The 24-Hour Café

by Libby Page

  ‘I just want you to be happy,’ her mother had said to her a few months ago. ‘Is your life really making you happy?’

  ‘Yes,’ Hannah had snapped at the time, despite the fact that she was just back from a shift, felt exhausted and didn’t dare check her bank balance because it was nearing the end of the month and she didn’t want to see how little she had left in her account.

  Since then her mother has been more cautious, asking questions but avoiding saying anything confrontational. Hannah supposes that’s where her fear of conflict comes from and can’t decide whether that’s a good or a bad thing.

  ‘It’s OK,’ Hannah replies, reaching down with her free hand to rub her shins, which are aching from standing all morning, ‘Sorry I missed your call – Eleanor’s just arrived so I’m taking my break now. Pablo’s granddaughter has started walking.’

  Hannah keeps her mother updated with news of the café staff – it seems a good neutral topic, and she knows how much her mother loves babies.

  ‘Oh, that’s such a gorgeous age,’ she says, her voice soft. Hannah knows her mother would never dream of expressing it, but she wonders if she is sad not to be a grandmother. As her parents’ only child, she is their only chance of becoming grandparents. She has never felt an urgent broodiness like some of her friends have described, but Hannah realises she always assumed that she would have children someday. Except as she has got older, the prospect of ‘someday’ has become less of a faraway thing and more of a cause for panic. Now that she is single again, she wonders whether ‘someday’ is ever likely to arrive for her. It’s something she has been grappling with since her break-up with Jaheim, and the photo of baby Mabel this morning stirred those feelings once more. But she realises she hadn’t properly thought about it from her mother’s perspective. She knows that’s not a reason to have children, but she also hears for the first time the longing in her mother’s voice and feels not anger at her hopes and expectations for her, but some sort of understanding. So many of her mother’s friends are grandmothers and she often talks about spending time with them and their grandchildren. Hannah thinks her mother would make a wonderful grandmother.

  ‘How’s Dad?’ Hannah asks, changing the subject and trying to push away the thoughts that she isn’t ready to confront because she has no answers to them.

  ‘He’s doing OK,’ replies her mother. Her father’s mother, Hannah’s grandmother, passed away at the start of the year and since then Hannah has felt a need to check up on him. It has been a strange shift, feeling like she needs to look after her parents rather than the other way around.

  ‘We went down to the coast last week,’ her mother continues, ‘Just packed some lunch in the morning and headed off. The weather wasn’t great but we didn’t mind.’

  Hannah’s parents have both recently retired and are enjoying the new freedom. She pictures them eating their sandwiches on a windswept beach and finds herself smiling.

  ‘And how’s Jaheim?’ her mother asks.

  The question catches Hannah off guard. She takes her feet off the chair and places them on the ground, leaning forward in an attempt to calm the sudden spinning in her head. Her throat feels dry and the storeroom seems suddenly not pleasantly cool, but painfully cold. She takes a long breath, wondering what to say.

  ‘He’s fine,’ she replies eventually.

  When Hannah and Jaheim broke up three weeks ago she was too upset to talk about it. She felt plunged into a darkness that she couldn’t find a way out of, and she stayed there for a week. In the second week she emerged, bleary-eyed and dazed, but trying to get back to her life. She considered calling her parents then, but she couldn’t find the words to tell them how Jaheim had betrayed her and that the relationship that she’d put so much hope and energy into was over.

  ‘That’s good,’ says her mother, not seeming to have noticed the hesitance in Hannah’s reply, ‘He’s a good egg – your father and I like him very much. We’re so glad you’re happy, darling, especially after what happened with Sam.’

