Terms & Conditions (22 page)

I was. Greg wasn't living up to his terms. For a start his name was lame.
Greg
. Not very spiritual. As a medium to the stars, Greg should have been called
Shine
or
Rainbow
. Greg should really have been a stoned hippie half-swallowed by a beanbag. Greg wasn't any of these things. He was a thick-set rugby player in ironed jeans. His flat was an exclusive property. There were no crystals, love beads, not even a Che Guevara poster. The guy wasn't even trying. When things aren't according to the terms and conditions, I get nervous. I take after my dad in that respect.*

* I need people to play their part, to fulfil the contractual obligations of their character.

‘Ready?' Greg asked.

I braced myself for a wash of vagaries, for all the chanting, eyeball rolling and silly voices. So when Greg didn't close his eyes or talk in tongues I was disappointed. He just said, ‘Your dad's Edward Shaw, a successful corporate lawyer. Now dead.'

‘Google could tell me that,' I said, with the irritating smugness of a sceptic disproving something.

‘OK, I see,' said Greg with a weary smile.

Feeling bad about being smug, I softened it by adding, ‘Although I'll give you points for that because I've literally spent all morning thinking about my mum and dad.'

‘Good. And your brother is Oscar Shaw; he has a huge influence over your life.'

Before I could stop myself, I defensively said, ‘Again, he's my boss and Google, or even our company website, could tell you that, so yes, you're right but no, I'm not impressed.'

‘Well, then, let's see if I can impress you, shall I?' said Greg archly. ‘For reasons that even you're not sure about you have started to graffiti public property. Worse still, you're trying to sabotage your brother and your own business, and your father's business, by writing rubbish on very important arms and drugs contracts. You're losing your way, Frank. You're completely and utterly lost in the emptiness of your own life, set adrift with no ability to connect to those you once loved. Oh, and your wife's a total bitch.'

If I hadn't already been sitting, I'd probably have passed out. I felt like a boxer who'd been sucker-punched by the referee. Dazed and queasy, I leaned low so that my head almost rested on my knees.

How could Greg possibly know about the graffiti, about the contract tampering?

My brain glowed hot with confusion. There was no way this guy could know this about me.

No one, not a soul knew, about my corporate graffiti – that was my dirty little secret.

I tried to figure out how Greg could possibly know this.

For a moment, I thought like my mother:
Maybe there are people who can hear spirits. I don't know everything, why should I have to be able to explain everything away, why can't there be spirits and things I simply don't understand?*

*
Because
– I heard myself respond in the reasoning tone of my father –
I'm an intelligent man who runs his life along a spine of explanation. I need it to stand up straight in the morning, to function, not to just lie around flaccid, freaking out that the universe is an unexplainable mess full of gossiping dead people
.

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF DENIAL

Denial is a treadmill – you can run for ever but you'll never escape.

‘You OK?' asked Greg.

‘Fine,' I lied, draining my face of any expression, hoping it would make me look more in control.

‘Gosh, you've gone very pale,' said Greg. ‘I'll make some tea.'

‘How could you possibly know about the contracts?' I asked. ‘No one knows.'

‘I hear things,' he said casually. He was so nonchalant; bored of plundering people's secrets.

‘Who from?' I asked.

‘Your dad,' he said.

Oh dear. The thought of my father knowing I was tampering with sacred legal contracts brought a tear to my eye. The idea of my dead dad knowing I was trying to bring down a company he – and
his
father – spent generations building. I started to sob. He would be so disappointed in me and my unforgivable, intolerable behaviour.

‘Want me to carry on?' Greg asked.

‘Prefer if you didn't,' I said.

‘Fair enough. But I'll say this much. Your wife's unhappy. Alice. Right? Unhappy. You knew that already, though. Right?'

‘No,' I lied.*

* Keep denying – keep running.

‘Come on.'

‘Yes, yes, OK, fine, I guess I did.'

We fell into silence again. I was sort of angry. He was sort of bored.

