Sparks (4 page)

I have been drugged.

This would explain the recent pain and the memory lapse.
The dentist must have drugged me and taken me to the Edgware Road,
thought Sparks.
I must have made a rude remark about his height. Or maybe he mugged me and had accomplices.
Sparks had never met anybody who had accomplices and was quite taken with this theory, until he realised that no dentist, no matter how fake or tall, would be likely to kidnap someone and release them slightly over two miles down the road. He patted his pockets. His wallet felt empty, but then it always did.
No-one would drug me,
Sparks decided, a little bit sadly.

I have gone mad.

This was more like it.
According to my memory, I went to see a dentist for no other reason than I saw his address on a website and wanted to say “redolent” to him and see what would happen. I’d say that’s the sort of thing a mad person does. But then again, isn’t it only sane people who think they’re mad, whereas all the properly mad ones think they’re sane?
Sparks didn’t know, so dropped the theory. He had never been mad before, anyway.

It was all a dream.

This was nonsense. No one ever went to the Edgware Road in a dream, unless they had a very restricted imagination or were Dick Whittington or something. Also Sparks could remember the entire day’s events in a non-dream way, which wasn’t very dream-like. And he hadn’t turned into a woman, or started his first day at school, or seen Alison in her underwear saying, “I’m sorry, Sparks,” all of which were the general hallmarks of his dreams.

Sparks gave up. Nothing was clear or obvious, except for the fact that he was on the Edgware Road and – he bought an Evening Standard – it was still Tuesday. The headline on the Standard was still the one on the lunchtime edition, so there had been no significant time lapse. Therefore, Sparks reasoned, he must have just suffered some sort of amnesia thing. It happened to people, even if generally they had taken drugs and beer to get it. And he’d had some beer in the non-local. Maybe it had gone off, in a psychedelic way.

He decided to have some more beer. He put the Standard in his back pocket and headed towards the nearest pub. Outside the pub there was a small crowd, about the right size for watching a drunk man be taken away by the police. This in fact was exactly what was happening, and the crowd were indeed watching a drunk man with a beard being led away by a policeman and a policewoman, both of whom seemed to know the drunk man, judging by their banter, which was so cheerful it might have come from a TV series about fictional policemen and women. The drunk man’s dialogue, though, might have come from a crude modern film, and referred exclusively to parts of the groin in different ways.

Sparks watched with the crowd as the police officers jovially manhandled the drunk into their police car, got in themselves, and then drove off. It was a typical Edgware Road kind of moment, Sparks might have thought, but for one thing. As he went into the pub, something was sticking in his mind. Everything about the scene had been ordinary and normal, except for a tiny detail. On the side of police cars, on the door in fact, for as long as Sparks could remember, the word POLICE had always been written. Cars had changed, colour schemes had gone from blue to jam sandwich orange and white, but the door had always had one word – POLICE – on it. This police car, however, had two words on it. They weren’t frightening or bad or even, in the circumstances, inaccurate words, but they were two words, and that was what made Sparks uneasy. On the side of the police car Sparks had seen were written the words:
THE POLICE

Which was different.

In the bar, Sparks had some beer. He said to the barman, who was Australian, “Bit of a commotion out there then.”

The barman agreed. “That was Jake,” he said. “He gets thrown out of most pubs round here and once a month he gets a bit lairy and they nick him.”

“Nice police car,” said Sparks, shoehorning somewhat. “Is that a new design?”

“Dunno, mate,” said the barman, who liked cars but was tired from taking seven tablets of ecstasy in a gay pub the night before.

“Only I’ve never seen that on the side of a cop car before,” said Sparks. “THE POLICE”.

“Eh?” said the barman. “They all say that, mate. Because they are the police!”

The barman laughed, felt a brief rush of stale MDMA as he did so, and went to serve another customer. Sparks finished his drink and went outside. There were no cars belonging to THE POLICE. For want of a plan, he went back to the dentist’s office.

The door was open. The office was empty. The vast old woman was gone, as were the dog and the dentist. The curtain by the sink was still there, so Sparks pulled it back and

OW!

OW IN A SORT OF REVERSE WAY!

Sparks found in himself in both pain and the dentist’s office. He went downstairs. In the street, a police car raced past, with no extraneous THE on its side.

