Terms & Conditions (3 page)

They were toys, plastic dolls, figurines packed with detachable organs: lungs, liver, spleen, in bright reds and blues that could be pulled out and popped back like a three-dimensional organic jigsaw. I grasped one and my panic peaked when I peered into its tiny plastic cavities where a little heart and brain should have been. It was missing vital organs. Their absence made me so mad that I tried to compose myself by lying back flat on the floor, arms outstretched. Holding the toy in my right hand I stared at the ceiling, trying to ride the panic back to calm. Very slowly, as my breathing hit a more natural rhythm, I turned my head and looked down the white line of my arm to my clenched fist, the figurine's head poked from one side of my palm and his feet from the other.

I sent a signal to my hand, but it seemed so distant and disconnected that I was faintly surprised when slowly, like a flower in bloom, the fingers opened and from my palm burst the organs – red kidney, purple spaghetti nervous system, deep brown bowel rolled along the wooden floor, and for a moment I simply stared at the imprint they left.

Once I had got a grip of myself I carefully replaced all the tiny organs – this small task filled me with childish contentment – then I repacked the books, hiding the one I'd abused deep down at the bottom of one of the boxes. (My wife would never know.)

I put the little dolls back. As I placed the final figurine on to the top shelf of the cupboard I spotted, right at the back, a small jar, an old Colman's mustard jar. On the label scrawled in childish writing it
read –
Leap of Faith!
There was no mustard inside. There was a murky fluid and floating in the centre was a parsnip, no, a bent crayon, no, a pale asparagus, no, it had a nail on it –
it was a child's little finger
.

Having been floored by a book and a toy, I expected that a child's finger would have sent me straight to the nuthouse. It did quite the opposite. I watched it – suspended in fluid – and it brought me a sense of calm; followed by a vivid flush of pride. I sat on the floor and cradled the Colman's mustard jar. Aside from the pride, the finger didn't bring back any specific memories.*

* I assumed that I had not kidnapped a child and chopped their little finger off. But, really, who knows? I decided, until I knew more, that it was probably best not to mention the floating finger to my wife.

I took an itinerary of ‘my search for me'. Needless to say, the clues so far failed to illuminate the dark recesses of my lost personality.

All I had was:

1. A maddening book by my wife.

2. Some weird dolls with detachable organs.

3. And a spare pinkie.

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF IMPRESSIONS

It's hard to do an impression of yourself.

Since I had returned from the hospital, my wife and I stuck to a strict routine. The doctor recommended this, advising us that routine was the best route to recovery. So my wife and I would have a proper dinner together every evening.

Pleasant
would best describe our dinners. We chatted about small things – her day at work, colleagues, the news – and, yes, occasionally we laughed a little. But the dinners had the quality of a first date –
a perpetual first date
– where each night we tried again to get to know one another. But each night we were frustrated by that grating friction which strangers generate between the rub of forced politeness and mild suspicion.

Sometimes Oscar would join us for dinner and this often made matters worse. I felt an added pressure in his company, as I tried hard to remember details. They tried hard to be as patient with me as possible. I wasn't at all sure that patience was a trait Oscar was familiar with.

Whenever I tried to bring up the question of my
little episode
my wife always answered my question with a question – ‘Why do you always ask about that, Franklyn?'

Because it sounds scary
, I wanted to say.*

* But I didn't, as I was conscious of not causing my wife and Oscar more anxiety than I already had.

It became obvious that Oscar and my wife had spoken to each other and devised an answer – or a deflection – which was simply, ‘You were just tired and stressed before the car crash. Don't worry about it.'

But during one dinner with Oscar and my wife I did hit upon another memory (this time my taste buds were the spark). While eating a slice of cake a detail came to me: a child in a cowboy outfit pointing
his gun and screaming at a group of stunned kids, ‘Stop eating my cake! You can all just go now!'

I ventured a guess: ‘Oscar, you once tried to kick your friends out of your own birthday party . . . because they were eating your cake?'

My wife laughed and said, ‘That's right, Franklyn.'

Oscar looked pissed off before admitting, ‘Yes, I was a bit of a nightmare as a kid.'

