Only love can mend a heart...

Tammy, he calls, his voice chasing her down the long corridor. Tammy, wait. Tammy walks on. Her stride lengthens putting distance between herself and the plaintive, echoing calls. On her shoulder is the 19-month old infant, gazing incomprehensibly at the fast-disappearing nearly-silhouetted figure as her mother bears her away.

Tammy, please! Tammy, don't go! Tammy, don't leave. Then, more personally: Tammy, don't leave ME.

Tammy reaches the twin glass doors at the end of the corridor that automatically slide open. Without a backward glance, she strides out into the open air. Thus she is not a witness to the closing of a circle, to the neat roundness that sometimes characterises a person's circumstance.

Perhaps it's better this way. Because, truthfully, there's nothing symmetric, or perfectly rounded about a dishevelled man folding up like damp cardboard, back pinned to the wall but unable to stop the downward slide as the knees give way. It's a sight that's not becoming.

A hundred - maybe more - people are witness to this mini domestic drama enacted off the food court in the shopping mall on a Sunday afternoon. For some, one can tell, it's free entertainment - reality television, in flesh and blood.

A coterie of all-male youngsters - chomping on burgers and washing them down with iced coke-sips - is laughing unabashedly at the slumped man. Someone cracks a joke and the laughter rises by two decibel counts.

A security guard, speaking into a microphone pinned to his coat lapels, is ambling towards the fallen individual. He looks like he's discreetly summoning reinforcements.

Others - men and women - that aren't eating at tables stand around in small knots, wondering aloud at the operatic scene just witnessed. Speculating comes easily whether the stomach is empty or full. Everybody's got an opinion. Everybody's got a view. Everybody's got a personal angle on the story. Everybody thinks he knows what triggered the whole thing, right from its inception to the climax in the draughty corridor.

Somebody thinks he recognises the distraught - now openly weeping - man. One older woman, hair white from age and probably experience, thinks he deserves it. Another agrees.

Dithers

A third dithers briefly then joins the denouncers wondering aloud why men such as this insist on playing out their private lives in public. 'Spineless, that's what it is,' says the white-haired one, 'He hoped to embarrass the poor thing so she wouldn't leave. Men are like that!'

Across the way, another group is theorising differently. One of them reckons the woman was heartless not to stop and try discussing the issue. Here, too, there are assenters and dissenters. And so the fictionalisation of fact continues. Give people one strand of reality and watch them spin it into several tales of the richest fabric.

Numerous versions of this occurrence will reach various homes and be recounted for those who were not present. Further shades will be added to the plot line as the imagination, and the desire to impress the listener, takes over. Very few of the watchers - by now totally rapt in the spinning of their yarns - is aware of when exactly the traumatised man is helped back to his shaky feet and led away, a security man's grip under each arm.

Nobody really notices that his feet don't really touch the floor, that it's only the shoe tips that scrape the mosaic tiles, that his eyes are blue (and red), that he's having difficulty holding his head up, pulled down as it is by the gravitational forces of shame or depression, or both.

Only two conclusions can be drawn safely, without speculation: This man, obviously, was once happy - with Tammy. This man is now distraught beyond description - with Tammy's leaving. It recalls the words of an old song - Only love can mend a heart... only love can break it again. Such is the multi-faceted nature of that all-powerful emotion. It's our oxygen and, sometimes, our monoxide.

Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney.