The Way Inn

This was paranoia, I knew, but it still needled me. I dropped the newspaper and some of the paper scraps into the bin, and stuffed the clothes back in the bag. Then I took off my tie and shoes. I opened my laptop; there was nothing of any importance in my email inbox – including nothing related to Meetex that could explain the incident with Laing at Emerging Threats. Just arrangements for coming trade shows and conferences – my life, my work, stretching out into the future in a reassuring manner, beyond this unfortunate professional hiccup. I snapped the laptop closed, took a beer from the minibar fridge and lay on the bed, back and head propped up with cushions. Eight cushions on this small double bed, along with the two pillows – serving no purpose beyond their role as visible invitations to be comfortable. This was presumably exactly the sort of moment a chain hotel imagined itself making a positive intervention – the weary guest comes in from a challenging day of combative big-B Business and finds solace; a private cube of climate-controlled air; a cold beer; a yielding bed covered in well-stuffed cushions. The group intelligence of the operating corporation’s marketing and public relations people, its designers and buyers, its choosers and describers had considered this moment, it had considered me. It was only a simulation of hospitality, of course, but still it provided some respite.

I sipped the beer straight from the can and listened to the quiet sounds of the hotel around me: the low vibration of its air systems, distant doors opening and closing. I closed my eyes, but sleep didn’t seem likely or desirable. Instead, I mentally replayed the day, examining and twisting it like a Rubik’s Cube, trying to line up its faces so it made sense. A man I had thought to be a prospective client was instead the event director of Meetex. I had given him a very detailed description of the service we offered, and in short order he had named me as a threat to the meetings industry. A threat to the meetings industry! How pompous, how vain of Laing to see himself as the guardian of a stronghold of civilisation, an ‘industry’ no less – though he would probably consider it a ‘community’ and a ‘family’ as well, the self-aggrandising prick. It was a stunt, a bid to look important and concerned for his customers, but a splash that would ripple away quickly. What troubled me, as a matter of pride as much as any practical concern, was that my anonymity had been breached – certainly this afternoon many more people knew the nature of my work than did this morning. Adam had really laboured the message that I had to be discreet on this particular job: he had told me so in every email relating to it, and in all our recent phone conversations. Perhaps he had had some premonition of what was in store, or had picked up on clues pointing to the ambush? If so, why hadn’t he warned me? But I was getting too far ahead of myself.

Adam would have to know about all this – in time. For a couple of minutes I considered emailing him right away, and I experimented with different wordings in my head. But I did not want to attach an air of emergency to the incident, and make it into a bigger problem than it really was. Sure, Laing knew who I was and what I did, but how many others? A couple of hundred people heard him – but were they listening, and did they care? A couple of hundred out of tens of thousands. There was Maurice to consider. He had gone to some effort to sit next to me. Maurice, early for a talk! He was a consummate latecomer, a man who no amount of tutting would deter from blundering past the knees of seated audience members to reach an empty seat in a middle row while a speaker was in mid-flow. It was, in retrospect, an incredible performance by him. If he had not found me after lunch (how long had he been looking?), I could be fairly sure that he would have lain in wait at the door of the lecture hall until I happened along. And now I remembered his request for a business card, our conversation about what I did. Cunning – far more cunning than I had imagined him to be – but, mysteriously, I once again found it hard to muster much anger towards the journalist. And, for the first time in our acquaintance, I discovered I was looking ahead to the next possible moment I could contrive a meeting with him. I needed to know his view on what had happened, and minimise it in his eyes.

He would be at the party tonight, of course. The party. With so much looking back – dismantling, examining and reassembling the recent past – I had neglected to look forward. For a brief while I considered not going to the party. But that wouldn’t do – hiding away, acting as if I had something to be ashamed of, was not the way to behave. It would be business as usual. And I would have an opportunity to prove to myself that I remained anonymous. And besides, I wanted to go: my ego had taken a knock, and a few drinks and some flirting would set that right. There would be girls there, for sure. Things had been going pretty well with Rosa – maybe something could happen there tonight, and I could hang the Do Not Disturb sign on my door. That would certainly restore the natural balance of my interior ecosystem. The aggressive energy generated by Laing’s subterfuge had left me restless. I had obtained my day-long desire, to be back in my hotel room, and I was almost ready to leave it again.

