Terms & Conditions (8 page)

My beautiful barista came over and asked if I was OK. She explained that I'd been laughing hysterically and freaking out people in the café. I noticed her hips, so invitingly wide, and her slight belly bent out towards me.

In a daze I heard myself ask, ‘Do you know of a place that doesn't have lawyers?'

She looked at me meaningfully and said, ‘How do you mean?'

‘A place without lawyers, without contracts, a place where people aren't always protecting their own backs, maybe a place where people don't even speak English.'

‘Oh, right,' she said. ‘Yeah, I know just the place. I went to Majorca last summer and half the bloody people there didn't even speak any English. It was a friggin' nightmare.'

She smiled her sweet smile and left me to my confused thoughts. I looked down at the contract screwed up tight in my fist. Then I let my head hang low, staring blankly at the floor, where I think I would have remained for hours had my peripheral vision not been broken by some strange black trainers. My eyes moved up a pair of dark moleskin trousers, past a crisp white shirt to Doug, who had a look of such terrible concern etched on his face that I said, ‘My God, what's wrong, Doug?'*

* Before I realised his concern was directed at me. I was what was wrong.

‘Come on, Frank,' he said. ‘Let's have a bit of quiet time.'

Without saying a word, I followed. In his office Doug made tea, pulled his chair over and sat beside me. He didn't speak, didn't ask questions, he just remained quiet until I said, ‘I've started to remember . . . things.'

‘That's great news,' Doug said but, reading my expression, added, ‘or not?'

I began, ‘I hate Oscar, I work for an arms manufacturer and . . .' And then – before I had time to stop it – I started crying. Doug handed me tissues and tears kept coming. He rubbed my shoulder and, for a moment, his hand felt like the only thing anchoring me to reality.* It seemed he understood this because he didn't move for a long time before saying, ‘Yes, um . . . that does sound like the old Frank I once knew.'

* As soon as he moved his hand I feared that I'd drift off into weightless insanity.

Snot started to chase the tears running down my face as I said, ‘Oscar and Alice didn't tell me any of this when I asked about my old life. They told me everything's fine, that I was just a bit stressed.'

‘Listen, Frank. Don't believe everything you hear.'

In a childish weeping jag I gulped down a series of tiny sobs and said, ‘Sorry, Doug. I'm a horrible mess . . .'

Men aren't conditioned for emotional encounters so we found ourselves temporarily stuck. I smiled, sipped my drink, and hid my teary face behind the lip of my cup. I gained a little control, cleaned my face, and felt the silence grow around us.

In what I assumed was an attempt to break our awkward moment, Doug suddenly jumped up and said, ‘Hey, come on. Want to see something amazing, Frank?'

But after my blaze of revelations, hardened in the kiln of shock, I mumbled, ‘Sorry, Doug, but nothing more could amaze me today.'

‘Nonsense. Trust me, Frank. You'll love this.'

He walked across his office to a couch that was in keeping with his style: functional, brown, something no-nonsense and Scandinavian about it.

‘I hear all sorts of silly rumours about myself in this place, Frank. That I spend hours in deep mathematical meditation. But the truth is I just love taking catnaps.'

And with this Doug pulled a lever and the couch folded out into a thin bed. Doug took such delight in this little moment that it made me laugh (and the unexpected sound of my own laughter – so long unheard – made me laugh more).

Doug laughed at me laughing, we relaxed a little, and both stared at how odd the bed looked in such a strict office environment. I didn't feel embarrassed about crying any more. I blew my nose hard. By that stage if the man had run me a bath I'd happily have stripped down and plunged in – such was the harmony of my vulnerability and Doug's reassurance. So, without another word, I walked over and lay on the bed.

Then – just as I started to feel a touch self-conscious about lying there – sleep grabbed me. When I woke Doug was gone but he'd left a note:

Frank – got a short meeting but back soon.

Stay where you are. Relax. I told Oscar you were with me and all's well. Sleep lots.

