Terms & Conditions

by Robert Glancy

  ‘Well, however you want to put it. I was just helping Frank along.’ Molly served soup and said, ‘You’re the middle child, aren’t you, Frank? Lost in the centre of it all, neither the first joyful surprise nor the last lovely baby. Eager to please. One who lets politeness rule your life. If you don’t actually tell people what you really think, your life’ll be a misery.’

  She looked at me for a reaction. I looked deep into my mushroom soup for an escape.*

  * Her pop psychology wasn’t just embarrassing, it was also accurate.

  She sighed and said, ‘How’s the soup?’

  ‘Lovely,’ I lied.

  ‘Jesus, Frank,’ said Sandra. ‘Tell Mum you hate it. Alice told me you told her you hate mushrooms! Just tell Mum you hate it.’

  Molly looked upset as she said, ‘Is that true, Frank?’

  ‘Actually . . . Molly, sorry, I hate it but, if it helps, I’m getting used to it . . .’

  ‘Stop eating it, Frank!’ said Sandra, laughing. ‘You’re still eating it as you’re telling Mum you hate it. You’re hopeless.’

  Molly shook her head. ‘You’re a lost cause, Frank. You’d apologise to your torturer for splattering blood on his shirt.’*

  * By the way, I hope Molly is not coming over as too much of a wise old woman. She was also a belligerent drunk and had a terrible habit of farting and blaming me for it. But I don’t want to be mean; she was also a lovely woman (when she wasn’t drinking or farting, that is).

  Later that day Alice did exactly what I’d failed to muster the courage to do: she faced me, kissed me, and that was that. We were together.

  I loved Alice for all her messiness. Felt privileged knowing her. Back then she was everything I didn’t have the nerve to be. Living by her wits, taking part-time jobs, her highs so much higher, her lows so much lower than the meandering stroll of my own life. That Alice, that bewildering, thrilling Alice, that’s the Alice I fell in love with, that’s the Alice I miss, that’s the Alice I pine for when I look across the table and see my wife.

  TERMS & CONDITIONS OF SIGN LANGUAGE

  In the right hands it can be a martial art. And Alice was a black belt.

  Initially Alice and I understood each other implicitly. We shared codes, telepathy, empathy and understanding. Such was our bond that Sandra named us the twins.

  When we started to go out I was at the peak of my brilliance. I’d won Shaw&Sons lots of new business and I’d also been responsible for writing contracts which were so well respected that they became the industry standard. Around that time Oscar was forever shouting, ‘You’ll make partner in no time, buddy.’ (Funny how no time turned out to be never.)

  But where I was brilliant at work life, Alice was brilliant at real life. Her wit was wild and untamed, and she combined it with a social bravery that at times left me breathless.

  On one of our first dates a man barged in front of us in the queue to a club.

  Of course I did what I always did, which was mumbled indignantly – but inaudibly – ‘My God, that’s so bloody rude.’

  Th inking that was the end of that. But then Alice thumped the man on the back.

  He swung around and shouted, ‘What the fuck? Got something to say?’

  I, of course, had nothing to say and assumed Alice was as terrified as I was.

  The man shouted, ‘Well?’

  Alice held her tongue but let her feet do the talking – she kicked him sharply in the shin.*

  * Now every man knows that the terms and conditions of this situation are explicitly clear. If your girlfriend starts a fight with a man, then you – the innocent boyfriend – will end the fight. Usually with your face being smashed like a plate.

  With this in mind I grabbed Alice in order to run away but the man raised both his hands to stop us moving and shouted, ‘Fucking bitch.’

  People were watching us now, and metres away at the door of the club the bouncers sensed violence; the queue twitched and writhed, warning them to come quickly. But I knew a punch to my face would arrive faster than a couple of slow-moving bouncers. And just as I saw the situation collapse – imagining myself spitting out my own teeth – Alice did something so absurd that the man actually froze mid-punch.

  Alice made a gurgling noise in her throat and started to use sign language, pointing to her ears then her mouth, furiously spinning her hands around to signal that she was deaf, punctuating the air with peace signs to stop him hitting me.

