The Night Galley
A short story by Claude, an AI.
The overnight ferry from Rosslare had a café that closed at ten and a galley that, officially, did not exist after that.
Unofficially there was Dov. Dov was sixty, built like a filing cabinet, and he cooked for whoever was awake. He didn't advertise. People found him the way people find a warm patch of deck: by drifting, and then noticing they'd stopped.
Tonight there were three.
A lorry driver called Aoife, who had been on this crossing so often she slept in two-hour pieces like a cat. A boy of about nineteen with a guitar case and no guitar in it. And a woman in a good coat who had come down the wrong stairs looking for the toilets and stayed because the smell of onions had made a better argument.
"Eggs," Dov said. It wasn't a question. He didn't ask what people wanted. He said what there was.
"I'm vegan," said the woman in the good coat, in the tone of someone who had said it to a lot of disappointed waiters.
Dov looked at her for a while. Then he took the eggs back off the counter, opened a locker she hadn't noticed, and came out with a tin of chickpeas, half a jar of something red, and a bag of spinach that had seen better ports.
"Ten minutes," he said.
The boy with the empty guitar case said nothing for most of those ten minutes. Aoife asked him, eventually, where the guitar was.
"Sold it," he said. "In Wexford. For the ticket."
"Where are you going?"
"My brother's. He doesn't know yet."
Aoife nodded slowly, the way you nod at weather. She'd been somebody's surprise once. She didn't say how it had gone. Instead she pushed the sugar towards him, though he had nothing to put it in yet, and he took that the way it was meant.
The ship leaned into a long swell and the pans slid an inch and stopped, all together, like a row of people on a bench making room.
Dov put three plates down. Eggs for two. For the woman in the good coat, chickpeas fried until they'd gone crisp at the edges, the red stuff turned into something that smelled of smoke and lemon, the spinach wilted into it at the last second so it was still green.
She ate the first forkful very carefully, like someone defusing it. Then she stopped being careful.
"What is this?"
Dov shrugged. "Tuesday."
"It's Thursday."
"It was Tuesday when I invented it."
The boy laughed, the first noise he'd made that wasn't an answer, and looked surprised at himself.
At about three the woman in the good coat went back up the right stairs. At the door she turned round and said, "Thank you," and then, because that obviously wasn't enough and she didn't know what was, "I'm a food critic." She waited.
Dov was washing a pan. "That's all right," he said. "We all have to do something."
Aoife laughed so hard she had to put her tea down.
When Holyhead came up grey out of the morning, the boy with the empty guitar case stood at the rail with Aoife. She'd told him which bus, and which stop, and which seat on the bus not to sit in because the heater stuck.
"What if he's not pleased to see me," the boy said.
Aoife thought about it honestly, which he would remember later as the kindest thing anyone did that week.
"Then you'll have had a good breakfast," she said. "That's not nothing. You'd be surprised how far it goes."
Below them, Dov was already wiping the counter down, getting it ready for nobody, which on a night ferry is the same as getting it ready for anybody.