Storymania - All-Day Breakfast by Kevin Cope

All-Day Breakfast
Kevin Cope

It was 11 o’clock.

I had over an hour to kill before I had to meet my agent. I had left early, and as usual in a rush to leave the house, I had forgotten to have anything to eat.

It was usually about this time that my stomach would start to send out small scouting parties in search of food. When It didn’t find any, it would start to make itself heard and warn me that, if it didn’t have something to eat soon, it would cross it arms in disgust and slump into a mild depression for the rest of the day.

A breakfast was what it wanted and it didn’t see any reason why it shouldn’t have one.

As luck would have it, I remembered that there was a small café just around the corner from where I was, so I decided to make my way there. My stomach gave me a small round of applause and nudged my small intestine, just to let it know that food was on its way.

As I made my way down the street, the small dog-eared café came into view. The dark blue paint work above the door had started peel. It hung downwards, towards the glass, as if it had spotted someone inside that it knew and wanted to say a quick ‘hello’.

The café looked dark and empty. I cupped my hands up to the door, and planted my face between them, to see if there were any signs of life. Luckily I could just make out a slightly lighter shadow moving in front of a slightly darker shadow at the back of the building. I decided to take a chance and go in.

I sat down at one of the many vacant tables and pushed the slightly sticky tomato sauce bottle to one side as I did so. The sauce bottle was shaped like a tomato. It seemed very embarrassed about this, and seemed not to want to talk about it, so I picked up the menu instead, which was trying desperately to stay upright between the salt and pepper pots.

I was studying the menu, when I suddenly heard a man’s voice behind me.

“Yes…Can I help you?”

I spun my head around quickly and looked down towards the back of the café from where the voice had drifted. All I could see was a large woman, staring blankly back at me. I searched the room again for the owner of the voice.

“Can I help you?” she said again slowly.

“Oh…yes…I thought that someone else had…err…” I stumbled, trying not to embarrass myself. “I…err… wanted something to eat.” I said, somewhat apologetically.

“Did you want an all-day breakfast?” she asked.

Before I could reply, she continued.

“Cause, if you do, say so now, because we stop serving them at 12 o’clock.”

“Don’t you serve them all day?” I said, looking puzzled.

“No!” She said, wobbling her head from side to side, as if I had asked her something profoundly stupid.

“Oh…OK...I’ll have an all-day breakfast then please.” I said, without stopping to read the other options on the faded laminated menu.

I felt a sudden urgency to order my breakfast quickly. Presumably, I thought, at the stroke of twelve, a team of waiters would storm in from the kitchen, whip the breakfast plate away from under my nose and leave me sitting there with my knife and fork poised for action against an empty table.

My ears were unexpectedly assaulted again when I heard the woman bark my order through an open hatch behind her. Well, I assumed it was my order; I couldn’t quite make the words through her strong bovine accent. For all I knew, she might have been shouting at a stray cat to get out of the kitchen and stop licking the sausages.

Before I could turn round again to order a drink to go with my breakfast, she came up to me with surprising speed, and thrust a steaming mug of hot tea in front of me.

“Comes with the breakfast,” she snapped.

“Oh…thanks very much…” I began to say, but she was gone again.

I was glad for the tea. I needed something sweet to kick-start my system. I gingerly tapped the pyramid of sugar in the sugar bowl in front of me with my plastic spoon. I wondered if it was going to let me scoop any out. As I suspected, it didn’t. I pushed down a bit harder and was horrified to see the bottom end of my spoon snap off and shoot across the room. I lost track of it for a split second and then moments later I saw it glide to an abrupt halt on another table two rows down. The woman looked up from her magazine and glared at me. I quickly put my head down and stirred my un-sugared tea, with what was left of the spoon and innocently starred out between the large hand-written menus on the window.

Not wanting to catch her eye again. I amused myself by watching an elderly woman on the opposite side of the road. She had a walking stick in one hand and a bag of shopping in the other. She was standing on the edge of the pavement looking quite agitated. She was trying to cross the busy lanes of morning traffic. I couldn’t see any traffic islands nearby, or any gaps in the traffic for that matter, so the chances of her crossing the road without being hit seemed to me to be pretty slim. I was just giving her chances of survival marks out of ten, when my attention was taken away with a loud ‘chink’, as the cafe door opened. In walked a thin, pale, unshaven man, wearing a shabby beige raincoat and an oddly shaped red bobble hat. It gave him the appearance of an old unused safety match. I was feeling fairly sociable, so I said good morning to him and smiled. He stared at me as if I had just asked him if my dog could pee on his shoes because all the nearby lampposts were being used. A thought quickly crossed my mind that perhaps, maybe, I was sat in his regular seat, and his look of disdain was my punishment. He walked past without saying a word and took off his coat and sat at a table near the counter. It was a few seconds before I actually realised that he was still wearing a coat even though he had just taken one off. The one he had taken off was in a crumpled heap in the seat next to him. I pondered this for a moment and assumed that he wore two coats to keep out the cold, but maybe it was his special coat, one that he wore for taking off in cafés and on buses to deter people from sitting next to him. But frankly I couldn’t imagine that many people would actually want to get that close to him. He gargled something at the woman, who, obviously understanding his language, busied herself with the ancient silver coffee machine bracing itself up on the back wall.

