Sparks (11 page)

“I am Mrs Irvine,” she said. “You have ten seconds to state your business before I call the police.”

“Good morning,” said Sparks. “I was wondering…”

“Five seconds,” said Mrs Irvine. “I told you.”

“I haven’t said anything yet,” said Sparks. “I was…”

“One second,” said Mrs Irvine. She held up a very small telephone and pressed a key. “Hello, police?”

“I know your daughter Alison!” shouted Sparks.

Mrs Irvine looked at him.

“We do not,” she said, “have a daughter. We considered it, a long time ago, but decided we could better spend our money on drugs and vases. I understand this is why there’s something of a decline in the population, but I couldn’t care less. Now I am calling the police.”

She pressed the key. Almost immediately the air was solid with screaming.

“That was quick,” said Sparks. He ran away, again.

Sparks made his way down back streets, past tramps, vagrants and people who were just dying in alleyways, up impressive Olympic boulevards that in his world were just streets, and with the aid of the rudest black cab driver he would ever meet, found Tisdall Road again. He ran into Conswardine House, and found flat 88. The door was still open. Sparks went in. A very large naked man was sitting on the floor, and as the large man gaped at Sparks, two women dressed as air hostesses came in. They too gaped at Sparks as he ran past them into the bedroom.

 Sparks locked the bedroom door. As thumping ensued outside, he took a quick look around at the most unpleasant place he had been in his life.

“Goodbye, cruel world,” said Sparks, and sat down on the bed.

OW!

OW!

DOESN’T GET BETTER WHEN YOU GET USED TO IT THEN!

OWWW!

Sparks woke up. Judging by the smell he was in the Flat 88 in his world. He opened his eyes. A small, amazingly filthy boy was staring at him. Sparks stood up. He felt awful, and slowly tried to stand up.

“Are you my dad?” the boy said.

Sparks stopped trying to stand up. “No,” he said, “No, I’m not.”

“Good,” said the boy. “You’re a loony.”

Sparks went home.

Jeff and Duncan were playing cards when the alarm went off.

“The alarm’s gone off,” said Duncan.

“I know,” said Jeff. “I can hear it. In fact, it’s so loud I couldn’t hear you saying ‘the alarm’s gone off’. But I knew that’s what you were going to say because that’s what you always say when the alarm goes off.”

“What did you say?” said Duncan.

Jeff went over and turned off the alarm.

“Nothing,” said Jeff. “Anyway, I knew the alarm was going to go off.”

“No you didn’t,” said Duncan. “How could you?”

“It’s him, isn’t it?” said Jeff. “He’s going round, doing stuff. Setting alarms off.”

Duncan looked troubled. “I think we should tell someone. You know, in authority.”

“No,” said Jeff. “When the time comes, we’ll do something ourselves. In the meantime, you’re bust.”

“They don’t have bust in Whist,” said Duncan, but he folded up his cards all the same. There was no point arguing with Jeff.

SECOND INTERLUDE

The Society, in its constant search for God’s Perfect World, came to a few conclusions over the centuries of its existence. One was that God’s Perfect World was very much not going to be just around the corner. Having visited thousands of worlds, none of which were perfect and most of which were just horrible, The Society realised fairly early on – well, not too early, say about 1875 – that God was not going to give them this one on a plate. One of the problems of searching an infinite variety of worlds was, basically, that it would take an infinite amount of time to visit them all. Of course, you might get lucky and find the one you were looking for straightaway – and the laws of chance said it was just as likely each time that someone would step through a portal and bingo, there would be a lot of people with flags and sashes and banners reading HEY! WELCOME TO GOD’S PERFECT WORLD DUDE! – but as time went on, the members of The Society were finding it less and less likely that the things with the flags and sashes and banners reading HEY! WELCOME TO GOD’S PERFECT WORLD DUDE! was going to happen any time soon.

