Terms & Conditions (9 page)

Without fail the monthly meeting would start the same way.

I settle in and my friend, the office clown, Gary, who works on another floor and who I only ever saw at this monthly meeting, arrives and shouts in the voice of that old Superman narrator, ‘Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No! It's Frank, our Terms and Conditions Man!'

Everyone, every month, laughs at Gary's joke.

It is not that it's funny, it's because he shouts it so everyone is forced to laugh.

He must have said it a thousand times but still, each time he says it, they all laugh.

The worst part is that I laugh too. I'm a social coward; too scared not to laugh.

‘Terms and Conditions Man to save the day!' Gary* shouts and the meeting begins.

* To be honest Gary is not really a
friend
.*
¹

*
¹
More of a colleague.*
²

*
²
Well not really even a colleague; as I've said, he doesn't even work in my division.*
³

*
³
So he's more like an acquaintance.*
⁴

*
⁴
Even that's a touch strong.*
⁵

*
⁵
When you get down to it, I suppose he's just the guy that makes that one joke again and again.*
⁶

*
⁶
So I guess he's like my set-up guy.*
⁷

*
⁷
Which I suppose makes me his punchline.*
⁸

*
⁸
Anyway, the guy's a prick and, to make matters worse, I'm the prick's punchline.

In the monthly meeting we're supposed to discuss major client issues but all we do is use these issues to push our own problems on to other colleagues. ‘Client issues' are just Trojan horses carrying our own agendas within them. I remember sitting in these meetings month after month listening, not to what people were saying, but to what they were trying to say, or even trying not to say. In meetings, subtext is all that matters.

Oscar would say, ‘So we have to increase our work on the talent-management side of our Contracts Division. Revenue's running low there.'*

* Which sounds like a perfectly normal thing to say. But what everyone in the room knows is that Oscar is really talking to one person and that is Roger Parks who is responsible for the Talent Division and who has taken to doing drugs with all his clients and slowly driving the department into bankruptcy.

Roger perks up and says, ‘Well, tough times for us, losing that EMI deal really kicked us in the guts, but we'll come back stronger. What I'm saying is – we don't need old EMI, we need new media.'*

* What I'm saying is,
I'm not drunk, or stoned, and I'm not washed up!

To which Oscar replies, ‘Yes, well, look, I know a lot of your talent these days are pop stars and they are unbalanced assets, always getting wasted and then having to dry out in rehab. But we need to get that business back on its feet, am I right, Roger?'* Even in a dense hungover funk, Roger is still able to read – loud and clear – exactly what Oscar is implying and he slumps back in his chair as Oscar fires his next round. And so the meeting goes on in this vein, cutting people down or bolstering those that have pleased him. But never in an explicit way – he only ever talks in subtext. It's how he avoids conflict, and how he maintains his delusional status as the good guy,
the boss we all love to love
.

* Translated simply as:
Stop getting wasted all the time or you're fired, Roger.

Meetings always remind me of those school classes where you expend all your energy trying to talk about anything except for the school subject. In meetings we talk for so long about anything but the clients. We talk about our weekends, what we've watched on TV, what books we've read, the weather, literally anything in order to ignore the long agenda of serious client issues.

In one meeting Gary said to all of us, ‘I read about a man who died in his office somewhere in California, I think, and, get this, no one noticed for two days. Two fucking days he was there rotting as everyone worked around him blissfully unaware. It wasn't until he started to reek that they realised the poor bugger was dead.'

Everyone tutted and made incredulous noises and someone said to everyone, ‘That's the most tragic story ever. Can you fucking believe that could happen?'*

* Yes, I can believe it. It didn't surprise me in the least. It could happen right here, in fact, it could happen to me. If I don't do something fast, one day it
will
happen to me.

Everyone said, ‘It's unreal,' and someone said, as if to protect us from the terrible story, ‘Shit like that wouldn't happen here, though.'

I listen, tuning out of the actual words people are saying and into the gaps between them where a war rages. Anger fills the spaces, disappointment boils between the words, so many banal office insecurities, bored people, ambitious people, people who feel they're long overdue pay increases or promotions, a single meeting contains so many silent victories and defeats. Turning away from a failed joke denotes the losers, while laughter is the trophy the winners campaign for. I remembered, a few days after the white door had been revealed to me, that Oscar didn't specifically talk about our new nefarious weapons client. Even he was wise enough to realise that we couldn't have too many people knowing that we're working for them. But he did say at the end of this meeting, ‘And, folks, we've a new company opening down the corridor, really great bunch of chaps, so make them feel at home.'

This seemed far too casual for me. I wouldn't even have mentioned them if I was Oscar, as I was sure there were a number of my colleagues who would have similar ethical problems about the new client as I did. But that was Oscar. He had no issue about mentioning them, he didn't think people would ask or be interested, he didn't believe there were ever any consequences to his actions. He was one of those guys – and I hated to admit he was probably right – who thought he would always get away with everything.*

* There are two types of people. The Oscars of the world, who assume, through no actual proof, that they naturally know more than everyone else, and therefore will always get away with murder. Then there's me, the type that assumes everyone knows more than I know and I'll always be caught.

Our meetings have a ritualistic quality. We begin and end with a joke. We always begin with the joke about me being Terms and Conditions Man. And always end with a joke delivered by Oscar: ‘That's it for this month, folks. My door is always open so you're all welcome to walk through it any time – although I'm almost never in so you can bugger off if you think I'm hanging around waiting to listen to you all moaning and complaining. Now go get on with your jobs!'

Oh, how we laughed.

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF REMEMBERING & REGRETTING

Regret is the seed from which bitterness flowers.

