The 24-Hour Café Read online

  Dedication

  FOR MY FRIENDS

  Title Page

  Contents

  Dedication

  Title Page

  12.00 a.m.

  1.00 a.m.

  2.00 a.m.

  3.00 a.m.

  4.00 a.m.

  5.00 a.m.

  6.00 a.m.

  7.00 a.m.

  8.00 a.m.

  9.00 a.m.

  10.00 a.m.

  11.00 a.m.

  12.00 p.m.

  1.00 p.m.

  2.00 p.m.

  3.00 p.m.

  4.00 p.m.

  5.00 p.m.

  6.00 p.m.

  7.00 p.m.

  8.00 p.m.

  9.00 p.m.

  10.00 p.m.

  11.00 p.m.

  One year later

  12.00 a.m.

  Acknowledgements

  About the author

  Also by Libby Page

  Credits

  Copyright

  12.00 a.m.

  The city never sleeps, and neither does Stella’s. A glowing red sign marks out the café that serves fish and chips, bangers and mash and American pancakes to Londoners and visitors at any time of day or night. While buses pull up and drift away outside the window, the coffee machine hisses and administers caffeine to the sleepless.

  The diner occupies the ground floor of a tall building opposite Liverpool Street station, during the day one of the busiest stations in London, at night a waiting ground for holidaymakers catching the coach to Stansted airport, drunk students heading home from a night out in Shoreditch, and those with nowhere else to go huddling beneath the awning of the Starbucks concession.

  Inside, the café is a gaudy mash-up of British and American nostalgia – nostalgia for a time and place that perhaps never existed on either side of the Atlantic. Every wall is covered in pictures. A pop-art style portrait of the Queen hangs next to a red plastic Coca Cola sign. Framed beer coasters below an old London Underground plaque that reads ‘Liverpool Street’ in huge letters. A lending library housed in a red wooden telephone box and a frumpy fringed lampshade hanging from the ceiling. Black and white checked linoleum lines the floor. Old wooden school chairs with space to slot books at the back sit opposite Formica tables and banks of fake leather seats. There are high tables with stools on either side, as well as diner-style booths where lamps hang low in the middle. Small packets of sauces sit in Oxo tins on the tables, red paper napkins stuffed beside them.

  In the middle of the café, at the back, is an antique Cadbury’s cabinet filled with cakes and smoothies in glass milk bottles. On a counter beside it is a shining silver coffee machine that glints with the reflection of the café and the faces of its lost souls. Behind the coffee bar is an enormous painted Union Jack, taking up the whole length and height of the back wall. Right in the centre, leaping from a wooden mount, is a stuffed brown bear. Its paws are outstretched, permanently frozen in ‘attack’. The bear is wearing a top hat.

  Hannah and Mona

  The bear is called Ernest. At least that’s how Hannah addresses him as she pushes open the door to Stella’s, a rainbow striped scarf wrapped tightly around her neck, flame-red hair poking out beneath. It is mid-September but chilly at this time of night and she is glad for the warmth of her scarf and her bright red woollen coat. Hannah steps into the café, the smell of fried food and the sound of Johnny Cash singing ‘I Walk the Line’ greeting her.

  ‘Good evening Ernest,’ she says, nodding up to the bear, who looks back through glassy eyes, but says nothing. ‘Or should I say good morning,’ she adds.

  The clock above the counter, its round face painted with a 1950s Kellogg’s advert, reads 12.05. She is five minutes late for her shift, which for Hannah is early. Lateness is just part of who she is, like the tattoo on her ankle, her aversion to conflict and the colourful clothes she wears like a uniform. The night has technically turned to morning, but it didn’t feel that way as she rode the bus earlier, loud groups heading home from nights out as she sat quietly with her earphones in, on her way to work.

