Terms & Conditions Read online

  ‘Old friends are the best ones. They’re the ones you’ve had the longest.’

  ‘What the hell’s got into you? What happened to that happy Franklyn that came out of the hospital? Let it go. Molly and Sandra are ancient history.’

  ‘They’re a part of our ancient history,’ I whispered, suddenly tired.

  ‘I promise I’ll see Molly later this week. As for our own discussion, I have to go cycling with Valencia, so let’s re-sched, so we can thrash it out later. Sound good?’

  ‘No. It sounds fucking awful,’ I said.*

  * And she looked at me as at a pet which, after years of docile obedience, had turned on her.

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Subject: East Beats West

  Frank – hi!

  Went to Wat Pho to see the reclining Buddha – a stunning piece of golden mellowness.

  In the West our religious icons hang off crosses, emaciated, bleeding and in eternal pain.

  In the East they have a golden God reclining like the happiest fucking dude in the universe.

  Love and joy,

  Malc

  PS Reincarnation is real in Thailand. Suzuki cars come back as boat engines.

  TERMS & CONDITIONS OF GOD

  He had ten of them.

  When I returned to the office after my little break, they started me on real work – on terms and conditions. Oscar joked that no one ever read them so I wasn’t to worry too much about it. I suspected the contracts I was given were not live ones, just old ones to make me feel useful. At first, the tiny words swam like tadpoles, and sleep pulled me under. But still no one told me off. In fact, Oscar treated me so well that I had a dull sense that he liked New Franklyn more than Old Frank.

  He smiled when I came back with a pharmaceutical contract and, checking it over, said, ‘Great work, buddy. So you don’t have a problem with this?’

  ‘Not at all,’ I said, not really understanding the question.

  ‘I love it,’ said Oscar. ‘You’re like the new and improved Franklyn Version 2.0.’

  Contracts were in some sense a great comfort. My post-crash life was a chaos of emotions, but fine print allowed me to tie things down with tidy rules. Small print also gave me the first clues about my old self. Reading his contracts, I saw Old Frank was a neurotic ball of fret. I could smell it in the way he wrote terms. I felt privileged to have been him; he was a man who elevated neurosis to an art form. A contract lawyer protects clients by mitigating risk and avoiding responsibility, so no loophole is left unlooped or condition unqualified. And Old Frank was a master at it. A great lawyer does not abide the Rumsfeld rule of unknowable unknowns. He insures clients against all unknowable unknowns. For instance, the dreamy-sounding Force Majeure – colloquially called Acts of God – is the ultimate opt-out clause used to ensure that everything from weather to unforeseen incidents will get a client off the hook.*

  * Beware of romantic-sounding legalese.

  The strict translation of Force Majeure is a Superior Force, and I considered the Superior Force in my life to be the people, or possibly entity, which had led to my episode and crash. I wondered if Old Frank believed in God. (I barely believed in myself, so having faith in some all-powerful force was a stretch.) I wasn’t sure that Old Frank was a believer but I was convinced that he wielded God-like power for his clients. His contracts, so beautifully drafted, acted like Catholic priests – absolving, forgiving, at times even rewarding clients, no matter the situation. Old Frank was indeed a neurotic master. And if poetry was a raid on the inarticulate, then Frank’s terms were a raid on the unforeseen.* His terms tamed the riot of life and he was the master of the thing I most feared – worst-case scenarios.*1

  * Here’s Old Frank displaying his power in a term he drafted for a writers’ contract for television: ‘The writer waives any right to seek injunctive relief for the exploitation of their Work.’

  The brutal placement of the word exploitation cuts so deep.

  In layman’s terms: Bend over, you’re about to be exploited (and did we mention, when you’re being buggered, you won’t even be able to complain about it. Now please sign your life away here, here and here).

  *1 A famous computer company’s terms are the best example of worst-case scenario taken to an absurd degree: You agree that you will not use this MP3 player for any purposes prohibited by US law, including, without limitation, the development, design, and manufacture of nuclear missiles.

  Nuclear missiles! Supremely surreal. A company that produces sublime products and ridiculous fine print.

  So I knew I was doing particularly well when I spotted another thing that Old Frank had missed.

  It was a font irregularity.*

  * Shaw&Sons, like all firms, has strict rules governing font size:

  The nastier the clause the smaller the font.

  The more important the condition, the less visible it must be.

  And I barely noticed but, just before I moved off the page, my eye snagged on it:

  *

  * Mea culpa: I am responsible.

  TERMS & CONDITIONS OF DOUG

  We’re bound by delicate strings.

  ‘Good to see you back on your feet, Frank,’ said Doug.

  We were in the corridor, standing in what should have been an awkward moment – two men between places, in transit, nowhere to put their hands, nothing to lean on – but it wasn’t awkward, it was calm. I didn’t remember much about Doug but I remembered enough to know that I trusted him, he put me at ease. Departed memories leave emotional residues, so even though I couldn’t remember any facts about Doug, I felt deep down that I liked him.

  ‘I feel much better, thank you.’

  ‘I’m not sure what you remember but I worked with your father. I’m in insurance, an actuary actually,’ and he smiled at this little phrase.

  I smiled back but Doug then looked at me very seriously and said, ‘Now, Frank, tell me, do you really feel better?’

  I responded with a knee-jerk, ‘Yes of course I do. Tickety-boo.’

  ‘Really?’ said Doug.

  I thought for a moment and said, ‘Well, actually, no, not really, not entirely.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ said Doug, in no way disappointed. ‘It will be tough for a bit. A brain injury like that. It’s a big thing. A fundamental thing.’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ I said. ‘I sort of feel like . . . oh don’t worry . . . it’s silly.’

  ‘No, Frank, finish the thought, please,’ he said, holding my gaze with his warm brown eyes.

  ‘It feels like everything is being kept sweet – you know – superficial, like people think I might break or something, and I can’t seem to talk to anyone about anything that, well, that matters,’ I said, realising as I spoke that this was exactly what the problem was.

  Doug nodded and I sensed he was weighing up a decision, determining whether he should tell me something of importance.

  He said, ‘Look, Frank, um, I think we may need a little chat, so why don’t we go and talk a while? My office is just down the corridor. What do you say? I make a mean green tea.’

  I almost agreed. But his smile had an unnatural tension to it – a rope pulled too taut – and for a second I wasn’t sure if my initial impression of Doug was right. We were so high up in the building that it seemed as if clouds were brushing past the windows. I felt dizzy with indecision: Doug was trying to help me, I knew he wanted to share something fundamental with me, yet I hesitated and said, ‘Thanks for the chat, Doug. It’s been great talking, but I’ve really got to get back to my desk and check . . . some things.’

  Doug’s head sagged and I felt him give up on me. That feeling, of people giving up on me, that’s a physical sensation now. As if we’re tied by a million soft strings and, when I disappoint, a few thousand strings stretch and break, as my connection to that person is severed by yet more thin slices of disappointment.*

  * And as I walked away in a daze, I f
elt the thousand tiny strings between Doug and me snap.

  TERMS & CONDITIONS OF CODES

  They only make sense when you have the key.

  A few days after my encounter with Doug, I sat nursing an undrunk coffee at the café. Someone had spilled sugar on the table and it caught the sunlight and shone beautifully – a sugary constellation. Partway through proofreading one of Old Frank’s contracts, I felt odd, woozy, with an unsettling slush in my belly. All I knew was that I felt something was wrong. Something felt wrong. I thought I was about to be sick, so I pushed the policy away and tried to focus on not throwing up. Then I picked it up again and told myself to get a grip, but as I read it this feeling of anxiety filtered back in, and the world tipped sideways.

  There were words in the contract that a lawyer would never use. And this time it wasn’t just typos or font irregularities. Blurring my eyes caused strange words to bob up to the surface. The first word I spotted was the oddest. It dangled in the middle of a sentence – may. Not a legal word; far too ambiguous. I highlighted it.

  I went over the page again. The next word – Warning. Now this may not seem exceptional, but it’s not the sort of word used in a contract. It’s far too sensational. The sentence it lurked in was standard: Warning: all benefits agreed by the insurer will be adjusted in accordance with annual increases in interest rates. The second part of that sentence is in every contract. But I’d never seen the word Warning precede it.

  Then this: the full agreed sum will be paid to the customer, contain, after the amount is fully approved by . . . I felt overpowered by a vague sense that things around me were connected, that I’d stumbled upon a mysterious pattern drawn from blooming revelations and coincidences. This must be what schizophrenics feel in the lucid seconds of excitable realisation just before they tip into the abyss. The epiphany before lunacy.

  The final word bubbled up and it was the most bizarre. And when I combined all the odd words into a sentence, it made me laugh out loud. The sentence read:

  Warning: This Contract May Contain Nuts!

  It was only after my laughter hit a feverish note that I realised I couldn’t stop. There was no brake on my hysteria. I couldn’t halt it. People, including my beautiful barista, were looking at me, but the laughter bored deep into a place I hadn’t been for a long time. Giggling wildly, I stared at those words and I knew. I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I’d written them; I’d tampered with this contract before my accident. Perhaps I’d tampered with all the contracts. It was as if my old self was screaming up from the bowels of a well, roaring at me from the past – Wake up! Wake up and smell the putrid coffee, Frank, your life’s a fucking disaster! This message had boomeranged back to me – or even forward to me – from Old Frank communicating from the past, shouting over the chasm. As I laughed I remembered. I sat, holding tightly to this tampered contract, and my old memory, my feelings, my personality poured into the empty husk that was me.

  I really wish I could say something positive – that returning memories were a million dandelion seeds floating back and sticking to my brain. I cannot. Cockroaches hold hundreds of babies in their wombs and, when squashed, their exploded bodies spew spawn as far and wide as possible to preserve the species; as I laughed I started desperately and frantically trapping all the disgusting scuttling memories before they escaped again. That was how it felt.

  My brain filed the returning memories, like the lawyer I was, defining in detail my relationships with everyone around me, and the love and obligations that bound us all together. Hysteria rocked my body, memories burst like the hot gush of saliva before vomit, and the first thing I recalled was brutally simple, all the hatred built to a screech, and at its highest pitch rose one word – Oscar.

  CONDITION 2

  HYPERMNESIA*

  * Vivid recall of the past.

  TERMS & CONDITIONS OF KNOWLEDGE

  Only after you achieve ultimate knowledge do you gain the final wisdom – that ignorance was bliss.

  TERMS & CONDITIONS OF OSCAR

  The condition of halitosis is one of stinking denial.

  Oscar’s face is like a board game in which his eyes, ears, mouth and nose compete to win the prize of ‘nastiest feature’. If I were judging, I’d say his eyes take the prize. They’re less like eyes, more like hollows left by a departing soul.

  In case you’re still unsure: I hate him.

  I remembered it all so clearly now.

  He has repugnant halitosis and was forever saying about other people, ‘Man, that guy has rank breath!’

  In fact it’s just bad-breath rebound. Oscar hasn’t sussed out that it’s his own breath wafting back at him.

  The only positive about Oscar is that he’s the one thing left that my wife and I completely agree on. (Yes, turns out I’m not a huge fan of my wife either, but I’ll come to that.)

  I remembered that my wife and I often played the Who-Hates-Oscar-The-Most game.

  I’d say: ‘If Oscar was an animal, he’d be a rattlesnake.’

  She’d trump this with: ‘Oscar is Stalin and Hitler’s lovechild.’

  I’d double-trump that with: ‘Most people are reincarnated as animals. Oscar will be reincarnated as AIDS.’

  You get the idea. I won’t write what Oscar actually is. It is simply too offensive.*

  * (Oscar is a cunt.)

  TERMS & CONDITIONS OF MY FAMILY

  No need to get personal.

  Then the crux of the matter came to me. The source of my rage – the Will.

  My dad’s Will stated that Oscar would take over the business, then I would become partner, and finally my youngest brother, Malcolm, would too. The contract was specific and fair; we all had to work hard to earn our partnerships. It was nepotism with a legal shine.

  Unfortunately, Dad put one tiny sentence in the Will which stipulated that my election to partner would be determined ‘at such a time as Oscar sees fit’.

  A decade after Dad’s death, Oscar hasn’t yet seen fit. My life ruined by one sentence.* It will be my epitaph. Here lies Frank. He died at such a time as Oscar saw fit. My dad snapped me into a legal trap. I remembered vividly the day I learned of Dad’s Will: a grey lawyer reading a manila Will in a beige office. The windows had steel bars that bent outwards and the walls were piled high with red books. The significance of the moment saturated everything with symbolism as I sat in my legal jail. And Oscar, calm as can be, stretched his fat legs out like a man sunbathing.

  * I warned you about that small print.

  My youngest brother, Malcolm, had his own response. He stood, said, ‘Fuck this,’ walked out, got on a plane and never returned. Shrewd move.

  The reading of the Will was a crossroads in my life but I’m still standing in the centre of it, still undecided, still too chicken-shit to move. I’m not saying I was my father’s favourite or that he loved me the most. He was egalitarian in his love.* But just to stick to tradition and give everything to the eldest brother was intolerable. Surely my father, even through paternal eyes, blurry with pride, must have noticed that Oscar was a power-mad twat.

  * His love was equitable and fair. His love would have stood up in a court of law. Legal love.

  Dad distributed the remaining parts of his estate with King Solomon precision. All funds, such as the money from his house, were ploughed back into the business, so logically all three brothers would ultimately profit from the investment.

  His other valuable possessions were then split evenly: his expensive briefcase was gifted to Malcolm, his fountain pen gifted to Oscar, and his antique wind-up watch went to me.*

  * I had admired it once, when I was a kid, and he promised it to me. But later on I found myself dismissing it. When I was an arrogant teenager I compared it to my own super amazing digital watch which did not require winding up. Dad didn’t like this, and I suspected he may have reconsidered his offer, but he told me at the time, ‘The great thing about my watch, Frank, is that you get out of it exactly what you put into it. The
re’s something rather nice and fair about it. It’s a beautiful contract. Every morning I take a few seconds to wind up twenty-four hours’ worth of time and every day my watch returns the favour by marking out twenty-four precise hours.’

  I smirked at him.

  I wish I hadn’t, and every morning I wind it up, I regret that smirk.

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Subject: No-News Flash!

  Frank – hi,

  News Flash: Nothing Happened Today

  On an island somewhere in Thailand nothing happened today. No politicians lied, no salesmen sold nothing, no missionary preached no word of no god, no policeman arrested no criminal, no one decided that they needed to have plastic surgery because their boobs seemed saggy, no one beat up no one else because no football teams lost no games, no banker embezzled no money, no one divorced no one else, no CIA conspiracies were hatched (not allegedly nor otherwise), no celebrity was photographed doing nothing to no one, no Starbucks opened on no street, absolutely nothing of any significance happened today. Not a blessed thing.

  Love and peace,

  Malc

  TERMS & CONDITIONS OF OBJECTIVES MEETINGS

  There’s nothing objective about them.

  Not only had Oscar seen fit not to make me a partner, he’d also seen fit to keep me in the lowest league of our firm. I’m still, so long after Dad’s death, the terms and conditions guy. And Oscar never missed an opportunity to put me down. We had the most painful objectives meetings in which Oscar had the cheek to tell me that I didn’t have the gravitas required for the promotion. He loved every minute that I loathed.

  ‘You’re a little light, Frank,’ Oscar said. ‘You need a bit more power. Buy some suits that cost too much, get rid of that stupid Japanese car, buy something imposing, enormous, get a new haircut, start wearing odd-shaped glasses. That’s how you achieve gravitas. Any questions?’