  Hannah holds a hand over her mouth, holding back a gasp of pain. She knows she should confide in her mother and that the longer she doesn’t tell her the truth, the worse it will be when it eventually comes out. She doesn’t want to hurt her mother by keeping secrets from her. And yet she still can’t find the words. She can’t bring herself to tell her mother that in the end, Jaheim had been just the same as Sam, even if his cheating wasn’t with another woman. She can’t admit how deeply she was tricked by both men, that she clearly learnt nothing from her first relationship because she let herself trust again so easily, so openly. And she doesn’t want to break it to her mother that now she is alone again and is worried that this time it is for good, that those children she thought she would have ‘someday’ are just a fantasy, like so much about her life.

  Swallowing hard and closing her eyes, Hannah speaks as calmly as she can into the phone.

  ‘Thanks, Mum. I’m sorry, Eleanor’s calling me from the café, I’d better go. Send my love to Dad.’

  Her mother says goodbye, and as soon as Hannah has hung up and double-checked the call has ended, she lets herself cry. Tears flow down her face and she wraps her arms tightly around herself, trying to stave off the fierce sobs that threaten to shake her apart.

  Without really realising what she is doing, she reaches for her phone in her apron pocket again. She is opening her photos before she can stop herself, scrolling through the pictures of her and Jaheim that she hasn’t yet deleted, tears still rolling down her cheeks. The photos have a folder to themselves and there are hundreds of them. Hannah and Jaheim in restaurants, cafés, parks and in Hannah’s parents’ garden last summer. There are several of Jaheim sleeping, photos she never showed him but which she couldn’t stop herself from taking. She meant to delete them all weeks ago, but she didn’t.

  She knows she shouldn’t look at them – it’s like picking at a scar that hasn’t quite healed. She can’t help herself though, and there is some kind of twisted relief in finally letting the pain wash over her after spending the last two weeks trying desperately to ignore it. In the silence of the storeroom she digs a little deeper, this time running her nail under the memory of the first time she met Jaheim, back when he was just another face in a crowded pub in this city full of strangers.

  *

  She doesn’t notice him at first. The gig is in Camden and Hannah is performing before the main act. She knows the gig was really a favour from one of Mona’s friends who is the manager here. When Hannah got the call saying they wanted to book her she pretended not to be aware of the connection, but as the evening drew closer the fact repeatedly tapped her on the shoulder, making her doubt herself. ‘They don’t really want you,’ she said to herself as she put her make-up on in the bathroom mirror, carefully painting her face in an attempt to hide her nerves, covering her worries with blusher and lipstick. It had taken nearly an hour to decide what to wear; she eventually opted for a red dress that clashes with her hair but in a way she hopes works.

  But as she sits on the bar stool preparing to play she suddenly worries she misjudged the colour of the dress and the style, which suddenly feels too formal. Looking around she notices most of the customers are wearing jeans. She spots leather jackets, battered Converse and Doc Martens. Mona is at the bar chatting with the manager. She came straight from a shift in the café but still manages to look effortless. She fits in here, and as she leans against the bar and laughs and the manager laughs back, Hannah sits alone with her guitar and envies her friend nearly as much as she loves her.

  While she waits to begin playing, no one seems to notice she is there. Conversations continue around her: the buzz of a Thursday night just after pay day. A man with a shaved head and a neat beard loudly orders five packets of crisps and carries them in his arms back to a table in the corner where his friends thank him and reach for the packets, ripping them open to share. A youn
g woman waiting at the bar is nudged to the side by a broad-shouldered man who tries to get the attention of a pink-haired waitress wearing dungarees and a striped shirt. She ignores the man and instead asks the woman what she wants. The young woman smiles with relief and soon turns back to her friends clutching a bottle of rosé and four glasses. They smile at her and immediately start talking, looping her into the conversation they’d been having while she was at the bar. Hannah picks out Mona’s laughter again and wishes, despite her dreams of making it as a singer, that she was leaning against a bar instead of teetering on a stool clutching a guitar.

