Like a controlled demolition she collapsed in on herself: her back bent, her head sagged to her chest, her hair fell forward as she read over the prenuptial agreement, her eyes darting, failing to focus, until her fist flopped forward, opened, and the prenuptial agreement swished rather gracefully to the ground.
‘Well, feel free to read it in your own time,’ I said. ‘It really is my father’s finest work. He was a poet. He understood human nature better than most.’
She looked up at me and I realised I had not really considered my final parting words; I had failed to rehearse my exit from her life.
I thought it should be something profound and memorable, but then I simply smiled and said, ‘Well then. Toodlepip.’
CLAUSE 3.2
A SUICIDE*
* Οϕ σορτς
TERMS & CONDITIONS OF TERMS & CONDITIONS
Like an infinite loop, even terms and conditions have terms and conditions.
TERMS & CONDITIONS OF CASSANDRA
Those Greeks knew a thing or two.
I’m just one of many unheard oracles.
Modern life is packed with warnings, whether they be legal – Terms and conditions apply! – biblical – Thou shall not kill – or cliché – A stitch in time saves nine. And what do we do with all this truth and counsel? We completely ignore it.
They say Don’t Speed! but we just fast forward through it because Life’s too short to worry about the details.
Stop!
Life is the details. As you age, the wording changes but life’s fine print is essentially saying the same thing – You’re a short time living and a long time dead.
So stop for a second and think about it.
You’re shot out of the void, and as a baby the details are simple – don’t lick electrical sockets, don’t choke, keep breathing – as a teenager the messages blare loud and clear – don’t smoke, don’t die young, and listen to your parents (they actually know things that you don’t) – you’re ageing now and, as you hit the middle, the messages get fuzzy – easy as you go, seize the day, appreciate the small things, tell your wife you love her – but by now time is tumbling over itself, and just as you start to take note, just as you stretch to grasp life’s simple truths, you’re rudely shunted out the other end into more eternal zilch.
Please Give Way!
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
CC: [email protected]
Subject: Give me back my spleen!
Hi Oscar – my brother, my keeper, my boss and my betrayer
I can’t be sure if my contract sabotage will lose you all your clients but, at the very least, I can rest assured that it will lose you some clients, which will make your life a nightmare as you desperately try and explain what happened – why millions of pounds of client money resulted in worthless contracts riddled with lame jokes. Which means you can kiss your precious stock-market money goodbye. The market doesn’t like it when you lose vast chunks of money in a day. Accountants frown on that sort of thing. I sabotaged – tampered with, improved?– an awful lot of contracts. So prepare yourself for a whole glut of angry clients.*
* As a small footnote I’ll admit that I didn’t send all of my best work out; there are still some little gremlins lurking in the terms and conditions, out there in the wild, some that I didn’t highlight; I can but hope that they’ll keep biting you on the bum for many years to come.
In case you’ve not grasped it yet – this is a suicide note.
Not a standard suicide. I’m not committing mortal suicide. Just corporate suicide, modern suicide, document suicide. I’m erasing myself from the page and hopefully living in a more real world. Of one thing I’m sure, no one will ever hire me as a lawyer again. This is a certainty that fills me with a warm sense of wellbeing. Once settled I may even use all that lovely salary that you signed off to start doing what I have always really wanted to – practise medicine and try to offset some of the bad that I’ve done with a touch of good. Do you even remember the day I got you to sign my new contract?
I know I misrepresented a little, and I assume that you’ll appeal for rescission as you signed it under unfair circumstances. However, I think, were we to debate unfair circumstances, that you certainly made mine intolerably unfair. I therefore appeal to
your sense of natural justice, and ask that you look upon that salary as indemnity. I hope you’ll honour my new contract in an attempt to balance the fact that you so blatantly dishonoured my life. I may be overestimating you, Oscar, but why don’t you surprise me, why don’t you prove me wrong? Don’t lawyer up, don’t fight me, just think about what you’ve done, pack up your rage, and do something decent for a change.
I’ll also be committing suicide in the sense that I will from now be dead to Alice and yourself. Dead in the sense that you’ll never see or hear from me ever again. Which I suppose is really what death is. I suspect that I’ll rather enjoy being dead. So consider this my final Will and Testament. I’m doing my best to shed all my paper parts, all the documents that make me official. I’ve already lost my driving licence so that’s a good start. (Well, it was taken away from me after the accident.) My legal licence is gone too. For the moment I’ll hold on to my passport until such a time as I find the final place I’ll stay, rest and eventually die and decay.
