Terms & Conditions (7 page)

According to my father, negotiation was one of life's most important skills. So Dad took my hand and we sat at Oscar's wooden desk. All of us seated on small chairs, my father's knees sticking up high in front of him, floating near his eyes.

Dad read over the contract, looked impressed and said, ‘This is nice work, Oscar. Clear clauses. So, Frank, what do you say?'

I cried.

Dad said, ‘My client is gathering his thoughts.'

I said, ‘I'll give you a pound per organ and nothing more. Final offer.'

Dad flushed with pride and said, ‘Not bad, Frank. Negotiation's the key. But just be aware of making final offers when you may have to back down on them; it weakens you.'

By now Malcolm had entered the room and was silently watching the proceedings.

‘Counter-response, Oscar?' said Dad.

‘Two pounds, nothing less,' said Oscar.

‘Well, that's an intractable position, son,' said Dad to Oscar, a little pride leaking into the reprimand.

‘Is that reasonable, Frank?' asked Dad.

‘One fifty,' I said.

‘One seventy-five,' countered Oscar.

‘Is this your best and final offer?' asked Dad.

‘'Tis,' said Oscar.

‘OK with you, Frank?' Dad asked.

‘Suppose so,' I said.

‘My client is happy with the resolution,' said Dad.

Oscar handed the contract to me as Dad leaned towards Malcolm and said, ‘Malcolm, you can be our independent witness to the signing.'

Malcolm glared back at my father, arms crossed over his chest like a knot, and said, ‘Fuck this,' then left the room.

Dad ran after him, shouting, ‘Malcolm, come back here right now! Who taught you that word? Malcolm! Malcolm! Where did you hear that word?'

I signed and Oscar sellotaped the contract together, laughed and quickly put it in his safe. He said, ‘You may pay in weekly instalments if that suits.'

‘I hate you, Oscar.'

‘No need to get personal, buddy,' he said.

It took five months to get back most of the organs. Every time I got pocket money it went straight into buying them. I got all of them except for one heart and a brain, which were lost somewhere along the way. That was how my dad went about helping his son; he treated it like a day in court. He was a stickler for details, my father. He loved nothing more than a perfectly worded contract. Some men love Shakespeare. My father loved legal contracts; he read them in his spare time.*

* I never stood a chance.

My father not only looked like a lawyer, he looked like the son of a lawyer and the father of lawyers. He was all-lawyer. If you cut him in half he'd be lawyer through and through – a pinstripe onion of layered lawyers.

At eighteen the sons of moneyed men might be bought a car, or given the deposit for a flat. Not me. My dad bought me my first insurance policy. When he presented it to me I gave it the level of fascination
that any eighteen-year-old would give to an insurance policy and said, ‘Thanks, Dad, I feel really, well, um, insured, I guess.'

Missing my sarcasm, Dad said, ‘That's good, son. There's no better gift a father can give his son than legally binding insurance.'

He loved insurance and he loved law. As you can imagine, he wasn't much of a dare-devil. Once he took so long reading the contract you sign at the fair when Malcolm wanted to bungee jump that Malcolm eventually said, ‘Oh, just forget it, Dad!'

Dad, not picking up on Malcolm's irritation,* said, ‘Well, that's the best thing to do in this situation, son. This document, this release, is basically asking you to sign your life away. I mean,
legally
, that's just insane.'

* In the same way that humans can't hear high pitches that dogs can, my dad couldn't hear nuanced tones such as sarcasm. If it wasn't legal, it wasn't audible.

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Subject: Stefan the Swede

Frank – hi!

Swede called Stefan came to Fon's restaurant. Stefan was very serious: ‘The final war will be between Zionists and Chinese, it will be an economic war. I'm running away from Chinisation. Thailand is
freeland
! The last innocent place, but even here television is spreading. TV is evil.'

‘
The Cosby Show
is bad, sure, but I wouldn't go as far as to say it was evil,' I said.

