‘So, Mr Shaw, your bones are healing well, ribs are still loose but they’ll heal, both your collar bones remain fractured. The amnesia we shall be monitoring very closely. Blood pressure is stabilising but your panic attacks are still frequent. And, finally, I’m sorry that we failed to mention this to you after the accident, it was a clerical error, and we should really have told you earlier, but I have to tell you now,’ and he leaned in slowly as if about to confess something terrible and said in a solemn tone, ‘you can live without it, so please don’t panic, but we had to remove your soul as it was ruptured in the accident.’*
* Remove my soul!
‘You removed my soul?’ I squealed.
‘No, no, that’s not my department,’ he said, smiling slightly. ‘Your spleen. We had to remove your spleen, which was ruptured in the accident. Yes, as I say, it’s not an essential organ. It just means you may be a little more susceptible to infection. The spleen is a very clever little additional filter but if you have a healthy lifestyle you can survive without it. No problem at all. In fact, history shows that many great men have survived, and even thrived, without their spleens . . .’
He left the sentence hanging, so I smiled, waiting for him to list some of the great men who had thrived without their spleens, but Dr Mills merely snapped shut the file and walked off to his next patient.
TERMS & CONDITIONS OF MALCOLM
He was nowhere to be seen.
My wife visited, dropped off my laptop, and opened my personal email account in order to help spark my memory. I dug into my past. It was an embarrassingly shallow excavation. It seems I didn’t suffer an abundance of friends. In fact, besides spam mail, the only consistent communication was from my younger brother, Malcolm, and from his sparse correspondence it was clear he was often off the grid. But his emails made me love him instantly.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: A Greek Tragedy
Frank – hi!
Ended up on a Greek train platform with a Scottish vagrant last night.
Missed the train and we were locked in the station.
Before he fell asleep his exact words were, Don’t worry, pal, I’m no thief – I’m just a wee bit of a murderer.
He actually said that then fell asleep, leaving me bolt upright.
Eventually exhaustion came to collect me and I fell asleep too.
Luckily – he turned out to be a liar.
When I woke up he’d stolen everything including the sleeping bag I’d been in. Phew!
Love and lies,
Malc
PS Saw this on a sticker today: The heart is a blind, hopeful organ, beating patiently, craving excitement and love. If you only feed it solitude and fear, one day it will give up on you.
TERMS & CONDITIONS OF HAPPINESS
Hysteria is just a hop away from happiness.
By the time I returned home my vivid panic had downgraded to anxious elation. I felt like a spy watching a stranger’s life. And, man, what a life! My wife: beautiful. The flat: amazing. It’s odd what you remember. I remembered exactly where the teaspoons were kept, but I still had no idea how I used to feel about this woman who was my wife. She seemed nice, though, and quite sexy.* (The only thing was, she was always watching me.)
* Although we’d not had sex yet as my ribs still swam inside me like snapped bamboo in soup.
Time and dental work had deflated my face to its original size, my eyes cleared, and all that remained was a scar on my forehead that I covered with my fringe. My senses had divorced and were independent again. And my memory was returning like the reconnection of a thousand torn fibres, an itch on your nose when your hands are occupied, screaming, scratch me, scratch me. I was still dopey due to the wide spectrum of anti-psychotics and painkillers but by the time I arrived home I was so happy I thought I might burst.* They say that people who walk away from near-death experiences are filled with overwhelming joy. What they don’t tell you is that the feeling is finite. It fades. Mine faded fast.
* Amendment to Terms & Conditions of Happiness: it transpired that my happiness was nitroglycerin. Clear and stable as long as everything was utterly calm. But shake it just a bit – and it exploded.
After a few drifting days, the first strange thing I noted about my life was that I was so completely absent from it. Like a murder scene in which someone had cleaned up all evidence of me. Was I one of those people who simply floated through life without leaving a mark? The flat was very feminine, with its white walls and profusion of cushions. So few clues. My clothes were generic, I had an ancient wind-up watch, and most of my books were about contract law. I looked around and thought, Where the hell am I in all of this?
When my wife went to work I became a drowsy detective in search of myself. Under the bed I found a box. As I opened it my heart beat hard like I was about to uncover my memory, as if one simple object in this box would unblock my amnesia dam, cause a flood, and I’d drown in me. I was sorely disappointed: inside were contracts, just random ones about employment or insurance. I skimmed through them.
I did, however, know I was doing well when I, New Franklyn, spotted something Old Frank must have missed. Within the fine print of one contract was a mistake: Term results in detriment – non omnis moriar – to the promisee. Now I know that Non omnis moriar* sounds like a legal term, and it slips past the eye easily. But I knew the phrase was wrong. It has no legal basis.*1
* Not all of me shall die.
*1 I’ll preface that by adding that odd phrases do make it into law. Latin and biblical quotes creep in. In Donoghue v Stevenson, Ms Donoghue drank a snail in her ginger beer and her lawyer made the court recognise that everyone – including ginger beer makers like Mr Stevenson – should Love thy neighbour, and in so doing try their utmost to stop people inadvertently drinking snails. And so a legal doctrine was born from a biblical quote.
I threw the contracts back, pushed the box under the bed, then worked my way through the bookshelf where I found a book called Executive X. I was a bit surprised to see my wife had written it. There was a picture of her on the back looking a touch younger. The front cover image was a giant X wearing a black tie. It was a book that described a man, an executive, and for all its corporate gibberish, I could only deduce that this guy, Executive X, was a complete tosser. It was a book about how to evaluate personalities, full of asinine questions like: Meeting someone new – a pleasure or a pain? After reading a few pages, my hand began to shake and, before I knew what was happening, I was throwing the book against the wall and then – as if in a dream, watching myself – I was stomping on it, again and again and again, until dizziness overpowered me.
When the rage passed I was mortified.
I’d destroyed a book by my wife. And I had no clue why. I began to fumble about to find a place to hide it, to conceal my crime. I opened a cupboard full of brown boxes.
Perfect, I thought.
But as I tore open the top box I was met with many more copies of Executive X. Feeling faint, I grabbed the box to steady myself but pulled it down with me, spilling boxes and books, ending up on my back thrashing about on the floor. Once everything had stopped tumbling I sat up and looked around at the boxes spewing out multiple copies of Executive X and noticed something else among the chaos – small figures.
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.*
Terms & Conditions Page 2