Sparks

by David Quantick

  Sparks went home.

  Jeff and Duncan were playing cards when the alarm went off.

  “The alarm’s gone off,” said Duncan.

  “I know,” said Jeff. “I can hear it. In fact, it’s so loud I couldn’t hear you saying ‘the alarm’s gone off’. But I knew that’s what you were going to say because that’s what you always say when the alarm goes off.”

  “What did you say?” said Duncan.

  Jeff went over and turned off the alarm.

  “Nothing,” said Jeff. “Anyway, I knew the alarm was going to go off.”

  “No you didn’t,” said Duncan. “How could you?”

  “It’s him, isn’t it?” said Jeff. “He’s going round, doing stuff. Setting alarms off.”

  Duncan looked troubled. “I think we should tell someone. You know, in authority.”

  “No,” said Jeff. “When the time comes, we’ll do something ourselves. In the meantime, you’re bust.”

  “They don’t have bust in Whist,” said Duncan, but he folded up his cards all the same. There was no point arguing with Jeff.

  SECOND INTERLUDE

  The Society, in its constant search for God’s Perfect World, came to a few conclusions over the centuries of its existence. One was that God’s Perfect World was very much not going to be just around the corner. Having visited thousands of worlds, none of which were perfect and most of which were just horrible, The Society realised fairly early on – well, not too early, say about 1875 – that God was not going to give them this one on a plate. One of the problems of searching an infinite variety of worlds was, basically, that it would take an infinite amount of time to visit them all. Of course, you might get lucky and find the one you were looking for straightaway – and the laws of chance said it was just as likely each time that someone would step through a portal and bingo, there would be a lot of people with flags and sashes and banners reading HEY! WELCOME TO GOD’S PERFECT WORLD DUDE! – but as time went on, the members of The Society were finding it less and less likely that the things with the flags and sashes and banners reading HEY! WELCOME TO GOD’S PERFECT WORLD DUDE! was going to happen any time soon.

  As a result several people tried to invent ways of speeding the process up. Some of them just took lots of drugs that made them go faster and in theory meant they could visit more worlds in a day. This, however, combined with the stresses and pain (OWWW!) of movement between portals, just meant that the travellers went mad and were no use to anyone. In fact, a lot of them took so many drugs that they would just go to the shops, see an old man with a beard or something and then come back convinced they had travelled to God’s Perfect World. (Later they would feel sick and really stupid, but by that time they were in a dungeon.)

  Some travellers tried to catalogue all the portals – this was in Victorian times, when cataloguing was seen as an end in itself – but this was a waste of time, as the portals didn’t take well to being catalogued. The nature of portals, the cataloguers found, was that they appeared and disappeared all the time, like a bad father only without the cheap teddy bear and the faint hint of whisky on the breath. A portal that one day was just hanging around the basement of the Empire State Building would turn up the next day at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, no good to anyone but fish with enormous jaws and bulbous light fittings on their foreheads. Another portal might have spent a pleasant afternoon at the ABC Turnpike Lane, before nipping off to a traffic island near Magnitogorsk. There was no point cataloguing portals because they wouldn’t stay put; it was like taking pictures of wriggling kittens, except less useful.

  However after a very long time, and the invention of computers, someone did find a way to guess where the portals were going to turn up, and this was the Random Life Generator, a name that didn’t say much about what it did, and in fact was rather misleading, but did sound good on the proposal, so it stuck. The Random Life Generator simply plotted where portals might appear on the very complicated evidence of where they had been before, allocated a password and an operative to the portal, and then the operative had to get down there before it vanished and guard it until a more senior operative turned up. This worked a lot better.

  But even being able to predict where a portal would be – and posting a man posing as a dentist or whatever to guard it – did not speed up the process much, as no one could work out far enough in advance where the portals were going to be next.

  Then one day, someone had a brilliant idea. His name was Duncan. Unfortunately, Duncan told his idea to his best friend Jeff, and Jeff got all the credit. Jeff’s (sorry, Duncan’s) idea was a very simple one, and he took it to the Senior Executive of The Society. The Senior Executive of The Society was a group of fairly old men who met every 10 years. This meant that most of them were dead by the time the next meeting came round, which was inconvenient, but they were the oldest members of The Society and therefore, it was supposed, the cream of the crop. This also meant that Jeff (or rather Duncan) was extremely lucky to have had his, or Duncan’s, idea when he, or Duncan, did, for if he (etc) had had it a week later, he’d have had to wait 10 years for another meeting.

  Anyway. Jeff was ushered into the Star Chamber of the Senior Executive, where he found the full panoply of The Society arraigned, or as he later described it to a still somewhat sullen Duncan, a lot of old men sitting round in bedsheets. One of the old men – who was The President, or the Chairman, or some such title that Jeff couldn’t remember – stood up, slowly, and said:

  “State your name and your business here.”

  Jeff found that, despite being one of the most unpleasant people in the world, he was also quite nervous. He coughed and said:

  “My name is Jeff and I have found a way to speed up the process of discovering God’s Perfect World.”

  There was a buzz of conversation in the room. Jeff felt quite excited. He felt a little less excited when the President, or whatever, said:

  “I’m sorry, we are all quite old and none of us could hear what you just said. Would you care to repeat it?”

  Jeff repeated it. This time a real buzz went round the room. Oh, and someone laughed, just to show they’d been here and done that before.

  “Explain,” said the President or whatever.

  “If there is an infinite amount of worlds…”, Jeff began, and was immediately interrupted.

  “If?” said the President. “What do you mean, ‘if’? There’s no if about it. This whole society is founded on the premise that there is an infinite amount of worlds.”

  “I know,” said Jeff, “I was just setting out my stall.”

  “I mean,” continued the President, “if there isn’t an infinite amount of worlds, we might as well all go home. If there’s only 20 or something, we’ve wasted our time somewhat, don’t you think?”

  “There’s no need to be sarcastic,” said another old man. “You’re only the Secretary, not the President or something.”

  “Yes, get on with it,” said another man. “I don’t want to have to come back here and talk about all this again in 10 years.”

  “Carry on,” said the Secretary.

  “If there is an infinite amount of worlds,” said Jeff, as pointedly as possible, “then it follows that there must be an infinite amount of Societies. Societies like this one.”

  “We didn’t think you meant building societies,” said the Secretary, and then shut up after a glance from the old man on his right.

  “Not every world will have a Society,” said the other old man. “And not every world that has a Society will have a Society exactly like ours.”

  “No,” agreed Jeff. “But enough worlds will have enough Societies like ours. And if we find those Societies, we can persuade them that we too have a common aim. And if we all work together to find God’s Perfect World, we will surely find it much more quickly.”

  All the old men looked at each other. Then the Secretary said, “This is an impressive idea. We will make a note of it, and debate it at the next meeti
ng of the Senior Executive, in 10 years time.”

  Jeff felt deflated. He had hoped to sell the idea and make a lot of money. Then the old man who wasn’t the Secretary stood up and said:

  “What a load of nonsense. This is an excellent idea and we shall implement it now. And this young man will be in charge of it.”

  He turned to the old man to his right. “Issue an order today that this young man will lead the search for other Societies. And give him a nice office.”

  And so Jeff had a new job, a nice office and a slow assistant (Duncan). He was now considered a rising star in The Society and one day would sit around with a lot of old men every 10 years. But for now, things were not ideal. Two years had passed since Jeff (or rather… you know) had had his great idea, and in that time he had failed to find a single other world with its own Society. People began to whisper behind Jeff’s back, and point fingers. It was noticed that the rising star aspect of Jeff’s career had been replaced by a jumped-up bighead aspect.

  “I’m in danger of losing my job here,” said Jeff to Duncan one day.

  “What are you going to do?” asked Duncan.

  “What I always do.”

  “Cry?”

  “No. Cheat.”

  People who enjoy lists and rules will be delighted to learn that The Society, being very old and very formal, had some lists and rules.

  Anyone who has ever been in a society – even a building society – will know that most lists and rules are designed to prevent interesting things happening, perhaps because these things tend to lead to mass death, or in the case of a building society, mass death and rising interest rates.

  The Society had lots of lists. These were mostly to do with where things had been put, because, as The Society was very old, it had acquired a lot of things – suits of armour, some crowns, a few yachts, France – and it would have been easy to mislay these things (except, obviously, France) without making a lot of lists.

  So there were lots of lists. However, despite being, as has been said, very old and formal, The Society did not have a lot of rules. Nobody really knew why this was; possibly it was because having a management body that only met once a decade meant that making rules was very time-consuming and by the time the rules were agreed on, no one could remember what the rules were for. Possibly it was because The Society was so old that most of the rules had been lost (and a few of the old members could sometimes be seen shaking their heads and saying things like, “In my day we were never allowed to put a hot mug on a polished wooden surface”, but things like that were probably not really rules). But most historians and people in pubs agreed that the reason The Society was a bit low on rules was because it only needed a few.

  “A few” is, to be honest, exaggerating things slightly. In fact, The Society only had two rules. These rules, though few and (in one case) brief and easy to understand, were iron rules, set in stone. And literally, not just a mixed metaphor. All over The Society’s buildings and properties, all round the world, the two rules of The Society were carved out in white stone and filled in with black iron letters.

  The second rule was the one that need not concern us here. This is because it was extremely long and dealt with smoking and where you could and could not do it on The Society’s premises; it was a recent addition, and a lot of people felt it went against the spirit of The Society, not because The Society was pro-smoking, just that it was a bit completely irrelevant and sort of looked stupid next to the first rule.

  The first rule was far from stupid and was as non-irrelevant as could be. It was also quite short, and it said:

  NO ONE SHALL GO ANYWHERE WITHOUT PERMISSION

  It was pretty clear, as rules go (in fact, compared to the second rule, which went off at tangents about pipes and ashtrays, it was a masterpiece of clarity). It was not the subject of endless textbooks and heated debates at committee level, because its meaning was understood. Nobody even made sarcastic remarks about it, or said things like, “I’m just going for a slash – oh, do I need permission?”, because everybody knew it didn’t refer to minor stuff like that.

