“Who are you?” Sparks asked. “What are you doing here?”
“We can’t tell you,” said Jeff. “We came to give you a message.”
“I saw it,” said Sparks. “Leave well Alan.”
“It says, if you look,” said Jeff, somewhat prissily, “Leave. Well. Alone.”
“It looks more like Leave Well Alan, with some blotches on the A’s,” said Sparks. To move the conversation along, he bounced on the desk a bit. Jeff and Duncan expressed their dissatisfaction with this, and Sparks repeated his questions.
“And if you don’t answer me properly this time,” he said, “I’ll kill you.”
“No you won’t,” said Jeff, but he sounded worried.
“I bloody will, you know,” Sparks said. “I hate burglars. I also hate thin people. I was intimidated by thin people at school.”
“They couldn’t help being thin!” shouted Duncan.
“True,” said Sparks, who in reality had nothing against thin people, in fact tended to judge people by their actions rather than their width. “But they could help intimidating me. And burgling me.”
“We’re not burglars,” said Duncan.
“No,” said Sparks. “You just thought you’d nip by, see how I was, knock me out and spray a message on the wall telling me to leave well Alan.”
“Alo…” Jeff began, but Sparks stopped him by tapping his windpipe with the hammer. Although it was a light blow, it shut Jeff up.
“For the last time before I pull your ears off and make you chew them like apricots,” said Sparks, feeling a bit queasy as he said it, “who are you?”
He tapped Jeff lightly with the hammer.
“All right then,” said Jeff. “Bloody hell, I knew today was going to be crap. Let me up and I’ll tell you.”
“No,” said Sparks. “I don’t trust you. I’ll let him up and he can tell me.”
Sparks got off the desk and lifted one end up. He pulled Duncan out and manhandled him fairly convincingly into a corner.
“Now,” he said, “tell me everything.”
Sparks sat Jeff and Duncan down. Jeff sat in a swivel chair, his feet Sellotaped to the stem, hands Sellotaped around the waste paper bin, which Sparks had placed in his lap. Duncan was tied to another chair, which Sparks had put under the NME T-shirt chart, so Duncan was sitting next to the I’M WITH STUPID T-shirt. A small victory for Sparks, and possibly a petty one, but he felt he deserved it.
“Tell me what’s going on,” Sparks said.
Jeff looked surly. Duncan looked worried.
“I’ll hit you again,” said Sparks.
“No you won’t,” said Jeff. “You’re not the type. You’re a big girl’s blouse.”
“I am not!” said Sparks, hurt. “I hit you before, anyway.”
“That was in the heat of the moment,” Jeff said. “You were angry. Now you couldn’t do it.”
“I could get angry again,” Sparks said, “with the names and all.”
“No, he’s right,” said Duncan. “The moment has passed.”
Sparks thought. The two evil thinnifers had a point, and while he did want to hit them, quite hard, and leave a mark, where people would see it, he couldn’t.
Sparks inhaled through his teeth, and felt them bend. He glowered at Jeff and Duncan and went into the kitchen. Jeff and Duncan craned their heads towards the door. There was rustling, and a swingbin swinging. Then some more rustling, after which Sparks came back in with a brown paper bag with squared-off handles, two metal foil cartons, and a small pan.
“We’re not hungry,” said Duncan.
Sparks ignored him. He opened the bag and the cartons, and took the lid off the pan.
“Oof,” said Duncan and Jeff, almost simultaneously.
“That stinks,” said Jeff, “Don’t you ever throw anything out?”
“No,” said Sparks. “I’m a slob, I’m afraid. Some of this food must have been here for a month. Dear God.”
“What?” said Duncan and Jeff.
“There’s a prawn or something here and, wow, I think it’s come back to life. Look!”
Sparks thrust the foil carton under Jeff’s nose.
“Take it away!” Jeff shouted. “I hate rotting food!”
Sparks shook his head. He dropped the carton into the waste paper bin on Jeff’s lap.
“That stinks,” said Duncan, from a few feet away. Jeff was too busy wrinkling his nose to speak.
