Sparks (13 page)

“Jump in,” he said.

Sparks jumped in.

OW!

And so on.

Sparks, having left his own world by jumping through the floor, entered the other world at some speed and as he hurtled towards the ground, he wondered what might be below him, and if it might be rocks. By great good fortune, it wasn’t rocks. It was water. In fact, it was a lake. Sparks sank like a stone wearing gloves and a balaclava, rose again with some furious paddling, and struggled to the surface. Trying to both breath and tear the balaclava off filled up a few seconds of his life, but soon, with some furious water-treading, Sparks was able to see that he was fairly close to shore. Then he had an extremely worrying thought; as he had surfaced in the middle of a lake, he might have some difficulty finding his way back. He looked around for a landmark. There wasn’t one, obviously.

“Oh, bugger,” said Sparks. He had no idea what to do now. However, he couldn’t tread water for the rest of his life, so he decided to swim towards land and have a think.

As he swam, Sparks had a further horrible thought; what if he had arrived in some sort of prehistoric world where man had never evolved? If this was the case, he thought, not only would he be trapped without any human company, but also there was little chance of phoning Alison up and asking her out for a drink.

Land loomed close, and Sparks began worriedly climbing a small mudbank to the shore. He stood up, and peered optimistically back at the lake. To his astonishment and relief, he could see a slight haze over the part of the water where he had surfaced, like a localised fog, which resembled a misty window that someone had rubbed with a finger. Sparks tried to make a mental note of the haze’s location, realised that he couldn’t, and sat down instead to open the bag and dry himself with the insanely scratchy towel. He could only hope that the haze would remain visible when he returned.

Dressed again, Sparks stood again and had a look round. The lake was surrounded by unkempt grass, scrubby trees and thorny-looking bush. Sparks was just wondering if he had arrived in a primitive world when he backed into something hard. It was a large metal pole with a small metal sign attached to it. MUNICIPAL RESERVOIR the sign said. KEEP OUT.

Feeling perversely regretful now that he hadn’t been plunged into a prehistoric hell where he would have spent all his time trying not to step on butterflies, Sparks could see that he was in fact in a part of North London that he recognised, just up from King’s Cross Station in fact. He hid the bag and the abrasive towel under a bush and set off to find a phone box.

As he walked onto the Pentonville Road, another large sign caught his attention. This one was much bigger than the reservoir sign and had lots of bright colours and big boggly letters on it. What caught Sparks’ eye mostly about the sign, though, was what it said:

ISLINGTON WELCOMES BEARS!

and there was a little cartoon of a very frightening-looking bear being welcomed by some people as though it was an old friend returned from a long sabbatical teaching media studies in Italy, rather than an enormous deadly lump of teeth and muscle that would stun you with its bear breath and then rip your lungs out before getting bored and going to sniff some beehives.

Sparks thought this was a bit strange, and wondered why Islington, or anyone other than a ringmaster or a zookeeper, would welcome bears anyway, and why, if it came to it, Islington was welcoming any bears in the first place. And then, ten seconds later, in what Sparks thought was an uncanny coincidence but obviously if he’d thought about it wasn’t, there was a lot of screaming from the car park of a large nearby hotel, and a very large brown bear came roaring out with murder in its eyes and blood and cloth on its claws.

Then Sparks noticed two things. One, nobody was attempting to restrain or even shoot the bear and two, it was coming straight at a woman standing in the car park. The woman appeared to be, and in fact was, Alison.

Part Two

ALISON

Alison had spent most of the morning standing in line in a supermarket. She felt terrible. The line wasn’t moving. It wasn’t ever going to move. Everyone in front of Alison appeared to have warehouses of food, forests of vegetables and estates of cans. Alison had a basket with a can of Diet Coke and a banana in it. The man at the front was trying to pay with a credit card that the checkout girl had never seen before. She called the manager. He had never seen one before either.

“Have you got any money?” the manager asked.

“Yes,” said the man. “But I want to pay with this card.”

