This suggested to Sparks’ dad that his wife thought he was a man who couldn’t handle more than two tasks simultaneously (he had been at the Blue Nun for an hour or so). As Sparks’ dad considered himself the kind of person who was quite capable of taking the dishes out and discussing alternate worlds, he decided not to say no and instead said:
“I find the topic very interesting.”
“No you don’t, you daft old man,” said Sparks’ mum, affectionately but rudely. “You just don’t want to look senile.”
Sparks’ dad came back from the kitchen and sat next to his wife in a way that he hoped suggested he was ignoring her. A small dog leapt up and began sniffing his pockets.
“Get down, Robert,” said Sparks’ dad who fortunately knew the dog, in fact had paid for it. “I’m having a serious conversation.”
“Robert,” said Sparks’ mum. “What a silly name for a dog. If that dog was human, he’d be furious if he knew you’d given him a name like that.”
“If he was human, he wouldn’t mind.” said Sparks’ dad.
“Robert’s a silly name,” Sparks’ mum said to the dog, “isn’t it, Boofles?”
Robert, who couldn’t have cared less if he’d been named Brave Lord Filth so long as he was fed and looked after, wandered off to sniff Sparks’ exotic urban groin.
“Alternate worlds,” said Sparks’ dad, who had no idea what he was talking about, “feature in much fiction.”
“I don’t care… I mean, I don’t mean fiction,” said Sparks. “I just wondered if there was any information about them outside fiction. I mean, in, er, non, er, fiction.”
“Well,” said Sparks’ dad, “there is of course JW Dunne’s extraordinary book, An Experiment In Time.”
“What’s that about?” said Sparks.
“I don’t know,” said Sparks’ dad, “I haven’t read it.”
“He has no idea what he’s talking about,” explained Sparks’ mum, affectionately. “He rarely does these days.”
“Are you saying I’m going gaga?” asked Sparks’ dad.
“No, dear, it’s more that… well, when you were a lecturer you were always reading the newspapers and listening to the news and keeping up with things and now… you don’t.”
“I do! I get my journals.”
“Yes, but you don’t actually read them. You turn to the back and look at pictures of sheds.”
“I like sheds.”
Sparks didn’t wonder why abstruse academic journals had pictures of sheds in the back. Nor did he wonder why, given that his parents hadn’t had a civil conversation since their wedding (and even their “I dos” were said with a tone of disbelief), they were still together. He was Sparks, and he tended not to wonder about things. Except, now, with alternate worlds.
“So you don’t know anything about alternate worlds?” he said, a little doggedly.
“Um,” said Sparks’ dad. “Not per se.”
Sparks’ mum looked at him in an I-was-right faced kind of way.
“But,” said Sparks’ dad, “I have got a tape.”
“Ah ha!” said Sparks’ mum, in a voice that she thought was bitingly sarcastic but was in fact only slightly ironical. “The famous tape collection comes into its own at last! I knew it was worth buying that video recorder.”
“Exactly,” said Sparks’ dad, missing even the ironical tone, never mind the imagined sarcasm.
“Since 19-whenever we got that video machine, we have taped, I don’t know, every single documentary that has been on television, I believe…”
“Oh, surely not,” said Sparks’ dad. “For a start, I hate wildlife.”
“We have an entire room full of videos,” said Sparks’ mum. “I could have used that room. I could have learned to paint. The light is excellent in that room.”
“It hasn’t got any windows,” said Sparks’ dad.
“The electric light,” said Sparks’ mum. “I planned to paint still lifes by electric light. But instead all I do in that room is dust videos.”
“You exaggerate,” said Sparks’ dad, huffily.
“Some of those videos,” said Sparks’ mum, pointedly, “are on Betamax.”
“What’s Betamax?” said Sparks.
“Exactly,” said Sparks’ mum.
Fortunately, the video that Sparks’ dad believed to be about alternate worlds was not on Betamax. And, while it was very old, and contained several hours of golf in which now-dead light entertainment stars tried to keep up with equally now-dead proper golfers, there was a documentary on the end of the tape, and it was about alternate worlds.