‘There's hope, though,' Stefan said, not smiling. ‘If the magnetic poles reverse, north and south will switch and computers will be useless junk, no internet, no TV, no bombs, no phones. Back to basics.'

‘But how will I send email?' I asked.

‘A clean beginning,' said Stefan who, like all conspiracy theorists, had perfected talking to the detriment of listening.

‘Hey, Stefan, this is all fascinating stuff but do you know if there's any weed on this island?'

‘Don't smoke it,' warned Stefan. ‘They put in chemicals that make you weird.'

‘What, weird like you?' I thought.

Love and paranoia,

Malc

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF ETHICS

Ethics are relative.

I know, I know, that's such a lawyer thing to say.

Oscar, my brother and boss, and the most corrupt lawyer in London – and trust me when I say he's up against some bloody stiff competition – heads up London's Legal Board of Ethics. I'm not entirely sure how he got on the board. He probably, without the faintest sense of impropriety, bribed someone. My moronic brother Oscar decides what the lawyers of London can and cannot do.*

* The world is suffocating in its own satire.

Oscar assures me that being a board member is great for the company and ‘
great for my profile
'.

Being a member of the Board of Ethics is a prestigious role and has made Oscar a minor celebrity.

He's the lawyer that's pulled on to the BBC if there is some ethical conundrum. (Recently he went on to a current affairs show to discuss the ramifications of taking Tony Blair to court over his decision to invade Iraq.) Most infuriating is that Oscar pulls it off. He belongs on TV, he looks the part, and I sit there watching him, boiling over with anger at the idea that my brother could be the spokesperson for what was right and wrong in this ridiculous world.

Although very thin, Oscar's fame is spread as far as it will go. He secretly hired a PR company to do more profiling for him.*

* I know this because the PR people came through to my phone by mistake once and I had to inform them that I was the less relevant brother, Frank.

Oscar's ability to shock me – even when I think I've grown immune to the shocks – never fails to shock me. So it was when Oscar called me to his office one day, not long after I had discovered the white door. My happiness dimmed when I noticed that he was beaming.*

* We've a zero-plus relationship; we fight over a finite chunk of joy: the happier he is, the sadder I am.

He said, ‘All right, I can tell you about the new office door now. Contracts have been signed. It's a new client that you must never tell anyone about.'

‘I'm confused,' I said.

‘That's not news,' joked Oscar. ‘So the new client is ####.'*

* The reason for the #### in place of the company's actual name is that I legally can't state who they are. Just know that they're an inventively cruel weapons manufacturer.

‘They're an inventively cruel weapons manufacturer, aren't they?' I said.

‘They sure are, Frankie, and do you know who made the most money last year?'

‘Inventively cruel weapons manufacturers,' I said. ‘And don't call me Frankie.'

‘You're really not as dumb as you look, Frankie,' said Oscar. ‘I don't care what everyone else says.'

‘Don't you think it's
wrong
working for that sort of a company?'

‘Typical Frank, you've no vision,' he said.

‘I'm not sure Dad would approve.'

‘Don't pull the Dead Dad card,' warned Oscar.

‘Not sure the partners will agree,' I said.

‘Already have. I showed them the money they'd make and they signed on the dotted line with only one condition – that we tell no one we work for them,' said Oscar.

‘What about the IPO and stock market – they won't like this,' I said.

‘They love it; it's shot the value of our company through the roof, a huge new client.'

‘Well,' I said, pulling out my trump card, ‘what would the Board of Ethics say?'

‘They'll be fine. But just in case they get all
ethical
about it, I've created a separate company, several companies in fact, a shell within a shell,' said Oscar. ‘Hire a load of suits to come in and work the business and we just siphon off the cash. No one needs to know we even work
for them. Legally secure and distant enough not to upset our clients or the Ethics Board. Then, just to be really safe, I build a Chinese Wall topped with a barbed-wire super-injunction.'*

* For those not fluent in legalese here's a translation.
Chinese Wall
: fictitious wall built around a client that is a conflict with existing clients. In theory you could work for both Coke and Pepsi if you had a Chinese Wall in place, so no one working on the Pepsi account ever spoke to anyone on the Coke account. Of course this is an extreme example and neither Coke nor Pepsi would allow the same company to represent them, even if – quite literally – the Great Wall of China was rebuilt brick for brick down the middle of the office.

