Sparks (12 page)

The first rule was known by all to mean that nobody was to go rooting round any other worlds without permission. The logic was simple; while The Society didn’t particularly care about messing with anybody else’s culture and was quite happy in principle to let people go round showing other people how to invent fire if they hadn’t invented it yet, they did feel rather strongly that a quest for God’s Perfect World might be slightly hindered by their operatives wandering around willy-nilly, meeting themselves and so forth. So they decided that anyone could go anywhere, provided they got permission first.

It was, as has been said a lot, a simple rule, and easy to follow. Easy, that is, if you weren’t the impatient type.

Jeff was the impatient type. He broke the pants off the rule.

The problem, for Jeff, was that his plan wasn’t working very well. The idea that they would soon find lots of world with Societies in them was a logical one, but also an optimistic one.

“You could go your whole life without finding another Society,” said Duncan.

“We’ll just have to look harder,” said Jeff. They were wandering around a world where the Dutch had, by a totally unexpected turn of events, won the Second World War.

“They’re going to get annoyed with you soon,” said Duncan, buying a big floppy pancake off a street vendor. “They’re going to sack you. And me.”

“I know,” said Jeff.

“As soon as they find out we’re visiting all these worlds for no reason, we’ve had it.”

“They’re not going to find out,” said Jeff. “I’ve disabled the alarms.”

“But,” said Duncan, “but what about permission?”

Jeff laughed, cynically.

“I don’t do permission,” he said.

“But what if we get caught?”

“We can’t get caught. I’ve disabled the…”

“I’m not happy.”

“Then report me. Resign from your nice job and grass me up.”

Duncan said nothing.

“Exactly. Now shut up and give me some of that pancake. In fact, give me all of it.”

And so Jeff and Duncan continued to ramble about various worlds, looking for Societies that clearly weren’t going to turn up. And time went on, and they got increasingly desperate.

Then one day one of them made a silly mistake. Which was where all the trouble started.

Not that they were going to tell anyone. Oh no.

*

SPARKS WOKE UP. His mind cleared slowly, like a stadium after a concert attended entirely by people who wanted to linger and crumple their way through thousands of plastic beer glasses. He remembered his busy day in the cruel world and his failed attempt to find Alison, who hadn’t existed in that world. He wondered where the Alison from his own world was and if she was sitting on a beach because that’s what people did in Australia, or if she was on a sheep station whatever that was in the middle of an unpleasant arid desert (Sparks was right on the first guess).

He decided to get up. This was risky for him, because it was still only early in Sparks terms and Sparks had never been an early riser. When he had stayed over at Alison’s, their early morning conversation would always go something like this:

ALISON

I’m off to work now, Sparks. There’s bread in the cupboard and don’t use the grill pan, you’ll burn yourself to death.

SPARKS

Mnurgh.

So Sparks was always a little bit happier and more clear-headed when he’d had a lot of sleep. And Sparks’ idea of a lot of sleep was almost verging on the 24 hour-ish. Sparks had never achieved his ambition of sleeping a whole day and waking up on, say, Tuesday and thinking it was, say, Wednesday, but one day, he hoped, he would. As things stood, he was doing pretty well, often putting in long, arduous 12-hour stints of sleep, having entire weeks, in fact, when he would completely miss all the hours between one minute to midnight and noon (Sparks hated to be around when hours repeated themselves. He had often said to Alison, “Who wants to go through half past seven twice in a day?” Alison, who often felt that she had gone through half past seven about four times every day, remained silent).

Sparks opened his right eye, then his left, then closed them again. It was light in his bedroom. Then he tried to get up without opening his eyes. He made it as far as the chest of drawers before barking his shin and falling over. This forced him to open his eyes, which was a bad thing. Someone had been in his room. Oh, and ransacked it too. Chairs were overturned, CDs were scattered across the floor, his computer had been turned on and left that way and, most obvious of all – Sparks being one of those people who was always going to be prone to the “I’ve been burgled”/“How can you tell?” scenario – his waste paper basket was on fire.

