The 24-Hour Café

by Libby Page

  ‘It’s OK, you’re going to be OK,’ says Hannah gently.

  Once Mona is sleeping again, Hannah cleans up and opens a window, moving the jug of gerbera she bought earlier that day from her bedroom to Mona’s bedside table. Later, she runs a bath and helps Mona from the bed to the bathroom.

  ‘Just put your arm around me,’ she says, letting Mona lean in to her, ‘It’s OK.’

  It is strange to see her friend, usually so strong and collected, like this. Being able to look after her gives Hannah a strange rush of confidence and pride. Last week she received another rejection from a music venue and attended another failed audition. But here is somewhere that she can be of use. She throws herself into the task with the enthusiasm she knows she should have given to last week’s audition but that she found suddenly so hard to muster, a fear of failure making her hold back. She had been ten minutes late for the audition and knew immediately that she wouldn’t get the part. But lateness seemed a more palatable reason for her failure than what she increasingly fears is the truth – that she just isn’t good enough.

  But this, being there for her friend, she feels good at this. She helps Mona undress out of her pyjamas (Hogwarts leggings and an over-sized, faded T-shirt with a hem dotted with moth holes), turning away discreetly and throwing them in a pile for the laundry basket and giving Mona an arm to lean on as she climbs into the bath.

  ‘OK, now lift your right leg, there we go, you’re in,’ says Hannah, keeping her voice gentle but firm. Mona silently follows her instructions.

  Once Mona is in the bath, Hannah carefully rolls a towel and places it at the head of the tub, encouraging Mona to lean back against it. Her slim body sinks into the clouds of foaming lavender bubble bath that Hannah swirled into the water.

  After a while, Hannah encourages Mona to sit up. She holds out an arm for her to lean against while she reaches for the shower head with the other. Carefully, she starts to wash her friend’s hair. As she sprays the warm water she sings quietly, practising a folk song she needs to learn for a gig. She hasn’t been practising as much as she knows she should, but here it doesn’t feel like practice. Here, in the warmth of the bathroom with Mona leaning weakly against her arm, it feels like how singing felt before she put the pressure on herself to make it her career. When singing was just singing.

  ‘Is the water warm enough?’ says Hannah, remembering the words the hairdresser used at the salon last time she visited. Mona nods.

  Hannah squeezes shampoo into her palm and rubs it gently into Mona’s scalp, picking up her song again. Her voice echoes around the small room, rising above the sound of the bathroom fan and the broken tap that they have never been able to stop dripping. As she rinses out the shampoo she places a hand at the top of Mona’s forehead and instructs her to lean her head back, careful not to let any shampoo suds into her eyes. Mona closes her eyes as the water falls and shampoo trickles down the length of her hair, so dark it is almost black when it is wet.

  Once her hair is washed, the room smelling of the bottle of aloe vera shampoo they both share, Mona leans back against the towel and looks up at Hannah.

  ‘I think this probably makes us best friends now,’ she says quietly. Hannah even spots the start of a smile. She laughs quietly.

  ‘I’d say so,’ she says.

  After two more days of illness, Mona is feeling better. On the fourth day, she takes Hannah out for dinner at a French restaurant in Islington. To look at her you wouldn’t think she had just recovered from being unwell: she is dressed in a chic pair of high-waisted trousers and a polo neck, her dark hair worn loose tonight. She orders wine for them both and tells Hannah about an audition she has lined up for the next week as they share the lukewarm carafe of red, the sound of Serge Gainsbourg coming quietly from the restaurant’s speakers and a couple with strong South African accents talking animatedly at the table next to them.

  Mona suddenly puts down her cutlery and looks seriously at Hannah.

  ‘I know this isn’t the same as Paris,’ she says, ‘I’m so sorry we didn’t make it. And thank you so much for looking after me – you were amazing.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ Hannah replies. Mona reaches for her hand and Hannah squeezes her friend’s hand back as the waiter clears their plates and asks them if they want dessert.

