Sparks

by David Quantick

  At first, most of it was pretty useless to Sparks, unless he’d been able to nip out to the Isle of Man for the afternoon, and of course, if he had been, he wouldn’t be sitting in a doctor’s office in an maximum security happy house writing addresses down. However this evening there were a couple of possibilities which, had he not been crammed to the eyes with tranquillisers, would have excited him, and as it was, still made him quite pleased.

  The first pleasing location was about 50 miles away, behind a church in a small historic village. Sparks found the location appealing, not least because he used to go there as a boy and try to remove pennies from a nearby wishing-well, into which he had actually fallen one day, coming out soaking wet but with £3.29 in very small change. Unfortunately, the village was pretty inaccessible for a dangerous mad person, and too far to go before the portal closed.

  The second location was less pleasing but much more interesting. Nearby, at least by van, there was a clinic where some of the inmates were taken for the kind of minor medical treatments that the institution could not do itself. This sounded sinister, but probably wasn’t, unless you believed that dental caps and crowns were thought control systems. Several of the people in Sparks’ institution did believe this, and they could usually be spotted by their terrible teeth.

  If Sparks could feign an immediate teeth problem and, once there, make a break for it before the portal disappeared, he would be all right. If, Sparks though laconically, in the traditional sense of the word by accident.

  The van looped bumpily down several country lanes, knocking bits of hedge off and splashing happily into big holes full of old water. Had the van been in a children’s animated TV show, it might have had a cheerful face and honked as it passed old ladies and farmers, it looked so cheerful. But, unfortunately for the van, it wasn’t. It was taking several sociopaths to the dentist, which pretty much disqualified it from any forthcoming kids’ shows. In fact, real children found the van frightening too, as its stern black exterior, grilled-over reflective glass windows and perhaps excessive gun turret jarred with the van’s chirpy country road-hopping.

  All these things occurred to Sparks as he sat in the back of the van. Initially he had ruled out the chances of getting an instant dentist’s appointment, or even of rolling around on the floor moaning and clutching his face, as the dentist would soon be shut, and anyway, people were always rolling around on the floor moaning and clutching their faces in this place. However, after a few minutes of sipping cold water and wincing, prodding his cheek, and so on, Sparks found that Dr Allman could easily be annoyed.

  “What’s wrong with you?” said the doctor, which was a bit undoctorly.

  “Tooth,” said Sparks succinctly.

  “Dentist, now,” said the doctor, and Sparks found himself being bundled out of the office into a threatening-looking but potentially cheerful van, which was now burbling its murderous-looking way happily down hill and dale. Sparks, surrounded by men who were mad, bad, dangerous to know and suffering from toothache, worked on his plan. It was a simple one.

  1 Ask to use the toilet.

  2 Instead, run away and escape via portal.

  How could it fail? he thought.

  Dr Allman reached for his phone with oddly thin fingers, fat man-wise.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, he is. What? Yes, he is both, I mean. Yes he is exceptionally dim, and yes he is under the impression that he’s going to the dentist. Yes, I know.”

  The doctor put the phone down. He hated two things in life. One was working undercover against the very Society he had once believed in so passionately. And the other was wearing a fat-suit.

  The van pulled up outside the clinic, eagerly braking as squirrels and rabbits fled its ominous presence. Carers, armed with big industrial syringes, hauled the inmates out into the evening light and into a big door held open by one of those male nurses you only see in films, namely a huge bulk-laden man in a white tunic with no collar whose name ought to be Urgo or Fist but is generally Mike.

  Sparks shuffled down the white-lit corridor, pretending his jaw hurt. He was shoved down onto a bench and a magazine pressed into his hand. It was a 30-year-old copy of Punch.

  “Stay here,” said their carer, and walked a few feet away to talk to a notionally attractive receptionist. The inmates, dulled by pain and some very strong pills, tried to study their magazines. Sparks opened his Punch and immediately became engrossed in a series of cartoons about the generation gap.

  “Sparks,” a carer said, so neutrally that he almost didn’t hear it. “Sparks, the dentist will see you now.”