The line groaned. People sagged. Alison’s basket got heavier. Alison moved her basket to a different hand. It made no difference. The man at the front with the exceptional credit card was holding his ground. A woman in front of Alison swore briefly and walked away, leaving her heaping trolley in front of Alison. She pushed it away and it rolled off into a large man’s backside, denting it briefly. The large man glared at Alison. She moved forward.

Now she could see the till more clearly. It was covered in meat products and sugary drink bottles. Next to the checkout girl was some sort of electronic display. It ought to have been flashing up price totals and whirring with the sheer joy of capitalism. It wasn’t. Instead, a message in spindly electronic letters was idling across it.

For want of something to do, and not having a machine gun, Alison peered at the message.

goodbye hope
, it said. It scrolled off and said
goodbye hope
again.

Alison couldn’t believe it. She was also deeply unsettled. Supermarket slogans were normally more optimistic than this. They said things like COME BACK SOON! Or BEARS ARE MAGIC! But there it was, again and again.
goodbye hope
. Alison could take it no longer. She dropped her basket and walked quickly out of the supermarket.

It’s an electronic display,
she thought,
you shouldn’t take these things personally
. But she did.

Alison set off for home. It was a sunny day. Somewhere in the world, fierce men with moustaches were being very nice to bears. And, somewhere else in the world, they weren’t. Life was like that. She heard a noise, and turned. Behind her was the source of the noise. Behind her was a bear.

A snarling, stinking heap of fur and claws will tend to make an impression on anyone standing near to it. Alison turned and saw the bear and her expression melted from fear to sheer terror to complete horrified understanding that she was about to die.

While Alison was experiencing all the bad emotions in a short space of time, Sparks was searching for a weapon. Improbably, he found one in the form of a large waste paper bin. Equally improbably, when he threw it at the bear, it hit it in the head, knocking the bear sideways and covering it in McDonald’s boxes and half-eaten Thai green chicken wraps (it was a nice part of Islington). The bear stopped being about to kill Alison and stood there for a second, looking stupid, even for a bear. Then it discovered that it was covered in food and staggered off to lick itself.

Alison sat down on a nearby low wall and Sparks found he was feeling very shaky. He had never attacked a bear before, even while drunk at the zoo. He was also still a bit shocked to find Alison – or at least a parallel Alison or a version of Alison or something – so easily. He wondered if she was surprised to see him. Perhaps in this world he was dead

“You’re dead,” said a voice next to him.

“What?” said Sparks.

“You’re dead, mate,” said the voice, which belonged to a man in a red T-shirt.

“Did you see what he just did?” said a woman to another woman. The other woman nodded.

“You can’t do that,” said the man.

“He must be foreign,” said the woman. “They do that there.”

“Yes,” said her friend, a late entrant to this, and possibly any other, conversation. “Foreign.”

“In this country,” said the man, speaking slowly and loudly, “We don’t do that.”

“Don’t do what?” said Sparks. “Stop bears attacking people?”

“He’s not foreign,” said the woman.

They thought about this for a moment.

“Let’s kill him,” said the other woman, and to Sparks’ further astonishment the two women and the man began to close round him, clearly quite intent on doing him lots of harm.

He was about to make some sort of complaint about this – “Don’t kill me”, that sort of thing – when Alison stood up.

“It’s all right,” she said. “I know him, I think.”

“What do you mean, you think?” said the man, clearly keen to get on with killing Sparks. “You either know him or you don’t.”

“Let’s kill him,” said the other woman again. She was not an indecisive woman.

“He’s been ill,” said Alison.

“No excuse,” said the man, but disappointedly, as though he was acknowledging that it wasn’t OK to kill the unwell, no matter how many bears they had attacked.

“I’ll take him to the police and sort this out,” said Alison.

“I’m not going to the police,” said Sparks.

Alison gave him a look that he found very familiar.

“Oh yes I am,” said Sparks.

They walked down the street together and then Alison turned left, sharply, into an alleyway and, after he had shown no signs of following, yanked Sparks in with her. Then she yanked him again, this time into a small yard full of huge metal bins on wheels.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she said.

“Pardon?” said Sparks, as was often his inclination.

