Free Bright Spark by Gavin Smith Page B

rarely turned off.
The sofa was too comfortable, the room too warm, it was so difficult to speak
or think or move. The diminished, bearded man in sellotaped glasses had in
other dreams politely and slowly explained that Mrs Crowe was detained with
another client. He smiled and hummed, not feeling the need to explain again,
and had settled like dust into his armchair to read a paperback bible. He’d yet
to turn the page from where it had fallen open in his lap. 
    The girl rocked slowly in the
other armchair, eyes rolling, lips twitching and a thin tracery of drool
sketching a lop-sided smile. Her fingers, pink and swollen with nails bitten to
the quick, pawed with their own energy at her food-stained nightdress.
           A mobile phone chose that moment to fill the room
with a saccharine R&B medley that demanded to be silenced. Shuffling in the
soft folds of the armchair while the tune swelled in volume and the singer’s
desires grew more ardent, he plucked the wretched thing from a pocket to find
it wriggling like an overturned cockroach. He flipped open its carapace and
jabbed at a red button, silencing the pimp-crooner mid-groan. He’d missed calls
from Slowey, from Hayley and most recently from himself.
    The bearded man eyed him over
his lenses, licked a finger and turned a page. The girl sobbed and bellowed
unformed words. The bird cocked its head and eyed him. The murmur from beyond
the frosted doors that led to Mrs Crowe’s conservatory had evaporated.   
    “Sorry. Probably work.” The
clock resumed its ticking. 
    “What is it you do then?” The
bearded man seemed to find his own voice surprising and his eyes returned to
the pages before him as if for guidance.
    “I think I’m a policeman.”
    “What an odd thing to say. Are
you or aren’t you?”
    “I suppose that’s why I’m
here.”
    “I suppose so.”
    “Next,” said the parakeet,
unleashing another whistle that made him grit his teeth and squeeze shut his
eyes. He held them shut, told himself to wake up, swearing that he’d see the
real world when he opened them. Then the air changed; it was warmer, and the
smell was all wrong, not leather and cannabis but stale sweat mingling with
just used cat litter.
    He prised open his eyes and was
folded into a deckchair that was much too small for him, staring over his knees
at Mrs Crowe while the fabric under his buttocks was slowly tearing stitch by
popping stitch. The raised hook of a cat’s tail brushed his knees.
    “Back again, Robert? The future
isn’t a fruit machine, you know. You can’t make all those bad things go away
just by pulling the lever again. Or are you one of those sceptics, come to
catch me out?”
    Mrs Crowe filled her half of
the conservatory. Her pale blue eyes, receding behind thick spectacle lenses,
were her sharpest feature. From the perm that domed her chubby face to the
fleshy forearms that cradled pendulous breasts and ankles whose thickening
flesh spilled from her slippers, she inhabited the space as fully as she could.
She rarely moved, nor did she need to. The physical realm was of little
interest to her. Only the glimmer behind her lenses, the faint movement of her
blouse and the sheen of sweat on her lip confirmed she was alive and awake. 
    “I don’t mean to come here. It
just happens.”
    “Robert, you’ll wake up in a
minute so we haven’t got time to debate fate versus free will. So, you just
happen to come here the same way you just happened to turn up at that girl’s
door when Hayley was working away. It says a lot that between us we can’t think
of her surname.  Always imagined you’d put in a better performance. A fumble on
her futon, one and only one mediocre orgasm, a guilty sulk then a very pricy
cab-ride home; barely seems worth undermining your marriage for.   
    “And don’t give me that look.
The spirits told me all about it, not long after you knocked them back.
Besides, I’m in your head and I see some rum stuff in here.”
    The