by Libby Page
‘Breakfast is served,’ he says.
They only have time to chat for a short while: soon the morning crowds are flowing from the station into the street and a queue of caffeine-hungry customers gathers in front of the counter. Hannah rises to her feet, her breakfast only half-finished on her plate.
‘You finish yours,’ she says to Eleanor, as she goes to rise too, ‘I’ll be fine on my own for a bit.’
‘Thanks,’ replies Eleanor, but she eats quickly, finishing up just a few moments later. Pablo takes the plates and returns to the kitchen.
As the morning crowd starts to fill the café, Hannah focuses on making their coffees, trying to ignore the book inside her apron pocket and the choice she is already making that she knows is not right but seems somehow inevitable.
8.00 a.m.
Hannah
A nervous-looking young woman in a grey trouser suit pulls a scrap of paper from her pocket as she reaches the front of the queue.
‘One soya latte, one decaf cappuccino, one regular cappuccino, two Americanos and a macchiato. Please. To go. And can I get a receipt please?’
Hannah nods and turns to make the orders. She can hear impatient tuts coming from behind the young woman – a need for coffee makes some people merely grouchy, Hannah has found; for other people it makes them lose their minds.
‘Can’t I go first?’ comes a loud man’s voice, ‘I’ve only got one order and I’m late for a meeting.’
Hannah doesn’t turn around.
‘As you can see, I am already serving this customer. I’ll be with you next.’
Eleanor is busy serving customers at their tables. She hasn’t been here long but she already looks frazzled – morning shifts do that to you, Hannah has found over the years.
She is tempted to go even slower with the order just to annoy the rude man, but she feels for the nervous young woman who she imagines is collecting an order for a whole team in her office. She looks around nineteen: Hannah guesses she is on work experience and wonders where she is working and whether her colleagues are friendly to her. The way she carefully consults her list for a second time as Hannah turns around with the drinks makes her think perhaps not. The young woman shuffles uncomfortably on her feet, clearly mortified to have made a scene and held up the queue.
‘I’ve written the orders on the side of the cups,’ says Hannah, slotting the drinks into a cardboard carrier, ‘And I’m putting the decaf and the regular cappuccino far away from each other so they don’t get confused, OK?’
The young woman smiles, folds the order and places it back in her pocket, and reaches for the coffees.
‘Thank you,’ she says, her shoulders sinking slightly and a shy smile reddening her face. She turns to leave but Hannah calls after her, ‘Don’t forget your receipt!’
She leans across the counter to hand it to the young woman. Their hands meet briefly and then the young woman nods and carefully weaves her way through the line of customers to the door, where a woman with a baby held in a carrier on her chest opens the door for her.
‘Right, who’s next?’ says Hannah, trying to sound cheerful.
‘An espresso to go,’ says a man at the front who doesn’t look up from his phone as he speaks. Hannah recognises the voice as belonging to the queue-jumper. She had wondered if he might leave in frustration, heading to his meeting instead, but once a customer is in the queue they very rarely do leave, regardless of how late they are running. This is a part of their day they can’t seem to skip and Hannah usually takes some satisfaction in filling that role for them, as though she is a pharmacist handing out over-the-counter drugs to the morning’s coughers and sneezers. With this man, though, she finds herself feeling only anger at his sense of entitlement and the way he doesn’t look at her as she takes his payment. For a brief moment she considers spitting in his coffee. But of course that would be terrible. And besides, the café is far too busy – someone would certainly notice.
Next comes a steady stream of customers dressed in officewear in varying levels of formality. One young man is still in his cycling clothes, a helmet and a rucksack held under his arm and one earbud in his ear. Two women chat while they order.
‘So you find out about the promotion today?’ says one. The other nods.
‘If I don’t get it I’m looking for a new job. I’m sick of seeing all the men in my team promoted ahead of me.’
There are a few customers sat at tables too and Hannah glances over to them, checking that Eleanor is doing all right serving them. In the far corner a woman in a Tesco uniform does her make-up, brushes, lipsticks and an eyelash curler laid out on the table as she peers into a small portable mirror that is propped up against her coffee cup. A few seats away from her, a man in hospital scrubs and a navy-blue coat pushes scrambled eggs on a plate, barely taking any mouthfuls. The mother who just arrived with her baby orders a hot chocolate from Eleanor and chooses a seat by the window, taking her baby out of its carrier and sitting it on the table so it can look outside. Hannah watches as the baby leans forwards, pressing both hands on the glass. She follows the baby’s gaze outside and spots John, the Big Issue seller who has worked outside the café for the past few years. With one hand he holds a stack of magazines, with the other he waves at the baby.
Hannah smiles and turns back to the queue that doesn’t seem to go down.
‘What can I get you?’ she says, trying to keep her voice light and ignoring the thoughts that threaten to distract her.
John
He laughs and pulls a face and the baby inside the café laughs back.
What a dote, he thinks, the laughter leaving the imprint of a smile on his face. Reluctantly, he turns away from the window and back to the street, back to work.
‘BIG Issue, Big Issue, Big Issue!’ he says in a sing-song voice. No one looks up. The flow of pedestrians continues around him like a river around an islet.
