Terms & Conditions (16 page)

‘Come on, #### do a lot more than just guns and missiles,' Phil said.

‘That's like saying Hitler did a lot more than just kill Jews,' I said.

‘It's completely different,' my wife protested.

‘Is it really?' I said.

She shot me a shut-the-fuck-up look.

‘I hear that Hitler did some delightful paintings,' Phil joked.

My wife laughed and said, ‘He was also a gifted writer.
Mein Kampf
is a real page-turner. I could barely put it down.'

I cut the laughter short with, ‘It feels wrong.'

My wife said, ‘Come on, Frank, when did you become such a wet liberal?'

They both laughed so loudly that no one heard me reply, ‘When I met you.'

Which was true. I started to be more liberal and caring when I met Alice, who was once the most liberal, intelligent and caring person. I smiled and gave her the peace sign and they laughed.

Phil said, ‘You've been reading too much Naomi Klein; time to toughen up, mate.'

Then my wife said, out of nowhere, ‘Frank wanted to be a doctor, you know,' and she smiled coldly. ‘He wanted to help people but he went to the dark side and became a lawyer so he could legally hurt people.' Drunk and with spite in her eyes, she said, ‘Oh God, Frankie, I'm only kidding. You take everything so fucking seriously. Chillax.'

She was no longer the defender of my dreams; my wife would now use a secret that I had shared in confidence as nothing more than a punchline to amuse a colleague.

She added, ‘Frank keeps these daft toys from his childhood: gross anatomical figures with plastic organs that pop out. He actually wanted them on display in the flat – can you imagine?'

After Phil had left, I tried to plug her lead into my phone – tried to force the little thing into the socket – but it wouldn't fit.* ‘Did you change phones?' I asked.

* Even our phones weren't compatible any more.

‘Company gave us new ones.'

I said, ‘Also, can we talk about something? It's just that I've not been feeling like everything is going too well.'

She looked at me, didn't smile. ‘Can you expand?'*

*
Expand
. That's pure management speak.

She sounded irritated, like I was inconveniencing her.

‘Never mind,' I said. ‘It's just that things don't feel right and . . .'*

* I was about to say, ‘I can't go on like this, Alice, I want a divorce.'

But her phone vibrated and the word
Valencia
appeared.

I handed it to my wife who, as always, started to take the phone to another room.

But as she was leaving, she turned and said coldly, ‘We'll talk about this later, Frank.'*

* Which is management speak for ‘Fuck off, Frank'.*
¹

*
¹
We never talked about it again.

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF FRIENDLY FIRE

Was there ever a more appalling misuse of the word ‘friendly'?

Oscar gave me another #### contract. His promise that I wouldn't have to work on them had already slipped. He said he just wanted me to ‘look it over', but it was the tenth one I'd just had to ‘look over'. As I worked on it I thought about how this contract would be used.

Imagine the scene:

A desert. A man – his face wrapped and covered; only a slit reveals his dark eyes – approaches another man in a suit. The man's suit is dusted in sand, like cinnamon sprinkles. Mr Suit is selling missiles to Mr Headgear. Money is exchanged. Cash (of course). Then, as a brief afterthought, Mr Suit asks Mr Headgear to sign the contract, which says something about the use of the weapons, maybe mentions the Geneva Convention. Mr Headgear sneers at the document. That sneer is as much attention as it merits. He signs with a brutal slash and drives away with his weapons into a swirl of sand and . . .*

* Implausible. Sorry. Bit too Tom Clancy.

Here's the truth:

No desert. No terrorist. In fact, all the dark dealings happen in a brightly lit office. Probably an office just like yours but with more expensive corporate art on the walls and better views. Two men, two lawyers, two accountants transferring obnoxious weapons from one to the other as if selling photocopiers. It's that simple. It's that horrifying. I know all this because I recently sat in on one of those meetings.

So why even bother writing Ts&Cs for weapons? Believe me, you have to. You have to protect the people that make them from the people that will use them and the people who will be blown to smithereens by them. That's what I do.

I protect and serve the sellers; I literally serve Satan. But if there are
any less-read words than the terms and conditions on a weapons contract then I've yet to find them.*

* Ingredients on ketchup bottles have received more attention.

It's not the shady underworld you would expect. Want to know the biggest door-to-door weapons salesman? Then Google ‘leaders of the free world'. There they all are – Obama, Cameron, Merkel – smiling in front of giant weapons of destruction. In the UK, the defence industry is the second largest, and every time the prime minister pops off on an official visit he adds a less official visit in which he meets leaders and sells them weapons. The world of defence is actually all there to see, barely hidden, almost visible, and it's happening right in front of your eyes. There are entire towns sustained by the economy of weapons, such as Barrow in Cumbria, a place that survives on one industry – the building of nuclear submarines.

Our new client specialised in drones, these small dark inventions that allow leaders to destroy their enemy remotely, to devolve war into some distant video game. The legality of drones is still hanging delicately in the balance and my job, as always, is to assist in ensuring that the drone makers never, under any circumstance, have to take any responsibility. And I did my job. I didn't want to, but I did it, and I did it well.

I won't say that I ever accepted it or that I felt it was right but for a while I did do it. I checked the terms and conditions, the clauses, I made sure all unknowable unknowns were covered, and then one night I switched on the news and I saw my work writ in blood and guts.

It wasn't even a major story, just another news report shoved between the doom and gloom of financial collapse and the horror of paedophiles. But for me that one minute lasted a lifetime. I watched as a reporter stood beside a hospital that looked as if it had been torn open and gutted by Godzilla.

This impoverished hospital in Afghanistan had a hole in the middle of it; it was a Red Cross centre set up in the middle of a war zone to help children caught in the crossfire – only to then be caught in the
crossfire. A number of British troops had also been killed in the attack. A British-made drone flown by Americans had killed British troops. An organisation called Dronewatch, interviewed as part of the report, suggested that this particular drone had a well-known design fault, which so far the manufacturer and the government had covered up, and if someone didn't hold the manufacturer accountable, this sort of tragedy would continue to happen and many more innocent people and allied soldiers would be part of the collateral damage. The government, and manufacturer, using a drone that I had written the contract for, had hit soldiers and a civilian target, this hospital which had become hell, with the limbs and organs of children flung far and wide, the souls of the innocent blown to pieces, and the worst part was that no one would pay, no one would be held accountable, no one would be punished, and as I sat there paralysed, staring at the flickering images, I knew I had played my role, I knew I was responsible, not fully and not comprehensively, but I was a part of the machine, the complex, a grim little cog in the fatal machine that killed these children. I had used all my skill, education and experience to protect the people who made this mistake, I'm responsible for the fact that no one is ever held responsible, I'm priest, jury, judge and higher power absolving the rich and powerful to smite the weak and innocent, and, as the report ended and a smiling weatherman told me that sun was on its way, I leaned forward and vomited all over the carpet until nothing but bile dripped from my lips.

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF WARNINGS

They usually come without warning.

The same evening I accepted that another problem I had been fighting was finally getting the better of me.

I had been having minor attacks with increasing regularity but so far I had hidden them from everyone and convinced myself that I was fine,
absolutely fine
.

But the image of the hospital – all the dead soldiers and children – had pushed me to the edge, and later that evening as I reviewed another #### contract, which I had brought home to work on, I realised what was wrong.

I looked at the #### contract in my hands and I had another panic attack.

My vision blurred. The paper became soggy as it absorbed all of the sweat from my wet palms. I felt sick try to lurch back up from my stomach again.

I looked at the contract and I thought I had figured out where my problem lay –
paper
.

Looking at the disintegrating contract, I whispered, ‘Fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck!'

There's a name for it –
papyrophobia
: fear of paper.

To test my theory I walked to the printer and took some blank paper and looked at it but nothing happened, no panic – I could touch it, could smell it, could crunch it into a ball without the slightest sense of fear. It wasn't paper phobia.

But as soon as I looked back at the arms contract and read through the terms I again felt woozy and jittery.

Blank paper wasn't the issue. The problem was not the paper itself.

It was the words on the paper. I had developed a phobia of words and particularly of
warnings
.

Knowing what the problem was didn't help; it only made matters worse. Days later, on my way to get some lunch, someone handed me a small plastic packet of tissues.

I took it and said, ‘Thanks.'

But as I looked back at the man I saw he had a cross on his neck and the fixed grin of a God merchant.

When I looked at the tissues I realised there was a bit of paper stuck on the back with a message that read –
Life's hard but resist sin or burn in hell. Jesus Loves You
.

I dropped it and leaned against a building before the pounding in my head stopped and I could breathe properly again.

It was then that I accepted that, since the shock of the hospital tragedy, I had developed a debilitating phobia.

No term exists for my condition.

Closest I came was a word for the phobia of long words:
hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia
.*

* There's something needlessly cruel about labelling the word for the fear of long words with an incredibly long word – thereby inflaming the very people who suffer from it every time you mention their condition to them. I mean, who does that? Probably the same bastards that coined ‘dyslexia'.

From that day on my phobia spun rapidly out of control. Some days were worse than others but it wasn't long before I even stopped looking directly at
Stop
signs or road signs generally, which is an incredibly dangerous habit.

It was a period of great confusion. I had lost my confidence. All I knew at that stage was that the world had never made less sense and, for the first time in my adult life, I was starting to understand what it was like to stand on the chipped edge of madness.

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF THE DEAD

It's so hard to get your own back on the dead.

‘Still wearing your dad's watch,' Doug said.

I looked at the elegant watch on my wrist and replied, ‘It weathered the car crash better than I did. Not a scratch on it.'

‘It's a beautiful watch.'

‘Yes,' I said. ‘But you have to remember to wind it up every morning, it's that old. Bit of a pain really.'

‘I actually like the fact it's a wind-up watch,' Doug said. ‘Something about winding up a watch makes me think, silly though it is, that the day is like an old toy and when you wind up the watch you're winding up your day. I like that watch, it has such a great tick-tock. Not like those dull digital watches silently swallowing the seconds of your life without the mildest warning that your time is sliding by. No, your dad's watch has a nice tock, like the soft shoe of a blues man tapping out the bittersweet passing of time. I told your dad that once and he looked at me like I was off my head.'

‘I can imagine,' I said. ‘He wouldn't have understood that at all.'

‘He understood more than you think,' said Doug defensively. ‘Your dad and I once took that watch to Piccadilly to be fixed by this nutty man who pulled out and replaced the golden cogs. Your dad was like a child, so happy to see it fixed. I suspect that we're the last generation to actually fix stuff , rather than toss it away. He delighted in the fact that you could keep fixing this watch for ever and it would keep going, outliving us all. He was more of a poet than you know, your dad. He was a great lawyer but also a big soul.'

‘Oh,' I said, completely floored by this revelation, a little lost in this image of my dad delighting in the golden cogs of his watch.

Doug said, ‘I've ordered food. You should eat. I'll pop down and get it. Got you a bacon sandwich and asked the lady downstairs to make your favourite coffee – cappuccino, right?'

Doug left and I lifted Dad's watch to my ear. I took comfort in its gentle tick and tock. From long before I was born this unassuming sound marked out my dad's time and his dad's before him. Now here it was, marking out mine. After Dad's death I was so angry with him and his stipulated condition –
as Oscar sees fit!
– that I'd thrown it in a drawer. I had tried – in only the way a spoiled ungrateful son can – to defy a dead man.