Sparks (8 page)

“I’ve got some stuff to get on with,” he said, and Sparks’ mum saw the bed full of bits of old Christmas cards, felt tip pens and tangled ribbons of Sellotape.

“All right, dear,” she said, “Cup of tea up there,” and left.

Sparks ignored the tea for now – there was already enough inside him to tan a pig – and went back to his bits of card. His theory and planning were limited, he felt, by his lack of a computer to lay out grids on and review the whole picture. In reality, Sparks knew nothing about computers and could barely cut and paste some text, let alone work out a divergent self-generating probability model, which is what he was trying to do now with the cards.

After an hour of tearing off pictures of robins, scribbling on the remaining white card, attaching cards to other cards with Sellotape, Sparks had two things. A lot of pictures of robins, and a tree-shaped skeleton of cards, each with different sentences on them, crawling up the wall over the pop star posters.

At the top, one card said:

ALISON AND ME SPLIT UP

Below that were two cards. They said:

WE GET BACK TOGETHER and WE DON’T

Below these were two more cards. The ones above WE DON’T said:

SHE MARRIES A GIT, and SHE DOESN’T

The ones above WE GET BACK TOGETHER said:

WE SPLIT UP AGAIN and WE DON’T

After that, Sparks pretty much ran out of ideas and wall. He had done enough, though; he’d clarified a few things in his mind, he felt a bit better and, most important of all, even if he didn’t actually have a coherent plan or anything that even a monkey might call a strategy, he did at least have a goal. For the first time in ages, Sparks felt excited.

Sparks’ mum and dad returned from the Morgans just before midnight. They had been at the red wine.

“Ssh!” said Sparks’ mum as Sparks’ dad fiddled with the front door key. “Don’t set the alarm off.”

“It’s not on,” said Sparks’ dad. “The boy’s here, remember?”

Just then the alarm went off, causing Sparks’ mum and dad to fall backwards into a small table.

“Why’s he set the alarm?” said Sparks’ dad. “Has he gone to the pub with his friends?”

“He hasn’t got any friends here,” said Sparks’ mum. “They all live in London.”

She climbed the stairs, with sherry-laced difficulty. “His bag’s gone!” she called back. “And he hasn’t drunk his tea!”

Sparks’ parents went dizzily to bed.

“Funny lad,” said Sparks’ dad. “I expect he’ll call us in the morning.”

He didn’t, though.

Sparks’ mind ploughed through his new plan, checking it out for errors, and ignoring the fact that both Sparks and his mind were on some horrible train that was not so much racing through the night as walking slightly behind it. Democrats would be pleased to note that the train had no first class section. There was also no buffet, not even in the form of a trolley pulled by two overly arm-muscled people in red waistcoats. And, in case the weary traveller was happy enough without food or expensive seating, the train had no toilets. It was the kind of train – all plastic bucket seats and useless pictures of scenes from rural life – that should have been taking prisoners to Legoland but instead it was the only way most of the West Country could get out of the West Country and into London.

Sparks’ travelling companions were not the kind of people who once sat convivially across from each other in horse-drawn coaches. They were, essentially, all pissed. There was a young couple, unconscious in cheap leather jackets, who had somehow managed to drool on each other’s necks in their ale-y sleep. There was a middle-aged man, who was trying to look sober by reading a book, but kept giving the game away by having to start the same page again because he was too rat-arsed to focus.

The train stopped at a station with a ridiculous name, like an illness or a racehorse. The man who couldn’t focus blundered off and some more people got on. One man, quite young and very unsteady on his feet, sat opposite Sparks and began to unload cans onto the little table between them. He had a lot of cans, all different, and some already open.

Sparks and his mind didn’t notice; they were busy going over Spark’s plan. At last, Sparks was happy. The plan was simple and even he could understand it. He smiled to himself, which was an error. The man sitting opposite him stopping looking into opened cans for cigarette butts and stared at him, a bit hard. Sparks smiled back, which provoked a different stare from the young man, a suspicious one. They were saved from any further smiling and staring by the man’s mobile phone, which suddenly started playing the theme tune to some awful 1970s children’s programme. The young man stopped staring and answered the phone.

Sparks returned to his mind.
I can’t see anything wrong with this plan,
he thought to himself.

“Wha’?” said the young man into his phone. “Is he there?”

