Terms & Conditions (17 page)

Then, not long before my accident, I took it from the drawer and wore it. Not only was it the start of achieving forgiveness for my father but also it reminded me that time was driving me past some undefined point of no return. In the days before I did what I did, I remembered arriving at work early and, as I rose through the building, I stared at myself in the lift mirror chanting like a maniac, psyching myself up to take action.

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF TIME

It don't wait for no man.

When
is
the time when I will finally sit and read all the books that stack up in my unread pile, when I will go regularly to the gym and become an Olympian; when is the time to step into the garage and throw away all that shit I know I'll never use; when is the time I'll get that suspicious creeping mole checked, spreading sinister like the slowest coffee stain across my shoulder; when is the time when I will go to a club and the music will be perfect and the people lovely and for the first time in a long time I will feel my limbs doing something odd and my head shaking and I will realise I'm dancing again and having a lovely time in a room full of smiling strangers; when is the time when I will sit for a moment, escape the noise of it all, the time when I will stop feeling mildly guilty about what I have settled for; when is the time when I'll finally sit with a guitar and at least try and teach myself just one chord from my favourite song, ‘The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea'; when is that time, when is the time when I will call my wife's mum and dad and say to them,
This is hard to say, Joy and Fred, but your daughter, who you love more than life, is ashamed of you, and she will never ever give you grandchildren
; when is the time I will get my wife far enough away from her phone and laptop to sit her down and say,
Sweetie, I'm dying inside and I think you're the acid that's melting me away
; when is the time when I face my brother Oscar, look into his dead eyes, and say,
You've taken our father's company and sullied it with all of your greed and ambition
; when is the time when I stand up at my desk, throw my phone against the wall, and walk out of the office to never return; when is the time that I finally email my brother Malcolm and say,
I miss you and I'm sorry I rarely write but your emails are so full of life I fear if I send you an email that it will reveal how full of death my own life has become
; when will I go and visit Mum and Dad's graves; when is the time when I hear Doug try to help me and, instead of waving him away like the last lifeboat on the
Titanic
, I grab his hand and say,
Yes please, can you help
me, I think I'm lost, and I just don't know what to do
; when is the time when I'll call Sandra and say,
Sandra, my wife hates you for some reason, but I want to see you, be friends, let's go out for dinner, just the two of us
; when is the time when I accept that most of my day is spent in the service of big men crushing little men; when is the time when I will take control and do something, when is that time?*

* It's right now.

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF ARIAL NINE

Rebellion is only worth it when someone notices.

For days I sat at my desk reading about the hospital bomb and looking for images of it. I tried to desensitise myself to the reality of it, but the more I looked, the more repulsed I became.

In one report I found a photograph of the children standing in a line a few days before the drone hit; they were smiling, looking up at the camera, and a nurse was standing beside them smiling. Many of the children already had war wounds, their small thin limbs wrapped in bandages and splints. One of the children was wearing a Mickey Mouse T-shirt and – awful as it is to admit – this tiny fragment of the West emblazoned on this small child's chest was actually the detail that made me feel a connection with him, made me see that this child was like any child, not some distant foreign entity, not some
other
, but a child who could have been my child, my son, my tragedy. And after staring at the smiling child and the grinning Mickey beaming from his dirty T-shirt, I slowly leaned forward, grabbed my bin, and threw up into it.

As I sat there feeling glum I made a small – some might say tiny – decision. I had to do something. Things with my wife and I were getting worse, our role-play rotting like actors performing their millionth matinée, and work was no better, ten years after my father's death, ten years of being the terms and conditions boy, ten years of humiliating meetings with Oscar, and now with my hands stained by the blood of distant children, I knew I had to do something. I should have stood up and walked out. Quit my job, told Oscar to go fuck himself, divorced my wife.*

* But I'm a coward and I didn't. I couldn't. I'm just not built that way.

But I did do something. A small thing.