‘And it looks like you really like your cake,' I joked, realising too late just how offensive it was to say this to a fat man like Oscar.

They both looked stunned that I had said something so rude.

Clearly Old Frank would never have said this and I felt the heavy disappointment of letting them down. Again I was failing this performance; I was basically doing a very poor impression of myself.

But, after a terribly long pause, Oscar grinned, then guffawed, and this in turn got a laugh from my wife, who smiled sweetly and said, ‘You got it, Frank.'*

* Maybe I hadn't said the wrong thing after all. I noticed she called me Frank that time. Just Frank. Not Franklyn. Like I got something right enough to be called my old name. This made me uncontrollably happy.*
¹

*
¹
Maybe this performance wasn't quite so impossible after all.

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF SEX

It takes two to tango (but both parties need to dance to the same rhythm).

Sex with my wife was a strange affair.*

* Particularly because she was basically still a stranger. Lying in bed, I spied on my wife as she cleaned her teeth. Even below the baggy folds of an old T-shirt the shape of her body was clear, a beautiful but not natural figure, distinctly modern, meticulously developed by cycling, yoga, multiple hours of fitness fads expressed in svelte, defined flesh. Still unaware that I was watching, she pulled off her T-shirt and appraised her body in the mirror.*

* Reading a woman's face as she reviews her body would take up more paper than the world has to offer, but I read enough to know that disappointment was at least one part of her critical self-assessment.

If her goal was to achieve an androgynous form, which I suspected it might be, she would forever be thwarted by a persistent layer of gentle curves. Atop her toned legs her hips had little fat yet their natural shape remained wide, spread out, wing-like, open and inviting, but their soft invite was mildly undone by her intimidating stomach, which was as hard as it was flat, even slightly concave, a trunk of uptight muscle hiding all suggestion of female organs below, and relief from her hard centre came only when her abdomen broadened outwards to accommodate her ribcage and breasts, which, although in no way large, were just big enough to resist being toned into the tough musculature upon which they so softly sat. Lost in her shape, I failed to see that she was now watching me watch her; she was approaching, saying, ‘I didn't tell you this, but Dr Mills said the best way to re-jog your memory was to have sex with your wife as often as possible.'

I felt faint, out of breath, losing lots of blood, as her fast hand, snaking below the sheets, found the very spot where most of it had decided to collect.

I said, ‘Um, this might not take long.'

With a disarming grin, she said, ‘Don't worry, Mister,* you were never much of an endurance runner. Now you really need to relax a little, Franklyn. Let me do this, just relax.'

*
Mister?
That was new. Was it a code between us? Something fun and provocative?

At first, all was going well, and then in the middle of a lovely moment, as our breathing became heavy and harmonised, I heard myself say, ‘I want to make love to you, Alice.'*

*
Oh dear
. I realised too late what a crap thing that was to say. In the centre of this hot moment I should have growled,
Let's fuck
– no, that's too rude! Possibly something milder,
We need to have sex right now?
I shouldn't have said anything at all. I was muddled between my polite mind and horny body; crude contradictions of love and lust, tangles of pleasure and rage clotted my tongue.

Aside from my mental neurosis, I was also physically struggling to free myself of my clothes as I tried to get my stupid boxer shorts off. Then, having recovered from my embarrassing gaffe, just as our heat and pace built to a new peak, I moved too quickly, causing a jagged pain to shoot across my body, as if one of my loose ribs had sailed
into a nerve. I squealed, kicked out my leg catching my wife in the face with my knee – crack!

She straightened up, shocked, her body taut as if under attack, her expression baffled. I wanted to crawl away and die.

I got on to my knees, brushing her face, ‘Oh God, I'm so sorry, I think I just kneed you in the face.'

She touched her cheek gently and said, ‘Goodness me.'

I muttered, ‘I'm like a fucking schoolboy, I'm sorry, let's just forget this.'*

* But although my mouth said,
Let's just forget this
, it was hard to ignore my penis*
¹
which was saying something altogether more forthright –
Let's fuck!
With both of us kneeling, facing each other, my cock literally looked like a small desperate hand stretching out to touch my wife's vagina.*
²

*
¹
Is cock a better word? Prick? Knob? Dong?

