The Way Inn

Maybe my father moved in that world, where things were actually happening. There was a provisional air to him, as if he was conserving himself for other purposes. Even when he was physically present, he conducted himself in absences. He smoked in the garden and made and received telephone calls, speaking low. I would listen, taking care that he did not see me, trying to learn about the other world from what he said when he thought no one was listening. But he spoke in code: Magneto, camshaft, exhaust manifold, powertrain, clutch. And, rarer, another code: Yes, special, away, not until, weekend, she, her, she, she.

I was missing something.

The other lift passengers and I debarked into a lobby that had filled with people: sitting on the couches, standing in groups, talking on or poking at phones. Normally these communal places – the lobbies, the foyers, the atria – are barely used, inhabited only fleetingly by people on their way elsewhere, checking in or out, perhaps alone on a sofa waiting for someone or something. To see the space at capacity, teeming with people, was curiously thrilling, like observing by chance a great natural migration. This was it: I was present for the main event, when the hotels were at capacity and the business centres hosted back-to-back video conferences with head offices all over the planet. I could see it all for what it was and what it wasn’t. Because even when thronged with people, the lobby is still uninhabited – it cannot really be occupied, this space, or made home; it is a channel people sluice through. Those people sitting on the sofas don’t make the furniture any more authentic than the maybe-virgin seat I had seen by the lift. The space isn’t for anyone. My younger self might have been troubled by this thought, that even the main event could not give the space purpose – but now I had come to realise that the sensation was simple existential paranoia. I recognised the limits of authenticity.

Where there are buses, there is hanging around; Maurice’s dictum was quite correct. The driveway outside the hotel was protected by a porte-cochère. Under this showy glass and steel canopy, three coaches idled while conference staff in high-visibility tabards pointed and bickered, and desultory clusters of dark-suited guests smoked and hunched against blasts of cold, wet wind. The buses were huge and shiny, gaudy in banana-skin livery; their doors were closed. Evidently a disagreement or communications breakdown was under way – the attendants listened with fraught attention to burbling walkie-talkies, staring at nothing, or shouted at and directed each other, or jogged about, or consulted clipboards, but nothing happened as a result of this pseudo-activity.

I was about to retreat behind the glass doors, back to the warmth and comfort of the lobby, when I spotted Rosa (or Rhoda) standing alone among the huddle waiting for the buses, cigarette in one hand, phone apparently fused to the other. She had put on a brightly coloured quilted jacket and seemed unbothered by the cold and the icy raindrops that the wind pushed under the shelter.

‘Hey,’ I said.

Rosa looked at me without obvious emotion, although her neutrality could be read as wariness. ‘Hey.’

‘What’s going on?’ I said, nodding in the direction of the buses, where frenzied stasis continued. She looked momentarily dejected, and shrugged. We would never know, of course. The cause of this sort of hold-up was rarely made clear, it was just more non-time, non-life, the texture of business travel. Hotel lobbies and airport lounges are built to contain these useless minutes and soothe them away with comfortable seats, agreeable lighting, soft music, mirrors and pot plants.

‘I’m sorry we didn’t get much of an opportunity to talk back there,’ I said. Rosa’s edge of frostiness towards me, her shrugs and monosyllables, bothered me. I was certain we had got on well in the past, and she seemed an excellent candidate for some conference sex, if we could get past this froideur. My failure to capitalise on the coincidence in the bar last night had left a sour aftertaste. Some sex would dispel that; it would divert me, at least. If Rosa reciprocated.

‘You seemed busy,’ she said.

‘Nothing important.’

‘Who was that man who joined us?’

‘Maurice? I thought you knew him. A reporter, for a trade magazine.’

‘I’ve seen him around.’

‘He’s hard to miss.’

‘A friend of yours?’

‘Not really.’

‘So this girl he mentioned …’

Sexual jealousy, was it? That was a promising sign.