Rest assured that this is not – as our American attorney cousins would say – a cease and desist order. In fact, it’s a proceed and permit order. I hereby state that you, Oscar, and Alice are granted legal, ethical and emotional permission to continue to conduct your affair. Go forth with my blessing and bonk my wife’s brains out. Oh, and I should probably mention that I’ve CCed your lovely wife, Nina – I just imagined your eyeballs desperately shooting up to the CC line on this email and then back again – yes, that’s right, I did really CC her.
Hi Nina!
Finally, I have left you a small gift, Oscar, a memento; it’s in a Colman’s jar. It’s not a pickled onion so don’t eat it. Whenever your ego gets too inflated, take a moment to look at it, and remember this – From deep down in your soul all the way up to your shiny surface, you’re nothing more than a fat fraud.
Bye bye, big brother.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Thank you
Dear Doug,
What can I say, other than to thank you half a million times over and more.
You once told me that life’s a gift. It’s an accurate saying. Accurate in the sense that gifts are usually discarded the moment they’re opened. All those gifts you got for birthdays, Christmases. Where are they now? You threw them out because they were crap.
After my car crash – just as the afterglow of my recovery had begun to flicker out – I was doing that: wasting days, disposing of the gift of life. Doing exactly what you pleaded with me not to do, I slipped right back into my old life, or an approximation of it, like wearing an old suit reeking of regret. The human nose is an amazing thing that can adjust to some truly repugnant smells and, for a brief time, adjust I did. Well, no more, Doug. Even though you’re a desk-bound soul, you still remain a man of action and you taught me enough to know that life doesn’t care, you have to make it care.
I know now that I’ve spent years waiting for the bridge I was standing on to burn down, willing it to fall apart in order to force me to jump.
Well, I’ve struck the match, Doug, and for better or worse I’m burning my own bridge, and I’m going to deal with whatever comes next.
I will miss you terribly, Doug, and I wish you the best of luck, or maybe I should say – I wish you the best possible statistical odds that life is willing to offer.
I have gifted you Dad’s watch.
Love, Frank
Dear Alice,
Short questionnaire. (Answers below.)
1. How did we fall so far apart?*
a. I changed.
b. You changed.
* Answer: c. There’s a man called Jerry who every day rides his bike up a hill to the McDonald Observatory in West Texas to fire lasers at the moon, measuring how far away it is from the earth. After thirty-seven years of this, Jerry has realised that the moon is very slowly moving away from the earth. That’s exactly what’s happened with us. Over time, at an imperceptible speed, we drifted millions of miles apart.
2. What will I miss the most?*
a. Your smile.
b. Your questionnaires.
c. Both of the above.
* This is a trick question. The truth is that leaving you for ever will not make me miss you any more than I already have for so many years. I miss the soft curves you carved away with exercise, I miss the warm wit you froze with corporate cynicism, I miss the intimate gap between your teeth. I have missed you for longer than I can bear. I do hope that over time you remember yourself, Alice, and remember what an incredible person you once were.
3. Do I still love you?*
a. He loves me.
b. He loves me not.
* Answer: a. I still love a small part of you – I love the faint echo of that riotous girl I fell in love with so long ago. Sometimes when I listen carefully to you talk, I can still hear her and she makes me laugh.
I hope you get this note. I left it on all the boxes of your stuff that the removal men will be taking out of the flat today.
So I’m on my way to a place called Anywhere But Here, accompanied by a woman who really loves me for me, to see a man who really knows when to say something I should have said so many long years ago – Fuck this!
I wish you the best of luck and lots of love.*
* Terms and conditions apply.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s time for me to begin again.
Frank
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Special thanks to Jemma, Lily, George and all my family for supporting (and at times suffering) my compulsive writing habit. Thank you to all my friends who were forced to read far too many drafts. Bob Gilhooly – you are brilliant; Charmaine Hunt – I’ll put more sex in the next one; Dominic Smith – who rightly demanded more Doug; and Alison Burford – you went well beyond your neighbourly duty. To Stan for opening my email and for everything you have done for me since, I’m indebted to you. And thanks to the wise and lovely Helen and all the brilliant double-barrelled Bloomsbury people who took a leap of faith with me.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Robert Glancy was born in Zambia and raised in Malawi. At fourteen he moved from Africa to Edinburgh and then went on to study history at Cambridge. He currently lives in New Zealand with his wife and children.
@RobertGlancy
#Terms and Conditions
First published in Great Britain 2014
This electronic edition published in 2014 by Bloomsbury Publishing plc
Copyright © 2014 by Robert Glancy
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 4088 5219 4
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