  Sparks got up.

  “I have to go to the toilet first,” he said.

  The carer smiled.

  “Of course. Here, I want to talk to this receptionist. Off you go on your own, now.”

  Sparks was not a suspicious man. He was a gullible man. Only his own personal poverty prevented him from regularly investing in pyramid sales schemes, internet start-up schemes and company pensions. However there was something in the carer’s almost lewd grin and unpleasant, leering face that suggested he was being made a fool of. So he decided to be cautious.

  Walking determinedly down the corridor, Sparks kept an eye out for anyone with a club or syringe. He rounded a corner and, safe from the carer’s insolent gaze, began looking for a fire exit or a window. There weren’t any. For a dental clinic, the place was amazingly secure. Sparks walked on some more and then found he actually did want to use the toilet. The perfect alibi, he thought as he opened the door of the gents. Then he saw Jeff and Duncan behind the door, and closed it again.

  Jeff and Duncan had in fact been in the gents for some time, and, forming the conclusion that Sparks wasn’t as predictable as they had believed, had decided that they too actually did want to use the toilet. Turning to the urinals for a long thin slash, they were therefore facing the wrong way when Sparks came in, giving him valuable seconds to run off into the nearest hiding place, which was the ladies.

  “You can’t hide in there for ever!” Jeff shouted, banging on a cubicle door.

  “No,” said Duncan. “This room is for women!”

  Jeff turned to Duncan.

  “Fool,” he said, and returned to banging the door.

  “You’ll have to come out sometime!” shouted Jeff.

  “We can wait all day!” said Duncan. “Unless,” he added, thoughtfully, “some women come in.”

  Jeff turned round and looked at Duncan.

  “I don’t think you entirely get this threatening people thing,” he said.

  Inside the cubicle, Sparks was only vaguely aware of Jeff and Duncan’s presence.

  “I expect you’re wondering how we found you,” said Jeff.

  “You can’t say that,” said Duncan, sulkily.

  “Why not?” said Jeff.

  “Because it’s a cliché. Villains say it in films.”

  “No they don’t,” said Jeff. “Unless it’s the gay porn films you watch.”

  “I resent that,” said Duncan.

  Sparks found he wasn’t too concerned how or why they had decided to trick him into coming here so something nefarious and dental could be done to him; he didn’t even care how they knew he was looking for a portal. In the corner of the cubicle, incongruously near the loo brush for a miracle of trans-dimensional strangeness, was a patch of shimmering air. Sparks had found the portal.

  There was a light thudding outside, like a very thin man throwing himself at a door, followed by a thin curse. Jeff (or Duncan) began hammering at the door instead. Sparks leapt at the portal, just as Jeff’s hammering reached a crescendo. Then the hammering vanished, like a clumsy edit.

  OW!

  This takes me back!

  OW!

  OWOWOWOW!

  Sparks woke up, as ever, in some pain. Worse, he realised as he cleared what felt like but weren't tiny red hot pikes from his eyes, he was back in the toilet. Admittedly, he was now in the next cubicle, but this was hardly a great e
scape. He turned to see the portal vanish with an audible pop (as opposed, he thought vaguely, to those inaudible pops which are so much part of modern life, or at least modern popping).

  Sparks waited for the cubicle door to be kicked in by Jeff, or possibly Duncan. He crouched down to cushion the blow, if a door falling on someone can properly be called a blow, but no blow came. The place was quiet, even for a lavatory. Sparks opened the cubicle door and peered out. The room was empty. A dripping tap and a bin full of crumpled-up green paper towels indicated either recent human occupancy or a race of bears that used lavatories. Sparks suppressed his fear of the latter possibility, and sneaked out into the corridor.

  He walked, almost literally, pretty much, right into a prison carer. Sparks drew back his fist, ready to punch him inefficiently.

  “Can I help you?” said the carer.

  “Um,” said Sparks, thrown by this. “No!” he decided to say. “No, I'm fine.”

  He walked away. “Oh,” he said, turning to face the carer. “And I'm not one of your inmates. I just dress in denim because I like it.”

