He tried to accustom himself to the darkness. Then he got annoyed with that and turned on his overhead light. This confirmed his initial impression; he was definitely on an airplane. Around him, men in suits slumped about, half throttled by their ties, while some people made dim dozy faces at little screens showing tiny films. One of the films was about a cat, and Sparks had seen it and found it cloying but normal, so at least he wasn’t in an utterly terrifying world where cats were lords of all or something.
Sparks thought fast. He was clearly in a plane, a large commercial airliner sort of plane that was going somewhere, as planes do. He had no idea where. He could be in or rather over any country or continent, and in any reality where it was OK to make films about cats. None of this was helpful.
However, Sparks remembered one thing about planes. He reached up and pressed a switch. After a while, a flight attendant came along. If she was surprised to see Sparks occupying a seat that had been empty for the first seven and a half hours of the plane’s journey, she didn't show it. He was sitting in economy, so she didn’t care either.
“Yes sir?”, she said, smiling.
“Can I have a large brandy?” Sparks asked.
“No,” said the flight attendant. “We're landing in five minutes.”
“Oh,” said Sparks. Then, realising he ought to seize the moment more firmly, opportunity-wise, he said, “Where?”
The flight attendant’s smile became thinner. This man, Sparks realised she was realising, was a drunk.
“I'm not a drunk,” Sparks said. “I just have that mind disease, where you forget. Things.”
The flight attendant smiled, more but tauter, like a hammock with a fat man in.
“Stansted,” she said. “Near London.”
“Bloody hell,” said Sparks. “That’s no good.”
The plane landed, and Sparks enjoyed, if that is the word, which it isn’t, the sensation of travelling from an airport with no luggage (thank God it was an internal flight, he thought) and then into town, all to get back to the point he had started from.
On the train back, he quickly worked out how this world was different – there was apparently some kind of religious persecution thing going on, or possibly an ad campaign involving ginger-haired men being displayed in large iron cages at every crossroads – and made a note to get out very quickly.
North London. Office. Computer. Random Life Generator. Address.
Sparks was getting fast.
Journey. Small Hackney flat. Portal.
Ow!
Ow!
It was very quiet where Sparks was.
“I don’t like it,” said Sparks. “It’s too quiet.” He had always wanted to say that, and felt happy. Later, he just felt he had been frivolous.
Where Sparks was, was by a river. The river was enormous, like the Thames only surrounded by trees and shrubs rather than bits of stone crap and metal crap. On either side of the river, there were more trees and shrubs and then some green bits. The green bits might have been fields if any order had been involved in laying them out; but they just looked on closer inspection like bits, that were green, and their purpose, if any, which there wasn’t, was to not have only trees and shrubs. Conversely, it was equally likely that the trees and shrubs were only there to break up the monotony of the green bits.
Certainly the sky wasn’t helping. There were no pylons or airplanes or vapour trails to break up the blue and white dullness of it. In fact, as with the ground, it wasn’t clear whether the clouds were there to break up the as it were blue skyitude of the place, or the blue was there to give the eye a break from all the white fluffiness.
And it was astonishingly quiet. Despite the warm weather, nothing buzzed at Sparks and tried to bite him or made a threatening “cheep cheep” noise or barked or even swore in a Cockney accent.
Sparks walked around a bit. Then he walked in a straight line for a while. Then he ran crazily across a green bit. Then, for want of any new ideas, he hid behind a tree. Then he got bored. Then he got scared.
An hour later, after some more walking and running and being scared, Sparks came to a conclusion. Either he was in a sodding big park that was closed for the day, which probably wasn’t the case given the lack of insects and pylons, or it was something worse. The something worse was that Sparks might be in a world where there wasn’t anything. Anything alive, anyway. Anything alive with legs or wings, obviously. Or that lived in a river.
As Sparks tried to make a definitive list of things that were alive that weren’t trees or plants, a second, more exciting but scarier thought came into his busy mind. Having run around and lost whatever bearings he had (ie none) he now had no idea where he was, where he had been or, more pertinently, how to get out.
I hope I like berries, Sparks thought.
Sparks couldn’t find any nuts and berries. This didn’t mean that there weren’t any, just that he wasn’t very good at finding them. He had a vague idea that berries grew on bramble bushes, and that these could be found beside railway lines, but there were no railway lines in this world, on account of the whole total failure of mammalian evolution thing going on. Similarly, the only nuts Sparks had ever seen were either in little bowls on bars or in supermarkets, again neither of which were likely to come along until some sort of as-yet uninvented fish were to crawl out of the sea, grow legs, and in millions of years find Sparks some nuts.
The planet, or rather this bit, which had Sparks known it, was essentially Luton, was teeming with edible life, and any experienced survivalist or keen boy scout would have been able to stuff himself on plant grub all day long. Sparks, however, was not a survivalist. His boy scout days ended at nine when another boy told him that his parents had lied and you couldn’t get measles from bunking off cubs. And he had never, ever, read any books where people manage to live in difficult and remote circumstances. The books that Sparks had read, which involved either large-breasted women on other planets getting snarky with large-breasted men from other planets, or dead people having a pop at people who weren’t dead but soon would be, were no help at all.