  Beneath the bear, a tall woman is stood at the counter, a loose, dark plait falling over one shoulder and her eyebrows meeting in a frown as she reads. She has skin the colour of well-done toast and her face is enviably free of any blemishes or marks other than a small, dark mole just beneath her left earlobe. She looks up as Hannah enters and their eyes meet; they share a smile of familiarity. Mona.

  ‘Hi,’ Mona says, at the same time that Aleksander, the chef on duty, shouts from the kitchen, ‘That bear is very dead!’ in his strong Polish accent.

  ‘Don’t listen to him, Ernest,’ says Hannah as Mona slips her book, a play, into the pocket of the red and black apron that is tied around her waist. She reaches behind the coffee bar for a second matching apron, which she throws at Hannah.

  ‘Give me a minute!’ says Hannah, catching the apron and placing her coat and scarf on the back of one of the many empty chairs.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ replies Mona, with a sigh, ‘I’m just knackered. I’ve been on my feet for twelve hours.’

  Today both Hannah and Mona are working double shifts. Stella, the café’s owner and their boss, knows they both care more about their wages than the legalities of sensible working hours.

  Mona stretches, extending her arms in an elegant way that another dancer would immediately recognise as a sign of a shared passion. She reaches a hand to the base of her neck and rubs firmly.

  ‘I know,’ replies Hannah, bundling her layers in a box under the counter and tying the apron, ‘My turn now.’

  ‘Lucky you.’

  Mona has been here since 12 p.m. the day before when the sun was high above the buildings and the café was busy with people taking an early lunch. Back then she wore a neat plait and her apron was clean; now her hair is in disarray and her apron is smeared with stains – tomato ketchup, coffee, spilt milk. Despite this and it being the end of her shift, she won’t leave immediately. Instead, this quiet moment between night and day is a chance for her and Hannah to catch up. Not that they don’t often see each other. As well as working together, they also live together.

  They share a one bed ex-council flat in Haggerston, Hannah using what is supposed to be the living room as her bedroom. It’s not where either of them pictured still living, aged thirty. They imagined flats that they would own and perhaps small gardens fit for a BBQ and a dog. But then many things about their lives are different to how they imagined when they were younger.

  The flat is on the third floor of a horseshoe-shaped building that looks down on a communal garden where raised beds house a mix of messy fruit bushes, neat rows of vegetables, and bare, empty dirt that the local cats use as litter trays. Inside the flat, Mona’s room is fastidiously tidy. The only things on show are a yoga mat and weights propped by the door, novels and hardback biographies of famous dancers stacked neatly on the bookshelves and one large frame above her bed filled with a grid of photographs. The bed is covered with crisp white ironed sheets, an extravagance that Hannah laughs at Mona for whenever she sees her at the ironing board, struggling with the large duvet cover. Hannah hasn’t used the ironing board once since they moved in four years ago.

  Hannah’s room is more chaotic but more personal too. Clothes are constantly strewn on the floor and abandoned shoes mark a path to the bed, obscuring a colourful rug that covers the worn carpet. A crumpled, floral duvet and a scattering of cushions crown the bed. Sentimental knick-knacks gather dust on the windowsill, lights twist around the headboard of the bed and a jug of flowers, Hannah’s weekl
y indulgence, bloom on the bedside table.

  Most days there is a drying rack propped in the hallway of the flat, draped in colourful shades (Hannah’s) and an array of cropped trousers and over-sized shirts in muted tones (Mona’s). The walls of the flat are covered with pictures of Frida Kahlo, Katharine Hepburn, Virginia Woolf and posters from their favourite shows.

  But the pictures are attached with sticky tabs that are designed specially not to leave a mark on the rented walls, which are painted a slightly greyish shade of magnolia that neither of them would have chosen themselves. At Christmas they decorate the flat with handmade paper chains and invite their friends over for mulled wine and pigs in blankets, but they never bother buying a Christmas tree as they both spend the holiday out of London and hate the thought of returning to skeletal branches, pine needles shed like an unwanted coat on the floor. It is a transient, temporary sort of home that nonetheless feels like their own corner of London.