As a result several people tried to invent ways of speeding the process up. Some of them just took lots of drugs that made them go faster and in theory meant they could visit more worlds in a day. This, however, combined with the stresses and pain (OWWW!) of movement between portals, just meant that the travellers went mad and were no use to anyone. In fact, a lot of them took so many drugs that they would just go to the shops, see an old man with a beard or something and then come back convinced they had travelled to God’s Perfect World. (Later they would feel sick and really stupid, but by that time they were in a dungeon.)

Some travellers tried to catalogue all the portals – this was in Victorian times, when cataloguing was seen as an end in itself – but this was a waste of time, as the portals didn’t take well to being catalogued. The nature of portals, the cataloguers found, was that they appeared and disappeared all the time, like a bad father only without the cheap teddy bear and the faint hint of whisky on the breath. A portal that one day was just hanging around the basement of the Empire State Building would turn up the next day at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, no good to anyone but fish with enormous jaws and bulbous light fittings on their foreheads. Another portal might have spent a pleasant afternoon at the ABC Turnpike Lane, before nipping off to a traffic island near Magnitogorsk. There was no point cataloguing portals because they wouldn’t stay put; it was like taking pictures of wriggling kittens, except less useful.

However after a very long time, and the invention of computers, someone did find a way to guess where the portals were going to turn up, and this was the Random Life Generator, a name that didn’t say much about what it did, and in fact was rather misleading, but did sound good on the proposal, so it stuck. The Random Life Generator simply plotted where portals might appear on the very complicated evidence of where they had been before, allocated a password and an operative to the portal, and then the operative had to get down there before it vanished and guard it until a more senior operative turned up. This worked a lot better.

But even being able to predict where a portal would be – and posting a man posing as a dentist or whatever to guard it – did not speed up the process much, as no one could work out far enough in advance where the portals were going to be next.

Then one day, someone had a brilliant idea. His name was Duncan. Unfortunately, Duncan told his idea to his best friend Jeff, and Jeff got all the credit. Jeff’s (sorry, Duncan’s) idea was a very simple one, and he took it to the Senior Executive of The Society. The Senior Executive of The Society was a group of fairly old men who met every 10 years. This meant that most of them were dead by the time the next meeting came round, which was inconvenient, but they were the oldest members of The Society and therefore, it was supposed, the cream of the crop. This also meant that Jeff (or rather Duncan) was extremely lucky to have had his, or Duncan’s, idea when he, or Duncan, did, for if he (etc) had had it a week later, he’d have had to wait 10 years for another meeting.

Anyway. Jeff was ushered into the Star Chamber of the Senior Executive, where he found the full panoply of The Society arraigned, or as he later described it to a still somewhat sullen Duncan, a lot of old men sitting round in bedsheets. One of the old men – who was The President, or the Chairman, or some such title that Jeff couldn’t remember – stood up, slowly, and said:

“State your name and your business here.”

Jeff found that, despite being one of the most unpleasant people in the world, he was also quite nervous. He coughed and said:

“My name is Jeff and I have found a way to speed up the process of discovering God’s Perfect World.”

There was a buzz of conversation in the room. Jeff felt quite excited. He felt a little less excited when the President, or whatever, said:

“I’m sorry, we are all quite old and none of us could hear what you just said. Would you care to repeat it?”

Jeff repeated it. This time a real buzz went round the room. Oh, and someone laughed, just to show they’d been here and done that before.

“Explain,” said the President or whatever.

“If there is an infinite amount of worlds…”, Jeff began, and was immediately interrupted.

“If?” said the President. “What do you mean, ‘
if
’? There’s no if about it. This whole society is founded on the premise that there
is
an infinite amount of worlds.”

“I know,” said Jeff, “I was just setting out my stall.”

“I mean,” continued the President, “if there isn’t an infinite amount of worlds, we might as well all go home. If there’s only 20 or something, we’ve wasted our time somewhat, don’t you think?”

“There’s no need to be sarcastic,” said another old man. “You’re only the Secretary, not the President or something.”

“Yes, get on with it,” said another man. “I don’t want to have to come back here and talk about all this again in 10 years.”

“Carry on,” said the Secretary.