PS Feel free to raid my ‘drinks cabinet' – the green tea is powerful stuff!

I tried to get out of bed fast to establish the fact that I was fine. The room spun so hard I screamed, ‘Earthquake!' before realising it was me doing the spinning. The scar on my forehead throbbed like a warning light and I sat down. I got up slowly this time. The world still had a woozy tilt but I was feeling a little better as I walked across the office. Looking out the window – ignoring my ghostly reflection staring back at me – I saw across the way the offices of Shaw&Sons and recalled how I felt about the place I spent most of my life.

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF MY OFFICE

Institutions that do the most damage are often the dullest.

My office is deathly dull. We all hate each other but – given the terms and conditions of office life – we all pretend to get along. After the revelations about #### I began to look around, to evaluate the company I worked for – this place that bore my name – and started to see it for what it was. A place of dull bureaucratic evil. Though you wouldn't know it to see it. We disguise our dealing well. The walls are painted bright colours in some lame attempt to distract from the blackness all around. Some of the meeting rooms have purple sofas and oversized lampshades, which makes them look like the set of a kids' TV show. We even have a green shag carpet (the fluff sticks to the soles of my shoes so at the end of the day it looks like I kicked a Muppet to death). The sofas, carpets and bright colours are trendy, apparently; they're trying to make the office seem fun and innocent. It doesn't work.*

* It makes it more depressing. Like painting rainbows and fairies on the walls of children's hospitals. It doesn't fool anyone. Especially not children, who instinctively know all life's tragic terms and conditions. They know you can't cover pain and death with fairies. In the same way a jazzy shade of apricot won't disguise the intractable evil of my office.

There was a time when I loved work, when this tightly controlled world of contracts made sense to me. I once loved terms and conditions; they were the meticulously written rules by which I ran my perfectly controlled professional life. But long before my
little episode
, I recalled that work had started to repulse me. The way we talked to clients as if they were gods briefly descended from heaven to grace us with their sneers. The way we danced around to the beat of false reverence. If you happened upon our office, and had no idea what we did, you'd assume from our grave tone that we were on the edge of cracking the cure for cancer. We're not. We're not doing any good to anyone.*

* Quite the opposite. Here's the big secret: I don't actually do anything for a living.

No one in my office does. We all know this. No one says it. It would be like breaking a spell. Cutting the rope that suspends our disbelief. Like an actor shouting to the audience, ‘You know what? This is all just made-up crap. I'm not dying and I'm not even a salesman.'

My clients are so similar that I simply copy the last set of contracts and change the company name and then I paste it and send it to my new client. I can cut and paste ten documents and change the company names all in less than twenty minutes. That is a whole day's work done. Then what do I do? I stare into the abyss of the endless hours stretching out before me. There it is. The raw truth. I cut and paste for a living. Monkeys would be bored by my job. I'm a legal chimpanzee. However, although we're monkeys, I still don't want to give the impression that we don't have an effect. We're monkeys that have broken into the nuclear launch station. One day, by random chance, we'll hit the codes and it'll all be over. Maybe it's already too late. (Or maybe I'm being melodramatic again.) We live in corporate times and Ts&Cs are what Dad proudly called the
DNA of life
. You can't always see them but they nonetheless determine everything you do. Here's what happens: companies are lazy so we all cut and paste each other's work. One set of Ts&Cs is cut and copied and pasted on to many other documents. The more often it happens, the more likely it is that anomalies and mistakes creep in (in-breeding is never a good idea). It happens. It happened to me.* And the slightest of errors, the tiniest inaccuracy, is tantamount to a criminal charge at Shaw&Sons. Dad always liked to cite terrible mistakes to remind his sons of the importance of air-tight accuracy.*
¹

* I see whole sentences of mine that I wrote ten years ago reappear in another document from another firm. I marvel that a sentence survived, made it through all the cutting and pasting, all the hundreds of documents, travelled from my company to many more companies, and somehow here it is, full, complete, not a comma moved, staring back up at me, my sentence, my baby. It fills me with shameful pride but plagiarism really is the sincerest form of flattery.

