Sparks

by David Quantick

  SPARKS

  By David Quantick

  Text copyright © 2012 David Quantick

  All rights reserved

  To Jenna, with love

  And thanks to…

  Steven Appleby for the cover

  Andy Fyfe for design and engineering

  James Gil for integral suggestions

  Part One

  SPARKS

  Vanilla vodka and ginger ale vanilla vodka and ginger ale vanilla vodka and ginger ale vanilla vodka and ginger ale vanilla vodka and ginger ale it said in Sparks’s head.

  vanilla vodka and ginger ale vanilla vodka and ginger ale vanilla vodka and ginger ale vanilla vodka and ginger ale vanilla vodka and it continued on. vanilla vodka and ginger ale vanilla and then, just as Sparks thought he was going to have vanilla vodka and ginger ale vanilla vodka and ginger ale vanilla vodka and ginger ale going through his head for ever, it suddenly stopped.

  Sparks leaned back on his pillow and sighed. The silence was blissful. Birds sang and bees hummed and an ageing fly left over from the summer described an incompetent arc around the bedside table before its wings fell off and it dropped dead in an ashtray. Sparks closed his eyes and let his gaze follow a bit of eye dirt around its orange circuit.

  It was the first of May.

  The silence in Sparks’s head was glorious. Placing a large climb-proof mental fence between his lovely quiet present and the drunken chaos of last night (and one event in particular, which even the sound of vanilla vodka and ginger ale vanilla vodka and ginger ale vanilla vodka and ginger ale was preferable to), Sparks inched the pillow under his head a little more and gin and cranberry juice gin and cranberry juice gin and

  Sparks winced in new pain. When would he learn not to mix his drinks?

  Sparks slowly got up. It was the first of May. Somewhere in the word, fierce men with moustaches were marching under red flags. And, somewhere else in the world, they weren’t.

  Paul Sparks – who no one ever called ‘Paul’, except his mother, and even then only until he was 12 – got to work, eventually. The people Sparks travelled to work with were an incurious lot. Possibly this was because Sparks travelled to work on a single decker bus rather than a commuter train, and so didn't have to sit facing the same people day after day. Possibly also this was because many people who use single decker buses are barmy, carry knives and don’t like to be asked stupid questions. In this respect, Sparks found it quite a good system, and certainly superior to taxi travel, where big fools in the driving seat were always asking stupid questions.

  Today a taxi would have been preferable, even one driven by a boil-faced ogre high on talking pills. On the bus this morning – the bus being the 106 from Stamford Hill and the morning being the first of May, time 9.40am, weather too hard to look up – were several people who in another age would have been known as ‘colourful characters’, but in this one tended to be known as ‘nutcases’. Large women with bags struggled to get off the bus and bumped their bags against Sparks’ head. Men who had breakfasted well on egg and meat products struggled to get on the bus and broke wind in Sparks’ face. Noises and discomforts were everywhere. Manners were abandoned, as was hygiene. Sparks could have got up and shouted to everyone on the bus that he was a human being and he wasn’t going to take it any more. But everyone on the bus was a human being too and they were all also taking it to some degree. Sparks was a nice man (and cowardly when it came to asking teenagers and mad old men and stinking people to do things). So he did the next best thing. He retreated into his mind.

  Soon the man behind’s roaring chunks of fear and swearing were far away things. The lad beside him with the bad radio faded into the buzzing of ambient bees. And even the very special odour of someone near the front became nothing more than the vaguest hint of slightly singed hair inside a damp wardrobe, as Sparks sank into thought.

  It was a year ago. Sparks was in a house with Alison, somewhere outside London. The house was enormous, freshly painted and empty. It had a massive front room, with no decoration other than a gargantuan white fireplace and a dirty great big thing round the light fitting which Sparks thought might be called a ‘ceiling rose’ but he really didn't know. That was more Alison’s sort of thing.