‘Life is a disappointment to you. You're haunted by an incident in which you didn't help a poor old man who was assaulted. You have an ethical problem working for an arms manufacturer and your brother's
attempt to put the firm on the stock market is the straw that broke the—'

‘OK! OK! Stop right there, you've impressed me, all right, Greg, I believe.'

‘Fair enough,' said Greg. ‘Just wanted to make sure I impressed you.'

We slumped into another silence and Greg sighed, then got up, and popped on the kettle. He stared at it for a moment then said, ‘Funny thing about kettles. I used to tell my son a dragon lived in the kettle and released this jet of steam to signal when the water was boiled.'

When the boiling water grumbled Greg poured it, saying, ‘It was a cute story until I caught him one morning dismantling the kettle. He'd broken it into pieces, literally unscrewed it all, then hammered the crap out of it. When I asked what he was doing, he said,
Looking for the dragon, Dad
. He was suspicious of me for a long time after that. Milk and sugar?'

‘Maybe something a little stronger than tea.'

Greg abandoned the tea and poured two thick shots of Scotch.

‘Cheers,' he said.

Deep in thought, I took my drink and walked over to a telescope* at the window.

* Telescopes have terms. Telescopic terms. They're never used to observe stars; they're always used to spy on neighbours – to spot a little faraway flesh.

Greg's telescope was adhering to its terms. It wasn't pointed heavenwards awaiting the glory of the cosmos. I looked through it and it was pointed into someone's bedroom. It seems that even the spiritual like to see a naked bottom.

I swallowed my Scotch and asked, ‘Is she really that unhappy?'

‘Who?'

‘My wife.'

‘Don't need a medium to tell you that.'

‘True,' I said.

When Greg went to the bathroom I did something completely out of character. I mean, I couldn't even believe it as I was actually doing it. I took Greg's bottle of Scotch – which turned out to be the same brand that I always bought – shoved it under my arm, and walked out of the house.

The terms of the ego are universal. Deep down we all cradle the illusion we're so wonderfully mysterious – our profound self tucked deep in the core of an impenetrable labyrinth – but a few minutes with Greg made me feel like one of my anatomical figurines, my insides outside, not even a thin skin to cover my bright, embarrassed self.*

* Run for your fucking life.

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF FACING FACTS

Rewriting your own terms and conditions is hard to do.

They're hardwired into your brain. It's much easier to stick to your terms and deny any conditions that contradict them. So I started to run, I started to deny, I started creating clauses and caveats to make sense of the nonsense. I started to think like Dad. I started to disbelieve anything that was inconvenient.

Here's how I did it. I thought: this is a big city, but the people I mix with comprise a small town really, more a village-worth of people. Greg might be less a spirit-whisperer and more of a man who brushes against the pollen of hearsay crossing from clique to clique; in other words – he's just a nosy gossip. Yes, this was all easily rationalised. Alice must have told people she was unhappy. In fact, I thought, she recommended this man, so she probably told him directly that I used to be brilliant but was now a little less than average. She probably just sat there telling Greg I was a huge disappointment to her. She would also have told him about the mugging and the arms manufacturer. That was that. Rationalised. Denied.

But! The tampering of contracts. That was a deep secret – the deepest kind – the kind with the darkest consequences. That was something inside, inside me. That was a real secret. That was a problem. How could he know that? No soul knew that one. How could I rationalise that? How could I run from that one? Alcohol seemed the only solution. I sat in the car and guzzled the whisky from the bottle.*

* Unlike most other things in life, the terms of booze are ever-changing and fluid, a contract written in Etch-A-Sketch. One good shake is all it takes to wipe it clean. I suddenly felt incredibly tired and wished I could lay my head back and have a sleep but my body had recently dispensed of sleep, as if it was some sort of disproved theory, something we no longer needed, like communism or shoulder pads.

I sat there trying to calm down as my body started to freak out.