  Hannah grew up in a small village in South Wales where she stayed while studying for a performing arts degree in Cardiff. After graduating she headed to London. She was one of a convoy of performers arriving in the big city, some of whom she still sees, others who drifted across the city and disappeared from her life, slotting into someone else’s instead. She has lived in London for nine years and still remembers when she first started referring to London as ‘home’, her parents’ house in Wales becoming ‘home home’ and later ‘my parents’ house’. After a failed two-year relationship, at twenty-five she found herself moving out of the flat she rented with her boyfriend and into shared accommodation again. She left with half a set of kitchen equipment, her guitar and a collection of records, suddenly in need of somewhere to live. It was in that house in Bounds Green shared by other artists and performers that she met Mona. It had been a relief when, a year later, they decided to move in together – sharing with just one other person felt at least slightly better than the hectic house share that had been depressingly similar to her first flats in London.

  Mona has the almost-but-not-quite American accent of a former international school student. With a German mother and an Argentinian father, she grew up in Singapore, attending an international school while her parents both worked at the city’s university. When she was fourteen her parents divorced, her father returning to Argentina where he shortly remarried. Mona’s half-brother Matías was born when she was seventeen. At eighteen Mona left Singapore for London (a city she had dreamed of but never visited) and a degree in dance. Now, her friends and family are scattered across the world, her mother and father on separate continents and some school friends still in Singapore but others in America, Australia or Europe. On her worst days, Mona feels like she belongs nowhere. On her best days, she belongs everywhere.

  For both women, waitressing is just one part of their lives. When they fill out forms that require them to list an occupation, both of them struggle to find a succinct answer. Hannah: Singer/Waitress. Mona: Dancer/Waitress. Their lives are constantly shifting: a daily balancing act of interests and the need to earn a living. Unfortunately, over the years the two have not overlapped as much as either of them would have liked. It’s not just their living situation that they imagined would be different at this stage in their lives: neither of them expected to still be working as waitresses. Yet the job facilitates the pursuit of the dream that they both still chase, despite it all. Both women are driven by a fierce ambition that sometimes bubbles up in an uncontrollable feeling similar to nostalgia: nostalgia for a life they imagined but have never quite realised. It gnaws at them, making them feel at once empty and full of an energy that has no outlet, a force with no direction. Many of their friends have flats, husbands, babies and pets. They have each other, and this ambition.

  The song in the café switches and the fast-paced intro to ‘Tutti Frutti’ plays loudly through the speakers. Hannah drops the tea towel she had been carrying.

  ‘Come on!’ she says, suddenly swaying her hips and waving her hands above her head.

  ‘I don’t know if I can, I’m knackered!’ says Mona with a groan.

  ‘You’re never too tired for dancing,’ Hannah replies.

  Mona pauses and then surrenders to this silly tradition, her hips starting to move and then her arms. It’s their rule – if they are on a shift together and this song comes on, they have to dance. She can’t quite remember who started the rule – probably Hannah, back when they had both just started working at the café and thought it would only be a temporary thing to fit around auditions. It seems a very long time ago now, but the tradition has stuck, perhaps because it reminds them both of what it felt like to be so full of hope and ambition that you just have to dance.

  Luckily, this time the café is empty. Mona might be classically trained but when she is off stage she dances like a wild thing. Hannah follows her lead and shakes and wriggles and waves her limbs as though they want to separate themselves from her body, her hair fanning around her face like a bright red mane.

  ‘We’re too old for this,’ says Mona as she swings enthusiastically.

  ‘Definitely!’ says Hannah in reply. But neither of them stops dancing.

  Hannah is half-aware of movement outside the café window – the buses and cars and the few people on the street – and the sound of Aleksander groaning ‘Not that fucking song again’ from the kitchen, but the other half of her is absorbed by the music and the feeling of her friend’s body moving beside hers. She suddenly feels filled with the memories of all the many times before in her life when music has overwhelmed her: the early singing lessons at school, her first performance at the village hall, and more recent gigs in underground bars where her feet stick to the floor but it doesn’t matter because everything is song. For Mona, it’s the feeling of her body stretching and swaying that hooks her. Even after hours on her feet her body still knows how to dance.

