‘Now I know how busy Alice is with her book and her work, and you too, love, I know you’re both so busy and we’re just old retired frumps, but we’d love to see you guys, happy to come to you, happy to bring a little pot, a stew, so you don’t need to fuss.’
I always said, ‘Yes of course,’ which would cause Joy to yelp, ‘Such great news. Fred! Fred! Frank said yes, he said yes, we can see them.’
I could hear Fred, who would shout in the background, ‘Tell Frankie I have a new Muddy Waters for him to listen to. Mint condition.’
Fred was the only person to call me Frankie, and from anyone else it might have irritated me, but from him I liked it. Fred and I bonded over a love of the blues; two skinny white men who couldn’t stuff enough rural black men into our ears.*
* A lawyer listening to the blues? Well, I was trying to find something. Trying to find something that wasn’t uncovered by my wife’s tests, something you couldn’t glean from my suit or hairstyle, and music reminded me that when I was young I did have something, something hidden, somewhere deep within the dark spaces between my skin and bones. It was around this time that I understood my character was a conflict waged between inner and outer voices. I was once that brilliant guy you’d meet at a party who’d make you feel witty and relaxed. Then I became the guy you glimpsed behind a pot plant pretending to read texts that weren’t there. Every time I said something out loud, my inner voice quietly disagreed. ‘I believe we did the right thing in going to war with Iraq,’ I’d say, as my inner voice whispered, ‘No you don’t.’ My inner and outer voices, once so melodious, are now battling drunks at a karaoke night. Put simply, I no longer believed a word I said.
But – again and again – my wife would try and wriggle out of these dinners. If she failed to think of a good excuse in advance, then, at times, she would pull out at the last minute, saying Valencia needed her, and I would have dinner with her parents but without her. I loved those dinners with them. This is not to say they were a replacement for my own parents, who I loved and respected dearly, but my wife’s parents had something that no one in my family could ever fake – and that was an unbridled enthusiasm for life. (Maybe something Malcolm had but not the rest of us.) This could of course go both ways. At times Fred could fall into deep discussions about how a certain guitar sounded, or a single note resonated on an album, and Joy would have to stop herself praising her own daughter, whether she was actually present at the dinner or not. But in the main, Fred and Joy were simply two of life’s great enthusiasts.
When my wife did attend these dinners they were – unfortunately – never quite as good.
Joy would forever try and touch my wife – a hug held too long, a pat on the hand – and my wife would flinch and wriggle away. Then Joy would say, ‘Now, Allie, I have told the Browns that you’re going to pop in to say hello next time you come to visit. Mrs Brown is just so proud of you, sweetie; she has your book in hardback and paperback and no one is allowed to borrow it but she always shows people where you signed it for her.’
Over time Joy had realised that she embarrassed her daughter by praising her all the time and she had hit upon this clever method of using third-party endorsement, such as talking about Mrs Brown, or other friends, and how proud they were of Alice, as a way of continuing to do what she loved most – which was simply to love and adore and encourage her only child.
My wife would smile painfully and say, ‘That’s sweet, Mum . . . now, I better just check my emails,’ and leave the table.
Fred and Joy would give each other just the mildest hurt look then Joy would brighten up and say, ‘Goodness me, she is a busy girl. Where did she get that work ethic from, Fred?’
‘Not me, sweets,’ Fred would say. ‘Not me. Now, Frankie, what are your views on the newly polished versions of the Son House album? Why are they messing with perfection, I say. I’ve got the original record in my bag. We should give it a spin, what do you say?’
‘I say let’s do it, Fred.’
And Joy would smile, grab my hand a moment as I tried to walk away, and I would know exactly what was coming next, exactly the question which had all night waited to be released from Joy’s excitable mind – ‘So has Allie talked more about babies, Frank? I know she’s a career girl but she is getting older.’
This was always the hardest part of the evening and somehow Joy only ever brought it up with me, as if she knew it was no use pushing her daughter for more commitment.