‘You shouldn’t believe a word Maurice says,’ I said. ‘He was only trying to stir up trouble. I was having a drink with an acquaintance. You know how you keep running into the same people at these things. Which can be a very good thing.’

‘Yeah.’ I was rewarded with a shy smile. Pneumatics hissed – one of the buses was opening its doors at last.

I decided not to overplay my hand – there would be other opportunities. ‘Really good to see you again,’ I said. ‘Let’s talk later.’

‘Sure,’ she said. ‘I’d like that.’ Her mobile phone, briefly removed from the social mix, reappeared like a fluttering fan.

Boarding the bus, I felt heartened by the encounter. It wouldn’t be too difficult after all.

The bus filled quickly, but there was a further mysterious delay before it got moving. Still, it was warm and dry, and the throbbing engine was as soothing as the ocean. The air had a chemical bouquet – new, everything was new. I stared at the patterned moquette covering the seat in front of me. Blue and grey squares against another grey. Hidden messages, secret maps? No, just a computer-generated tessellation reiterating to infinity. People milling around outside. New tarmac. A woman sat in the seat next to mine; I appraised her with a half-glance and found little that interested me. She ignored me and thumbed her phone, her only resemblance to Rosa.

Movement. One of the organisers appeared at the front of the bus, craning her neck as if looking for someone among the passengers. The bus doors closed with a sigh; the organiser sat down. The engine changed its pitch and we moved off.

We drove along an access road parallel to the motorway. The motorway itself was hidden from view by a low ridge engineered to deaden the howl of the high-speed traffic. The beneficiaries of this landscaping were a row of chain hotels: the Way Inn behind us, ahead a Novotel, a Park Plaza and a Radisson Blu, all in the later stages of construction, surrounded by hoardings promising completion by the end of the year. Here was the delayed skywalk: an elegant glass-and-steel tube describing most of an arch over the access road, the ridge and the unseen motorway, but missing a central section, the exposed ends sutured with hazard-coloured plastic. On the Way Inn side of the road, the skywalk joined the beginnings of an enclosed pedestrian link between the hotels at the first-floor level. Eventually guests would be able to stroll to the MetaCentre in comfort, protected from the climate and the traffic, but only the Way Inn section was finished. Perhaps all this construction work was evidence of industry, investment, applied effort – but the scene was, as far as I could see, deserted. There were no other vehicles on the road.

Signs warned of an approaching junction and myriad available destinations. The bus circled the intersection, giving us a glimpse down on-ramps of the motorway beneath us, articulated lorries thundering through six lanes of filthy mist, and then of the old road, a petrol station’s bright obelisk, sheds, used cars. We didn’t take either of those routes. Instead the bus turned onto another access road, again parallel to the motorway, but on the opposite side. A vast object coalesced in the drizzle: eight immense white masts in two ranks of four suggesting the boundary of an area the size of a small town, high-tension steel crosshatching the air above. The MetaCentre. My first instinct was to laugh. For all its prodigious size and expense, and the giddying alignment of business and political interests it represented, there was something very basic about it. It was, in essence, a giant rectangular tent, with guy ropes strung from the masts supporting its roof, keeping the rain off the fair inside. Plus roads and parking. So there it was, the ace card for the economic planning of this whole region: a very big dry place that’s easy to get to. And easy to see – the white masts, as well as holding up the immense space-frame roof, were a landmark to be noticed at speed from the motorway; while from a circling plane, the white slab would glare among the dull grey and brown of its hinterland.

The bus was off the access road now, onto the MetaCentre’s own road network: bright yellow signs pointed to freight loading, exhibitors’ entrances, bus and coach drop-off. Flowerbeds planted with immature shrubs were wrapped in shiny black plastic, a fetishist’s garden. There, again, was the ascending loop and expressive steel and glass of the unfinished pedestrian bridge. A handshake the size of a basketball court dominated the white membrane of the façade, overwritten with the words WELCOME MEETEX: TOMORROW’S CONVENTIONS TODAY. This was accompanied by multi-storey exhortations from a telepresence software company: JOIN EVERYONE EVERYWHERE.

