Sparks

by David Quantick

“These are dirty sites?” the other said.

  “Yes dirty sites!” said the first man, a bit loudly. “Random ones! That change all the time!”

  “Oh,” said the other man. “Random. I see.”

  He took a sip of his beer.

  “So they’re definitely dirty then?”

  Just then Alison reappeared with the drinks, and the conversation moved on to more salacious topics, like why Sparks didn’t like pasta, and why that man over there was trying to put the other one’s head into his pint glass.

  Sparks, remembering the spotty men in the pub, and noting that he now had an ocean-going chub going on, made a decision. He tapped the words RANDOM DIRTY SITE GENERATOR into the computer. Then he looked at them and felt embarrassed. He wondered if other people could find out what sites he had been looking at. A vision of Alison finding out that Sparks looked up dubious sites came into his mind, followed by one of Sparks, unshaven and dark-lidded, being deported for unspecified sex crimes and made to live in a barrel far out in the Atlantic Ocean.

  Sparks looked at the words RANDOM DIRTY SITE GENERATOR again. He erased the words DIRTY and SITE, so now he was looking at the phrase RANDOM GENERATOR. It looked too short. Like life, Sparks thought, except the way he was feeling right now, his life could have got shorter by about 50 years and he wouldn’t have been that bothered. As far as Sparks was concerned, Sparks and his life were heading for a divorce. I’ve dumped my girlfriend, Sparks thought, and now I appear to be considering dumping my life.

  Life, thought Sparks. The Japanese soldier in his trousers had retreated to the jungle of his subconscious. Life, thought Sparks again, trying to sound wry in his head. He looked at the computer again, and typed LIFE into the search engine. Then he clicked on GO. Too late, and frankly not caring that much, Sparks realised that when he had written LIFE on the search engine, the cursor had still been where he’d erased dirty site. The search engine was racing off to look for, not LIFE, but something else.

  The something else came up. There was one result for it. Result, thought Sparks, this time trying to sound ironic in his head. The information on the result was scanty in the extreme. It consisted solely of the three words Sparks had typed in. On the screen in front of Sparks, underlined in a rather nice blue, were the words RANDOM LIFE GENERATOR. Sparks clicked on them.

  Everything changed after that. Sort of.

  But not quite yet.

  Sparks was impressed; you didn’t get sites this slow nowadays. It was all highly retro. First the screen on Sparks’ computer filled up with red pixels, very slowly, like a large and cumbersome migraine. Then the three letters R, L and G appeared, flashing hesitantly. This went on for fully two minutes, after which the word LOADING appeared. This too flashed for a couple of minutes, until finally the R, the L and the G reappeared, spread out away from each other, and the spaces between filled up with letters to read, perhaps a little unsurprisingly, RANDOM LIFE GENERATOR.

  All in all, six minutes had passed since Sparks had clicked onto the site. Yet he was totally engrossed in its unfolding; so much so that when the word ENTER appeared, in orange letters in a little yellow box that was so almost orangey-yellow as to make the word ENTER all but illegible, he stared at it for a long time, just oddly contented at coming across such an amateurish but somehow engaging site. It was, to use a word that Sparks had excised from his vocabulary and liked to wince at whenever others – such as, mainly Alison – used it, cute. Finally, when the word ENTER started flashing and some sort of rudimentary electronic keyboard began to play the scales in a dinky but sluggish way, Sparks woke from his reverie and clicked on ENTER.

  All hell broke loose. The music stopped being dinky and started being jagged and jarring, like some modern classical music Alison had made Sparks listen to once, while the screen turned black, then red, then a garish yellow, then repeated the colours in a strobing fashion, and suddenly (and, from where Sparks was sitting, a bit too realistically) a tiny object rushed forward from the centre of the screen, getting larger and larger as it got nearer, until – just before it became so big it nearly filled the screen – it turned from small white blob to a huge bleached skull and crossbones.

  The skull and crossbones looked unnaturally real to Sparks. Then its white jaws opened and a voice so loud that it made Sparks start (and also made him wonder how his crappy old speakers had got so powerful) shouted:

  “WARNING! DO NOT ENTER WITHOUT PERMISSION OR AUTHORISATION!”

  Sparks sat back in shock, part of him wondering if anything else scary might happen, like the computer getting off the table and twatting him, or his ears suddenly catching fire. Nothing, fortunately, did, and the skull and crossbones just lurked on the screen, wobbling slightly and not looking all that frightening at all any more. Sparks moved the mouse tentatively across the screen. When the cursor passed over the formerly terrifying skull, a little hand appeared. Sparks clicked on the little hand.

  Nothing happened. Then the screen filled with text. Hundreds of words rushed downwards like a dictionary with the trots. Sparks peered in, to see if any of the words were rude. None of them were, although some of them were pretty strange and one of them might have been FROTTAGE. Finally the words slowed down to autocue speed, then some more again, and then they stopped completely. Then most of the words vanished, including the one that might have been FROTTAGE. There were about 12 words left on the screen, and they stood there, blinking slightly like some words picked for a school football team. Sparks leaned over and examined the screen. The 12 or so words didn’t make much sense to him.

  TODAY’S WORD REDOLENT OPERATING ENTRANCE LONDON 92 MARYLEBONE HS DUTY R PATTERSON

  Then the screen cleared completely, and just as quickly refilled itself again. There were 12 or so new words, and this time they said:

  TODAY’S WORD REDOLENT OPERATING ENTRANCE CAEN 45 RD CENTRALE DUTY JM LEVERT

  The screen cleared again, and refilled itself. Now there were some new words and they read – but Sparks had lost interest. The whole thing, whatever it was, looked like it might go on like this, as far as Sparks could tell, forever. He frowned and moved the mouse across the screen, looking for the word EXIT. Sparks found it, in the top right corner and was about to click on it when a shrill noise jammed itself into his consciousness. After a couple of seconds, Sparks realised that it was not the sound of a thousand tiny virtual missiles launching themselves with a shriek from the computer into his eyes, but his mobile phone. (He was not a man who got a lot of phone calls, and as a consequence could never quite remember his ringing tone.)

  He reached across the desk for his mobile. The display said TLA. It was the lovely Alison – calling, Sparks suddenly realised, for the first time since he had dumped her. Perhaps she wanted to get back with him! Perhaps – perhaps it was more complicated than that! In his mind’s slightly bloodshot eye, Sparks could suddenly see two Alisons next to each other in two split screen... screens, he supposed it would be.

  One Alison was smiling as she pressed SPARKS in her mobile phone memory. She looked ready to forgive and to make a new start.

  One Alison was crying as she pressed SPARKS in her mobile phone memory. She looked as unhappy as a person can be.

  Sparks winced. The second image was the likeliest. He pressed ANSWER, and the phone went dead. Alison had rung off, presumably not while smiling. Sparks felt miserable. Suddenly the boring listy website looked interesting again. The words were still coming up on the screen and clearing again and vanishing and returning. Even for a pretty bastard obscure message, he thought, this one looks completely unable to make up its mind. He decided to see if there was a pattern, like those submarine code things there was a documentary about every week these days.

  Probably, Sparks thought with a numb excitement, I have stumbled into some sort of government website and these are codes that could authorise a nuclear war or have the entire Shadow Cabinet rounded up to be eaten by dogs in a King’s Cross lock-up. Then again, probably not.

 
He read the latest words on the screen. TODAY’S WORD was still REDOLENT, whatever that signified, and there was still an OPERATING ENTRANCE, but this time it was BIRMINGHAM 32 OLIVER CROMWELL MANSIONS and the DUTY was LIN-YIU. Sparks’ head started to hurt in a new way. His hangover – vanilla vodka and ginger ale vanilla – started to hover like a nasty drunken fly on the edges of his perception. These messages were hard and possibly too stupid to be important secret service codes. Then again, Sparks believed the security services to be capable of doing anything at all, especially if it was completely idiotic and the sort of thing that would cause a slightly dim toddler to wave its arms in panic and shout, “No no no no NO!”. Sparks looked at the screen, checking for places to click that might accidentally plunge the world into horrific nuclear darkness. There weren’t any. He sat back in relief as the screen refreshed itself.