‘I’m keen as mustard,’ I said. ‘But Alice is really at a key point in her career . . .’
Joy said, ‘Say no more, Frank, we know we can rely on you to make it happen.’
And that was it, we were all a team against my wife, and Fred would say, ‘Just nick her pills or pop a hole in that rubber there, Frankie, she’ll never know!’
Joy would squeal, ‘Fred!’ then smile, wink, and say, ‘But you do what you need to do, Frank, we’ll support you. Your secret’s safe with us, son.’*
* My own mum and dad never used to call me ‘son’ so it really got to me when either Joy or Fred tagged that term of endearment on to the end of a sentence – son.
My wife’s return to the table would plunge us all into an awkward silence, us three conspirators, and, somehow knowing what we were discussing, she would say, ‘Let’s not have the bloody grandkids chat tonight, OK? Give it a rest.’
‘Whatever you say, dear,’ Joy would say, starting to clear up the dishes but catching my eye and winking as she walked off to the kitchen.
There was always a moment at these dinners when the energy my wife exerted trying to be nice to her parents would finally give and she would say something rude.
One night I looked up from my plate and winced at the grating sound of my wife’s voice amplified by her third vodka and Coke. She often got drunk in front of her parents, creating a drowsy river of booze between her and them, something to soften the edges of the experience she found so distasteful, and when I asked if she wanted a top-up my wife said loudly, ‘I’ll’ ave a vodka and Coke, alwight luv.’
She said it in a grinding parody of an East End accent. It was an accent we all recognised immediately.
She was taking the piss out of her own father.
Fred looked so hurt and my wife was not too drunk to see her mistake, and said, ‘Only joking with you, Dad, come on, don’t be silly. Come on.’
He looked both furious and ashamed and said, ‘You – luv – used to talk like that too. Remember, before you got all la-di-da.’
This really hurt my wife, who just grimaced like a brat, and her mother quickly patched over the tricky moment by standing up and saying, ‘I’ll tidy up.’
Then like clockwork as soon as the door was closed behind her departing parents, my wife rolled her eyes and muttered, ‘Thank God that’s over, they’re so embarrassing. Why does Dad insist on wearing those lumberjack shirts? He looks like a fucking builder.’
‘He is a builder,’ I said.
‘All the more reason not to bloody look like one,’ she replied.
‘Goodness me, you are such a snob,’ I said.
‘Better a snob than a yob,’ she replied, trying to make a joke.
I didn’t laugh.*
* Instead I did that terrible thing that warring couples do: I remembered this moment and filed it away, I stockpiled it among a list of her other mistakes, loading my arsenal to fire back at her later on down the line – when she unleashes upon me a similar stockpile of my own slights and faults. I’m ashamed to admit that I stockpile her mistakes, but I do; it is all I have left to fight her with.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Evolutionary Boredom
Frank – hi!
I’ve been lying in a hammock all week and I’ve realised something fundamental. Boredom may not seem like much of a motivator but, believe me, boredom is a powerful life force, boredom makes people murder, rape, abuse, it causes insanity, it fuels revoluti
ons, it inspires people to invent, create and discover everything, including art, blood sports, board games, plastic surgery, the internet, mobile phones, money, edible knickers, the stock market, God, pasta, drugs, soap operas, operas, vibrating condoms, books, double-entry billing systems, clothes for small dogs, small dogs without fur that bite people, children, marriage, fights, sex, blowjobs, homosexuality, priests, prostitutes and those small umbrellas for cocktails, perverts, those women who hate men, those men who hate women, lions, giraffes, Bob Geldof, nanotechnology, politicians, the God Particle, lies, secrets, and it makes the world go around and around as we all desperately search for some way of avoiding it, avoiding the hideous boredom of death, the black hole of boredom, searching for places to hide from its vast nothingness, from its eternal and awkwardly unanswerable questions. Boredom is evolution’s spark and its fuel, and we all spend our lives desperately trying not to slow down and face the fear that holds in its centre one dull throbbing idea – That everything is completely pointless.