I made a call, a small decision, an infinitesimal decision; I decided, screw the consequences, to make my terms and conditions bigger – to make the font size larger.

To blow them up from the standardised Arial Eight to the more aggressive and readable non-standard Arial Nine.

I completed the document, I made sure no one was looking, I ‘selected all' of my small print and I did it.

I enlarged them from eight to nine.

Wow!

I considered going to ten but, easy now, that was too radical.

My heart beat hard, my mouse ran wet with sweat, I admired the larger font. I'd done it.

At last my words were just that little bit harder to ignore.*

* Disclaimer: I know it's silly and juvenile. What's the point of a rebellion fought in such tiny font? Well, all I can say is it was a start at least.*
¹

*
¹
Disclaimer to disclaimer: I sounded so pathetic in that last disclaimer. It won't happen again.*
²

*
²
Disclaimer to the disclaimed disclaimer: I regret to inform you that I cannot guarantee the previous disclaimer.

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF DISAPPOINTMENT

It's a bottomless well.

I was elated.

I was finally doing something.

I shouted, ‘Night, Pam!' to our receptionist as I left. She looked at me funny.

I smiled at strangers. They frowned back.

I had a secret. A power. I'd done
something
.

I went home, listened to Howlin' Wolf, drank whisky; I even danced a little on my own in my study.

But, by the next morning, the revolution was over.

I realised something about my job. I mean, I wasn't completely delusional.

I know that you, the public, never read my fine print, but now I realised that even my boss, my brother, my keeper didn't read it either.

No one read anything I wrote.

I wondered if any of the clients ever read them.

I spent my life writing words no one read.

I was deflated when I left work that night.

I didn't say goodnight to Pam, who didn't even notice me leave.

I sneered at strangers. They sneered back.

I didn't stop there, however.

I felt as if now there were no consequences to any actions. As if I was invisible. There was a certain freedom to it.

Then a big idea formed in my head.

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF SELF-SABOTAGE

You've only got yourself to blame.

I took my tampering to the next level. I started to sabotage some of the #### contracts. Now don't get me wrong, I wasn't being righteous or unrealistic. I had no hopes of stopping even one arms deal, as I have said; the paperwork is not really a big part of the process. I didn't think tampering with these contracts would prevent a single bullet fulfilling its fatal destiny, but I did think – I hoped – that I stood a chance of at least making the arms company fire us for our sloppiness. I'm not saying I wanted to ruin the company, or Oscar; I just wanted to get rid of this client, and give Oscar a jolt out of his maddening smugness.

So with this in mind, I decided to add a little bit of my own copy into one of our incredibly long weapons contracts. I hid it deep in the jungle of small print at the end of page 99. Few people even make it to page nine. Fewer still make it to page 99. The only person who possibly gets that far is the person being paid a huge amount of money to read it and that person is the in-house lawyer of the arms client. And the only other is me – the lawyer in the agency paid a lot of money to write it. That's all it is. It's just two lawyers – one writing it, me, and one reading it in the arms manufacturer's office – while the rest of the world happily goes about trading missiles and legally blowing each other to bits.

Every missile drags in its terrifying wake entire forests' worth of documentations. Just as behind every new drug, under every tiny white pill, there is a literal mountain of contracts. I knew a few rogue words here and there would get lost in the fine-print sprinkle of hundreds and thousands. Well, they would get lost for a time; until, that is, they were finally spotted by some sharp-eyed legal eagle – then my world would really get interesting.

I'm also the last person to see these contracts before they go to the client, I'm the most accurate proofreader, and although Oscar is
supposed to do the final approval, he rarely does, he is too busy being a bastard. So right in the middle of some particularly dull copy about munitions policy and transportation safety issues, I wrote,
Jesus Wept
. Short. Shortest sentence in the Bible. I'm not religious and not sure why I chose that one, it just seemed appropriate. Very slight. Nothing much to it; even the laser eye of a lawyer could miss those words as they scanned one of a thousand documents. I sent it off and guess what happened?