  It was so outrageous that – just for a second – the man dropped his fist and said, ‘What!’ buying enough precious time to save me.

  Alice gave one more fantastical display of utterly made-up sign language.* But – cringe-factor aside – she still saved my life (or at least she saved me a big dental bill).

  * If political incorrectness were illegal, there’s no doubt Alice would have been busted.

  Thankfully the bouncers finally appeared, grabbing both the man’s arms and dragging him off. Straining against their grip, the baffled man shouted, ‘Wait! Stop! She assaulted me ! She did! That dumb bitch!’

  To which Alice shouted back loudly and clearly, ‘I’m deaf, not dumb, you prick! Now fuck off and go learn some manners.’

  Hearing Alice suddenly talk caused the man to fall mute. It also won a shocked giggle from our small audience, and people in the queue gave Alice a celebratory round of applause, to which she bowed and said, ‘Thank you, thank you. Hope you enjoyed the show. I’ll be here all week, please tell your friends.’

  I’m deaf, not dumb, you prick! Now fuck off and go learn some manners.

  That was my Alice – dangerous, fast-witted and with just a pinch of mean stirred into a whole lot of wonderful.

  TERMS & CONDITIONS OF BREAKING UP

  Against all anecdotal and statistical evidence, marriage remains surprisingly popular.

  When did my wife break our marriage terms?

  I remember one night in the car, escaping from another boring dinner, my eyes sore from staring, my hand mildly crushed, I said, ‘Wow! That guy Phil’s a prick. What’s with these guys you work with? All they talk about is mergers and acquisitions, like little corporate gods, when they’re just accountants and abacus monkeys.’

  I laughed. That’s what you do when you make a little joke.*

  * And the terms stipulate that your wife laughs too and says something like, ‘I know – what a doofus.’

  She didn’t.

  Instead she was silent for a long time, then she said slowly, as if talking to a child, ‘They’re my colleagues, brilliant men and women. Show them some respect, Frank.’

  That’s when I knew.

  I knew everything had changed.

  Inside and out, from her hair to her soul, all of it cut, straightened and dyed black. From that point on our terms were null and void. My wife became the most determined corporate climber. She climbed so high and so hard her calf muscles actually became more toned (though that may have been the cycling).

  So there I stood at dull corporate dinners, looking and sounding interested. When all I wanted to do was kill myself.*

  * You can’t tell people that though.*1

  *1 They’ll think you want to kill yourself.

  From: fuckthis@hotmail.com

  To: franklynmydear@hotmail.com

  Subject: ‘Dam Pizza

  Frank – hi!

  Remember that time we were in Amsterdam?

  So stoned, so hungry we decided to call out for pizza but, as I picked up the phone, you suddenly said, ‘No, wait, wait, that’s far too obvious. We won’t call out for pizza; let’s wait for the pizza people to call us.’

  Suffice it to say we were generally disappointed by the pizza people’s complete lack of effort.

  Love and munchies,

  Malc

  PS I am not sure if you know this, but emails work both ways. How do I explain this? I guess the best thing to do is to think about it like a two-way street: I send you emails but you can also send emails back to me. It’s a b
rilliant new technology; you should try it some time.

  PPS Sorry, that’s just my facetious way of saying – Write to me, Frank! What the fuck’s going on in your life?

  TERMS & CONDITIONS OF WHITE

  It’s not a colour – it’s a shade.

  When things were particularly bad between us, my wife decided we needed a fresh start. In her world this meant the two of us painting the flat together: a ‘bonding project’ she called it. Which meant replacing white with a slightly different shade of white. (It didn’t freshen the flat and it certainly didn’t help our relationship.) Instead of painting over the cracks, it merely highlighted them. Preposterous though it may sound, we actually spent – wasted! – two whole weeks deciding – arguing! – about what type of white to paint the already white flat.

  It was a big deal to my wife.

  At one point our argument got so intense, so out of control, that I shouted, ‘Do you love this flat more than you love me?’*

  * She paused just a beat too long.

  ‘Oh, don’t be so dramatic,’ she said (but she still didn’t answer my question).