Love and boredom,
Malc
PS Having said all that, boredom has not really motivated me to invent or discover anything of any use to anyone so far. Which is not to say I have done nothing. For instance, I have recently perfected a way of expending the least possible energy in order to keep my hammock swinging. Without getting lost in the details, it involves hanging my right foot out of the hammock and swinging it slightly up and down and . . . I’ll leave the rest of the explanation for the next email as this may take quite some time. In fact, I may need diagrams to really get the idea across accurately. I assume that you will await my continued explanation with bated breath. Until then.
CLAUSE 2.2
DOUG
TERMS & CONDITIONS OF DOUG
Truth, lies and damn statistics.
TERMS & CONDITIONS OF CHANCES
You only get half a million of them.
When Doug returned to his office he found me clutching Executive X.
‘Your lovely wife gave me a signed copy,’ explained Doug.
‘She’s not lovely, though, is she?’
‘You may be right there. So a few more memories have arisen.’
‘Can you please tell me what I was like before the crash?’
‘Well,’ said Doug. ‘I’m not sure what to say, really.’
‘Just give it to me straight,’ I pleaded.
‘Look,’ said Doug. ‘I wasn’t involved in your life as much as I would like to have been, I don’t know everything that was happening to you, but I’ll tell you something that I do know. I once lied to you when you were young; it was a small thing, but I think I may have influenced your life detrimentally. And for that, I’m sorry. So now I’m going to tell you something very blunt. To try and make amends, so to speak. Humour me. So here it is. Don’t listen to what people are promising you, Frank. Not Oscar, nor Alice, not any of them. All that rubbish about you just being a bit stressed before your little episode. It’s untrue. They’re revising your history. You see, before the accident, and before your mental breakdown, we spoke, you and I, only briefly, in the lift, and I’ll tell you now, take it from me, you were bloody miserable. There were nothing but problems in your life and I don’t want to sound bleak but at the time you were very unhappy. You don’t want things to get back to being normal, you don’t want to be back to the way you were. But the good news is that they say after an accident you get a second chance.’
‘You think my accident is a second chance for me?’ I asked, hopefully.
‘Don’t kid yourself, Frank,’ said Doug sharply. ‘That’s all movie clichés. But it’s a second chance for me to tell you something. I’m a statistician and let me tell you now; we have half a million chances in life. Every single day we all get up and we could all change the world but we don’t, because it is too much hassle, or because our mum’s coming to tea. We live until we’re about eighty. That’s around 30,000 days – that’s 30,000 chances. But, in fact, you can change your life at any hour, twenty-four hours, seven days a week for eighty years – with a rough calculation that’s half a million chances. So what do we do with these chances – nada. They slip through our fingers like sand. We don’t take one of those chances to call our estranged daughter, to help that beggar we ignore on our way to work, to turn to our wife and say, Honey, I love you. So forget your accident, forget that cliché about second chances, and believe me when I say that you were miserable. I’ve seen you since the accident, trying to please everyone, trying to fit back in, am I right? I am. You need to do something else with what’s left of your life, Frank. Take it from a man who’s done nothing with his own life but calculate death. Life’s a gift, so grab it. Oh dear, you’ve turned awfully pale, are you OK?’
Not an actual word but a squeal escaped from my mouth as I recalled the day when Doug had used all his wit and wisdom to help me.*
* And I, in turn, had employed every ounce of my profound idiocy to dash Doug’s attempt.
‘I’ve remembered who you are,’ I said slowly.
Doug smiled. ‘Well, now, that’s always a nice thing to hear.’
TERMS & CONDITIONS OF THE MASTER ACTUARY
Actuary is a science but some consider it an art.
