The sky is a brooding, miserable mess, its moods swinging to and fro, from the sulking of a spoiled child to the hysterical weeping of a professional wailer. A thick, heavy blanket of grey clouds hangs low and looms above, pressing down on ducked, intimidated buildings and wet, overcrowded streets filled with an endless line of crawling cars. Glowing headlights after glowing headlights creeping through the pouring rain - a bleak procession that stretches across the intersection and beyond the horizon. It slowly parades past me like a giant line of drowning fairy lights, while I torpidly wait to plunge into the lion's den that is Friday afternoon shopping.
The traffic lights turn green. It is my signal to join the monotonous convoy that moves at a funereal pace. The sky turns from weeping to sulking, and back to weeping. Windscreen wipers are confused.
Galaxies die until I pull up to the car park of the shopping centre looming up ahead. I slowly weave through a trickling stream of stressed-out predators, hurriedly pushing their hunted prey towards their readied getaway cars. Their brimful shopping trolleys rattle noisily on wet asphalt, as they maneuver around the incoming, the searchers, the slow, the preoccupied and the I-don't-give-a-fucks.
I manage to find a parking space on the far end of the place, turn off the engine and soak in the silence and the solitude, revel in it for a brief moment, while the rain pounds on the car roof in a rhythm I cannot follow. I get out and hurry to open my umbrella. I have grown beyond the years when it was uncool to carry one and much cooler to get soaked to the skin instead. For the fraction of a second I feel a little old.
The rain continues to drum its rhythm on the brolly's canopy, as I hurry towards the shop that lures with its treacherous, warm light, its huge, illuminated logo and a store front completely made of glass. Huge billboards scream special offers in your face. Neck relax cushions are on sale today. Buy because they're cheap, not because you need.
Inside, there is no surprise. It is survival of the fittest, with the whole ensemble already present: there's the doddery, the impatient, the undecided. The stressed, the nigglers, the pushers. The cheaters, the stupid, the prepotent and the generally miserable. A smorgasbord of human misery.
Chubby, middle-aged women with varicose veins the size of leeches become wild, unpredictable beasts. Old, scrawny men with no hair turn into bloodthirsty predators. Young mothers become lionesses, while they hunt for things to feed to their children. They skulk around overburdened shelves like scavengers around carrion, lashing forward, ripping out big chunks from the rotting carcass. They plunder and they ravage, they push the old and weak aside, they shove you out of their way and frantically fill their trolleys with goods like there is no tomorrow. Furies at work.
I warily move through the aisles, while I gather the little I need, pushing aside brimful, abandoned shopping trolleys, weaving through bickering couples and miserable spinsters, turkish families with armies of children and obese men with black, greasy hair. Now and again the sickening smell of stale sweat insults my nostrils. An unpleasant chill emanates from a row of chest freezers, while they hum a monotonous tune in perfect unison, as I make my way towards the checkout counter, where a pale, pony-tailed girl with a blank, expressionless face moves an endless line of items past a scanner, that beeps agreeingly every time she does so.
Her eyes are tired, her mood is hidden under thick layers of frustration, her moves are monotone and machine-like. She doesn't look up once, not even as I pay. 'Hello', 'Thank You' and 'Good-Bye' sound hollow, thin and rehearsed. Coming from an automaton, not a human being. I have no time for sympathies and neither has she, so I take my stuff and leave her in her misery. After all, I have my own miseries to drown. And as I leave I can hear her hum the same tune as the chest freezers. In perfect unison.
