Terms & Conditions (11 page)

It was a big deal to my wife.

At one point our argument got so intense, so out of control, that I shouted, ‘Do you love this flat more than you love me?'*

* She paused just a beat too long.

‘Oh, don't be so dramatic,' she said (but she still didn't answer my question).

We looked through lots of swatches and analysed all the different whites with their wonderful names. The Half Villa Whites, the Quarter Tea Whites, the Eighth Thornton, the Half Supernova.*

* Like fantastic-sounding designer drugs, ‘
Can I have a tab of Supernova and a gram of Thornton White, please?
'

I bought test pots and painted patches on different walls and I sat there staring at three types of identical white saying, ‘I can't really see the difference,' which made my wife shout, ‘You're just colour blind, that's your problem!'

‘I don't think white is technically a colour,' I said. ‘It's a shade.'

‘You're a fucking shade,' she screamed.

Yes, we actually argued over what white was the right white.

Then, after weeks of deliberation, we finally decided on a white; we received the full pots, and a label on the bottom read,
Production batches may differ from the colour in the test pot
.*

* What! How could that be? How could we spend two weeks deciding on an infinitesimal difference in colour spectrum only to be told at the end that the final colour may vary?

When I told my wife about this in an incredulous voice, she accused me of not taking the
process
seriously enough.*

* Sometimes she was more observant than she seemed.

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF MY WIFE'S JOB

Couriers lose hearts all the time.

My wife profiles humans for a living.

She writes psychometric tests to tell companies what people are like. Apparently we can't tell any more. There was a time when we trusted our instincts. Now we pay people like my wife to slice instinct out of the whole flabby human equation.*

* We've made a science of everything we're too scared to do for ourselves.

There's something so sad about the process, about this human evaluation, that often I have to stop myself thinking about it as it makes me want to weep.

My wife gets me to do the tests. I'm her guinea pig. I've no idea how I score on them and I don't care. But she does. She'll have a spreadsheet somewhere – she loves spreadsheets – or some graph with a swan-diving line indicating my devolution. I wonder when I started to fall from grace. I can't pinpoint the moment I slipped from brilliant to average to ungradable, although I'm sure my wife could tell me down to the exact day.

At university I was a straight-A student, wildly, effortlessly ambitious, incorrigibly intelligent. I loved tests; they made me feel as if I was accomplishing things. My wife met me when I was at the peak of my brilliance, destined for greatness. She picked a beauty in me, she really did. I couldn't sustain it, of course. Brilliance is brittle. It's such a clear and hard thing that when I failed to live up to my brilliance, I cracked. My brilliance was a fragile academic type rather than a worldly brilliance. I was a pure academic who soon found the scope of clean white examination papers muddied by real people and ethical conundrums.

So I take her tests and she never tells me my scores and I pretend I don't care. She says it's not like an exam where you need to get high scores. It's about something else.*

* What?

She's so different now. I barely know her. She used to be like everyone else. She'd meet someone she didn't like and she'd say, ‘Man, that guy's an arsehole.'

I got that.
Arsehole
. Everyone gets that. But now she leaves a party and says something like, ‘That guy's such an EFTJ, with rather worrying F tendencies.'

I guess what I'm trying to say is this: I don't understand my wife any more. And I'm not talking emotionally. I'm not saying I don't understand my wife because men are from Mars and women are from Venus. I mean:
I actually don't understand what she's saying.
And the more she talks in this corporate gibberish, the less she's capable of understanding my own plain English. Often I say something perfectly normal and she'll stare at me quizzically as if I'm speaking Yiddish. At times I understand so little of what she says that I feel as though I'm lodging with an immaculately dressed foreign-exchange student. Then I find myself getting over-excited when we do actually achieve the most basic understanding.

‘Pass the milk,' she'll say.

After frustrated hours of not understanding her, I'll feel giddy that I understood, and pass the milk with a smile, saying, ‘Here you go, sweetie, the
milk
!'

She'll take it and, without looking up from her mobile phone, say, ‘Stop calling me
sweetie
. When did you start that? It's such a P thing to say.'

Here's an example of one of my wife's test questions:

If I were a garden, I would most resemble:

a. Wildflower Garden: carefree and enthusiastic.

b. Japanese Garden: accurate, and detail-oriented.

When she gave me that test question I froze and said, ‘I don't feel like either.'

‘It's a simple question, why can't you choose?'

‘Because I'm not a garden, I'm a person, and I'm fairly sure a garden can't be enthusiastic,' I said.

‘Well, don't shout at me. It's symbolic,' she said.

‘Well, I still don't feel like a fucking garden, symbolic or otherwise.'

I walked away and pretended to be busy doing something else. I noticed my wife looking at the test, shaking her head slowly. I made a cup of tea and from the kitchen window watched a Renault with
Medical Courier
written on the side. I thought about that car whizzing about the city with a polystyrene box packed with ice in the centre of which sat a dead-still heart, a plump fist of meat waiting to be plugged back in. That this organ can survive without us seems incredible. For a long time I stood staring out the kitchen window, searching for that dead-still part of myself that I had lost.

What do you most resemble?

a. Japanese garden.

b. Wildflower garden.

c. A heart packed in ice in a Renault Clio on the A4.

My wife's boss is called Valencia. I've never met her but I know exactly what Valencia's latest interests and hobbies are because my wife adopts them. Bosses are the new Messiahs. First there was the cycling, then came the Thai boxing. My wife returned from work one night and said, ‘We should really take up Thai boxing, it's the new yoga.'

I agreed in the hope that it would bond Alice and me. When you're in a relationship, but no longer having sex, you take up odd and painful hobbies like Thai boxing in the hope that they'll rinse out some frustrations. However, after a month of having my face punched in by a tiny man named Chang, I quit.