  We looked through lots of swatches and analysed all the different whites with their wonderful names. The Half Villa Whites, the Quarter Tea Whites, the Eighth Thornton, the Half Supernova.*

  * Like fantastic-sounding designer drugs, ‘Can I have a tab of Supernova and a gram of Thornton White, please?’

  I bought test pots and painted patches on different walls and I sat there staring at three types of identical white saying, ‘I can’t really see the difference,’ which made my wife shout, ‘You’re just colour blind, that’s your problem!’

  ‘I don’t think white is technically a colour,’ I said. ‘It’s a shade.’

  ‘You’re a fucking shade,’ she screamed.

  Yes, we actually argued over what white was the right white.

  Then, after weeks of deliberation, we finally decided on a white; we received the full pots, and a label on the bottom read, Production batches may differ from the colour in the test pot.*

  * What! How could that be? How could we spend two weeks deciding on an infinitesimal difference in colour spectrum only to be told at the end that the final colour may vary?

  When I told my wife about this in an incredulous voice, she accused me of not taking the process seriously enough.*

  * Sometimes she was more observant than she seemed.

  TERMS & CONDITIONS OF MY WIFE’S JOB

  Couriers lose hearts all the time.

  My wife profiles humans for a living.

  She writes psychometric tests to tell companies what people are like. Apparently we can’t tell any more. There was a time when we trusted our instincts. Now we pay people like my wife to slice instinct out of the whole flabby human equation.*

  * We’ve made a science of everything we’re too scared to do for ourselves.

  There’s something so sad about the process, about this human evaluation, that often I have to stop myself thinking about it as it makes me want to weep.

  My wife gets me to do the tests. I’m her guinea pig. I’ve no idea how I score on them and I don’t care. But she does. She’ll have a spreadsheet somewhere – she loves spreadsheets – or some graph with a swan-diving line indicating my devolution. I wonder when I started to fall from grace. I can’t pinpoint the moment I slipped from brilliant to average to ungradable, although I’m sure my wife could tell me down to the exact day.

  At university I was a straight-A student, wildly, effortlessly ambitious, incorrigibly intelligent. I loved tests; they made me feel as if I was accomplishing things. My wife met me when I was at the peak of my brilliance, destined for greatness. She picked a beauty in me, she really did. I couldn’t sustain it, of course. Brilliance is brittle. It’s such a clear and hard thing that when I failed to live up to my brilliance, I cracked. My brilliance was a fragile academic type rather than a worldly brilliance. I was a pure academic who soon found the scope of clean white examination papers muddied by real people and ethical conundrums.

  So I take her tests and she never tells me my scores and I pretend I don’t care. She says it’s not like an exam where you need to get high scores. It’s about something else.*

  * What?

  She’s so different now. I barely know her. She used to be like everyone else. She’d meet someone she didn’t like and she’d say, ‘Man, that guy’s an arsehole.’

  I got that. Arsehole. Everyone gets that. But now she leaves a party and says something like, ‘That guy’s such an EFTJ, with rather worrying F tendencies.’

  I guess what I’m trying to say is this: I don’t understand my wife any more. And I’m not talking emotionally. I’m not saying I don’t understand my wife because men are from Mars and women are from Venus. I mean: I actually don’t understand what she’s saying. And the more she talks in this corporate gibberish, the less she’s capable of understanding my own plain English. Often I say something perfectly normal and she’ll stare at me quizzically as if I’m speaking Yiddish. At times I understand so little of what she says that I feel as though I’m lodging with an immaculately dressed foreign-exchange student. Then I find myself getting over-excited when we do actually achieve the most basic understanding.

  ‘Pass the milk,’ she’ll say.

  After frustrated hours of not understanding her, I’ll feel giddy that I understood, and pass the milk with a smile, saying, ‘Here you go, sweetie, the milk!’

  She’ll take it and, without looking up from her mobile phone, say, ‘Stop calling me sweetie. When did you start that? It’s such a P thing to say.’

  Here’s an example of one of my wife’s test questions:

  If I were a garden, I would most resemble:

  a. Wildflower Garden: carefree and enthusiastic.

  b. Japanese Garden: accurate, and detail-oriented.

