The 24-Hour Café Read online

  ‘Wow,’ says Hannah, standing up again, ‘We don’t really make great evil characters, do we?’

  The woman dressed as Harley Quinn looks down at her costume, her painted face breaking into a smile. It’s a warm smile that immediately makes Hannah feel slightly less on edge. She feels herself relaxing a little, not having realised that her whole body had been tense as she surveyed the living room, trying to find a way in to the party.

  ‘No, I guess we don’t,’ says the woman, ‘I’m Mona by the way, the rest of the time.’

  ‘I’m Hannah.’

  Hannah properly takes in the woman who shares the small kitchen space with her. Mona is a similar height to Hannah and has the physique of a dancer. She guesses she is around the same age as her, but it’s hard to tell her natural complexion or hair colour beneath the wig and make-up. Sounds of the party flow in through the door to the kitchen and Hannah wonders whether she should head back out again and make another attempt to meet people and chat with her housemates, but she finds she doesn’t want to. She wants to stay exactly where she is.

  ‘So, are you a housemate or guest?’ Mona says. Hannah notices an accent but cannot place it.

  ‘Housemate – I only moved in three weeks ago. So I know you’re a guest.’

  Wilma Flinstone walks into the kitchen and Hannah and Mona step aside, waiting until Wilma has found a still half-full bottle of wine and carried it back into the living room.

  ‘I’m an old friend of Poppy’s,’ says Mona when they are alone again, ‘We went to dance school together. She’s great, but I haven’t seen her in a little while – I think she’s invited our whole graduate year group tonight.’

  Hannah hears another burst of laughter and swell of voices rising from the living room and the spare room, where guests have now started to congregate too, and thinks Mona might be right. The house is heaving.

  ‘Yeah, I get the sense she likes a party,’ Hannah says.

  Mona laughs.

  ‘Yeah, that’s Poppy. We had some crazy ones when we were students.’

  ‘She’s also got this plan to try and find someone who’s in need of a room – the room opposite mine has been empty since I moved in.’

  ‘You’ve got a room going?’ asks Mona, looking interested. Hannah nods and Mona looks as though she is going to ask something else, but instead she pauses and takes another sip of her drink.

  ‘So what are you then?’ she asks brightly, ‘An actor, dancer, artist?’

  Hannah raises an eyebrow and they both find themselves laughing. Hannah feels suddenly aware of the strange bubble that this house, and her life, exists in. Most of the guests at the party are women and from what she knows of her housemates so far, she guesses most of them are ‘creative’ in some way like they are: young people balancing individual passions with day or night jobs. Hannah guesses that the proportion of people who can tap dance in this house compared to those who can’t would be way above the national average. Hannah thinks about the bizarreness of that fact – the strange skills of the people assembled under this roof. She wonders how many other ‘bubbles’ there are spread across London – villages within a city, villages with their own tribes, their own traditions, their own language even.

  She tells Mona her usual story, about moving from Wales and her struggle to find work after graduating, a struggle that she paints in a positive light, like they all do. A knack for positive spin is essential in their world.

  ‘At the moment I’m working as a part-time receptionist, but it’s great that it gives me the flexibility to do gigs,’ she says, ignoring the fact that she has just had a series of gigs cancelled and doesn’t know when her next one will be, and that she hates her job. She very briefly summarises her history with Sam, saying only that they were together for two years and have just broken up, and that’s why she is living here. She doesn’t give any more detail and Mona doesn’t ask. Instead she listens intently, nodding and smiling, silently topping up Hannah’s cup of wine while she talks. Then Mona tells her story too, how she grew up in Singapore but left for a dance school in London at eighteen. Other than a year dancing on a cruise ship she has been in the city ever since, moving around between flat shares like Hannah. Her current home is a flat shared with two ‘difficult women’, but she doesn’t elaborate and instead goes on to talk passionately about shows she’s recently seen.