  He walked out. Then he came back.

  “Um,” he said, “Just checking something.”

  “What?” said the carer.

  “Do I look like a serial killer to you?” said Sparks.

  “No,” said the carer unhesitatingly. “And I've met millions of them. I've killed three.”

  “Ta,” said Sparks, and walked out properly.

  “Sodding nutcase,” said the carer to himself and returned to his charges who, maddened by being left alone, beat him up and stuffed him into a linen cupboard.

  Sparks walked out into the summer, or whatever it was, evening. Right now he didn't care what new world he had arrived in. It was almost certainly one where he wasn’t a serial killer or in a booby hatch, and that would do for Sparks. He looked around. Clearly and obviously he was still in the Lake District, which even Sparks would agree was a very nice place. But far from London, which Sparks needed to be in, and which also, with little or no justification, he thought of as civilisation. This monocentric view of the world – shared in its day by several empires – had been one of the several barriers between him and Alison.

  “London isn't everything,” said Alison once, as Sparks had again turned down her idea of moving to somewhere less like London (in this case Hastings).

  “When a man is tired of London…” said Sparks, tailing off not for dramatic effect but because he couldn't remember the rest of the line and by stopping halfway through he hoped Alison might think he was tailing off for dramatic effect.

  Alison looked at Sparks. Sparks, who couldn't tail off any more than he had already, considered making a fruity hand gesture, but decided against it.

  “I like London,” he said, using all his powers of debate.

  “Well, it's not the be-all-and-end-all,” said Alison. “There are lots of other nice places in the world.”

  “‘Nice’,” said Sparks. “I hate that word, nice.”

  “I don’t,” said Alison. “I’m more annoyed by people who say they don’t like the word ‘nice’. They can never say why they don’t like it, it’s just a smartarse thing to say that most people grow out of when they’re 16 and discover that nice things like, say, central heating and scones sort of have the edge over, I don’t know, heroin and syphilis.”

  “I only said I liked London,” said Sparks, but he could tell that Alison was miffed.

  Sparks was recalling this conversation right now not because he had a lot of time on his hands and liked to sift through moderately unpleasant memories, but because he was lost, and his mind tended to wander off in search of useful memories when this happened. Right now, his mind was trying to recall if this particular part of the Lake District was either the one where Sparks and Alison had spent an unsuccessful weekend camping (it wasn’t Sparks’ idea) or the one where Sparks had gone on cub camp and lost six eight-year-old boys on a hill at night. His mind decided it was the former, and in that case, there should be a small town somewhere over to the right.

  Sparks registered this memory, claimed the insight for himself, and set off to the right.

  Sparks’ insight was, for once, spot on, and resulted in the following:

  a) small train with two coaches from somewhere quaint in the Lake District to somewhere far from quaint in the Midlands.

  b) large train with 14 coaches, no buffet and a toilet apparently designed as a urine-based aquarium from the Midlands to just outside London, where it became immobile, or broody, or both.

  c) large immobile train moving very slowly from just outside London to London, arriving late and full of compensation slips unfilled in by people who couldn’t be arsed filling in a form to reclaim £5 for a train journey that cost £75. (“I blame the unions,” said one elderly passenger, but when challenged, couldn’t remember why.)

  d) tube from London station to North London.

  e) long walk from tube station to Sparks’ office, whichever Sparks this might be, and if indeed there was a Sparks here, or even an office, to be confirmed.

  Sparks stood outside the building that might contain his office and arguably him. He suddenly felt very tired. In the last few weeks he had been arrested for murder, locked up for life, escaped from a nuthouse, being attacked by thin villains, and travelled on a train. None of these things were pleasant in any way. He was no nearer to his quest, a simple thing of travelling through an infinite amount of worlds to find a woman who might love him, and would have to be exactly like his ex-girlfriend – in fact, be his ex-girlfriend, only not find him annoying. And he was really hungry.

  He looked in his wallet. There was no money in it. Sparks wondered if his cashpoint card would work in this world, too. It was a possibility, if there was another Sparks, if that Sparks used the same bank, and so on, and so forth. It was equally possible that in this world, hot tea would come out of a cashpoint, but Sparks was prepared to take the risk.

