Terms & Conditions

by Robert Glancy

  ‘There were no homeless people involved . . . and that doesn’t matter, that’s not the point. No, it’s not good, and, yes, I should’ve done something.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad you didn’t,’ she said, and her hand went to her phone, but I picked it up and threw it hard against the wall. I hoped it would break, smash in a loud dramatic gesture, but it had a rubber cover so it bounced awkwardly, comically, and landed at her feet.

  ‘What the fuck, Frank?’

  ‘It feels as if no one’s listening any more . . . I just feel . . . isn’t working for an arms manufacturer grotesque? Am I the only one with an ethical fucking problem with this?’

  ‘Oh, Frank, you think you’re so fucking ethical, don’t you, and the rest of us are all morally devoid gits. Well, listen, Frank, being a boring bastard doesn’t make you an ethical pillar. It just makes you a boring bastard. Just because you’re too scared and don’t even have the balls or imagination to think outside the box, to explore the grey areas, does not make you ethical. It just makes you fucking dull.’

  I stood staring in disbelief, not so much at her mean words, but at the fact that we were actually arguing – it was brilliant. I had shocked my flatlining wife back to life.

  ‘Well, I’m glad you’re telling me what you think for once,’ I said. ‘This is great, you shouting at me, actually listening to me . . .’

  She nodded and I felt a connection with her as she picked up her phone, cradling it like an injured animal. She turned to look directly at me and I was about to tell her I loved her because in her eyes I saw a rare look of kindness – but before I could talk, she said, ‘It’s fine, Frank, don’t worry, my phone isn’t broken after all. Thank God.’

  ‘Bitch,’ I whispered under my breath.

  She didn’t hear, too engrossed in her texting, and when she looked up she said, ‘Phil’s coming over for a bite; we need to finish off a report.’

  Phil was one of my wife’s dull identikit colleagues. I could barely distinguish one from the next but I remember Phil because he was incredibly tall. When he arrived I sat at the table smiling at just how tall Phil looked in our flat, folded awkwardly into a seat, sipping red wine. When my wife’s colleagues come over I play a game in which I see how long I can go without saying anything, how long I can be completely ignored for, invisible. Above the dining-room table is a clock I bought Alice for her birthday. As Phil and my wife spoke, I watched the clock.*

  * My record for the longest silence is fifteen minutes ten seconds.

  My wife was chatting about an article Malcolm Gladwell wrote which basically laid the blame of Enron at the foot of Enron’s consultancy, McKinsey.

  She said, ‘Gladwell may be a great writer – sure, no question – but does he know how to hire a staff of two thousand talented people? Could he take those risks? That’s what McKinsey did, that’s what I do every day of my life; I build companies and it’s not easy, not even with the level of science we now bring to bear upon the profiling process.’

  ‘What’s Mr Tipping Point know about the real world?’ agreed Phil.

  I zoned out for a bit, watching the clock and thinking I was doing well – five minutes so far – when I heard Phil ask, ‘Is The Sopranos really that good?’ and my wife explained to Phil how the show captured the ‘corrupt essence of America’. ‘I’d pay a lot of money to profile the real Tony Soprano. I tell you, most of those top guys would probably hold a lot of the same personality-profile characteristics as our top CEOs.’

  Phil said, ‘You mean they’re all fucking psychopaths.’

  My wife and Phil both laughed loudly and so did I.*

  * A laugh wasn’t counted as talking, so I was still in the game. Seven minutes so far.

  ‘Absolutely, very interesting point, Phil,’ said my wife.*

  * Whenever she sucked up, saying crap like, ‘Very interesting point, Phil,’ I’d hear an echo of what the young Alice would have said to this sort of guy years ago, something along the lines of ‘Fuck you, dickface.’

  Those were the sort of things Alice used to say to people like Phil. The young Alice had a sharp way of shuffling her intellectual self with her streetwise self – just as she lured someone into a deep conversation about existentialism, she’d throw them off-balance by saying, ‘Existentialism is just a bunch of French farts trying to get laid.’ I used to love that.

