Sparks

by David Quantick

  Alison!

  You are mad, you know. I have Flat 3, 14 Plover Gardens, W14. Is this up to date?

  Jen

  Sparks replied that it was up to date, and wrote the address down. Then he went to the pub.

  Three pints of beer later, Sparks decided that he had better get on with it before he was too drunk. He went outside and hailed a cab.

  “Plover Gardens,” he said to the driver. Then, once inside the cab, he had a thought.

  “Is there a hotel near Plover Gardens?” he said.

  “Blimey,” said the driver. “Change your mind every six seconds, why doncha?”

  “I have £500 in cash and no credit cards,” said Sparks to the receptionist. “But I do have…”

  He stopped. He felt himself to be slightly drunker than he had realised. He had certainly intended to go to a nicer hotel than the one he was in.

  “Of course,” he said, “as I am the person who is drunk as well as the person who is trying to see if I am drunk, then both of us are drunk.”

  “What’s that in your hand?” said the receptionist, who was no philosopher. Instead, if forced to guess, Sparks would have said that the receptionist had actually devoted most of his life to the study and breeding of dandruff.

  “Never mind,” said Sparks, ramming his hand back into his pocket. “Because I have £500 and no credit cards.”

  “Hundred pounds a night,” said the receptionist, “There’s no lift.”

  The receptionist pointed to where a lift might be, if there was one.

  “That’s all right,” said Sparks, “I’ve not got any bags.”

  He raised his arm, to indicate any bags he was carrying, if he had been carrying any.

  The receptionist gave Sparks a tiny key attached to an enormous piece of wood and Sparks made his way to where the lift wasn’t.

  “Good night,” he said to the receptionist. The receptionist ignored him. £500 or not, this guest was clearly too drunk to want any prostitutes.

  “He could have gone to hers,” said Duncan.

  “He doesn’t know where she is,” said Jeff.

  “He could have looked it up,” said Duncan. “He’s good at that.”

  “I suppose,” said Jeff. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “He could have gone to him,” said Duncan.

  “He doesn’t know anything about him.”

  “He’s got a name.”

  “I suppose. It doesn’t matter.”

  “Cheer up.”

  “Don’t tell me to – I really hate it when people tell me to cheer up.”

  “Well, you keep saying ‘It doesn’t matter’ like you’re depressed.”

  “I’m not depressed.”

  “Then why do you keep saying…”

  “I keep saying ‘It doesn’t matter’ because… It. Doesn’t. Matter. As in it doesn’t matter because if he finds her or if he finds him, it’ll only confirm what we told him.”

  “But he’ll know…”

  “He won’t because he’s in luuvvve with her.”

  Jeff spent a long time saying ‘luuvvve’, even for an elongated version of ‘love’.

  “And because he’s in luuuuvvvve with her,” he added, “he’ll believe us.”

  “What if he hasn’t gone to look for her, or him?” said Duncan. “Or does that not matter either?”

  Jeff was silent for a second. Then he said, “What did he take from you, exactly?”

  “Answer me first.”

  “No, you answer me.”

  “No, you.”

  “No, you.”

  Sparks woke up with a slight headache. The room was fuzzy and yellow, as though a huge dog had put its leg up on the window. This was in keeping with the room’s overall design, which looked as though a kind of decor-eating animal had eaten a lot of cheap furniture and vomited it up, but Sparks decided, more rationally, that he must have fallen asleep with the curtains open, and now the room was filled with the urinary light of street lamps.

  He got up off the bed, whose candlewick patterns clung to him worryingly, and went to wash his face. Somewhere, if Jeff and Duncan are right, there must be a world where there actually is a decor-eating animal, Sparks thought to himself as he splashed one handful of boiling and one handful of freezing water onto his face.

  If Jeff and Duncan are right, he thought again.

  “No, you.”

  “No, you.”

  “No – ow!”

