A Grotesque Luncheon

I was walking through Regent's Park, on my way up to the entrance of the zoo. It was lunchtime so I decided to see if the eating place was still there that I had visited on my last trip to London, two years ago. Sure enough, halfway up the park's long central pathway, was 'The Honest Sausage'. Since my last visit the proprietors have changed, from a couple of middle-aged mums to an Eastern Euro family of father, daughter and mono-browed son. The son was behind the counter, shuffling about in, as I later observed, very big shoes. I scanned the fare, which was written on boards hanging on the wall above his large, oblong head. The hotdog was eponymously titled, but I certainly wasn't going to ask Eyebrow to provide me with his finest, 'Honest Sausage', so I plumped for the banger and mash with onion gravy.
 
Eyebrow took my order and disappeared out the back. More people arrived in the queue behind me. Eventually, he returned from the back room and stood at the large stove where some steel pans sat. He ladled some gravy onto my spuds.

Then the father appeared from the back room: a tall, severe man with gun-metal hair. He barked an order to his son in a language I didn't recognise. The cowed young man dropped the ladle and scuttled out into the back room again. The father followed him and continued his Stalin-ating.

People in the queue gave each other the universal mime-show of exasperated-patience-tested, complete with: raised eyebrows; eyes sweeping up to the ceiling; hands turned palm-upwards. We all waited. For a long time.

Finally, the daughter appeared from the back to complete my lunch order. She had a mean, pinched little face and she sported some deftly-penciled, thick black lines across her forehead where her eyebrows once lived - perhaps she felt she couldn't possibly compete with her brother's luxuriant display?

Now provided with my sausage-like object and coagulated warm 'gravy', on its bed of cold potato, I repaired to the annexe room to sit down at one of the tables, each of which were spread with large vinyl covers featuring a red gingham pattern; mine was gelid with grease.

As I started to cut the grey meat on my cardboard plate a solitary pigeon flew into the room and began its demented, nodding strut across the floor over to my table. It noodled about by my right foot, grotesque with expectation. Its feathers were coated in filth; it looked as if it had been dipped in lard and rubbed in dirt. It didn't seem to realise that it was repulsive. With contempt, I threw it a knot of gristle that had just emerged from the masticated matter within my mouth. It nodded over to it and gluttonously wolfed it down. 

 All at once, Eyebrow flew into the room, flap-flap-flapping a large sheet of oil-drenched cardboard in the direction of the wretched bird which, in panic, delivered a grey-white blob of shit onto the floor before flying raggedly into the air, shedding a few of its filthy feathers and a cupful of avian dandruff over my table.

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