Sparks (18 page)

He walked, almost literally, pretty much, right into a prison carer. Sparks drew back his fist, ready to punch him inefficiently.

“Can I help you?” said the carer.

“Um,” said Sparks, thrown by this. “No!” he decided to say. “No, I'm fine.”

He walked away. “Oh,” he said, turning to face the carer. “And I'm not one of your inmates. I just dress in denim because I like it.”

He walked out. Then he came back.

“Um,” he said, “Just checking something.”

“What?” said the carer.

“Do I look like a serial killer to you?” said Sparks.

“No,” said the carer unhesitatingly. “And I've met millions of them. I've killed three.”

“Ta,” said Sparks, and walked out properly.

“Sodding nutcase,” said the carer to himself and returned to his charges who, maddened by being left alone, beat him up and stuffed him into a linen cupboard.

Sparks walked out into the summer, or whatever it was, evening. Right now he didn't care what new world he had arrived in. It was almost certainly one where he wasn’t a serial killer or in a booby hatch, and that would do for Sparks. He looked around. Clearly and obviously he was still in the Lake District, which even Sparks would agree was a very nice place. But far from London, which Sparks needed to be in, and which also, with little or no justification, he thought of as civilisation. This monocentric view of the world – shared in its day by several empires – had been one of the several barriers between him and Alison.

“London isn't everything,” said Alison once, as Sparks had again turned down her idea of moving to somewhere less like London (in this case Hastings).

“When a man is tired of London…” said Sparks, tailing off not for dramatic effect but because he couldn't remember the rest of the line and by stopping halfway through he hoped Alison might think he was tailing off for dramatic effect.

Alison looked at Sparks. Sparks, who couldn't tail off any more than he had already, considered making a fruity hand gesture, but decided against it.

“I like London,” he said, using all his powers of debate.

“Well, it's not the be-all-and-end-all,” said Alison. “There are lots of other nice places in the world.”

“‘Nice’,” said Sparks. “I hate that word, nice.”

“I don’t,” said Alison. “I’m more annoyed by people who say they don’t like the word ‘nice’. They can never say why they don’t like it, it’s just a smartarse thing to say that most people grow out of when they’re 16 and discover that nice things like, say, central heating and scones sort of have the edge over, I don’t know, heroin and syphilis.”

“I only said I liked London,” said Sparks, but he could tell that Alison was miffed.

Sparks was recalling this conversation right now not because he had a lot of time on his hands and liked to sift through moderately unpleasant memories, but because he was lost, and his mind tended to wander off in search of useful memories when this happened. Right now, his mind was trying to recall if this particular part of the Lake District was either the one where Sparks and Alison had spent an unsuccessful weekend camping (it wasn’t Sparks’ idea) or the one where Sparks had gone on cub camp and lost six eight-year-old boys on a hill at night. His mind decided it was the former, and in that case, there should be a small town somewhere over to the right.

Sparks registered this memory, claimed the insight for himself, and set off to the right.

Sparks’ insight was, for once, spot on, and resulted in the following:

a) small train with two coaches from somewhere quaint in the Lake District to somewhere far from quaint in the Midlands.

b) large train with 14 coaches, no buffet and a toilet apparently designed as a urine-based aquarium from the Midlands to just outside London, where it became immobile, or broody, or both.

c) large immobile train moving very slowly from just outside London to London, arriving late and full of compensation slips unfilled in by people who couldn’t be arsed filling in a form to reclaim £5 for a train journey that cost £75. (“I blame the unions,” said one elderly passenger, but when challenged, couldn’t remember why.)

d) tube from London station to North London.

e) long walk from tube station to Sparks’ office, whichever Sparks this might be, and if indeed there was a Sparks here, or even an office, to be confirmed.

Sparks stood outside the building that might contain his office and arguably him. He suddenly felt very tired. In the last few weeks he had been arrested for murder, locked up for life, escaped from a nuthouse, being attacked by thin villains, and travelled on a train. None of these things were pleasant in any way. He was no nearer to his quest, a simple thing of travelling through an infinite amount of worlds to find a woman who might love him, and would have to be exactly like his ex-girlfriend – in fact, be his ex-girlfriend, only not find him annoying. And he was really hungry.

