Read Terms & Conditions Online

Authors: Robert Glancy,Robert Glancy

Terms & Conditions

For Jemma

CONTENTS

Dedication

Terms & Conditions of Life

Condition 1 Amnesia

Terms & Conditions of Me

Terms & Conditions of Senses

Terms & Conditions of Coffee

Terms & Conditions of My Wife

Terms & Conditions of the Spleen

Terms & Conditions of Malcolm

Letter: A Greek Tragedy

Terms & Conditions of Happiness

Terms & Conditions of Impressions

Terms & Conditions of Sex

Terms & Conditions of My Office

Terms & Conditions of Bees

Terms & Conditions of Culling

Letter: East Beats West

Terms & Conditions of God

Terms & Conditions of Doug

Terms & Conditions of Codes

Condition 2 Hypermnesia

Terms & Conditions of Oscar

Terms & Conditions of My Family

Letter: No-News Flash

Terms & Conditions of Objectives Meetings

Terms & Conditions of Doors

Letter: The King and Oscar

Terms & Conditions of Organ Dealing

Letter: Stefan the Swede

Terms & Conditions of Ethics

Terms & Conditions of ### ###### ##### #####

Terms & Conditions of Saviours

Terms & Conditions of My Office

Terms & Conditions of Meetings

Terms & Conditions of Remembering & Regretting

Clause 2.1 Alice

Terms & Conditions of Love

Letter: Pure Meow

Terms & Conditions of Change

Terms & Conditions of Mushroom Soup

Terms & Conditions of Sign Language

Terms & Conditions of Breaking Up

Letter: Dam Pizza

Terms & Conditions of White

Terms & Conditions of My Wife's Job

Letter: Cop or Criminal

Terms & Conditions of Executive X

Terms & Conditions of Executive X

Letter: Ignore Signals

Terms & Conditions of Tests

Terms & Conditions of Kids

Terms & Conditions of My Wife's Parents

Letter: Evolutionary Boredom

Clause 2.2 Doug

Terms & Conditions of Chances

Terms & Conditions of The Master Actuary

Terms & Conditions of Doug

Terms & Conditions of Fear

Terms & Conditions of Tests

Terms & Conditions of Doing Something

Terms & Conditions of Trying to Get Your Wife to Listen to You When You're Falling Apart

Terms & Conditions of Friendly Fire

Terms & Conditions of Warnings

Terms & Conditions of the Dead

Terms & Conditions of Time

Terms & Conditions of Arial Nine

Terms & Conditions of Disappointment

Terms & Conditions of Self-Sabotage

Terms & Conditions of Dinner Parties

Terms & Conditions of Dares

Terms & Conditions of Dragons

Clause 2.3 My little episode

Letter: Supicious Molar and Phantom Pinkie

Terms & Conditions of Belief

Terms & Conditions of Seeking Help

Terms & Conditions of Mediums

Terms & Conditions of Denial

Terms & Conditions of Facing Facts

Terms & Conditions of Dead Voices

Terms & Conditions of Revelation

Terms & Conditions of Facing Alice

Terms & Conditions of a Personality

Condition 3 Reality

Terms & Conditions of Habits

Letter: Remember me

Terms & Conditions of Guilt

Terms & Conditions of the Devil

Terms & Conditions of Acting

Terms & Conditions of Quantifying Happiness

Terms & Conditions of the Liver

Terms & Conditions of Gluten-Free

Terms & Conditions of Revenge

Terms & Conditions of Molly

Recipe For Mushroom Soup

Terms & Conditions of Snail Mail

Terms & Conditions of Tenses

Letter: Catching up

Clause 3.1 Revenge

Terms & Conditions of Conning a Con Man

Terms & Conditions of A Prenuptial Agreement

Terms & Conditions of Dad

Terms & Conditions of Hope

Terms & Conditions of Oscar

Terms & Conditions of Packing

Clause 3.2 A suicide

Terms & Conditions of Cassandra

Letter: Give me back my spleen

Letter: Thank you

Short questionnaire

Acknowledgments

A Note on the Author

eCopyright

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF LIFE

The condition of life is a complicated one in which the terms are rarely made clear.

My name is Frank Shaw and I write contracts for a living. I'm not proud of what I do. In my bleaker moments I believe I'm the death of an essential part of humanity. People once sealed deals with handshakes. I replace handshakes with expensive ink. I swap the human touch with cold contracts. What anti-matter is to matter, I am to trust –
I'm anti-trust
, the dark force committed to destroying life's faith, hope and wonder. Put simply – I'm a corporate lawyer.

I specialise in fine print, which places me on one of the bottom rungs of my business. I'm the legal equivalent of the guy who sweeps up hair at the barbershop. You probably didn't read my terms and conditions today, when you bought something off the internet and clicked ‘Agree'; or when you signed blind some contract giving away your rights, your life, a pound of your flesh.

My masterpiece is the work I did on the modern insurance policy. I wrote it fresh out of law school when my brilliance was still radiant. Its genius lies in the fact that it's unbearably dull. Few can read it all the way through and none ever get to the small print. That's the loophole I hang you with – the policy seems to weave a golden safety net catching you as you plunge through life's tragedies but my sharp fine print rips the net to shreds. For if the devil's in the detail, I'm the devil's ghost-writer, typing cautionary tales in font so small they're rendered invisible. You can barely see them and when you do it's too late.*

* So I warn you now – read the small print.

I speak from bitter experience. After my car crash I learned that terms and conditions don't just govern my work – they're also the tight rules underwriting my life. However, directly after the crash – lying broken in bed – I remembered little of this; all I knew for sure was that something awful had happened.

CONDITION 1

AMNESIA

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF TRAGEDY

If some strange and terrible thing happens to you – that's tragedy.

If some strange and terrible thing happens to someone else – that's just entertainment.

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF ME

I'm not the man I used to be.

I awoke to people – who professed to be my family – telling me I was going to be fine.

How can I be fine? I've no idea who the hell you people are!

They tried to outrun the truth, to smother reality with hope, by chanting,
You're fine, Franklyn, absolutely fine!

Watching my forgotten family I realised that denial is like running on a treadmill with the monstrous thing you're denying waiting for you to tire, fall, and shoot back into its hairy hands. But I knew the truth – I was far from fine. The monster had me. And for a time I lay in its dark silent embrace. When I did talk, it only made matters worse.

‘Who are you people?' I asked.

One of them replied, ‘I'm your wife, remember?'

My second question really put a stop to them saying I was fine.

‘And who am
I
?'

With so few clues as to who I was, it was hard to be me. I wanted to say something to assure everyone that I was the same old Frank and that everything was fine. (But I wasn't and it wasn't.) And I certainly knew when I said something wrong. Their faces leaked little rivers of worry and they'd look at me askance, as if I'd fallen out of focus, as if I'd said something unsuitable. Which was exactly the problem: I no longer suited myself. (Failure to fulfil a contract is called
impossibility of performance
and that was my trouble – I kept saying things pre-crash Frank wouldn't say.) The only thing I remembered for sure was that before the crash people just called me
Frank
. But after it they reverted to using my full name –
Franklyn
. I lost a personality but gained a syllable.*

* Slim compensation indeed.

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF SENSES

Mine no longer made sense.

When I saw my face I didn't recognise myself. The mirror reflected a pulped stranger: bloated eyes adrift in blood, shattered fence of teeth, gross mushroomed cheeks. And my new world wasn't much prettier either. It was a place wedged with warnings. Machines released shrill cries calling forth fast-moving medics. Signs on floors shouted,
Slippery When Wet!
Screams rose from distant corridors only to be snuffed out. My drugs came with lists of warnings as long as Russian novels. A red button declared,
Press in Emergency!

My body was incessantly panicking, urging me to press the button all the time. Initially I did press it all the time. They disconnected it. Then I started screaming,
Help, help, I can't remember who I am!
They injected drugs, which muffled my panic below a hundred blankets where no one could get to me. I wished they'd reconnect the button. I missed it.

My terror was heightened by my muddled hormones. The accident had smashed my separately labelled jars –
Sad, Happy, Mad
– into a sloshing chaos of wild fluids. I wanted to laugh, cry and scream all at once, all the time. Also, the nerves that once ran along separate pipes to my ears, eyes, nose and mouth were plaited into a confused braid. So I saw green and tasted fish, heard screaming and saw blue, smelt cheese and heard music.

Dr Mills assured me that this synaesthesia was simply my brain's attempt to find new ways back to old memories. My sense and sensibilities were so scrambled that when Dr Mills drank a coffee I saw the steam rise like a deep bass note vibrating my tangled senses and triggering a feeling, a deeply embarrassing feeling –
a crush
. As I listened to Dr Mills' coffee, I realised that feelings are stickier than memories.*

* Violently shake your brain and memories float off like pollen, but feelings – they grip on like Velcro. So my first real feeling wasn't about my brothers or my wife or family –
it was about my beautiful barista
.

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF COFFEE

Its taste never lives up to the promise of its aroma.

This sticky, curly, embarrassing feeling –
this silly crush
– snagged my first real memory. I remembered that I hated coffee but I was madly in love with the coffee lady from the café in our office block. Her chocolate-brown hair poured down her face and her bosom was forever rising up towards me. I recalled spending many hours trying to think of witty, interesting things to say to her.

This one time, when it was just the two of us in the café, I said to my beautiful barista, ‘Your coffees are amazing.'

She smiled. Her lips don't thin when she smiles, they fatten, and as she frothed the milk, a speck flew up and landed on her breast. It was right then that I decided to do the most impulsive thing I've ever done in my safe little life – I leant across the counter and wiped the speck away. She looked as if she was about to slap me, I flinched, she grabbed my head, pulling my face to within a whisper of hers, and in the flustered moment she covered me with espresso kisses, her breath warm, rich, full of love, her body bending towards me as her breasts . . *

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