Sparks

by David Quantick

  The teddy bear section was not what he had expected. There were bears of all sizes, bears of several colours, and bears available in a variety of fabrics; but that was all the resemblance they bore to normal teddy bears. These bears, frankly, put the fear of God into Sparks. The tiniest of them looked like they were about ready to run up Sparks’ back passage and chew through his lungs; the largest just looked like they fancied killing everything in the world.

  Sparks suddenly felt amazingly keen to leave this world. He walked out, breathing hard, and approached a sales assistant.

  “Do you want to buy a bear?” said the assistant.

  “No,” said Sparks. “I want to see Mrs Reeves.”

  “Oh,” said the assistant, in a sort of ‘Oh, you must be the other weirdo we always thought would come round and want to see Mrs Reeves’ way. “She’s on the third floor, in tanks.”

  Sparks felt suddenly relieved, and took the lift.

  On the third floor, there were lots of reassuring tanks, all trundling about, bumping into other tanks and knocking over helpless green soldiers. Operating about three of them at the same time was a middle-aged woman in a white lab coat. She looked as happy as anyone Sparks had ever seen.

  “Are you Mrs Reeves?” he said, hopefully.

  “Yes, dear,” said Mrs Reeves. “Would you like to play with the tanks?”

  Sparks looked at the tanks for a long time. He sighed a tiny sigh of quiet air and said, “The word of the day is Manatee.”

  Mrs Reeves gave Sparks an odd look and said, “It’s in the storeroom.” She put down her tank remote control and stared at Sparks quite hard. “You don’t look like one of them,” she said. “You’re not thin enough.”

  “I can explain,” said Sparks, a bit hopelessly.

  “No you can’t,” said Mrs Reeves. “And I don’t want to know. Here, before you head off there, have a go on this tank. It’s smashing.”

  And Sparks and Mrs Reeves had a go on the tanks.

  WUH!

  URH!

  OWF!

  Sparks woke up as his feet hit the floor and immediately started staggering around, half-blind and with his ears whirring. After a minute the whirring and the half-blindness stopped, and were replaced with the desire to vomit and, at the same time, the desire to blunder clumsily into the door post. Sparks fought the desire to vomit successfully, but found himself unable to combat the desire to blunder clumsily into the door post. He crashed into the door, fell over, and was sick on his T-shirt. Then he fell asleep.

  While he was asleep, Sparks had a very exciting dream. It didn’t make much sense to him, but this wasn’t too surprising; Sparks had a powerful capacity for being confused by even the simplest dreams. He had once woken Alison in the middle of the night and said, “Alison, I’ve had a really weird dream.”

  “What?” said Alison (or, more accurately, “Wobg?”).

  “I dreamt I was driving a car and I couldn’t control it and it went over a cliff… it was really weird and I don’t know what it was about,” said Sparks.

  “Sparks, you’ve got your driving test tomorrow,” said Alison, and went back to sleep.

  “So?” said Sparks.

  Sparks’ new dream was much less coherent than his driving dream (which, by the way, Sparks had stopped having since he failed his test, which was a relief in some ways). Sparks’ new dream was set in a large white hall with extraordinarily high ceilings. I’m glad I don’t have to paint those ceilings, thought Sparks as he walked across the large white hall with the loud clup-clup of feet that people always have in these rooms. Then he came to a door with a sign on it. OPEN ME, said the door. Sparks stared at it, and the sign changed to read IT’S NOT A TRICK.

  Sparks opened the door, and walked into a very small room, full of dolls. Even Sparks, whose knowledge of dreams was limited, groaned inwardly. He didn’t know what dolls meant in a dream, but he knew they were really naff. These dolls were all Victorian in style, the creepy porcelain kind with old man’s wispy hair and big eyes that stared right through Sparks. They were pretty much no fun kind of dolls. After a second, Sparks noticed that they all looked like Alison. This made sense; Alison was a bit doll-like in some respects, in that she was attractive and had blonde hair, although in others, like attitude, and height, she wasn’t.

