Terms & Conditions (27 page)

I took your advice and I'm just about to catch up with my life.

Don't move.

Don't come home.

Wherever you are, stay there, I'm coming.

Send me an email and tell me where you've got to.

Can't wait to tell you what's been happening. It's been rather an interesting ride.

Love,

Frank

PS I'm bringing a friend.

CLAUSE 3.1

REVENGE

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF ENDINGS

More often than not, they're badly disguised beginnings.

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF CONNING A CON MAN

It's all about timing.

Today I rewrote my own employment contract with a tiny addendum. Which was that if I left the company, regardless of the reason, I would continue to receive my full salary for five years. Getting Oscar to sign was simple. For a start he was willing to do anything for me at the moment. Since I had passed out in our meeting, he had gone into overdrive, as if there was nothing he would not do for me. I took a stack of contracts so that he was in the rhythm of signing when I sprung the trick. I timed it so that my employment contract was placed in front of him right at the moment when the beautiful barista arrived in his office. (Simple distraction technique. Oldest trick in the book.)

‘What's this?' he asked.

‘My employment contract. HR brought it to my attention yesterday. It's out of date. I told them it didn't matter but they insisted. They're such sticklers.'*

* Keep your lie trim and taut (any extra fat will weaken it).

He looked up at me for a moment, unsure, but it was wiped clean off his face when the barista appeared, opening the door with a nudge of her soft hip, holding a cardboard tray of coffees and saying, ‘Cappuccino?'

Oscar smiled and said, ‘I didn't order one, love,* but I'll take it.'

* Oscar called anyone who had an accent that wasn't as posh as his own
love
. He thought it was a term of endearment that the lower classes used with one another. He'd heard a few cabbies calling his wife that and so he used it now.

My beautiful barista placed two cups on the desk, and Oscar stole a long, obvious look down her cleavage saying, ‘Lovely.'

‘So can you just sign,' I said.

I knew that the idea of Oscar signing something, looking important, would be more than enough for him not to read the contract.

He never read them anyway; he left that to his underlings. To me.

The barista waited for the money and Oscar with a flourish took Dad's fountain pen* and scribed a large florid signature across my tampered contract.

* Sorry, Dad, you wouldn't approve of this moment.

‘All I do is sign sign sign,' said Oscar, screwing the top of Dad's fountain pen back and standing up straight so the barista could see he was tall and powerful, so she could take in his full impressive fatness.

‘That's five quid,' she said.

‘Oh right, um, I'm like the Queen, love, I never carry money, filthy stuff, sure my little brother can sort you out,' said Oscar.

Little brother
. The comment about the Queen. Another
love
thrown in.*

* It all slid off me. I had the contract, I felt wonderful, I'd found a loophole all of my own to slip through.

I asked the beautiful barista to come to my desk where I had money. As I rummaged through my drawer looking for the cash, the sweet scent of her breath hit me like the chocolate sprinkles on a mocha.

She pointed to something in the drawer and said, ‘Oh yeah, going anywhere nice?'

She was pointing at my passport, which I had placed in my drawer in preparation.

I thought about lying and saying, ‘Off to Majorca actually. You told me you loved it there, didn't you?'

But that sounded creepy and it was also another lie. And since my memory had returned I had decided to live a more straight life; I had self-imposed a new honesty policy.

So I said, ‘Well, I'm off on an adventure.'

She said, ‘Where you off to, then?'

I didn't want to lie or be too specific so I said, ‘A special place.'

‘Special how?'

‘Well, special in the sense that it's uncorporate and unsophisticated, special in the sense that it doesn't have anyone that's like me there.'

She laughed, ‘You're odd, aren't you?'

I handed her the money and said, ‘Thank you, I'm trying. All I want to do is try and tell the truth for a change.'

‘Well, best of luck with that,' she said. ‘Got any truth for me?'

She said it in a flirty way that made my heart race. I could have said so much. I could have confessed my silly crush, told her how much happiness she brought to my bleak days, but then I realised the only thing I could honestly say to her was – ‘I really hate coffee.'

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF A PRENUPTIAL AGREEMENT

It's just a postnuptial disagreement waiting to happen.

My prenuptial agreement made me smile. When we married I never even read it but now it made me so happy. It had an almost magical quality. Before our wedding it had been a sore point between my father, Alice and me. Dad was adamant that it be signed; I was even more adamant that it be torn up. Alice was polite enough to step in and, for the sake of all of us – to stop a family imploding – graciously sign it.

I'm not a spiritual man and it's a strange sensation for a dry contract to work as a channel to the spiritual world. But that's exactly what happened. It may just as well have been a Ouija board.

With his tight clauses Dad had woven a safety net for me. At a time when I had raged against him – and warned him not to sully my grand emotions with his cynical law – he politely ignored me, and thank God he did. For here in this document was everything I needed. There was the clause which read that in the light of any ‘morally dubious' situation by the bride, all financial benefits concerned with Shaw&Sons (including bonuses that I would receive or company dividends) would not be granted to my wife as part of the settlement. And the flat – the thing she loved the most – would be taken from her (as it was in the firm's name). Plus he had ring-fenced all money protected under a trust. Which basically, in layman's terms, meant that she might get half of what we had in our current account – a few hundred pounds at best – and otherwise that was the lot.

I felt my eyes well up. This quiet time alone with an old contract, with my dad, was possibly the most emotional moment we ever shared. Long after his death my dad had done what so many fathers fail to do: he had protected me.

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF DAD

He had his moments.