  Sparks looked out the weeing windows. The street – Plover Gardens – was narrow, dirty and laid out according to some mystical dry-cleaner/curry house alternating scheme. He noticed that most of the dry-cleaners and curry houses had flats above them, most of them empty right now, but one or two occupied by large middle-aged men who spent their evenings leaning on the windowsill and watching television while smoking. At that exact moment, Sparks felt that there could not be a more fantastic way to live one’s life, certainly compared to ways of life like, say, being chased around the universe by two psychotic anorexics who had just told him that the love of his life was now at it with a nutcase who he had to kill.

  Sparks guillotined this thought and put on a coat. He went downstairs to the lobby, pretended to wait for the lift to annoy the receptionist, and went out into a night acrid with curry and cleaning fluid.

  14 Plover Gardens was a big thing, a white house with tall cake pillars sandwiched between other white houses with tall cake pillars in a street composed entirely of cake pillar white houses. It was big enough to contain four or five flats, and so it had been divided into seven or eight. Flat 3 was on the first floor and, fortunately for Sparks, faced the main road.

  Sparks sat inside a Portuguese chicken restaurant, wiping grease from his burning fingers and looking out at 14 Plover Gardens. For once, he did not have a plan, unless “LOOK AT ALISON’S OLD FLAT ALL NIGHT” was a plan. He sat at the window for two hours, killing time by occasionally going up and getting more refills of diet cola (Sparks hated diet cola but reckoned that the staff would be less likely to throw him out if he drank something he didn’t like. How the staff would know, or even care, that he didn’t like diet cola was not something Sparks wanted to think about.)

  Sparks was onto his fifth diet cola of the evening when he saw Alison come out of 14 Plover Gardens. She was laughing and wearing a yellow coat. Sparks remembered the coat, or its equivalent; he had bought it for Alison on her birthday. Or, more accurately, he had given Alison the money and she had bought it. Or, even more accurately, he had given Alison not quite enough money and she had made up the difference and bought the coat. But then, he thought, she once got me the wrong CD one Christmas so we’re even. Well, not even, much. Or at all, rea…

  There was someone else with Alison, coming now out of the doorway and carrying an umbrella. He was tall and, even across the street through the window of a Portuguese chicken restaurant, intense-faced. This was the sort of face that would look intense under clown make-up and a big straw hat. It was all cheekbones and brooding dark eyes. If the face’s owner had not just then been kissed by Alison, Sparks would have hated it. As it was, it did get kissed by Alison, and Sparks really did hate it, a lot.

  Alison and the man with the face crossed the road. They were coming towards the restaurant. Sparks, meant to be dead, stuffed his face into a Portuguese menu; peering over it like a git, he noticed that, even crossing the road, the intense man managed to look intense, and brooding, and shifty. He looked as if he was watching for something, suspicious of every passer-by and car. Sparks found he had never distrusted someone he hadn’t met quite so much in his whole life. The man put his hand out, and a cab slowed down. He bent down to the driver’s window in what looked to Sparks a brooding way and spoke to the driver, intensely. The driver nodded, and the man opened the cab door.

  Alison got into the cab, and it drove off. The man went back inside 14 Plover Gardens. And then, presumably, up to Alison’s flat. Possibly, probably even, Sparks thought, to sit on her bed and
rumple her sheets and generally act suspiciously.

  He had no choice. He had to go and look.

  Sparks stood outside the house with a lot of keys. He rattled one out of the bunch that had a bit of green marker pen on it. It was, in his world, the key to the outer door which he had had copied when they were still together and failed, as happens, quite often actually, to return when he had given back the key to Alison’s flat. Alison had never mentioned this, probably because with only the outer door key, all Sparks could do was hang around Alison’s lobby, and she knew that Sparks wasn’t really that kind of person.

  Today, however, Sparks was that kind of person as he let himself into the lobby of 14 Plover Gardens. He climbed the immense, windy, banister-wise dubious stairs to the first floor. Once there, his options pretty much ended. He could hardly break the door down and shout, “I am here to eavesdrop on you! Carry on doing what you were doing!” at the man. Nor could he listen at the door, in case one of the other people in the building came by and saw him. The door also had no letterbox, as all the mail tended to lie downstairs in a big heap to be sifted through.