A zigzag kerb, coaches nosing up to it diagonally. We dropped out of the front door one by one in the stunned way common to bus passengers, however long their journey. But we recovered quickly – no one lingered in the half-rain – and we scurried towards the endless glass doors of the MetaCentre, past an inflatable credit card that shuddered and jerked against the ropes securing it to the concrete forecourt.

Hot air blasted me from above, a welcoming blessing from the centre’s environmental controls. Thinking about my hair, I ran a hand through it, a wholly involuntary action. Grey carpet flecked with yellow. Behind me, someone said, ‘Next year we’re going to Tenerife, but I don’t want it to be just a box-ticking exercise.’ Queues navigated ribboned routes to registration and information desks. Memory-jogged, I fished my credentials out of my jacket pocket and slipped the vile lanyard over my head. Door staff approved me with a flicker of their eyes.

A broad ramp poured people down into the main hall of the MetaCentre. Gravity-assisted, like components on a production line or animals in a slaughter-house, we descended, enormous numbers of us – a whole landscape shaped to cope with insect quantities of people. Hundreds of miles of vile yellow lanyard had been woven, stitched with METACENTRE METACENTRE METACENTRE thousands of times to be draped around thousands of necks now prickling in the bright light and outside-inside air of the hall. Ahead of us, and already around us, were the exhibitors, in their hundreds, waiting for all those eyes and credentials and job titles to sluice past them. There is the expectant first-day sense that business must be transacted, contacts must be forged, advantages must be gleaned, trends must be identified, value must be added, the whole enterprise must be made worthwhile. Everyone is at the point where investment has ceased and the benefits must accrue. A shared hunger, now within reach of the means of fulfilment. Like religion, but better; provable, practical, purposeful, profitable.

At another fair, in other company, these thoughts might have been mine alone. Not here. All those thousands of conferences, expos and trade fairs around the world, of which I have attended scores if not hundreds – their squadrons of organisers comprise, naturally enough, an industry in itself. And, also naturally enough, this industry revels in get-togethers. It wants, it truly needs, its own conferences, meetings, summits and expos. Its people spend their lives selling face-to-face, handshake, eye contact, touch and feel, up close and personal, in the flesh, meet and greet. They believe their own pitch – of course they do. They actually think they are telling the truth, rather than just hawking a product. (Our pitch is very different.)

A conference of conference organisers. A meeting of the meetings industry. And they all knew the recursive nature of their gathering here – they all joked about it, essentially telling the same joke over and over, draining it of meaning until it is nothing more than a ritualised husk, but they laugh all the same. Just a conference of conference organisers, one among many – Meetex joins EIBTM, IMEX, ICOMEX, EMIF and Confex on the calendar, and all of those will include the same jokes and the same small talk, redundancy piled on redundancy, spread out across the globe. This repetition proliferating year after year was enough to bring on a headache. And indeed a headache had stirred since I left the hotel, accelerated perhaps by the stuffy bus and its throbbing engine, its boomerang route, the swinging 360-degree turn it had made around the motorway junction.

Hosting Meetex was a smart move by the MetaCentre – this space, which could swallow aircraft hangars whole, was in a way the biggest stall at the fair, advertising its services to the people who, captivated by its quality as a venue, would fill it with gatherings of other industries in the coming years. The airport! The motorway! The convenience! The state-of-the-art facilities! The thousands of enclosed square metres! A space without architecture, without nature, where everything outside is held at bay and there is no inside – no edges, the breezeblock walls too distant to see, a blankness above the steel frame supporting scores of lights. But inside this hall was a space with too much design. The fair, the exhibitors, all exhibiting. It was an assault on the eyes, a chaos of detail, several hundred simultaneous demands on your attention. And it was active, it came to you with bleached teeth and a tight T-shirt. Many stands were attended by attractive young women, brightly dressed and full of vim; there must be an inoffensive technical term for them, perhaps along the lines of ‘brand image enhancement agents’, but they are mostly referred to as booth babes. They jump out at you, try to coax you to try a game or join a list, or they hand you a flier or a low-value freebie like a USB stick or a tote bag.

