CLOSED CIRCUIT
by D.B. Adams

Sharon was fed up, fed up with her hair, fed up with her job in the petrol station, fed up with working the night shift for the third week in a row and fed up with the sodding closed circuit, which was playing up again.
The hair she could do something about, as soon as she got paid she would be off to the hairdresser to put it right. She wondered idly if she could sue the company that sold the dye; after all it had said Honey Blonde on the bottle, and what she ended up with was Straw with a hint of green.
Anyway she thought all that could be put right when she got the pittance that she was paid for doing this lousy job. That was the next thing to get sorted, anything would be better than this boring job, well almost. She wouldn't go back to "Burger Bites", that really had been slave labour, at least she only got shouted at occasionally here and nobody had thrown up over her, yet!
But three weeks on the graveyard shift was the pits and this was the forth night in a row that the CCTV had played up. The boss had told her that the engineer had been along to look at it yesterday and couldn't find anything wrong with it, but she didn't believe him, because there it was again.
The same picture of the same car pulling onto the forecourt, Sharon looked out through the armoured glass and it was not there. She looked back at the monitor, there was the GTI, the driver was out of the car as usual, not at the back where the filler cap would be, but standing by the offside front wheel looking down, as though he had a flat tyre or something.
Sharon looked out of the window again; an Escort van was just pulling in, if the GTI had been there the van would have hit it. An oldish man got out of the van and put some petrol in. Sharon watched him on the screen as he walked towards her with that strange stop action walk, like an animated creature from Jason and the Argonauts, caused by the slow refresh rate of the closed circuit monitor. Behind him on the screen the GTI pulled in and superimposed itself on the Escort van.
The man came up to the glass window and paid, he thought to himself that the girl on the other side was a little odd, not just the greenish hair, she didn't seem to be quite with it, "drugs probably". After the man had gone, Shaz watched the GTI pull in and stop once more, then she turned the monitor around so it faced out of the window and locked up the till.
Stepping round from behind the counter, Sharon opened the filing station door and stepped out into the cool night air. She walked across the forecourt to where the GTI always stopped, turned towards the t.v. screen at the window and watched as the familiar shape pulled in off the main road.
The young man jumped out of the GTI and run round to the front. He stood there looking down, his mind was reeling. He was regretting the bottle of wine he had ordered at the restaurant, they were sure to breathalyse him, but it wasn't his fault.
He hadn't seen her until it was to late because the petrol pumps were in the way. He told the policeman, he'd pulled in and she was just standing there, staring at the t.v. monitor in the garage window. She hadn't moved an inch, although she must have seen the car pulling in on the screen.

Copyright : D.B.Adams 1998