I turned away from the window, away from my pale reflection, away from Shaw&Sons, and looked at Doug's bookshelf, which was filled with books whose titles alone could cure insomnia:
Understanding Actuarial Practice
;
Risk is Opportunity and Vice Versa
;
Executive X
;
Advanced Maths and Applied Maths Made Simple
. . .

Executive X.

There it was again. I took it out and looked at the author picture of Alice.

Because so far Old Frank's memory lane was littered with hatred, confusion and anger, I needed something happy to hold on to. I focused my energy on thinking about my wife, hoping to strike a memory well of love and joy.*

* Turned out the well had run dry.

CLAUSE 2.1

ALICE

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF LOVE

Falling into it's easy.

Staying in it – that's the tricky part.

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF LOVE

True love is conditional.

Not the most romantic notion but bear with me, I'm a lawyer, not a poet.

Marriage Ts & Cs

My wife married me because I was brilliant.*

* Now I'm not.

I married my wife because she was nice.*

* Now she's not.

I'm not entirely sure who came off worse in the deal. We signed a prenuptial. (Something Dad, against my will, absolutely insisted on.) But, beyond our prenuptial, and between the lines of our vows, ours – like all marriages – had unwritten, unspoken terms.

Which were: I stay brilliant; you stay nice: everyone's happy.

It didn't work out. Everyone's miserable.

Alice was so lovely when we first met. I was starting at my father's law firm; she was working in a music shop trying to figure out what to do with her life.

We loved to talk about books, music and all of our friends.

We were young.

We barely went out.

We were enough for each other.*

* That's a big statement when you think about it.

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Subject: Pure Meow

Frank – hi!

Met a slow-talking American called Joe, an anthropologist researching a soon-to-be-extinct tribe in Burma. When I enquired about what he had learned, Joe said, ‘Well, like, you know, we just kinda hung out with the tribe for a while.'

After such a comprehensive reply I felt it rude to delve any deeper.

Joe sat all night lovingly staring into the eyes of his new Thai wife, Meow (I kid you not).

‘We,' Joe pointed to his new wife for emphasis and then to himself, ‘before we got married we got to know each other really well, we communicated a lot by email, didn't we, my love?'

‘Wha?' said Meow.

‘We,' Joe said again, louder this time, the fingers again pointing to Meow then to him, then typing on an imaginary keyboard, ‘emailed a lot before we met. Yes?'

‘Wha?' said Meow.

‘Communicated,' said Joe, desperately this time, the show not going well. ‘We communicated.'

‘Wha?' said Meow.

‘Oh never-fucking-mind,' snapped Joe.

Rarely have I seen such pure love.

Love and Meow,

Malc

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF CHANGE

They say change is as good as a break. They lied!

I used to adore my wife. It was as if I had sat beside Alice's creator with a little pencil and jotted down, to my exact loving specifications, all the things she would be.

But then Alice got a job in human resources and everything changed. It started with her hair. Once an autumnal muddle of golden-browns, it was, soon after taking the job, dyed a deep wintry black.* They advised her at the company that her hair wasn't serious enough and if she wanted to be taken seriously she had to project seriousness. So she dyed her hair and it's the straightest, blackest bob you've ever seen. It worked. I started to take her very seriously. A serious marriage is no fun. Although, just below the surface, the fine print can be amusing. For example:

* For days after the dyeing, grey smudges stained her fingers like evidence of some ambiguous crime.

My wife says, ‘We need to go to the Smiths' tonight.'

I'll say, ‘Oh God. Do we really
need
to go?'

‘Yes,' she'll reply. ‘We
need
to go. He's a partner.'

‘Is this like a tennis tournament where if you miss too many games you lose your ranking?' I ask.

My wife looks at me like I'm a moron and says, ‘What are you talking about?'

I say, ‘I think I'm talking about tennis but I may be wrong.'

‘The only thing you're right about is that you're wrong,' says my wife.*

*
My wife
. Why do I insist on calling her my wife? Her name's Alice. I think I call her
my wife
because it fits an odd formality that's descended on our marriage. I'll try not to do it any more.

My wife's job changed her. She works for the human resources department of a management consultancy. Some jobs are just jobs. Some jobs are religions. You have to believe. Her job was one of those.
As a general rule, jobs with the least actual work require the most faith. After the hair, more changes arrived. She fixed her teeth. This tiny gap between her front teeth, so slight that only people who knew her well noticed. I loved it but she went ahead and got it
fixed
, got it filled. I miss the gap; it was the chink that let me inside when she smiled. Now when she smiles it's like being hit by a wall.

Then came the hobbies. First of all she took up cycling because her boss Valencia had taken up cycling. My wife would vanish for hours, returning flushed, slurping off her outfit and leaving it on the bathroom floor like a second skin.

Then came the dreadful dinners with her colleagues. Young men whose slim necks left awkward gaps between neck and collar – betraying something of the schoolboy still in them – not yet filled out into the fat businessmen they aspired to be. They all gave iron-grip handshakes and stared unflinchingly into my eyes. The iron grip and the stare were management tricks. They teach you these things at my wife's firm. I know, because they taught my wife. She was coached to look deeply into people's eyes, to shake people's hands with a firmness that suggested there wasn't a problem in the world she couldn't solve. Sometimes over breakfast I'd look up from my cornflakes and catch my wife staring at me and I'd say, ‘Can you stop that staring, it's freaking me out.'

‘Sorry,' she'd say, ‘I was just practising.'

My wife was lovely when we first met. Relaxed, quick-witted. In fact, more than all of that, she was a wonderful mess of a girl. The day I met Alice she was crying into her beer in a pub on the South Bank. I'd spotted her in the audience at the cinema watching Kubrick's
2001
. Afterwards I followed her to the bar. She looked as lonely as I felt, so I followed her. At the bar she started to cry. I leant over and said, ‘The film wasn't that bad, was it?'