  Sparks reached out for one of the Alison dolls. It stepped backwards. Sparks, a bit shaken, tried again with the doll next to it, but that one moved too. Sparks reached in further after the second Alison doll, but it just moved back more. Sparks reached in some more, and then he was on the shelf, chasing the dolls back and back. The dolls just got further and further away, and Sparks gave up. He turned around to retrace his steps, and saw that everything was black and he was lost.

  Sparks woke up with a jolt.

  “Blimey,” he said out loud. “Even I understood that one.”

  Sparks looked around the room. It was very similar to his own room, which was a good sign. He eased open the door and went outside. It was early evening and the streets looked quite normal. There were even a few people Sparks knew, in the sense that they were tramps and mad people and newsagents he had seen before, but – not being a tramp or a mad person or a newsagent himself – had never spoken to. And there were no bears. This was clearly a sensible world. Sparks bought a paper, noticed the headlines were about some pop star he had heard of marrying some sportsman he had also heard of, checked the picture to see if they had five tongues or if any members of an oddly Nazi-like world government had attended the wedding, and walked on, feeling fairly relieved.

  He went into a pub and ordered a drink. The barman served him immediately and didn’t give him a pint of lizard’s eyes or anything like that; nor did Sparks receive a handle of human teeth as change. Sparks drank his beer and pondered his next move. I could just go and see where Alison lives, he thought, then thought again. What if, as seems likely, she is going out with me in this world, like in the other one? It might save me a bit of time if I checked first.

  Sparks finished his drink and left. He was going to go round to his flat and see if he was going out with Alison.

  After an uneventful, if slightly odorous, bus journey, Sparks finished up outside his flat. He was pleased to see that his key fitted and somewhat surprised to see that the mail on the doormat was pretty much near identical to the mail on his own doormat; and that this other Sparks was level-pegging with him in the red bill stakes.

  Sparks rang the doorbell. There was no answer. He allowed a minute or three for hangovers or mental confusion, and rang again. After a similar non-answer, Sparks let himself in to the flat. It was, again, alarmingly like his own flat, so much so that there was even the same crumpled empty beer can acting as a really inept bookmark in the same paperback he had been reading for the last six months but (he checked) had never been able to get past the part where the two men who both owned a second hand record shop had a fight in the road over the secretary.

  Sparks creaked open his bedroom door, as he was beginning to think of it, and was pleased to see that his bed was rumpled and empty (but less pleased to see that the Spider-Man sheets and the Incredible Hulk pillow case were exactly as faded as his own). He sat down by the bed. A thought had occurred to him.

  Oh bugger, was the thought, I’ve come back to my own…

  The thought was interrupted by the huge dull thud of something huge and dull thudding into the back of Sparks’ skull. For the second time in, what?, half an hour – And, while we’re at it, Sparks thought, about the fifth time this year, Sparks lost consciousness.

  Sparks woke up, lying on the bed. Everything was dark.

  “Are we going to do him?” said a voice. The voice sounded unenthusiastic.

  “No,” said a keener voice. “Not now, anyway. We need him.”

  “What for?” said the other voice.

  “Things,” said the second voice.

  “What things?” said the first voice. “You can’t just tell me ‘things’. I might hav
e to prepare stuff.”

  “What sort of stuff?”

  “I don’t know… stuff.”

  “Well, that’s a bit vague, isn’t it? ‘Stuff’. That’s as vague as ‘things’. More vague. At least I know what I mean by things but you don’t know what you mean by stuff.”

  “Hello, Jeff,” said Sparks, opening his eyes. “Hello, Duncan.”

  “Why didn’t you blindfold him?” said Jeff, annoyed.

  “Why didn’t you?” said Duncan.

  Sparks looked at Duncan and Jeff. They looked tired. Jeff in particular looked awful, and had bits of crusty yellow sleep in his thin eyes.

  “You look thinner than ever,” Sparks said, and got to his feet.

