The 24-Hour Café

by Libby Page

  ‘Of course she won’t answer your calls,’ replies Mona, ‘You’re a thief.’

  She says this bit louder on purpose. She doesn’t care if the customers hear – she wants them to hear. A few do look up and throw glances towards the counter, some confused, others intrigued. Mona’s eyes fall on the older couple by the window, they look concerned and for some reason this makes her even more angry – the fact that Jaheim would interrupt the calm afternoon of these gentle customers. That he would have the nerve to come here at all … She plants her feet firmly on the ground, straightening to her full height. She is taller than Jaheim and suddenly this matters.

  ‘I just want to talk to her,’ he says quietly, hands now in his pockets, ‘I just want to say sorry and to try and explain. When we broke up I didn’t get to say everything I meant to … She has to understand why it happened, that I never meant to hurt her.’

  ‘There’s nothing to understand,’ Mona says, her voice fierce and strong, ‘You lied to her, you stole from her, in her home, in our home. She is better off without you – she is happy that you’ve gone.’

  Mona knows that this isn’t strictly true – although Hannah has at least now got up and out of bed and has been trying to hide her feelings, she knows that she is still reeling from the break-up. She feels a stab of sympathy for Hannah before she remembers how Hannah has treated her recently. The accusations she made, the distance she let grow. Her anger towards Jaheim is partly towards Hannah too.

  ‘I miss her,’ perseveres Jaheim, ‘I’m sure she misses me too. If I could just talk to her …’

  But Mona interrupts.

  ‘I think you should leave now,’ she says.

  As she says it, she feels movement behind her and turns to see Aleksander stepping out of the kitchen and notices Sofia weaving through the tables until she is by her side, standing behind the counter with her arms folded too. Mona feels relief and another surge of anger as she finds her strength – she is not alone. Aleksander doesn’t say anything but stands by the door to the kitchen, staring forcefully at Jaheim, his hands on his hips.

  ‘You heard what Mona said,’ says Sofia, to Mona’s surprise, ‘You should leave. Go on, fuck off.’

  The anger in Sofia’s voice surprises Mona. She has always been so quiet. But now her voice is strong and determined, her posture mirroring Mona’s.

  Jaheim looks at the three of them, clearly faltering. He stares at Aleksander for the longest. Aleksander says nothing but stays where he is, unmoving and unflinching. The whole café is looking at Jaheim now too and he suddenly seems to shrink under their gaze. He might have controlled Hannah and charmed her so successfully that she was oblivious to his lies, but he has not charmed or controlled this room. Mona feels her heart pounding in her chest.

  ‘It sounds like you’re not wanted here, mate,’ says a customer who is sat close to where Jaheim is standing.

  Mona doesn’t say anything else, she doesn’t need to. Jaheim pauses for a moment but then gives in and turns to leave.

  ‘And don’t fucking come back,’ says Aleksander suddenly. For a second Jaheim pauses, looking back at the café and at Mona. Their eyes meet for a moment and Mona thinks she sees in his face a look of acceptance. She feels sure it will be the last time she sees him and hopes and believes it will be the last time he enters this café.

  As he leaves, the customer who spoke earlier gives a little cheer.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ says Mona to the room, and within a few moments normal conversation has resumed in the café, the customers returning to each other and their drinks.

  ‘Are you OK?’ asks Sofia, placing a hand on Mona’s arm. Mona nods.

  ‘Thank you,’ she says to the other waitress, ‘Thanks for helping.’

  Sofia shrugs and then heads back to the café floor, taking the order of a young couple in one of the booths. Mona lets herself relax a little, trying to calm down and rid her body of the anger. She suddenly notices that Aleksander is still stood in the kitchen doorway.

  ‘Thanks, Aleksander,’ she says with a smile. He shrugs.

  ‘Who was that?’ he says, gesturing towards the door where Jaheim just left. ‘A boyfriend?’

  Mona laughs bitterly.

  ‘Not mine,’ she says, wondering for a moment if Aleksander almost smiles as she says it, ‘an ex of Hannah’s. They broke up three weeks ago.’

