Sparks

by David Quantick

  SPARKS: Then I’m not a suspect, am I? I’m guilty.

  DI WALTERS: Suspect admits guilt, 8.24…

  SPARKS: No I didn’t. I meant, if you say I did it, then how can I be a suspect?

  DI WALTERS: (Sigh) Well, what do you suggest we call you? Sergeant Baverstock and I are all ears.

  SPARKS: That’s not for me to say.

  DI WALTERS: Interview terminated.

  DI WALTERS: Interview recommenced with suspect – accused – guilty… guilty suspect Paul Sparks, 9…

  SPARKS: Interview recommenced after I was beaten up!

  DI WALTERS: No one beat you up. I just had to go out for a cigarette.

  SPARKS: Ow!

  DI WALTERS: “Ow”? What do you mean, “ow”?

  SPARKS: He just hit me again.

  DS BAVERSTOCK: No, I didn’t! You thumped the table. He just thumped the table, ma’am.

  DI WALTERS: I have a sick headache. Interview terminates 10…

  SPARKS: Ow! He did it again!

  DS MOLLOY: I didn’t! Sir – Ma’am! You saw me!

  SPARKS: Saw you what? Eh?

  DS BAVERSTOCK: Saw… saw me not hit you!

  DI WALTERS: Interview terminated whatever bloody time it is.

  Looking back, Sparks decided that the interview had not been a success from anyone’s point of view; the police were clearly a little disappointed by Sparks’ answers, but this had not made them any keener on releasing him.

  Typical, thought Sparks, as they kicked him towards his cell, I failed the interview and I still got the job.

  Sparks lay on his bed and decided to reflect for a bit on how much he hated irony. He went through the last ironic few hours in a trough of despond. Sent home by a loop in the space time... thing, arrested for a crime he hadn’t committed, thrown into a van with THE POLICE written on the side, interviewed by a sarcastic woman...

  Sparks froze in his trough. His mind, always much smarter than him, had tricked him into reviewing the day’s events and in doing so had released new information, or rather, old information that Sparks had failed to register. But what was it? Sparks’ mind, possibly wishing that it was inside a dolphin’s speedy skull, tiredly flashed the words THE POLICE! THE POLICE! in Spark’s brain.

  Sparks got it. The van he had been thrown into, and against, was a police van, but instead of having POLICE written on it like it should – Sparks was really catching up with his mind here – it had THE POLICE written on it. And the last, or first, or only, time Sparks had seen THE POLICE written anywhere – Sparks was ahead of himself here, a condition his mind could nearly sympathise with – was on the side of a police car, in the first parallel world he had ever been to, the one with the Edgware Road in it.

  Sparks lay back on his mattress, his thoughts reeling like drunken midgets in the tiny pub of his brain. If he was in a parallel world, he thought, then he couldn’t be in his own world. And if he wasn’t in his own world, then not only had he been tricked by Duncan and Jeff, but there was still hope for his grand plan.

  Sparks lay back some more (it was a very soft mattress). Of course, there was also the fact that, in his own world, Sparks wasn’t a dead serial killer, and in this one, he was.

  I should have thought of that, thought Sparks.

  In some deep mental recess, Sparks’ mind slapped itself on the forehead again and again.

  On the plus side, Sparks’ grand plan was not thwarted. He had not been sent back to his own world, and he could still travel on and continue his search for Alison.

  On the minus side, he was probably in jail for life for serial murder, and was unlikely to ever get out.

  These were the thoughts that flipped, binarily, in Sparks’ head as the police van – helpfully labelled THE POLICE – took Sparks, and some other serial killers, to a very large institution for very dangerous unwell people. It was in the Lake District, not far from Sparks’ mum and dad’s, actually.

  Oh well, thought Sparks with perhaps more optimism than the situation merited, maybe I can look myself up in the prison library and see what serial killings I did.

  It was an unusual shard of hope to cling on to, but, oddly, one that all the prisoners in the van were thinking of, at the same time.