Combined, these multitudinous pleas – each an invitation to enter a different corporate mental universe and devote yourself to it; invitations that are the product of enormous investments of time and money and creativity – formed a barrage of imagery and information and signs and symbols that at first challenged the brain’s ability to process its surroundings, becoming an undifferentiated blaze of visual abundance, overwhelming our monkey apparatus like lens flare. Which was precisely the point – it was in the interest of the organisers and the host to dazzle you, to leave the impression that there’s not just enough on show, there’s more than enough, far more than enough, a stupefying level of surplus. For a fair to imply that it might have limits is anathema – that’s why they rain down the stats and the superlatives, the square metres and the daily footfall, the record numbers of this and that. What other industry stressed that its product was near-impossible to consume? No wonder my services were needed. Adam was a genius.

It wasn’t impossible to see a whole show on this scale, but it was difficult. It took work. You had to be systematic, go aisle by aisle, moving up the hall in a zigzag, giving every stand some time but not so much time that it diminished the time given to others. That used to be my approach, but I found that route planning and time management occupied more of my thoughts than the content of the show itself. I was lost in the game of trying to see every stand, note every new product and expose myself to every scrap of stimuli – the show as a whole left only a shallow track on my memory. And my reports were similarly shallow. They were even-handed but lacked any texture; they were mere aggregations of data. In being systematic, I saw only my own system. Completism was blindness: it yielded only a partial view.

After a year of trudging around fairs in this manner, I realised my reports were formulaic and stale, full of ritual phrases and repeated structures. And the entire point of the endeavour was to spare clients that endless repetition. They employed me because they already knew the routine aspects of these fairs or didn’t care to know them – what they wanted was something else. So I threw away my diligent systems and timetables and started to truly explore. Today was typical of my current method of not having a method – I would strike out into the centre of the hall, ignoring all pleas and distractions, and from there walk without direction. I would try to drift, to allow myself to be carried by the current and eddies of the hall, thinking only in the moment, watching and following the people around me. Beyond that, I tried to think as little as possible about my overall aims and as much as possible about what was in front of me at any given time. I would give myself to the experience, keep my notes sparse, take a few photos. It’s not easy to be purposefully random, but it pays. Once I started taking this approach, my reports became colourful and impressionistic. They were filled with telling details and quirky insights. The imperfection of memory became a strength.

It’s only on the second and subsequent days of a fair that I seek out the specifics that clients have requested and conduct any enquiries they might have asked for. More detail accrues naturally, organically, around these small quests.

Surrounded by conference organisers, I am the only professional conference-goer. It’s what I do; nothing else. And they – the people here, the exhibitors, the venues, the visitors, the whole meetings industry – have no idea.

The stands passed by, hawking bulk nametags, audiovisual equipment, seating systems, serviced office space. Not just office space – all kinds of space are packaged and marketed here, and places too. You can get a good deal, a great deal, on Vietnamese-made wholesale tote bags at Meetex, but what it and its competitors mostly trade in is locations. Excuse me, ‘destinations’. Cities, regions, countries; all were ideal for your event, whether they were Wroclaw, Arizona or Sri Lanka, or Taipei, Oaxaca or Israel. All combined history and modernity. All were the accessible crossroads of their part of the world. All were gateways and hearts. All had state-of-the-art facilities that could be relied upon. All had luxurious yet affordable hotels. Most importantly, all of these hundreds of places across the world were distinctive, unique and outstanding. Consistently, uniformly so.

