Terms & Conditions (24 page)

Lateral.

That's when I ran. I mean physically ran. I ran hard and fast and I bumped into lots of people on the way until finally I got to my car where the sparrow was perched on my boot and as I drove away, I scrolled through Alice's phone messages and there they were, message after message from Oscar – although it was all under the name Valencia – and even suggestive voicemails, ‘Hi, Alice, it's me, call me, the eagle has flown the coop, how about a lunch meeting, same place?'

The phone rang. Alice trying to call me. I was crying a lot, steering the car with one hand, scrolling through Alice's messages with the other. A
Stop
sign flashed in front of me; I ignored it and drove on through.

Stop.

The phone rang again.

Give Way.

It was Alice who said, ‘Please, Frank, I think something is very wrong with you. Come back and we can talk about it.'

I wasn't concentrating on the road. Something loud with bright flashing lights was screaming towards me – a fast-approaching violence – and the last thing I remember thinking before my car crash was, ‘Everything's messed up. My life couldn't get any worse than it is right now.'*

* And, of course, I was wrong.

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF A PERSONALITY

Piecing together a personality is a complicated affair.

Particularly when it's your own and you can't remember who you are.

Which was exactly the dilemma I faced after my car crash.

I lost my personality. More precisely, it was shunted out of me at 100 miles an hour. Car accidents come with conditions. Luckily for the other guy, he was driving a car renowned for being safe. I, however, was driving a car renowned for being crap.

The conditions created by a 100-mile-an-hour collision changed the state of my car from steel to jelly and it wobbled itself to bits.

My personality proved equally flimsy. It imploded, wiping clean the crib notes of my thoughts, memories and ideas, and leaving in its place a stark blank page.

I am that blank page.

My name is . . .*

* And you know all about my amnesia, the hospital, and my long walk –
crawl
– back to being me.

CONDITION 3

REALITY

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF REALITY

You can't stir things apart.

If your life became a soap opera and you were the joke character in the centre of it all, would you:

a. Learn your lines and hope for the best.

b. Pray it wasn't a long-running series.

c. Desperately try to get your character killed off.

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF HABITS

They die hard.

I didn't tell Doug all the things I had remembered. I was too ashamed of most of it and too furious about the rest of it.

He threw the remains of his sandwich in the bin and said, ‘Let's get you home.'

I raised my hand and muttered, ‘Nonsense. I'm actually fine, Doug. Thanks so much for the rest, though, and the chat. This has been the best few hours of my post-crash life and I can't tell you how much I appreciate everything you've done for me.'

‘Oh, tosh,' said Doug. ‘But, look, even if I'm not here, you're welcome to come and use my secret bed whenever you need, Frank. I mean it. Just let yourself in, close the door, and have a snooze.'

We both stood up and Doug put his right hand out to shake mine but I wrapped my arms around him and he stiffened slightly inside my hug. After we broke apart I thanked Doug another ten times before he gently pushed me out of his office saying, ‘Yes, yes, come back and talk whenever you want. I'm usually here meditating.'

I stumbled along the corridor back to work, trying to muddle my way through the many options rolling out before me.

In Sandra's book business they talk about the ‘narrative arc' – the gorgeous sweep of a character's development rising up a steep, seemingly intractable problem, hitting an epiphany at the peak, then sliding down the slope to a satisfying solution. Having now remembered all the horrible events that led to my episode and car crash, I felt as if I was at the apex of my arc, looking down, prepared to ride the slide with childish abandon to a gratifying conclusion.*

* But it turns out narrative arcs are a little bumpier than they initially seem.

These moments in life define you but you're also defined by your life in these moments. For instance, if I'd been an American I would probably have taken a gun and shot my wife in the face, shot Oscar in
the balls, then strolled to the bright white door, kicked it open, blown away a couple of the lawyers that worked on the #### business to relieve the world of a little more evil, then calmly, amid the mounting chaos, I'd have sighed, sat below a desk, placed the barrel to my head and ended my life with a fatal metal full stop –
bang!