  Sparks sat in his room. It was really a cell, but it was called a room to stop prisoners giving themselves airs. The prisoners were also called patients, for the same reason. There had been a time when the prisoners were called customers, but then someone noticed that customers were supposed to be always right, and in a maximum security institution for the dangerously unwell, this could cause problems. So patients it was.

  Sparks had a cell, or rather room, to himself, even though he was supposed to share it with another patient, or, as the warders put it, psycho, but as the previous occupant had tried to strangle the other previous occupant with some bookbinding thread from a very old and large-spined encyclopedia, the room was temporarily unmanned. This was also why the prison library was closed, as guards, or carers as they hated to be called, spent days removing anything threadlike from the books, so all the spines fell off and some of the patients, or nutters, ate them.

  Sparks knew none of this. He just sat in his room, wondering if he should make some notches in his bedpost or if that would just depress him. As Sparks was pretty depressed already, this was semi-academic, but it passed the time, of which there was a lot knocking about.

  Then his cell door opened.

  “Visitor,” said a carer, or bastard.

  “Yes, I suppose you are,” said Sparks.

  “No,” said the carer. “Not me. Your mum.”

  Sparks was so surprised, he dropped his penknife. The carer picked it up.

  “We’ve got to get some more consistent rules in this nuthouse,” he said, and ushered Sparks towards the stairs. “Hospital,” he added, correcting himself.

  Sparks’ mum sat on a large leather sofa, holding a bag of fruit. She looked confused, as well she might, Sparks supposed.

  Sparks was directed by his carer to a large wooden chair next to his mum. He was surprised at the informality of the visiting system, but then he noticed the large club in the carer’s waistband. Reassured factually if not emotionally, Sparks sat down next to his mum. He didn’t know what to say.

  His mum did.

  “You’re not Sparks,” she said.

  “How can you tell?” said Sparks, hurt at the ability of people in parallel universes everywhere to not mistake him for more interesting or exotic versions of himself.

  “Well, for a start, Sparks is dead,” said Sparks’ mum. “That’s a giveaway. But you don’t look like him.”

  “I wish the police thought that,” said Sparks. “I wouldn’t be in here.”

  “The police know nothing,” said Sparks’ mum. “If they did, they wouldn’t have arrested my son.”

  “You mean me?” said Sparks, adding politely, “Mum.”

  “No,” said Sparks’ mum. “You’re not my son. I just said that. And please don’t call me mum. It’s distressing enough seeing someone who looks like my son without that. Call me Patricia.”

  “Sorry,” said Sparks, but still not calling a woman who looked like his mum anything resembling her first name. It sounded too libertarian.

  “So,” said Patricia, “what alternative world or whatever the phrase is are you from?”

  Sparks, who believed in the truth of cliché, was still surprised to feel his jaw actually drop.

  He was about to speak, and say things like, “What?” and “Pardon?” when the carer leaned over and said, “Time’s up.”

  “See you next week,” said Patricia.

  Sparks’ jaw continued to ache from dropping for several minutes.

  Next time Patricia came to visit Sparks, he was quicker off the mark.

  “What do you mean, what world are you from?” he said.

  “You know what I mean,” said Patricia. “I tell you, Sparks’ dad won’t come. He thinks this is all his fault.”

&n
bsp; “What?” said Sparks, as ever. “Why? What?”

  “He thinks it’s his fault because he told Sparks about alternative worlds and all that, and that’s why Sparks started to look for Alison, and it all went wrong,” said Patricia.

  “But I knew about the worlds thing before I asked Dad about it,” said Sparks.

  “That’s what I told him,” said Patricia. “But he feels guilty. And me coming to see you doesn’t help. It doesn’t help me much, either, come to think of it.”

  “I’m very confused,” said Sparks. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “This is so hard for me,” said Patricia, “Knowing you’re not my son, but you’re so like him. Same face, same dress sense, same lack of gumption.”

  “Why is it,” said Sparks, heavily, “that every world I go to, people keep telling me how useless I am?”