“If there is an infinite amount of worlds,” said Jeff, as pointedly as possible, “then it follows that there must be an infinite amount of Societies. Societies like this one.”

“We didn’t think you meant building societies,” said the Secretary, and then shut up after a glance from the old man on his right.

“Not every world will have a Society,” said the other old man. “And not every world that has a Society will have a Society exactly like ours.”

“No,” agreed Jeff. “But enough worlds will have enough Societies like ours. And if we find those Societies, we can persuade them that we too have a common aim. And if we all work together to find God’s Perfect World, we will surely find it much more quickly.”

All the old men looked at each other. Then the Secretary said, “This is an impressive idea. We will make a note of it, and debate it at the next meeting of the Senior Executive, in 10 years time.”

Jeff felt deflated. He had hoped to sell the idea and make a lot of money. Then the old man who wasn’t the Secretary stood up and said:

“What a load of nonsense. This is an excellent idea and we shall implement it now. And this young man will be in charge of it.”

He turned to the old man to his right. “Issue an order today that this young man will lead the search for other Societies. And give him a nice office.”

And so Jeff had a new job, a nice office and a slow assistant (Duncan). He was now considered a rising star in The Society and one day would sit around with a lot of old men every 10 years. But for now, things were not ideal. Two years had passed since Jeff (or rather… you know) had had his great idea, and in that time he had failed to find a single other world with its own Society. People began to whisper behind Jeff’s back, and point fingers. It was noticed that the rising star aspect of Jeff’s career had been replaced by a jumped-up bighead aspect.

“I’m in danger of losing my job here,” said Jeff to Duncan one day.

“What are you going to do?” asked Duncan.

“What I always do.”

“Cry?”

“No. Cheat.”

People who enjoy lists and rules will be delighted to learn that The Society, being very old and very formal, had some lists and rules.

Anyone who has ever been in a society – even a building society – will know that most lists and rules are designed to prevent interesting things happening, perhaps because these things tend to lead to mass death, or in the case of a building society, mass death and rising interest rates.

The Society had lots of lists. These were mostly to do with where things had been put, because, as The Society was very old, it had acquired a lot of things – suits of armour, some crowns, a few yachts, France – and it would have been easy to mislay these things (except, obviously, France) without making a lot of lists.

So there were lots of lists. However, despite being, as has been said, very old and formal, The Society did not have a lot of rules. Nobody really knew why this was; possibly it was because having a management body that only met once a decade meant that making rules was very time-consuming and by the time the rules were agreed on, no one could remember what the rules were for. Possibly it was because The Society was so old that most of the rules had been lost (and a few of the old members could sometimes be seen shaking their heads and saying things like, “In my day we were never allowed to put a hot mug on a polished wooden surface”, but things like that were probably not really rules). But most historians and people in pubs agreed that the reason The Society was a bit low on rules was because it only needed a few.

“A few” is, to be honest, exaggerating things slightly. In fact, The Society only had two rules. These rules, though few and (in one case) brief and easy to understand, were iron rules, set in stone. And literally, not just a mixed metaphor. All over The Society’s buildings and properties, all round the world, the two rules of The Society were carved out in white stone and filled in with black iron letters.

The second rule was the one that need not concern us here. This is because it was extremely long and dealt with smoking and where you could and could not do it on The Society’s premises; it was a recent addition, and a lot of people felt it went against the spirit of The Society, not because The Society was pro-smoking, just that it was a bit completely irrelevant and sort of looked stupid next to the first rule.

The first rule was far from stupid and was as non-irrelevant as could be. It was also quite short, and it said:

NO ONE SHALL GO ANYWHERE WITHOUT PERMISSION

It was pretty clear, as rules go (in fact, compared to the second rule, which went off at tangents about pipes and ashtrays, it was a masterpiece of clarity). It was not the subject of endless textbooks and heated debates at committee level, because its meaning was understood. Nobody even made sarcastic remarks about it, or said things like, “I’m just going for a slash – oh, do I need permission?”, because everybody knew it didn’t refer to minor stuff like that.