Dad always warned,
A Shaw heart is a short heart
. And he wasn't wrong. His dad died young from heart complications and my dad died young too. Which meant my own Shaw heart had a relatively short lifespan, beating like a bird's, a tight knot of worry pumping towards its use-by date. It made me think of Doug and the half-million chances and how I probably had to cut twenty years off that formula, which was why I had to make a decision quickly – or I'd end up as the guy slumped in my office chair, dead and rotting, without anyone noticing.

My dad was conscious of his short heart too but as far as I could tell he never grabbed life, he never questioned his destiny. My dad was a study in repression and shelved dreams. He showed us boys so little of himself that it felt at times as if there was simply not much there. But I remember Mum would occasionally give us a glimpse into who he was, beyond the dull lawyer, beyond the dry dad.

My mum was a vessel of love, joy and support and I suppose – without over-simplifying her – that she was everything I could ever hope for in a mother. But remembering my father was a less satisfying experience. For us kids he was a humourless disciplinarian, forever treating fatherhood like some extension of his job, always littering the house with tiny scribbled contracts between us and him –
If I clean Dad's car I'll get extra pocket money
– signed by all the parties. I think Dad thought they were funny but as I got older I found all these contracts – all our childish drawings on the fridge eventually smothered in Post-it note contracts – a little creepy. He was simply not an expressive man, which is not to say he did not feel as deeply or profoundly as any other man, but you would just never know it.

When I was young, I asked Mum what Dad was like as a young man – and she shocked me.

I expected her to say, ‘Your dad was just like you, Frank,' or, ‘Your dad was like Oscar, very ambitious.'

What she actually said was, ‘Your dad was exactly like Malcolm, rebellious and forever striving to push people or ideas.'

‘Rubbish,' I said. ‘Dad was never like Malcolm. Never. No one's like Malcolm.'

‘Well, where do you think Malcolm comes from? He's not from my genes, he's from your dad. You're too young to realise but life changes you. Remember that your dad was forced to take over the law firm from his dad too. And, believe me, your dad didn't want to do it at first either. He wasn't a rebel in the way you use the term now but, back in the sixties, your dad was one of the first people I knew to take environmental issues seriously. He wanted to use his legal training not to do contracts for corporations but to take corporations to court, to hold them responsible for breaking environmental laws, and for years your dad worked nights to push through some of the most fundamental environmental regulations that still exist today. He really cared.'

I had to ask, ‘Well, what happened to him?'

‘Well, to be blunt,' Mum said, ‘you happened, and Malc, and Oscar. Life happened and he had to buckle down and be responsible.'

‘I just wish he'd show some of those feelings sometimes, that's all,' I said.

‘I know, Frank,' she said. ‘I know.'

Which is not to say that my dad never showed himself to me.

He was not always hiding within his pinstripe prison. My father was far from an abundant source of emotional moments. But that's not to say there were not
some
. Being his son was rather like walking across acres of grey concrete only to find that somehow, through a tiny crack, a single poppy had bloomed.

I remember when Dad was older and we were in the car together; I think I was driving him for a hospital check-up, and as usual, having covered client issues and work stories, we were left without a huge amount to say to each other.

I had put the radio on and John Lennon was singing ‘Imagine'.

Dad wasn't one to tap his feet to music, so when his hand went to the radio I assumed he was about to turn it down or off, that it was
irritating him, but he turned it up and we both listened to the song, and Dad said, ‘It's a beautifully simple song about people, Frank. People not relying on religion and ideals that cause so much death and war, but people just getting on with one another. This was your mother's favourite song, you know.'*

* I paused, waiting for Dad to do what he so often did, which was to kill the moment with a punchline. Like, for instance, he might suddenly – to the tune of ‘All You Need Is Love' – sing ‘All you need is Law!' Thankfully he didn't do it this time.

After extended emotional droughts, these moments arrived with such a sense of relief that I had to look straight ahead to ensure that Dad didn't see I was welling up when I said, ‘I know, Dad, it's a beautiful song.'

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF HOPE

There are others like me out there.

Just before I went to see Oscar for the last time, I printed off all my sabotaged contracts. Or at least the ones I was particularly proud of. Everything from my original tiny start, right through to the crazy stuff when I lost control and wrote whole paragraphs all over the arms manufacturers' contracts. And of late, I had really been going to town on a whole slew of new contracts. Holding them all together, they seemed so dull and insignificant but, truth be told, they really were the most fundamental and important thing I had ever done with my life.

I took a pink highlighter and coloured in all my best work, so the reader's eyes were dragged immediately to these terrible little additions.

Now it may have been my broken memory playing tricks with me – and I can never be entirely certain of this (or of anything, for that matter) – but as I highlighted my best work, I reread one of the very first contracts that I ever tampered with and there was something new there – something that I was fairly sure I hadn't written myself.

I read and reread it again and again.

It seemed another lawyer, possibly the in-house lawyer, had added something, had responded to my words, had replied – another lawyer had tampered with my own tampering.

For deep in the forest of fine print, right next to the words that I had added to this contract,
Jesus Wept
, was a small addition from another lawyer, a reply I suppose, which read –
and with good reason
.

With a smile on my face and skip in my step I took the contracts to Oscar and, without saying anything, I placed them on his desk.

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF OSCAR

The reputation of a hundred years can be lost in the blink of an eye.

Waiting.

Oscar, who was on the phone, winked at me and carried on talking. As he spoke he absentmindedly looked down at the contracts.

The first thing that happened was that Oscar's mouth dropped open. Then he stopped talking. He didn't say goodbye to the person on the phone, he didn't put the phone back on its cradle, he just dropped it on his desk, and violently riffled through the contracts, leaning close to them as if his eyes were lying to him. Redness rising in his face, he said, ‘What's this? Is this a joke? What's happening?'

I smiled and a great look of fat relief spread across Oscar's face. He knew nothing of my returning memories.*