  “I knew you were from somewhere else,” said Patricia, with maternal triumph. “Sparks’ dad said you might be a police trap, but I couldn’t see what for. Also your nails are dirty for a copper.”

  “All right,” said Sparks, “I am from somewhere else. I split up with this girl in my world…”

  “Alison,” said Patricia, sighing. “We got a letter from her, after our son disappeared. Of course, you can’t say it’s her fault, but...”

  “And I found a machine that enabled me to go to these places…”

  “The Random Life Generator,” said Patricia.

  “I went to several worlds, one with bears, and then I was tricked and came here,” said Sparks. To make life faster for the modern reader, he explained his recent life in detail that even Patricia found excessive, and she was his mum, sort of.

  “Well, that’s not what happened to Sparks,” Patricia said, stifling a yawn.

  “What did happen to Sparks?” said Sparks, forced to refer to himself in the third person like he was a dictator.

  “Well,” said Patricia, “that’s…”

  “Time’s up,” said the carer, reluctantly, as he had been happily eavesdropping on what sounded to him to be the maddest arse he had ever heard, and him working in a loony bin, or caring zone, too.

  “Next week?” said Sparks, hopefully.

  “I don’t know,” said Patricia. “The buses are terrible.”

  The week after that, Patricia didn’t come. Sparks began work on a basket, to be ironic.

  The week after that, just as some of the sharper carers were beginning to realise that Sparks’ basket was ironic, and that therefore they should tap him on his face quite hard, Patricia popped by again.

  “Thanks for the unnecessary tension,” said Sparks.

  “Sorry,” said Patricia, “but I had to check some facts in my diary. Also, I meant it about the buses. It’s miles and you have to wait half an hour. And the other visitors! You can imagine.”

  Sparks imagined. He felt sorry for this woman who wasn’t his mother exactly.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Don’t come if it’s hard.”

  Patricia ignored him, as people often do when apologised to. Instead she turned to the carer.

  “Can you ask the chief screw to fix it for my son to use the prison library?” she said.

  Sparks winced. But the carer just smiled, and said, “I’ll have a word.”

  Not for the first time in his life, Sparks wished he was someone’s mum, just for the service.

  Patricia turned back to Sparks.

  “This is what happened,” she said.

  It took more than one visit to piece it all together, but eventually Sparks and Patricia worked it out. About the time that Sparks had come into his first world – the world he was jailed in – the other Sparks, the one from this world had, with some sensible symmetry, gone into a third world. This world, he later told Patricia, was extremely unpleasant.

  “Were there bears?” asked Sparks.

  “Shut up,” Patricia said. “This world was… unevolved, was the word Sparks used. He said nothing felt right. The air tasted funny, the colours were not quite the same as here, and the people…”

  She paused. Sparks thought she was going to tell him to shut up again, even though he wasn’t talking.

  “Sparks said the people just didn’t seem right. He said they seemed… badly made, and dangerous.”

  “Like a cheap toy?” said Sparks, trying to understand. “One with a sharp edge or a rusty spike in it?”

  For the first time, Patricia looked at Sparks the way his mother looked at him.

  “Those,” she said, “were his exact words. Like a cheap toy with a rusty spike in it.”

  “I had one of those once,” said Sparks. “So what did… your son do next?”

  “He said he was going back there,” said Patricia. “He said he thought he’d seen Alison,”

  “And he never came back? That’s when he disappeared?”

  “No, he came back, but with the dead people,” said Patricia.

  “The dead people?” said Sparks.

  “They found him near his flat, sitting there, with the dead people. The ones they said he killed,” said Patricia. “There were two of them, which I suppose made him a serial killer.”

  “Who were they?” Sparks said, finding that he was taking an almost proprietorial interest in his doppelganger’s apparent victims.

  “Nobody could identify them. They had no ID on them and no one claimed the bodies,” said Patricia. “But they were dead. Oh, and very thin.”

  “Thin?” said Sparks. “In what way?”

  “Thin,” said Patricia, almost as annoyed as Sparks at his call-and-response interview technique. “Just thin. And tall. Like stick insects.” Patricia looked at him. “Did you know them?”

