42” Flat Screen Plasma TV £399 or nearest offer

42” Flat Screen Plasma TV £399 or nearest offer

I couldn’t miss it. It practically filled the shabby window of a seedy second-hand shop. It was black and sleek, almost sensuous. More importantly it was practical which counted for all in the shabby little one bedroom flat I was lumbered with. Okay it was practically the length of the living room wall but at least it wouldn’t be on the floor.
I hesitated going in. The shop itself looked closed and uninviting. A strange idea that walking in through the TV screen was preferable popped into my head. The doorway was so unkempt I doubted that even a vagrant would not stoop so low as to doss in it.
It sat epicentre on the High Street which designation was a joke in itself. It certainly wasn’t high. Neither was it low, which at least would have given its medieval civic planners a sense of irony. It was as flat as the flattest street in the flattest town in Holland.
It was my first excursion through the smallish town since the move. I’d been ‘encouraged’ to take up a new position within the company. It wasn’t a demotion; I hadn’t been down graded – it was a necessary nudge toward the horizontal. My predecessor was desperate for retirement and the town’s important office needed manning immediately. A whole novel lay between those lines.
If it was barely a high street it was barely a town or to put it another way the high street was the town. It wasn’t that high either. Walking its length at a saunter, in less than ten minutes including stops, its geometry mirrored my recent promotion. There was a small unnatural dip about midway that I suspected was more a consequence of the old mining industry in the area rather than a natural contour of the earth’s surface.
A bright late autumn morning sun lay on the street like a vapid solarium but I doubted that even in mid-summer the town would look deserve anything more descriptive than insipid. This was it. Lost forever now in the north. I wondered if I were a success or not would it really matter; I would grow old and forgotten if they kept the branch or middle aged and redundant if they didn’t.
It was the latter that put the e-coli in my stomach. Thirty-five and looking for a job with a dodgy reference and a CV that worked backwards. Back to Mom and Dad – God no, not that. “We’ve kept your bedroom just as you left it” she’d say and it was true; pink wallpaper and Duran Duran posters. Dad was okay but spent most of his time at his council allotment, when he wasn’t lecturing on wastrels. Neither was it having to return to that estate with its rising crime and boarded houses that made me shudder.
Who was I kidding? It was exactly that. The end of a journey that ran not in a progressive line but in a full and cruel circle dumping me back to that from which I thought I’d escaped. And he would probably find out I was back too.
No I had to make this work here. I had to increase profitability that couldn’t be disregarded and have them beg me come back; to put a tangent in that circle and work my way back toward the Gods.
Right now, though, I needed to treat myself. New that monster would cost twice that but no-one would know I hadn’t brought it with me. The flat was clean but small and nothing in comparison with my City apartment, yet, thankfully, located in a quiet district ten minutes from the office. If I had owned the latter I could have bought a country house up here, rather than the menagerie of boxes that collectively were addressed as 27 Gawain Close.
So I was going to need the thing mounted on the far wall. On a stand it would swamp the lounge. That would cost but at least I had a handsome little cache to compensate. Not from the boyos back there. There was a relocation package but it was means tasted and mean spirited. Most of the costs in the move I’d paid for by selling my City furniture. It was never going to fit here either spatially or aesthetically. There were a couple of pieces I couldn’t bear to sell but these I’d keep in storage for as long as I could afford to because the only alternative was to send them to my parents.
I looked again at the television. In the City flat I had a beautiful Panasonic in the sitting-room and two smaller compact screens in the kitchen and the bedroom. But these were cosmetic; I hardly ever watched TV. When I wasn’t working I was socializing. I turned it on sometimes getting home late on a Saturday night and perhaps caught five minutes of the de rigueur cinematic gore fest on Channel Five. The next time I touched it would be to turn it off early Sunday morning after waking on the sofa. Something told me I would be seeing a lot more of it here.
Suddenly I was aware that there was an image on the TV. I hadn’t noticed it before, perhaps due to the brightish sunshine. The scene was foggy, as thick as a stereotypical Victorian mist, but I could just make out a bridge positioned about mid screen. It was almost dreamlike and I found it hard to pull away from. I guessed it was part of an old costume romp that was being resurrected on daytime television, the sort of programme I’d gladly skim past with the remote control, but here I was, feet rigid to the pavement and totally fascinated.
The picture was crystal clear with no spotting. Whoever had owned it had looked after it. Then suddenly the image faded. I guessed the shopkeeper had seen my interest and put it on to push the sale and as quickly turned it off to tease me. Well it was a wise move mister, I’m going to take it.