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.
Not for the first time, Sparks had a little daydream about London being covered in giant words and estate agents saying to clients, “Yes, it is a dark flat, but it’s very exclusive, it’s right underneath the H in HAMPSTEAD.” Then he woke up, remembered how horrible Stockwell was, and went and had a wash.
People who do not enjoy reading descriptions, especially of journeys they never plan to make, will be relieved to learn that Sparks’ journey to Stockwell was neither unpleasant nor overly exciting; he did however get on a train to Green Park instead of one to Brixton, which delayed him slightly and caused him to arrive in Stockwell slightly later than he planned. But not much later.
Sparks found Tisdall Street easily, and sensibly started walking up it from the end nearest the tube station. After a while, he realised that, as always happens, he was at the wrong end of the street, but since there weren’t any buses, or even people, in Tisdall Street, there was nothing he could do about this. Sparks wasn’t surprised that Tisdall Street was incredibly empty; if he’d lived there, he’d have avoided it too, as it were.
On one side of the road were huge tower blocks, painted according to some ill-advised ’70s scheme in black and yellow, like vertical wasps; and on the other was just, well, South London crap. Not that Sparks had anything against South London (or, come to think of it, most kinds of crap), just that there was nothing here of any use or even shape. Broken painted signs with YARD or SCRAP written on them, fences protecting nothing but old coke cans, playgrounds with everything in them destroyed but little plastic elephants on broken springs, houses that had obviously been teleported from 1950s Warsaw… and no people.
Sparks, feeling a bit spooked now by the absence of people, walked right past Conswardine House and only realised when he ran out of Tisdall Street. Cursing in a modern way, he started back into the silent street and then noticed the largest of the waspy blocks. CONSWARDINE HO S , it said, amusingly, on a sign outside. Sparks looked at his bit of paper and then walked in.
The first thing Sparks noticed about the estate, which seemed to have no name at all, was just how broken it was. There were burnt-out cars and motorbikes (and even burnt-o
ut prams), there was a skip that somebody had somehow managed to upend, there was a smashed telly with an incredibly expensive-looking DVD player stuffed into its shattered face, and even the boards on the broken windows of the empty flats were themselves broken. The estate looked as though it had been the victim either of a small earthquake or some kind of epidemic toddler tantrum, like the Children’s Crusade only pettier.
He found Conswardine House, behind a sack of rubbish; it was taller, but in most other respects very similar. A small fire guttered in the lobby, throwing unwanted light onto the names spray-painted around the lift. TIGO: CEF: PRO BOY: SACKA: the teenagers of the area named themselves like types of household goods.
Sparks pressed a sticky elevator switch and, much to his surprise, the lift doors opened. He was about to step in when he saw that there was a shopping trolley on its back in the lift. He stepped up to the lift to haul it out, and then stopped, teetering at the door’s edge and trying to flail his arms like a limited helicopter. The trolley wasn’t on the floor of the lift; there was no floor. The trolley was perched on top of a heap of loose rubbish – tables, bins, dashboards – that reached up from the basement and only coincidentally stopped at ground floor level.
Sparks decided not to take the lift. He took the stairs, moving fairly quickly past bursting black bags and the odd brutalised former music centre, and reached the eighth floor a few minutes later. Then he had a little sit down, to let his lungs stop trying to beat up his ribs, and when he felt a bit less breathless, made his way to flat 88.
The door to flat 88 was not so much open as absent. Sparks knew it was flat 88 because the gaping doorway was between a boarded up door with 87 written on it in bad paint and a perfectly nice door with a carriage lamp-shaped knocker and an 8 and a back-flipping 9 on it. Sparks looked round and went over the threshold to 88. The light was on, which was good, because the floor was covered in bin bags, old picture frames and old magazines that Sparks didn’t recognise but were called things like This Olde England and My EYES.
The front room was empty, as was the kitchen and the bathroom. This left the bedroom, whose door was closed. As this door was the only one for miles around, Sparks was reluctant to open it. The tiny porcelain plaque on the front that said JOHN’S ROOM with a picture of a 1970s footballer beneath it did nothing to increase Sparks’ confidence. He did the sensible thing and knocked. There was no reply. Sparks knocked again, this time more loudly. Sparks summoned up all his courage, which didn’t take long, and turned the door handle. It was a bit greasy, but it opened on the first turn. Sparks went into the bedroom.
The room was covered in football posters, all faded and pretty old. Sparks knew nothing about football, but he knew the players in these posters would be lucky to be opening supermarkets these days, or even their eyes. There was a low shelf with badly-made model airplanes and tanks on it, and in the corner some albums. Sparks, who did like music, had a riffle through the albums. Like the football posters, they were all slightly old and neither odd nor interesting. Then he heard the noise.
It was a rustling movement from the corner. Sparks turned, hairs on his neck standing up like tiny toothpicks. The noise came from the bed. Sparks stared at the bed. It looked like quite a normal bed, even if it was under a duvet covered in cartoon faces from a long-forgotten TV show. The duvet had something underneath it. Sparks picked up a model Phantom jet from the shelf, and threw it cautiously onto the bed. Nothing happened, apart from one of the wings on the jet fell off.
Sparks, feeling made of reluctance, went over to the bed and threw back the duvet. He started as a mouse as big as his thumb leapt off the bed, hurled itself between his legs and ran out into the corridor. Then he laughed, nervously, and sat down cautiously on the bed to steady his nerves. Then he saw something dark on the bed which made him jump – it could have been a stain, it could have been an old comic – and he edged suddenly backwards against the bedroom wall.