He looked in his wallet. There was no money in it. Sparks wondered if his cashpoint card would work in this world, too. It was a possibility, if there was another Sparks, if that Sparks used the same bank, and so on, and so forth. It was equally possible that in this world, hot tea would come out of a cashpoint, but Sparks was prepared to take the risk.

He walked to the bank. The bank was where it ought to be. So was the cash machine. Sparks inserted his cash card, keyed in his number, and decided for a test run to take out £10. This was in fact more a habit thing than a test run thing, as Sparks often had not much more than £10 in his account and suspected that the other Sparks, if he existed, might be similar. Then he had another thought. Behind Sparks, a bus pulled up. By the time Sparks had finished his thought, the bus had pulled off, leaving several people on the pavement.

Sparks – briefly distracted by a large movie poster on the side of the bus shelter which had an unfamiliar yet familiar face on it – decided to act on his thought. Instead of taking some money out, he checked his, or rather the other Sparks’ balance. The screen flashed, and did not tell him he had keyed in the wrong number. Instead it told him his balance. Sparks gulped, like a cat in a cartoon that has just seen a bulldog standing behind a mouse with a hammer. The balance of the account was enormous. It contained hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Sparks stared at the balance. In this world he was clearly a millionaire, or at least a builder. Perhaps he was even famous. Suddenly, Sparks remembered the poster.
Oh wow!
he thought,
I’m…

“Bloody Nora,” said a voice behind him. “For goodness’ sake,” said another. “Take some money out, why don’t you?” suggested a third, not charitably.

 Sparks acted. He took out a lot of money, stuffed it into his wallet, turned round to face the fractious queue, and said ‘Sorry about that” to Jeff and Duncan.

“Oh,” he said, recognising them.

“Oh indeed,” said Jeff, and lunged out of the queue at Sparks. Sparks ducked out of the way, but Duncan made a lunge of his own. Sparks, hemmed in, lunge-wise, grabbed his wallet. He pulled out the money and threw it everywhere. The queue suddenly unlocked itself and people leapt at the money. Jeff and Duncan were knocked flying, being so thin, and Sparks fled.

“Famous people,” said a man in the queue. “Typical.”

A few minutes later, having sneaked into his nicely-decorated office and turned on his computer (neither of which, of course, were his, but while he was throwing his money around, again literally, such definitions were otiose to Sparks), Sparks found himself staring at the Random Life Generator. Destinations and place names danced around the screen, not literally.

Sparks grunted. He was starting to feel tired. Nothing was getting him anywhere. He wrote down an address almost resentfully, and headed out the door.

Sparks found the portal. It was at the back of a shirt and tie shop. After hundreds of young men had asked if they could help him, Sparks saw the portal in a changing cubicle. He grabbed a handful of bad ties and vanished.

OW!

OW! Bumpy

Shi

Why is it bumpy?

It wasn’t bumpy before

It wasn't bumpy before!
Sparks thought, groggy but awake. It was bumpy now, though, and he appeared to be, in fact he definitely was, in some sort of chair, which was better than being, say, not in a chair. Sparks opened his eyes (little ants, inserted individually, by fairly clumsy giants) and saw…

Lots of darkness, mostly.
Wait up
, he thought groggily again. There were tiny lights in the darkness, red and white, with pictures of cigarettes, and hands clasping like those Irish rings that people liked, with the, well, as Sparks had already thought, with the hands clasping.

No. Not hands clasping. Hands on a seatbelt. Hence the…

Hence the bumpiness. Hands on a seatbelt as in fasten seatbelts as in bumpy ride as in…

Oh bugger,
Sparks thought,
I’m on an airplane.

Sparks supposed he wasn't totally surprised to find himself on an airplane. After all, he had previously found himself in a lake and on the Edgware Road, so the world was clearly full of possibilities, and in some ways, maybe he should be pleased that he hadn't landed in, say, the belly of a whale or the Straits of Magellan. Not that he was sure what the Straits of Magellan were, but he had a pretty clear idea that they wouldn’t be a great place to land in. (Later, Sparks got an atlas, and saw he was wrong. The Straits of Magellan were perfectly fine, unless you were Magellan, which he wasn’t.)