Sparks was properly awake now, almost. He leant against the wall, partly for support and partly because he thought he might be able to sleep standing up and forget all this. Instead, his hand slipped. He looked at his hand and saw it was smeared in red. Then he looked at the wall. Someone had written on it, ruining Sparks’ picture of the London Underground with all the names changed:

Stop it Sparks

The writing was red and shiny, like fake blood. Sparks licked his hand speculatively to check. Then he started spitting a lot. It wasn’t fake blood, after all.

Then his bed burst into flames.

“You didn’t have to set fire to his waste paper basket,” said Duncan, as he and Jeff made their way home (they were early risers and had done Sparks’ place over while he slept).

“He’s got to learn,” said Jeff. “This is serious. Hence the fire and the pig’s blood”.

Duncan shuddered. “And I don’t see why I’m the one who has to get the blood from the butchers every time.”

“I told you,” Jeff said. “I can’t do it because I’m a vegetarian.”

Just then a sheet of flame shot up from the upstairs window of the house behind them and knocked out the glass.

“Timer switch,” said Jeff.

Duncan looked up. He could see Sparks running about, trying to put out the flames on his burning bed with an equally burning duvet.

“You had a bacon sandwich in the cafe,” he said accusingly.

Sparks was a bit shaken up by the fire and the pig’s blood. A lesser man, in fact, would have been shaken up enough to take the advice on the wall and stop, but Sparks had a stubborn streak. This was partly why Alison had gone, and partly why he had never had a proper job, believing shirts and ties to be Satanic in some way (and ties to be a literal symbol of restriction and oppression), but it was also partly why Alison had liked him, and why he was able to continue working at a job that would have depressed one of those vicars who favour the tambourine and the chirpily-rewritten Bible story. Sparks was tenacious, often to the point of pointlessness, but if two extremely thin men were going to come into his flat, burn his waste paper basket and then his bed, and write things on his wall in blood, just to make him give up doing what he was doing, then Sparks wouldn’t.

However, the blood and the fire and the overturned chairs and the left-on computer did make him think a little, and instead of leaping out of the house and into action, Sparks decided to consider things a bit more fully. Not much more, he told himself, he wasn’t Professor Brainstein, but a little bit, just to bolster his own confidence.

 Sparks went downstairs to the kitchen, which like the rest of the house was very unransacked. He made himself a cup of tea, put some milk in it, smelled the result and poured it down the sink. Then he got a glass of milk, drank half of it before he realised the cause of the tea smelling was probably the milk, and poured the milk down the sink. Finally, after some thought, he got a can of lager from under the sink, sat down at the kitchen table and made himself a list.

The list was the longest thing Sparks had ever written that didn’t end with the words “please come back”.

How much danger am I in?
it began, and went on…

What happens if I meet myself?

How can I avoid going to worlds where there’s no Alison?

Why do I end up sometimes in the same place and sometimes in a different one?

What’s this password thing and why sometimes do I need to talk to a dentist and other times not?

Why are all these worlds only a bit different? Why haven’t I been to a world where it’s just monsters or monkeys?

And, after a few moments’ thought…

How long can I keep doing this before they get really annoyed and do something properly bad to me?

Sparks put his pen down. He felt better already. He looked at his unopened lager, put it back under the sink, and went into the bathroom, where he suddenly jumped in alarm. The bathroom had also not been touched by his intruders but, as Sparks learned when he caught his reflection in the mirror, they had
made him up like a clown.

“That’s it,” said Sparks, annoyed. He hated clowns.

Sparks got dressed and went to his office. He turned on his computer, went online and clicked onto the Random Life Generator, which he had bookmarked under NATIONAL TRUST HOLIDAYS to fool any intruders.