After finishing the beer, I dozed on the bed, letting the painting on the wall in front of me focus and unfocus. An idea coalesced. My mobile phone was on the bedside table: I picked it up and used it to take a photograph of the painting on the wall. One more for the woman’s collection – one she could not have seen, because it was in a guest’s room, not a public area. If we did run into each other again, I would have something to say to her, a way to show interest in her pastime, and if she wanted the picture she would have to give me a mobile phone number or an email address. I would not lose contact with her again.

Around me, I could sense the hotel filling with life as people returned from the conference in greater numbers. Footsteps and fragments of muffled conversation sounded in the corridor. From the room next to mine, 217, I could hear music playing faintly through the wall, drifting in and out of the realm of perception in a way that was more distracting than if it came through loud and clear. I switched on the television. It had reset to the hotel welcome page, the smiling staff, the weather for tomorrow and the latest from the restaurant, which was ‘Closed for private party’. I turned to a news channel and ordered a sandwich from room service. Forty-five minutes to an hour – they were busy. I half-watched the news, which was fretting over a lacklustre economic statistic – a poker-faced little number representing the aggregate of thousands of individually bland decisions made in fabric-covered cubicles, all added together, up a fraction of a per cent, down a fraction of a per cent … while along the motorway, more and more boxes were built to accommodate those people and their nano-consequential impulses and resolutions, their planning, their decisions.

As a child, I marvelled at office blocks – what could they possibly find to do in all that space? Office interiors were generally such anti-climaxes, just desks and filing cabinets and telephones. I saw men in suits on the street and elsewhere and they only ever seemed to be talking or reading, never really doing anything – not like people driving trains or building buildings. There were so many of them, men and women, doing impossible-to-tell jobs. This impression was particularly forceful in unfamiliar cities where, I was amazed to discover, life also went on as normal, wrapped up in this arcane charade of offices and paper and neckties. On the occasions he was available for questioning, I would quiz my father, the only representative of this world I had at hand. ‘But what do you do?’ I would wheedle and insist. Sell auto parts, he would say. But what do you do, I would repeat, meaning what actions does this involve, what is said and heard, how on earth can anyone fill days and weeks just doing that one thing, or any one thing? Maybe more detailed explanations were forthcoming but I don’t remember them, so they can’t have satisfied me. Or, depending on his mood, he would say that he put food on the table, and that was that. I asked my mother, too. Her answer was ‘he travels’, which was no answer at all. But I did not like to pursue enquiries about him with her; she became chilly before long, although it was some time before I realised that she was concealing her lack of knowledge, not a grand secret. Or perhaps that was the grand secret, that she knew so little about the man she’d married.

These questions – like my concerns about the actual substance of the world – at times bother me to this day. I can see from the world of trade fairs and conferences that every tiny thing has an industry behind it; all things from the grandest to the tiniest are backed by thousands of people in scores of competing companies resting their livelihoods on the rise or fall in sales of that thing, and having conferences and trade fairs devoted to the endeavours and future of their enterprise, which naturally they regard as central, pivotal and vital to the national interest. Conferences and trade fairs, for all their expansive rhetoric, were insular, introverted, exercises in commercial navel-gazing and solipsism. So what did it mean to attend all of them?

My food arrived, a well-stuffed BLT. The paper napkin that accompanied it would also have its day, its market share and prospects earnestly discussed at Caterex and Snackcon and Bulk Ply Paper Products Forum and Mouth Hygiene Expo. Once I had finished my sandwich, I showered, imagining many showers taking place in the hotel at that moment in the early evening, particulates from the MetaCentre and the motorway being washed from many bodies and swept into the drains beneath the Way Inn; all the new infrastructure that had so excited the redhead, the new connections being made and the exotic ridges and spikes of potential they generated on her maps and charts – development gateway, investment zone, emerging regional hub. As she said these phrases, these pert word couplings charged with promise and yet light on immediate meaning, a change had come over her. She had slipped from detachment into deep trance-like concentration. ‘Enterprise opportunity corridor … public-private gateway zone … motorway halo …’ A new link, a new pathway through cheap land; octopus-like journey-time diagrams flex and stretch out their tentacles, and the ground is sown with tax breaks and more infrastructure and superfast broadband and hey presto I’m taking a shower, eating BLTs and watching rolling news thirty feet above undistinguished frozen dirt.