He tried to accustom himself to the darkness. Then he got annoyed with that and turned on his overhead light. This confirmed his initial impression; he was definitely on an airplane. Around him, men in suits slumped about, half throttled by their ties, while some people made dim dozy faces at little screens showing tiny films. One of the films was about a cat, and Sparks had seen it and found it cloying but normal, so at least he wasn’t in an utterly terrifying world where cats were lords of all or something.

Sparks thought fast. He was clearly in a plane, a large commercial airliner sort of plane that was going somewhere, as planes do. He had no idea where. He could be in or rather over any country or continent, and in any reality where it was OK to make films about cats. None of this was helpful.

However, Sparks remembered one thing about planes. He reached up and pressed a switch. After a while, a flight attendant came along. If she was surprised to see Sparks occupying a seat that had been empty for the first seven and a half hours of the plane’s journey, she didn't show it. He was sitting in economy, so she didn’t care either.

“Yes sir?”, she said, smiling.

“Can I have a large brandy?” Sparks asked.

“No,” said the flight attendant. “We're landing in five minutes.”

“Oh,” said Sparks. Then, realising he ought to seize the moment more firmly, opportunity-wise, he said, “Where?”

The flight attendant’s smile became thinner. This man, Sparks realised she was realising, was a drunk.

“I'm not a drunk,” Sparks said. “I just have that mind disease, where you forget. Things.”

The flight attendant smiled, more but tauter, like a hammock with a fat man in.

“Stansted,” she said. “Near London.”

“Bloody hell,” said Sparks. “That’s no good.”

The plane landed, and Sparks enjoyed, if that is the word, which it isn’t, the sensation of travelling from an airport with no luggage (thank God it was an internal flight, he thought) and then into town, all to get back to the point he had started from.

On the train back, he quickly worked out how this world was different – there was apparently some kind of religious persecution thing going on, or possibly an ad campaign involving ginger-haired men being displayed in large iron cages at every crossroads – and made a note to get out very quickly.

North London. Office. Computer. Random Life Generator. Address.

Sparks was getting fast.

Journey. Small Hackney flat. Portal.

Ow!

Ow!

It was very quiet where Sparks was.

“I don’t like it,” said Sparks. “It’s too quiet.” He had always wanted to say that, and felt happy. Later, he just felt he had been frivolous.

Where Sparks was, was by a river. The river was enormous, like the Thames only surrounded by trees and shrubs rather than bits of stone crap and metal crap. On either side of the river, there were more trees and shrubs and then some green bits. The green bits might have been fields if any order had been involved in laying them out; but they just looked on closer inspection like bits, that were green, and their purpose, if any, which there wasn’t, was to not have only trees and shrubs. Conversely, it was equally likely that the trees and shrubs were only there to break up the monotony of the green bits.

Certainly the sky wasn’t helping. There were no pylons or airplanes or vapour trails to break up the blue and white dullness of it. In fact, as with the ground, it wasn’t clear whether the clouds were there to break up the as it were blue skyitude of the place, or the blue was there to give the eye a break from all the white fluffiness.

And it was astonishingly quiet. Despite the warm weather, nothing buzzed at Sparks and tried to bite him or made a threatening “cheep cheep” noise or barked or even swore in a Cockney accent.

Sparks walked around a bit. Then he walked in a straight line for a while. Then he ran crazily across a green bit. Then, for want of any new ideas, he hid behind a tree. Then he got bored. Then he got scared.

An hour later, after some more walking and running and being scared, Sparks came to a conclusion. Either he was in a sodding big park that was closed for the day, which probably wasn’t the case given the lack of insects and pylons, or it was something worse. The something worse was that Sparks might be in a world where there wasn’t anything. Anything alive, anyway. Anything alive with legs or wings, obviously. Or that lived in a river.

As Sparks tried to make a definitive list of things that were alive that weren’t trees or plants, a second, more exciting but scarier thought came into his busy mind. Having run around and lost whatever bearings he had (ie none) he now had no idea where he was, where he had been or, more pertinently, how to get out.