The usual threats and noises came up, skulls raced to the front of the screen like inquisitive skull fish, if there was such a thing which, Sparks supposed, somewhere there was, and then the mass of text appeared and it all resolved itself. The first phrase on the screen was:

TODAY’S WORD BALUSTRADE OPERATING ENTRANCE WASHINGTON DC 476 SMITH AVENUE DUTY OFFICER M LIPS

Sparks briefly contemplated flying to America and saying “Balustrade” to a complete stranger, but he would never have got there in time and, besides, he could barely afford to go to the shops, let alone Washington DC. He waited for a few sites to pass, one of which was in Warrington, wondered if he would have to hitch to Warrington, and then the letters rearranged themselves:

TODAY’S WORD BALUSTRADE OPERATING ENTRANCE LONDON 96 MARSH ROAD E4 DUTY OFFICER J PATTERSON

This was much better. Sparks wrote the address down and was on his way out when he had a thought. He went into the kitchen and made some crisp sandwiches for when he got there in case the food was toxic, or nasty. Then, because it might be cold, he put on some gloves and stuffed an old ski balaclava into his pocket.
Better prepared for every eventuality than not,
Sparks thought to himself as he walked up the road to the bus stop, eating his crisp sandwiches.

Sparks was, however, unprepared for 96 Marsh Road. It was a pub, the smallest pub Sparks had ever seen (and over the years, he had seen many pubs, some tiny and some enormous). There was barely room for a door between its two tiny windows, while the pub sign, as it swung from side to side, was in danger of harming the occupants of 94 and 98 Marsh Road when they leaned out of their windows, which they probably did from time to time to refill their pint mugs from their beds. The pub was called The Grand Old Duke of York and was, Sparks supposed, about the same size as a duke.

Sparks pushed open the pub door and went in. The pub was, un-Tardislike, as small inside as it was out. It consisted of a small counter and a small table with three chairs round it. These chairs were each occupied by an old man, and none of the old men were talking to each other, probably because they were blind drunk. In the corner of the room was a broken door marked GENTS. There did not appear to be a ladies’ toilet; Sparks supposed that none had ever been needed.

Behind the bar, a young man with a T-shirt that said YOU ARE A TWAAAT was polishing the grime back into some pint mugs. Sparks approached him.

“Yuh?” said the young man, making no attempt to put the mugs down or even point either of his eyes at Sparks.

“Are you J Waterman?” said Sparks.

“Nuh,” the young man snorted, apparently stunned and contemptuous that anyone could make such an elementary mistake. He turned his back on Sparks and, before Sparks could vault the bar and rip the young man’s head off his shoulders, shouted “Boss! Someone to see yuh!” into a hole that might once have been a dumb waiter. Then he turned back into his unpolishing.

Sparks stood at the bar, wondering what would happen now. Then a voice shouted back through the hole, “Send him up!” The young man winced as though he had been interrupted in some great mathematical task and jerked his head at Sparks to indicate a door beside the bar that said PRIVATE. Sparks opened the door and went upstairs. There was another door, which he opened, and behind it was J Waterman. And J Waterman, Sparks realised with slight horror, was also J Singh, giant dentist from the Edgware Road.

J Waterman was doing something with a crossword puzzle, and had not registered Sparks’ presence yet. Sparks hurriedly pulled on his balaclava and, just in case, his gloves.

“Hello,” he said in what he hoped was a disguised voice.

Waterman or Singh or, for all Sparks knew, Mister Kippers, BA, but he was bloody tall either way, looked at him.

“Why are you wearing that balaclava?” said J Waterman.

“I’ve got mouth scabs,” said Sparks, hoping that his reply would be so unpleasant as to put J Waterman off.

“Let me have a look,” said Waterman, to Sparks’ horror, “I’m really a dentist.”

“They’re outside the mouth,” said Sparks.

“Oh, well, that wouldn’t be ethical,” said Waterman, disappointedly. “Did you want something?”

“Yes,” said Sparks. “Balustrade.”

“This way,” said Waterman, still sounding disappointed. He pulled a mat off the floor to reveal a big hole.

“Take off your clothes,” he said to Sparks.

“Pardon?” said Sparks, as one would.

“Take off your clothes,” said Waterman. “And put them in this bag.”

He held up a large plastic bin liner. Sparks thought Waterman looked a bit determined, so he stripped and put his clothes in the bag. Waterman looked happier, but not, Sparks was both relieved and disappointed to notice, in a kind of happy to see Sparks’ fine nude frame kind of way.

“Did you bring a towel?” Waterman said. Sparks shook his head and Waterman sighed. He gave Sparks a horrible towel that felt like cardboard, tied up the bag of clothes and indicated the big hole in the floor.