Sparks, in fact, was starving to death. His diet for his first day and a half in the empty world was embarrassingly low in nutrition, although a cow with an eating disorder might have liked it. He had eaten some grass. He had drunk some river water. The river water contained some sort of floating germ, and this had made Sparks throw up the grass. When Sparks felt well enough to eat something, perhaps a little clear soup and a pale sherry, he found there was still nothing to be had, except some more grass.
Sparks decided to go to sleep instead, as it was getting dark and he was surprisingly bored, as a starving person. He pulled his coat over himself, used his arm as a pillow, and fell asleep. Then he was sick again.
The next day, Sparks woke to a cloudless blue sky, sunlight bouncing off the dewy grass, and the sound of no life whatsoever. Wind swished some leaves about, some other wind made some small stones fall down a hill, and far off, a very old tree that had never been disturbed by insects eating it or birds building nests up it just fell over with a fairly pointless thud. It was another useless day in the empty world.
Sparks’ mouth was dry and sticky. He needed a shave, a shower and an enormous amount of toothpaste. Worst of all, as he stood up and dusted some bits of woody stuff off himself, he realised he was very hungry. He was also pretty thirsty, but in the “look at me!” stakes, hunger was beating thirst. And this was what worried Sparks the most; traditionally, thirst was the feeling that had its hand up fastest, especially when Sparks had been drinking. But Sparks had not been drinking; his last drink had been on the airplane, and that had been rather small, as Sparks hadn’t realised he was in economy and tried to drink it all before the stewardess made him pay for it, which he couldn’t, so she grabbed it off him mid-sip.
Sparks, feeling even worse at the memory of a half-drunk drink in a different world, leaned against a tree. A nut fell out of it and rolled across the ground, but he didn’t s
ee it. His eyes were swimmy with unwellness and his stomach was cramping. I can’t go on much longer like this, he thought, and for once he was right.
When Sparks was little, they showed a film at his school. It was the one with a little boy crouched under a tree, much as Sparks was doing now, only the little boy wasn’t vomiting and crying, he was looking at a mosquito. Then the camera pulled up, high above the trees, and Sparks saw that the boy was in a forest. The camera pulled up some more, revealing the forest to be in a large country, and then some more, showing the country to be part of a continent, and so on, until the camera had somehow got into outer space. And then, just as the camera threatened to reveal all the secrets of the cosmos and do an establishing shot of the universe from the outside, it stopped, changed its mind, and began hurtling back towards the Earth again, where it did a lot of interesting stuff involving the little boy’s cellular structure and that.
If this camera had decided to have some pulling-up fun in this world, it would have been a spooky affair, pulling up from the buckled and puking figure of Sparks, high over trees and valleys, up into the skies of a world with no other humans, or animals of any kind. Then, instead of whizzing off to have a look at the universe, it might have decided to have a look around the empty world, just to emphasise the complete and utter lack of any other life other than one dying man.
And then it would have seen something a bit odd. A bit of hazy air, just visible as a kind of hazy pinprick in the sky, which was suddenly almost ripped open by turbulence, said turbulence being caused by the arrival of a large, twin rotor helicopter, the kind that looks like it has been broken a bit in the middle.
Part Three
JOSEPH KAYE
Joseph Kaye woke up and found that he was thinking about a cockroach. A very large cockroach, about three inches in length, with a shiny back and long legs. It was lying on its shiny back and waving its long legs in the air. He went downstairs to the kitchen, where his father and mother were having their breakfast.
“Drink your coffee before it gets cold,” said his mother.
“I woke up this morning and found I was thinking about a cockroach,” said Joseph.
His father snorted. “What the hell’s a cockroach?” he said.
It was the first of May.
“You can’t sit in there all day, Joseph!” his mother shouted. Joseph Kaye shifted his position on the cold black plastic lavatory seat. He thought that he could sit in the toilet all day. It was a lot better than going mad. His mother, now noisily moving about the house, passed by the toilet, and banged on the door as she did so with a flat iron. Kaye sighed and got up. Before he unlocked the door, he took a quick look behind the toilet bowl, as he had a vague idea that if there were any cockroaches in the house, they might be hiding there. Although, he had to admit to himself, he had certainly never seen any cockroaches there, or indeed anywhere else in the house.
In fact, Joseph Kaye thought, as he left the house ignoring his mother’s sarcastic queries about his faulty stomach, he had no memory of ever having seen a cockroach, in real life or in a photograph, in his entire life.
“No,” said the head librarian, “I have never heard of it. Or them.”
Joseph Kaye’s head was starting to hurt.
“Are you saying that I have imagined this thing?” he heard himself saying.
“No,” said the head librarian, now moving a large leather-bound ledger nearer to himself, as if, Kaye, thought, he was preparing to repel an attack with it.
“I will be back,” said Kaye’s voice. His head was beginning to hurt very much now
“I don’t care,” said the librarian. “We still won’t have any books about cockroaches.”