There wasn’t a bedroom wall.
Sparks fell backwards, the football posters disappearing from view, and then…
OW!
THIS HAS HAPPENED TO ME BEFORE OW!
OW OW I SEE THAT PAIN IS NOT ALTERED BY REPETITION OW OW!
OW AND OW AND I THINK WE HAVE ROOM FOR YES WE DO ONE MORE OW!
BONUS OW!
OW REPLAY!
OW OW OW OW OW!
WELCOME TO OWTOWN, HOME OF THE OWTOWN PAINSTERS!
OW!
They say that pain cannot be remembered, but as he lay on his back, Sparks thought he was having a pretty good go at it. He wasn’t actually in pain anymore, having wisely opted to spend 10 minutes unconscious so the pain could go away and close the door quietly behind itself, but he could remember the pain as if it had just happened, which it had. It was so memorable, in fact, that he could have described it to the police, if they’d asked; he could certainly have drawn it for them, and might even have been able to do an impression of it at a party.
Sparks sat up, his senses coming back to him like lost property. It was his sense of smell which first alerted him to the fact that he was still in the flat. This perturbed him slightly. The whole idea of this unpleasant trip had been to travel through one of those portal things and end up in an exciting new world where he might meet a version of Alison who loved him and wanted to be with him for ever. Instead he was in a smelly bedroom in a stinky flat, just like he had been 20 minutes ago. Things didn’t bode well. In fact, thought Sparks as he sat up and crushed the rest of the Phantom jet, things didn’t were not doing any good kinds of boding at all. Oh well, he reasoned, at least I’m not in the Edgware Road. Sparks didn’t like the Edgware Road; very few people do. He got off the bed and made his pain-remembering way cautiously to the front door. Sparks took one last, nostalgia-less look around flat 88 and stepped out into the disgusting hall, where he got a big shock.
The hall was no longer disgusting. It was lovely. Thick white shag pile carpets like thousands of Persian cats sewn together flowed in a tide from one end of the corridor to the other. The walls were painted a shade of ochre so restrained that any actual ochre nearby would have resigned in shame and become something easier, like mauve. There were green glass lamps along the walls, and there were pictures. Some were tasteful photographs of bits of people walking along the street in New York, and some were oil paintings of attractive people. One was of a man being kicked, but in a tasteful way.
Sparks walked towards where the bottomless lift shaft had been, and was not surprised to find that there was a lift there now, a lift with enormous teak doors, possibly carved from a special rectangular tree. There were buttons by the lift, and above the lift door was a little arrow that went from side to side. Sparks summoned the lift, and it came whooshing to him, borne on hydraulics and clean shiny cables. The door opened and a lift attendant was revealed to be behind it. Sparks stepped in.
“Ground floor,” he said, and the lift attendant, barely registering shock at Sparks’ horrible clothes, pressed the button and the lift went down.
Either I went through a portal, Sparks thought as the lift doors opened onto a marble and gilt-crammed lobby, or the council are really busting a gut on the whole renovation thing.
Sparks emerged into bright sunlight, and an awful lot of grass and plants. The estate had the look of a place that had been entirely redesigned by the sort of people from films about the future who wear togas and communicate by thought. Scanning the sky for giant flying heads, Sparks made his way down Tisdall Road, which had changed from a graveyard for all the crap in the world into a kind of modernised Roman boulevard. Big white houses lined the spotless pavements, all arches and columns, and through their windows Sparks could see extremely good-looking people doing fun things like watching enormous televisions or drinking out of very impressive-looking wine glasses.
Sparks sat on a clean wall and collected his thoughts. He was clearly in a very classy world. It looked so classy, Sparks found himself almost wanting to see some dog mess or a burning m
oped for contrast. But there was nothing like that, just lots of impressiveness.
Sparks walked on, trying to notice more things (he had always been bad at noticing things, like oncoming traffic and Alison telling him stuff). After a while – because Tisdall Road, in this world as in his own, was still bloody long – Sparks did begin to notice something. There were no nice things.
This didn’t strike him as particularly bad or wrong, just odd. There were lots of clean things, and lots of new things, and there were lots of majestic things (one big red pillar box Sparks passed looked about ready to march down the street and deliver letters itself), but there wasn’t anything nice. No chintzy curtains, no little dogs, no toys in people’s gardens and, in the newsagent’s window he was now staring into, no jolly adverts for unwanted furniture or non-smoking flatmates.
Sparks decided to buy an A-Z street guide. An A-Z of this somewhat different London might be useful, he thought, also he could murder a wine gum. He found something that looked like an A-Z of London and something else that was definitely a bag of wine gums and went up to the newsagent, who was picking his nails with a safety pin.
The newsagent stared at him for a few seconds. Sparks stared back, wondering if he had breached some local code, like not smiling or having his flies undone. After a while, Sparks decided to break the ice by saying, “How much are these, please?”
The newsagent sighed, put down his filthy pin, and said, “Have I neglected to price those items?”
“No,” said Sparks, “I just…”
“Give them to me,” said the newsagent. He snatched the items from Sparks, looked at them and dropped them on the counter. “£4.36,” he said curtly. “I haven’t got any change.”
“That’s all right,” said Sparks, “I have”.
“I haven’t got any carrier bags,” said the newsagent, taking Sparks’ money.
Sparks Page 7