  “Not quite. But I know some people who are them,” said Sparks. “In the way that I am your son.”

  “I see,” said Patricia, and it looked to Sparks like she did see. “So where’s my son?”

  “I don’t know,” said Sparks. “It sounds like he got away, at least. And it definitely sounds like someone was out to get him. And me, too.”

  “Well,” said Patricia, looking up at the barred windows. “I’d say they’re doing a good job so far.”

  Sparks saw what she meant.

  “I’m not coming again,” said Patricia. “You’re not my son, but I feel he would have wanted to help you. So…”

  She got up.

  “Bye then,” she said. “You do have some of his good points, you know.”

  Sparks rose to say goodbye, but once again Patricia was talking to the carer. And staring at Sparks as she did so.

  “This library,” she said, “does it have a computer?”

  Sparks applied for permission to use the library. This was refused, so instead Sparks applied to become a trusty. He didn’t really know what a trusty was, but it was obviously something to do with libraries, so he thought it was worth a go. After a week or so, he was brought before the chief doctor of the institution, a round-headed man called Dr Allman who wore square spectacles to make himself look more angular, or, if results were the criterion, a melon wearing glasses.

  “It says here you want to be a trusty,” said Dr Allman.

  Sparks couldn’t help noticing that the doctor was looking at a bare desk. He decided to ignore this detail.

  “Yes, I do,” he said.

  “Do you know what a trusty does?” said the doctor.

  “Not really,” said Sparks.

  “Good,” said the doctor. “Because if you did, that would mean you’d been inside this institution before, which would make you a recidivist. And we can’t give positions of trust to recidivists.”

  Sparks felt relieved, if not deeply sure he knew what a recidivist was.

  “Why do you want to be a trusty?” said Dr Allman, adjusting his glasses to make them look squarer.

  “Because I want to look up the Random Life Generator on the computer, if there is one, and see if there’s a portal I can escape to,” said Sparks. He had decided to gamble on telling the tru
th, thereby making himself look mental.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” said Dr Allman. “Which only goes to show that you are clearly mental...ly ill. And the fact that you are mentally ill means, again, that you are not a dangerous criminal but rather a sick patient, who can be treated.”

  “I would like to be a library trusty,” said Sparks.

  “Ah,” said Dr Allman. “I’m afraid I can’t let you do that.”

  Sparks’ heart sank.

  “Libraries are dangerous places for mad people. By which,” the doctor added, “I mean the unwell. Books full of stories and encyclopedias with unpleasant facts. Even the dictionary is a minefield of inspirations for the crazed killer. No offence.”

  “None taken,” said Sparks, from his mental basement of despondency.

  “However, I am a lenient, and angular-faced, man,” said the doctor. “I shall give you a trusty’s job elsewhere. You can work here, in my office, doing the filing. Not the dangerous filing, of course, just the dull stuff.”

  “How do I do filing?” said Sparks, glumly.

  “You’ll need to know the alphabet,” said the doctor. “Oh, and you’ll need this computer.”

  He indicated a large, blue and white computer on a desk behind him.

  “I’ll do it,” said Sparks, as enthusiastically as he dared.

  Dr Allman’s office was darkened, half-lit by the eerie glow of the computer screen, and also half-lit by the eerie glow of the computer screen bouncing off Sparks’ face. It was late at night, but Sparks was now a trusty, his new status reflected in his trusty pass, which allowed him to go anywhere but the library, and his trusty’s uniform, which was a pair of navy blue dungarees and a nice red T-shirt.

  Dressed as a git, every night Sparks would come in, pretend to do some filing for a few minutes, read the doctor’s junk emails (‘Unusually-shaped head? Acquire relief for less than $10000 with Nu-Crania-Shape”) and then type in the address of the Random Life Generator. The first time he did this, he realised how long it had been since he’d last done it, and he almost forgot the details, but the screen filled with the same imagery and Sparks began frantically writing down everything he saw.