weren’t working. They left dishes piled in the sink for days, enjoying the fact that there were no parents to tell them to wash up. But eventually the carefree lifestyle began to grow tedious. Hannah wanted to cook a proper meal and know there would be clean saucepans for her to use. Although her room was always a mess, she was surprisingly tidy when it came to the communal spaces. She started to resent the fact no one else ever seemed to empty the bins or clean the bathroom. When she brought it up the others said they did do their share, she just never noticed, or that she was being uptight. They started to argue frequently about stupid things. Who last bought toilet roll, who came in late and forgot to lock the front door. But at the time they didn’t seem insignificant and things became so fraught that Clara, Amy and Becky didn’t even feel like friends any more, just annoying people whom she lived with.

  Hannah tries to remember the last time she saw her first flatmates but finds she can’t. After she moved out she kept in touch with them for a while but something in their friendship had been fundamentally altered since living together. She and Becky stayed in touch for the longest – she’d always been particularly fond of the flamboyant, funny actor. But even they drifted in the end, their lives stretching further and further apart until the link between them broke entirely. Facebook informs Hannah that Clara is now married and living in America, Becky is teaching performing arts at a stage school outside of London, and Amy still lives in London, works in marketing and has a one-year-old daughter.

  She’d stayed with the Cardiff girls for a year, then spent the next two years bouncing between places she found on SpareRoom, sharing flats and houses with strangers. Over the years she mastered house sharing, learning to keep her best kitchen supplies and stashes of chocolate in her bedroom and to cook dinner late in the evening so she would have the kitchen to herself. She made the life-changing discovery of earplugs.

  Hannah became friends with a few people in those house shares but also encountered many she was happy to leave behind, like the drummer who practised early in the morning before his day job at a telesales firm, the compulsive liar who convinced her flatmates she was a twin despite being an only child, and the young woman who kept a pet mouse in a cage under her bed (Hannah has had a lifelong phobia of mice).

  And then she’d met Sam. Hannah flinches at the thought of her first serious boyfriend, back when she was twenty-three. She’d dated other guys before, but there had been no one like Sam. No one who’d left quite such an impact. She had never lived with another boyfriend and hasn’t since. That has been one bittersweet consolation in the recent painful break-up with Jaheim. At least she still has her flat, she still has Mona. A fresh stab of pain pierces her as she thinks about Jaheim and wonders what he is doing now. Sleeping, of course, she thinks to herself. She knows she shouldn’t care and shouldn’t let herself think about him at all, but she does.

  ‘What is it?’ asks Pablo, whom Hannah hadn’t noticed leaving the kitchen. He carries a tray of chocolate brownies, fresh from the oven. These early hours can be quiet and Pablo usually fills them by baking, partly in preparation for the day ahead and partly because he loves to bake. If you saw him in the street you might not guess that he can make a chocolate ganache so shiny that you can see your face in it, but over the years Hannah has learnt that the one thing you can rely upon is people’s ability to surprise you.

  Before placing the brownies inside the counter Pablo tears one off and hands it to Hannah.

  She smiles at the simple gesture.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ she says, trying to hide the shake in her voice. He looks at her, his sympathetic face scrunched into a frown. She finds herself talking without meaning to – it’s hard not to when he smiles like that. He makes her think of her father; although they look nothing alike she feels almost as at ease with this Spanish chef as she does with her dad.

  ‘I don’t know why but I was just thinking about my first boyfriend,’ she finds herself saying. Pablo has worked at the café even longer than Hannah and Mona and with his chatty, inquiring nature he knows the ins and outs of their lives almost as if they were his own family. Pablo shakes his head as Hannah continues.

  ‘I haven’t thought about him in ages, but I guess since Jaheim and I broke up, it’s brought it all back really.’

  She finds herself gulping back tears. Even mentioning Jaheim’s name is hard. The pain is mixed with something else, too – embarrassment at another failed relationship. She can’t help but think about all her married friends and the seemingly endless wedding invitations that she receives every year now. Jaheim is gone and she is alone again. To stop her eyes from overflowing she takes a large bite of the chocolate brownie instead. It is delicious and holds back the tears.

  Pablo is nodding now, clutching the brownie tray and shifting his weight from foot to foot.

  ‘You’re better off without them,’ he says in his gentle voice.

  Hannah hasn’t spoken much about Sam to Pablo, and she certainly can’t bring herself to tell him the truth about Jaheim and why they broke up, so it heartens her slightly to know he is on her side without needing to know any of the details.

  ‘My Rosa is never going to have a boyfriend,’ he says fiercely, ‘All trouble. I’ll fight them if I have to.’

  Hannah pictures an aged Pablo fighting off Rosa’s prospective boyfriends and can’t help but laugh – she just can’t imagine the curly-haired baker who wells up over photos of his granddaughter involved in a fight. She then stops herself, remembering suddenly the little she knows about Pablo’s life before he started working in the café. It is so easy to forget that when he started here it was the only job he could find – no one else wanted to hire an ex-convict. Despite his usual openness, he has never told Hannah or Mona what he was in prison for, only that he spent eighteen months there and that it was hell on earth. He is a wonderful chef; Hannah sometimes wonders whether he has stayed here so long because no one else will have him, or out of loyalty to Stella.

  ‘You finish that brownie, chiquita,’ Pablo says, ‘Brownies help everything.’

  Hannah smiles at ‘chiquita’ – she feels far from a young girl – but it’s what he always calls her and Mona. She eats the brownie as instructed and Pablo nods and returns to the kitchen.

  Eventually th
e group of students finish their food and get up to leave, reading the name of their Uber driver and the licence plate out loud. The girls carry their shoes as they head to the door. They walk close to the table of the young man with the rucksack, looking to Hannah as though they might bump into his chair. But they skirt around him and then they are gone, the sound of their carefree young voices ringing in her ears.

  2.00 a.m.

  Dan

  The café is quiet again, the only sign the group were there the half-empty plates and milkshake glasses on the table in the booth that the waitress is currently clearing away. She nearly drops the tray she is carrying but steadies herself against one of the chairs, taking a deep breath before she continues clearing. He notices that her make-up has already started to smudge and that she looks tired in a dazed sort of way.

  One of the girls at the table has left two pancakes and Dan’s stomach roars at him. He looks up at the menu and fumbles in his pocket – the pancakes cost £4.50 but he only has a fiver on him, and that has to last him for breakfast tomorrow too.

  ‘They certainly had some lungs on them,’ comes a quiet voice.

  Dan looks up. The man with the crossword book at the nearby table is looking at him, a pen poised in his hand. He wears round tortoiseshell glasses and a navy corduroy shirt open over a Pink Floyd T-shirt. An additional pen is clipped to his shirt pocket and Dan notices that one of the buttons is different to all the others, bright red instead of white. He has the start of a beard and Dan guesses he is in his fifties. He has the kind of face that looks meant for smiling – there are creases around the corners of his eyes – but is clouded by something. Worry, tiredness, illness perhaps.