Terms & Conditions (20 page)

I laughed and, looking through the window at Oscar, blobbing on the sofa, his belly testing his shirt buttons, I whispered, ‘What do you think, Doug? Oscar? How long?'

Doug smiled and, obviously remembering Oscar's mean ‘batty boy' comment, he decided to play along and said, ‘Well, overweight, that cuts his years considerably, and all that dairy he pours into his veins, he has a Shaw heart, which is a short heart, as your dad always
said, and a French wife, lots of passion but lots of pain, that's enough to keep any man's heart racing. Oscar's a time bomb. He could really go at any minute.'

Not long after that Oscar and Nina, when their argument started to get too loud for a public setting, made a quick exit. I was cleaning up but stopped at the kitchen door when I heard Sandra hissing at my wife, ‘You can't do it again, Alice. I refuse to be a part of any book in which you exploit that poor man. Frank has done nothing but help you and that book . . .'

‘Get off your high horse,' my wife snapped. ‘What I did was fine, Frank doesn't mind at all. He supports me.'

‘He says that, but he's just too nice and loves you too much to tell you the truth. You really gutted that man, you embarrassed him by using so much of him in that book,' said Sandra. ‘And I for one have had enough of your ambition and we will not be taking on your next book. I love you but this awful business relationship is ruining our friendship so let's end it and just be friends again.'

I waited for my wife to concede but she said, ‘Fine, I'll pitch it to another publisher.'

Sandra said, ‘Come on, Alice, don't be like that, don't let this come between us.'

My wife said, ‘OK, sorry, I'm just pissed off with you. There, I've said it.'

I made a noise and they both spun around and smiled in the way that people do when they are caught talking about you.

‘You girls OK?' I asked.

‘Great,' said Sandra, loud and unconvincing. ‘But so tired I really have to go.'

She gave my wife an awkward hug, which was to be their last, and I took Sandra to the door and she gave me one of her full generous hugs and kissed me on the lips, saying, ‘Take care and call me this week, we should have a coffee or something, you and me.'

This was an odd suggestion, certainly not something we had ever done in the past, not without Alice there – as she was really Sandra's
friend – but I smiled and said, ‘Yes, that's actually a good idea. Let's do that, Sandra. Call me. You know what you and I . . .'

But before I became even more forthright and rambling on the subject of a coffee with Sandra, Doug came and said, ‘You're east too, aren't you, Sandra? I can drive you home if you want. You can tell me all about the latest books I should be reading.'

Sandra grabbed Doug's arm and they turned to leave, but Doug stopped just before that and said to me, ‘This has been a fun evening, Frank. We should do it again soon.'

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF DARES

Real dares contain real dangers.

Oscar, Malcolm and I used to play together. Never happily and never without a high risk of incident but we were brothers and we still spent a lot of time being boys and being, not friends exactly, but, well, being brothers, I suppose.

Not far from our house was a public park full of things that boys loved: trees to climb, bushes to build dens in, hills to roll down or sleigh down in the winter. There was a safe acre or two of park where paths were cleared and flat, and people would walk their children, and boys played football. And then there was a large area where the park sloped away and dipped into a rambling forest, which grew thick and dark pretty quickly and was riddled with long dangerous drops and high hills – this was where we preferred to play. Far more interesting, forbidden and dangerous. For the most part we were safe; we played there for many years and the most dangerous thing we ever did was tie swinging ropes to the trees so we could fly over the shallow river and back again, squealing and daring each other to swing faster and further.

More than any other place in the world, that forest was where we defined our limits and our personalities. Oscar as the oldest, and most annoying, was in the habit of taking a perfectly lovely time – usually when Malc and I were quietly fishing in the stream – and transforming it into a tense test of brotherhood.

Oscar was the Master of Dares. Most of them were ridiculous, and Malc and I learned to ignore them. But Oscar had one recurrent one that he simply wouldn't let go, and it was a dare in its purest sense – an utterly futile task that took considerable courage.

Oscar even had a name for it –
the Leap of Faith.