You see it every week on the news. You even see it in the UK now; I remember someone telling me a lady came into a shop in Chiswick and used a shotgun to blow a hole into a woman who was sleeping with her husband. Before the shock and disgust of the story took hold, I thought –
Wow, that happened in the UK, in Chiswick, no less!

Like a posh postcode would in some way prevent you being a savage person.

If I were French I would have used that rage to tear Oscar's throat out with a pen and then beaten Alice to death with her bicycle wheel, and would have gone to court smug in the knowledge that I'd be let off because it was merely a
crime passionnel
.

But I'm British. So shooting people wasn't an option. I wouldn't know where to get a gun if my life depended on it. As for allowing my rage to trigger a
crime passionnel
, well, let's be honest, that's far too hot and European for my cold Anglo blood.

I was actually surprised to find that, after only a short time had passed, my anger cooled and my rage slipped into agitated indecision. I couldn't shake the agitation but I overpowered the indecision by making a decision.

First and foremost I wasn't going to tell Oscar or Alice a thing. Partly because I wasn't sure how you approach people and say,
Hey, I just remembered everything – I fucking hate your guts and you both ruined my life by sleeping with each other
.

The other decision I made was to email Malcolm. I opened my laptop, created a new email account – so Alice would never find it – and wrote.

From
:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Subject: Remember me!

Hello Malcolm,

Don't panic but I've been in a car accident and lost my memory.

The good news is that much of my memory has returned. The bad news is that the good news might be bad news.

By which I mean, I've remembered that I hate my wife and that our brother Oscar might be a twat.

I can't tell you everything that happened; it would take too long. Can you call me or send me your phone number: I need to talk.

Love,

Frank

I closed my laptop and decided to bide my time. I needed to heed the cliché about revenge being best served cold.

I kept my memories secret and, like a spy, decided to act as if everything was exactly the same until I could figure out an appropriate reaction.

But, of course, everything looked and felt different; my new world was a hard place to live in – as if viewing life through two sets of eyes – and even as I rode the lift for a meeting with Oscar, I nostalgically remembered the bliss of my ignorance.

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF GUILT

Guilt is the gravity that glues the universe together.

Scientists are pondering an elemental dilemma. And it is this. Gravity is not strong enough to hold the world together. They say, in theory, that gravity is in fact too weak to hold a cup to its saucer, to hold us to the earth, to hold the earth to the sun, the galaxy to other galaxies. Gravity is weak glue. We should in theory be flung apart like so many bits of fluff in a storm. Yet here we all are, connected: the cup to the saucer, us on the earth, the earth spinning gleefully around the sun, and galaxies grinding merrily around other galaxies.

So how can this be? Scientists are tangled in the String Theory which suggests that some of the power of gravity's stickiness leaks in from other portals and places. Well, I can tell you the answer right now, I can reveal the mystery of this missing force that holds us in place, so shut down CERN, close the billion-dollar laboratories, and go home.

Here it is:

•
Guilt is the missing force.

•
It will hold together the most opposing forces of the universe.

•
Even my wife and I are stuck together by it.

This is what I realised as I rode the lift. Oscar and Alice had stuck by me, even after their affair. Why? In theory, they should have just gone off with one another into the sunset to screw each other's brains out. They were probably just about to do it too – but then I went all mental and had a car crash.

So what did they do? They realised I had lost my memory and they decided not to tell me anything. Riddled with guilt, they probably thought this was their chance to make amends, so they stuck with me and tried to make it work. Guilt got to them.

As the lift ascended and floor numbers binged – 8, 9, 10 – my brain sizzled with flashbacks of Alice and Oscar sitting nervously at my
hospital bed after the crash. I remembered – when my senses were all a-jangle – seeing that seething white light between Oscar and Alice, and thinking it was hatred. In fact, it was the heady cocktail of wild love and filthy guilt. That was my twisted senses trying to tell me something – that bright white light was a warning.

