Short story · 4 min read · Set in Alder Hill ·
The Menu of What I Ate
The Alder Hill canteen prints its menu at four o'clock as a true account of the meals already eaten that day, and the printed column for tomorrow has already been paid for by nobody anybody can name.
The Alder Hill canteen sits at the back of the rates hall, down four steps past the plan chests, and its menus do not announce anything. The sheets go up on the door at four o'clock with the day already served behind them: what the kitchen cooked, what went over the counter, what went back on the plates. A receipt dressed in a menu's clothes, the younger clerks call it, and the supervisor, Miss Hilda Twomey, lets the phrase stand because it is accurate and the office is fond of accurate.
I have taken my midday there eleven years, and I understood the arrangement until September, when the sheets began to carry two columns.
The first column closes the day out: soup, main, two vegetables, pudding, tea at ninepence. The second column, set to the right in the same typeface, is headed TOMORROW, and it is priced. Not guessed — priced, to the penny, in the same red ink the till uses for settled sums. And the next day the second column is served. Not similar. Served: the same joint, carved the same, the same two vegetables in the same order, the same pudding with the same crack through its middle that the kitchen swears it did not plan.
We have all tried to eat against it. Kenneth Pelley of the sewers section ordered cheese when the column said ham, and was served cheese, mind, and the column corrected itself by the evening printing to read what he ate, which is the whole trick of the sheet: it never lies. But the kitchen counters that the ham he declined was in the steam table regardless, weighed out in his portion, and had to go back to the stock pot unused. The food bought for him that he did not eat was still on the books as bought for him. Wednesday he ate the ham. He says it was out of spite. The kitchen says the accounting is easier. Miss Twomey says both, in that order, and has the portions book to fall back on.
Then there is the money. June Maddox counts the till and the menu together at closing, and the second column is not only priced, it is met. Every sheet, every evening, tomorrow's column comes up covered: a credit in the tin, coin mostly, that arrived across the counter some time in the day and cannot be traced to any diner. She has counted it forward three separate ways and it answers every time. Paid in advance, she says, and counted twice, and she chalks the letter P beside the column so the morning staff know not to ask the till for it twice.
The bursar's office was asked properly, in writing, whether a credit from no fault could be refused and returned. A credit cannot be refused; that is the ruling, twice underlined, initialled in the corner. Money that arrives across a counter belongs to the meal it settles, whoever carried it in. So the column is served, because it is paid, because the books balance; and the books balance because the column is paid; and Miss Twomey read that round of it aloud to the kitchen and stood a while with the steam rising before anybody went back to the pans.
The puzzling part is not the serving. It is the paying. For eleven years I have walked down those four steps at ten to one and chosen as I chose, free of account. Now I choose between the column and the counter, and the column is always ahead of me, and somebody unknown settles my choice the same afternoon. Not a subscriber, not a works fund, not canteen club. Loose coin, honest sums, and it never arrives with any name.
I have begun, lately, to notice what the column orders for me on the difficult days. Soup the day the overheads came in. Pudding, unasked, on the Monday after my mother's anniversary. It seems kind. That is what I mind about it. An appetite I did not make is on file in my name, costed and commented, and a hand I have never seen pays it daily in small coin and takes no receipt, because the taking of receipts is my half of the arrangement and I am given no billet for mine.
So the question I carry up the four steps now, past the plan chests with my tray: tomorrow's column is already printed, already priced, already met to the penny — and whose mouth is it written for; and if I stay at my desk tomorrow and eat nothing, who it is that eats my paid-for meal in my name.