My lift to the ground floor was shared with other party-goers. The doors, when they opened on my floor, burst a bubble of heavily perfumed air; three men in suits with slicked hair, two women in cocktail dresses, all doused in scent and aftershave. It looked crowded in the small compartment, and I indicated that I’d wait for another lift, but they laughed and huddled up together and coaxed me with homely quips like ‘Room for a small one!’ and ‘The more the merrier!’ They held the doors and would not depart without me, so I had to board. When the doors slid closed on us, the cube rapidly filled with volatile hydrocarbons and laughter. A sequinned rear end was pressed, by obligation of the close quarters, against my right thigh. Was I here for the conference, the owner of the rear end asked me. Of course, I said.

‘Of course he’s here for the conference, Jan!’ said one of the men. He was around my age and looked like ‘Hapless Dad’ from an advert for cleaning products, but here he was on form, in his element and revelling in it. ‘You’re going to the party, yeah?’

Yeah. The lift arrived in the lobby, the doors opening like a breach in a containment facility for hazardous materials under pressure. My companions in descent and I chatted as we joined the line of people filtering past clipboard-bearing PR brunettes into the party. They all worked together, naturally, in the kind of intimate environment that breeds in-jokes, so nothing more than a cryptic half-comment or a facial expression could set them all off laughing. Their purpose was to promote a provincial city, a ‘fast-emerging destination’ – there was a stand in the MetaCentre, had I seen it? I said I had probably been by, which was probably true, and that I would look out for it tomorrow. Don’t come by too early in the morning, they said, all laughing as one, before accusing each other of being intent on intoxicated mayhem, and of inability to moderate their alcohol consumption.

Normally I would expect to hate these people. I would find their ease with one another and with me intolerable and I would want to be elsewhere. But at this time I appreciated their temporary inclusion of me in their group. It was reassuring – there would be thousands of people here who were unaware of my ‘unmasking’ earlier, and who in all likelihood would care little if they heard of it. And this sense I felt of no longer being anonymous, no longer having to guard myself, was tantalising. Much as I like to be unknown, I was drawn towards candour as if the ground sloped that way. Our ideology, as a business, was after all to ease the flow of information.

The clipboards were closer now. My new friend from the provincial chamber of commerce asked me: ‘What brings you here?’

‘I’m a pirate,’ I said.

He enjoyed that, immediately wading into what he imagined was a joke on my part. ‘Oh yeah? Where’s your parrot, then?’

‘Upstairs. Flat battery.’

‘Eyepatch?’

‘Don’t need one. Laser eye surgery. It’s transformed piracy.’

He laughed. ‘What do you do then? Go around nicking other people’s ideas, or what?’

‘No, nothing like that. I’m a conference surrogate. If someone doesn’t want to go to an event like this, they pay me to go instead. Some people consider that piracy.’

Chamber of commerce digested this. ‘Doesn’t make a difference to us, I shouldn’t think.’

‘Yeah, that’s what I thought.’

‘So you go to conferences? That’s all? Nothing else?’

‘Nothing else.’

‘Are there lots of conference surrogates?’

‘As far as I know it’s just me. But the company I work for wants to expand. Are you interested?’

‘Not for me, mate,’ he said. Perhaps concerned that my feelings were hurt, he quickly clarified his remark. ‘I mean, we go to four or five of these things a year and they’re always a great time’ – he looked towards his colleagues, who had hurled themselves deep into the party, and who were already dancing together – ‘but they’re a getaway, you know? Something different. Doing nothing else would do my head in, quite frankly.’

I regarded him sympathetically. ‘I think it takes a particular kind of person,’ I said.

A rare kind of person. We were past the PRs, and I excused myself, telling chamber of commerce that there were people I should say hello to, releasing him to rejoin his colleagues. It occurred to me that the reason I found it hard to mix with the people I saw every day was that I didn’t see much of myself in them.