When I told her I quit, my wife said, ‘But Valencia says it's so good for your core.'

Sometimes Valencia will call on a Saturday to demand my wife comes into the office, and my wife always agrees. ‘It's an emergency. I have to deal with this, Frank.'*

* What sort of emergency could it be? A doctor I understand.
Someone's dying, I have to go
. But my wife is in HR. She writes psyche tests. What's the emergency?
Come at once, this guy you evaluated as a calm type has just said something a bit mean about my new shoes, we need you to re-test him immediately!

My wife thinks I'm having an affair.

She reads all my texts and looks through my wallet. I'm not having an affair.*

* Yes, I know I have a crush on the beautiful barista but that's just born out of desperation. That's fantasy. I wouldn't have the nerve. I'm not an unreliable narrator. Unhinged, yes; unreliable, no.

I admit that I do mourn the death of the person that my wife used to be, but I'd never use that grief to justify being unfaithful to the person my wife has become.

My wife's job involves a lot of role-playing. When my wife first suggested that we role-play together I got very excited, my mind wandering like a naughty teenager into saucy scenarios.

I was to be disappointed.

She meant role-playing really boring and obvious scenes like how to tell an employee they're not performing well at work. My wife and I role-play all the time now. My wife and I have role-played ourselves into the adults we are today. We're role-playing what it would be like if two people who married young and had grown apart still lived together pretending that their marriage was real.*

* I'm sorry, that's actually a terrible thing to say about my marriage.*
¹

*
¹
I meant every word of it.

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Subject: Cop or Criminal

Frank – hi!

Spotted a sticker on a backpacker yesterday:

Life's a fucking riot, pal! So you best figure out if you're a protester or a policeman!

Ha!

Love and revolution,

Malc

PS I have not the slightest inkling what the hell that means.

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF EXECUTIVE X

X marks the plonker!

OK, so in the spirit of full disclosure, I should confess that I do know how I score on my wife's tests. I know exactly how I score. The reason I know is because my wife published my results for the world to read. My wife wrote a book called
Executive X
. The cover was black with a giant white X in the middle wearing a collar and tie. It was in that period of the late nineties, before the crash, when everything was working, when there was money everywhere. A time when no one was sure why it was working or who was responsible – until, that is, management consultants were credited with the world's runaway success.*

* Proviso: management consultants didn't earn the credit – they took it. They did this by writing books informing the world that management consultants were the reason for the rude health of the world, that they had cracked the code of commerce and in so doing were without question the one and only reason for the unfettered success of the universe.

The Self-Help shelf bulged with corporate tomes such as
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
. My wife, a young executive at the time, managed to get in on the act. She published the definitive psychometric book about how to hire the right – or wrong – man for the job. And it made her famous; well, industry famous at least.

It was her friend Sandra, who had become a commissioning editor, who actually published it. Which was all great.

Until I actually read it.

My wife hadn't given me a copy until it was published and when I read it I knew why.
Executive X
, the subject of the book, the man who did all the tests and was analysed like a lab rat, was, yes, you guessed it – me. Muggins.

I remember Sandra phoning me one day just before publication and having the most cryptic chat. Normally when I spoke to Sandra it was fluid, we got on well and laughed, but this conversation was
missing a crucial ingredient that would have bound it all together, which was that Sandra assumed that I'd read the book.

Our discussion went something along the lines of:

‘Well, I always knew you were a good guy, Frank. But until I read this book, I never knew just how good you were. You're quite something.'

‘Well, thank you,' I replied, thinking I was good in the sense that I made Alice lots of cups of tea when she worked late into the night. ‘I just supported her as best I could.'

‘You certainly did,' said Sandra. ‘I mean, well, to give so much of yourself to her, it is really something, Frank, you're one in a million.'

Right there was the problem. I'm like a child. When people compliment me I blush and lap it all up and in so doing I become completely distracted from the actual content of the words.*

* I miss the fine print.

‘Well, I love Alice and would give her anything she needed.'

‘You can't give her much more than what you gave her for this book. You're a brave man, Frank.'

As friends do, we then went on to chat about other pointless rumours and gossip. Afterwards, that conversation replayed in my head so many times, but I ignored all my instincts and got on with other, less pressing things.

It wasn't until I read the book that I understood what Sandra had been saying; that was when I realised that I had been a monumental idiot. I was Executive X. I was Alice's executive crash-test dummy.

All my answers to tests she had casually given me to do on the kitchen table were there for all to see. And it was not pretty. She didn't paint a nice picture of me, she used me as the basis for who you should
not
hire, as opposed to who you should hire. It made for humiliating reading. At first I fooled myself that no one would make the link between X and myself.*

* What a fool.

But I knew it was obvious that it was me when one day Oscar arrived at work and said, ‘Well, if it isn't Executive X himself.'

Oscar has the observational skill of a bat. Utterly blind to anything muddied with nuance, yet even he could see that I was the subject. I knew then that I was screwed. The entire office called me Executive X, or just X. They even began playing tricks on me to see how I'd react to certain situations. In the book Alice had described Executive X as the sort of man who expended huge amounts of energy maintaining a calm and pleasant front. No matter the problem at hand, Executive X was a classic Adaptive Child, bending over backwards to keep everyone happy. So the office would stress-test me; usually – in fact, always – initiated by Oscar. One morning, before I arrived, they put a cup full of coffee upside down on my desk. I picked the cup up and coffee washed over my keyboard, papers, mobile phone and everyone, especially Oscar, who was lingering close by waiting for the punchline, laughed. They laughed, they pointed, they cackled and what did I do?