  I was clock-watching again: eleven minutes.*

  * My personal best was in sight!

  And, just then, as I basked in the slight elation of minor achievements, my wife said, ‘Frank, you listening?’

  ‘Course I am,’ I eventually said.*

  * Damn! So close!

  ‘Well?’ my wife said.

  ‘Completely agree,’ I said.

  She gave me that look of infinite disappointment that I had grown accustomed to.

  ‘You weren’t listening,’ she said, and turned to Phil. ‘Frank’s company is about to start working for #### and Frank’s in a wee ethical conundrum, aren’t you, darling?’

  I was angry that she was chatting away about something this confidential and personal, and I said, ‘I’m just not happy about working for those sorts of companies.’

  ‘Come on,’ said Phil, ‘death and taxes, old man. Your wife and I work on the tax side of life, you work on the death and insurance part – you’ll be set for life.’

  They laughed at this but I wasn’t sure where the joke lay.

  ‘I don’t agree,’ I said.

  They went quiet. I’d hit too heavy a note for our light chat. This was what happened with my wife and her colleagues; there was simply no conversation that they couldn’t ridicule. All of the really big questions were mocked; as if they had seen it all before, they were all so world-weary, too sophisticated to care.

  ‘I’m just concerned that working with those sorts of companies isn’t good,’ I said.

  ‘Come on, #### do a lot more than just guns and missiles,’ Phil said.

  ‘That’s like saying Hitler did a lot more than just kill Jews,’ I said.

  ‘It’s completely different,’ my wife protested.

  ‘Is it really?’ I said.

  She shot me a shut-the-fuck-up look.

  ‘I hear that Hitler did some delightful paintings,’ Phil joked.

  My wife laughed and said, ‘He was also a gifted writer. Mein Kampf is a real page-turner. I could barely put it down.’

  I cut the laughter short with, ‘It feels wrong.’

  My wife said, ‘Come on, Frank, when did you become such a wet liberal?’

  They both laughed so loudly that no one heard me reply, ‘When I met you.’

  Which was true. I started to be more liberal and caring when I met Alice, who was once the most liberal, intelligent and caring person. I smiled and gave her the peace sign and they laughed.

  Phil said, ‘You’ve been reading too much Naomi Klein; time to toughen up, mate.’

  Then my wife said, out of nowhere, ‘Frank wanted to be a doctor, you know,’ and she smiled coldly. ‘He wanted to help people but he went to the dark side and became a lawyer so he could legally hurt people.’ Drunk and with spite in her eyes, she said, ‘Oh God, Frankie, I’m only kidding. You take everything so fucking seriously. Chillax.’

  She was no longer the defender of my dreams; my wife would now use a secret that I had shared in confidence as nothing more than a punchline to amuse a colleague.

  She added, ‘Frank keeps these daft toys from his childhood: gross anatomical figures with plastic organs that pop out. He actually wanted them on display in the flat – can you imagine?’

  After Phil had left, I tried to plug her lead into my phone – tried to force the little thing into the socket – but it wouldn’t fit.* ‘Did you change phones?’ I asked.

  * Even our phones weren’t compatible any more.

  ‘Company gave us new ones.’

  I said, ‘Also, can we talk about something? It’s just that I’ve not been feeling like everything is g
oing too well.’

  She looked at me, didn’t smile. ‘Can you expand?’*

  * Expand. That’s pure management speak.

  She sounded irritated, like I was inconveniencing her.

  ‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘It’s just that things don’t feel right and . . .’*

  * I was about to say, ‘I can’t go on like this, Alice, I want a divorce.’

  But her phone vibrated and the word Valencia appeared.

  I handed it to my wife who, as always, started to take the phone to another room.

  But as she was leaving, she turned and said coldly, ‘We’ll talk about this later, Frank.’*

  * Which is management speak for ‘Fuck off, Frank’.*1

  *1 We never talked about it again.

  TERMS & CONDITIONS OF FRIENDLY FIRE

  Was there ever a more appalling misuse of the word ‘friendly’?