So many of them are on their phones. Either walking with them held to their ears, having loud conversations that he catches snippets of as they walk past, or staring at them in their hands, only looking up to cross roads or when they nearly walk into other people or the occasional lamp post.
‘Let me finish!’ says a short man with a loud voice and a flushed face as he walks past John, ‘Let me finish! I said, let me finish!’ He is nearly shouting now and a few of the people around him turn to watch. He seems oblivious to anyone aside from the person speaking to him on the other end of the phone.
‘Mum! Will you just shut up?’ he says, and then he turns down a passageway at the end of the road and disappears.
The lights change and a stream of pedestrians cross the road. An old woman with a rucksack on her front and a map in her hand walks slightly ahead of an old man with a hooked nose and a creased, pink face who walks slowly, looking all around him. Straining against a lead is a dog wearing a high visibility jacket with ‘NERVOUS’ written in large letters. It jumps and jolts away from the feet of pedestrians and John can hear its owner, a young woman in a bright orange beanie hat, talking to it in a soothing voice. He feels for the dog; although John hides his anxieties well, there are days when he’d like to wear a jacket like that himself. Wouldn’t we all? he thinks to himself.
Pedestrians weave in and out around John as he stands on the pavement, some continuing along the street, a few veering off into the café.
John takes a deep breath and tries again.
‘Good morning sir, can I interest you in a Big Issue? Well, have a great day. Madam, Big Issue? Have a lovely day. Who’s going to make me a happy man on this grey day then?’
Most people ignore him but some look up at the sound, make brief, awkward eye contact and then look hurriedly down again. He is not surprised. Resilience is a key requirement of this line of work.
‘Get a fucking job!’ shouts one voice. It belongs to a man in his sixties, wearing a
tweed jacket and yellow trousers.
‘This is my job!’ John shouts back, but the man has already walked away.
That always pisses him off. He doesn’t come to other people’s workplaces and disparage them, does he? He is always polite, even when people refuse a copy (which is most of the time). Sometimes it’s hard – when it’s raining and he has a few copies left and is determined to sell them before leaving. But he doesn’t pester people – it’s not professional.
He’s been doing the job for three years, working on the same pitch opposite Liverpool Street station and outside Stella’s. It’s more than a job, though – he likes to think of himself as an entrepreneur. He buys the stack of magazines from head office, just like any other business owner purchasing their stock, and then keeps the profits on what he sells. It’s up to him what time he arrives and leaves work – whether he works late on a busy day and packs up early on a slow, rainy one. He likes the flexibility and feeling, finally, as though he is taking back control of his own life.
‘John!’
He looks up and sees Paul, one of his regular customers, heading towards the door of Stella’s, his hand raising briefly in a wave. He is a tall, middle-aged man with a broken nose and dark eyes. He carries a briefcase and a weight on his shoulders that slumps them forwards. John waves back at him.
‘Good to see you Paul,’ he says, as Paul fishes in his pocket for coins. They make the exchange swiftly and quietly and once Paul is holding a copy of the Big Issue, which he rolls and puts into his pocket, they move onto the important part.
John thinks of his job as part entrepreneur, part therapist. He has plenty of regular customers who stop by for a chat, but often someone new pauses by him after buying a copy and starts telling him something about their life. When he first started the job it had surprised him, these conversations. But now he thinks of it as completely natural – he has learnt that everyone just wants someone to talk to. And he is here every day, rain or shine. They know where to find him, and his conversation can be bought for as little as £2.50 (much cheaper than a therapist). He’ll talk for free, of course, but the serious customers understand the etiquette. Buy a magazine, and then let’s chat. Let’s chat for as long as you like.
‘How are things?’ says Paul. He is still wearing his suit, poor man, and a purple tie. He lost his job several weeks ago but still comes in every day, dressed as though he’s going to the office. John gets it – when things started going wrong for him it took him a while to admit to himself how bad it was getting. When he finally did so, it was too late. The thing that he has learnt is that it can happen to anyone.
‘Not too bad thanks, mate,’ he replies, ‘And how about you? Any luck with finding a new job?’
Paul sighs.
‘Not yet, no,’ he says slowly, ‘But I’ve got a few leads. I’m hoping at least for some interviews in the next few weeks. I hope by the end of the month I’ll have good news for Sandra.’
‘I know it’s not my place, mate,’ says John, ‘But do you think perhaps you should tell her? She’s your wife, I bet she’d understand.’
‘I expect she would,’ says Paul, ‘But with that would also come her pity. And I just can’t bear it. Not yet, anyway. I just need a bit more time.’
And John understands that too.
‘Righto, boss. She’s your missus after all – you know what’s best. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for you. And my toes!’
He makes a show of wobbling on the spot and Paul laughs. It feels good to make someone laugh. They say goodbye and John waves his magazines as Paul opens the café door and steps inside.
