She could be anywhere from sixteen to her early twenties, a strewn mess of hair rests tangled above and over her face. A regular at the Seaford Shopping Centre, she watches families walk by, smiling at children and when no one is nearby she talks to herself. In the winter her bare feet purple from the cold and as summer approaches her skin showing bruises, cuts and debris that clings to her youth.
Pacman, the man mountain who works security tells me that she is nice, keeps to herself and the mall management and local shop owners don’t mind her being inside. Though it’s not the weather that she seeks refuge from. In such a public place she can hide in plain sight, barely social she is not alone as strangers and those regular go about their business. She is safe inside the shopping centre.
Roxy who works at the local Ecumenical centre told me that she has clothes and shoes often given to her, though she seems to throw the footwear away. The girls mother is somewhat in the picture but the daughter refuses to go home or stay with her so instead she roams the streets, sleeping between bins and living inside the mall.
A few months ago I spent a night with local homeless men after talking with a man who lives in a tent across from where I live. He is a man down on his luck, the working poor who is lost between the welfare dependency and real estate entitlement of Australian culture. His name Kyle, he will be alright in time. The other men who I spent a night with, were not battlers or noble poor. They boasted of predatory pasts and instincts to do it again, the streets to them was not a place that capitalism or what ever other scapegoats one can monetise forced them to, but rather they sought it because it meant vice and no responsibility reigned. One of them told me I was the idiot because I had to go to work as the sun rose for the morning while they lay in the miasma of chemistry.
Maybe he was correct.
She is not like them. There is an innocent in her situation. A rightful unwillingness to trust, perhaps especially those who say, “I want to help.”
Her knuckles scrapped red, as she beats them against her head while no one is looking. She whispers things to herself, in between smiles. One time she watched me as I walked in her direction, then said fast words at me. Another time I handed her fruit and a protein shake, she opened a wallet to show me that she had cash. Alongside a notebook of scribbles, a broken necklace and a couple of half eaten chocolate bars. A couple of weeks ago I saw her walk in front of incoming traffic outside the gym I was heading to train at, no one aggressively reacting instead each driver slowed with concern. She seemed oblivious to the risk, or maybe welcoming the potential harm that a car at speed could bring.
I will write about Kyle and the gaggle of homeless men another time. Their stories are not so sad, not as noble as many passerby’s would like to imagine. One of the men boasted about masturbating while he stood outside a school, how he loved the time he was a Santa Claus who sat in a mall, aroused by the children squirming on his lap while parents fed him their innocence so that they could take a photo in a ritual so sacred that it’s not strange. His vile words spat his boasts to me with putrid confidence, even as I threatened him physical harm he continued with a tirade of predatory babble. I suspect his boasts were all made up, his attempt at humour or to get a reaction from me. I saw him some weeks later, outside a supermarket, strangers giving him money and handing him food. They felt sorry for him. I don’t think that I do.
Earlier this year a tall man in a blanket, long dirty hair wafting his secretions to all nearby came by my mobile comic books shop. He seemed harmless enough until he pulled at a young girls hair, tugging hard. She yelled at him, he looked at her with stunned indignation. I shooed him away, making sure he understood what his fate would be if he returned. He scurried to the bushes in the distance. A woman yelled at me, “leave him alone, he’s homeless. He’s unwell, it’s not his fault.”
The little girl whose hair he yanked, she but a prop. “It’s not his fault…”Right. Perhaps it was the little girls.
It is my own biased perspective, a pollution of chivalry and masculine honour that sees such men as threats rather than instant victims because of their addictions, values, mental status and income. And I see the girl in the mall as an innocent who has likely endured, suffered, and is close to so many families, homes or what many consider normality. They walk by her every day. She is in a purgatory, trapped in her own mind, shackled by past abuse and now as her youth wanders by as quickly as those strangers in the mall, her deterioration and escaping something, or others may someday no longer be possible.
It’s not a material or a spiritual crisis, just a human one. The problem was human beings, the solution is also human beings. Given how she responds to passing men, or when I offered her food. I suspect that it may need to be from a woman or girl of an emphatic and patient nature who can reach her.
I just wanted to write this and share it because we live in a world where many exist in our peripheries. Not all are as obviously in need of humanity as the girl in the mall, but they may be the mechanic who today told me about his custody battle with his wife, close to tears as he shared his frustration but above all how much he misses his son. Or the old lady who I spoke to the other week at the beach, it was the anniversary of her husbands death, four years. She talked to me, a complete stranger, about him so that in some way he could live on through her words and into my mind.
There is more to living that making a living. Sometimes the living is in knowing the world close to home, for the girl in the mall I imagine life to her is living day by day. Maybe her joy is in the scribble she puts into her notebook and watching, smiling and even laughing not at but with the kids that pass her by. A family walking by that she never had. Or maybe the Seaford Shopping Centre has adopted her as much as she has it, and for now it’s all the family she needs.
