Sparks fell between categories with his letter. He glanced at the neat, lady’s writing on the envelope, completely ignored the postcode and was about to open the letter like a normal person, when he stopped. Instead of opening the letter, he put it down on a rather sticky breadboard and sat next to it. For the next few minutes, in fact, Sparks sat staring at the letter. Then he got up, as if about to tell the letter he was going to the shops and did it want anything, and walked out of the room. Then he went into the bathroom and sat on the toilet, looking blank.
Sparks did all this, not because he wanted to look interesting or he was barmy, but because he recognised the handwriting on the envelope. It was Alison’s. This was significant, and also scary. In all his relationship with Alison, he had never received a letter from her. This was partly because it wasn’t 1768 and neither Sparks nor Alison were prone to pressing gold sovereigns into the hands of messenger boys and making them run through the streets of London town to press missives into each other’s hands; but mostly it was because Alison was not a great communicator. She disliked email, thought phones were germy, and found text messaging a bit lugubrious. Not that she had said any of this to Sparks; they never sat up nights while Alison smoked a cheroot and said, “The thing is, Sparks, I find text messaging a bit lugubrious.” But the fact was, and Sparks knew it, Alison didn’t usually write letters; and, essentially, Sparks was bricking it.
After a few minutes of thinking pointless, looping thoughts and getting his hopes up (“Dear Sparks, I was mentally ill when I dumped you, please marry me”) and then getting them down again (“Dear sir, this is to inform you that we are a squad of elite assassins hired by your ex-girlfriend to kill you, please tell us when you will be at home so we can come round and do you”), Sparks gave the toilet roll a long, hard and even slightly grown-up look, opened the door and went back into the kitchen.
The letter lay on the breadboard, a few toast crumbs nestling underneath it. Sparks picked it up, stared at it, and even contemplated studying the postcode, before suddenly ripping it open. “136b Wilmott Road,” he read nervously, before realising that this was only Alison’s address, and would contain no new emotional information for him. He moved further down the letter, recklessly ignoring the date.
Dear Sparks, he read, This is Alison. I know normally you’re supposed to say that at the end of the letter, but I never know with you. You might be drunk or get bored or accidentally set fire to it, and then you’d just be stood there wondering why your mum was writing you such a weird letter. Not that this is a weird letter. I don’t think so anyway, but then I wrote it.
Sparks stopped reading and lowered his arm. Now, he thought, at least I know why Alison doesn’t write many letters. This is stream of consciousness without the consciousness. Then he felt bad about his smartarse thought and started reading again.
I’m sorry this letter’s gone rambly already, he read, and felt guilty, but I suppose I feel bad about stuff. I don’t know why I feel bad and I don’t think I should, after we had that bust-up, but I do. And I bet you hate letters where people say ‘Anyway, here goes,’ but anyway here goes. The last few weeks have been really bad for me, I’m sure for you too. But I meant it when I said I couldn’t go on like this. You seem to like me, but it’s sort of hard to tell when all we do is go to the worst pubs in the world. And when I asked you what you wanted from the relationship, I did feel that after two years, just shifting on the couch wasn’t a deeply felt response. You never do anything, Sparks, you don’t even under-achieve, you just sort of, well, under, really. And I don’t want undering, I want a life.
Undering’s not a verb, thought Sparks, and then his eye was caught by a very large yellow spider in the corner. He was about to go and wind it up by staring at it really close when he remembered he was reading a letter. He blanked the spider from his mind and carried on.
Anyway again, he read on, I’ve been up here for a while now and you might call it a rebound or whatever but there was a boy here I used to know, Gary he’s called, and…
Sparks put the letter down, on some jam, and went over to the window. For some reason, he was overcome with a deep, intense feeling of having tricked himself. He went to the fridge, and took beer out.
Later, when Sparks was too drunk to cope with that sort of thing well, he read the rest of the letter. Words swam up at him like angry cod and refused to be part of any actual sentences, but as Sparks looked down at the letter like a man looking through a very squishy telescope, he saw phrases like: we are very happy; I am staying here: and, more confusingly: he is going back to Australia and I am going with.
Him, thought Sparks as he passed out somewhere near the meter cupboard, going with him.
Duncan whistled as he made his way to his unpleasant workstation. He hummed cheerfully, wiping bits of cigarette ash from his keyboard, and he even winked at a very crumpled Polaroid of his mother holding a pint of beer on his personal foamboard.
Jeff leaned over from the adjacent, equally horrid workstation.
“Look at this,” he said, pointing at his own screen. “That bloke’s dead.”
“Which one?” asked Duncan.
“The one,” Jeff said. “The one we had the little trouble with… he’s dead.”
“What, here?”
“No,” Jeff said, “Jesus God, no. If he was dead here, we’d be... “
Jeff trembled slightly. “No,” he said, finishing with his trembling, “He’s not dead here. He’s dead… here.”
Jeff clicked something and pointed at the screen.
“Hit by a bus,” he said.
“Oh,” Duncan said. “I knew that.”
One Alison queued at customs, wondering why airplanes made you smell funny and why her new boyfriend had insisted on moving to Sydney a week before the Mardi Gras parade.