I wasn't entirely sure of it, and I had spent most of the morning trying to ignore it, but I was gradually becoming convinced that I was being followed around by a bird.*

* Not a hawk or a raven or anything ominous, Stephen King-like, just a little sparrow, a brown bird flitting from here to there. I had noticed it when I left the flat. I saw what I assumed was another one later at the car park – which was odd as the car park is underground; now here it was again, flitting around my car.

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF DEAD VOICES

Dead people really shouldn't keep talking.

I waved the pesky bird away and thumped the windscreen to get it to fly off. It just sat there, cocky as can be, and then I thought I heard something odd. I ignored it and kept trying to get the bird to bugger off, switching the windscreen wipers on to scare it. I heard that something again.* This time I stopped and listened very carefully. I checked that the radio wasn't on. Then something strange happened. I sat still for a long time trying to take it in.

* It couldn't be.

I thought I'd heard my dad.*

* Now – just to emphasise how odd this was – please keep in mind that my dad was long dead.

I listened. There it was again. Slight, as if shouting from a distance. It was a voice that I still carried in my head every day, the tough, assured accent of a well-educated confident man. He spoke in the way that people on the BBC used to speak before they introduced lots of regional accents. He spoke with clipped Received Pronunciation.

It often sprang unexpectedly out of my muddled internal jukebox, his voice, usually in the form of some advice I was ignoring at that exact moment:
Never, never, sign anything unless you have read it and understood every word, every nuance, every single effect of that contract.

But to hear his voice
outside
my head . . .

He said,
Hi, Frank
.

Just like that.

Hi, Frank
.

It brought an emotional lump to my throat. I leaned against the steering wheel and tried to listen. But I didn't hear any more voices. For a moment I seriously considered that Greg had given me a hallucinogen, spiked my drink. In a delirious moment I convinced myself that
maybe the whole episode, this entire day, with the spirits and the sparrow, Greg's knowledge of me, all of it was a delirious trip.

A man's word is worth nothing. Get it on paper, Frank. Ink is binding. Ink binds.

That was my dad again.

It sounded like it was coming from Greg's flat. I thought I saw Greg walk past his window. I crept back to his door and peeked through the letterbox. There was just an empty corridor, which looked different to how I remembered. I'm not sure what I expected to see. Maybe my dead dad standing there chatting away to Greg. When I stepped back I realised I was not even at the correct door. I was pretty sure that Greg's door was a red wooden door with a silver number ten on it – but this was a blue door with a different number. I jogged down the street looking for Greg's red door but all the doors were blue and none of them had the number ten. I stopped to catch my breath and shook my head in that same pointless way that you shake or gently bash your phone when it's malfunctioning.

This was ludicrous.

The explanation was simple: I was just half blasted on whisky and shock.

That was all.

Fact.

I sagged with the exhaustion.

I wasn't fit enough for all this denial.*

* Run, run and run some more.

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF REVELATION

It's not just a chapter in the Bible.

I rang my wife. I realised that I had picked up her phone by accident that morning so I scrolled down the list and called my number, hoping she had picked up my phone by accident.

At first I was going to tell her everything, explain about Greg, confess about the contract tampering, tell her about the bird that was following me, beg her for help, and tell her I was falling apart, but something held me back.

‘Hi, Alice,' I said.

‘Frank, where the hell are you?' she asked.

‘I'm with Greg, the medium you sent me to,' I said.

‘What're you on about, Frank? I woke up this morning and you'd disappeared.'

‘Don't you remember you sent me to see the guy, the must-go-to guy for all things spiritual,' I said, and – as I waited an eternity for the reply – I felt the world slip a little further away. (I suddenly realised that I had absolutely no recollection of leaving the house this morning or driving here.)

‘I don't know any mediums,' she said.

‘I think something might be wrong, something might be wrong with me, love, I think something might be happening to me.'

She said, ‘Sorry, Frank, can we talk later, I'm literally swamped with deliverables.'