Sparks went home, and fell asleep on the sofa.

Bit of a funny day really,
he thought as his head hit the cushions.

Duncan glanced at the old red phone with the Care Bears stickers on it.

“Don’t even think about it,” said Jeff.

Jeff was tapping madly at a keyboard. An address came up.

“Good,” said Jeff. “Right, let’s get him.”

“Oh bugger,” said Duncan, with feeling.

One Alison gets off the train with a large suitcase with little wheels on it, which her father takes from her and puts in the car.

“Glad to be back, love?” says her Dad, and Alison nods. She feels slightly tearful.

One Alison stays at home and phones in sick, which does not go down well with her boss.

“That’s two weeks in a row,” says her boss. “Are you coming in tomorrow?”

“I’m not sure,” Alison says, and her boss says, “Well, don’t bother coming in at all, then.”

Sparks woke up from a dream where police cars had the wrong things written on them and Alison was apologising to him and crying. His eyes opened and he found that his head hurt quite a lot. “Have a glass of water, Sparks,” was what Alison would have said at this point, but Alison wasn’t there, so Sparks had a glass of Tango from a can he found in the bathroom. Then he put on a T-shirt (FLY UNITED, it said, with two ducks having sex in mid-air) and went into the front room, where two men knocked him to the ground.

The Tango went everywhere. The men leaned over Sparks and tapped him quite hard on the head with something. Sparks fell to the ground.

“Hit him,” said a voice. There was a thud and Sparks experienced mild pain.

“Hit him properly, Duncan,” said the voice.

“I did,” said another voice.

“Oh, is that what you call properly?” said the first voice.

“Yes, Jeff,” said the second voice, “that is what I call properly.”

“That wasn’t properly,” said the first voice. “This is properly.”

Sparks experienced severe pain.

“Oh, right,” said the second voice. “Got you.” There was another thud and Sparks passed out.

Sparks woke up some time later – he didn’t know how much later, having forgotten to look at his watch before being knocked unconscious – and saw, out of the corner of an eye that didn’t know if it wanted to be open or closed, two extremely thin figures in the corner of his office, looking like the number 11 on a bad day. They were making a strange hissing noise and for a moment Sparks thought his office had been invaded by rapidly deflating anorexics. Then he realised that they were spraying something on his walls and the hissing came from aerosol cans.

One of the thin men stepped backwards.

“You’ve spelt it wrong,” he said, and Sparks recognised the peevish tones of the second voice. He peered through his indecisive eye. On his wall – which had been grubby and not too pleasant before – the thin men had sprayed some words. LEAVE WELL ALAN they said.

“‘Leave well Alan’,” said the second voice. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Oh bugger,” said the first voice. “I must have been thinking of Alan, and written ‘Alan’ instead of ‘alone’.”

“Why? Are you in love with him?”

“No, but he is my boss and I do spend a lot of time working with him and…”

“All right. Just change the A to an O and we’ll get out of here.”

There was a hissing noise again.

“That looks rubbish.”

“It’s not my fault. You can’t correct things with an aerosol.”

“You could make it look like an anarchy A in a circle.”

“Yes, that would work. But we’d have to do the other A’s as well.”

“Oh yes. Oh, and put an E on the end of Alon. ‘Leave Well Alon’ doesn’t make sense.”

“I think we should have had a stencil made.”

Sparks groaned. This was an error.

“He groaned!”

Realising what he’d done, Sparks tried to make the groan sound like the noise a man makes when he wakes up, groans and passes out again.

“I think we should hit him again. Just to make sure.”

“Should we hit him properly?”

“Don’t be sarcastic. You have do these things pro... right.”

“Where’s he gone?”

“Oh bugger.”

Sparks lay beneath the desk he had rolled under when he noticed his assailants were engrossed in bickering. It wasn’t exactly a secure hiding place, but there were lots of things underneath and Sparks – never a tidy man – knew what most of them were. Several of them were sharp, and one was a hammer.

He slid a hand towards the hammer and grabbed its handle. Just in time, really, as an extraordinarily thin head peered under the desk.

“I think I can see something,” said the head in a muffled, under-a-desk kind of way.

“Is it him?” asked the other voice.

