Sparks

by David Quantick

  Walking through the park, which was now milling with other, hunching people and a smaller group of smug people who had remembered to bring umbrellas, Alison looked around for a tea stand. After a few minutes, she began to wonder if in fact there was such a thing as a tea stand, or if maybe she had just seen one in a romantic comedy film. There were certainly none to be found here. Then she saw what looked like a small mass of people huddling up around something. Perhaps they might be an excited group of tea drinkers? she wondered, and hunched off to have a look.

  A tall man in a billowing raincoat was standing on some sort of box – Alison was no box-maker so couldn’t be certain – and shouting. The wind was whipping the tall man’s words away, so each time he said something, it would be removed and dumped somewhere else in the park. This didn’t appear to bother the tall man, as he mostly appeared concerned with getting his message out, rather than ensuring audio clarity. Alison was sure it was a message the man was trying to get out, rather than, say, his favourite song titles, because of the man’s demeanour, which was a heady mix of earnest and frightening.

  Alison moved closer to the tall man, who she now noticed had really excellent cheekbones. She had never been a fan of cheekbones before, largely because the only men she ever saw who had them were either on the covers of magazines or singing hits of the ’80s. No one Alison had been out with, either, had been particularly cheekboney, even Sparks, who, while not unattractive, had never had the kind of face you could cut yourself on.

  This man did. And with the billowing raincoat, the sense of earnest and frightening and the cheekbones, he was a compelling sight. Alison found herself powerfully drawn to him and his inaudible speech (“Mumph! Mumph whumph dumph!”). Unfortunately, so did several other people, most of whom looked very annoyed and were themselves shouting. They difference was that they were shouting clearly and audibly, possibly because they were facing into the wind, possibly because they had had a lot of experience in shouting.

  It only took a few seconds of shoving and brushing her sodden clothing against the small crowd for Alison to get near the front. There she could both see the cheekbones and hear the speech more clearly.

  “There is something going on!” the tall man was shouting. “Something wrong!”

  “Sod off!” shouted someone.

  “Be more specific!” someone else shouted.

  “Something is missing in the world!” the tall man bellowed.

  “Is it coherence?”

  “Sod off!”

  “Stop being so vague!”

  “All right!” said the tall man. “I’ll tell you. For the last few months I have been searching for something – something,” he added hastily, “very specific indeed. I have searched museums, books, computers, everywhere I could think of...”

  “Where was the last place you saw it?”

  “Did you look under the bed?”

  “And!” the tall man said, “I could not find it. Which proves to me that there is a conspiracy to prevent me finding it.”

  “Good argument!”

  “You’re mental!”

  “Give him a chance!”

  Alison was surprised to hear herself shouting the last phrase. The crowd looked pretty surprised, too, as they stopped shouting in order to stare at her.

  “Let him speak. You know, and that,” she added, a little less emphatically. The crowd gave a collective shrug, but it was silent.

  “Thank you!” said the tall man, and his cheekbones burned red as he caught Alison’s eye. “Yes! Unable as I was to find proof, I have constructed proof! Look at this!”

  And the tall man took a matchbox from his pocket and tipped out the contents into his hand.

  “See!” he said.

  “No! Hold it up!”

  The tall man held it up. It was most unimpressive. It looked to Alison like some sort of plastic beetle that someone with no modelling skill whatsoever had made, using bits of other, more well-made plastic beetles.

  “Behold,” said the tall man, “the missing roach!”

  There was a moment of silence.

  “Bollocks!”

  “Push him into a hedge!”

  “I defend the right to free speech but that’s ridiculous!”

  “Stick his beetle up his arse!”

  “Yeah! Do that! That would be good!”

  The crowd moved angrily forward, crushing Alison. The tall man looked alarmed. His fake beetle fell out of his hand and onto the ground. Alison heard its plastic back snap as the crowd surrounded the tall man and his box. She closed her eyes in panic.

  “All right… that’s enough.”