One Alison sat back in the back of a car inching its way up a fairly filthy London street. This Alison felt slightly queasy and for a second wondered if she was going to be sick in a car. The moment passed, and she went back to looking out of the window at the thrilling parade of lampposts, shops and early-rising tramps who were attempting to throng the streets at 8.15am. One particularly energetic tramp, who had gone round the back of Starbucks and consumed every latte dreg they had, was trying to throng the street on his own, but dancing round in circles in a heavy granny coat is not enough to throng anything, except perhaps a call box, and thronging a call box isn’t very exciting.
“Are you all right, dear?” said Alison’s sister, who, being younger than Alison, still thought it was funny to call people dear.
“Yes,” said Alison. “Just thinking about thronging, really.”
Alison’s sister fell silent. This was unusual but fortunate, as Alison was starting to feel a bit weird, weird that is in the sense of “about to go mad and start burbling about tramps and thronging”, and she felt that her sister, who was at the time employed in not knowing the names of any bands in a large CD shop, might not have been able to handle Alison’s burbling.
“Here we are,” said Alison’s dad, using one of his favourite sayings (his other was, “There we go”. He got out of the large black car and opened the door. Alison, in neat black suit, climbed out and looked confusedly around the large cemetery.
“I think they’re burying him over there,” said Alison’s sister, and wondered, as Alison strode off somewhat rapidly, if perhaps she might have said the wrong thing.
“Well, pardon me,” said Jeff. “I shall never tell you anything interesting ever again, since you obviously know it all already.”
He spun round in his swivel chair, presenting his inconsiderable shoulders to Duncan, and spent the rest of the morning playing a card game on his computer. It was an easy card game, but you wouldn’t have known that the way Jeff played it.
The minister and the mourners gathered around a big hole surrounded by Astroturf. Alison stood with Sparks’ parents.
“Who of us really knew Paul Sparks?” he asked.
“Yes, what a silly thing to say,” said Sparks’ mother. The mourners nodded. “We’d hardly have turned up here if we didn’t know him,” said a man who’d been at college with Sparks and kept in touch. Alison touched the minister on the arm. She felt sorry for him, having to say insincere things all day long in the hope of making bereaved people feel better.
The minister looked around at the group of friends and relatives.
“How many of us knew Paul Sparks?” he began. “All of us, I think. We were in a real sense all his friends.”
“You weren’t,” said Sparks’ dad.
“No,” said Sparks’ friend from college. “I’ve never seen you before in my life.”
The minister sighed. He never got this at christenings.
Sparks woke up. He was lying on the floor. He stood up, ineptly, and fell into a few things. Sparks rubbed his eyes. He wasn’t well. He felt like someone had walked over his grave. He felt like death warmed up. He picked up an empty beer bottle. He remembered Alison’s letter.
“Oh well,” he said, trying to sound convincing to himself, “It’s her funeral.”
FIRST INTERLUDE
There is an infinite amount of worlds, was what they taught Jeff and Duncan and Alan and the others, and one of these worlds, by definition, must be God’s perfect world. It is the nature of infinity to be all-encompassing, as in that thing where an infinite lot of chimpanzees will write the complete works of Shakespeare given an infinite lot of time; except that so long as you have the right world, you only need a few chimpanzees, perhaps 10 or 12, and a reasonable amount of time, say, a year, because you have an infinite amount of worlds.
In fact, although it had never been discovered, the thinkers of The Society claimed that, logically, somewhere out there was a world where some fool had employed a lot of chimpanzees to write the complete works of Shakespeare. Some people in The Society liked to speculate as to what happened when this proud hypothetical chimp-employer turned up at the publisher’s with the complete works of Shakespeare typed by chimpanzees. There was even a popular, if illegal, game among Society staff – Jeff had played it, Duncan had reported him, there were ructions – where people imagined the publisher’s likely response to the chimpy Shakespeare. The winners, as it happens, were these:
‘This play has promise on every page, but it has banana and something brown on every page, too.”
“You’ve spelled Hamlet with two “m”s. And 46 “t”s.”
“This is an impressive feat but the complete works of Shakespeare have already been written. Couldn’t you get them to write something new, ideally featuring a hot young lawyer and some vampires?”
And there was one entry that was suppressed, because if it had been brought to the attention of people like Jeff and Duncan’s boss, Alan, it would have ensured a clampdown on harmless but illegal games.
This entry read:
“This is an extraordinary feat, even by the presumably low standards of some chimpanzees, but not as extraordinary as the fact that a man had already written all these plays and poems, on his own, without monkey help, 400 years ago. That indicates to me that this, after all, must be God’s perfect world.”
This entry was suppressed, sensibly, on the grounds that chimpanzees are not monkeys, they’re primates, and everybody was able to get on with their work, discovering new worlds in The Society, and seeing if they were perfect or not.
And so time passed. On one world, England played Germany and beat them, 5-1. On another, England beat Germany 5-1 and then ate them, as was the custom. And on still another, there was no such thing as football, so a lot of English people just went abroad and attacked anyone they saw.