  The only other thing in the room was large and white, too. It was an estate agent. The estate agent's name was John and he was showing Sparks and Alison around the property. Sparks had phoned John the previous day to indicate that they were thinking of buying an enormous house, and John had indicated that he had one to show them. Now they were standing in the gargantuan front room underneath the dirty great big thing round the light fitting, and not saying anything, as people do when they have been shown round a house and want to avoid saying something obvious like, “Well, we’ve just looked round a house.”

  John the estate agent looked expectantly at Alison. It was a very attractive house, and the sort he imagined women would like. Also, it was quite cheap owing to an enormous structural fault (basement, stream) that John was not going to bring up yet, or at all.

  Alison finally noticed John looking at her expectantly.

  “I like it,” she said. She nodded. “I really like it.”

  Sparks made a noise with his mouth. It wasn’t a favourable noise. In fact, it was – phonetically speaking – “phnurth”.

  Alison looked at Sparks.

  “Did you say something?”

  “No,” said Sparks, turning away from Alison and jamming his hands a bit firmly into his jacket pockets (he was wearing a jacket today, to be taken seriously by estate agents).

  “Yes, you did,” said Alison. She looked at John, who tried to look blank. “It's a lovely house,” she said. “But he…”

  She shrugged.

  “He what?” said Sparks, turning round again. “What he what?”

  “Nothing,” said Alison. “Only it’s obvious you don’t like it.”

  “Oh,” said Sparks, in the voice of a man who hated vowels. “I am sorry.”

  “Are you?” Alison said, and John sensed a small storm cloud brewing.

  “I'll just step…” he began, but Sparks cut in.

  “Yes,” he said, “I am sorry. I'm sorry I don’t like the house. I’m sorry it's a big white cack house. I'm sorry we had to waste this gentleman's time. But most of all I’m sorry I had to take half the day off work to come all the way out here and look at this... this...”

  “I’ll just pop down…” said John the estate agent, but this time Alison cut in.

  “Day off work?” she said. “What work? If it wasn’t for me, working all the hours God gives, you’d be signing on. He hasn’t,” she said, turning to John, “been in the office more than an hour a week since December.”

  “I’ve got SAD!” shouted Sparks. “Seasonally Affected Disorder!”

  “You’ve got SHB!” shouted Alison, “Shit For Brains!”

  “I think I heard the doorbell,” said John, and fled.

  The door slammed behind him.

  Alison, eyes burning, strode up to Sparks.

  “Well?” she said.

  Sparks smiled. “Well,” he said, “I think we’ve got five minutes.”

  He threw his jacket to the ground. Then he embraced Alison and they began kissing each other and stroking each other, quite hard, and slid to the ground.

  After four and a half minutes, Sparks looked up at the light fitting.

  “Is that,” he said, his left hand still caught in Alison's bra strap, “is that a ceiling rose?”

  They saw three more houses that day, and didn’t put in an offer for any of them.

  Some warm minutes later, Sparks got off the bus, hot, vexed, and smelling like a cat basket, and walked a mile to his office. His office was on the ground floor of a block of modern workshop dev
elopments, beneath a West Indian barbershop and next to a printer’s that wanted people to phone Florida for £1.99 a minute. He unlocked the door, turned the CLOSED sign round to read OPEN (this always confused him as, from his desk, the sign read CLOSED and he would get up to turn it round again, then realise), and sat down in a very old swivel chair with three working wheels and a dead one. He leaned back in the chair, his head resting on a large cutting tacked to the wall.

  The cutting was a full page from an issue of the New Musical Express dated 6 November 1977. It was an ad for a mail order company that specialised in T-shirt designs. Some of the T-shirts featured the logos or LP covers of various bands, most of them American, and several named after states or cities like Kansas or Boston, but most of them were funny slogans and cartoons.