Admittedly it is my plan and its flaws are likely to be invisible to me,
Sparks thought, more dubiously.
But that doesn’t matter. I’m not thick or anything.

“Get ’im,” said the young man. “Get ’im to the phone.” There was a pause. “I don’t care. You don’t do that.” The young man glowered at the phone and raised his voice some more, which was impressive, as he was pretty much up there already. “YOU DON’T! DO THAT! Get ’im.”

All I need is to go back and do it again,
thought Sparks.
I did it once, I can do it again. It’s not like there’s a set of infinite variables or anything.

“He’s a sod!” said the young man, fortunately to the phone. “Why? You know why. He glued…” He became overcome with emotion, as well as cider, and could not speak.

Ah,
thought Sparks,
bugger. Come to think of it, it is like there’s a set of infinite variables.

“He glued a johnny to under my bed!” said the young man, furious and affronted. “You do not! Glue! A johnny! To under my bed!”

Oh well,
thought Sparks’ mind – Sparks was no longer thinking, having become interested in the kipper business –
there isn’t any other way to do this.

“You don’t do that!” shouted the young man, red-faced. He held the phone away from his face and stared into it like it had recently been a kitten and just then transformed before his eyes into a mobile phone. His face went redder. “Not to Gibbons!”

He snapped the phone shut. Then he saw Sparks staring at him. This was a reversal of normality for the
soi-disant
Gibbons, who was clearly one of life’s starers. He evidently found it hard to deal with, and Sparks, who was one of life’s starees, felt embarrassed for him.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I didn’t mean to stare.”

Gibbons looked unconvinced. He was getting starey again.

“I was just… so deep in concentration that my eyes were sort of… looking forward,” said Sparks. “At you.”

“Thinking?” Gibbons said, sneering almost. “About what? Your arse hole.”

Sparks was unnerved, partly because Gibbons looked angry now and partly because he had managed to make “arsehole” into two separate words. Nevertheless, he sensed that placating Gibbons, who it appeared no one sodded with, was a bad idea, so he decided to just tell him the truth.

“My girlfriend left me,” Sparks told Gibbons. “She went off to Australia because I couldn’t commit, whatever that means, and I was crap, which is fair enough. But I love her and I want her back.”

Gibbons was looking dangerous, like an ale shark, if they exist, which they don’t. Sparks forged on:

“Anyway, I also discovered recently that there are alternate worlds. Like this one, only different in a lot of ways, and if you step on a butterfly it doesn’t matter. So I think that somewhere out there is a world where there’s another Alison like the one I love, only this time if I can be less crap, she’ll love me and not care about committing, whatever that means. So I’m going to look for that world.”

“Fnutter,” Gibbons said under his powerful breath, and turned to look out of the window.

Sparks took his iPod-like mp3 player out of his bag and listened to Radio 2 all the way back to London.

Sparks arrived at Paddington Station shortly after midnight. The underground was closed and there were no taxis, so he made his way home on an array of buses. The last bus of the four that he took – which was also the grimmest – happened to take him past his office, and Sparks, noticing this, did something he had never done before. He got off the bus and went to his office when he didn’t have to.

Unlocking the door and turning off the alarm system – the phrase “turning off” here identical in meaning to “hitting” – Sparks tried to walk across the room in the dark, barked a shin on the desk edge, and using swearing managed to turn his anglepoise lamp on. The room looked slightly better in the dark, as shadows in corners hid a lot of mangy anarchy. Removing some sort of apple core (he hoped) from his chair, Sparks sat down and turned his computer on. It farted electronically into life. Sparks muted the sound and clicked on his internet logo. After a while, the computer – belying slightly computers’ general image of being supersmart creatures that will one day enslave the human race and make them pull trucks full of coal around for some reason – noticed that Sparks was clicking on his internet logo, and reluctantly connected him to the internet, in the manner of somebody introducing two people to each other who he knows will get on really well and do interesting things and stuff as soon as he has buggered off and stopped annoying them.

Sparks found a search engine, opened it, and wrote RANDOM LIFE GENERATOR in the little writing gap. As before, the computer started to have what scientists would call a crap attack, and flashed up skulls and daggers and various other pirate things. Just for the hell of it, Sparks turned off the computer’s mute button and let the poor sod shudder as its speakers were filled up with music and noises clearly designed to be played on a bigger system, such as one they might have installed at a stadium.