  TODAY’S WORD REDOLENT it said, as ever, then OPERATING ENTRANCE LONDON 17 OSWALD ROAD DUTY T SINGH. Sparks blinked. His flat was about 200 yards from an Oswald Road. He groped for a pen on his pen-covered desk and wrote the address down. Then, after a moment’s thought, he wrote down REDOLENT and T SINGH. When he had done that, Sparks wondered why. Normally he was the kind of person who didn’t even reply to letters that promised him millions of pounds and all he had to do was send the letter on to some other gits, but now he was writing down an address from a site that he didn’t know anything about.

  What am I going to do? thought Sparks. Go to some house, knock on the door and when some bloke opens it, say ‘Redolent’ to him?

  “Yes,” he heard himself say.

  In a particularly nasty but giant shed, a thin man known to his colleagues as Jeff turned away from a far too tiny computer screen that had suddenly started bleeping and addressed the equally skinny man sitting next to him.

  “Oh bugger,” said Jeff.

  “Oh bugger, Jeff?” said the other thin man.

  “Yes, Duncan,” said Jeff. “Oh bugger. Oh bugger someone’s online oh bugger.”

  He looked at Duncan. “Without authorisation. We’ve had a break in.”

  Duncan leaned over and looked at his own computer screen. Now it too was bleeping.

  “Oh bugger,” he said. He picked up his phone. It was an old red dialling telephone, with faded Care Bears stickers all over it, and it was very dusty. There was a reason for this; to the best of Duncan’s knowledge, it had never, ever, been used before.

  “What are you doing?” asked Jeff. He took the receiver from Duncan.

  “We have to report this,” said Duncan. Jeff looked at Duncan, in a bad way.

  “After last time?” he said. “After what you did?”

  Duncan looked downcast.

  “Then what are we going to do?” he said.

  “We’re going to have to sort it out ourselves,” said Jeff.

  “Oh bugger,” said Duncan.

  Oblivious to all this, obviously, Sparks was sitting at his desk closing down his computer, a process that took only slightly less time than closing down, say, a small industry. Sparks finally made the computer whirr and grumble into silence, scratched himself in several places where if they were sentient hands would be waving themselves and going, “No no no NO!”, and stood up.

  Funny, he thought, I was going to do something. Then he saw the piece of paper on the desk with the address on it. He picked it up, scrunched it into his pocket and headed for the door. Lunchtime, he thought, adding the word Beer as, literally, an afterthought.

  One Alison takes out a sheet of writing paper and writes a letter to her mother.

  Dear Mum,

  How are you? I am not bad, well I have been better. I am going if you and Dad don’t mind to come home for a few weeks, well maybe longer if that’s OK. I will tell you all about it when I get to yours. Sparks sends his love, or he would I’m sure if I was still seeing him, that’s another thing I will tell you all about when I see you. Work is fine although I have left my job, another thing to tell you.

  lots of love and don’t worry about me, I am fine

  Alison

  PS I am not fine, sorry

  PPS I love you both

  She posts the letter and goes back to her flat. Watching Emmerdale, she feels safer for the first time in a week, although this has nothing to do with Emmerdale.

  One Alison takes out a sheet of writing paper and then remembers a small quarrel she had with her mother. Not large enough to matter normally, but enough to make her feel she cannot go and be comforted by her family. She puts the paper away, goes into her small front room and turns on the television. Watching Emmerdale, she has a small but definite feeling of terrible foreboding, although this has nothing to do with Emmerdale.

  Sparks was in the pub, because it was lunchtime. Sparks’ local was not the kind of pub he would have chosen to spend his lunchtimes in if there had been any other pubs in the area. In fact, so horrible was his local, Sparks would have gone elsewhere for his lunchtime drink if there had been a meths stall run by a blind tramp that also sold sausage rolls. There were reasons for this, which Sparks listed to himself in his daily, unwilling visits to his horrible local. The main reason he hated the pub, as a local, was that it did not cater to locals at all. Sparks was the nearest the pub had to a local, and even he lived three miles away. The customers were exclusively strangers. Plasterers on a job, sales reps, lost drunks, once even a man who had been born in a house that had once stood where the horrible local now was (and who left in tears after a lager shandy, crying “My life is dead!”). They were all strangers, and none of them were locals. Sparks was even sure that he had once heard the landlord (who did not live above the pub, but got a minicab in from Eltham every morning) tell a customer, who had made the mistake of revealing that he lived up the road, “We don’t get many locals round here. This is a strangers pub.” The local had left at once, to the jeers of the pub’s many non-regulars.