Mrs Kaye tapped on Joseph’s bedroom door.
“Are you all right, Joseph?” she said. There was no reply. “I’ve made you some beef broth,” she added, wondering even as she said it why she had said it. Not only was there no bowl of beef broth present at this time but also Mrs Kaye had never made beef broth in her life. Once she had attempted some sort of indeterminate lamb stuff with hot water, but that had not been a success. Joseph’s father had refused to eat it, while Joseph had eaten three bowls out of maternal love and then been violently ill all over the settee. So to refer to broth at all was tactless. Mrs Kaye thought she might be getting a little hysterical, that or her son was making her nervous.
“I’ll take it back downstairs,” she said, feeling even more foolish. “The cat can have it.” She set off for the kitchen, only then remembering that they did not have a cat.
In his room, Joseph Kaye heard his mother’s footsteps recede and her faint muttering of, “Mmm, delicious beef broth” become fainter and fainter. Good, he thought, peace and quiet. He turned his attention once more to the things on his counterpane. There were a dead bee, a dead fly, a sleepy spider with one leg missing, and a sort of green beetle. Round up the usual suspects, thought Joseph Kaye, and laughed mirthlessly but rather loudly. “Bee fly spider beetle,” he said. “No cockroach.”
In the kitchen, Mrs Kaye set about the cooking sherry with gusto.
Joseph Kaye lay in his bed, the place he had first inadvertently formed the notion that something was missing from the world, something shiny and small with legs and feelers. Not necessarily a good thing missing from the world, but a missing thing nevertheless. The omission – or the sense of omission – bristled up against Kaye’s sense of right and wrong. Other people, like his father, perhaps, might have said, “Well, they certainly sound unpleasant, these cockroaches, and not very original either, since they are essentially a sort of hard beetle, so I can’t really see why we want more, or rather any, since to have more we’d need at least one, and we haven’t got one.” But Kaye was not like that. If something was missing from the world, however unpleasant or odd, then the world was by definition incomplete.
Kaye didn’t like the idea of the world being incomplete. In fact, it was getting to him. Some people, his mother perhaps, might have argued that, what with the pet shop business and the unpleasantness with the head librarian, it had got to him already. But Kaye had realised the pointlessness of these small actions. He needed to do something to warn the world that something was missing from it. Something big.
He went out onto the landing, down the stairs, and picked up the phone that his parents had had installed in the hallway, possibly on the grounds that there wasn’t a less private or more uncomfortable place to have a telephone in the house.
“Hello, operator?” he said. “I should like the number of Speaker’s Corner.”
He fiddled with the phone cord as the operator said something.
“Oh, you just turn up, do you?”
Kaye rang off, feeling slightly foolish.
The world will know the truth! he thought, as he made his way back upstairs and accidentally kicked over the bowl of cabbage stew that was still lurking outside his bedroom door.
It was a wet Wednesday morning, and Alison was already regretting her New Plan. Her New Plan was to walk to work every day, which would have been a fantastic plan if she had lived in Madrid or Rainless Paradise, California. But she didn’t; she lived in Dalston, where rain and filth were constant companions, and only took time off to go bowling with gale force winds. Even this might not have been so bad, if her place of work had also been in Dalston. But it wasn’t. It was in the West End, a part of the world as easy to walk to from Dalston as, say, Madrid or Rainless Paradise, California. On a sunny day, true, Alison’s New Plan might have been passed by some notional committee of slightly slow-witted people as an excellent way to get fit, see London, and forget all about bereavement caused by the still fairly recent death of an ex-boyfriend in a bus accident. Today, however, as the rain came down like a tarts’ drawers in liquid raindrop form, even a committee of really stupid people would be looking at Alison as she ran along the road, trying to keep gussets of dirty London rain off her neck by hunching, and made tapping-head gestures, rotating-fingers she’s-a-loony mot
ions and even the odd impression of a teapot.
And Alison would have agreed with them. She was half an hour late for work – well, she said work, she was being optimistic, she meant a job interview – she was sodden between skin and clothing, and her emergency plan – running underneath the trees in Hyde Park for cover – wasn’t working, as there were so many other people already hiding under the trees that someone could have made money employing a bouncer and a guest list and selling tickets.
Alison gave up. There is a point where, even though you know that you can get wetter, you actually feel that you can’t get wetter. Alison had reached that point; and, seeing as she was completely sodden, she also felt that no job interviewer would say to her, “We admire your decision to walk here on the rainiest day of all time, and we have decided to ignore your drenched condition. Please have a job”. (And she was right; in none of the worlds where Alison went for this job did anyone offer her the job. In one, she was eaten by a bear, but not after being offered the job, so the argument still holds.)
And then, just as Alison was completely fed up and wet and convinced that she was unemployable, it stopped raining. This of course was not quite the transcendent moment it might have been, as immediately after it stopped raining, Alison began to experience the foul, sticky sensation of former rain now just being water running down her back. She hunched again to try and keep the rain away from her skin, which didn’t work, and began to think about buying a cup of tea to reduce her misery slightly.
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