  Sparks stood outside Alison’s flat, wondering how to look convincing on a landing. He was just deciding that this was impossible when an old man came out of his flat to put a cat on the landing.

  “Door’s open,” said the old man. “I don’t think she’s in, though.”

  “Pardon?” said Sparks.

  “The door’s open,” said the old man. “You’re Sparks, aren’t you? I remember you now.”

  “Yes, I am,” said Sparks.

  “I thought you were dead,” said the old man.

  “I get that a lot,” said Sparks.

  “Well, you’d better go in,” said the old man, watching the cat as it buggered about the landing.

  The old man laughed through dated teeth. “Go on, you daft animal,” he said to the cat, “Go out the window and enjoy yourself. Be a cat.”

  The cat ignored him and buggered about some more.

  “Stupid thing,” said the old man, without rancour, and went back inside his flat. The cat immediately stopped buggering about and sat down. It stared at Sparks. Sparks noticed that the cat had a slight squint, which made it look slightly baffled.

  “I don’t know,” said Sparks. But he did. Feeling even more cautious, he pushed Alison’s door. Very quietly, it opened.

  The cat ran in, and Sparks, feeling more justified by this, followed it.

  Sparks had of course no intention of speaking to the intense man (“Carry on! Don’t mind me!”) or even of being seen by him. Alison’s flat was quite big for a small flat, as it were, and Sparks thought he would just sneak around, gleaning, and trying not to walk straight into the intense man.

  He walked straight into the intense man.

  Joseph Kaye had been going to make a cup of tea and watch a cartoon about an animated bathmat (Alison liked cartoons, and had pointed out several of her favourites to Kaye) when he heard voices on the landing, laughter and the word “dead”. His suspicions, never exactly low, were instantly raised high like a traitor’s quartered corpse on some ramparts. They went through the roof when the door began to slowly open.

  A cat appeared. It looked baffled by something, and went straight past Kaye into the living room, where it sat under the TV set and mewed at Kaye, ineptly.

  “Foolish cat,” said Kaye, and was about to go in after it when Sparks walked into him.

  “Hello,” said Sparks.

  The other man stared at him, intensely.

  “I was…” Sparks rifled his mind for a verb. “I was following the cat,” he said.

  “Is it your cat?” said the man.

  “No,” said Sparks. “I was just… no.”

  It’s not going well, Sparks’ brain told him. I know, Sparks replied. He looked for an exit. There wasn’t one.

  “Who are you?” said the man. “Because following a cat is not a good enough reason to enter someone else’s property.”

  “I used to go out with Alison,” said Sparks.

  Fantastic, said Sparks’ brain, maybe we should let the ears or the liver do the thinking from now on.

  “What?” said the man. “Who are you?”

  “Um,” said Sparks. “I have to go now.”

  “You can’t go,” said the man.

  “You wanted me to go just now.”

  “You can’t go!” said the man. He looked agitated to Sparks. In fact, he was shaking. Sparks was alarmed. People rarely shook when he said he was going

  “Who are you?’’ said the man again. “You didn’t go out with Alison.”

  He seemed very angry about this. Affronted, Sparks’ brain might have said, if it wasn’t so affronted itself.

  “I did,” said Sparks, himself now affronted.

  The cat walked between their legs, wall-eyed but at least not affronted by anything.

  “What’s your name?” said the man.

  “ – ” said Sparks.

  “That’s not a name, that’s a mouth noise,” said the man. “You’re not some… boyfriend. Why are you here?”

  “I…” said Sparks. “Cat,” he added, inefficiently.

  Sparks turned and ran.

  Kaye was vibrating with anger and fear. The intruder was deeply upsetting on a level he couldn’t explain. Kaye didn’t believe the intruder’s story. No one would go out with this bizarre figure, who acted mad and looked as though he had slept in a moat, and the cat story was an obvious feeble cover. Kaye did not know what to do next. Then his anger overcame his fear and he lunged at the intruder.

