Extreme Craving for a Mall

Due to the coronavirus lockdowns, I hadn’t been to a shopping mall since February, when I was buying decorations for Chinese New Year. At this time, the news of covid-19 had just begun percolating through Australia, although the seriousness of the true threat hadn’t completely registered.

At the café where I was having lunch at the time, I was only partially worried about covid-19. In my diary I even spelt the word as corvid-19, evoking a flock of studded, luridly-coloured viral balls with raven wings. Takeaway customers waiting at the counter, discussed coronavirus with the staff. People were worried, but at this point the virus still seemed a distant threat.

Throughout the lockdown, I kept on feeling an extreme craving to go to a shopping mall. I wanted the whole mall experience, having a list of items to buy, hunting them down and finishing off the shopping expedition with a café lunch.

Since 1 June, lockdown restrictions have been eased in New South Wales, allowing eateries to have 50 customers at a time with a distance of 4m squared around them. I decided that this was the ideal time to finally follow the siren call of the mall.

The bus had around ten passengers on it, the normal amount. I made sure to leave an empty seat between myself and the person in front of me and to keep a gap between myself and other passengers when alighting from the bus.

The mall had been undergoing renovations in stages for a while. Plenty of hoardings barricaded shops. It was hard to know if their closures were due to renovations or covid-19. At least the majority of shops were open.

Because I hadn’t been to the mall for so long, there were hoardings I hadn’t seen before, and I became disoriented, wandering from one corridor to another, wondering if it was me or the mall.

Eventually I found the clothing store I’d been searching for. The layout had altered since I’d been there four months earlier with racks of clothing arranged further apart. The store felt slightly desolate, but I could have been imagining it. I found a pair of trackpants and a sloppy joe that seemed to be the right size. The dressing rooms had been barricaded off with trolleys and a closure sign, but a shop assistant told me that customers had 100 days to return their items if they didn’t fit. I asked her how everything had been going under lockdown and she said they’d been busy, which was good news.

Announcements were regularly made in stores about these difficult times, social distancing, advising self-isolating customers to stay at home and order goods online. There were reminders to sanitise hands by washing for twenty seconds and to cough into elbows.

One announcement said, We can all do something to stop the spread of covid-19. Thank you for your cooperation. In accordance with government requirements, maintain distance between customers and staff.

By the time I saw this sign, I’d already been in an aisle with more than two people in it, but we managed to keep our distance anyway.

I made sure not to touch escalator railings, even though I had to fight my instinct to hold onto them.

The tables at the mall’s cafés were widely spaced. It was good to see businesses up and running, and plenty of customers in the eateries at the widely-spaced tables. I soon found a spot and ate a delicious lunch, the first lunch I’d had at a mall in four months.

I’m wearing the trackpants now and they fit, so I’m glad I don’t have to return them. I never thought I would suffer from extreme craving for a mall. As far as coronavirus is concerned, things are finally more nor-mall.