  Aleksander nods and pauses, and for a moment Mona wonders if he is going to say something else, but instead he returns to the kitchen and calm returns to the café. Except Mona can’t calm down. Instead she is stuck in the past, remembering a moment she has tried hard to forget but that seeing Jaheim has brought back vividly. Of everything that has happened over the past few months, this is the one thing that stays with her like a pebble lodged in her throat. It is a cold, hard memory that is always there. As she serves the few customers in the café she relives it one more time.

  *

  Things between Hannah and Mona have grown steadily more stilted and distanced, but Hannah doesn’t seem to notice. When they are in the flat together or are sharing shifts in the café Hannah is often distracted, looking at her phone or watching the clock, waiting, Mona assumes, for the seconds to pass and bring her closer to seeing Jaheim. She spends more time at his flat, heading there straight after shifts in the café.

  But often she is light and breezy too as though nothing has changed. She buys flowers and places them in a jug in the hallway. One evening when Mona gets home from work she finds a bunch of gerbera in her bedroom too, on the bedside table. They watch her as she sleeps and although Mona used to love these flowers they suddenly seem to her falsely cheerful.

  Mona focuses on auditions and dance practice and her shifts in the café. It’s during a shift with Hannah early one morning that it happens. As they refill salt and pepper shakers, Hannah asks a question that can never be taken back.

  ‘Mona, are you OK for cash at the moment?’

  It comes as such a surprise that for a while Mona can only stare at Hannah blankly. The café is quiet, the only customer an elderly regular who listens to music on an old iPod, tapping his fingers on the table.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she says when she realises what Hannah has said, and that she is waiting for her to reply.

  For both of them money has always been something to be acutely aware of. A good tip week can mean feeling more settled, perhaps a takeaway or a dinner out, but there are more troubling weeks too when a glance at her bank account is enough to make Mona feel vaguely ill. She often finds herself dipping into her savings account to keep things in order. Over the years she has become used to it though, this constant juggling. It is part of her life that she has come to accept. It’s something she knows Hannah experiences too, but it’s not something they talk about. They don’t need to: if one of them catches the other eating beans on toast for dinner or calling Stella and asking for extra shifts, they understand immediately without needing to explain. It’s the first time Hannah has asked her so directly about money.

  Hannah takes a breath and talks quickly, ‘It’s just my purse is short twenty pounds and I’ve noticed it a few other times too recently when I could have sworn I had more in there. It’s not a big deal, you know I don’t mind lending you money if it’s a tight month, you’ve just got to ask, that’s all.’

  Mona feels her stomach drop. She wonders if she has misheard Hannah, or at least misinterpreted the words. But there’s surely no other way to take this question? Hannah looks down at the floor but then glances at her quickly as though checking something. Her face wavers slightly as she catches Mona’s eye.

  ‘So, did you?’ she asks quietly.

  Opening her mouth as though to speak, Mona finds there are no words in her throat. She watches her best friend and the implication of what she has just said burns her with a fierce heat. She knew things had become strained between them over
the past months, but surely things couldn’t have got this bad? She has worked hard to keep her feelings about Jaheim and Hannah’s relationship with him to herself and despite the recent troubles, the two of them have been friends for years – surely she has done nothing to deserve this suspicion from her flatmate and closest friend? Her ears ring as she looks at Hannah and suddenly sees a stranger.

  ‘I can’t believe you’d think I’d steal from you,’ she says eventually. Even speaking the words aloud is painful and as they pass her lips she listens back to them, not quite believing they are real. Not one to cry usually, she feels herself blinking back tears of anger, hurt and confusion.

  ‘Not stealing,’ Hannah says hurriedly, ‘I can just see how it might have happened, you know, if you were short on rent or something …’

  She trails off and looks down again. The way she avoids Mona’s eyes hurts almost as much as what she is saying and what it implies. Because although she says ‘not stealing’, there is no other way for Mona to interpret her words. The language might be softer, but she knows she is being accused just as clearly as if she were standing before a judge.