  Kaye lunged a second after the intruder turned and ran. As the intruder was turning in a small corridor, Kaye’s lunge connected fairly successfully and he pushed the intruder to the ground.

  “Who sent you?” he said, sitting on him.

  “No one sent me,” said the intruder.

  “That’s not true,” said Kaye. “You don’t know me. I don’t know you. You must have been sent. Who sent you?”

  “Fair point,” said the intruder. “I can’t really say. Not down here.”

  “I know what you want,” said Kaye, pulling the intruder’s arm round from under him.

  “Good,” said the intruder. “That means you don’t have to sit on me and pull my arms out of their sockets.”

  “Where did you get Alison’s name?” said Kaye. “I ought to kill you.”

  “I went out with her,” said the intruder.

  Kaye pulled the intruder’s arm harder.

  “I bloody did. For six years. Until last summer. ”

  “He’s dead,” said Kaye. “You’re not dead.”

  “I can explain that,” said the intruder. “Only I need my arm.”

  “I need your arm. Because if I do this…”

  “Ah!”

  “Then you feel pain. If you feel pain you’re not dead. So you’re lying. Who are you?”

  “You’re mad.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “OK. But you are mad. Ah!”

  “Tell me who sent you or I will kill you. I mean it. I have had enough.”

  “Let me up and I’ll tell you.”

  “Don’t be stupid. I have watched television.”

  “That’s nice. What’s your favourite programme?”

  “I mean that even on television, people who say ‘Let me up and I’ll tell you’ are going to attack the person not letting them up when they get a chance. Now tell me who you are.”

  “Right. Good point. But I could tell you who I am and be lying. And – and! – I mean but...”

  “And? But?”

  “And, but my wallet with my ID is in my coat pocket which my nipple is lying on. There’s lots of ID. And a photo of me that I stole from my girlfriend, with my writing on the back which I suppose isn ID but…”

  The intruder looked thoughtful, in a stupid way.

  “Anyway, I have to get up,” he concluded.

  Kaye thought about this.

  “
All right.”

  He got off the intruder and stood back to let him get up.

  Sparks got up. He reached into his coat pocket for his wallet. Then he leapt at the man, who was clearly crazy and probably meant it about the killing him thing.

  The man must have guessed that Sparks would do this, because he hit him very hard on the chin. Sparks staggered back onto the wall and, to his great surprise, passed out.

  Kaye dragged the intruder into the front room. The cat walked around the intruder’s unconscious body. Kaye took the wallet and threw its contents onto a table. There was about £400 in cash, a cashpoint card and three video club membership cards, all of which belonged to a man called Paul Sparks, and a picture of Alison. This last Kaye found more disturbing than he could explain. The money wasn’t too reassuring either. It looked perfectly fine, but it also looked wrong. It looked too perfect, Kaye thought. He took out a £10 note from his own wallet and put it alongside one of the other notes. They were identical, but the other note made his note look fake. This too Kaye found disturbing, but in a different way.

  He took one of the video membership cards and the picture of Alison and stuffed Sparks’ wallet back into his coat. Then he sat down on the floor and shook for several minutes. After that, he went into the kitchen and opened as many drawers as he could, as loudly as possible. He was ostensibly seeing if Alison had any old packets of cigarettes at the back of a drawer, but really he found that slamming the drawers made him feel better.

  Kaye found some cigarettes, lit one, discovered it was so elderly that it made him depressed just smoking it, extinguished it under the tap, and went back into the other room to find out who had sent Sparks.

  Sparks was gone.

  So was Kaye’s wallet.

  Waking up, Sparks noticed he was alone, sneaked out of the room past the kitchen, where he heard some banging, decided not to see if the banging was drawers or guns being loaded, went into the hall, saw a wallet on a table, took it and left, full of fear, triumph and dramatic irony.