The Virgin record store was shouting about its three CDs for £22 offer and C&A had a cut-price deal on ski-wear. Two security guards were discussing a plan for the evening over their walkie-talkies. The phoney potted palms were considering growing roots, out of sheer boredom. It was Friday night and I was in the suburbs. More to the point, it was Friday night, I was in a shopping mall in the suburbs, and I couldn't have been happier.
The reason for this particular urbanite's trip to outer suburbia was simple enough. Determined to have a quiet weekend for once, and aided by the fact that most of our friends were away doing glamorous things in Goa or Wexford, the flatmate and I decided to go to the cinema on Friday. We debated the various merits of Toy Story II over The Talented Mr Ripley until she pointed out that with a bit of careful planning, and a trip to the Ster Century cineplex in the Liffey Valley complex, we could do both.
Being a firm fan of having my cake and eating it, and keeping a bit in a tin for later, this plan seemed like a terrific one, although truth be told, I was a little wary of leaving town on a Friday night, and particularly to go beyond the city limits. People who choose to live in urban centres tend to share the same kind of attitude toward the suburbs - a kind of snobbishness mingled with fear disguised as boredom. We all know how recently we crawled out of the swamp and just how easily scratched our veneer of urban cool really is.
The flatmate, who had done the shopping-mall-Friday thing before, threw out bait she knew I couldn't resist. There was late-night shopping, she pointed out, with shops we didn't have in town, and an area called the South Beach Food Court which offered every conceivable different take on fast food except, she said, "healthy", and cinema seats that let you pretend you were on a first-class airline. I was sold; my fears disappearing in an orgy of greed, sloth and more greed.
Was I ever glad! From the moment I saw the lights hovering alongside the N4, as though the Starship Enterprise had decided to make a late-night pitstop at an ice-hockey stadium, I could tell it was going to be an other-worldly experience. But I wasn't prepared for the distance I was to travel in minutes. I had thought I was going to a shopping centre, but I was going to a different country. Everybody was ambling round, in couples or in groups of three or four, and they weren't doing anything except being with the shopping centre. I could see why, because something about the place inspired that kind of awe. The dome arched high above our heads, like a giant plastic birdcage without a hint of rust, crackling paint or reality about it at all. The avenues that linked the various plazas were as wide as a river and as clean and shiny and pink as a set of dentures just out of a glass. Toddlers zoomed down the pretend roads in pretend cars attached to parents who pretended very hard that they weren't pushing them from behind.
Nobody was rushing; people were just hanging out. They were at their destination - they were at the mall and they were having a good time talking, window shopping, wandering aimlessly and eating. I suddenly had to sit down and have large quantities of fast food to recover myself and to work out exactly why I was so overcome by the place. Proust-like, it came to me over my second milk-shake.
I was feeling nostalgic. But the curious thing about this particular fit of the sentimentals, was that I was feeling nostalgic for a past I never had. Of course I had done a bit of hanging out in shopping centres as a teenager. Indeed owing to the fact I lived in the country, miles away from anything as exciting as a corner shop, I insisted on doing a lot of quality hanging-out in friends' shopping centres at every available moment. But this was time spent sitting on cold cement bollards, lusting over Impulse body sprays and tormenting anything male which had the misfortune to pass.
It was a world away from the bright, warm, shininess of Liffey Valley shopping centre at the weekend. This was a shopping mall, the likes of which I had not even thought about since the days when I borrowed Sweet Valley High novels from friends and pretended to be bored silly by Beverley Hills 90210 on television. This was a vision of middle America and I would have killed for it at the age of 14.
It seemed to me then that to hang out at a mall was the epitome of everything Americans had that I had not. American teenagers had cars and boyfriends, and money for things like batwing denim jackets and rhinestone pixie boots. They didn't have rain and Dunnes Stores and the mortification of nobody snogging you at Wesley disco. Even when I grew out of the idea of the mall as a social centre par excellence, it was replaced by a more complex and perverse fascination.
I went mad for films like David Byrne's True Lives and Kevin Smith's Mallrats, not because of their dramatic merits but because of their depiction of mall life. It wasn't always entirely complimentary - malls, according to this school of film makers, were timeless, placeless places where people tended to feel at home because they had no natural sense of place and no real use for time.
Yet for me, shopping malls have that contradictory atmosphere that contemporary life so often throws up. Like motels, neon lights, airports and office blocks at night, they are sterile yet full of suggestion, inorganic yet brimming with a kind of natural beauty. Like small Disneyworlds, these shiny malls ring our cities offering minibreaks to middle America; an escape from our daily life where plants have roots, roads aren't pink and a burger joint is called a burger joint. So next time urban life gets too gritty, too dirty and too darned real, I'm booking myself a trip to suburbia, but you may be sure it'll be a return ticket.
Louise East can be contacted at wingit@irish-times.ie