  Throughout the evening people come and go in the kitchen, but Hannah and Mona stay talking to each other. Hannah feels at ease, as though she has known Mona all her life. She admires the way she talks about dancing, how she lights up and her whole body seems to come alive, as though she might start dancing herself any second.

  ‘There’s nothing like it,’ Mona says, and Hannah thinks immediately of singing – how it feels to close her eyes and surround herself with the music.

  ‘I know it might sound silly,’ continues Mona, ‘But when I’m dancing I feel as though I’m doing what my body is meant to do. I’m more myself than I am at any other time. I sometimes feel like someone should watch me dance if they want to really get to know me. It’s like my body can describe me better than me talking ever can. It’s more eloquent, somehow. Does that sound mad?’

  Hannah finds herself swallowing hard as Mona’s words hit her in the chest. Because they don’t sound mad at all – they make perfect sense. Since breaking up with Sam, she hasn’t been singing or playing her guitar every day like she used to, and she suddenly realises how much she misses it. It’s the thing she has loved since she was a young girl living in a village in Wales and dreaming of the city. It’s the thing that is always there, no matter what else is going on in her life. Her upcoming gigs might have been cancelled and she might be starting out on a new, unexpected chapter of her life, one she didn’t choose for herself, but no one can take away the ache in her heart and the dream that is still there beneath the sadness and the disappointment. No one can take away the music. She decides suddenly and firmly that she has to start singing again, and that this change in her life could be her opportunity to devote herself to her music – to finally get her big break.

  ‘Not at all,’ Hannah says eventually to Mona, ‘I know exactly what you mean.’ From the start they understand each other completely.

  *

  The day after the Halloween party Poppy triumphantly announced that her plan had worked and someone wanted to move into the spare room.

  ‘You met her, Hannah,’ Poppy said, ‘Her name’s Mona.’

  When Mona moved into the room opposite hers a week later, Hannah helped her unpack and they got to know each other as they sorted through the boxes and assembled Mona’s wardrobe. They talked and talked and Hannah felt the giddy excitement of an instant connection – that feeling when you meet someone and it just clicks. She already associated meeting Mona with inspiring her to get back to her music; the day after the party she had picked up her guitar again despite her hangover. And now it seemed as though this new friend would also help her feel at home in the house that up until then she’d still felt somewhat reluctant to be in.

  They very quickly became close friends, staying up late in one or other of their rooms and talking. Mona took Hannah to shows at Sadler’s Wells and Hannah showed Mona her favourite music venues. They started cooking together, sharing food shops and a shelf in the communal fridge and leaving each other leftovers in Tupperware boxes when they were working different schedules and couldn’t eat together. And when Mona moved from a job she hated as a bartender in a seedy nightclub to a job waitressing at Stella’s, the all-night café on Liverpool Street, she told Hannah how flexible the owner was about shifts and taking time off for auditions and about an opening they had for another waitress. Mona put in a good word and Hannah got the job; suddenly they were working together as well as living together and they grew even closer, bonding over gossip and speculation about customers and shared late-night shifts.

 
At first Hannah was cautious about letting Poppy see how close she and Mona had become; if they went out somewhere together she would always invite Poppy too, not wanting her to feel left out. Hannah was aware that Mona was Poppy’s friend first, even if they hadn’t seen each other in a while and even if she knew that sounded petty. She didn’t want to offend her new housemate and knew that even though they were in their mid-twenties none of them were immune to the hurtful effects of being left out. But Poppy, a young woman who collected friends like some people collect shoes or toy cars, was usually too busy to commit to plans. Over time Hannah and Mona stopped expecting her to come, and then stopped inviting her. The housemates very quickly forgot that Mona had joined the house as Poppy’s friend, not Hannah’s.

  ‘Do you have to spend your whole time on that bloody phone?’ comes a sudden loud voice. Hannah turns to the booth where the couple in fancy dress are still sat. The woman dressed as Marilyn Monroe is staring at the man dressed as a gorilla, and the man dressed as the gorilla is staring at his phone. But at the sound of her voice he looks up.