  Her eyes wander to a group near the door: men and women a similar age to Hannah huddle around a table filled with pint glasses, some full, some empty. They look like they’ve come straight from an office – they are smart but not too smartly dressed and sit a little apart from each other but talk quickly and animatedly. A slightly older woman still wearing an office lanyard places three full pints on the table that overspill slightly. No one seems to care as they lean forwards to grab their drinks. At first Hannah doesn’t know why her eyes are drawn to the man with the large brown eyes and hair so short that it emphasises the size of his ears, which are not small. He isn’t the most attractive one there – even sitting down, she guesses he is shorter than she normally likes. Yet he’s the one she focuses on and she quickly realises why: while the others in the group drink and talk, he is watching the woman in the red dress with the guitar balanced on her lap. Hannah looks away, adjusting her guitar strap and shifting slightly on the stool. When she looks up again he is still watching her. He smiles, and suddenly he becomes the most attractive in the group. His smile takes up most of his face and is the type of smile that can only belong to someone who knows how to laugh and is kind to their mum. You can just tell, or at least Hannah thinks she can. There’s something about his smile that makes her feel more at ease. Hannah smiles back, watching him for a moment and waiting for him to break eye contact with her or to stop smiling. But he doesn’t.

  Hannah is the first to look away. She glances over to the bar manager, nods at him, and he nods back. She places her hands on her guitar, the feeling of the strings so familiar against the pads of her fingers. Then she starts to play. As soon as she begins to sing the conversation and laughter in the bar quietens down and eventually stops altogether. She knows that when she’s at her best she is able to do that – to quieten a room. It feels almost arrogant to admit it, but she has sung in enough rooms to know that it is something like her superpower. The problem for Hannah has never been the singing. It’s been getting into those rooms in the first place.

  Normally when she performs she looks for Mona’s face in the crowd. If she can, Mona will always be there for Hannah’s gigs, just like Hannah is there for all of Mona’s performances. Hannah knows that her friend will always give her the smile and the nod she needs to tell her it’s going well and that she believes in her. But tonight Hannah doesn’t look at Mona. Instead her eyes fall on the face of the man with the most wonderful smile she has ever seen. The man who saw her when no one else did, before she revealed her superpower. When she was just Hannah. He looks back and everything else in the bar is just background noise.

  As they lock eyes she knows very clearly what will happen when she finishes her set. For someone so often filled with self-doubt, there is suddenly no question about it. She knows that when she stops singing she will cross the bar and find the face of the man with the big smile, the slightly too-large ears and the brown eyes, and she will kiss him. He will kiss her back and after talking and drinking, they will go home together. There is no question about it. And being certain for once of how things are going to go makes Hannah happier than she has felt in months. In the warm bar in Camden that smells of beer and cigarette smoke that clings to the jackets of the customers, Hannah sings and he smiles. Everything else is just background noise.

  *

  In the storeroom, Hannah stares at the photos on her phone, her hands still trembling. She fell for Jaheim quickly and fiercely. Looking back, she wonders why she wasn’t more guarded and cautious, given what happened with Sam. But when love struck her she found she suddenly forgot everything else, entirely consumed by the sweetness of it. She cringes at the stupidity of it, wishing now that she had been more careful.

  They might have met at one of her shows where for a short while all eyes were on her and she held the room with her voice. But very soon Jaheim became the centre of her world. Because he saw her when no one else did and that meant everything. Because he was something to count on when everything else was uncertain. Because their relationship was something to pour her attention into, something to focus on.

  That’s why she can’t tell her mother that it’s over. Because she was so wrong, and she feels so ashamed.

  Hannah returns her phone to her pocket. She looks around the storeroom, trying to calm herself by taking in all the small details and the fact that she has six more hours of her shift to get through. She can’t fall apart right now, she has to work. After a few more moments she wipes her face, wondering at the state of her make-up. Before heading back to her shift, she sneaks to the bathroom to reapply her eyeliner and mascara, staring at herself in the mirror and trying to set her face into a confident, calm expression. Once she is happy with her mask, she takes one final deep breath and returns to the café. She has been a performer for long enough to know that the show, and the shift, must go on.

