#LIMBO HELL FULL#

In there it could be any weather, any day, any time between 19 and the lights would still be on, people still propped on escalators slurping Gloria Jeans coffees or huddled in atriums with their loot, downing junk food from every corner of the Earth and waiting for their strength to return. It didn’t come back until the evening, after a walk with her toes in the earth by the sol wara (salt water).Įven after foraging there for enough years that I no longer get lost (not even in the double helix, double-sided car park) I can well believe our mall is a bad-spirit place.

The bad spirits had robbed one of the artists, Dapene, of her strength.

#LIMBO HELL FULL#

The place had been full of bad spirits, congregating worst around where the escalators deliver up the people into the food court. “No,” she said, “that would be impossible.” They had recently visited a similar mall with disastrous results. When my friend asked where they might go to buy some warmer clothes for the women I suggested Broadway, our local shopping mall. When she withdrew she declared, softly, “Him gutpela pikinini man.” It seemed as much a blessing as a statement of fact, and I took it in the serious spirit in which it was offered. “And this,” my friend said, pointing to the bundle on my chest, “is baby Max.” Before she’d finished speaking the tinier of the other women had her head in the sling. They looked me more directly in the eye than I am used to. The artists were small, dignified women, dressed in long summer skirts.

The first time I took my new baby out I put him in a sling and walked to the local shops, where I ran into a friend with two Papuan artists whose exhibition she had helped arrange.

Limbo hell