Again, the screen filled and cleared and went mad and then became a field of names. Sparks waited for them to settle down so he could get to work, but the screen changed again. Sparks stared in disbelief and distress at the new details. In a large and unfashionable typeface, the screen requested him to type in a user name and a password. Clearly changes had been instituted.

Bugger,
thought Sparks,
I’m buggered.
He was tired from the journey and keen not to use up all the swearwords he knew, in case things got worse. Then he had an idea. Remembering the only other people he’d ever met who had heard of the Random Life Generator, Sparks typed in the word JEFF.

Nothing happened; that was the easy bit. Even Sparks knew that user names were easy because they were just names, whereas passwords were extremely difficult, and generally impossible to guess. Sparks thought a while, but had no useful ideas. The only words he associated with Jeff were unpleasant ones like SHORTY and DIM and he doubted that Jeff would use these as passwords.
But what,
Sparks thought,
what if Jeff is so dim that his password is incredibly simple?

After a few minutes thought, Sparks found he could think of only one word that Jeff might use, and that word, unfortunately, was JEFF. It didn’t look likely, even to Sparks, that Jeff’s password was Jeff, but Sparks had no other ideas.

What the hell,
he thought, and typed in JEFF again, which came up as four big dots. Sparks hit RETURN. Nothing happened. Jeff was too crafty for him! Sparks wondered what to do next. If only he knew someone who was like Jeff but more likely to use his own name as a password!

Sparks erased the JEFFs and typed in DUNCAN twice. He hit return almost casually and sat back for rejection. It never came; the screen filled up with dancing names and deranged tangoing words as it had before, and then pruned itself back to just one sentence. TODAY’S WORD HENNA OPERATING ENTRANCE MANNHEIM 46 HUBERSTRASSE DUTY H GINZER it said. Sparks waited for the screen to clear again. It did so, and this time it read TODAY’S WORD HENNA OPERATING ENTRANCE SYDNEY 7A KING STREET DUTY L M DERMOTT. He waited for the screen to clear again, hoping that, as with the previous time, he would get a London entrance very soon.

Instead, London did not come up the next time, or the time after that, or several times after that. Sparks sat in the half-dark watching desperately as portals all over the world opened and closed, none of them anywhere near him (and one at the bottom of a radium mine in Siberia, which struck Sparks as sod-all good to anyone, except possibly a very cold radium miner who was hoping to be a radium miner in a nice warm world).

At last, as Sparks’ eyes were being to go wobbly and his buttocks to melt into one hard, bored muscle, he saw it. It said: TODAY’S WORD HENNA OPERATING ENTRANCE LONDON 88 CONSWARDINE HOUSE TISDALL STREET STOCKWELL DUTY L MACDONALD. Sparks picked up a biro and wrote it all down just before it faded to be replaced with some good news for alternate world travellers based in the Antwerp area.

He looked at the clock on the computer and deducted an hour because he had been too lazy to change the clock after summertime ended. It was 3.32am. Too late to go to Stockwell. In fact, Sparks’ tired and for once overworked brain decided, too late to go home.

He leaned back in his chair and fell asleep almost at once.

Sparks woke the next day covered in bacon. Anyone else would have been a bit alarmed by this, maybe thinking, “Oh no! A pig has exploded near me!” or something equally panic-stricken, but Sparks was not fazed. He simply assumed that he had woken up, bought a bacon sandwich from the cafe across the road, sat down, eaten most of it, and then fallen asleep again. This was the kind of person Sparks was; not fazed by bacon.

He brushed the bits of bacon off himself that he hadn’t absently eaten and sat up properly in his slightly broken chair. It was 11.02, not a bad sleep by Sparks’ standards, almost conforming in some way to normal sleep cycles, which it would have done had Sparks lived in a slightly out of phase time zone, perhaps below the mighty waves. Unaware but perhaps subconsciously proud of his Atlantis-related body clock, Sparks cracked a couple of knuckles, said “Ow,” twice, and looked at the piece of paper on his desk. Then he pulled an incredibly old Streetfinder from a drawer and looked up Tisdall Street. Reassuringly, he found it; less reassuringly, Tisdall Street was quite possibly the longest street in South London; it began just to the left of the big S in the word STOCKWELL printed across two pages of his Streetfinder and ended somewhere to the right of the second L.