  Mona wants to ask Hannah how she could possibly ask this of her and at what point in their friendship she changed in her mind from her best friend to a potential thief. Or has she never truly trusted her? Throughout all the years they have lived together, all the times they have laughed together and cried together and shared takeaways and gossip and shifts in this café – was Hannah always holding something back from her? If Hannah truly believes that Mona would ever steal from her then she has never really thought of her as a best friend, or any kind of friend at all. Mona thinks about the times she considered Hannah to be something like a sister – part of the family she has chosen for herself to make up for her real family’s shortcomings. If this is what Hannah really thinks of her, then they are simply flatmates and colleagues, nothing more.

  ‘No, Hannah,’ she says instead, working hard to control her emotions and not to cry, ‘I haven’t taken any money from you.’

  Hannah frowns slightly, but like a cloud passing away from the sun she then laughs lightly, smiling and shrugging her shoulders.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry, it’s probably just me being clumsy,’ she says brightly, ‘I probably dropped a twenty getting money out at the cash machine, that’s happened before. Just forget I said anything, OK?’

  Hannah returns to the salt and pepper shakers, focusing on pouring salt from a large box into the small glass bottles. Mona watches her, trying to work out what she is thinking and whether some explanation or further apology is on its way. When nothing comes she picks up the box of pepper and reaches for another set of bottles, not looking at Hannah.

  ‘Sure,’ she says. But she doesn’t forget.

  *

  It was the day after that conversation that Mona sent in her application for the job in Paris. She had spotted it a week before and felt disappointed that a job that suited her so much had to be in another city. Despite it being perfect, when she first saw it she didn’t even consider applying. But the day after Hannah’s accusations about the money she was scrolling through Instagram on the bus back from a dance class when she paused on a picture of Poppy and Antoine, the image reminding her of the job advert for the dance company in Paris. She looked at the smiling face of her friend and for the first time imagined what it would be like to leave London. She had never even visited Paris before but something inside her suddenly stirred – the start of an idea unfurling.

  When she arrived home that evening the flat was empty and quiet. Dropping her keys on the table by the door she spotted a Post-it attached to the mirror there. ‘At Jaheim’s for the night. H x’. With the flat to herself, Mona wandered in and out of the rooms, noting the mould in the bathroom that had grown steadily darker over the years, the peeling paintwork on the kitchen ceiling and the scrap of tinsel in a ceiling corner in the hallway that had got stuck there a couple of years ago and that neither of them had ever bothered to pull down. Despite the tattiness of the flat and its cramped size, for the past few years it had felt like home. But standing alone in the hallway with the pain of Hannah’s words from the night before still fresh, as though they were tattooed into her skin, Mona felt as though she had wandered somewhere she no longer belonged. Almost as though she had returned to a former childhood home only to find a new family living there with new furniture and photographs on the walls, she felt suddenly out of place in the flat. It was still her flat, but it no longer felt like home.

  She wrote the application that evening, sending it before she could change her mind. She told herself that it wasn’t just out of anger: it was a good job and if she was as serious about her career as she’d always thought she was, she should have applied anyway. But really, she hadn’t thought about it too much after sending it. She didn’t expect to hear back.

  In the café, Mona looks around at the quietly talking customers and at Sofia whom she now sees in a new light and feels a new sense of warmth towards. She watches the space where Jaheim just stood, her anger cooling slightly now that he is gone but never truly going away.

  6.00 p.m.

  Martha

  As they drink, Martha finds her attention wandering to the other people in the café. There was an argument earlier that had caused Martha to look over in concern, watching the dark-haired waitress shouting at a young man with floppy hair and slightly protruding ears. She didn’t trust him just from looking at him, the way he squirmed and looked contrite but in a way Martha didn’t believe was truly authentic. She has a way of seeing the truth of people, something that she didn’t have when she was younger (if she did, perhaps she would never have married Chris) but which has grown more attuned and precise over the years.

  Now though, things are back to normal and the café buzzes with the sound of workers stopping for a coffee before heading home. The street outside is busy, reminding Martha that it is nearly time to cross the road and catch their train to the airport. She teased Harry for arriving so early but really this is one of her favourite things to do: to sit for several hours in a café with him and watch the world go by outside the window. He knows that, of course, which is why her teasing was affectionate.