  The first rule was known by all to mean that nobody was to go rooting round any other worlds without permission. The logic was simple; while The Society didn’t particularly care about messing with anybody else’s culture and was quite happy in principle to let people go round showing other people how to invent fire if they hadn’t invented it yet, they did feel rather strongly that a quest for God’s Perfect World might be slightly hindered by their operatives wandering around willy-nilly, meeting themselves and so forth. So they decided that anyone could go anywhere, provided they got permission first.

  It was, as has been said a lot, a simple rule, and easy to follow. Easy, that is, if you weren’t the impatient type.

  Jeff was the impatient type. He broke the pants off the rule.

  The problem, for Jeff, was that his plan wasn’t working very well. The idea that they would soon find lots of world with Societies in them was a logical one, but also an optimistic one.

  “You could go your whole life without finding another Society,” said Duncan.

  “We’ll just have to look harder,” said Jeff. They were wandering around a world where the Dutch had, by a totally unexpected turn of events, won the Second World War.

  “They’re going to get annoyed with you soon,” said Duncan, buying a big floppy pancake off a street vendor. “They’re going to sack you. And me.”

  “I know,” said Jeff.

  “As soon as they find out we’re visiting all these worlds for no reason, we’ve had it.”

  “They’re not going to find out,” said Jeff. “I’ve disabled the alarms.”

  “But,” said Duncan, “but what about permission?”

  Jeff laughed, cynically.

  “I don’t do permission,” he said.

  “But what if we get caught?”

  “We can’t get caught. I’ve disabled the…”

  “I’m not happy.”

  “Then report me. Resign from your nice job and grass me up.”

  Duncan said nothing.

  “Exactly. Now shut up and give me some of that pancake. In fact, give me all of it.”

  And so Jeff and Duncan continued to ramble about various worlds, looking for Societies that clearly weren’t going to turn up. And time went on, and they got increasingly desperate.

  Then one day one of them made a silly mistake. Which was where all the trouble started.

  Not that they were going to tell anyone. Oh no.

  *

  SPARKS WOKE UP. His mind cleared slowly, like a stadium after a concert attended entirely by people who wanted to linger and crumple their way through thousands of plastic beer glasses. He remembered his busy day in the cruel world and his failed attempt to find Alison, who hadn’t existed in that world. He wondered where the Alison from his own world was and if she was sitting on a beach because that’s what people did in Australia, or if she was on a sheep station whatever that was in the middle of an unpleasant arid desert (Sparks was right on the first guess).

  He decided to get up. This was risky for him, because it was still only early in Sparks terms and Sparks had never been an early riser. When he had stayed over at Alison’s, their early morning conversation would always go something like this:

  ALISON

  I’m off to work now, Sparks. There’s bread in the cupboard and don’t use the grill pan, you’ll burn yourself to death.

  SPARKS

  Mnurgh.

  So Sparks was always a little bit happier and more clear-headed when he’d had a lot of sleep. And Sparks’ idea of a lot of sleep was almost verging on the 24 hour-ish. Sparks had never achieved his ambition of sleeping a whole day and waking up on, say, Tuesday and thinking it was, say, Wednesday, but one day, he hoped, he would. As things stood, he was doing pretty well, often putting in long, arduous 12-hour stints of sleep, having entire weeks, in fact, when he would completely miss all the hours between one minute
to midnight and noon (Sparks hated to be around when hours repeated themselves. He had often said to Alison, “Who wants to go through half past seven twice in a day?” Alison, who often felt that she had gone through half past seven about four times every day, remained silent).

  Sparks opened his right eye, then his left, then closed them again. It was light in his bedroom. Then he tried to get up without opening his eyes. He made it as far as the chest of drawers before barking his shin and falling over. This forced him to open his eyes, which was a bad thing. Someone had been in his room. Oh, and ransacked it too. Chairs were overturned, CDs were scattered across the floor, his computer had been turned on and left that way and, most obvious of all – Sparks being one of those people who was always going to be prone to the “I’ve been burgled”/“How can you tell?” scenario – his waste paper basket was on fire.

  Sparks was properly awake now, almost. He leant against the wall, partly for support and partly because he thought he might be able to sleep standing up and forget all this. Instead, his hand slipped. He looked at his hand and saw it was smeared in red. Then he looked at the wall. Someone had written on it, ruining Sparks’ picture of the London Underground with all the names changed:

  Stop it Sparks

  The writing was red and shiny, like fake blood. Sparks licked his hand speculatively to check. Then he started spitting a lot. It wasn’t fake blood, after all.

  Then his bed burst into flames.

  “You didn’t have to set fire to his waste paper basket,” said Duncan, as he and Jeff made their way home (they were early risers and had done Sparks’ place over while he slept).

  “He’s got to learn,” said Jeff. “This is serious. Hence the fire and the pig’s blood”.

  Duncan shuddered. “And I don’t see why I’m the one who has to get the blood from the butchers every time.”