As he thinks about Paul, he can’t help but think about his own story. It started with a lost job too. He was working in construction but when the crisis hit he was let go. He tried looking for other work but it was made hard by the drinking. Without a job to get up for each morning he was drinking more and more. He didn’t think of it as a problem – it was just his way of coping. Everyone had their own thing, didn’t they? His was drink. It softened everything: his aches and pains after years of working on building sites and his fear of what to do next. But it also softened his brain, made him sluggish and unmotivated. What started as a coping mechanism became the thing that prevented him from moving forwards at all.
He lived in a nice flat, a little one-bed that he’d been proud to be able to afford when many of his colleagues lived in shared accommodation. But the longer he remained unemployed and the more he drank the harder it became to meet the rent. At first the landlord, who lived in the flat above his, was understanding. John had been there for several years and they’d become, not exactly friends, but friendly. They’d even been to the pub on the corner of the street for a beer a few times. But John found that kindness only went so far when it came to money. He was evicted a few months later.
John knows that most people would disagree, that they’d think themselves above it somehow, but he has come to believe that addiction can happen to anyone. Give them the right situation (or the wrong one, more accurately) and they too would find some way of numbing the pain and would soon see how hard it is to stop once you’ve found that rush, that pleasure in a grey world. He has always been somewhat proud that at least his substance of choice is legal. Because it would be easy to fall the other way too.
After the eviction he moved in and out of temporary accommodation – sometimes with friends, sometimes in hostels. But it never worked out. His vice always made it difficult: by then it had taken up so much of his existence that living a normal life seemed impossible.
Thinking back to that time, two years sober, John shudders. Some of his old friends he has been able to apologise to. They are still wary, but he hopes he is proving to them day by day that he has changed. But there are also those whom he knows he can never talk to again. He pushed them too far, did things that wake him up in the middle of the night, terror and shame caught in his throat. He mourns the loss of those friends with a pain stronger than that of his failed romantic relationships (because there have been many of those too), feeling as though a part of him has broken away – that he is somehow less whole now. Then there are the friends whom he simply can no longer see because they don’t understand that for him, being sober means he will never be able to set foot inside a pub again. The place that felt for a while like some sort of shelter, a kind of home even at his worst, is now dangerous, off-limits.
Over the past few years things have steadily improved. He is proud of the room he now rents – just a small place with a sink in his bedroom and a shared bathroom and kitchen down the corridor – and of his job selling the magazines. But he still has a way to go. He would like to have a little balcony one day and to grow his own chili plants and maybe some tomatoes. And most of all, he would like a dog. He will get one, he promises himself, once he is confident he can look after himself. When he feels back on his feet. He already knows what he will call his dog: Lucky. Because although it sometimes doesn’t feel that way when the hot water in his flat stops working or customers are particularly rude to him, he knows he is lucky. He is lucky to be alive.
As he waits for more customers he watches the sky. The clouds are the same colour as the backs of the pigeons that huddle together on the roof of the station. For a moment he forgets about his work and watches them, picking out the stripes of blue and black in their grey feathers. Most people who look at pigeons see pests, he thinks as he watches them. Rats with wings that are as bleak to look at as the city on a winter’s day. But if you look a little closer you notice an iridescence to them. You see how soft their feathers look and how bright and inquisitive their eyes appear. They are not what they seem from a first glance. They are more than what people make of them.
Hannah
After a while, Hannah and Eleanor swap stations, Eleanor taking over at the counter and Hannah waiting on the tables. After taking the order of the woman with the baby, she approaches
a man in a suit and purple tie who she guesses is in his late forties. His posture sags, as though a child who is slightly too old to be carried sits on his shoulders. A laptop is open in front of him but he looks fixedly out the window, at John and the office workers who clutch coffee cups and sidestep one another on their paths towards their buildings as though performing a perfectly choreographed dance. Hannah has to bend down to catch the customer’s eye and ask him what he wants to order.
‘An orange juice and a full English please,’ he says, barely moving his eyes. Hannah nods and turns away just as a broad-shouldered man in a navy suit worn with a pale pink shirt opens the door and heads towards the queue. But before he reaches the end he stops, looking at the man by the window. He holds a phone tightly in one hand.
‘Paul!’ he says loudly, raising the phone in a wave. Hannah looks up and watches the interaction as she pours the orange juice and prepares the other orders. The man sat at the table, who by his acknowledgement Hannah assumes is named Paul, is turning to follow the noise and seems to shudder slightly at its sound. He nods, and the pink-shirted man walks over. He stands next to Paul’s table, his legs apart and planted firmly on the ground. Hannah notices the flash of silver cufflinks poking out from beneath his jacket sleeves. His hair is a somewhat unbelievably rich brown and worn in the style she sees so many male office workers favouring: short at the sides and long and gelled into a sort of mound at the top.
‘Good to see you,’ he says, reaching out his right hand, his left still gripping his mobile like a baton he is not about to pass over any time soon. Paul stands up, and after the handshake remains standing somewhat awkwardly, one hand resting on the table and the other in his trouser pocket. The table is too low down though for him to lean on it comfortably, so he tilts to one side slightly. Watching him, Hannah realises his face is familiar. She must have seen him in here before and suddenly wonders why she took so long to recognise him. But unless they are steadfast regulars she loses track of customers easily. There are just too many to hold inside her head.