As I looked at the woman behind the counter more closely, it struck me that she looked not unlike a walrus that had won a makeover competition on daytime television. Her heavy colourful makeup covered her face in no particular order and as she bobbed and weaved around behind the counter, it gave the impression that her face had been put together with vibrant coloured putty.

I had only taken my eyes off her for a few moments to sip my tea when, suddenly without warning, she was there next to me holding my breakfast. She waited until I had removed my arms from the table and then slid the plate in front of me and then made her way down to the table that had claimed ownership of the bottom half of my broken spoon. She deliberately picked it up and ‘tutted’ to herself loudly enough for me to hear and then made a point of ignoring me on her way back to the counter.

I stared down at my breakfast. The heat coming from the plate was so intense I felt sure that it would melt through the peeling red and yellow speckled surface of the table and disappear onto my feet below. I prodded a couple of sausages and lifted up the egg white, just to make sure everything was in order. I didn’t know quite what I was looking for, but I thought I’d better check all the same. As I cut into one of the shiny brown sausages, I felt the safety-match man in the corner looking at me over my shoulder. Obviously I thought trying to make me feel guilty for spending nearly three pounds on one meal. I shrugged off my guilt quickly and attacked the sticky fried assortment.

It was 11:57am as I pushed my last piece of sausage around the plate and swallowed it down with the remains of my tea. Two minutes later the woman appeared at my side and snatched my empty breakfast plate away.

“Do you want anything else? ” she asked, looking directly at an old couple that had come in and had sat themselves down at a table in front of me facing the window.

Was she talking to them? Or me? I wondered. I played dumb and pretended to be engrossed in re-aligning the salt and pepper with the clear plastic flower vase in the centre of the table. She then stared at me with the force of a small builders van and said.

“Well did you want anything else or not?”

“Sorry, I didn’t think you were talking to me. “ I said as casually as I could, trying not to let her see the fear in my eyes.

“Who do you think I was talking too? “ she asked, as I watched my empty mug of tea slide across the greasy plate she was now holding in her hands at an alarming angle.

“Errr…I don’t know.” I said. “Have you any cakes?” I asked quickly.

“What we have is all on the counter.” She sneered, her head flicking back in the direction of the cakes. Obviously she hadn’t forgiven me for breaking one of her spoons.

I nodded my thanks and looked closer, hoping that my eyes would fall upon a large, chilled, puffy chocolate éclair. What actually met my eyes were three scared current buns, huddled close together for protection from a large brown slab of crusty fruit cake, that was threatening to fall sideways and crush them all. I scanned the rest of the counter, all I could see was a small, slightly shrivelled, and slightly disheartened doughnut, which was showing signs of an identity crisis. I glanced at the current buns one more time and then my subconscious gingerly tapped the inside of my forehead and informed me that it had just had a quickl informal meeting with my stomach and they both whole-heartedly agreed, that perhaps, it was probably better to leave the cakes for now and get something later. I had to agree.

Time was getting on and I had an appointment to keep, so I walked up to the counter to pay. Feeling a pang of guilt for not having a cake, I spotted a rack of sweets next to the till. I picked up a Mars bar and peered around the coffee machine to find someone to take my money. The woman wasn’t to be seen, so I craned my neck to look further back down the counter. I heard a light shuffling sound and then a small greasy man popped up in front of my eyes, like a shooting target at a fairground.

“Hi, how can I help?” He said cheerfully, standing perfectly still.

“I want to pay for my all-day breakfast…and this.” I said, pushing the Mars bar towards him with my finger and thumb as if I was making a rather cunning chess move.

“Breakfast and a Mars...That’s three pounds forty then please.” He said, as he clunked his fingers on the till.

I handed him a five-pound note and as I slipped my newly acquired afternoon snack into my coat pocket I noticed the woman sticking another poster on the already overcrowded window. I turned back to the man, who was still standing perfectly still. I loaded my mouth and shot him down with a ‘thank-you’. He then promptly disappeared down behind the counter again.

I turned and headed toward the door, sidestepping a furry yellow wine-gum stuck to the floor as I went. I walked past the red bobble hat with the man beneath, that now had one of his legs hooked up over the table and was engrossed in massaging a grubby black toe.

I opened the door slowly, hoping it would ‘chink’ with a little bit of consideration and let me exit without the woman noticing. It didn’t. It ‘chinked’ loud and clear, because obviously, that was its job and that’s what it was good at. She glared at me with a forced ‘please come again’ smile and then went back to scrawling something on a blackboard in the window.

I slipped onto the pavement outside. As I stood in the haze of the city air, buttoning up my coat, I looked at the black board through the window. It said, ‘SUNDAY LUNCH SPECIAL ONLY £3.95’ and underneath in smaller writing it read ‘MONDAY THRU’ TO SATURDAY ONLY’. I stared at it for a few moments, shaking my head at the absurdity of it all and then headed down the busy street.

I glanced briefly at the other side of the road. The old woman was still trying to cross the road. She was now looking quite weak and disorientated from all the exhaust fumes. She was like a canary, teetering on the edge of its perch, about to drop dead.

I toyed with the idea of helping her, but I had things to do, people to see.

If she’s still there next week, I thought. I’ll cross over and give her a hand.