  A harried-looking woman eyes up the cake stand, orders an orange juice to go, and then changes her mind and asks for a caramel shortbread before paying. The waitress places the shortbread carefully inside a paper bag and as the woman pays a dark stain creeps through the paper. The woman punches in her pin number while eyeing the spreading grease stain. When the waitress hands her the bag and the juice she shoves the bag quickly inside her handbag. Next in the queue are a man and a woman who order two Americanos to go. They look down at their phones as the waitress makes the drinks.

  ‘Did you remember to renew the car insurance?’ says the woman without looking up.

  ‘Yes,’ says the man next to her.

  ‘And you’ve booked next Friday afternoon off work for Rachel’s assembly?’

  ‘Yes,’ replies the man.

  The woman nods. They are handed their drinks and then they turn towards the door in silence.

  Martha puts down her now-empty cup of tea and reaches for Harry’s hand. She thinks back to the earlier argument between the young man and the waitress and how grateful it made Martha feel for Harry’s honesty and gentleness.

  ‘I’m so glad I’m here with you,’ she says.

  ‘What, here specifically?’ he replies, ‘You should have told me you’d be happy with just a café and we could have cancelled the honeymoon!’

  She laughs. Although their trip has cost them both a large chunk of their savings, she knows he is looking forward to this holiday as much as she is. It feels appropriate to mark a new start with a journey. Her first honeymoon didn’t feel as significant somehow. It felt almost too much after the indulgence of the wedding – a much bigger affair than her second. A church wedding a
nd a country house reception – she and Chris rented the whole house for the weekend. There was a cake the size of a small child, lots of dancing, and speeches that went on longer than Martha would have liked. Her cheeks ached from smiling but she didn’t feel as happy as she knew she should.

  By the time they set off in a rented vintage car for the airport she felt exhausted, although of course she didn’t admit it at the time. Mauritius had been Chris’s choice – stunningly beautiful and what he thought of as a ‘perfect’ honeymoon destination (he might have read it in a newspaper somewhere), but she had felt bored after a few days. The hotel resort was full of other newly married couples. She watched them all at breakfast, lunch, then dinner, noticing how after a few days old habits emerged out of the post-wedding glow. Couples snapped at each other – gently, but still enough to be noticed – and interrupted one another and failed to laugh quite sincerely enough at each other’s jokes. As she watched she felt her chest tightening. Were they like that? She wanted to escape the resort for an afternoon and go on a very long walk on her own. It took her thirty-five years to realise the trapped feeling she felt in their honeymoon suite above the water was not just newly-wed nerves.

  Her first partnership lasted thirty-five years and produced two daughters – now grown up – but this new one already seems to Martha like her true marriage. As if the first was a test run preparing her for this. On bad days she thinks of all those years that she could have been with Harry and her heart aches. She never tells her children about this sense of regret, but sometimes it sneaks up on her and grips her tightly. But other days she thinks that at least now she is truly ready for this. She knows what it means to be married. She has thirty-five years of experience to bring to this new marriage.

  But why did she wait ten years between meeting Harry and breaking things off with Chris? She knew it wasn’t right with Chris early on. And then came the first affair, his guilt, both their tears and their agreement to work things out. But then came another. And another. And then she met Harry – this good-natured, funny man who made her laugh across the dinner table in a way that made both Jennifer and Chris clearly uncomfortable, but which she couldn’t help, couldn’t bring herself to stop. What was it, then, that held her back from walking out of her home as soon as she met Harry and saw in him something she had never seen in her husband? Her daughters, her darling daughters, yes. They were still young then and their cries when they tripped over or fell out with friends were enough to make her want to rip out her own heart and hand it to them if only it would make them happy. She couldn’t bear to cause them pain herself – because she knew that leaving their father would cause them huge pain. She worked hard to shelter them from their problems, sending them to their grandparents or her sister for the weekend so that she and Chris could spend entire weekends screaming at each other or instead ignoring each other as fiercely as they could, spending the two days in separate parts of the house, only crossing each other for brief moments in the kitchen. Her children had no idea how alone she felt in her marriage, perhaps hadn’t really even considered that she had feelings of her own outside of her love for them. She couldn’t do that to them. But it was also more than that – it was fear. It took ten years to scale the height of her fear.