“Tell me everything,” said Sparks to Jeff. It was clear that Jeff was trying to oblige, but his Adam’s apple was bobbing in and out so fiercely that he could not speak.
Sparks put a pizza box lid on the wastebin. Jeff swallowed and gurgled for a few seconds, and then started to speak.
“What exactly is it you want to know?” he said.
Sparks thought. It had been so long ago, what with the beating and all that, he had partly forgotten.
“Why there are cars that say THE POLICE,” he said. “Why you’re here. What a random life thing is. How I ended up in the Edgware Road. Why I went to a seven-foot dentist. ” A new thought came to him.
“Are you ghosts?”
Jeff looked at him with etiolated contempt.
“No,” said Jeff. “We’re angels. We’re here to protect you and guide your future.”
Sparks considered this for a second. “You’re taking the mickey now, aren’t you?”
Jeff nodded.
“The easiest way to explain all this,” said Duncan, “is to start at the very beginning, 300 years ago…”
“Excuse me,” said Jeff. “There’s a bucket of stinking takeaway under my nose. Can we not start at the beginning 300 years ago?”
“I like starting at the beginning 300 years ago,” said Sparks. “Carry on.”
“300 years ago,” Duncan said, “there was formed a society. It goes by many names in many lands. Some called it the Brothers of the Zohar. Some the Fellowship of Chance…”
“None of these people had buckets of stinking prawn curry under their noses,” said Jeff.
“As I say, there were many names for this society,” said Duncan, “but the name that stuck, the name that prevails to this day, is The Society.”
“The Society,” said Sparks. “Like in building society?”
“Not quite,” said Duncan.
Jeff sighed, thinly, and interrupted.
“No, not like building society. Can I do this instead?”
“Why not,” said Sparks. “Do go on.”
“The Society is one of the most important institutions of all time,” said Jeff. “Founded and staffed by scientists, artists, philosophers, mathematicians…”
“Carpenters,” said Duncan, trying to wrest control of the conversation again.
“No carpenters,” said Jeff. “The cream of Western – and, to some extent, Eastern – society was represented. Kings, poets, generals…”
“Carpenters,” said Duncan, stubbornly.
Jeff closed his eyes. “Anyway, a lot of people, and all these people were brought together by one thing, one feeling.”
He paused. Sparks waited.
“It would really help me,” Jeff said, “if you were to say, ‘And what feeling was that?’ at this point.”
“Sorry,” said Sparks. “And what feeling was that?”
“Thank you,” said Jeff. “This feeling was, at the time, a blasphemous one. It was an anti-establishment feeling. It was, in short, a naughty feeling. There were in the world people who believed in essence that…”
“That there is no point to anything,” said Duncan.
“Fine,” said Jeff. “Just steal my punchline.”
“Carry on,” said Sparks again, more firmly, “Your turn.”
“For hundreds of years,” said Duncan, “people thought everything was part of a divine plan. God in his Heaven, the king on his throne, the carpenter at his bench…”
Jeff snorted.
“The carpenter at his bench,” continued Duncan. “But then what
did we have? Revolutions. Reformations. Copernicus. People saying the sun didn’t go round the earth. People saying if they think, they are. All kinds of doubt and stuff. Things that used to make sense didn’t make sense. Nothing was certain. By now, kings were having their heads chopped off and it was no longer a sure thing that God was in his Heaven.”
“And this is why I ended up in the Edgware Road?” said Sparks.
“Yes,” said Jeff.
“Right,” said Sparks.
“Don’t get sarky,” said Jeff. “What happens next is The Society decided to go out and find God.”
“Oh,” said Sparks. “Are you like Jehovah’s Witnesses ?”
“No,” said Duncan. “I mean literally about the portals.”
“The pottles?” said Sparks.
“Portals,” said Duncan. “The portals are the great discovery of The Society. You see, after about 200 years of theorising, someone came up with the idea that maybe the reason life here seems so utterly random is because there are other worlds.”