Those comfortable, cost-effective hotels and state-of-the-art facilities were also present at Meetex. Other conference centres promoted themselves, boasting of the inexhaustible square kilometres they had available on scores of city outskirts. Within a giant space, I was being coaxed to other giant spaces; a fractal shed-world, halls within halls within halls.

Another section was devoted to the chain hotels, and its promises of pampering and revitalisation were hard to bear. Women wrapped in blinding white towels, cucumber slices over eyes. Men, ties AWOL, drinking beer in vibrant bars. Couples clinking capacious wine glasses over gourmet meals. Clean linen, gleaming bathrooms, spectacular views. These were highly seductive images for me. I wanted to be back at the hotel, reclining on the bed, taking a long shower, ordering a room service meal, perhaps with some wine thrown in.

It mattered little that the images were a total fiction – posed by models, supplied by stock photo agencies, the gourmet food made of plastic, the views computer generated, the bar a stage set – the desire they generated was real. Meetex was dominated by these deceitful images, defined by them. The location on sale is immaterial. The picture, the money shot, is nearly identical everywhere: a gender-mixed, multicultural group unites around an arm-outstretched, gap-bridging handshake, glorying in it; gameshow smiles all round, with an ancient monument or expressive work of modern architecture as the backdrop. Business! Being Done! The transcendent, holy moment when The Deal is Struck. Everyone profits! And in unique, iconic, spectacular surroundings, heaving with antiquities and avant-garde structures, the people bland and attractive, their skin tones a tolerant variety but all much alike, looking as if they have just agreed the sale of the world’s funniest and most tasteful joke while standing in the lobby of a Zaha Hadid museum.

If only they looked around. Business was done in places like the Way Inn, or in giant sheds like the MetaCentre. Properly homogenised environments, purged of real character like an operating theatre is rid of germs. Clean, uncorrupt. That’s where deals are struck – in the Grey Labyrinth. And that’s where I headed, because I had business to attend to.

The Grey Labyrinth took up the rear third of the centre’s main hall. This space was set aside for meetings, negotiations and deal-making, subdivided into dozens of small rooms where people could talk in private. It was the opposite of the visual overload of the fair, a complex of grey fabric-covered partitions with no decoration and few signs. All sounds were muffled by the acoustic panels. The little numbered cubicles were the most basic space possible for business – a phone line, a conference table topped with a hard white composite material, some office chairs. Sometimes they included a potted plant, or adverts for the sponsor company that had supplied the furnishings. Mass-produced bubbles of space, available by the half-hour, where visitors video-conferenced with their home office or did handshake deals. They loved to talk about the handshake, about eye contact, about the chairman’s Mont Blanc on a paper contract – these anatomical cues you could only get from meeting face to face. They wanted primal authenticity, something that could be simulated but could never be equalled. But it all took place in a completely synthetic environment – four noise-deadening, view-screening modular panels, a table, some chairs, a phone line. Or, nowadays, a well-filled wifi bath in place of the latter.

I had booked cubicle M-A2-54 for 10.30 a.m. It was empty when I arrived, four unoccupied office chairs around a small round table. A blank whiteboard on a grey board wall. No preparation was needed for the meeting and I sat quietly, drumming my fingers on the hard surface of the table, listening to the muted sounds that carried over the partitions.

The prospect was seven minutes late, but I didn’t let my irritation show when he arrived, and greeted him with the warm smile and firm handshake I know his kind admire.

‘Neil Double. Pleasure to meet you.’ False – I am indifferent about the experience. Foolish to place so much faith in a currency that is so easily counterfeited.

‘Tom Graham. Likewise.’ Graham was an inch or two shorter than me but much more substantial – a man who had been built for rugby but, in his forties, was letting that muscle turn to butter in the rugby club bar. His thick neck was red under the collar of his Thomas Pink shirt. Curly black hair, sprinkled with grey, over the confident features of a moderately successful man. We sat opposite each other.