Sparks (3 page)

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 three 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.

Sparks ignored a trainer with a dead mouse in it that flew past his ear (“Tossaaa!”) and went through the raddled gate of number 17. He rang the first floor bell and a buzzer went off like all the wasps of hell. Sparks pushed the door open and climbed the stairs. 

The first floor landing had an unusual ambience, of fresh paint and the pink stuff dentists like people to drink. Sparks, who liked dentists as much as anyone does, felt a little apprehensive. One of his teeth suddenly felt cracked. He crossed the creaky landing to an off-white door that repeated the message that T Singh was a dental practitioner.

Sparks went in. He found himself in a small off-white room with a desk at one end and a split leatherette sofa at the other. Behind the desk was a vast old woman in Henry Kissinger glasses and a white coat. On the sofa was a small grey dog with wet brown hairs sticking up around its mouth. The dog stared at Sparks’ chest, and licked its lips. The vast old woman prodded some lemon curd tartlets on a plate for a moment and then looked at Sparks.

“Yes?” said the vast old woman.

“I would like to see Mr Singh,” said Sparks, uncertainly.

The vast old woman sighed.

“Do you have an appointment?” she asked.

“No,” said Sparks, frankly and boldly.

The vast old woman sighed again. She looked over at the dog, as if to say, “Society is in ruins, dog, what else can we expect?” The dog ignored her. It was still staring at Sparks’ chest, and now it drooled a little.

She turned her sighing gaze back on Sparks like a depressed searchlight.

“Go in,” she said, and sighed so much that one breast touched the desk, denting a tartlet.

Sparks stood there, feeling a bit uncertain and, if he was honest, scared. He was about to ask the vast old woman if she was sure he didn’t need an appointment, when she picked up the dented tartlet, threw it bodily into her mouth, opened a magazine with a photograph of three horses on the cover and began noisily flicking the pages.

Sparks crossed the room, avoiding the dog’s gaze (it was now looking hungrily at his groin) and went through the open doorway that, like its associates, was keen to assert that T Singh was a dental practitioner.

T Singh, dental practitioner, was also T Singh, giant. He stood, six feet seven tall in his stockinged dentist’s feet, in the middle of his surgery, his dentist’s chair on a slightly higher plinth than usual, wearing an immaculate white coat and an immaculate blue turban, and holding some nasty-looking bits of knives and wires.

“Hello,” he said. “It is my lunch hour.” He sounded slightly nervous.

“Hi,” said Sparks, who was definitely nervous, and beginning to wonder why he had come here on the basis of some stupid crap on his computer which was beginning to look more like a stupid student joke or some stupid thing like that and why didn’t he go back to his stupid office and maybe learn some other words apart from ‘stupid’ and stuff this for a game of soldiers and he should just tell this giant dentist sorry I interrupted your lunch even though I don’t see you with any actual food or anything.

Sparks didn’t say any of this. Instead he said, perhaps tactlessly:

“You’re very tall for a dentist.”

T Singh looked confused for a moment. Then he said, “Yes, it can make life difficult sometimes. Being so far away from the mouth. Fortunately I have long arms.”

There was a pause in the so-far not-gripping conversation. Sparks remembered his piece of paper.

“Redolent,” he said, confidently.

There was another pause, this one quiet enough to hear the gurgle of the fountain where the pink stuff goes.

“Pardon?” said the dentist.

“Redolent,” said Sparks, a little less confidently now.

“Ahhhh,” said T Singh. “I thought that’s what you said. Only you don’t seem the type.”

Sparks thought quickly, about as quickly as he had ever thought about anything.

“I am the type,” he said, trying to sound as though he was, whatever it might be. “The type to say redolent.”

T Singh nodded and pulled back a plastic curtain by the sink. Sparks walked over.

“Excellent. Stand here,” said T Singh, giant dentist, and pushed Sparks through the curtain.

IT REALLY HURTS!

OW!

BOLLOCKS OW!

OW OW OW OW!

IT REALLY HURTS SOME MORE!

These were most of Sparks’ thoughts for the next ten minutes or so. In fact, they were Sparks’ life for those ten minutes, too, as he could neither see nor hear anything. It was all sensation, and that sensation was pretty much OW! When Sparks stopped being in exciting pain, he found he could hear again, and what he could hear was a low rumbling noise like traffic. Then his sight returned and Sparks discovered that the low rumbling noise like traffic actually was traffic. He was standing next to a tube station. Sparks had been in a dentist’s surgery belonging to the tallest dentist in the world. Now he was on the Edgware Road. This was not right, no matter how tall the dentist. He ran through some options in his head: