Terms & Conditions (2 page)

* Disclaimer : of course, none of this actually happened.*
¹

*
¹
My frazzled brain was blending fantasy with reality. The truth was far less Mills & Boon. In fact – if I'm remembering correctly – I barely ever spoke to her. Yet I'd return to my desk brimming with joy; but as my cappuccino cooled, a sadness settled in and every day I'd sit with a cold cup of coffee thinking,
What the hell am I doing with my life?
*
²

*
²
And every day a tiny voice would reply, ‘Not a lot.‘*
³
'

*
³
This melancholy memory was the first sign that all was not well.

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF MY WIFE

Alice is my wife – allegedly.

My alleged wife, like many of my visitors, seemed very nervous when she came to see me.

Why? Were they worried I wouldn't recognise them? Maybe they were hopeful they'd be that special person –
the key
– the one whose mere presence would miraculously unlock me? Or was it that people were nervous because I'd been a complete bastard?

Was Old Frank a real twat?

I discovered early on that no one would tell me what I had really been like. When I asked my wife, she offered only the vaguest sentences; words that could have described a billion other people: ‘You were,
are
. . . a nice chap and funny, really driven and . . .'

It was like that awful ‘Personal Section' in curriculum vitaes –
my CV personality
. So I accepted that I was the only one who could really discover who I once was – I knew no one would ever tell me the unvarnished truth.*

* No one would turn to me and say,
You were such a cunt-face, Frank. You hated life, detested your friends, and you were often found in parks furiously masturbating.

But my nervous wife did drop some clues which made me realise that my memory wasn't entirely deleted. (Where my short-term memory was a burnt-out office, some long-term memories were safely backed up in a warehouse far away.) So when my wife told me I had a brother called Malcolm, two words bobbed from my amnesiac soup and I shouted triumphantly, ‘Fuck this!'

She laughed, ‘That's right. Malcolm liked saying that. We've tried to track Malcolm down, but he's off travelling, God knows where . . .'

My wife kept talking but I wasn't listening: I was, for a moment, mesmerised by my own hand and I could only really focus on one thing at a time. (My concentration was the most under-staffed
department of my broken brain; it was just one guy frantically adding to an endless
To Do
list unspooling behind him like toilet roll.)

‘. . . you listening, cotton-brain?' she said, but winced at what a bad thing that was to say to a brain-damaged person. ‘Oscar? Your older brother? Remember? Oscar?* Tall . . . He's um . . .' As I watched her strain to describe Oscar, I realised that people knew friends and family so well that they didn't really see them any more. (Everyone becomes invisible.)

* Oscar? Um? Nope, no Oscar here – try Lost & Found down the hall past the Department of Déjà Vu.

I, on the other hand, was overpowered by details. My blurred vision meant that features shot out of people's faces like caricatures – Dr Mills' bald head; Alice's black bob – but what I lacked was the glue to stick the right feature to the right person. So in my woozy underworld Dr Mills appeared with Alice's black bob, or Alice with Dr Mills' bulbous nose hanging grotesquely off her face. (Legally,
confusion of goods
describes a situation in which the property of two persons becomes inseparably mixed – I suffered
confusion of features
.)

I must have flicked in and out of sleep because Oscar was suddenly there, sitting stiffly beside my wife, as if he'd popped out of thin air, or in his case fat air, as – it turned out – he was an extraordinarily large man. The two of them were tense, sitting in silence, one fat, one slim, both watching me. I noticed that they never talked to each other directly and I sensed that they hated one another.*

* So palpable was the rage between them that I saw it as an iridescent white light.

Oscar had a bag of plums, and he said, ‘Franklyn, having another snooze, eh? Brought you these. People always bring grapes. I upped it, brought you plums. Basically giant grapes.'

And a rancid green smell oozed from somewhere.

Oscar picked the price sticker off a plum and rolled it around his fingers. I took a plum and admired it: taut skin marbled with thin crimson veins running deep into the dark flesh within – this perfect design overwhelmed me and I said, ‘Can you believe this?' to which
Oscar, still staring at the price sticker, barked, ‘I know! £2 for a few plums! It's daylight fucking robbery!'