  ‘Oh shut the fuck up,’ he says. All the laughter that was in his voice earlier has disappeared and his tone is coarse and bitter. He thumps a furry fist down on the table so hard that it rattles and Hannah jumps slightly. The young man on the nearby table looks up at the sound but then looks away again quickly. Hannah stares, wondering if the man in the gorilla suit will start laughing again as though he was just joking, but he doesn’t. The woman, who seemed so confident when she first arrived, sinks a little into her seat and says nothing. They stare at each other for a moment and Hannah prepares herself to head over or shout for Pablo if a more violent argument kicks off. It wouldn’t be the first time that has happened in the café. But the man dressed as the gorilla goes back to looking at his phone and the woman sits opposite him in silence. After a while she stands up and pays at the counter, avoiding Hannah’s eyes. She returns to the table and without a word the man in the gorilla suit picks up his mask and stands up.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he says, reaching for the woman’s hand. Hand in hand, the gorilla and Marilyn Monroe step outside into the street. Hannah watches them as they walk towards the bus stop. She wonders where they have been and where they are heading. Whether the shouting was a tired one-off or a sign of something more serious. But of course, she will never know. A bus pulls up and they step on, the doors closing behind them.

  ‘Are you OK?’ says Pablo, suddenly in the doorway between the café and the kitchen, a tea towel flecked with chocolate flung over his shoulder, ‘I heard someone shouting but was at a very important moment with my cake.’

  His face is pink and glistening with the warmth from the kitchen and chocolatey handprints stain his chef’s whites where he must have rubbed his hands while baking.

  ‘I’m fine, thanks,’ replies Hannah, glad of Pablo’s presence even though she has seen far worse fights here over the years, ‘Just an angry customer, but he’s gone now.’

  Pablo nods and then hesitates, pausing in the doorway. Hannah suddenly thinks how lonely it must be working in the kitchen with only the radio for company and without these customers to observe and wonder about.

  ‘Do you remember when Mona and I first started working here?’ she asks him. He smiles.

  ‘Of course,’ he says, nodding, ‘You made me coffees to practise using the machine and they were terrible. They are better now though.’

  ‘I should hope so, I’ve been making them for five years,’ she replies. As she says it her mind rests on the number – has it really been that long?

  ‘It’s seven years for me,’ Pablo says. Hannah thinks again about his life before the café, and how little we often understand about the people we think we know so well.

  The café door opens and a woman walks inside.

  ‘I better get back to the cake,’ says Pablo, ‘It won’t ice itself, the bastard.’ He disappears into the kitchen.

  4.00 a.m.

  Hannah

  The new customer is petite, perhaps only just five foot, Hannah guesses, and wearing tracksuit bottoms, trainers, a trench coat and a large grey cable-knit jumper that looks much too big for her and has a small pale stain on the chest. One of the legs of her tracksuit bottoms is tucked into her sock: pale blue with puffins printed on it, reminding Hannah of a pair she owned as a child. With wide, dark eyes the woman looks around her as though she has landed there by some magic, instead of having just stepped off the night bus. Her hair, blonde at the tips but dark from the roots, is tied back in a messy ponytail. As her eyes meet Ernest’s she shudders a little and moves to a table facing the opposite direction without looking at Hannah. Once she is seated she sits very still, staring ahead out the café window.

  The boy in the green hooded jumper is still sat at his table surrounded by books and glances across at the new customer. He looks at her for a long time, something like but not quite a frown on his face. Then he shakes his head slightly and returns to his books, his head resting in his hands as he reads them. Every now and then his eyes dart back to the woman in the tracksuit, and then back to his book.

  ‘Can I take your order?’ asks Hannah, standing over the woman’s table. As she speaks, a buzzing sound comes from the woman’s coat pocket.

  ‘A cappuccino,’ says the woman, the buzzing continuing.

  Hannah nods and turns to leave, but then turns back.

