Sparks (23 page)

“The job’s yours.”

“What if I had asked for a different drink? Pernod and black?”

“The job would still be yours. Would you like to go to the pictures tomorrow night?”

“I don’t think anyone says ‘the pictures’ any more.”

“Sorry. I don’t get out much.”

“Then we’d better go to the pictures tomorrow.

THIRD INTERLUDE

Mark and Peter stood outside the darkened and closed-up room. Gary threw the great doors open and they filed in with the others.

“Do you have to do that, Gary?” said Mark.

“What?” said Gary. He blinked in the dark.

“Throw the doors open. Why can’t you just push them?”

“We always throw the doors open.”

“It’s not even as though they’re particularly big doors. If they were great huge iron things with, I don’t know, carvings on, fair enough. But they’re only – what? – about the size of office doors.”

“It’s a tradition,” said Peter.

“How is it a tradition?” said Mark. He pulled his white robe down where it was riding up. “We’ve only ever done this once before.”

“Well, we threw the doors open that time,” said the third person, who was called Peter.

“How do you know? Last time was over 400 years ago.”

“I read it.”

“No you f…”

A loud stomping interrupted Mark, as if made by an oak pole on a marble floor, which is what it was. All the lights in the room came on, illuminating about 100 very skinny men and two reasonably sized doors. (“Much betters doors.” “Ssh!”). The lights revealed that the person doing the stomping with the pole on the floor was, unusually in this gathering, uniquely even, neither skinny nor a man. It was a large woman. She was standing in the middle of the skinny men, a hefty magnet drawing in a lot of anorexic iron filings

“Welcome,” said the large woman, “to this extraordinary meeting of the Society.”

A drone of excitement filled the room at ear level. The large woman banged the pole on the floor again.

“For the second time only in 500 years, we have been compelled to meet,” she said. “For the second time in 500 years, all of the members of the Society who are not otherwise engaged are gathered here to discuss a new problem. A problem of such urgency that it could destroy our mission.”

“Do you mean,” said a voice, “do you mean the search for God’s Perfect World?”

“No, the search for a new kind of badger,” said a voice. A tall man appeared behind the others. The large woman stood back to let him in.

“Welcome, my friends,” said the man, who had an air of affable smugness, like a vicar who has done well on the Stock Exchange.

“Welcome, Alan,” said the others.

“I was being ironic when I mentioned the badger,” said Alan. “Our friend is quite right, if a bit slow. The quest for God’s Perfect World is indeed in peril. May I take the staff please, Mrs Reeves?”

The large woman gave Alan the pole, and he tapped it lightly on the floor. The lights went down and a screen appeared. Two speakers rose up from beneath the floor to bookend the screen.

“This must have cost a fortune,” said Peter.

“Shh!” said Gary.

The speakers began to play ominous music. The screen chattered with numbers and then the numbers resolved themselves into a gargantuan image of a human face. The face was Joseph Kaye’s.

“Gentlemen and Mrs Reeves,” said Alan. “We have a major problem. This man…”

He stopped.

“By the way,” he said. “Has anyone seen Jeff and Duncan lately?”

*

LATER IN HIS room, as workmen took the television away, Sparks went through what Jeff had told him. Some of it he even wrote down on hotel notepaper to make it clearer. After a while, he drew some stick men and a Venn diagram to see if that would help. It did, although later Sparks thought he might have regretted the Venn diagram as not having been strictly necessary.

Jeff’s points were, essentially, these:

1) The person who was about to cause all the trouble did not know that he or she was about to cause all the trouble. Despite this, they still had to be stopped. (“Like in that DVD,” said Sparks. “Shut up,” Jeff said.)

2) The trouble this person was about to cause concerned the Society.

3) The trouble concerning the Society affected more than one world.

At this point, Sparks had a good point to make.

“Why?” was his point.

“Because there is a Society on more than one world,” said Duncan. “And all these worlds are different, but on them the Society is the constant. We’ve been active for so long that the search for God’s Perfect World is taking place on a myriad…”

“Hang on,” said Sparks, feeling like an incredibly clever philosophy professor, and thus wishing he hadn’t prefaced his point with “hang on”. “You said there are an infinite amount of worlds.”