I must have looked confused, because Alice and Oscar realised I wasn't talking about the price. They laughed hard and loud, forcing the tension around us into temporary submission.*

* And dimming the fierce light between them.

My wife said, ‘That was so funny, Franklyn.'

As the laughter faded – and the tension regained its hold – I became overpowered by the foul green smell. Oscar looked at me hard as if expecting me to say something. He was ill at ease. I smiled; my shattered teeth sparked a flicker of disgust on Oscar's face as he said, ‘Do you remember much about your little episode, Franklyn?'

Little episode!

My wife's hand shot across the divide between them and grabbed Oscar's knee. He jumped a little.

‘What do you mean?' I said. ‘What
little episode
? I was told I was in a car accident.'

My wife smiled – her hand released Oscar's knee and the gap between them flared bright – when she said, ‘Nothing, nothing, nothing at all, Franklyn. You were rather tired . . . stressed and tired, before your crash, that's all . . .'

But the sharp silence that followed – which I saw as a violet scream – suggested they were hiding something from me. Exhausted by my sensory cocktail I lay back and stared up at the white ceiling. The violet scream faded, the green stench paled, and I sank into a colourless sleep.

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF THE SPLEEN

You can live without it but it makes life just a little bit harder.

Mornings began with Dr Mills giving me an update on my condition. It was almost comical –
were it not tragic
– the way he sat with his glasses hanging off the end of his nose detailing my grim anatomical itinerary.

‘So, Mr Shaw, your bones are healing well, ribs are still loose but they'll heal, both your collar bones remain fractured. The amnesia we shall be monitoring very closely. Blood pressure is stabilising but your panic attacks are still frequent. And, finally, I'm sorry that we failed to mention this to you after the accident, it was a clerical error, and we should really have told you earlier, but I have to tell you now,' and he leaned in slowly as if about to confess something terrible and said in a solemn tone, ‘you can live without it, so please don't panic, but we had to remove your soul as it was ruptured in the accident.'*

*
Remove my soul!

‘You removed my soul?' I squealed.

‘No, no, that's not my department,' he said, smiling slightly. ‘Your
spleen
. We had to remove your spleen, which was ruptured in the accident. Yes, as I say, it's not an essential organ. It just means you may be a little more susceptible to infection. The spleen is a very clever little additional filter but if you have a healthy lifestyle you can survive without it. No problem at all. In fact, history shows that many great men have survived, and even thrived, without their spleens . . .'

He left the sentence hanging, so I smiled, waiting for him to list some of the great men who had thrived without their spleens, but Dr Mills merely snapped shut the file and walked off to his next patient.

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF MALCOLM

He was nowhere to be seen.

My wife visited, dropped off my laptop, and opened my personal email account in order to help spark my memory. I dug into my past. It was an embarrassingly shallow excavation. It seems I didn't suffer an abundance of friends. In fact, besides spam mail, the only consistent communication was from my younger brother, Malcolm, and from his sparse correspondence it was clear he was often off the grid. But his emails made me love him instantly.

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Subject: A Greek Tragedy

Frank – hi!

Ended up on a Greek train platform with a Scottish vagrant last night.

Missed the train and we were locked in the station.

Before he fell asleep his exact words were,
Don't worry, pal, I'm no thief – I'm just a wee bit of a murderer.

He actually said that then fell asleep, leaving me bolt upright.

Eventually exhaustion came to collect me and I fell asleep too.

Luckily – he turned out to be a liar.

When I woke up he'd stolen everything including the sleeping bag I'd been in.
Phew!

Love and lies,

Malc

PS Saw this on a sticker today:
The heart is a blind, hopeful organ, beating patiently, craving excitement and love. If you only feed it solitude and fear, one day it will give up on you.

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF HAPPINESS

Hysteria is just a hop away from happiness.