It was simply a jump, a frankly impossible jump, over a ravine.

It was just far enough that through the blurred eyes of bravery you might have thought you could make it, but the drop down the ravine was steep and jagged, with a childish nightmare quality to it. I assumed
for many years that my young imagination had filled in a fairly harmless shallow ravine with spikes, depth and jagged ridges, but in fact, returning to it as an adult, I was struck by how frightening it remained. It was a genuinely dangerous gap which, even fully grown, I would think twice about leaping.

Oscar again and again brought it up – ‘Do you dare take the Leap of Faith?' he would taunt.

And each time he would up the stakes, offering more and more to get one of us to try it – ‘I'll give you my bike, I'll give you all my albums, I'll tidy your room for a month.'

And every time I'd shrug and say, ‘No way,' and Malc would say, ‘Fuck that shit.'

I can't remember how old we were when Oscar finally took the plunge but maybe Oscar was around fifteen, I was thirteen and Malc was twelve.*

* Although my memory was returning, it was still not refined enough to detail chronology with any real accuracy. But I remember that we were young enough to have that dangerous imbalance of bravery and stupidity.

So this time Malc changed his normal script and instead of saying,
Fuck this shit
, he said, ‘Why don't you show us how it's done, Oscar?'

Oscar was a little stunned but said, ‘Well, OK, what's on the table?'

Malc thought for a second and then said, ‘I'll do all your homework for a month.'

Malc was by far the smartest and Oscar the dimmest, so this offer was pure gold.

Oscar looked at us both, then at the gap, and said, ‘You have yourself a deal, Malc.'

What followed was a lot of limbering up and Oscar grunting and stretching to prepare; he walked back and forth pacing out the run-up to get it just right, by which time I was saying, ‘Let's forget this, this isn't a good idea, this is bad, let's go home,' but Malc remained unemotional and ready to watch Oscar finally put his money where his mouth was.

Oscar stood ready to jump, and he looked at us and said, ‘So, Malc, you do my homework for a month if I make it.'

‘Deal,' said Malc.

‘And what if I don't make it?' said Oscar.

‘Then you won't ever have to do homework again,' said Malc. Oscar smiled at this dark joke and said, ‘Very true, very true.'

Malc added, ‘We'll call you an ambulance and if we never find your body we will divide your earthly possessions evenly between us.'

‘Har, har, har,' said Oscar with a fake laugh, then looked towards the gap, his face tense, his body shaking lightly.

Even back then Oscar had a little extra weight but he was a fit rugby player and for a moment I thought he might just make the jump. It wasn't until he started running that I knew this wasn't going to end well, he wasn't a natural runner, he plodded, and the closer he got to the edge the harder my heart beat. Without knowing it I had stopped breathing and the sounds of the forest pressed in on me – the high pitch of the birds mixed with the earthy rustling of the forest floor – then his body left the earth, but it didn't leave it enough, not nearly enough; like a badly timed long-jumper Oscar two-stepped just at the end, adjusted too late, cutting the speed out of him, blunting his momentum, and he plunged out of sight like a dumb stone. If it wasn't so tense it would have been funny; he didn't leap, he just fell, and I had still not taken a breath by the time I made it to the edge, with Malc by my side, and when we looked over there was nothing there but the river quietly running below like a silver ribbon.

‘Oscar!' I screamed and Oscar replied, ‘Calm down, Frank,' and there he was, right under us, so close he was hidden underneath us, standing on a small ledge before the final drop, which he had intentionally jumped to and was holding on to some branches so he didn't tip off the ledge into the ravine. It was a trick – he never intended to jump, he knew about the small ledge, the two-step was part of the ploy, and I was relieved and furious.

‘You two look fucking terrified,' he said, and he let out that horrible laugh that he saved for moments like this, for times when he had conned us into caring for him.

‘You two are a sight. Did you really think I'd try that jump? No way, no one can make that jump.'

‘You bastard,' whispered Malc and I could hear how stressed he was too.