“Is,” said Jeff. “Is an infinite amount, yes.”

“Well, therefore then,” said Sparks, “there must be a load of worlds where there is no Society.”

“Yes, you bozo,” said Jeff, a tad warmly. “But we’re not concerned with saving the Society on worlds where there is no Society, are we? That would be stupid. We’re concerned with damage limitation. We want to save the Society to further its purpose.”

“But there must be worlds where the Society’s purpose isn’t what you want,” said Sparks.

It went quiet. Duncan pretended to be looking at chutney.

“What?” said Jeff. He sounded cold and hard, even for Jeff.

“If there is an infinite amount of worlds, then in some of them the Society must have deviated from its purpose,” said Sparks. “Because that’s what infinity does, right?”

He stopped. He wasn’t very comfortable with the infinite, and Jeff was giving him a deeply superior and cold and hard look.

“No,” said Jeff. “The Society exists outside these worlds as well as on them. Therefore…”

“But…” said Sparks.

“Therefore the Society will always have a common purpose,” said Jeff. “I mean,” he said, a horrible laugh gurgling out of him like mud in a toilet, “there isn’t, there isn’t a world where the Society is trying to find a nice golf course. So…”

“But,” Sparks said again.

“So to return to my main point,” said Jeff, adding some foamy spittle to the gurgling mud-toilet laugh, “If this person – this person that we’re supposed to be talking about – is causing trouble to the Society in this world, he’ll be doing it on other worlds, and…”

Jeff held up a hand to silence Sparks. “And as the Society also exists outside the worlds it exists on, then...”

He looked around and wiped his hand on the grass.

“Then we’ve all had it,” he said.

“So what’s it got to do with me?” said Sparks.

“Um,” said Duncan. “You’re the only one who can save us.”

“I’m the only one who can save you?” said Sparks.

“Yes,” said Jeff. “How sad is that?”

The workmen left, then came back for the minibar and the telephone. Sparks crumpled up his diagrams and lay back on his pillow.

Joseph Kaye crumpled up his diagrams and lay back on his pillow. He had spent the last hour trying to draw the insect in his head, something he did every night. But now he found he was tired of drawing and wanted instead to think about recent events (and part of him was relieved not to have to obsess about bugs and beetles for once).

So Joseph Kaye lay back and thought about Alison.

Sparks lay back and thought about Alison. He found he hadn’t thought of her for a while, presumably, he presumed, because he was in life-threatening circumstances on an alien world (and he wondered in what way this world would be alien, maybe the cars were powered by dandruff or something unpleasant like that). He wondered if there was an Alison on this world (he made a mental note to look, as soon as he had got away from Jeff and Duncan, found a computer and got out through a portal, not really intending to participate in the skinny men’s plan, which sounded to him both complicated and dull).

Sparks stopped thinking about Alison and started thinking about Jeff and Duncan’s plan. They wanted him to stop someone doing something. This wasn’t surprising, as Jeff and Duncan were exactly the type of person who was always trying to stop someone doing something. What did engage Sparks’ interest was how he was meant to do the stopping, and who he was meant to stop.

He hoped it wasn’t someone he liked off the television.

Alison went to the supermarket for a late night bout of fruit shopping. As she stood in line, basket in hand, she thought about Joseph Kaye. Since Spark’s death in the bus crash, she had avoided thinking about men, partly because this was generally unproductive, and partly because she had been too sad. Now she found she was feeling a lot less sad, and was even looking forward to things. And, given that these things involved visiting a library and working for the civil service, this was quite a remarkable achievement.

Maybe this was meant to happen, Alison thought vaguely. Then, shocked, she analysed the thought. Do I mean that maybe it was a good thing that Sparks died so I could meet Joseph? she thought.

Just as she was about to pay up so she could go home and spend the rest of the evening feeling guilty and wrong about things, she noticed a small electronic display by the till. It was flashing up a message.
goodbye hope
, it said, and then
goodbye hope again
. Alison felt even more deflated.

“Bloody thing,” said the checkout girl. She whacked the display. “It’s always doing that.”

goodbye hope
, the display announced once more. Then it hiccupped out
goodbye hope to see you
, and finally
goodbye hope to see you soon
. It repeated
goodbye hope to see you soon
. And again
goodbye hope to see you soon
, clearly happy to go on like that all day.