Alison said it again, but this time didn’t wait for a reply.

“Is this one of your look-at-me mind game things, Sparks?” she said, so at least Sparks knew that he wasn’t the only Sparks here, in fact was clearly pretty similar to the other Sparks, as the other Alison had also been prone to asking him questions containing phrases like ‘look-at-me mind game things’.

A hundred – well, five – thoughts raced through Sparks’ brain as though they might win something. Clearly, this was a weird place, especially re: bears. Clearly, Alison was annoyed with him. Equally clearly, she was often annoyed with the other Sparks who, equally equally clearly, she thought he was. The alley thing probably meant she wasn’t really taking him to the police station, unless it was an extremely small police station in the bins. But the annoyed thing suggested to Sparks that he would have to explain himself, and in a way that wouldn’t enrage Alison, such as, for example, the actual truth.

Sparks thought fast. He would tell her that he had been pretending to be a foreigner who didn’t know local customs. Alison and he had once spent a day doing this, putting on foreign accents and booking hotel rooms in the West End and then having sex, foreignly, so it wasn’t such a bizarre assertion.

He was about to assert it when Alison said, “And don’t tell me you were pretending to be a foreigner, Sparks. You weren’t doing the accent.”

Sparks stopped thinking for a moment, literally, like a stalled car. His brain rotated uselessly in its skull. Then he said:

“I think I’ve got that flu.”

“What flu?” said Alison. “The one where you go mental and act like a complete idiot?”

“Yes,” said Sparks, immediately realising Alison was being sarcastic. “All right, no. But I do have flu and it’s really doing my head in. I got up this morning and I didn’t know where I was.”

“You were at my flat,” said Alison, her eyes changing shape in a dangerous way, as though the irises and the pupils were regrouping to throw tiny eye rockets at Sparks. “We had sex and you said it was brilliant and then you asked me to marry you.”

“Oh hell,” said Sparks, feeling immensely guilty. Then he realised that in fact that morning he hadn’t had sex and proposed to Alison; he had been in bed in a parallel universe, dreaming he had retractable legs. But this logic wouldn’t work on Alison, even if she wasn’t, which she now was, very angry.

Then her expression changed completely and abruptly from anger to bafflement. It changed so completely that Sparks thought it looked like someone had stuck a slide of a person looking baffled into a series of holiday slides of people looking angry.

“What’s wrong?” said Sparks.

Alison wasn’t listening. She gave every impression of concentrating hard on looking baffled.

“You’re not Sparks,” she said.

Sparks felt an electric wave go up his spine and mess with the hairs on his neck.

“Yes I am,” he said, which was pretty much the truth. In fact, it was the truth. And also, it wasn’t.

“You look different,” said Alison. She looked scared, Sparks thought, and wondered once more at the human capacity to change emotions like a chameleon on a gay flag.
One of those rainbow ones
, Sparks explained to himself, then realised he was going into a reverie and Alison was crying, in a scared way.

“What’s going on?” said Alison. “I mean, you are Sparks, I can see that, no one would be as daft as you, but…”

“Thanks,” said Sparks, before he realised that mild sarcasm never helps with crying, and in fact may not even be noticed.

“But also you’re not Sparks. Which doesn’t make sense.”

Sparks inhaled powerfully. Then he looked around, in case anyone had written the solution to his problems on some nearby walls. Then he spoke.

“I have an explanation. It’s stupid, but it’s true.”

Alison sniffed a bit and wiped a tear off her cheek. He really was scaring her, Sparks realised.

“OK,” she said. “That sounded like the sort of thing Sparks would say if he was being sincere. Um – where is he, by the way? You haven’t killed him or occupied his body or... I’m going to stop talking now.”

“I don’t know where he is,” said Sparks, “I expect knowing him, you know what I mean, knowing me, anyway, I expect he’s still in your flat, looking for bacon. Does he like bacon or do all the bears get it here for free?”

“Bears don’t eat bacon,” said Alison. “They eat…”

“Anyway,” said Sparks, anxious to move on. “We need to talk about the bears thing but I suspect me being Sparks is more of a priority for you.”