Sparks (16 page)

“Steady, ma’am,” said one of the policemen.

“Don’t worry,” said the woman. “He won’t hurt me.”

“No,” said Sparks, disappointed to find out that he was indeed clearly a bad person in this place. “Besides, I can’t move and I’m in quite a lot of pain.”

“Boo hoo,” said the woman. “Wish you’d thought of that before killing all those people.”

This was the kind of line Sparks really hated. It always made him want to say something like, “You’re right. I’d never have done it if I’d thought someone might try and arrest me.” But he didn’t. He had a feeling it might make things worse.

“My name is Detective Inspector Walters,” said the woman. “I have only one question for you, Sparks. We nicked you, six months ago. We gave you life imprisonment. Seven sentences, all to run consecutively, just in case you were going to live for ever, seven times. And you disappeared, Sparks. From a closely-guarded cell. Saving the state a lot of money, but not satisfying all those people who think justice should be done.”

“Sorry,” said Sparks, who had got caught up in the flow rather.

“And then, just when we think justice will never be done, we get a report from some woman that she’s seen you in your old flat. The one that your old mum has kept the same ever since you were nicked. We thought she was just sentimental…”

Just forgetful, more like
, thought Sparks, but secretly he was impressed with his parents. He was a serial killer and they still loved him!

“…but now it seems she knew you’d be back,” said Detective Inspector Walters. “How did you do it, Sparks? How did you disappear?”

There comes a time in everyone’s life when the truth must be told. Sparks told Detective Inspector Walters and the policemen the truth.

“Oh dear,” said Detective Inspector Walters, “I can see I’m not going home tonight.”

DI WALTERS: Interview with suspect Paul Sparks, 8.20am, Friday the…

SPARKS: Are you supposed to say that?

DI WALTERS: What? Shut up! Say what?

SPARKS: Suspect. You said I’d been tried and sentenced.

DI WALTERS: Ah, so you admit it.

SPARKS: No. I said “you said”. I’m not admitting anything. Anyway, I’m not having a go. I’m just asking why you said I was a suspect. I mean, if – as you say – I’ve been tried and sentenced…

DI WALTERS: Yes, yes…

SPARKS: Then I’m not a suspect, am I? I’m guilty.

DI WALTERS: Suspect admits guilt, 8.24…

SPARKS: No I didn’t. I meant, if you say I did it, then how can I be a suspect?

DI WALTERS: (Sigh) Well, what do you suggest we call you? Sergeant Baverstock and I are all ears.

SPARKS: That’s not for me to say.

DI WALTERS: Interview terminated.

DI WALTERS: Interview recommenced with suspect – accused – guilty… guilty suspect Paul Sparks, 9…

SPARKS: Interview recommenced after I was beaten up!

DI WALTERS: No one beat you up. I just had to go out for a cigarette.

SPARKS: Ow!

DI WALTERS: “Ow”? What do you mean, “ow”?

SPARKS: He just hit me again.

DS BAVERSTOCK: No, I didn’t! You thumped the table. He just thumped the table, ma’am.

DI WALTERS: I have a sick headache. Interview terminates 10…

SPARKS: Ow! He did it again!

DS MOLLOY: I didn’t! Sir – Ma’am! You saw me!

SPARKS: Saw you what? Eh?

DS BAVERSTOCK: Saw… saw me not hit you!

DI WALTERS: Interview terminated whatever bloody time it is.

Looking back, Sparks decided that the interview had not been a success from anyone’s point of view; the police were clearly a little disappointed by Sparks’ answers, but this had not made them any keener on releasing him.

Typical,
thought Sparks, as they kicked him towards his cell,
I failed the interview and I still got the job.

Sparks lay on his bed and decided to reflect for a bit on how much he hated irony. He went through the last ironic few hours in a trough of despond. Sent home by a loop in the space time... thing, arrested for a crime he hadn’t committed, thrown into a van with THE POLICE written on the side, interviewed by a sarcastic woman...

Sparks froze in his trough. His mind, always much smarter than him, had tricked him into reviewing the day’s events and in doing so had released new information, or rather, old information that Sparks had failed to register. But what was it? Sparks’ mind, possibly wishing that it was inside a dolphin’s speedy skull, tiredly flashed the words THE POLICE! THE POLICE! in Spark’s brain.

Sparks got it. The van he had been thrown into, and against, was a police van, but instead of having POLICE written on it like it should – Sparks was really catching up with his mind here – it had THE POLICE written on it. And the last, or first, or only, time Sparks had seen THE POLICE written anywhere – Sparks was ahead of himself here, a condition his mind could nearly sympathise with – was on the side of a police car, in the first parallel world he had ever been to, the one with the Edgware Road in it.

Sparks lay back on his mattress, his thoughts reeling like drunken midgets in the tiny pub of his brain. If he was in a parallel world, he thought, then he couldn’t be in his own world. And if he wasn’t in his own world, then not only had he been tricked by Duncan and Jeff, but there was still hope for his grand plan.

Sparks lay back some more (it was a very soft mattress). Of course, there was also the fact that, in his own world, Sparks wasn’t a dead serial killer, and in this one, he was.

I should have thought of that,
thought Sparks.

In some deep mental recess, Sparks’ mind slapped itself on the forehead again and again.

On the plus side, Sparks’ grand plan was not thwarted. He had not been sent back to his own world, and he could still travel on and continue his search for Alison.

On the minus side, he was probably in jail for life for serial murder, and was unlikely to ever get out.

These were the thoughts that flipped, binarily, in Sparks’ head as the police van – helpfully labelled THE POLICE – took Sparks, and some other serial killers, to a very large institution for very dangerous unwell people. It was in the Lake District, not far from Sparks’ mum and dad’s, actually.

Oh well, thought Sparks with perhaps more optimism than the situation merited, maybe I can look myself up in the prison library and see what serial killings I did.

It was an unusual shard of hope to cling on to, but, oddly, one that all the prisoners in the van were thinking of, at the same time.

Sparks sat in his room. It was really a cell, but it was called a room to stop prisoners giving themselves airs. The prisoners were also called patients, for the same reason. There had been a time when the prisoners were called customers, but then someone noticed that customers were supposed to be always right, and in a maximum security institution for the dangerously unwell, this could cause problems. So patients it was.

Sparks had a cell, or rather room, to himself, even though he was supposed to share it with another patient, or, as the warders put it, psycho, but as the previous occupant had tried to strangle the other previous occupant with some bookbinding thread from a very old and large-spined encyclopedia, the room was temporarily unmanned. This was also why the prison library was closed, as guards, or carers as they hated to be called, spent days removing anything threadlike from the books, so all the spines fell off and some of the patients, or nutters, ate them.

Sparks knew none of this. He just sat in his room, wondering if he should make some notches in his bedpost or if that would just depress him. As Sparks was pretty depressed already, this was semi-academic, but it passed the time, of which there was a lot knocking about.

Then his cell door opened.

“Visitor,” said a carer, or bastard.

“Yes, I suppose you are,” said Sparks.

“No,” said the carer. “Not me. Your mum.”

Sparks was so surprised, he dropped his penknife. The carer picked it up.

“We’ve got to get some more consistent rules in this nuthouse,” he said, and ushered Sparks towards the stairs. “Hospital,” he added, correcting himself.

Sparks’ mum sat on a large leather sofa, holding a bag of fruit. She looked confused, as well she might, Sparks supposed.

Sparks was directed by his carer to a large wooden chair next to his mum. He was surprised at the informality of the visiting system, but then he noticed the large club in the carer’s waistband. Reassured factually if not emotionally, Sparks sat down next to his mum. He didn’t know what to say.

His mum did.

“You’re not Sparks,” she said.

“How can you tell?” said Sparks, hurt at the ability of people in parallel universes everywhere to not mistake him for more interesting or exotic versions of himself.

“Well, for a start, Sparks is dead,” said Sparks’ mum. “That’s a giveaway. But you don’t look like him.”

“I wish the police thought that,” said Sparks. “I wouldn’t be in here.”

“The police know nothing,” said Sparks’ mum. “If they did, they wouldn’t have arrested my son.”

“You mean me?” said Sparks, adding politely, “Mum.”

“No,” said Sparks’ mum. “You’re not my son. I just said that. And please don’t call me mum. It’s distressing enough seeing someone who looks like my son without that. Call me Patricia.”