You guessed it.

Not a damn thing.

No one noticed. No one read it. No one fired me or Oscar or the company. We didn't lose the account. Nothing happened. Zilch. So I continued to tamper with the contracts. I got creative. In fact, I started to run riot. I included lyrics and sayings. In the middle of another munitions contract I wrote in the small print,
Sow wind and reap storm
.

Then after a few days of nothing happening, my bravery increased and instead of sprinkling words around – I couldn't stop myself now – I started to write long sentences:
Isn't fighting for peace rather like fucking for virginity?

It quickly got out of hand. I became a sort of deranged corporate graffiti artist, a lawyer gone rogue, and still no one said a word, still no one was listening. So I did the only thing I could. I carried on. On another contract I wrote:

I'm a missile. But I don't want to explode. Please may I formally request that you just leave me in a deep hole to rot, I promise I won't go off, I'll silently and peacefully disintegrate until there's nothing left but rust and a whiff of sulphur. Yours sincerely, Sir W.M.D. Missile.

I handed it to Oscar, who handed it to an in-house lawyer, and I waited. And nothing happened. When would they notice? When would we be fired? When would I be fired? I thought maybe that even the in-house lawyer couldn't be bothered reading it. It seemed that it was so, because I heard nothing from him. I got more courageous. I started writing little letters and stories. For instance, for a
pharmaceutical company I added, in the tiniest teeniest font, the longest one I dared write:

Hi there. I'm a tiny little pill. They call me Viaxton. But my friends just call me Jeff. I seem so white and pure but what you don't know about me is that I'm not really officially tested. I was sort of tested on some monkeys and they sort of went mad and sort of ate their own fingers. But I'm so precious that a few men in suits decided to ignore the men in white coats and here I am, on your hand, ready to enter your body. Look at me, gleaming white on the palm of your hand. And while you're doing that, take a look at your lovely fingers too. It will be the last time you see them. Bon appetit! Love Jeff.

I sat. I waited. I wondered when the first person would notice. I had tampered with so many contracts that I'd lost count. I began printing them and storing copies of them in a box under my bed. And strangely, the more I tampered, the less my phobia flared up. Soon my rebellion spread beyond the office. I went a little crazy, if truth be told. I started vandalising public property. On the tube one day I realised I was the only person in the carriage and I took out a Magic Marker and altered a sign. After I played with it, instead of reading
If you see a suspicious package do not approach it but report it immediately
, it read,
If you see a suspicious package please open and cut the red wire.
Not the blue wire!
The red wire. Thank you.

Then on the walk home I passed a church and on the board outside there was a message:
When The World Ends Fear Not For God Shall Save Us One And All.

I got my marker out, added an asterisk at the end and wrote: *
Results May Vary.

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF DINNER PARTIES

No matter what's on the menu, neurosis is always the hors d'oeuvre.

I remembered a strange dinner. At that time my wife and I were attempting to act like everything was fine between us. We had taken to throwing dinner parties to hide our own silence with the sounds of our friends. It was one of those dinners that I barely distinguish from so many others – but the passing of time, like fine falling sand, revealed its monumental significance. It was a dinner of Last Times and Only Times. It was the last time Sandra and Alice would ever be in the same room together; the last time Oscar and his wife Nina would be in our house; the only time Doug had been to see us socially. I was forever politely inviting Doug to dinner and Doug was forever politely declining. But this time he said yes and I was slightly thrilled by this fact.

The dinner was at our place but I remember all that week in the build-up to it that Oscar had tried to have it at his place. My wife and I had negotiated hard. We needed it to be at our place. We didn't do it for any reason other than the fact that neither of us could stand going to Oscar's house, which my wife called Oscar's Marvellous Museum of Me, where he spent the whole time showing off his ‘
lifestyle
'.*