Terms & Conditions (5 page)

My wife paused, her fork hit her plate a touch hard and she looked at me.

‘I see you're starting to remember what a smartarse you were,' she said.

It was delivered in a particularly caustic tone, yet it suited her and vibrated through me into some past truth.

I said, ‘But Sandra told me you were best friends.'

‘
Best friends
. You sound like you're six years old, Franklyn,' she said, and smiled a smile so thin it could slice eyeballs.

I raised my voice a little, ‘Well, you sound like a bitch.'

We took a moment to accept that I'd said something cruel, but what was worse was a sense that we had finally hit our groove. I felt deep down – in a way that was more powerful and convincing than mere memory – that my wife and I used to argue like this before my crash.

‘Franklyn, listen, they're just
old
friends.'

‘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 felt 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
.