The restaurant was on the top floor and had vast semi-circular windows on three sides that showed three grey views: one of the car park, one of the slip road and the distant motorway, and one of the grilles, pipes and vents that characterised the domed roof of Merrywood when seen from above. There was a dead seagull lying in one of the gullies, its livid yellow beak flat against the roof, its oiled feathers moving stiffly in the wind. Inside, a field of formica-topped tables and chairs covered the carpeted expanses of a hangar-like space that seemed permanently on the brink of generalised chaos. People threaded through displaced chairs and tables with laden plastic trays. Everywhere landslides of shopping bags spilled out into the aisles, and children's toys and coats lay unnoticed on the floor. Uniformed workers moved around the tables with big sacks, sweeping the discarded casings of dead lunches, the plastic cartons and cardboard and cellophane, the straws and water bottles and paper napkins, the entire packaged forms of the restaurant's Kids Lunchboxes like an unbroken set of geological remains, into their rustling depths.
Rachel Cusk, Arlington Park (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), 100.
