Terms & Conditions

My name is Frank Shaw and I write contracts for a living. I'm not proud of what I do. In my bleaker moments I believe I'm the death of an essential part of humanity. People once sealed deals with handshakes. I replace handshakes with expensive ink. I swap the human touch with cold contracts. What anti-matter is to matter, I am to trust â
I'm anti-trust
, the dark force committed to destroying life's faith, hope and wonder. Put simply â I'm a corporate lawyer.

I specialise in fine print, which places me on one of the bottom rungs of my business. I'm the legal equivalent of the guy who sweeps up hair at the barbershop. You probably didn't read my terms and conditions today, when you bought something off the internet and clicked âAgree'; or when you signed blind some contract giving away your rights, your life, a pound of your flesh.

My masterpiece is the work I did on the modern insurance policy. I wrote it fresh out of law school when my brilliance was still radiant. Its genius lies in the fact that it's unbearably dull. Few can read it all the way through and none ever get to the small print. That's the loophole I hang you with â the policy seems to weave a golden safety net catching you as you plunge through life's tragedies but my sharp fine print rips the net to shreds. For if the devil's in the detail, I'm the devil's ghost-writer, typing cautionary tales in font so small they're rendered invisible. You can barely see them and when you do it's too late.*

* So I warn you now â read the small print.

I speak from bitter experience. After my car crash I learned that terms and conditions don't just govern my work â they're also the tight rules underwriting my life. However, directly after the crash â lying broken in bed â I remembered little of this; all I knew for sure was that something awful had happened.

CONDITION 1

AMNESIA

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF TRAGEDY

If some strange and terrible thing happens to you â that's tragedy.

If some strange and terrible thing happens to someone else â that's just entertainment.

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF ME

I'm not the man I used to be.

I awoke to people â who professed to be my family â telling me I was going to be fine.

How can I be fine? I've no idea who the hell you people are!

They tried to outrun the truth, to smother reality with hope, by chanting,
You're fine, Franklyn, absolutely fine!

Watching my forgotten family I realised that denial is like running on a treadmill with the monstrous thing you're denying waiting for you to tire, fall, and shoot back into its hairy hands. But I knew the truth â I was far from fine. The monster had me. And for a time I lay in its dark silent embrace. When I did talk, it only made matters worse.

âWho are you people?' I asked.

One of them replied, âI'm your wife, remember?'

My second question really put a stop to them saying I was fine.

âAnd who am
I
?'

With so few clues as to who I was, it was hard to be me. I wanted to say something to assure everyone that I was the same old Frank and that everything was fine. (But I wasn't and it wasn't.) And I certainly knew when I said something wrong. Their faces leaked little rivers of worry and they'd look at me askance, as if I'd fallen out of focus, as if I'd said something unsuitable. Which was exactly the problem: I no longer suited myself. (Failure to fulfil a contract is called
impossibility of performance
and that was my trouble â I kept saying things pre-crash Frank wouldn't say.) The only thing I remembered for sure was that before the crash people just called me
Frank
. But after it they reverted to using my full name â
Franklyn
. I lost a personality but gained a syllable.*

* Slim compensation indeed.

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF SENSES

Mine no longer made sense.

When I saw my face I didn't recognise myself. The mirror reflected a pulped stranger: bloated eyes adrift in blood, shattered fence of teeth, gross mushroomed cheeks. And my new world wasn't much prettier either. It was a place wedged with warnings. Machines released shrill cries calling forth fast-moving medics. Signs on floors shouted,
Slippery When Wet!
Screams rose from distant corridors only to be snuffed out. My drugs came with lists of warnings as long as Russian novels. A red button declared,
Press in Emergency!

My body was incessantly panicking, urging me to press the button all the time. Initially I did press it all the time. They disconnected it. Then I started screaming,
Help, help, I can't remember who I am!
They injected drugs, which muffled my panic below a hundred blankets where no one could get to me. I wished they'd reconnect the button. I missed it.

My terror was heightened by my muddled hormones. The accident had smashed my separately labelled jars â
Sad, Happy, Mad
â into a sloshing chaos of wild fluids. I wanted to laugh, cry and scream all at once, all the time. Also, the nerves that once ran along separate pipes to my ears, eyes, nose and mouth were plaited into a confused braid. So I saw green and tasted fish, heard screaming and saw blue, smelt cheese and heard music.

Dr Mills assured me that this synaesthesia was simply my brain's attempt to find new ways back to old memories. My sense and sensibilities were so scrambled that when Dr Mills drank a coffee I saw the steam rise like a deep bass note vibrating my tangled senses and triggering a feeling, a deeply embarrassing feeling â
a crush
. As I listened to Dr Mills' coffee, I realised that feelings are stickier than memories.*

* Violently shake your brain and memories float off like pollen, but feelings â they grip on like Velcro. So my first real feeling wasn't about my brothers or my wife or family â
it was about my beautiful barista
.

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF COFFEE

Its taste never lives up to the promise of its aroma.

This sticky, curly, embarrassing feeling â
this silly crush
â snagged my first real memory. I remembered that I hated coffee but I was madly in love with the coffee lady from the cafÃ© in our office block. Her chocolate-brown hair poured down her face and her bosom was forever rising up towards me. I recalled spending many hours trying to think of witty, interesting things to say to her.

She smiled. Her lips don't thin when she smiles, they fatten, and as she frothed the milk, a speck flew up and landed on her breast. It was right then that I decided to do the most impulsive thing I've ever done in my safe little life â I leant across the counter and wiped the speck away. She looked as if she was about to slap me, I flinched, she grabbed my head, pulling my face to within a whisper of hers, and in the flustered moment she covered me with espresso kisses, her breath warm, rich, full of love, her body bending towards me as her breasts . . *

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