*
²
My wife's pussy? Cunt?
Oh I don't know!

She looked as if she was just about to accept the offer, roll over, and go to sleep, but instead she got down and helped me struggle to get shot of my boxer shorts and said, ‘Stop, Franklyn, calm down,' and she leaned in and kissed my face, and placed her hand gently on my chest as if to bring my heart back to a normal rhythm, ‘No need to rush.'

She pulled the sheets free, tossed them off the bed, and I felt horribly exposed, lying naked, my pale, scarred body uninviting next to my wife's finely carved figure. But she seemed not to notice. She looked at me with nonjudgmental eyes. She touched my penis in the way that you might handle a trophy, she made me feel important. My God, my wife was an amazing woman, and somehow she even managed to joke, saying in a sexy tone, ‘At least this part of you is still going strong, Mister.' She stopped me as I tried to move again, pushed me back, put a leg over me and straddled my body. With an almost yogic motion she slowly laid her entire body on top of mine in methodical stages.

So calming was this movement that I knew it was something we must have done in the past. For all our awkwardness – trying to get to know each other and work around each other – this moment, her lying flat on top of me, was the closest we had come to true calm. Where our personalities had so far failed to synch, our bodies were perfectly fitted together: her breasts came down first, packed in between us, soft and warm, spreading peacefully over my anxious heart; our shoulders aligned and locked; her concave stomach descended, a hollow filled by my small belly; her hips gently bracketed my own and, with a short practical motion of her hand, she directed me deep into her, as the soft equal sign of our thighs and shins came parallel. For a second, maybe two, I was calm; for the first time since I had woken up in the hospital, I was home.*

* I had been so lost in my mind since the accident and finally I was out of my head and inside my body. I was
feeling
. Momentarily relieved from the unyielding
thinking and thinking and thinking
, I wanted to scream with joy –
Why hadn't we done this earlier!
I felt overpowered by an urgent need for the sort of sex which would pitch me into a state of unthinking abandonment.

Sex didn't bring back any memories as such, but my body, blood and bones remembered something, remembered enough to release them from the panic that had encased them since my crash.

Alice kissed me and whispered, ‘I love you, Frank.'*

* The returning message of love bubbling up –
I love you too
– got lost somewhere between my heart and my mouth.

Her hips moved and I was so close to saying, I love you, Alice – I thought the words were literally about to exit my mouth – but what came instead was a light exhale of air and in its wake I felt the build-up, the moment of pressure which precedes relief. The pressure was strong: the many tiny cuts I had in my neck, where the doctors had pushed their drip tubes into me, felt like they might tear and I would squirt like a human sprinkler. As the tension built I waited for the pleasure to come but I realised too late the pressure was panic, radiating out from my groin across my stomach, jangling my ribs, raking against my heart and singeing my brain. Alice misread the sudden jerking of my body – as I tried to disconnect, tried to buck her off me – for some sort of sexual ecstasy and she rose up on her arms like a soldier doing press-ups, biceps tightening, pelvis grinding. My panic attack was in full flush – tears and sweat and sperm rising out of me like a squeezed sponge – as thrashing Alice rode my attack all the way home, clashing hips, her head raised so I could only see the underside of her jaw, clenched and hard like the rest of her primed body; only her breasts gave away any softness in her as she shouted to the ceiling, ‘Come on, Mister, that's it, that's it, yes, yes, yes!'

I was crying but didn't want to admit that I was in a state of terror so I gripped on for dear life – the tendons on her neck tightening – hoping she would finish soon. Before I could throw her off she pushed a final brutal shove downwards, her jaw loosened, fell slack like an anchor dragging down the rest of her face – taut wire veins deflated and receded back into her throat – and her head lay heavily on my chest as she moaned and ground the last bits out of me as if at the gym giving her all on a final push-up. I had managed to run my panic back deep into the centre of me somewhere and I smiled and hugged her tight so she couldn't look at my face and read my terror. Her tense body deflated and she moaned, ‘Great job, Mister. We'll have you up and running in no time, I'll be your personal sexual trainer.'