Sparks took the video cosy off the video recorder. Sparks’ dad owned the world’s only video cosy, which was like a tea cosy only oblong. Sparks’ mum hated the video cosy, but it did mean that she and Sparks’ dad owned the world’s only functioning 1978 vintage VCR. Sparks plugged in the 17-foot lead connecting the remote control to the recorder, removed the polythene bag the remote was wrapped in, and pressed “play”.
A BBC logo as timeless and as dated as a heraldic blazon fuzzed up onto the screen, a cartoon globe of a long-lost world spun idly, and a long-sacked continuity announcer told the people of 20 years ago that they were about to watch the first programme in a new series about the far frontiers of science, and that this, which was as he said the first programme, was about the possibility of there being alternate worlds. He went on to essentially tell nervous people and anyone with a dog or a cat to go and watch ITV, and the programme lurched into action. The whole thing took about two days and all but killed Sparks’ desire to watch the tape. Things were more leisurely then, he thought, despondently.
After some film of stars and what may have been all of Holst’s The Planets, Sparks resisted the urge to lash the remote control lead like a whip and flick the whole damn thing out of the window, and settled back to try and concentrate.
The programme was introduced by a plummy man, aided by some cheap green lines on a blue cartoon background, and appeared to be saying two important things about alternate worlds. One, they didn’t exist and two, if they did, they shouldn’t. But the plummy man did reluctantly acknowledge that people had talked about these things, while managing to suggest that such speculation was a bit vulgar, unless of course it was done in a documentary presented by a plummy man. There was a montage of photos of scientists, pundits and philosophers, who Sparks thought all looked a bit mental. He was beginning to get really bored and long for some violence (“Take that, Sir Isaac!”) when an engraving of some 18th century men waving rolled-up paper at each other appeared and the plummy man said: “Most devoted to the theory of worlds outside our own was the so-called Society of God’s Perfect World.”
Sparks sat up on the sofa, electrified by his own standards.
“The Society, as it was known for short, was founded by eminent men of the day. Scientists, philosophers and polymaths were all entranced by the fanciful notion that our world is, as it were, random…”
Then the door opened.
“Cup of tea, dear?” said his mum, coming in with one anyway.
“Um,” said Sparks, frantically trying to find the PAUSE button on the aged remote. It didn’t have one.
“Naturally there were dissenters,” the commentator was saying, “These men felt that…”
Sparks couldn’t hear what these men felt as his mum was now opening the noisiest drawer in the world. She finally wrenched the drawer open, took out a coaster, put the coaster on the table and put the cup of tea on it. Sparks tried to crane his ears around her as she moved, but all the tea and table action was pretty obscuring and, by the time his mother had gone, the plummy man had moved on to the early fiction of Jules Verne, which wasn’t relevant at all but did provide an opportunity to show a painting of a huge squid holding a steamship like a ciggie.
“Don’t say thank you, will you?” said Sparks’ mum cheerfully as she left the room.
Sparks stopped the tape and rewound it, prodding madly at the remote. It creake
d into action and suddenly the tape leapt back four minutes. Sparks tried to hit PLAY, jabbed RECORD instead and spent the next few seconds trying to get the machine to stop recording. By the time he had had the smart idea of abandoning the remote, leaping across the room and turning the recorder off at the wall, it was too late; they were halfway through the huge squid.
Sparks sat down and disconsolately watched the rest of the documentary, which was highly vague and factless, and then turned into an hour of golf again. He put the tape in a box marked KRAMER VS KRAMER and took his cooling tea out into the hall.
He had learned nothing about alternate worlds. But he did have an idea.
Sparks’ mum knocked on Sparks’ bedroom door, a habit she had learned the hard way during Sparks’ teenage years.
“Cup of tea, dear?” she said, a cup of tea already in her hand.
“Yeah, thanks,” said Sparks’s voice absently through the wood.
Sparks’ mum opened the door, moved a gonk on the chest of drawers, took a coaster from her pocket, set it down and put the cup of tea on it.
“We’re going over to the Morgans in a while,” she said. “Will you be all right on your own?”
Sparks looked round the room at the children’s books, model airplanes, pop star posters and assorted buttons that decorated it. “I’ll be fine,” he said, wondering as he did sometimes if in fact he had died and his mum was keeping his room just the way it used to be. Then he dismissed the thought as uncharitable and smiled at his mum.
“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.
Sparks Page 6