  An authoritative voice had cut in, calm and patrician and, more to the point, using a megaphone. The crowd, aware that megaphones are often followed by batons, stopped being a crowd and started being some disgruntled people off for a mutter in the park. Two policemen appeared, along with the holder of the megaphone. He was very tall, taller than the tall man. He was also, Alison was almost shocked to see, ridiculously thin.

  “Joseph Kaye,” the very thin man was saying, still through the megaphone even though he was about a foot away now, “You are under arrest for breach of the peace. Get down off that box.”

  “This is Speaker’s Corner!” Kaye shouted as the two policemen pulled him off the box. “I am entitled to speak!”

  “Leave him alone!” Alison said, angered. “He’s harmless, isn’t he?”

  “Let’s hope so,” said the very thin man. He paused. “Oh no,” he said. “Look, he’s got a knife.”

  “I don’t see a knife,” said Alison, wondering why she was being so defiant.

  “Well, I do,” said the thin man. “Looks like he’s going to the loony bin.”

  Suddenly he stopped, and stared hard at Alison. He smiled, in a way that disturbed Alison to her core.

  “Sorry about your boyfriend,” he said, and smiled again. Then he pushed past Alison out of his way and led the man he had called Joseph off. The last thing Alison heard Joseph Kaye say before a large white van appeared was, “How did you know my name?” (The last thing she heard after the van appeared was a policeman saying to the thin man, “Where’s my money?,” which was equally odd).

  She stood in the park for some time after that. The sun was out at last and was belatedly drying everything out and making it clammy. Alison unhunched her damp shoulders and walked towards an exit. There was a small crunch under her feet. She looked down, to see that she had trodden on the two halves of Kaye’s insect.

  Alison picked up the broken beetle and went home.

  *

  Sparks was dying. His body was running out of nutrients, liquids and the will to live. He was hallucinating in a moderate way, seeing not very thrilling visions involving cats and tinned food. His life, disappointingly, was failing entirely to flash past him, although he was getting bursts of a particularly unpleasant school football match where he fell into some mud early in the game.

  His mind full of light and nonsense, his mouth confusingly at once both dry and tasting of mud, Sparks was not in a good way. There was no light at the end of the tunnel. There was, in fact, no tunnel. An angel was not standing in the mid distance, arms outstretched.

  Sparks’ last thought before his gummy eyes closed was: Well, I can’t say I wasted my life. Although, on second thoughts, I have.

  His first thought as his eyes were prised open was: Oh great, them again.

  The helicopter rose above the unpopulated ground, buzzed a couple of trees that would never be chopped down or hugged or nested in, and flew over a fishless river. Inside, Sparks lay on an old mattress, by look, smell and texture the ex-property of the world’s clumsiest tramp. He had something stuck in his arm, and he felt appalling. Groggily, he decided that the two facts must be connected.

  “Stop that,” said Jeff.

  Sparks ignored him. Ignoring Jeff was, he discovered, a new pleasure. He tugged at the thing in his arm.

  Jeff said, “Oh for God’s sake.
Leave that drip alone. It’s feeding you.”

  “What?” said Sparks.

  “The drip. It’s feeding – why do I have to repeat everything? Jesus, a whole world with no people and it gets you. The new Adam.”

  “Mnuh,” said Sparks, who had now established that the thing in his arm was indeed a drip. The thought of having a drip in his arm made him feel queasy.

  “Nearly there!” said a cheerful voice from the front of the helicopter which Sparks guessed must be Duncan’s.

  “I am going to strap you down,” said Jeff.

  He did so easily, because Sparks was too weak to resist. Then Jeff sat on the other side of the helicopter and strapped himself in. Then the helicopter went through something, and Sparks passed out in the usual inevitable manner, only this time strapped down, in a helicopter.