  ‘There you are,’ says Eleanor, ‘I was about to come and find you. I know you showed me last week but I can’t remember where the coffee beans are, the machine is low.’

  Hannah focuses on helping Eleanor drag a fresh bag from the storeroom and fill the machine. It feels good to have a task to throw herself into, but as they work a thought flashes into her mind. She wonders how long Eleanor will be working here for. Once her masters has finished, will she stay, or will she find a full-time job that excites and inspires her? Will she stay for five years, like Hannah has, or will this café just be a fleeting chapter in her life, a chapter to flick through quickly before getting on to the main story?

  ‘There we go,’ she says, once the machine is full, ‘If you have any other questions today, just shout.’

  Eleanor nods and heads over to serve a man who has just arrived at a table in the corner.

  ‘I’m off now,’ comes a voice, and Hannah turns to see Flavia, the cleaner, picking up her bucket of cleaning products and heading to the counter to pay.

  ‘Good to see you,’ Hannah says as she deals with the payments, ‘See you again soon.’

  Hannah watches as the woman crosses the road towards the office blocks on the other side, where she will spend the morning wiping desks and stacking abandoned mugs into a dishwasher. Hannah wonders if the office workers will even notice that yesterday’s crusty cereal bowls have been removed from their desks, or the faint smell of antibacterial spray. The bright flash of the cleaning bottles is visible against the grey of the street and then Flavia walks away and Hannah can no longer see her. Because that’s how it goes. People come and go and Hannah stays. She blinks quickly.

  On the street outside newspaper sellers in branded uniforms push wheeled trolleys stacked high with copies of the Metro and City AM, each pile covered in a coloured piece of paper and wrapped tightly with a cable tie. Soon they will be snipped open and the newspapers handed out to commuters as they stream out of the station, copies slipped under arms or stuffed into bags.

  It is still quiet at this time in the café. She has a little longer until the office workers start to come in and a queue starts to form by the counter. Although her feet ache, Hannah suddenly welcomes the thought of the approaching rush – anything to occupy her and make the rest of her shift pass quickly. She feels like she is fraying around the edges; but perhaps work, mindless work, can keep her together for a few more hours. She wipes vigorously at tables that are already spotless and waits for the r
ush of customers to arrive.

  7.00 a.m.

  Dan

  He only manages a few chapters of The Hobbit before he falls asleep again. His head nods and his eyes burn as he tries desperately to keep them open. He focuses on the clock above the counter, its hands bringing him gradually closer to his first lecture but seeming to him to be frozen in the same spot. Fatigue circles him but he pushes back against it, pressing his fingernails into his palm until it is covered with indented crescent moons.

  Sleep eventually comes to him like a dark, cold wave pulling him under. He is too exhausted to fight back and resist as he slips beneath it and down into the deep. It is not a restful sleep. It is not the kind of sweet dreams and calm, heavy breathing that you wake from feeling refreshed. Sleep for Dan is sinister – it claws at him and drags him down, down into a place that he feels he can’t escape from.

  Sounds from the café enter his mind like wind through a gap in a windowpane. He hears the hissing of the coffee machine, but in sleep it becomes the sound of the Orient Express, sighing great clouds of steam as it stands at a station platform. It looks like Paddington; he remembers it from trips to visit his grandparents when he was very young, before they both passed away. He is at the station with his mum, old-fashioned suitcases piled beside them. She is wearing one of the smart trouser suits he remembers the women wearing in the murder mysteries that she liked. She is smiling. It makes him smile too. But as the steam parts he realises that something is wrong. The train is nothing like he imagined. It doesn’t look like the shining, glamorous vehicle that hung in a frame, the page cut from a magazine, in their kitchen. The paint is rusting and peeling, the windows are smashed and as he looks through them he sees that the carriages are completely empty – there are no seats or tables or the bar he remembers his mum talking about. He turns to her and she must not have noticed yet because she is still smiling.