  I’M WITH STUPID, one said, over an arrow pointing sideways. PATIENCE MY ASS, said a caption next to a cartoon of two vultures, I’M GOING TO KILL SOMETHING. FLY UNITED, said another, this time over an illustration of two airborne pigs having sex. JOIN THE ARMY, said a long and hard to read one, TRAVEL TO EXOTIC COUNTRIES, MEET INTERESTING PEOPLE AND KILL THEM. Another said, in Gothic script, YEA, THOUGH I WALK THROUGH THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH, I SHALL FEAR NO EVIL, ’COS I’M THE BIGGEST BASTARD IN THE VALLEY.

  Sparks’ entire working life was based on this cutting. He worked for a company who made replica 1970s T-shirts. For a small fee – or rather, a fee about 20 times larger than the original cost of the T-shirts – any retro-obsessed student, nostalgic fortysomething or plain mad person could have an exact reconstruction of a T-shirt design not seen on the streets since punk had happened.

  Sparks’ job was to reconstruct the T-shirts from the tiny pictures on the ad. Unable to find any originals, he would stare at the drawings for hours, sometimes using a magnifying glass, sometimes using beer-powered eyes, and draw new versions that were as accurate as possible. He had once told Alison that he thought of himself as a T-shirt scientist, reconstructing the DNA of long lost designs, and bringing extinct diplodocuses of the T-shirt world like PATIENCE MY ASS back into being. Alison’s reply had been brief, and involved swearing.

  Sparks remembered this now. He had been sure Alison had been joking when he told her was a T-shirt scientist and she said, “Sod off, Sparks”, but it occurred to him now that there had been an edge in her voice, some buried tension about to come to the surface. Somewhere in there, he felt, was the sound of Alison getting fed up with him. True, the phrase “Sod off, Sparks” is not in itself an affectionate one, as lots of people had proved to Sparks over the years, many of them builders, but generally, when Alison used the phrase, it was affectionately and in a way that suggested she didn’t so much want him to sod off as to, well, sod on, as it were.

  And so, whenever he looked at the ad with the T-shirt slogans on, he heard Alison saying not just “Sod off, Sparks”, but something worse, like “It’s over, Sparks”. As a consequence, he didn’t want to look at the cutting any more – he had memorised every design on it, anyway – so, with some effort, Sparks got up again and turned his desk around to face away from it. He could have just moved the cutting but that, he told himself, would have been too easy.

  He sighed and turned on his computer, which was beige and horrible with a brown groove on top where someone had tried to rest a cigarette on it. The screen was off-white and horrible and had a line of Tipp-Ex across one corner for some reason, which had been hilarious when Sparks was young and in love but now so wasn’t. It contained two icons. One said, ‘THINGS TO DO”. The other was the logo of an internet company famous for being inept, expensive and unknown outside Britain and Luxembourg.

  Sparks was aware that there were cheaper, better internet companies but this one had infiltrated his system so thoroughly that the only way he could get rid of them would be to throw the computer away. Also he quite liked the idea of being, on some tiny level, a bit Luxembourgish. One day someone might say to Sparks, “I wonder how it feels, how it really feels to be from Luxembourg,” and Sparks, puffing on the stout briar he had brought specially for the anecdote, would say, “Well, I actually, ah, use their internet company.”

  Briarless for now, Sparks looked at the two icons, from THINGS TO DO back to the internet company logo, and back to THINGS TO DO again. Then, for no other reasons than boredom and the fact that no-one in the world has ever wanted to open a file called THINGS TO DO, Sparks clicked on the internet icon. After a while of more clicking, he decided to look at his emails. This was not time-consuming as he didn’t have any. Sparks was a bit annoyed about this, and opened his online address book to see who was avoiding him.

  His online address book was deeply sparse. It consisted of two addresses. One was Alison’s, and one – owing to Sparks’ not powerful understanding of how email worked – was his own. As Alison wasn’t talking to him at the moment, or, to be more precise, forever, and as even Sparks wasn’t so desperate as to send himself email, there were no emails for him. Sparks closed the address book. Then, just for the hell of it, he opened the address book again and sent himself a blank email. Then, just for the slightly diminishing hell of it, he opened it, and forwarded it to himself. Then he opened it again, wrote a swear word and sent it back to himself. This time, he deleted it without opening it.