“Like Mars and Venus?” said Sparks.
“No,” said Jeff. “Not Mars and Venus. Those worlds are as barren and dead as your… as some people’s minds. I mean other worlds that exist in the same time and space as ours.”
“I’m sorry, I know I’m stupid,” said Sparks, “but I don’t see...”
“Other worlds,” said Jeff, impatiently. “Parallel worlds. Worlds existing at the same time as this one and often in a similar way, but different.”
Sparks frowned.
“OK,” said Duncan. “Think of television. On TV you have different channels. They all have different things on but they all exist at the same time.”
“So...” said Sparks slowly. “This world is like, BBC1...”
“More like the Big Bozo That’s You You Big Bozo Shopping Channel, but we’ll say yes for argument’s sake,” said Jeff.
“And there are other channels, which are other worlds?”
“Good stuff,” said Jeff. “And this was the theory, that the reason our world seemed so pointless and random was that there are other worlds, some worse, some more pointless, but also some better. And if, as was suggested, there are an infinite amount of worlds…”
“Is,” said Duncan. “Is an infinite amount of worlds…”
“Is,” said Jeff, sighing, “then out there somewhere, there are also near-perfect worlds. And, it follows, there is also somewhere out there a perfect world. And that world, it also follows, is God’s world.”
Jeff sat back, his look of triumph only slightly marred by the stinky bin between his legs.
“So,” Sparks said, “was that where I went? Another world?”
“Yes,” said Jeff. “You met an operative, illegally told him the code word for the day, and he let you through a portal…”
“It does sound like pottle when you say it,” said Duncan. “And you found yourself, we believe, in an alternate world.”
Sparks snorted. “It didn’t look that alternate to me. The only thing different I could see was the writing on the police cars was wrong.”
“Not wrong. Different,” said Jeff. “Wrong would assume that this is God’s perfect world. Clearly it isn’t, or I wouldn’t have a bin full of prawn goo leaking into my crotch.”
“But it was just like this one, apart from the...”
“Writing on the police cars, yes,” said Duncan. “Random 9 isn’t very different. We, perhaps arrogantly, assume that God’s perfect world isn’t that much different to this one, and it isn’t a planet like, say, Number 22, where Supertramp are so enormous they formed a religion.”
Sparks stared at Duncan.
“I’m joking,” said Duncan. “Really.”
“Thank God for that,” said Sparks. “I hate Supertramp.”
“You’d love Number 46, then,” said Jeff. “I’ll say no more.”
“Anyway,” said Duncan. “Basically, that’s all we can tell you, because if we tell you any more, our bosses will do us. And they can do us far more effectively than you can. So can we go now?”
Sparks looked at the two men. He thought.
“I do have one more question,” he said.
“For God’s sake,” cried Jeff. “Just let us go, will you?”
“Just one?” said Duncan. “I mean, we are in some discomfort.”
“Sorry,” said Sparks and moved forward to loosen Duncan’s bonds, then realised he didn’t know how, and stepped back.
“All I want to know,” he said, then corrected himself. “All I’m worried about is, well… when I went into this parallel thing… well, did I change anything?”
“No,” said Jeff and Duncan, so simultaneously as to sound the same, only faster.
“No way,” said Jeff.
“Absolutely not,” said Duncan.
“Only I read some thing where someone went back in time, which I know isn’t the same thing, but they were in the land of dinosaurs and they trod on...”
Jeff sighed. “Trod on a butterfly, we know. And changed the whole course of evolution.”
“Can’t happen,” said Duncan, looking nonchalantly at his fingernails.
“Are you sure?” said Sparks. “Because, you know, I talked to people and stuff, and I could have trodden on anything. Especially in the Edgware Road.”
“Listen,” said Jeff. “I’ve done it. I’ve been… somewhere… and I’ve trodden on, I think it was an actual butterfly. Yeah! I was in some swamp or something and I stood on a butterfly.”
“Wow,” said Sparks, impressed. “What happened?”