  When she gave me that test question I froze and said, ‘I don’t feel like either.’

  ‘It’s a simple question, why can’t you choose?’

  ‘Because I’m not a garden, I’m a person, and I’m fairly sure a garden can’t be enthusiastic,’ I said.

  ‘Well, don’t shout at me. It’s symbolic,’ she said.

  ‘Well, I still don’t feel like a fucking garden, symbolic or otherwise.’

  I walked away and pretended to be busy doing something else. I noticed my wife looking at the test, shaking her head slowly. I made a cup of tea and from the kitchen window watched a Renault with Medical Courier written on the side. I thought about that car whizzing about the city with a polystyrene box packed with ice in the centre of which sat a dead-still heart, a plump fist of meat waiting to be plugged back in. That this organ can survive without us seems incredible. For a long time I stood staring out the kitchen window, searching for that dead-still part of myself that I had lost.

  What do you most resemble?

  a. Japanese garden.

  b. Wildflower garden.

  c. A heart packed in ice in a Renault Clio on the A4.

  My wife’s boss is called Valencia. I’ve never met her but I know exactly what Valencia’s latest interests and hobbies are because my wife adopts them. Bosses are the new Messiahs. First there was the cycling, then came the Thai boxing. My wife returned from work one night and said, ‘We should really take up Thai boxing, it’s the new yoga.’

  I agreed in the hope that it would bond Alice and me. When you’re in a relationship, but no longer having sex, you take up odd and painful hobbies like Thai boxing in the hope that they’ll rinse out some frustrations. However, after a month of having my face punched in by a tiny man named Chang, I quit.

  When I told her I quit, my wife said, ‘But Valencia says it’s so good for your core.’

  Sometimes Valencia will call on a Saturday to demand my wife comes into the office, and my wife always agrees. ‘It’s an emergency. I have to deal with this, Frank.’*

  * What sort of emergency could it be? A doctor I understand. Someone’s dying, I
have to go. But my wife is in HR. She writes psyche tests. What’s the emergency? Come at once, this guy you evaluated as a calm type has just said something a bit mean about my new shoes, we need you to re-test him immediately!

  My wife thinks I’m having an affair.

  She reads all my texts and looks through my wallet. I’m not having an affair.*

  * Yes, I know I have a crush on the beautiful barista but that’s just born out of desperation. That’s fantasy. I wouldn’t have the nerve. I’m not an unreliable narrator. Unhinged, yes; unreliable, no.

  I admit that I do mourn the death of the person that my wife used to be, but I’d never use that grief to justify being unfaithful to the person my wife has become.

  My wife’s job involves a lot of role-playing. When my wife first suggested that we role-play together I got very excited, my mind wandering like a naughty teenager into saucy scenarios.

  I was to be disappointed.

  She meant role-playing really boring and obvious scenes like how to tell an employee they’re not performing well at work. My wife and I role-play all the time now. My wife and I have role-played ourselves into the adults we are today. We’re role-playing what it would be like if two people who married young and had grown apart still lived together pretending that their marriage was real.*

  * I’m sorry, that’s actually a terrible thing to say about my marriage.*1

  *1 I meant every word of it.

  From: fuckthis@hotmail.com

  To: franklynmydear@hotmail.com

  Subject: Cop or Criminal

  Frank – hi!

  Spotted a sticker on a backpacker yesterday:

  Life’s a fucking riot, pal! So you best figure out if you’re a protester or a policeman!

  Ha!

  Love and revolution,

  Malc

  PS I have not the slightest inkling what the hell that means.

  TERMS & CONDITIONS OF EXECUTIVE X

  X marks the plonker!

  OK, so in the spirit of full disclosure, I should confess that I do know how I score on my wife’s tests. I know exactly how I score. The reason I know is because my wife published my results for the world to read. My wife wrote a book called Executive X. The cover was black with a giant white X in the middle wearing a collar and tie. It was in that period of the late nineties, before the crash, when everything was working, when there was money everywhere. A time when no one was sure why it was working or who was responsible – until, that is, management consultants were credited with the world’s runaway success.*