*
IT WOULD BE nice to say that Sparks respected the nature of infinite worlds and acted in an infinite variety of ways but, by some fluke of probability-defying character, Sparks managed to do the same infinitesimal amount of work and drink the same huge amount of beer in all his realities. In one, true, he fell down stairs and broke his arm, and in another he bought a little dog to make him look interesting in pubs, but generally, Sparks contributed little to the limitless variety of the universe. And in this world, Sparks had a very good reason for his inactivity. He was drunk, all the time.
Sparks wasn’t a heavy drinker, or rather, that is what he told himself. As proof he would point to his time with Alison, when he hardly drank at all, or at least not excessively, or anyway not on his own. The counsel for the prosecution that lives inside everyone, and always makes sure to have plenty of casework to be getting on with, liked to point out to Sparks that his time with Alison was a comparatively short and arguably blip-like period in Sparks’ life, where circumstances like happiness and love had, sadly, kept Sparks away from the boozer, except towards the end of their relationship, obviously. One might equally well argue that Sparks had been rarely drunk as a baby.
This argument (not the one about the baby) was becoming more and more convincing to Sparks. Since he had received Alison’s postcard, his routine had consisted less and less of waking up, leaping out of bed nuts a-dangle, whistling at the shaving mirror and working on new ideas for T-shirts, and more and more of waking up, suddenly noticing a new and extremely powerful hangover, staying in bed, and later wandering into another room in search of last night’s stale lager.
Lots of people do this kind of thing; some of them never stop; a few go to alcoholic support groups; but many take the Sparks approach, namely be utterly miserable and drunk for months until, if the pain is that sort of pain, it fades to a bearable degree and life can continue in a sober state once more. And this is what happened; after six months or so, Sparks stopped being drunk nearly all the time and started being sober nearly all the time. He even began going back to work again, although he wasn’t up to having any ideas for successful retro T-shirts, or indeed any ideas at all.
But while Sparks was drunk, he was very drunk indeed; drunk enough to not entirely believe that something very strange involving two slight men and a fight had actually happened. And as for his apparent trip into a world where things were slightly different, well, during his drunk six months, alcohol took Sparks to several worlds where things were slightly different anyway.
So when one morning Sparks woke up with the unfamiliar urge to find the kettle and make some tea, rather than throw up into it, a lot of things had a distinct air of unreality about them, and therefore were pretty much gearing up to slip his mind.
Now that he felt better, and now also that it was late December, Sparks went home for Christmas, to see his mum and dad. Sparks’ dad was called Jim and had been a polytechnic lecturer. He lectured in English Literature and his one ambition – to turn down the sexual advances of a pretty young student – had never been realised, because Sparks’ dad was such a nice man that even the most corrupt and profligate of his students couldn’t bring themselves to be seduced by him. After 30 years lecturing, during which time his poly had become a uni and his students had gone from being mad for magic realism to being slightly disappointed by books they had got into after seeing the video version of the movie, Sparks’ dad took one farewell look at his class, said, perhaps too loudly, “Bloody hell, I wouldn’t go to bed with any of this lot,” and retired.
Sparks’ mum, Patricia, had been a reporter. This had been quite exciting to Sparks when he was young, and he had lived in hope that the whole family might have to relocate to Florida or Latvia after his mum had exposed the Mafia’s links with local businesses. In fact, Sparks’ mum had devoted her life to writing about nothing very exciting. This was because she had a husband and son, and wasn’t keen to get relocated to Florida or Latvia after accidentally writing a hard-hitting story. She had even been known to turn down reporting on flower shows in case there might just be a Mafia connection. Sparks’ mum had met Sparks dad in headier times, when she was young and single, and couldn’t give a fig for the dangers inherent in cover
ing the opening of the local poly’s new English Department building, having a glass of wine with the new young junior lecturer (“I expect my students will come to fancy me in time”) and then getting married six months later, on account of Sparks, but still pleased about getting married.
Sparks’ mum still covered the odd WI event, which was easy for her as she was a member these days, and Sparks’ dad still subscribed to some fairly esoteric critical journals, some of which he now saw that his old students were writing for. They had a nice quiet life and they missed Sparks when he wasn’t there and were always happy when he left and their nice quiet life could resume. Sparks was deeply fond of them and almost always remembered to buy them presents or send them the relevant cards.
Today, six months after Sparks had been attacked by beanpole men for travelling into another dimension, and a few weeks after he had retired from self-pitying lushness, he sat down to Christmas dinner at his parents’ house. Everyone was wearing paper hats, except for Sparks who had taken his off but found it still felt like he was wearing it. Crackers had been pulled (Sparks got a whistle and a puzzle so obscure he didn’t even understand what he wasn’t supposed to do) and a quantity of Blue Nun consumed. Conversation had been light – when your son has had the same dog-end job for 10 years and his long-term girlfriend has left him for an Australian, you tend to fall into silence a lot – and Sparks’ dad was just about to clear the much-ravaged (by Sparks) turkey when Sparks looked up from the potato he was making, inappropriately, into a little brown Halloween lamp, and said:
“Dad, do you believe in alternate worlds?”
“No,” his dad was about to say, when Sparks’ mum interrupted.
“Don’t bother your father when he’s taking out the dishes.”
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