“Let me get a bit – ow!”

“What do you mean ‘a bit – ow!’?”

“He hit me with a hammer. God ouch!”

“Has he hit you again?”

“Yes, on the buggering hand. Ouch!”

“I take it he’s hitting you quite a lot now.”

“Stuff this. You have a go.”

“No! He’ll hit me with a hammer.”

“He might not.”

“I will!” Sparks said, from under the desk.

“You hear that? He’s hammer mental.”

“Let’s go, then.”

“Eh?”

“Come on, Jeff.”

The thin head, which must be Jeff, frowned.

“But – oh, right. OK, Duncan.”

Jeff’s head vanished. Sparks heard loud footsteps that faded. Then a whispered voice said, “Shut the door!” and the door closed. Sparks could still hear breathing. And see feet. The feet were quite close, and in fact were edging closer. When they were extremely near, he rose up as far as he could under the desk and heaved his shoulders into it massively. The desk rose up and, as Sparks rose up with it, he shoved it forwards. His shoulders hurt a lot, but it was worth it to hear the cries and pain as the contents of the desktop – a computer, a printer, a phone and a toy Oscar with BEST DRINKER on the plinth that Alison had given him when he had annoyed her for a drink-related reason – slid heavily off and onto the two thin men.

Sparks heaved again, and this time the desk went over too. He stood up, hunching and unhunching his sore shoulders, and was satisfied to see that his assailants were now pinned by the desk. One of them had the BEST DRINKER Oscar resting on his forehead like a deformed golden eyebrow.

“Let me go!” said Jeff, windedly.

“Me?” said the other thin man.

“I’m playing for time,” said Jeff. “Come on, Sparks, let me go. Us.”

“How,” asked Sparks, not unreasonably, “do you know my name?”

“Oh bugger,” said Jeff. “It was Duncan’s idea.”

“What was?” said Sparks.

“We read your mail on the way in,” said Duncan.

“I haven’t got any mail,” said Sparks.

“Some must have just come,” said Duncan.

Jeff rolled his eyes, which looked weird from where Sparks was standing.

“Who are you, and why are you so thin?” Sparks asked.

“That’s not nice,” said Duncan.

“Yeah,” said Jeff. “You don’t have to insult us. I mean, you’ve already got us trapped under a desk.”

“That’s true,” said Sparks, and sat on the desk.

“Ow ow!” said Jeff. Duncan said much the same thing.

“Who are you?” Sparks asked. “What are you doing here?”

“We can’t tell you,” said Jeff. “We came to give you a message.”

“I saw it,” said Sparks. “Leave well Alan.”

“It says, if you
look
,” said Jeff, somewhat prissily, “Leave. Well. Alone.”

“It looks more like Leave Well Alan, with some blotches on the A’s,” said Sparks. To move the conversation along, he bounced on the desk a bit. Jeff and Duncan expressed their dissatisfaction with this, and Sparks repeated his questions.

“And if you don’t answer me properly this time,” he said, “I’ll kill you.”

“No you won’t,” said Jeff, but he sounded worried.

“I bloody will, you know,” Sparks said. “I hate burglars. I also hate thin people. I was intimidated by thin people at school.”

“They couldn’t help being thin!” shouted Duncan.

“True,” said Sparks, who in reality had nothing against thin people, in fact tended to judge people by their actions rather than their width. “But they could help intimidating me. And burgling me.”

“We’re not burglars,” said Duncan.

“No,” said Sparks. “You just thought you’d nip by, see how I was, knock me out and spray a message on the wall telling me to leave well Alan.”

“Alo…” Jeff began, but Sparks stopped him by tapping his windpipe with the hammer. Although it was a light blow, it shut Jeff up.

“For the last time before I pull your ears off and make you chew them like apricots,” said Sparks, feeling a bit queasy as he said it, “who are you?”

He tapped Jeff lightly with the hammer.

“All right then,” said Jeff. “Bloody hell, I knew today was going to be crap. Let me up and I’ll tell you.”

“No,” said Sparks. “I don’t trust you. I’ll let him up and he can tell me.”

Sparks got off the desk and lifted one end up. He pulled Duncan out and manhandled him fairly convincingly into a corner.

“Now,” he said, “tell me everything.”