“What happened?” said Jeff. “I’ll tell you what happened. I got butterfly on my shoe, that’s all. Nothing happened.”
“OK,” said Sparks, “but what about today? You coming round and all this? Surely that’s not…”
“Oh dear God, just kill me now,” said Jeff. “I mean, we’ve answered enough questions, haven’t we? Please just let us go. Really.”
Sparks thought about it again, and untied them.
They shook hands. It was all quite formal. Jeff and Duncan thanked Sparks for letting them go, and Sparks thanked them for explaining everything to him. The effect was slightly spoiled when Duncan tried to jump onto Sparks’ throat and choke him, but Sparks punched him in the nuts and so everything was equal again.
He would have felt less good if he’d been able to hear the conversation between Jeff and Duncan as they waited for a car to pick them up further down the road.
“We didn’t tell him anything, did we?” said Duncan.
“No,” said Jeff. “But I’m still going to get him for this.”
Sparks sat at his desk, thinking about his slightly too exciting day. He noticed it was getting dark, and turned on the lights. Then he wondered, for some reason, if maybe he should do his accounts, which unnerved him so much that he decided to go to the pub. Then he decided that he didn't feel like any beer, which unnerved him too, so he went home and had toast, which he burned.
As he scraped huge reefs of black stuff into his pedal bin, he wondered what other Sparkses were doing right now on other worlds. There was something appealing about the whole idea. Perhaps, Sparks imagined, as he made black toast, other Sparkses were going out to glamorous parties, learning the electric guitar or having mini-series made about their lives.
Sparks would have been deeply disappointed to learn that, in fact, at that moment most of the other Sparkses on other worlds were going home and having toast, which they burned. Three or four Sparkses met a supermodel who had become lost in North London, but none of them thought to ask her out. One Sparks did ask the supermodel round to his, but she left before he could take her home and burn the toast.
Bizarrely, one Sparks stayed behind and did his accounts. On the way home, he was hit by a bus and killed.
A crowd gathered.
“Is he dead?” someone asked.
“Never mind him,” said someone else. “Isn't that woman over there a supermodel?”
Sp
arks got up and sorted his post. This was harder than it sounds, considering that usually he didn’t get any post. Around lunchtime, the post would thunder through the door – the local postman was a determined man and, more to the point, hated filling out the WE CALLED BUT YOU WERE OUT cards, so would always brutalise every large piece of mail, no matter how large, until it fit through the letterbox.
Sparks went into the communal hall, where bicycles hung on the wall like extremely realistic pictures of bicycles on the wall, and unexplained bits of other people’s kitchen doors lay about, waiting for someone with a mint condition 1960s kitchen to adopt them. The floor was for some reason covered with a thick, repellent layer of hessian, designed, so far as Sparks could tell, to collect as much dirt as possible and entrap a similar amount of postman’s elastic bands.
Today, judging by the odd wetness of the hessian, the postman had apparently spat a wad of elastic bands into the hall, smashed a Faberge egg in its case, rolled both it and a lot of letters into a rugby ball shape and crammed the lot into the letter box as though he were trying to gag it.
Sparks got down on his knees and started uncrumpling the mail; the Faberge egg (or set of thimbles bearing the many faces of Vera Lynn, or whatever) was rattly beyond redemption and the fury of the man upstairs (who collected things) would be audible forever. The letters, however, could be saved. Sparks gently massaged a water rates bill for the downstairs flat into its former shape, coaxed a postcard from Malaga into rectangular life, and then blew into a particularly crinkled air mail letter. Having done this, he realised that there was actually a letter for him. He stuffed it into his T-shirt and went back into his flat.
There are, letter-wise, two kinds of people in the world. One is the kind that looks at a letter for about three days, studies the blurred postcode and the spidery writing on the envelope, shakes the letter and then says, “I wonder who this is from?”, as though letters generally contained not even the slightest clue about the sender’s identity and usually confined themselves to a few veiled threats like I WILL GET YOU DUMMY. The other kind is the people who look at a letter and open it, thereby ascertaining in a few seconds who the letter is from.
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