*
¹
My dad's favourite was ‘the Greene comma': on his deathbed Graham Greene added a comma to a clause which sparked decades of legal debate between his estate and his biographer over the rights to Greene's archives.

As a kid I worked a summer job and Dad told me to look over a contract and alter the names. I replaced all the old company names. It was easy.

A synch.

But I made a mistake.

I missed one. One of the
old
company names remained on the
new
contract. Dad went ballistic. He told me if the client signed this agreement it would be null and void; that one mistake, that one word, made the document defunct. He would have lost the contract and the client, and the reputation of the firm would have been in jeopardy.

All that from just one tiny word.

So the offices of Shaw&Sons were far from my favourite place in the world. I remembered once that I noticed dead flies lying in clusters on the floor near my desk. Not swatted into two dimensions but lying dead in circles on the carpet. It was eerie. I wondered how they had died all together like that. My theory was that they'd killed themselves. Upon entering the office they'd simply lost the will to live. They flew to the highest point, turned, folded their wings and dived to the floor, desperate for death.

Ts&Cs are the modern curse.

We live in over-simplified times and lawyers – like me – exploit that to hide, disguise and distil so many life-altering terms and conditions behind two simple statements:
AGREE
or
DISAGREE.

I don't have the answers but I do know this much – few things in life that are really worth thinking about can ever be reduced down to those two words.

I seemed to have spent my life stuffing the world with fine print. What will I leave behind, what is my legacy to this earth? Am I just the man who makes everything safe for rich nasty men? Is that my sum total?

I imagined an end-of-the-world scenario in which aliens came down to look through the rubble of our earth, but everything and everyone is dead and there's nothing left except piles of corporate contracts, all the rubbish I write. My contracts are the only evidence
left of humanity. All the petty arguments between business partners, hideous prenuptials, corporate buy-outs, all the pathetic loopholes that evil men had slipped through, so many short stories of death and disagreement. I reckon those aliens would just flick through a couple of folders, shake their noble green heads and say,
Oh well, no great loss
.

I don't want to change society – I'm not that ambitious – but I would prefer it if my every working hour was not devoted to making this world a slightly worse place to live.

They should put health warnings on our payslips every month.

Just like they do on cigarettes.

The warning should read –
This sort of work is bad for your health. Too much of it may cause cancer of the soul
.*

* Or more simply –
Work kills.

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF MEETINGS

They're never about work.

Memory is not discerning. When your memory returns it simply gushes all the content out at once, from sad memories that make you want to curl up and die to the really dull crap which most,
most
, of all of our days are generally made up of. Without a discerning editor, your memory is just a giant wasteland of everyday disposable scraps with a few diamonds lost in the rough. Staring out of Doug's window, I remembered as much of the boredom, futility and idiocy as I did the amazing, important and incredible.

I particularly remembered spending many fruitless hours in meetings, usually with Oscar parading around like a prat and the rest of us looking on in glum desperation. What I remembered specifically about meetings was that they are never about the work at hand. Meetings – at their most basic – are really all about how everyone in the meeting happens to be feeling at that time.

Two people are worth mentioning in the office. George is a woman. (Only just. Only in gynaecological terms.) In all other terms, she's a man. She has no breasts, she dresses like a man, talks like a man, walks like a man, is uglier and more aggressive than a man. She never laughs. It's her thing. She smiles sometimes but when she does, you wish she hadn't.

And Gary is our office clown. His thing is that he can count pages just by holding them. Give him a stack of paper, he holds it, closes his eyes, and says, ‘Twenty-one pages!' Most boring trick in the world.*

* As I wrote that I realised that Gary wasn't worth mentioning after all (and neither was George).

Anyway, we had these monthly meetings in which Oscar would crack jokes and try to be the greatest boss on earth.