Sparks Read Online Free PDF Page B

says her Dad, and Alison nods. She feels slightly tearful.
    One Alison stays at home and phones in sick, which does not go down well with her boss.
    “That’s two weeks in a row,” says her boss. “Are you coming in tomorrow?”
    “I’m not sure,” Alison says, and her boss says, “Well, don’t bother coming in at all, then.”
    Sparks woke up from a dream where police cars had the wrong things written on them and Alison was apologising to him and crying. His eyes opened and he found that his head hurt quite a lot. “Have a glass of water, Sparks,” was what Alison would have said at this point, but Alison wasn’t there, so Sparks had a glass of Tango from a can he found in the bathroom. Then he put on a T-shirt (FLY UNITED, it said, with two ducks having sex in mid-air) and went into the front room, where two men knocked him to the ground.
    The Tango went everywhere. The men leaned over Sparks and tapped him quite hard on the head with something. Sparks fell to the ground.
    “Hit him,” said a voice. There was a thud and Sparks experienced mild pain.
    “Hit him properly, Duncan,” said the voice.
    “I did,” said another voice.
    “Oh, is that what you call properly?” said the first voice.
    “Yes, Jeff,” said the second voice, “that is what I call properly.”
    “That wasn’t properly,” said the first voice. “This is properly.”
    Sparks experienced severe pain.
    “Oh, right,” said the second voice. “Got you.” There was another thud and Sparks passed out.
    Sparks woke up some time later – he didn’t know how much later, having forgotten to look at his watch before being knocked unconscious – and saw, out of the corner of an eye that didn’t know if it wanted to be open or closed, two extremely thin figures in the corner of his office, looking like the number 11 on a bad day. They were making a strange hissing noise and for a moment Sparks thought his office had been invaded by rapidly deflating anorexics. Then he realised that they were spraying something on his walls and the hissing came from aerosol cans.
    One of the thin men stepped backwards.
    “You’ve spelt it wrong,” he said, and Sparks recognised the peevish tones of the second voice. He peered through his indecisive eye. On his wall – which had been grubby and not too pleasant before – the thin men had sprayed some words. LEAVE WELL ALAN they said.
    “‘Leave well Alan’,” said the second voice. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    “Oh bugger,” said the first voice. “I must have been thinking of Alan, and written ‘Alan’ instead of ‘alone’.”
    “Why? Are you in love with him?”
    “No, but he is my boss and I do spend a lot of time working with him and…”
    “All right. Just change the A to an O and we’ll get out of here.”
    There was a hissing noise again.
    “That looks rubbish.”
    “It’s not my fault. You can’t correct things with an aerosol.”
    “You could make it look like an anarchy A in a circle.”
    “Yes, that would work. But we’d have to do the other A’s as well.”
    “Oh yes. Oh, and put an E on the end of Alon. ‘Leave Well Alon’ doesn’t make sense.”
    “I think we should have had a stencil made.”
    Sparks groaned. This was an error.
    “He groaned!”
    Realising what he’d done, Sparks tried to make the groan sound like the noise a man makes when he wakes up, groans and passes out again.
    “I think we should hit him again. Just to make sure.”
    “Should we hit him properly?”
    “Don’t be sarcastic. You have do these things pro... right.”
    “Where’s he gone?”
    “Oh bugger.”
    Sparks lay beneath the desk he had rolled under when he noticed his assailants were engrossed in bickering. It wasn’t exactly a secure hiding place, but there were lots of things underneath and Sparks – never a tidy man – knew what most of them were. Several of them were sharp, and one was a hammer.
    He slid a hand towards the hammer and grabbed its handle.