Injunction:
a gag that stops the media discussing a corporation. Like name suppression but for a company as opposed to a celebrity flasher. But a
super
-injunction is far more potent than your bog-standard injunction. A run-of-the-mill injunction prevents the press talking about the incident but does allow them to write:
BP is being sued for an undisclosed amount by an undisclosed company over an undisclosed allegation.

But with a super-injunction that same sentence reads:—is being — for an — by an — over an —
.

Not much left in there once the super-injunction has gutted everything but the articles and prepositions. Super-injunctions state that you can't even mention the company name. Can't even hint at it. It's a legal method so powerful that it verges on legal voodoo. It literally, and legally, makes problems vanish into thin air.*
¹

*
¹
It's how Oscar lives with himself, by constantly building internal super-injunctions around all of his terrible mistakes, affairs and fuck-ups so he never has to face them.

After he'd mentioned the company name only once, Oscar started to omit it, putting a short pause in its place when he spoke: ‘When we start with [pause] we'll ensure no one here works on it, except maybe you proofing major contracts that come out of [pause]* division.'

* Such is the power of the super-injunction that our reality had literally been dubbed, as if a swear word was scrubbed from our dialogue.

‘Oh my God, and there I was thinking the door was just a bunch of lawyers and accountants trying to find a way to break Dad's Will and get us on the stock exchange.'

Oscar looked shifty before finally admitting, ‘Well, actually we've done that as well. This deal with [pause] puts us onto a new financial level and that means we're all, including non-partners like you, buddy, about to get very rich indeed. We're aiming to go IPO this year.'

‘But how can you break Dad's Will? He wanted this to remain in our hands, not some faceless board of shareholders.'

‘Well, Dad's a clever man but he was sloppy and he left a tiny detail in the Will, which we've found a way around. He said and I quote, “As long as my name is on the business it will never under any circumstances go public.” So I've decided that we're changing the name. We're rebranding; everyone's doing it these days. It's that simple. I was thinking we call ourselves The Firm or Oscar's Law. I don't know . . . those clever marketing bods will think of something.'

I was opening and closing my mouth but astonishment made me mute.

‘Are you OK, buddy? Come on, we'll be rich,' said Oscar.

Finally, words shot out. ‘How could you do this to Dad and to Mum and . . .'

He shushed me and said, ‘Don't get so emotional. This will benefit all of us. Dad made that Will in different times; we need to move on, buddy. Now, any more questions?'

Accepting that I wouldn't shift him on the IPO, I made a last desperate plea to his moral core. ‘Don't you have any ethical qualms about working for a hideous weapons manufacturer?'

Oscar smiled and, revealing his moral core to be as false as his Da Vinci veneers, said, ‘No, no. This company doesn't just make missiles or drones and things; they also make medical equipment, they make incredible metal alloys for . . .' Oscar's shallow knowledge ran dry and he waved his hand and said ‘. . . and other stuff. Come on, cheer the fuck up, will you,' then he punched me on the shoulder and walked off whistling.

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF

### ###### ##### #####

Later that day, I was sitting at my desk when this fellow approached me.

‘Frank?'

‘Hello. Who are you?'

‘Your brother hired me. I work in the [pause] division.'

I laughed and said, ‘You're the invisible lawyer behind the Chinese Wall barbed by super-injunctions. Pretty ridiculous when you think about it, isn't it?'

He didn't smile when he said, ‘I can neither confirm nor deny that it's ridiculous.'

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF SAVIOURS

Don't be surprised if they turn up in trainers.

Reliving my past was a punishing experience and as I clutched my coffee cup I was aware that everything remained the same – my cold coffee; the
May Contain Nuts
contract; spilled sugar still glittered like a sweet constellation – yet everything was different. I was different –
or the same
. I was Frank again.