Particles

Once inside the building, I headed up the escalator to the restaurant area.

It was reasonably busy, with customers wearing that resigned look that everyone has in a motorway service area: resigned to crap food, resigned to paying through the nose for it.

Seeing the queue at the coffee franchise counter, I opted instead for a cup of instant from the machine by one of the food serving areas ... and then realised that the only till open was the one at the coffee franchise counter.

Now, I'm not a dishonest person by nature - it's more to do with the way I was brought up than any need to do the right thing - but after all that had happened to me lately, I just couldn't be bothered to queue up. So I simply picked up the cup I'd poured, and walked calmly to a table. Nobody bothered me, or even paid attention. But to be honest, after breaking in to a high-security building, it wasn't much of an illicit thrill.

After staking my table, I headed for the are where the sugar, milk and stirrers were stored. As I was picking out some plastic milk and a small wooden stick, the sachets of salt and pepper caught my eye. It was something about the contrast of the red and blue colours, the pattern they made and the number of sachets that were squeezed into the tray ... all of these things seemed to draw me in.

In my mind's eye, I imagined how many grains of pepper would be in just one sachet, and how small each grain would be. I then tried to take in the scale of the large, high-ceilinged restaurant, seen from the perspective of a speck of pepper. Why, the room must surely be the size of a world to it.

Already feeling dizzy from this train of thought, I then caught sight of the traffic speeding along the carriageway below. Trying to cope with their speed and might - seen from the self-same pepper dot's-eye view - as well as the size of the outside world, was too much for my brain.

Holding on to the edge of the counter to steady myself, I headed back to my table. Sitting down and stirring the coffee, for a moment I forgot who I was, forgot all about the real life I lived, far away from my new, strange service-station universe.



Story begins here.