Alison picked up her purchases, feeling immensely cheered for some inscrutable reason. “Goodbye,” she said to the checkout girl. ‘Hope to see you soon.”

The checkout girl smiled, just in case.

Jeff woke up. Duncan was asleep, dreaming about headless meerkats running around being chased by his mother. Jeff lay awake, listening to Duncan murmur “no, mum, no,” softly to himself. He was in a very good mood. He had a plan, and it was an unpleasant one that would not only sort out all the difficulties that were plaguing him, but it was a plan where at least one person would be hurt and probably killed.

Maybe two
, he thought happily.

The next day, Joseph Kaye woke up and found that he was thinking about Alison. The sun streamed approvingly through his bedroom windows, covering various drawings of bugs and weapons with golden light. He went downstairs to the kitchen, where his father and mother were having their breakfast.

“Drink your coffee before it gets cold,” said his mother.

“I think I’m in love,” said Joseph.

His father snorted. “Gay sort of remark,” he said.

It was, oddly, the first of May.

Sparks woke up. Jeff was standing over him.

“Get up,” said Jeff. “Jesus, I spend my whole life telling you to get up. I ought to have GET tattooed on one set of knuckles and UP on the other.”

“You’d have a lot of knuckles left over,” said Sparks.

It was the first of May.

Alison got up and thought about Joseph Kaye. She made a cup of revolting instant coffee and drank it with a smile on her face.

It was the day before the second of May.

“What did you wake me up for?” said Sparks.

“Shut up,” said Jeff.

“You say that a lot, too,” said Sparks.

“Maybe I should have that tattooed on my knuckles instead of GET UP,” said Jeff, breathing oddly.

“You could have GET UP on one hand and SHUT UP on the other,” said Sparks. “Except you’d have to have the S on one hand as well.”

“Pardon?” said Duncan.

“Don’t listen,” said Jeff. “He’s trying to annoy me.”

“Which would mean you’d have GET UPS on one hand, and HUT UP on the other,” said Sparks.

“Oh for God’s sake,” said Jeff. “Next time we’ll open his head up and put in a remote control device.”

“No,” said Duncan. “That’s assuming you start with GET UP. If you started with SHUT UP, you could have SHUT U on one hand and – ”

“Shut up!” Jeff shouted. “Get up!”

“See?” said Sparks as he got to his feet. “It’s much quicker if you just shout it.”

Jeff and Duncan pushed Sparks into a black cab (Jeff did most of the pushing). The car ploughed through London like a dead pig through syrup.

“Can’t you go any faster?” said Jeff, clutching his case to his angry chest. “We’re on important business.”

“It’s these traffic lights,” said the driver as he slowed down to avoid some air.

“We’re not tourists,” said Jeff. “Drive properly or I’ll report you, you pointless Cockney chuff-tickler.”

The taxi stopped abruptly, or as abruptly as a slow cab can stop, which is almost imperceptibly.

“Get out,” said the cabbie. “I’m not putting up with that.”

“Drive on!” shouted Jeff. “It’s important!”

The driver got out of the cab and walked round to Jeff’s side. He opened the door.

“And I want £20 for the cost of cleaning my cab,” he said.

“Cleaning?” shouted Jeff, twitching like a preying mantis in a suit. “What cleaning?”

“Blood,” said the driver, punching Jeff in the nose. Jeff went down like a cocktail stick on a slope, and Sparks jumped out between him and Duncan and ran off.

“Come back,” said Duncan, but quietly so as not to attract attention.

“Heeb’s gob my bab,” said Jeff, through most of his nose.

Sparks had no computer, no portal, but he did have Jeff’s bag, and that was the core of his plan. If Jeff and Duncan were travelling through portals, and clearly they were, then they must have some way of knowing how to find them. Therefore they must have a computer. The only luggage Jeff and Duncan had was this attaché case. There must, therefore, be a laptop in it. Sparks would go online, find the Random Life Generator, and head off home. He didn’t know where home was, but that was part two of his plan. Sparks would let Jeff and Duncan find him, and then offer to trade them their laptop back for directions.