By the time I returned home my vivid panic had downgraded to anxious elation. I felt like a spy watching a stranger's life. And, man, what a life! My wife:
beautiful
. The flat:
amazing
. It's odd what you remember. I remembered exactly where the teaspoons were kept, but I still had no idea how I used to feel about this woman who was my wife. She seemed nice, though, and quite sexy.* (The only thing was, she was always watching me.)

* Although we'd not had sex yet as my ribs still swam inside me like snapped bamboo in soup.

Time and dental work had deflated my face to its original size, my eyes cleared, and all that remained was a scar on my forehead that I covered with my fringe. My senses had divorced and were independent again. And my memory was returning like the reconnection of a thousand torn fibres, an itch on your nose when your hands are occupied, screaming,
scratch me, scratch me
. I was still dopey due to the wide spectrum of anti-psychotics and painkillers but by the time I arrived home I was so happy I thought I might burst.* They say that people who walk away from near-death experiences are filled with overwhelming joy. What they don't tell you is that the feeling is finite. It fades. Mine faded fast.

* Amendment to Terms & Conditions of Happiness: it transpired that my happiness was nitroglycerin. Clear and stable as long as everything was utterly calm. But shake it just a bit – and it exploded.

After a few drifting days, the first strange thing I noted about my life was that I was so completely absent from it. Like a murder scene in which someone had cleaned up all evidence of me. Was I one of those people who simply floated through life without leaving a mark? The flat was very feminine, with its white walls and profusion of cushions. So few clues. My clothes were generic, I had an ancient wind-up watch,
and most of my books were about contract law. I looked around and thought,
Where the hell am I in all of this?

When my wife went to work I became a drowsy detective in search of myself. Under the bed I found a box. As I opened it my heart beat hard like I was about to uncover my memory, as if one simple object in this box would unblock my amnesia dam, cause a flood, and I'd drown in me. I was sorely disappointed: inside were contracts, just random ones about employment or insurance. I skimmed through them.

I did, however, know I was doing well when I, New Franklyn, spotted something Old Frank must have missed. Within the fine print of one contract was a mistake:
Term results in detriment – non omnis moriar – to the promisee
. Now I know that
Non omnis moriar
* sounds like a legal term, and it slips past the eye easily. But I knew the phrase was wrong. It has no legal basis.*
¹

* Not all of me shall die.

*
¹
I'll preface that by adding that odd phrases do make it into law. Latin and biblical quotes creep in. In
Donoghue v Stevenson
, Ms Donoghue drank a snail in her ginger beer and her lawyer made the court recognise that everyone –
including ginger beer makers like Mr ­Stevenson
– should
Love thy neighbour
, and in so doing try their utmost to stop people ­inadvertently drinking snails. And so a legal doctrine was born from a biblical quote.

I threw the contracts back, pushed the box under the bed, then worked my way through the bookshelf where I found a book called
Executive X
. I was a bit surprised to see my wife had written it. There was a picture of her on the back looking a touch younger. The front cover image was a giant X wearing a black tie. It was a book that described a man, an executive, and for all its corporate gibberish, I could only deduce that this guy, Executive X, was a complete tosser. It was a book about how to evaluate personalities, full of asinine questions like:
Meeting someone new – a pleasure or a pain?
After reading a few pages, my hand began to shake and, before I knew what was happening, I was throwing the book against the wall and then – as if in a dream, watching myself – I was stomping on it, again and again and again, until dizziness overpowered me.

When the rage passed I was mortified.

I'd destroyed a book by my wife. And I had no clue why. I began to fumble about to find a place to hide it, to conceal my crime. I opened a cupboard full of brown boxes.

Perfect
, I thought.

But as I tore open the top box I was met with many more copies of
Executive X
. Feeling faint, I grabbed the box to steady myself but pulled it down with me, spilling boxes and books, ending up on my back thrashing about on the floor. Once everything had stopped tumbling I sat up and looked around at the boxes spewing out multiple copies of
Executive X
and noticed something else among the chaos – small figures.