  When the music stops they both look around as if dazed, suddenly remembering where they are. The smell of frying wafts from the kitchen and the lights seem to throw a suddenly harsh glare on the café. They catch each other’s eyes, both thinking the same thing but not saying it. What are we still doing here?

  Hannah shakes off the thought and instead reaches for a cloth and starts absent-mindedly wiping the coffee counter.

  ‘So tell me, what’s been going on today?’ she asks.

  This is a ritual of theirs too – sharing their observations of the customers who have visited the café, some witnessed, others imagined. As waitresses, they can melt into the surroundings – they are as much a fixture of Stella’s as Ernest the bear and the gaudy pictures on the walls. It allows them the perfect opportunity to watch and listen.

  ‘Well, unhappy soya latte woman is finally getting a divorce,’ says Mona as she wanders between tables, rearranging paper napkins and wiping surfaces, ‘and about bloody time, according to her friend. She’s been secretly saving up for her own apartment – now she has found one in Limehouse that she loves, so she can finally admit she knows about the affair and move out. She’s taking the cat.’

  ‘Good for her,’ replies Hannah, knowing whom Mona is referring to immediately. Hannah pictures the scene: the customer sitting on the sofa with a suitcase at her feet and a cat on her lap as her husband arrives home, calling him in to the living room and calmly telling him it’s over, that she knows about the other woman and she wishes them the best – her lawyers will be in touch soon and she doesn’t expect it to end well for him. Her mind turns suddenly to Jaheim, her most recent boyfriend. It’s been three weeks since they broke up and the pain is still raw. She wonders for a moment whether Mona has noticed her sudden intake of breath and guessed where her thoughts have wandered, but she doesn’t seem to, as she continues talking.

  ‘There was a hell of an argument in the afternoon too,’ says Mona, ‘A mother and teenage daughter. They were speaking a language I didn’t recognise so I obviously couldn’t work out
exactly what they were saying, but I did notice a new-looking eyebrow piercing on the girl so maybe it had something to do with that.’

  Hannah smiles; she remembers her own mother getting angry when she got her tattoo, a small string of musical notes on her left ankle, when she turned twenty-two. She was home for a week during the summer, some time off between temp jobs, and was stretched out on a deckchair in the garden enjoying a rare day of sunshine as her father struggled with the sun umbrella. Her mother had been furious. Hannah had resisted an argument – she usually did anything possible to avoid a confrontation – but inside she seethed. It was her body, it always had been, and she was a grown woman.

  Mona pauses for a moment.

  ‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ she says eventually.

  ‘Go on?’ says Hannah, putting down the cloth she’d been using to clean the counter and turning towards Mona to indicate she is listening, that her friend has her full attention.

  ‘I got a call-back!’ Mona says, smiling, her cheeks flushed.

  There is a brief moment when Hannah says nothing and her face rests in a blank expression. She feels her heart pounding inside her chest and a sudden drop of her stomach as though she is falling. But in an instant, she has found her smile, pulling it out like a pair of keys dug out of the bottom of a handbag. She steps forward, enveloping her friend in a hug.

  ‘Mona, that’s amazing,’ she says.

  ‘It probably won’t come to anything,’ says Mona, pessimism being her usual defence strategy. ‘It’s just a call-back, not a definite offer.’ But she is smiling, and Hannah can read her smile.

  She isn’t sure which audition this one is – they both attend so many that they long ago stopped sharing all the exact details – but she certainly knows the significance of a call back. When they first started living together, Hannah’s and Mona’s careers felt at similar stages, but in the last few years Hannah knows this has changed. Recently she has felt as though she is falling far behind. She leans against the coffee counter to hide the fact that her hands are shaking.