For every person who gives away all their worldly goods, for live a life of ascetic spirituality, there are half a dozen friends willing to aid them in their journey, and to pick up a bargain in the process.
Darren Lane's room shone like the night sky when he turned out the light. Primary-coloured stars shone into the blackness of his small second-floor flat, in functional constellations.
The hi-fi: north-westerly, twelve Magnitude Two LEDs in distinctive Caprine formation (with imagination).
The game-station: a small constellation, close to the horizon, unremarkable but for its distinctive blue colouration.
The most fasinating formation, however, occupies the southern wall of the flat. Initially you see only a dim, aged red lamp, but persist! Soon you will notice that the entire southern wall, adjacent to this small red star, is quite devoid of light, a void of a quality unmatched throughout the remainder of Darren's flat. The mass of blackness around which his flat rotates, the impotent absence which has slowly been consuming Darren Lane's home is none other than The Last Cathode Ray Television. Perhaps not the last on a global scale, but to the extent of the knowledge of Darren's bargain-hungry friends, the final specimen of a once ubiquitous species.
The size and weight of a large fish tank, Darren's television teetered on insubstantial chrome legs, which bow under its massive influence. Truth be told, even in daylight, the screen manages to somehow suck the light and joy from the room, its dour blank visage as welcome as the reaper at a charity picnic.
More than anything, then: more than his DVD-recorder and his satellite receiver, more than his CD collection and assortment of exceedingly sharp kitchen knives, Darren was keen that someone take away his television, before he started his journey to inner enlightenment.
In the end, Tommy Martin obliged. One Saturday morning, he helped Darren lug the television down the steps of the block and into his car. Short, but thin, and with a large, open face, Tommy's fashionable pointed fringe flopped in front of his eyes as he rounded the corners of the staircase. Darren walked confidently backwards. Much taller than Tommy, but of a similar build, he was young, but had a sun-worn face, an incoherent mop of blonde hair, and an altogether more practical bearing. His flat was nearly empty now the television had gone, and only a few essential pieces of cutlery and crockery rattled around a flat which seemed to have disproportionately grown in size since the exodus of his possessions. With the television gone, he could start his life anew.
Tommy sat for a moment in his old Ford, its rear axle noticeably weighed by the light-consuming bulk in its boot. In an hour or so he'd have to pick up Fiona from the depot.
Things hadn't been going well with money, and the house, of late, with Tommy losing his job at the plant, and Fiona's consultancy work being thin on the ground. For six months, Tommy had tried, and failed to find work at other factories around town, but nobody was hiring. Ultimately, Fiona had found a job cleaning buses, which she worried would atrophy her mind. And so Tommy rolled about the place like a spare wheel, collecting other people's second hand junk to fill their rooms.
With time to kill before e end of Fiona's shift, Tommy drove with the television to a small retail park on the edge of town, parked up, and rolled a cigarette. The massive television would look ridiculous in their front room, and almost consume it, but the LCD-TV had packed in a week before, and so Darren's monster had outlived it. Wagtails hopped around the car-park, searching for crumbs, and landscape gardeners arrived in a small truck, and began to trim the small, neat hedge between Argos and PC World. The sky was intense and clear, the sun bright, and the air cold: it was the start of spring.
Darren's departure westward, to a poorly triangulated camp of hippies in Wiltshire, or Dorset had come as a surprise to everyone who knew him, no less Tommy than the others. Perhaps more than anyone else he knew, Darren had seemed the most wedded to a well-oiled life of earning and spending. And stranger still that he should have chosen a nuclear action group, rather than something more contemporary: global warming perhaps? It's said, after all, that the cold war is over. Children, teenagers and even (and Tommy hated the phrase) "young professionals" have no knowledge of nuclear Armageddon. But perhaps no war ends until anyone who has lived through it is dead? His cigarette nearly finished, Tommy rearranged the stub in his fingers to gain the benefit of a final few drags. The hedge trimmer was still buzzing in the vernal distance as three young children and their mother emerged from Argos, and loaded numerous large yellow plastic bags into the boot of a taxi.
Tommy picked Fiona up from the depot, and she looked dog-tired. She collapsed into the passenger seat and seemed to be consumed by it.
"I've Darren's old TV in the back" "Oh, you haven't? Not the stone-age one?" "We can't afford to get a new one, Fi, and you're the one who's kicking about the house when you can't sleep if there's nothing to watch".
A short, heavily-built woman, in her late twenties, with bottle-black hair, and heavy makeup, Fiona opened her mouth, as if to reply, paused for an age, and sighed. She deflated into the threadbare seat."
"I've split the atom, you know!" "I know you have, Fi. Things will improve."
Tommy turned the ignition and pulled away, driving around the small twisting roads which led through the industrial estate.
Until Darren sold the flat, none of them really believed that he would go. But go he did, and reports of his fortune became fragmentary and strange, Darren himself sent no word, but he was spotted by friends of friends, living his new life in the west. Some even claimed that he had found God, was a monk ay an abbey near Lyme. More likely sightings suggested he had become a gardener in the abbey grounds, remaining resolutely heathen.