  ‘Remember, this is my treat,’ says Mona.

  Hannah smiles.

  ‘Why not then?’ she says. They order two different puddings so that they can share.

  *

  At the coffee counter, Hannah starts typing a message to Poppy and then remembers what time it is. She finishes the message but closes WhatsApp before pressing ‘send’, making a mental note to send it at a more reasonable hour. Perhaps she could plan another trip to Paris, she thinks to herself. It would be good to see Poppy again and might be the perfect distraction from her worries about her career and the pain of her recent split with Jaheim. Maybe Stella would let Mona have the time off so she could come too, Mona, Hannah and Poppy reconnecting over red wine. It could be a break, and as she leans on the coffee counter looking out over the nearly empty café, Hannah realises that’s what she needs more than anything. She just needs a break.

  6.00 a.m.

  Dan

  As the morning edges closer to day, he feels exhaustion pressing down on him, melting his thoughts until they swirl into one another like marbled paints. Brief snippets of things he has read in his textbooks merge with snatches of overheard conversation in the café around him, as well as remembered words that seem just as real to him as he sits alone at the table.

  ‘Not long until breakfast,’ says the dark-haired man in chef’s whites as he steps through a door at the back of the café and is handed a coffee by the red-haired waitress.

  ‘Just one more chapter,’ says his mum as he struggles to read another page in another textbook, ‘Just one more chapter.’

  The thought distracts him, and he is no longer in the café but instead lying in his bed in the old flat, his mum sat on the edge with her legs tucked under his duvet. A copy of his library book, The Hobbit, rests in her lap. They have read it together twice already, but it is his favourite, and when she took him to the library on Saturday morning it was the one he chose. He sat in one of the colourful chairs reading the beginning that he knew so well while his mum walked slowly up and down the aisles in the adult section. He was proud that a love of reading was something he got from her, just like the bump in his nose that she told him gave his face character, his green eyes and his light blond hair. They are all he has left of her now.

  A new customer pushes open the door: a small woman Dan guesses is in her fifties or sixties, with grey hair worn short and a frown on her face but bright, smiling eyes, who nods at the red-haired waitress as she takes a seat at one of the bar stools. She carries a large bucket filled with colourful bottles. Dan remembers the cupboard under the sink in the old flat that was full of similar bottles, and how every other Sunday his mum would get them out and they would spend the morning cleaning the flat. Even when he was very little she gave him a task to do, starting off with dusting or changing the sheets and moving up to hoovering and cleaning the bathroom.

  ‘It’s just the two of us,’ he remembers his mum saying when he must have been six or seven, ‘We’ve got to help each other out, OK?’ He nodded and climbed onto a chair to dust the bookshelves and the top of the TV.

  When he was much older and she got sick, he took on more and more of the Sunday jobs until he knew how to clean the entire apartment and did it while his mum sat on the sofa.

  ‘You’re an angel,’ she said quietly to him as he worked around her in the living room, refilling her mug of tea as well.

  His cleaning skills had come in handy when he stayed with Rob. The flat had been a mess when he first arrived, but he cleaned the kitchen thoroughly before cooking for them all on his first night there. />
  ‘Wow, this is great,’ he remembers Rob’s flatmates saying as he served them steaming bowls of spaghetti and meatballs, and he had felt the warmth from the steam and his own pride flushing his face.

  Dan is modest but knows he would make a great housemate or tenant. His mum brought him up well, he can see that now.

  The new customer looks up and catches his eye. He smiles and she smiles back, and although she is years older and at least a foot shorter, there is his mum again in the warmth of this stranger’s smile.

  Hannah

  On the street, a dustbin lorry is parked with flashing hazard lights. Four men in dark green trousers and fluorescent jackets jog up and down this stretch of road, grabbing full bags from the pavement and slinging them into the mouth of the dustcart. There is something graceful about their actions: the light-footed running to keep up with the lorry as it slowly moves down the road and the ease with which they seem to swing the bags.