“Sorry,” said Sparks, but still not calling a woman who looked like his mum anything resembling her first name. It sounded too libertarian.

“So,” said Patricia, “what alternative world or whatever the phrase is are you from?”

Sparks, who believed in the truth of cliché, was still surprised to feel his jaw actually drop.

He was about to speak, and say things like, “What?” and “Pardon?” when the carer leaned over and said, “Time’s up.”

“See you next week,” said Patricia.

Sparks’ jaw continued to ache from dropping for several minutes.

Next time Patricia came to visit Sparks, he was quicker off the mark.

“What do you mean, what world are you from?” he said.

“You know what I mean,” said Patricia. “I tell you, Sparks’ dad won’t come. He thinks this is all his fault.”

“What?” said Sparks, as ever. “Why? What?”

“He thinks it’s his fault because he told Sparks about alternative worlds and all that, and that’s why Sparks started to look for Alison, and it all went wrong,” said Patricia.

“But I knew about the worlds thing before I asked Dad about it,” said Sparks.

“That’s what I told him,” said Patricia. “But he feels guilty. And me coming to see you doesn’t help. It doesn’t help me much, either, come to think of it.”

“I’m very confused,” said Sparks. “I don’t know what to say.”

“This is so hard for me,” said Patricia, “Knowing you’re not my son, but you’re so like him. Same face, same dress sense, same lack of gumption.”

“Why is it,” said Sparks, heavily, “that every world I go to, people keep telling me how useless I am?”

“I knew you were from somewhere else,” said Patricia, with maternal triumph. “Sparks’ dad said you might be a police trap, but I couldn’t see what for. Also your nails are dirty for a copper.”

“All right,” said Sparks, “I am from somewhere else. I split up with this girl in my world…”

“Alison,” said Patricia, sighing. “We got a letter from her, after our son disappeared. Of course, you can’t say it’s her fault, but...”

“And I found a machine that enabled me to go to these places…”

“The Random Life Generator,” said Patricia.

“I went to several worlds, one with bears, and then I was tricked and came here,” said Sparks. To make life faster for the modern reader, he explained his recent life in detail that even Patricia found excessive, and she was his mum, sort of.

“Well, that’s not what happened to Sparks,” Patricia said, stifling a yawn.

“What did happen to Sparks?” said Sparks, forced to refer to himself in the third person like he was a dictator.

“Well,” said Patricia, “that’s…”

“Time’s up,” said the carer, reluctantly, as he had been happily eavesdropping on what sounded to him to be the maddest arse he had ever heard, and him working in a loony bin, or caring zone, too.

“Next week?” said Sparks, hopefully.

“I don’t know,” said Patricia. “The buses are terrible.”

The week after that, Patricia didn’t come. Sparks began work on a basket, to be ironic.

The week after that, just as some of the sharper carers were beginning to realise that Sparks’ basket was ironic, and that therefore they should tap him on his face quite hard, Patricia popped by again.

“Thanks for the unnecessary tension,” said Sparks.

“Sorry,” said Patricia, “but I had to check some facts in my diary. Also, I meant it about the buses. It’s miles and you have to wait half an hour. And the other visitors! You can imagine.”

Sparks imagined. He felt sorry for this woman who wasn’t his mother exactly.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Don’t come if it’s hard.”

Patricia ignored him, as people often do when apologised to. Instead she turned to the carer.

“Can you ask the chief screw to fix it for my son to use the prison library?” she said.

Sparks winced. But the carer just smiled, and said, “I’ll have a word.”

Not for the first time in his life, Sparks wished he was someone’s mum, just for the service.

Patricia turned back to Sparks.

“This is what happened,” she said.

It took more than one visit to piece it all together, but eventually Sparks and Patricia worked it out. About the time that Sparks had come into his first world – the world he was jailed in – the other Sparks, the one from this world had, with some sensible symmetry, gone into a third world. This world, he later told Patricia, was extremely unpleasant.

“Were there bears?” asked Sparks.

“Shut up,” Patricia said. “This world was… unevolved, was the word Sparks used. He said nothing felt right. The air tasted funny, the colours were not quite the same as here, and the people…”

She paused. Sparks thought she was going to tell him to shut up again, even though he wasn’t talking.

“Sparks said the people just didn’t seem right. He said they seemed… badly made, and dangerous.”