Witness account · 4 min read · Set in Tavernier ·
The Usual Regulars
At the all-night counter of the Tavernier six customers order from a menu that was retired before the Misprint, leave correct change, and never stay past the first tanker.
- reliability: corroborated
- witness: Nuala Reedy, night counter, the Tavernier
I work the all-night counter at the Tavernier and have done nineteen years. Night work is night work and the counter keeps me off my own thoughts.
Here is what I know, set out plainly and without decoration, because what use is decoration at four in the morning.
They come in at three. Not 02:58, not 03:05. Three, by the bell the landlord keeps over the till, which has run slow since before I came. Six of them. It is always six since I have worked there; my predecessor, who trained me that first fortnight, used to say seven, so there is an arithmetic question hanging over us all that nobody has settled and nobody will. They take the counter stools, which are nine, and leave the seventh one — you will notice the count doesn't come right whatever way you do it. Hi-vis, overalls, mugs they bring to their own lips. Coats smelled of diesel and rain and six kinds of cold.
They order the dish of the day. That is where any new girl goes wrong with them; we changed the last of the 1979 menu when the boiler was renewed. But nobody at my counter asks what the dish is. They ask for the dish of the day, and whichever regular is nearest gets served first, same as anyone.
And — this took me some years to be sure of and I will swear to it in black and white — the food gets eaten. The plate goes up steaming. It comes back like a plate that's been eaten with the sides of forks. The tea urn drops a measurable amount, and the till drawer has the right money in it by morning, correct to the penny, and in the little saucer by the bell, every night, tips: old-looking silver, every one struck 1979 and bright as a new pin, and never damp.
They speak when you'd expect them not to and not otherwise. They order and they thank. I got nineteen years of hellos and goodnights out of some of them and nothing else, and I made it a rule long ago not to push. My one rule broken was four winters back, when the counter man in the canvas jacket — fourth stool, big quiet man — looked up and said:
"You've moved the sugar. It's nearer your hand now. That's better."
And it was. I had moved the sugar that Tuesday on a whim because my wrist ached, and had mentioned it to nobody. The kind word from the fourth stool. I have not had a nicer said to me at work in thirty years of working.
They go when the first tanker goes. The yard is at the back of the Tavernier, ten steps from the counter door, and you hear a tanker move off the forecourt the way you hear weather change. Whatever hour it happens, whether we're still 04:00 or fast rolling on to 05:00, the six stools are empty within a minute of the first tanker's engine, and the hard metal door swings itself — no draught in this room, I have checked the seals — and my side of the street is just a launderette and me again.
The owner says what he says, which is that the till is correct so let's all go to bed. He is not being hard. I have seen him wipe the seventh stool down with his own handkerchief before the counter girl comes on, with a level of care you'd give a sire in a chapel, and let nobody tell me he doesn't know more than his brevity lets on.
Corroborated, they tell me to say, since I've gone on this long, and I will not contest the word. The till rolls are filed, nine hundred orders or more for dishes the establishment has not served to the living in decades, and the coins are kept in a box in the office, and a boy from the Assay could not find a lie in them with a jeweller's scale. My daughter corroborates one part, and asks it as a question: "Mum, why do their pans always come back warm if nobody's warmed them?" And I say, because I do say it, that pans come back warm when they've been eaten from.