  Seeing the lorry, Hannah suddenly remembers the bins in the kitchen and beneath the counter. As she reaches for them, holding her breath to avoid the wafting smell of bin juice as she puts in the new liner, a favourite phrase of Mona’s comes into her head.

  ‘I feel like this is going to be our year.’

  It’s a phrase that Mona says every year and that Hannah usually nods along to. But as she ties a knot in the full bin bag she wonders again whether her year is still to come, or whether time has simply marched away with her dreams, leaving her behind. After fetching the kitchen bins too, she dashes out into the street, asking Pablo to watch the café while she does.

  She catches the lorry just in time.

  ‘Sorry!’ she says to one of the refuse collectors as he takes the bags from her and slings them into the back of the truck. She normally puts them out in plenty of time, but this morning she has been distracted and on edge. It started with news of Mona’s call-back and has become worse throughout the night, a sort of agitated nervousness that she feels now rushing through her body like electricity.

  For a moment she stands on the street, watching the sky growing brighter as the sun rises above the city. Sunrise is usually her favourite part of her shift – she loves watching the sky change colour and the buildings bathed in light. She never actually sees the bright orb until much later when it is no longer hidden behind the buildings and her shift is over. But throughout the day she charts its effects, the colours it spreads and the shifting quality of the light. She knows it is there and that if she were to be standing at the top of the Gherkin or the Heron Building or one of the others that scrape the London sky, she would see it rising out of the grey streets like a phoenix spreading its wings. In the past it has been a comfort just to know that, even if she can’t see the sunshine for herself.

  Today though, the morning light seems to have lost its charm. Instead of noticing the colours in the sunrise she sees the homeless man crouching by the station and the litter scattered at his feet. Her eyes fall on the newsstand plastered with adverts: a local fish and chip shop and an unappealing brown and orange ad for a tanning salon. The air is heavy with the smell of the dust on the street and the tang of the bin lorry. This street that she knows so well seems all at once like any other street in any other city – a pulse of anonymous faces beating past and the same hum of traffic and layer of dirt and grime that coats the street and pavements.

  Suddenly she wonders what would happen if she didn’t return to the café. It would be so easy to just walk away down the street and not look back. With the air on her face it feels like an easy decision and a voice shouts loudly at her to run. For a moment she pauses, her feet ready to take her towards the bus stop and then home. But then the sensible side of her brain switches back on, as though she is waking up out of a dream. She thinks of Pablo and of Stella, who might be coming in to the café later and whom in any case Hannah feels indebted to for always being flexible and letting her have time off for gigs and auditions. Eleanor, one of the café’s other waitresses, will be arriving soon for the morning shift. She is fairly new and Hannah knows she can’t leave her on her own, it wouldn’t be fair. She takes one last look down the street and then turns back towards the glowing red sign of the café, following it inside.

  ‘Sorry,’ Hannah says to Pablo, who is standing behind the counter watching the café for her, ‘I had to chase the lorry down the street a bit.’

  ‘No problem,’ replies Pablo, stepping out from behind the counter to let Hannah retake her position.

  ‘Pancakes soon,’ he adds, winking. Around 7 a.m. every morning when they are on a shift together, she and Pablo sit down to a quick breakfast of fresh pancakes. Her stomach rumbles and she realises how hungry she is.

  Once Pablo has returned to the kitchen, Hannah scans the café. By now the student with the rucksack has abandoned his textbooks and instead stands in front of the lending library telephone box, his head tilted as he reads the titles. He reaches for one particular book and pulls it out, smiling with recognition as he sees the cover. He brings it back to his table and settles himself to read.