Doug’s an actuary. A skilled statistician, which, on the surface, appears to be the most boring job in the world, but you’d be wrong to think this. Doug’s a master actuary, a man who weaves together mathematics, statistics, weather, finance, economics and sociopolitical algorithms to determine how insurance companies can maximise profits.
The examinations, tests and experience required to be an actuary are so long, arduous and complicated that it’s seen by some as a spiritual quest. Many seek out a master actuary and work under them as apprentices for years before establishing themselves as masters. Sitar players train for a decade before they’re allowed their first public performance, so complicated and precise is the instrument. Actuaries have to train for at least twice that long before they become masters, and great actuaries sit in the top offices of the world’s skyscrapers, levitating in clouds, determining the essential question – When will you die?
How long will you live? And how much will it cost? How much is your life worth? Some say you can’t put a price on life. Doug disagrees. Doug does it for a living. Doug’s the guy who decides how much you should pay for insurance. If you’re a thirty-year-old previous smoker with two kids, Doug knows to within a couple of years when you’ll die. He also knows to within three or four possibilities what disease will kill you.
Doug has one job: he ensures people pay more money in than companies pay out. The margin between how much insurance companies shell out versus how much they take in is astronomical. You need only look at the major cities in the world to see that margin manifest itself into sparkly skyscrapers owned by insurance companies and banks. And the banks are only that big because the insurance companies keep their profits in them.
If there was ever a real medium, a modern soothsayer, then it’s Doug. And he fits the part. Doug is in his late fifties but looks younger than me. According to office folklore he hasn’t consumed a grain of sugar for thirty years and he eats only skinless, boneless chicken. He often closes his office door and blinds and is said to spend hours in deep meditation cracking the most complicated advanced maths known to man. I wondered if Doug has calculated his own death date, and is so far away from it that life still seems sweet. Is that why he’s so serene? Or is it some sense of godliness that he gleans from his power to see into the future that credits him with this righteous glow?
Doug wears crisp white shirts, no tie, moleskin trousers, with odd shoes that are black and from a distance look like business shoes, but close up transpire to be trainers. No one has ever seen these business-trainers for sale anywhere and they started a whole new myth about the fact that they were specially crafted by men in India who make the perfect soles that are forever pushing essential life-giving, life-extending reflexology points whenever Doug walks. Rumours
grow like mould in the Petri dish of office boredom. They’re all probably rubbish, but there’s something about Doug that validates the hearsay. That makes you think: maybe there’s something in it. He doesn’t radiate that dull anxiety that so many business people do; he floats around the office in his bouncy trainers, a few rubber inches off the stressful surface of it all.
His office is sparse. Not Philippe Starck sparse, not designer sparse, but sparse in an unused sort of way. White walls, no carpet; Doug got his office floor stripped back to wood. There are theories about this too: the desire to dispel microscopic spores roosting within. Odder still, odder than all the sparseness, is the fact that he has no computer. It makes it seem as though the office is not only deserted, but that the person deserting it stole everything on his way out.
Doug and my dad were associates and their relationship kept my father in business for many years. Although Doug was much younger than my father, they seemed to have a mutual admiration for one another and Doug always ensured that all legal contracts for his insurance company were handled by my father’s firm.
When my father ran the company it was a fairly average, medium-sized business. It did terms and conditions and corporate contracts for lots of insurance companies and, yes, some of them were not great companies but overall it was fairly benign stuff. I’m not sure if that was due to some personal decision on my father’s behalf or if it was just a slightly gentler era back then. All I know is that in a short time Oscar had brought his own distinctly horrible personality to bear. Suddenly we were working with bad insurance brokers, gambling companies and arms manufacturers.
And I remembered that once it was all out in the open, Oscar and I argued about the weapons manufacturer every single day.
I told him I was appalled and he would just say, ‘They’ll need legal counsel, buddy; it’s just the boring contracts, we’re not selling missiles to anyone. Why worry?’
Terms & Conditions Page 10