  “I suppose I should have tied him up as well, should I?” said Duncan.

  “What are you doing here?” said Sparks. “Have you followed me? Are you allowed to do that? Go round lots of other worlds following people?”

  Duncan was about to speak when Jeff interrupted. “We haven’t been to lots of other worlds,” he said, smugly. “This is…”

  Sparks groaned a bit. “This is my world, isn’t it?” he said. “I thought it looked familiar.”

  “That’s why we’re here,” said Jeff. “To tell you it doesn’t work. You can’t keep using the portals. Can you, Duncan?”

  “No,” said Duncan. “You can’t keep using the portals. Because…”

  “Because there’s a loop effect,” said Jeff. “You keep using them, you loop back. Back to where you were. Back to here. You’re stuck here now.”

  Sparks looked at Duncan.

  “How am I stuck here?” he said.

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Jeff, before Duncan could speak. “You’re stuck, that’s all. End of stupid search for whatever it is you’re searching for. Back home and stuck here.”

  Sparks got off the bed.

  “That’s not true,” he said, more hopefully than anything else. “It can’t be.”

  “But it is,” said Jeff. “Look around you. Look outside. You’ve come back home.”

  Jeff stood up. Duncan stood up.

  “Enjoy it,” said Jeff, and they left.

  Sparks sat on the edge of the bed. He didn’t hold his head in his hands, because people don’t do that. He didn’t cry, because he couldn’t. He just sat there and felt pointless.

  All this, he thought. I thought all this meant I had a chance. I thought I could change my life and make everything right. But I can’t. It’s all useless and there’s no reason to it. It’s all random. And I’m stuck.

  Sparks, although for once nowhere near unconsciousness, lay back down on the bed and closed his eyes.

  Most people have different mechanisms for dealing with defeat and disillusion. Some people find the best thing to do is to kill themselves. While solving aspects of the problem – immediate reduction in pain, complete severing of any feelings of defeat (or anything), and so on – this approach raises more issues than it solves. If, for example, there is a hell, that’s where they’re going, and arguably it’s not a good idea to top yourself because you’re mightily hacked off, as you might find yourself spending eternity being boiled in a big crater full of unnecessarily hot carbolic acid while people you dislike stand around nearby clearly just about to get off with your favourite lady film star.

  A better option is to bring it up with someone in authority. The problem here is that there is, in life, no one in authority. Praying has limited effect, as God, if he exists, is in some ways like a DJ, in that He only plays the requests he likes.

  So most people go for the third option; crawling into bed, staying there, and feeling deeply sorry for yourself. This may not solve any problems, but it does enable people to eat a lot of pizzas, watch all the bad TV in the world, and hide under the duvet. Sparks, perhaps inevitably, took the third option. He took it from 6.30pm until 12.10pm the next afternoon, when he had to go to the toilet, and thereafter for the next two days, the odd cold pizza break excepted. He felt utterly disillusioned with life, cast down, and so glum that even watching the horrible sunny lives of people in lunchtime soap operas made him feel envious and want to be a surfing waiter.

  I must be depressed, Sparks thought, I’ve never wanted to be a surfing waiter before.

  This thought made him so depressed – and there is nothing worse than becoming depressed about the idea of being depressed – that he decided to go outside in his pyjama bottoms and look unhappy for a minute. (Actually, this was not the actual thought Sparks had, more what would be the physical manifestation; Sparks’ intended plan was to see if he could start smoking again, as smoking was cheap and not too labour-intensive, and might cheer him up in between the bouts of cancer guilt).

  Sparks got up, put on some pyjama bottoms, and went downstairs. He picked the keys and some change off the kitchen table and was about to go outside when he heard voices outside. Sparks froze; the voices were talking about him.

  “Is he in there?”

  “I saw ’im!”

  “But he can’t be. He’s dead.”

  “I saw ’im! He’s back from the dead to kill us all.”

  “People don’t come back from the dead, ma’am. Not even serial killers.”

