Shopping Centres. They present a challenge. The escalators stretch two storeys high, spitting out stair by stair the motorised design of my pursuit. They are grim, grid-like stairs with a look of lassitude about them, fatigued by the relentless reel of station. I flick my exhausted cigarette onto the stair before me. It joins the hundreds of other butts this escalator will swallow today. To my left, listless consumers float downwards away from my target. What goes up, must come down, as has been said. I will be going down soon too. After.
There is one other climber of these escalators apart from me. A girl. Young, maybe in her early twenties. But I can't tell for sure. She stands about eight stairs in front. We slowly move upwards together at the standard mechanical pace. She is carrying a long umbrella and wears a bag on her back shaped like the shell of a turtle. Her image sends a picture of past business to my brain. Shadows of what went before. Thought-forgotten figures and forms half-turning, half-seeing, and eventually falling.
And then the girl falls. I don't see it happen. My eyes have turned away briefly and in that moment she seems to have slipped on the stairs. All I see is her body flat down, her turtle shell to the air, as the stairs continue to ascend slowly. It looks like a bad fall. I experience a sudden reaction of concern. She struggles messily to regain her post. As she is doing so, she notices me on the stairs behind. Her eyes convey the shame of a century. The umbrella is so long that it gets wedged between the sides of the escalator aisle as she clambers shaking to her feet. She unwedges it aggressively.
The girl reaches the next floor in an agitated manner. She stops for a moment and rubs her right leg having obviously injured herself. I watch as she fumbles around trying to adjust the turtle shell bag on her back and then as she hobbles away uneasily, first one way, then another, then the other way again.
When I reach the level of my target, I begin to ponder the poor girl's embarrassment. I feel regret that I let her catch my eyes following the incident. I should have looked away, feigned an unawareness of her mishap. That would have made her feel better. Knowing that I hadn't seen. That her uncomfortable accident had occurred without witness. Even with my own impassive constitution, a scene such as that, if it had happened to me and was witnessed by another, would have pained and scarred me. Public embarrassment is a dreadful thing, no matter who you are. And in the age of mass media's love affair with the fleeting sneer, the deliberate decline of empathy within societies dampens my spirit. After putting two bullets in my target's brain, I once more take to the escalators, this time going down, and still thinking about the scene with the girl. I wish I hadn't witnessed the whole thing. We are all one and the other in this shopping centre, passing hopefully unnoticed by pity, scorn, mockery, derision, judgement. A slight misstep may not draw too much attention, might forgive us shortly afterwards and return us to comfort, but a chaotic display of human shortcoming such as what happened to that poor girl always has an audience. A willing wanting unshaken audience. It makes me sad for this world.
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