Fi continued to shrink in spirit, and to become anxious and disconnected. She would sit in front of the massive television, its colours now poorly distributed in blotches around the screen, and watched hour-after-hour of true life crime shows. Tommy fought the despair of a 'redundant' life with increasingly risky and inadvisable schemes, which never brought home the riches they foretold. The house became shabby and unkempt and, as interest rates climbed higher, Fi began, again, to smoke. They both smoked indoors, now, lacking the energy to stand in the kitchen doorway. Tommy's hair lay flat and unstyled, and Fi migrated to increasingly shapeless clothes.
She called the television her 'synchrotron', though Tommy had noticed her mispronouncing the name of a machine which, five years earlier, she would have designed. Tommy wondered if this could be the start of an organic disease: her occasional ataxia and lapses of memory; her worried, downcast gaze. Fi only wished that the depot would give her a regular shift, so she could sleep and awake feeling fresh. She would stand in the bathroom in front of the basin and mirror, and turn the cold tap on and off, on and off. Sometimes Fi would place a finger into the stream, rarely splash water onto her face.
Their debt was building.
One autumn evening, Fi and Tommy arrived home, and quickly ran inside, hiding from one of the first cold, crisp winds of the year. Tommy had sold the old car, or rather paid a scrap-merchant to take it away. Though the tax and fuel for the car had proven far too pricey, Tommy always ensured he had enoug change to meet Fi at the depot, it was one fixed point which continued to hold their relationship together.
They both slumped in the dust-grey dilapidated sofa, which was old, and enveloping, and comfortable, and waited for the synchrotron to warm up. After a longer than expected pause, an intense white dot appeared for a moment, there was a faint squeal, and the dot was extinguished. A small puff of grey, smokey dust rose from the substantial top air grill, and then only a smell of rosin and shellac.
Tony and Fi looked at each other in momentary surprise, after which, with some sudden bolt of energy, Tommy dived for the wall-socket and rapidly pulled out the plug. Lying on the floor, his arm stretched to the wall, Tommy rolled onto his back to look at Fi. They both burst into laughter like they hadn't for years.
Tony noticed Fi's cheekbones, more defined than he had ever known them, and though he was surprised by the definition in her face, and though that rekindled in him a passion which had been held in abeyance since their troubles had begun, he realised with anger that Fi looked gaunt and spent.
"Help me with this!", he shouted, with near joyful resolve, jumping to his feet.
Suddenly relishing an adventure, Fi walked to the other side of the television, with an uncertain look on her face. Tommy noticed how much stronger Fi had become, and the two of them lifted the ancient television with ease; Fiona, truth be told, carrying most of the weight. Outside, the wind had grown even more bitter. Pausing only twice for breath, Tony and Fi walked a mile or so along roads and connecting footpaths to the delivery yard of the retail park where Tony was once in the habit of stopping in his car for a cigarette.
Tony and Fi unceremoniously dropped the television from carrying height onto the tarmaced delivery yard. The sound was impressive, and it lay warped on the ground.
"A new model!" Tony declared, "of deconstructed television".
"You nutter, Tony", Fi replied, giggling. "Have we really carried that thing all the way here to... why here?"
"Oh, I don't know. I suppose I've got a thing for this place. I used to come here for a crafty smoke when things were starting to unravel, when we were struggling to stay 'with the programme'. This crappy trading estate is the living room of 'the man', and every living room needs a television. I see they still keep the hedges in good order."
A bark sounded in the distance (perhaps a guard?)
"Come on Fi, let's go?"
"No, Mr T. Wait a minute."
Fiona looked around the junk-strewn flower-bed verges, and found a misshapen piece of metal. She brought it over to the set, and wrenched the back cover free of the chassis, revealing the massive tube.
"It's hard to imagine that this was once the future", she said, stroking the neck of the glass envelope.
"We all had a particle accellerator in our front rooms, once, which brought us random, enjoyable crap to enlighten our lives. They all looked just like this, you know! All those accellerators where they probed the inner workings of the atom, they were all glass, and magnets, and EHT. This was a small fragment of that atomic promise which came true, a bit of the future from the start of the twentieth century."
She slapped the tube heavily (Tommy worried) carefully avoiding the anode cap.
"/Darren's/ future?" Tommy suggested, and Fi smirked.
Hearing the sound of a guard approaching, Fi and Tommy leisurely jogged towards the bollard which marked the start of the warren of passageways which cluttered their less-than-desirable estate.
But Fi paused, and turned at the entrance to the passageway and began to slowly stalk the wreckage of the television.
"Fiona, quick!", stage-whispered Tommy, half-hidden by bushes.
Fi picked up speed and grabbed a short piece of dislodged curbstone.
An elderly, uniformed security guard rounded the corner with a timid looking Alsatian. The dog had a limp, and Fi rushed to the television more out of concern of the old man's heart, and at the dog's patent pain, than for any fear or respect for the agents of justice.
Fi speedily threw the curbstone at the television tube, which smashed not so much explosively as with a relaxing submission to gravity.
"Hey!" the guard shouted weakly, as he began a wheezing jog, the alsatian gamely running alongside, but carefully avoiding forcing the pace.
Fi was already turning and running, and she soon joined Tommy running alongside. The guard and his dog came to a halt alongside the former television and sighed. He talked into his radio.
"I abhor vacuums", Fi shouted over to Tommy, as they joyful escaped.