After the anger passed I was just relieved, happy not to be sprinting home to call an ambulance to find my dead brother lying buckled like a doll at the bottom of the gap. Malc stormed off and I stretched my hand down to help Oscar back up. Oscar pretended to pull me down with him but he could tell from my pale face that he had taken his joke far enough. Back on the edge he thumped my shoulder and said, ‘Thanks, buddy, don't look so worried. I was never going to risk that jump. I'm not crazy.'

I said, ‘Let go of me, creep. I thought you were dead.'

By now Malc should have been out of sight, sulking off in the distance, storming off home, but he was actually coming back towards us, in fact he was coming back fast, jogging first then running, sprinting, and his expression was terrible to see.

On his face was described a level of commitment that Oscar could only fake for short periods and that I would never know. Unlike Oscar, Malc was completely committed. I could see from his expression that there was not a molecule in his body that wasn't in accord, not one rogue cell thinking,
Hang on a minute, we might not make this.

His face was staunch, but it was also scared, as if death himself was slicing at Malc's fast-moving heels. Where Oscar was a lumbering rugby lout, Malc was built to run, slim, unencumbered by fat, his limbs long and elegant but strong enough to pump and push his streamlined body through wind and gravity and to hit speeds that Oscar and I – even as older brothers – could never attain, and just at the moment – when I was going to step in front of Malc to stop him – I saw his face, no longer scared but calm, as if the jump was done, as if the impossible was already achieved and in the past, the face of a boy
relaxing at home, but his body remained taut and fast as he zipped past us and took off, not vertically, he knew he couldn't make this jump leaping from feet to feet – he took off horizontally – he knew he had to use all his speed but also every inch of his body – his length – if he was to stand a chance of surviving this jump, of making it, he actually went off hands first like fucking Superman, and to this day I don't know how he technically did it – it's incredibly hard to leap forward from a sprint to a hands-first stretch but he did it – and Oscar and I both watched as he appeared to lay flat in the air, shooting out, suspended over his own certain death – physics and reality pausing to allow Malc access to the impossible – somehow his body travelled far and fast enough that he awkwardly but spectacularly hit the other side, his stretched fingers hitting the dirt of the distant bank and tightening like hooks to cling on as his body caught up, falling and slamming unceremoniously flat against the bank and causing Malc to release a scream as he tried with all his might to scramble up the lip – reality biting back and gravity's heavy hands tugging at his ankles, dragging him into her deadly arms – but with animal panic he tore long lines out of the mud, until he finally gained purchase, a proper hold of a tree root, then he was up, but not standing yet, just lying flat on his belly, panting, taking in the fact that he almost died, and slowly he got to his knees then his feet, and turned to us with a smile. I screamed over the gap, ‘You fucking did it, Malcy,' and even Oscar shouted, ‘You crazy fuck, you made the Leap of Faith.'

Then Malc looked at his hand, screamed in pain and buckled to his knees.

I ran around the ravine, trying to get to Malc, who by the time I arrived was standing again and smiling, and I assumed it was some sort of joke.

I said, ‘Fuck, are you OK, Malc? That was unbelievably fucking amazing, how did you do that?'

‘I just took all that anger at Oscar tricking us and I used it to fucking jump,' said Malc. ‘But I hit the bank funny and I've a bit of a problem,' and he showed me his left hand.

The little finger on his left hand was so twisted that it looked like a snapped parsnip; it had that grey texture to it and it was bent right back at a grotesque – seemingly impossible – angle and I saw that it had started to swell and the grey was darkening to a blood-purple.

By the time Oscar lumbered over, Malc's finger was huge with swelling and Oscar took one look and just about passed out, folding to the floor like a girl and muttering, ‘That's completely disgusting, I think I'm going . . . to spew.'

I didn't have a problem with it, I was fascinated, and I gently took Malc's hand and said, ‘I think you've done some serious damage here, Malc.'

Wild with adrenaline and success, Malc said, ‘It was worth it.'

Oscar got back to his feet but avoided looking at the snapped finger, and said the only nice thing that I can ever remember him saying to Malc, ‘That was the most incredible thing I have ever seen in my whole fucking life.'