Terms & Conditions (12 page)

You guessed it – I did exactly what Executive X does.

I pushed my frustration into the core of my body, I took the joke, I laughed along with everyone, and Oscar, red in the face from the joy of it all, thumped me on the back and shouted, ‘X strikes again. Nothing can shake him!'

Alice was on a number of television shows, and the more books she sold, the more famous she became. A
Guardian
reporter asked her if it was based on anyone and she denied it. It was a terrible time. I felt ashamed, that I'd been used, that she'd so accurately nailed down my personality with these ludicrous tests. The book made me look like some snivelling plonker, that's what really hurt, some modern corporate lackey. It was so insulting but, of course, like a good Executive X I took it, I supported her, I said,
Well done, sweetie, I'm so proud of you
.

She loved the fame; she always said: ‘This is so good for my profiling, for my career, a published author for the consultancy, it's really great stuff for everyone.'*

* Well, not for me, lady, not for me.

She kept popping up as a quote monkey in articles, even in
The Economist
one month, about the surge in dotcoms and the talent search for more and more creative geniuses; it was a time when
Th inking out of the Box
and
Not Reinventing the Wheel
were shoving themselves into everyday speech.*

* And it was a time in which I lost all faith in my wife, in life and, worst of all, in myself.

When I tried to broach the subject with my wife – and explain that I was humiliated by the way she had used me – she denied it. She shrugged and said, ‘Frank, X is not you, that's crazy talk, now let's not let our individual personal successes upset each other, that's not what good couples do, now, is it?'*

* Many employment contracts have Love Clauses, which disallow employees falling in love at work –
I loathe the way that law thinks it can mitigate love
. It seems my wife and I had developed many of our own Love Clauses. When you find that your Love Clauses outnumber your love, it's time to take a good hard look at what you're doing.

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF EXECUTIVE X

Unlicensed excerpt – go ahead and sue me!

Executive X is emotionally intuitive. He can empathise with others to a high degree and is extremely ethical. In the context of a modern corporate workplace this can work for, and against, a company employing an X. For instance, the power of empathy can, if left unchecked, result in periods of unrestrained emotional exuberance. X can become unfocused – even distracted – by how everyone ‘feels' about what he's doing at work.*

* At least I feel something, you cold-hearted bitch.

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Subject: Ignore Signals

Frank – hi!

Vietnam is overrun by scooters. No one pays any notice to traffic lights. They just beep their horns to warn people they're driving behind them.

Driving by sonar!

My Vietnamese driver said: ‘Never signal in Saigon – it just confuses people.'

Love and lights,

Malc

PS There are an incredible amount of road deaths in Vietnam.

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF TESTS

Philosophical debates (‘What is the meaning of existence?') interest me:

a. Very much.

b. Little.

c. Neither of the above.

I nearly lost my mind when she asked me what sort of garden I was, so you can imagine how hard this question was. I just sat at the table staring at it as if it was the most terrifying question I'd ever faced.

The words in parenthesis (‘What is the meaning of existence?') glowed up at me in fierce neon and I realised, as my vision blurred, that I hadn't taken a breath for a long time; I had simply sat there, suspended in my own panic.

I pushed the paper away and said to my wife, who was across the table with her stopwatch, ‘I don't want to do these tests any more, sweetie.'

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF KIDS

My wife hates them.

I love them. I want one or two or three or four of them. But my wife is not keen. She's an only child and comes heavily burdened with many of the issues that only children carry.*

* In other words, she's a selfish little brat.

Even as an adult she still views other children as a threat to herself, to her time, to her body, to her career, to her parents' attention (to her toys!). When we married she promised that once our careers were sorted we would discuss the
possibility
of having children. And she has stuck to her terms, but I have glibly accepted that ‘discussions of the possibility' are as close as we are ever going to get to having kids.

I'm as desperate to have children as she is not. I spend hours negotiating, telling her I'll happily be a house husband, she can return to work as soon as the child is born and I'll raise the child (or children), change nappies, take Sebastian/Polly/Tom/Julie/Amy (yes, I already have names) to the doctor, play with them, love them, cuddle them; I'll make sure my wife's clothes are ironed and that she always has a cooked meal ready for her when she returns to her perfectly clean home.

When I've discussed this with her, she just looks at me and says, ‘If you can give birth to the kid too, then we have a deal. I've not worked my body to perfection just to have a kid turn me into some frumpy milky mum. Yuck. And I've not made my way to the top of the career ladder just to sabotage myself with debilitating baby brain. Count me out. I don't want a snotty brat and I don't want a weedy house husband who resents my success.'

‘Wow,' I said. ‘You should tell me what you really feel some time.'

‘Sarcasm doesn't suit you, Frank,' she said. ‘You should stop being so EFTP.'

‘You should try speaking English.'

To soften her to the idea of children, I once tried to present a well-behaved, good-looking child to my wife, to see if it would melt her cold heart. Desperation led me to agree to babysit Oscar's son, Lucas, one afternoon. I mainly said yes because Oscar's charming French wife, Nina, was at her wits' end, asked for help, and I thought Lucas was the perfect kid to introduce to my wife. Cute, well-mannered, no fuss.

My wife smiled when Lucas came in, she complimented him on his T-shirt, which had something French written on it, and Lucas, being a well-brought-up child, returned the compliment and said what lovely shoes my wife was wearing.*

* I fell into an imagined future of a house full of our laughing children: Polly playing violin in her bedroom, filling the air with happy music, my son Tom lying on the sofa, his full concentration poured into reading a book, our younger children Amy, Sebastian and Julie splashing about in the bath, and me smiling in the centre of all this life and joy.

Then Lucas put his school bag on the table and tipped my wife's glass of red wine all over a report that she was writing.

She grabbed the sodden paper and screamed, ‘You clumsy clot, look what you've done.'

Lucas proceeded to cry and demanded to be taken home, and I cleaned up the mess and hugged him while glaring at my wife, who then tried – without effect – to apologise. ‘Sorry, Lucas, it's just that I'm writing a very important report and you spilled very expensive wine on it . . . and well, I shouldn't have shouted, I shouldn't have called you that, but I was angry.'

Lucas wiped his eyes and looked at my wife and said, ‘You're mean.'

‘I'm not really that mean,' said my wife and walked towards him and gave him an awkward rub of the shoulder.

Lucas and I could see that she had the maternal instincts of a scorpion, but Lucas gave me a smile and said to my wife, ‘Sorry I spilt your drink on your thing.'

She smiled and they sort of made up but I could see the effort of the moment had annoyed my wife and they never fully recovered after that.

My wife went on to ignore Lucas as he and I got down to some colouring-in. I could tell from her huffing and puffing that my wife was upset by how much space his crayons and paper took up on her dining-room table and, after some time had passed, she simply couldn't resist antagonising Lucas. She kept rolling renegade crayons back down the table towards him. Flicking them with her fingers, at first playfully, but then rather aggressively. Together we ignored my wife's darkening mood and got on with making a paper chain of people holding hands. My wife took one look at it, made a face, and said, ‘Hmm, it's OK, not great, they don't look like real people.' Who says that to a kid?

Without looking up from the paper, Lucas said, ‘You're not great.'

My wife smiled; she had a rival in Lucas, and she liked that.

She said, ‘You're an interesting little boy, aren't you, Luke?'

Lucas replied, ‘It's Lucas! And you're not good at talking to children.'

She sneered, ‘Well, you're not very good with adults,' and stuck out her tongue in what I assume she thought was a playful way but in fact came off as horrid and mean.

I was about to accept this whole thing was a failure and take him off to watch cartoons in the sitting room but he heroically shrugged my hand off his shoulder as if to say he could handle his own battles, pointed his chubby finger at her, squinted his eyes in a serious manner that revealed just a flash of Oscar, and whispered quietly with a hot rush of feeling, ‘You make my heart grow small.'*

* For years I've struggled to describe the withering effect my wife has had on me and in comes this kid and nails it –
You make my heart grow small
.

My wife actually flinched. Something about this odd statement cut deep and, as childish as it was (maybe
because
it was so brutally childish), she could do nothing but snort, stand up and say, ‘Well, I think I've had enough of this little experiment, thank you very much.'

I said, ‘This is not an experiment, this is a child, this is Lucas, and you shouldn't say things like that to kids, Alice, you know that.'

‘Well, research shows that when bringing up kids, unconditional praise is just as detrimental as complete neglect,' she said tartly.

‘Well, research shows that people who only rely on research, and never on their instincts, are generally rather hard to get along with,' I said through clenched teeth, trying not to say anything too obviously rude in front of Lucas.

She waved her hand as if bored of me, before slinking off to open another bottle of wine and chat on her phone to Valencia.

I realised then that my wife and I would never have children together. I saw through little Lucas' clear blue eyes just how ugly and dysfunctional my wife and I had become. I had invited in this little chap to charm my wife and bring warmth and light into our lives, to persuade my wife that children were the answer to our problems, and, through no fault of his own, Lucas had acted as a piercing X-ray, exposing all the fractured bones of our rotten relationship.

With my wife out of earshot, Lucas got back to his colouring-in, and only glanced at me momentarily when he said, ‘Why is she your wife?'*

* Kids always ask the killer questions.

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF MY WIFE'S PARENTS

They loved Alice unconditionally.

When my wife and I first met, she was always running away from home and hiding at Molly's house. My wife painted a picture of her parents as difficult people, demanding perfection from a daughter who did nothing but consistently disappoint them.

Which meant that before I met her parents I, naturally, loathed them. I could see they caused their daughter nothing but misery. So it came as no small shock when I met my wife's parents and discovered that I actually loved them. They were kind, they were generous, and it was no act; they loved their only daughter with such unconditional awe and affection that it literally shone out of them whenever they were in her presence. My wife had not given me a slightly skewed version; she had simply lied, blatantly and with malice, about the sort of people her parents were. She had crafted them as evil baddies in order to explain and, at times rationalise, her own increasingly idiotic, selfish and cruel behaviour. We all create baddies as backdrops to make us look like the goodies, and that's exactly the part that my wife elected for her parents. It was a part, however, which they could never convincingly play. They were simply and naturally too good; they were good people.

When I first met them I awaited a couple of ogres, uptight religious creeps who would consistently display their displeasure. In fact what I met was a charming low-key man called Fred, who had a quiff as thick and white as a scoop of cream and always wore soft lumberjack shirts, and a darling lady called Joy – who could have been a model for one of those cheesy mum pictures that advertising men put on biscuit tins to give them a homely feel. They smiled all the time and touched their daughter in the way that believers touch their icons. Their daughter was their life and somehow my wife had taken all that love and twisted it into hate towards her parents.

We had them over for dinner rarely, mainly because my wife never wanted them to come; she was embarrassed by them; so far had she travelled from her parents that she now viewed them as some sort of disposable and disgraceful part of her old life. My wife was the posh Ferrari that lived in shame of the fact that she was originally made in a dirty manufacturing plant. But her parents' campaign to get invited to dinner was relentless. After a while Joy took to calling my mobile, rather than my wife's, to try and arrange a visit. Joy knew I was the weak link.

‘Now I know how busy Alice is with her book and her work, and you too, love, I know you're both so busy and we're just old retired frumps, but we'd love to see you guys, happy to come to you, happy to bring a little pot, a stew, so you don't need to fuss.'