  “I don’t care. I seen ’im. Mad Dog Face Eater Sparks. ’E’s in there.”

  “Sigh. OK, Sergeant, guns at the ready… let’s kick down the door.”

  Sparks froze even more. Jeff and Duncan had lied to him. He wasn’t in his own world at all. They had only told him that to make him stick around. He was in a world where he was – or had been, since these people thought he ought to be dead – a serial killer. One with a long, but unappealing, nickname, too.

  Sparks turned and headed for the back door, just as the back door exploded. Several policemen in body armour ran into the kitchen.

  “I can explain…” said Sparks, inefficiently, as the policemen knocked him to the ground and handcuffed him, painfully.

  Sparks, although in pain, was fully aware of the passage of time as the police took him away. Thus he was able to really feel the plastic cords of the handcuffs digging into his wrists like hungry mouths. He was keenly sensate of his shoulders being wrenched up by the two large police officers as they dragged him along. And he was completely and unambiguously aware of the large crowd of staring people who looked at him with a raw mixture of hatred and interest as he was trundled at speed toward the police van.

  There was something odd about the van, but Sparks was too busy being trundled at speed and avoiding hate-filled stares to take it in. The van itself took an interest in the proceedings when it hit Sparks in the face. Then its doors were opened and the policemen threw him into the back, causing Sparks to hit some kind of metal bench quite hard with most of his jaw. Sparks fell to the ground and decided he fancied writhing in agony for a bit. Then his writhing, if not his agony, was curtailed when someone put their foot on his chest.

  “Ow,” said Sparks.

  “Shut up, Sparks,” said the tired voice, and Sparks twisted his head round to see that he was being addressed by a very long-looking woman with a great big nose. The woman took her foot off Sparks’ chest and leaned down to breathe through epic nostrils at him.

  “Steady, ma’am,” said one of the policemen.

  “Don’t worry,” said the woman. “He won’t hurt me.”

  “No,” said Sparks, disappointed to find out that he was indeed clearly a bad person in this place. “Besides, I can’t move and I’m in quite a lot of pain.”

  “Boo hoo,” said the woman. “Wish you’d thought of that before killing all those people.”

  This was the kind of line Sparks really hated. It always made him want to say something like, “You’re right. I’d never have done it if I’d thought someone might try and arrest me.” But he didn’t. He had a feeling it might make things worse.

  “My name is Detective Inspector Walters,” said the woman. “I have only one question for you, Sparks. We nicked you, six months ago. We gave y
ou life imprisonment. Seven sentences, all to run consecutively, just in case you were going to live for ever, seven times. And you disappeared, Sparks. From a closely-guarded cell. Saving the state a lot of money, but not satisfying all those people who think justice should be done.”

  “Sorry,” said Sparks, who had got caught up in the flow rather.

  “And then, just when we think justice will never be done, we get a report from some woman that she’s seen you in your old flat. The one that your old mum has kept the same ever since you were nicked. We thought she was just sentimental…”

  Just forgetful, more like, thought Sparks, but secretly he was impressed with his parents. He was a serial killer and they still loved him!

  “…but now it seems she knew you’d be back,” said Detective Inspector Walters. “How did you do it, Sparks? How did you disappear?”

  There comes a time in everyone’s life when the truth must be told. Sparks told Detective Inspector Walters and the policemen the truth.

  “Oh dear,” said Detective Inspector Walters, “I can see I’m not going home tonight.”

  DI WALTERS: Interview with suspect Paul Sparks, 8.20am, Friday the…

  SPARKS: Are you supposed to say that?

  DI WALTERS: What? Shut up! Say what?

  SPARKS: Suspect. You said I’d been tried and sentenced.

  DI WALTERS: Ah, so you admit it.

  SPARKS: No. I said “you said”. I’m not admitting anything. Anyway, I’m not having a go. I’m just asking why you said I was a suspect. I mean, if – as you say – I’ve been tried and sentenced…

  DI WALTERS: Yes, yes…