  Sparks also hated the pub because it was enormous, but empty. Built along the lines of some concrete ship’s stateroom, it was large enough for cattle rustlers to hide entire herds in, had the cattle been old enough to drink. Instead, the pub’s contents were deeply meagre, consisting as they did of two fruit machines, each at opposite ends of the pub – some 70 feet apart – possibly to stop them mating, and a large horseshoe shaped bar, situated, not in the middle of the pub for the convenience of customers, but at the back, by the ladies’ toilets. This meant not only that it was a long walk to the bar from the polarly-oppositional car park, but also that women customers had to squeeze past fat drunks whenever they wanted to use the toilets.

  So Sparks, who had been coming to this pub for eight years, really hated it. Alison, who had come with Sparks three times and had heard his list of reasons to hate the pub twice, found his ambivalent attitude distressing. She didn’t say that, though. Not being a ponce, she wasn’t given to saying things like, “I find your ambivalent attitude depressing, Sparks”. Instead she said: “If you don’t like it here, Sparks, why do you come all the time?”

  Sparks looked into her lovely brown eyes.

  “I don’t know,” he said, absently making a ribbon out of a crisp packet. “I suppose I like the atmosphere.”

  “No you don’t,” said Alison, absently rubbing someone else’s lipstick off the edge of her glass, “You like coming because it gives you something to complain about.”

  Sparks shrugged. It was true.

  “And that locals thing,” said Alison, “I saw that on a telly show. Locals and strangers, it’s not your joke.”

  “Ah,” said Sparks. “But I thought of it first. Anyway, my joke is different, and it’s better, too. I was going to write it up and send it to someone, but I never quite, you know.”

  Sparks paused and undid his crisp packet ribbon.

  “Got around to it,” he finished.

  “You never do, Sparks,” said Alison. She finished her drink and left.

  Remembering this moment, which wasn’t hard, as it had only happened about thr
ee weeks ago, Sparks himself became sad. Then he became outraged. He did get around to things! He had invented the replica T-shirts business himself! Well, all right, he had taken the idea to Bill the printer who let him use his office. And, all right again, he hadn’t had any new ideas for T-shirts – all right a third time, new ideas in the sense of finding old designs to copy – for a long time, but it had been a great idea at the time. Even if the time had been six years ago. Since then, though, he had done other things.

  Sparks made a quick mental list of the other things he had done. It was quite short.

  One: he had started using the non-local pub as his local.

  Two: he had made a list of things he hated about it.

  I’d better be careful, Sparks thought, as he tried and failed to make a ribbon out of a small empty peanut packet, I could be getting into a rut. Searching for other things to make ribbons out of, Sparks dug out a piece of crumpled paper. todays word redolent operating entrance london 17 oswald road duty t singh, it said, in Sparks’ poor handwriting. Sparks finished his drink. It was still his lunchbreak. Oswald Road was round the corner. He was feeling very decisive. He would go there now.

  Unusually, he did.

  17 Oswald Road was between 19 Oswald Road and a vast amount of rubble that must at one time, Sparks supposed, have been 1-15 Oswald Road. Children played in the rubble like Blitz kids, only with far more colourful vocabularies. No matter how hard the depredations of the Blitz, Sparks had the impression, even while doodlebugs were falling and rationing meant that the powdered egg was king, young cockney boys and girls did not turn as one to total strangers and address them as, “Oi you, arsebandit, innit?”

  Sparks ignored the merry Cockneys at their play, even when they threw half a Lucozade bottle at his head (‘Wanka!”), and went and had a proper look at number 17. At some point in its history, number 17 Oswald Road had been a large, moderately grand family house with servants and everything, Sparks decided. He was impressed by the sheer size of the house, but mostly by the slightly manky stone lion above the door. Now it was a variety of dwellings, judging by the acne blast of doorbells all round its porch. Sparks would have had some difficulty working out which doorbell was T Singh’s, but luckily for him there was a huge sign in the first floor window that said T SINGH DENTAL PRACTITIONER.