This is all my roundabout way of confessing something, of absolving my own guilt.

I'll confess it here and now – guilt nearly got to me too. I nearly didn't do anything. Floating between floors, I almost took a bad turn. Hypnotised by the soft purr of the rising lift – 11, 12, 13, 14 – I actually thought:
Maybe I'll just let it all go, pretend it never happened; these people have been so kind to me since my accident, have we not all suffered enough?*

* Then the opposite thought hit –
Pull yourself together, Frank, and do something with your life!
As this idea took hold my right hand snapped into a tight fist, as if finally snatching one of the half-million chances that usually slipped through my fingers.

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF THE DEVIL

He's not nearly as bad as his lawyer.

I stepped out of the lift and took a deep breath. The first meeting with Oscar was hard. When I arrived at his office, I spent the entire time chatting calmly to him while imagining myself screaming –
I know what you did, Oscar! You fucked Alice! Now I'm going to fuck you up!
*

* I'm always so assertive in my fantasy life (and I swear a lot more too).

I heard Oscar say, ‘You look pretty pale, pal, do you need to go home? Doug said he found you in the café looking a bit battered and made you lie down. Did you take your meds today?'

‘Yes,' I lied.

‘Well, look, if you're sure, we have a meeting with a new client, just a small insurance firm. Do you fancy coming in with me and helping me sound impressive?' he said.

I heard my voice, as if from a distance, say, ‘Yes, that would be great, Oscar.'

‘Nice one, buddy. I'll pitch, and you can pull me up if I say anything too dumb.'

The insurance client was just one chap in a cheap suit and Oscar was on a roll. ‘We're big but we're also specialised. We love insurance law, as it's something that's been managed here since the day my granddad started this firm. And now his grandsons, myself and the brilliant Franklyn Shaw here, my younger brother, are proud to carry on that work. We know your business, we understand insurance – we get it.'

Oscar – realising he had the guy eating out of the palm of his hand – pulled out his favourite lawyer joke. He gave the man a generous wink and said, ‘Franklyn here is the king of fine print, there's not a clause-maker in this city who can seal a contract tighter. You'll never have to pay a customer again once he's drafted you a contract. Franklyn here could make a colander airtight.'

All I managed to squeeze into Oscar's performance was a smile and a nod before Oscar delivered his well-worn set-up line, ‘Here at S&S we believe that Ts&Cs stand for
Total Arse Coverage
. We cover your arse against
every
eventuality. And we have the heritage here at S&S. Let me put it this way,' Oscar said, oiling up his laughing gear for the punchline, ‘when Robert Johnson sold his soul at the crossroads, we were right there, working for the man with the horns, standing by Satan's side.'

Then, right there in the middle of this dull meeting, I felt faint and had an imagining so vivid it became a vision; my fury flipped inside out and manifested itself as an apparition. Spots floated like pollen, the world tipped at an obtuse angle, I grabbed for the desk, missed, the room rippled, the client and Oscar faded, and in their place here's what I saw:

Robert Johnson, the blues man, stands stick-thin at the crossroads, dust swirls round his old shoes.

Satan, whippet-thin, levers himself from his limousine.

Beside Satan jogs a man in a thousand-dollar suit – a corpulent lawyer with a striking resemblance to Oscar – scroll in hand, muttering, ‘Mr Beelzebub, now are you absolutely completely sure you don't want to include Mr Johnson's entire family in this sale? A bulk deal, so to speak. We may as well harvest a sack o' souls while we is at it, Mr B. What do you say? Might as well screw as many souls out of this rusty old blues man as we can?'

Satan himself flinches at his lawyer's unbridled greed, Satan himself feels his sympathy surge towards Robert Johnson, and turning, horns glinting in the southern sun, Satan says, ‘Mista lawyer-man, you make me sick.'