Free Sparks by David Quantick Page A

expensive seating, the train had no toilets. It was the kind of train – all plastic bucket seats and useless pictures of scenes from rural life – that should have been taking prisoners to Legoland but instead it was the only way most of the West Country could get out of the West Country and into London.
    Sparks’ travelling companions were not the kind of people who once sat convivially across from each other in horse-drawn coaches. They were, essentially, all pissed. There was a young couple, unconscious in cheap leather jackets, who had somehow managed to drool on each other’s necks in their ale-y sleep. There was a middle-aged man, who was trying to look sober by reading a book, but kept giving the game away by having to start the same page again because he was too rat-arsed to focus.
    The train stopped at a station with a ridiculous name, like an illness or a racehorse. The man who couldn’t focus blundered off and some more people got on. One man, quite young and very unsteady on his feet, sat opposite Sparks and began to unload cans onto the little table between them. He had a lot of cans, all different, and some already open.
    Sparks and his mind didn’t notice; they were busy going over Spark’s plan. At last, Sparks was happy. The plan was simple and even he could understand it. He smiled to himself, which was an error. The man sitting opposite him stopping looking into opened cans for cigarette butts and stared at him, a bit hard. Sparks smiled back, which provoked a different stare from the young man, a suspicious one. They were saved from any further smiling and staring by the man’s mobile phone, which suddenly started playing the theme tune to some awful 1970s children’s programme. The young man stopped staring and answered the phone.
    Sparks returned to his mind. I can’t see anything wrong with this plan, he thought to himself.
    “Wha’?” said the young man into his phone. “Is he there?”
    Admittedly it is my plan and its flaws are likely to be invisible to me, Sparks thought, more dubiously. But that doesn’t matter. I’m not thick or anything.
    “Get ’im,” said the young man. “Get ’im to the phone.” There was a pause. “I don’t care. You don’t do that.” The young man glowered at the phone and raised his voice some more, which was impressive, as he was pretty much up there already. “YOU DON’T! DO THAT! Get ’im.”
    All I need is to go back and do it again, thought Sparks. I did it once, I can do it again. It’s not like there’s a set of infinite variables or anything.
    “He’s a sod!” said the young man, fortunately to the phone. “Why? You know why. He glued…” He became overcome with emotion, as well as cider, and could not speak.
    Ah, thought Sparks, bugger. Come to think of it, it is like there’s a set of infinite variables.
    “He glued a johnny to under my bed!” said the young man, furious and affronted. “You do not! Glue! A johnny! To under my bed!”
    Oh well, thought Sparks’ mind – Sparks was no longer thinking, having become interested in the kipper business – there isn’t any other way to do this.
    “You don’t do that!” shouted the young man, red-faced. He held the phone away from his face and stared into it like it had recently been a kitten and just then transformed before his eyes into a mobile phone. His face went redder. “Not to Gibbons!”
    He snapped the phone shut. Then he saw Sparks staring at him. This was a reversal of normality for the soi-disant Gibbons, who was clearly one of life’s starers. He evidently found it hard to deal with, and Sparks, who was one of life’s starees, felt embarrassed for him.
    “I’m sorry,” he said, “I didn’t mean to stare.”
    Gibbons looked unconvinced. He was getting starey again.
    “I was just… so deep in concentration that my eyes were sort of… looking forward,” said Sparks. “At you.”
    “Thinking?” Gibbons said, sneering almost. “About what? Your arse