  Alison was having a dream. In it, a man in a flapping overcoat was standing in the park shouting ‘There’s something missing!’ at an audience of tall thin men in bowler hats. They were all booing him, but Alison found his words deeply moving. She woke up feeling very odd indeed, and made herself a cup of tea. The tea, despite being muddy-looking and not very milky, reminded Alison of the man in the overcoat whose name, she suddenly remembered, was Joseph Kaye. Alison went downstairs and got her post. All of her post, which was mostly bills and a catalogue from something horrific involving knitwear, reminded her of Joseph Kaye.

  Alison wondered what was wrong with her. Then she wondered what Joseph Kaye was doing.

  At the exact moment that Alison was wondering what Joseph Kaye was doing, about 200 miles away Joseph Kaye was also wondering what he, Joseph Kaye, was doing. Kaye was sitting in the office of a man called Dr Allman. Dr Allman had a piece of wood on his desk with CHIEF DOCTOR engraved on it. Dr Allman also had a round head, and a small goatee beard. This caused him to resemble an egg that liked jazz.

  Dr Allman was staring at Kaye with wide-open eyes.

  “I’m sorry I’m staring at you with wide-open eyes,” said Dr Allman, “but I’m experimenting with contact lenses.”

  From the way Dr Allman said “experimenting with contact lenses”, it sounded to Kaye like he was grafting tiny mouse heads onto the contact lenses or making the contact lenses smoke cigarettes. Kaye wondered if he was being unduly paranoid. On the one hand, he reasoned, he did have a tendency to see conspiracies and evil everywhere. On the other, he was in a high security mental hospital.

  “Why am I in here?” said Kaye, as Dr Allman struggled to stop his eyes spinning in their sockets.

  “Because you committed a crime,” said Dr Allman, “And because the balance of your mind was disturbed when you did it.”

  He paused. “Not that you’re mad, of course. We don’t use that word here.”

  “I know I’m not mad,” said Kaye.

  “That’s right,” said Dr Allman. “That’s right. You’re not mad. You’re just…”

  “What?” said Kaye. “If I’m not mad, what am I?”

  “As I said,” said Dr Allman, “We don’t like to use the word mad.”

  “What word do you like to use?” said Kaye, feeling his ears get red. “And is it that I’m not mad or you just don’t like the word mad?”

  “Well,” said Dr Allman. “You’re not mad. No. Not at all. You’re just…”

  Dr Allman searched his mental vocabulary. It was a small one and the only synonym for ‘mad’ it contained appeared to be ‘nuts’.

  Kaye sat, waiting to be told what he was if he wasn’t mad.

  “You’re…” said Dr Allman, unhelpfully. Then suddenly he shouted, “Jesus Christ!” and thrust his fingers into his eyes.

  “I’m Jesus Christ?” said Kaye. This was a new, and worrying, development.

  Dr Allman wasn’t listening. “Jesus Christ,” he repeated. “These bastards are driving me insane.”

  He pulled a contact lens case out of a drawer, dropped the lenses into it, and put on a pair of wire-rimmed glasses. Then, composure regained, he turned his red and flooded gaze back at Kaye.

  “When I said driving me insane,” he said, “I didn’t mean that in a clinical sense. I meant that…”

  “I want to go back to my cell and be sedated now, please,” said Joseph Kaye.

  “Well, I want to get out of this fat-suit,” said Dr Allman, “But we don’t always get what we want, do we?”

  Joseph Kaye was feeling better. He had decided that there was nothing to worry about. If he was mad (and given the evidence – belief in imaginary beetles, over-reacting to situations, being arrested and put in a loony bin – he was mad), then everything was fine. He was mad, and he was in a mental hospital, which was how it should be. If he was not mad, then at least he was right. There was something wrong in the world, something to do with a cockroach, whatever a cockroach was, and it was clearly his duty to find out what it was – ‘it’ being both the cockroach and the thing that was wrong with the world.

  Either way, Kaye was reasonably content. He found that his new mood was a calmer one and he was no longer so angry, even without eating the little pills he kept finding not ground up properly in his meals. And his new bifurcate approach of treating every situation in two ways – how would he react to something if he was mad, and how would he react if he wasn’t – was extremely easy to maintain. If he wasn’t mad, Kaye decided, he would continue his quest, assume that everyone was out to get him, and try to regain his freedom. If he was mad, equally, he could do what he wanted to, being nuts, and doing what he wanted to in this case meant, again, that he would continue his quest, assume that everyone was out to get him, and try to regain his freedom.

  His plan was so clear that sometimes Kaye wondered just how fine the line between being mad and being not mad actually was. Nevertheless, it was a good plan, and Kaye decided to get on with it. To this end, he applied for permission to use the library. This was refused, on the grounds that Kaye was mad, if not in so many words, so instead he applied to become a trusty. Kaye’s extensive reading had told him that in institutions, sometimes inmates, mad or not, were allowed to hold minor positions. From the point of view of staff and warders, these positions were too dull or unpaid to be worth holding, but from the point of view of the inmates, anything was better than sitting in your cell all day pretending to be interested in what flies do.

  After a day or two, Kaye was taken to see Dr Allman.

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

  “Yes,” said Kaye.

  “Good,” said the doctor. “Because if you didn’t, and you were as well read as we know you to be, that would mean you’re lying. And lying is in many ways a form of denial. And we can’t give positions of trust to liars. Unless,” the doctor added after a moment’s thought, “we wanted the liars to feel that we trusted them with responsibility. Even though we don’t because they’re liars.”

  Kaye nodded, hoping to impress Dr Allman with his sanity and honesty. This was a waste of time, as the doctor was studying a fly to see if it was looking at him funny.

  “Why do you want to be a trusty?” said Dr Allman, taking off his glasses and pulling a small contact lens case out of a drawer

  “Because I want to prove that there is such a thing as a cockroach and thus prove that unknown forces are controlling our, and in particular my, lives, or life,” said Kaye. He had decided to tell the truth, as that would make him look mad, even if he was, or wasn’t.

  “Wow, you’re as nutty as a fruit cake,” said Dr Allman. “Which is what a layman would say,” he added quickly. “But I am not a layman. I can tell from your remarks that you are unwell in the head.” He shoved a contact lens into his eye. It fell out again.

  “So can I be a trusty?” said Kaye.

  “I should say not,” said the doctor, patting his jacket in search of the lens. “Being a trusty is a responsible position, given the limits of being a patient in a booby… a mental hos…. an institution for cureitude. And you are clearly too… too brain-seasick to be given respon
sibility.”

  “Oh,” said Kaye. He felt his small, painful world get smaller, and more painful.

  “However, I am a kind man, if not too lucky with my contact lenses,” said the doctor. “I shall instead let you use the library. You can read books but not lend them out to other people. Or chew them.”

  “But you wouldn’t let me use the library before,” said Kaye.

  “Ah yes,” said the doctor. He looked like he was thinking. “That was to teach you that life isn’t a picnic. ”

  “Thank you,” said Kaye. “I suspected life might not be. What with being in a mental hospital and everything.”

  “Booby hatch,” said Dr Allman absently as Kaye was escorted back to his cell.

  Kaye’s membership of the library was a pleasant thing. Every three days he was allowed to leave his cell, cross the tree-lined courtyard to the admin block, sit in his own corner, and read as many books as he liked. He could even take out three library books to read in his cell. As the institution had once been a large country house belonging to a vicious but literate earl, and the library had remained intact when the country house had become a lunatic asylum (with the vicious earl its first inmate, which was neat and tidy), it was a superb library for a bughouse.

  After several months, Kaye had hardly begun to work his way through the fiction section. He had become well acquainted with several novels of the boys’ public school variety, some of which were unusually heavy on the punishment-of-innocent-victims side, and he was reading all the classics of 20th century literature that he could find. There were quite a few of these, as the library liked to confiscate inmates’ books for their own stock (which explained the large and perhaps inappropriate haul of serial killer biographies, histories of the Third Reich and novelettes about men coming to terms with fatherhood).