  He walked to the bank. The bank was where it ought to be. So was the cash machine. Sparks inserted his cash card, keyed in his number, and decided for a test run to take out £10. This was in fact more a habit thing than a test run thing, as Sparks often had not much more than £10 in his account and suspected that the other Sparks, if he existed, might be similar. Then he had another thought. Behind Sparks, a bus pulled up. By the time Sparks had finished his thought, the bus had pulled off, leaving several people on the pavement.

  Sparks – briefly distracted by a large movie poster on the side of the bus shelter which had an unfamiliar yet familiar face on it – decided to act on his thought. Instead of taking some money out, he checked his, or rather the other Sparks’ balance. The screen flashed, and did not tell him he had keyed in the wrong number. Instead it told him his balance. Sparks gulped, like a cat in a cartoon that has just seen a bulldog standing behind a mouse with a hammer. The balance of the account was enormous. It contained hundreds of thousands of pounds.

  Sparks stared at the balance. In this world he was clearly a millionaire, or at least a builder. Perhaps he was even famous. Suddenly, Sparks remembered the poster. Oh wow! he thought, I’m…

  “Bloody Nora,” said a voice behind him. “For goodness’ sake,” said another. “Take some money out, why don’t you?” suggested a third, not charitably.

  Sparks acted. He took out a lot of money, stuffed it into his wallet, turned round to face the fractious queue, and said ‘Sorry about that” to Jeff and Duncan.

  “Oh,” he said, recognising them.

  “Oh indeed,” said Jeff, and lunged out of the queue at Sparks. Sparks ducked out of the way, but Duncan made a lunge of his own. Sparks, hemmed in, lunge-wise, grabbed his wallet. He pulled out the money and threw it everywhere. The queue suddenly unlocked itself and people leapt at the money. Jeff and Duncan were knocked flying, being so thin, and Sparks fled.

  “Famous people,” said a man in the queue. “Typical.”

  A few minutes later, having sneak
ed into his nicely-decorated office and turned on his computer (neither of which, of course, were his, but while he was throwing his money around, again literally, such definitions were otiose to Sparks), Sparks found himself staring at the Random Life Generator. Destinations and place names danced around the screen, not literally.

  Sparks grunted. He was starting to feel tired. Nothing was getting him anywhere. He wrote down an address almost resentfully, and headed out the door.

  Sparks found the portal. It was at the back of a shirt and tie shop. After hundreds of young men had asked if they could help him, Sparks saw the portal in a changing cubicle. He grabbed a handful of bad ties and vanished.

  OW!

  OW! Bumpy

  Shi

  Why is it bumpy?

  It wasn’t bumpy before

  It wasn't bumpy before! Sparks thought, groggy but awake. It was bumpy now, though, and he appeared to be, in fact he definitely was, in some sort of chair, which was better than being, say, not in a chair. Sparks opened his eyes (little ants, inserted individually, by fairly clumsy giants) and saw…

  Lots of darkness, mostly. Wait up, he thought groggily again. There were tiny lights in the darkness, red and white, with pictures of cigarettes, and hands clasping like those Irish rings that people liked, with the, well, as Sparks had already thought, with the hands clasping.

  No. Not hands clasping. Hands on a seatbelt. Hence the…

  Hence the bumpiness. Hands on a seatbelt as in fasten seatbelts as in bumpy ride as in…

  Oh bugger, Sparks thought, I’m on an airplane.

  Sparks supposed he wasn't totally surprised to find himself on an airplane. After all, he had previously found himself in a lake and on the Edgware Road, so the world was clearly full of possibilities, and in some ways, maybe he should be pleased that he hadn't landed in, say, the belly of a whale or the Straits of Magellan. Not that he was sure what the Straits of Magellan were, but he had a pretty clear idea that they wouldn’t be a great place to land in. (Later, Sparks got an atlas, and saw he was wrong. The Straits of Magellan were perfectly fine, unless you were Magellan, which he wasn’t.)