  As well as the student, there is a man in a Transport for London uniform reading a magazine (Hello!, Hannah notices with a smile) and Flavia, the local cleaner who often comes in at this time of day and sits at the same table not far from the counter. She is a small woman in her fifties with a stern expression that clashes with the bright blue of her uniform and the lilac eyeshadow she always wears. She sips her Americano (no milk), occasionally smiling up at Ernest the bear as though gloating over the fact that he is dead while she is alive.

  Hannah checks on the customers and brings the man in the TFL uniform a cappuccino and puts in his order to Pablo for a bacon butty. She glances at the clock: it is halfway through her shift. She knows it should bring her some relief to know she has already made it through to that point, but the remaining six hours loom ahead of her. As she is looking at the clock the door opens. It is Eleanor, arriving for her shift and Hannah breathes a sigh of relief.

  ‘Morning,’ she says quickly to the petite woman in her early twenties who is making her way through the café. Eleanor is currently completing a masters and works part-time in the café to support herself. She is Spanish and speaks in Spanish to Mona, Pablo and Sofia, another waitress who works part-time at the café. Mona and Pablo always reply in English, but when Sofia and Eleanor are in the café together they only speak English to take orders from the customers. It has made it difficult for Hannah to connect with them and she usually finds herself bristling slightly when either of them arrives on a shift, but today she is relieved to see her.

  ‘Now you’re here, I’m going to take a quick break,’ says Hannah, as Eleanor reaches for an apron and ties it round her waist. Before Eleanor can say anything, Hannah is heading for the small storeroom at the back of the café. As soon as the door is closed behind her she feels herself breathing more deeply, happy to be away from the café for a moment even if the storeroom is a mess. It is piled high with boxes filled with bottles of drink, napkins, receipt rolls. This is where the cleaning products are kept, too, a mop, bucket and hoover tucked in one corner, as well as spare crockery and glasses. There are a couple of chairs wedged between all the boxes and Hannah sits down heavily on one, stretching out her legs and resting her feet on the other. It is cooler and more dimly lit in the storeroom than in the café and the chill feels pleasant on Hannah’s hot, tired body.

  With nothing much to look at in the storeroom apart from the boxes, she reaches for her phone and sees a missed call from her mother. To anyone else, a call from a parent at 5 a.m. might be cause for alarm, but Hannah is used to it. Her mother is an insomniac, and if she knows that Hannah is working a late shift she often calls her, hoping to catch her on a break. It has been over a week since Hannah last spoke to her mother so she settles into the chair and dials her number.

  ‘Hello, darling,’ answers her mother, so quietly that Hannah can
hardly hear her, ‘I’m just going to go downstairs so I don’t wake your father; wait one second, honey.’

  Hannah can hear the low rumble of her father’s snoring in the background. She covers her mouth to stop herself from laughing. A few moments later her mother resumes talking at a normal volume.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ she says, ‘After I couldn’t get through to you I went back to bed for a bit but of course couldn’t drop off.’

  At thirty, Hannah supposes she shouldn’t derive quite so much comfort simply from the sound of her mother’s voice, but as she sits, tired and anxious in the café storeroom, the chat reaching her down the phone soothes her.

  Hannah wishes suddenly and fiercely that she was in her bed at her parents’ house in Wales, the room truly dark, unlike any she’s had in London. The room is not really her room any more – her parents redecorated it several years ago and turned it into a generic guest bedroom. But the bed is still more comfortable than the one she has in London and the cool blue shade her mother chose for the walls is peaceful and calming. She pictures waking up and joining her parents for breakfast, her father reading the paper and her mother chatting and pouring the three of them coffee. In her mind she can see the kitchen that looks out over the garden and the hills beyond and she realises how much she misses the colour green.

  ‘So how are you? How’s work?’ her mother asks.

  Hannah knows that her mother doesn’t understand why she still works at the café. Over the years, both her parents have been incredibly supportive of her dream to be a singer, attending gigs and loaning her money for new guitars and other equipment. But as more and more of Hannah’s friends have bought flats and settled down, she can tell that her parents’ understanding of her choices has faltered.