  ‘Your phone?’ she says, indicating the woman’s pocket which is vibrating from the buzzing of the phone.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ says the woman distractedly, taking the phone out of her pocket. She presses the ‘decline call’ button and places it on the table in front of her. Then she turns back to the window. Hannah looks at her for a moment, the woman clearly oblivious that she is still there. Her shoulders sink slightly as she settles into the chair. Everything about this woman makes Hannah want to reach out and place a hand on her shoulder, but instead she turns back towards the coffee machine.

  ‘Your coffee will be with you in a sec,’ she says. The woman says nothing in reply.

  Dan

  He is used to bumping into his mum in the street or staring at her in a TV programme. He always realises very quickly that the person is not actually his mum, just someone who bears a faint resemblance to her, but it stills sends a jolt through him every time.

  The woman who just walked into the café has the same shade of hair as she had and is around the same height. He stares at her for a moment as she looks out the window. Her phone buzzes repeatedly on the table but she ignores it. As he looks closer he realises this woman is much younger – she looks almost like he remembers his mum did when he was little.

  She had him when she was still quite young – twenty. He didn’t realise this was unusual until he met the parents of his school friends and noticed that they seemed older than his mum. He was always proud of that fact – she was young and slim and wore tight jeans and jumpers that he thought made her look nice. He saw the other parents looking at her at the school gates and he felt proud in a way he couldn’t describe. He loved the big gold hoop earrings that she always wore – how they shimmered in the light as though they were made from real gold.

  It was through meeting his friends’ parents that he also realised lots of families had both a dad and a mum. Not all of them – some of his friends lived just with their mum like he did (none of them lived just with a dad) – but a lot of them did. He liked visiting his friends who had both – like Aaron and Sadir at primary school. He enjoyed observing the fathers in each of his friends’ homes. He watched them closely, noticing how they were with their wives, how they were with their children, how they were with him. Sadir’s dad always kissed Sadir’s mum on the mouth when he arrived home – it made Sadir squirm and shout at them to ‘Cut it out!’ but Dan secretly liked it. It made him feel slightly uncomfortable too, but it also made him smile. Aaron had two sisters but his dad didn�
�t treat them particularly differently to how he treated Aaron. He worked from home and would greet them at the door when they arrived (Aaron always walked his younger sisters to and from school) and hug each of them in turn and plant a kiss on their cheek. When Dan visited after school Aaron’s dad would do the same to him, except missing out the kiss. He would never have admitted it, but as he sank into Aaron’s father’s hug (he smelt like peppermint tea), he wished for a kiss on his cheek too just like the rest of them.

  But despite Dan’s interest in fathers, he liked the fact that it was just him and his mum. He liked that they could share a two-person pizza on a Friday evening when she finished her shift early, and that she let him have half of the bookshelves in the sitting room for his own books. She never brought a man back to the house, not once, and he didn’t know how he would have felt if she did. The thought makes him sad now – sad that she didn’t have anyone other than him to look after her when she was sick. And, although he dismisses the thought as selfish, he regrets that he has to carry the weight of his grief alone – that there is no one who feels it as keenly as he does or who he can call to say, ‘I saw someone who looked just like her today’.

  He looks at the woman again. Her body is hunched over slightly and she tightens the belt of her trench coat around her waist. As he looks closer, he realises her hair is actually much darker at the roots than his mum’s was, and she is much shorter too. In fact, he realises that she looks nothing like her at all.

  Hannah

  When Hannah’s phone buzzes she thinks it is the customer’s again – it has been going off since she arrived in the café but she hasn’t once picked up. So she continues to stare outside to where two drunks are shouting at each other in the middle of the street. Luckily the road is empty. One throws a can towards the café and it lands on the pavement, rolling down into the gutter. Hannah watches and wonders if she should step outside and warn them that they’re in the road. But as quickly as the fight started it stops and the men turn and go separate ways, one towards the station, one towards Spitalfields.