legends · 4 min read ·
Services, 4 a.m.
A lorry driver stops at a motorway service station at four in the morning and is asked, again and again, if there is anything else.
The lorry driver, Aled, pulls into the services at ten to four with a tachograph that says he must stop and a stomach that says he should have stopped an hour ago. The car park is almost empty. A van with its curtains drawn. A coach with the engine ticking. Rain, not hard, the fine kind that never quite lands.
Inside, the building is lit like an operating theatre. Every surface is wipe-clean. The shop has its shutters half down, the burger counter is dark, but the coffee machine glows, and there is a woman behind the till of the one open kiosk, a thin woman in a regulation fleece, her badge turned inward.
"Evening," says Aled.
"Morning," she says.
He orders a tea and a bacon roll, and pays by card, and the machine beeps its approval. She slides the tea across. He takes it to a table by the window, where the glass shows him only himself and the rain, and he sits and rubs his eyes.
When the roll comes, she brings it to him herself. This is unusual. He has been using services for thirty years and he knows that nobody brings anything to a table after midnight. She sets it down on a paper napkin and stands there a second.
"Is there anything else?" she says.
"No, love. That's grand."
She nods, and goes back to the kiosk. Aled eats. The roll is hot and perfectly cooked, the bacon crisp at the edge and soft in the middle, better than a roll has any right to be in a building like this. He thinks: someone's taken some care.
He finishes. He wipes his hands. At the till the woman looks up and says, as she might say it to anyone: "Is there anything else?"
He blinks. He has already answered that. But he says, kindly, "No, you're all right."
"Tea?" she says. "Bacon roll?"
"I've had them, love."
"Of course," she says.
He gets up, bins the napkin, and heads for the toilets, which are down a long corridor of tiling and humming light. Hand-dryer. Mirror. The face of a tired man of fifty-two. When he comes out she is at the end of the corridor, the badge still turned inward, and she says "Is there anything else?" as if she has been practising it.
Aled has driven through every kind of night. He has been in the cab when a deer came over a crash barrier. He is not a man who startles. But he says, with great evenness, "I'm going to go to my lorry now, love."
"Of course," she says. "Safe journey."
He walks the length of the hall. The shutters. The dark burger counter. The automatic doors, which open, and which he gets halfway through before he hears her behind him, close, in the empty hall, in a voice a good deal lower than the one she used for him.
"Tea? Bacon roll?"
It is not a question to him. It is a question to a second customer at the table by the window. He turns his head, and there is no one at the table, only his own reflection in the glass, sitting forward with its elbows on the Formica, and the reflection, rather than turning with him, is looking at the woman and nodding.
Aled goes out into the rain. In the cab he locks the doors and sits with both hands on the wheel for the length of one cigarette he does not light. The tachograph says he has forty minutes left on his break. He starts the engine anyway and pulls onto the slip road with the wipers going.
At the junction he looks in the mirror. The building is lit and bright and clean, a ship at anchor. The kiosk is lit. In the glass of the window there is a man at a table, forward on his elbows, with a plate in front of him and a woman standing patiently at his shoulder.
He did not look back at that. He looked at the road. He drove for six hours, and he did not stop again, and when at last he did, at a services a hundred and eighty miles north, with the sun well up, he ordered a tea from a young man with an earring and it came in a polystyrene cup. Nobody brought it to the table. He drank it. He sat a long time.
When he went to pay, the young man said, "Anything else?" and Aled had to put his hand flat on the counter and breathe for a while before he could say, "No. Thank you. That's everything."