  Now Sparks had run out of reasons to be online. And, according to his computer, he had THINGS TO DO. But seeing Alison’s email address had made him think of Alison again. This was hardly surprising – seeing traffic wardens could make him think of Alison. Pictures of racing drivers could make him think of Alison. Once he had actually been at the pictures with Alison and, engrossed in the film, had forgotten she was there until a huge ant-faced robot had loomed into sight on the screen, and that had reminded him of Alison and he had suddenly started with the realisation that the proper Alison was sitting next to him. He tried to explain this to Alison in the pub later, but she just smiled, in a way that also reminded him of her, if you can be reminded of somebody by something that they are doing when you are actually looking at them.

  So Sparks being reminded of Alison by her email address was not deeply unusual for him. Email had played a large part in the early stages of their relationship, when after a lot of sex and beer, they would have to part and go to their respective places of work. Sparks, feeling empty somehow without Alison, would email her little messages and graphics. He had read about emoticons, little faces made up of semi-colons and commas that apparently when you looked at them sideways made faces. To Sparks they always looked like someone had been shot dead and fallen face down onto the part of the keyboard where the semi-colons live, but he supposed other people liked them. Eventually, Alison sent him an email asking him to stop sending her bits of punctuation because she couldn’t understand them. Sparks, who had been trying to convey the emotions of regret and mild lust by drawing a little semi-colon face with some number for a hat, realised then and there that she was the woman for him.

  I LOVE YOU, he wrote back.

  SO DO I, Alison replied.

  SO DO YOU WHAT? wrote Sparks. LOVE YOURSELF, OR ME?

  I HAVE TO GO NOW, Alison replied.

  Most of their correspondence was like this. It wasn’t the collected letters of George Bernard Shaw but it meant a lot to Sparks, and to Alison as well. Sparks found to his utter lack of surprise that he was feeling slightly aroused. The combination of beer, bad food and low-grade sleep had not dented the wreckage of Sparks’ libido in any way. The fact that his (fairly useless) instincts told him that dumping Alison – because Sparks was the dumper here – was the right thing to do was irrelevant, so far as his libido was concerned. Sparks’ libido was like a Japanese soldier in his trousers who thought the war was still on and occasionally would rush out and kill some socks, or something. Right now the soldier appeared to be fixing bayonets for a charge.

  Now, Sparks was not the kind of person who used the internet in a dubious manner. He would never dream of giving his credit card number to some people in Idaho s
o he could watch tiny videos of oddly-endowed men and women at it like knives. He still vaguely believed that pornography involved the exploitation of women. He was generally embarrassed when someone sent him material of a suggestive nature on the net. But right now, that second, he found he wanted to see something rude.

  Now what? thought Sparks, who was no expert on the internet. He had no sites bookmarked, perhaps because he didn’t know what a bookmark was, unless it was leather and had A PRESENT FROM BEAUFORT CASTLE written on it. But he did vaguely remember a conversation he’d overheard in a pub a few weeks ago, when Alison had been at the bar buying them drinks and Sparks was whiling away a few minutes eavesdropping on a pair of spotty men at the next table.

  “It’s amazing,” said the first spotty man. “You just go to the site, and it generates other sites, and it’s random.”

  “What, like dirty sites?” said the other spotty man, who clearly was not ready to move on to the subject of randomness yet.

  “Yes, dirty sites,” the first spotty man said. “It generates them. At random.”

  “What do you mean, ‘random’?” said the other man.

  “I mean random,” said the first man. “Random random. How else can I explain it? Random is random. That’s the word for it. Random is the definition of random. I don’t know! It’s random, it’s got randomness, it…”

  “So what do you do?” asked the other man, who had a relentless quality to his enquiries.

  “I work in a hobby shop,” said the first man, slightly embarrassed. “We sell plastic jets in kit form.”

  “No,” said the second man, “to get the sites.”

  “I told you,” the first man said, “You go to the site and it generates sites, and you click on them, and…”