  Oscar gave me another #### contract. His promise that I wouldn’t have to work on them had already slipped. He said he just wanted me to ‘look it over’, but it was the tenth one I’d just had to ‘look over’. As I worked on it I thought about how this contract would be used.

  Imagine the scene:

  A desert. A man – his face wrapped and covered; only a slit reveals his dark eyes – approaches another man in a suit. The man’s suit is dusted in sand, like cinnamon sprinkles. Mr Suit is selling missiles to Mr Headgear. Money is exchanged. Cash (of course). Then, as a brief afterthought, Mr Suit asks Mr Headgear to sign the contract, which says something about the use of the weapons, maybe mentions the Geneva Convention. Mr Headgear sneers at the document. That sneer is as much attention as it merits. He signs with a brutal slash and drives away with his weapons into a swirl of sand and . . .*

  * Implausible. Sorry. Bit too Tom Clancy.

  Here’s the truth:

  No desert. No terrorist. In fact, all the dark dealings happen in a brightly lit office. Probably an office just like yours but with more expensive corporate art on the walls and better views. Two men, two lawyers, two accountants transferring obnoxious weapons from one to the other as if selling photocopiers. It’s that simple. It’s that horrifying. I know all this because I recently sat in on one of those meetings.

  So why even bother writing Ts&Cs for weapons? Believe me, you have to. You have to protect the people that make them from the people that will use them and the people who will be blown to smithereens by them. That’s what I do.

  I protect and serve the sellers; I literally serve Satan. But if there are any less-read words than the terms and conditions on a weapons contract then I’ve yet to find them.*

  * Ingredients on ketchup bottles have received more attention.

  It’s not the shady underworld you would expect. Want to know the biggest door-to-door weapons salesman? Then Google ‘leaders of the free world’. There they all are – Obama, Cameron, Merkel – smiling in front of giant weapons of destruction. In the UK, the defence industry is the second largest, and every time the prime minister pops off on an official visit he adds a less official visit in which he meets leaders and sells them weapons. The world of defence is actually all there to see, barely hidden, almost visible, and it’s happening right in front of your eyes. There are entire towns sustained by the economy of weapons, such as Barrow in Cumbria, a place that survives on one industry – the building of nuclear submarines.

  Our new client specialised in drones, these small dark inventions that allow leaders to destroy their enemy remotely, to devolve war into some distant video game. The legality of drones is still hanging delicately in the balance and my job, as always, is to assist in ensuring that the drone makers never, under any circumstance, have to take any responsibility. And I did my job. I didn’t want to, but I did it, and I did it well.

  I won’t say that I ever accepted it or that I felt it was right but for a while I did do it. I checked the terms and conditions, the clauses, I made sure all unknowable unknowns were covered, and then one night I switched on the news and I saw my work writ in blood and guts.

  It wasn’t even a major story, just another news report shoved between the doom and gloom of financial collapse and the horror of paedophiles. But for me that one minute lasted a lifetime. I watched as a reporter stood beside a hospital that looked as if it had been torn open and gutted by Godzilla.

  This impoverished hospital in Afghanistan had a hole in the middle of it; it was a Red Cross centre set up in the middle of a war zone to help children caught in the crossfire – only to then be caught in the crossfire. A number of British troops had also been killed in the attack. A British-made drone flown by Americans had killed British troops. An organisation called Dronewatch, interviewed as part of the report, suggested that this particular drone had a well-known design fault, which so far the manufacturer and the government had covered up, and if someone didn’t hold the manufacturer accountable, this sort of tragedy would continue to happen and many more innocent people and allied soldiers would be part of the collateral damage. The government, and manufacturer, using a drone that I had written the contract for, had hit soldiers and a civilian target, this hospital which had become hell, with the limbs and organs of children flung far and wide, the souls of the innocent blown to pieces, and the worst part was that no one would pay, no one would be held accountable, no one would be punished, and as I sat there paralysed, staring at the flickering images, I knew I had played my role, I knew I was responsible, not fully and not comprehensively, but I was a part of the machine, the complex, a grim little cog in the fatal machine that killed these children. I had used all my skill, education and experience to protect the people who made this mistake, I’m responsible for the fact that no one is ever held responsible, I’m priest, jury, judge and higher power absolving the rich and powerful to smite the weak and innocent, and, as the report ended and a smiling weatherman told me that sun was on its way, I leaned forward and vomited all over the carpet until nothing but bile dripped from my lips.

  TERMS & CONDITIONS OF WARNINGS

  They usually come without warning.

  The same evening I accepted that another problem I had been fighting was finally getting the better of me.

  I had been having minor attacks with increasing regularity but so far I had hidden them from everyone and convinced myself that I was fine, absolutely fine.

  But the image of the hospital – all the dead soldiers and children – had pushed me to the edge, and later that evening as I reviewed another #### contract, which I had brought home to work on, I realised what was wrong.

  I looked at the #### contract in my hands and I had another panic attack.

  My vision blurred. The paper became soggy as it absorbed all of the sweat from my wet palms. I felt sick try to lurch back up from my stomach again.

  I looked at the contract and I thought I had figured out where my problem lay – paper.

  Looking at the disintegrating contract, I whispered, ‘Fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck!’

  There’s a name for it – papyrophobia: fear of paper.

  To test my theory I walked to the printer and took some blank paper and looked at it but nothing happened, no panic – I could touch it, could smell it, could crunch it into a ball without the slightest sense of fear. It wasn’t paper phobia.

  But as soon as I looked back at the arms contract and read through the terms I again felt woozy and jittery.

  Blank paper wasn’t the issue. The problem was not the paper itself.

  It was the words on the paper. I had developed a phobia of words and particularly of warnings.

  Knowing what the problem was didn’t help; it only made matters worse. Days later, on my way to get some lunch, someone handed me a small plastic packet of tissues.

  I took it and said, ‘Thanks.’

  But as I looked back at the man I saw he had a cross on his neck and the fixed grin of a God merchant.

  When I looked at the tissues I realised there was a bit of paper stuck on the back with a message that read �
� Life’s hard but resist sin or burn in hell. Jesus Loves You.

  I dropped it and leaned against a building before the pounding in my head stopped and I could breathe properly again.

  It was then that I accepted that, since the shock of the hospital tragedy, I had developed a debilitating phobia.

  No term exists for my condition.

  Closest I came was a word for the phobia of long words: hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia.*

  * There’s something needlessly cruel about labelling the word for the fear of long words with an incredibly long word – thereby inflaming the very people who suffer from it every time you mention their condition to them. I mean, who does that? Probably the same bastards that coined ‘dyslexia’.

  From that day on my phobia spun rapidly out of control. Some days were worse than others but it wasn’t long before I even stopped looking directly at Stop signs or road signs generally, which is an incredibly dangerous habit.

  It was a period of great confusion. I had lost my confidence. All I knew at that stage was that the world had never made less sense and, for the first time in my adult life, I was starting to understand what it was like to stand on the chipped edge of madness.

  TERMS & CONDITIONS OF THE DEAD

  It’s so hard to get your own back on the dead.

  ‘Still wearing your dad’s watch,’ Doug said.

  I looked at the elegant watch on my wrist and replied, ‘It weathered the car crash better than I did. Not a scratch on it.’

  ‘It’s a beautiful watch.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But you have to remember to wind it up every morning, it’s that old. Bit of a pain really.’

  ‘I actually like the fact it’s a wind-up watch,’ Doug said. ‘Something about winding up a watch makes me think, silly though it is, that the day is like an old toy and when you wind up the watch you’re winding up your day. I like that watch, it has such a great tick-tock. Not like those dull digital watches silently swallowing the seconds of your life without the mildest warning that your time is sliding by. No, your dad’s watch has a nice tock, like the soft shoe of a blues man tapping out the bittersweet passing of time. I told your dad that once and he looked at me like I was off my head.’