For the party, the hotel restaurant and bar had been combined – a sliding partition was all that separated them, and it had been pushed back to make one large space. Not for the first time, I admired the careful design of the hotel: its adaptability, its multiple possible configurations and reconfigurations, its promiscuity as a venue. Features refined through hundreds of repetitions of the same basic form. I took a glass of champagne from a passing tray, drained it swiftly, and found another, which I preserved. With this prop, I made an unhurried circuit of the room. The person I really wanted to see was Maurice – strange, after so long trying to avoid him – but his uncanny ability to manifest himself whenever I had no desire to see him had, it seemed, an unfortunate corollary: when actually needed, he was absent, or at least not apparent. There was free booze to be had, and he was nowhere. It defied reason.

The party was hosted by the Way Inn group and the promotional point was heavily made. WAY INN WELCOMES MEETEX read a banner that ran the length of the glass wall of the lobby. Fatty clusters of red balloons were suspended from the ceiling, each adorned with the Way Inn logo. In one corner a stand had been set up and a young woman sat behind it handing out fliers, USB sticks and ballpoint pens and other merch. I took a pen. A display related the history of the chain: America in the 1950s, giant cars, ranch-style motor courts, flamboyant neon-Aztec roadside signs, the development of the interstate highways. Then, nothing but growth, growth, growth – the end of the display, the end of history, was a map of the world freckled with red markers indicating Way Inn branches. Hundreds of markers on six continents, with coastal America and north-western Europe completely obscured. WAY INN EVERYWHERE, read the closing caption.

It was approaching nine already – I had spent longer lounging in my room than I had realised. The party had been going more than an hour and the ice was well broken – the air pulsated with chatter, laughter and amplified music, as if this mutual sound was a medium in which we all swam. In this buoyant scene, I could usually pass unnoticed, and would be free to strike up promising conversations with any women who caught my eye. But more than once I suspected eyes were upon me, and, although I could not be certain, I felt I was not being regarded with favour. Finishing my second champagne, I started towards the bar, and a heavy-set man going the other way blocked my path, forcing me to abruptly and ungracefully change course to avoid colliding with him; I could not help but believe that this was deliberate. The bar was mobbed – other drinkers trying to place their orders did not give me an inch of spare room or extend the slightest courtesy; twice someone pushed ahead of me. All of these individual incidents were barely incidents at all, but they disturbed me.

Having at last secured a whisky from the bar – a treble, to delay my return to the scrum for as long as possible – I set out to look for Maurice once more. The venue had filled noticeably in the preceding half hour. When I arrived, I had been able to saunter up and down the length of the room unobstructed, so that it was notable when someone contrived to get in my way; now we were all almost shoulder to shoulder and movement amid the throng was slow, a question of navigating narrow channels between knots of people, seeing gaps between pairs of turned backs and squeezing through. More than once, I was jostled, bumps that I feared might not have been pure accidents. Every aspect of the party was taking on an ugly complexion, and the crowds, malign or not, were sapping my energy. I was increasingly ready to leave, to take my drink up to my room and enjoy it in peace, when someone tapped me sharply on my shoulder. I was primed for the worst.

But when I turned, I saw a friendly smile. Its owner was Rosa (or Rhoda – my memory was no less impaired). She was wearing a very simple, almost austere, grey dress which clung attractively to her petite frame. Her smile was enhanced by light pink lipstick, and she had a decorative burst of tinselly metal pinned in her short hair.

‘Neil!’ she said. ‘I thought it was you.’

‘Hi!’ I said.

‘Busy, isn’t it?’

We pushed our way to one side of the space, near the windows overlooking the car park, a lacuna in the mass that gave us enough room to face each other.

‘Lots of people here,’ I said, uselessly.

‘Nowhere else to go, right?’ Rosa said, casting an eye to the window and the low brows of the cars beyond, streaked by rain and security lights. ‘Not much nightlife around here.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘We could head down to the airport, there might be a Starbucks or an Irish pub there or something …’

She laughed. Her lips sparkled. Was it lipstick, or lip gloss? I am hazy on these crucial details. I wanted to kiss them, in any case. ‘Yeah, wild. We could hit the travel chemist and get wasted on anti-malarial drugs. That stuff is mental.’

‘See, now you’re getting into it,’ I said. Nonchalant: ‘Are you here with colleagues?’

‘I was,’ she said, ‘but they’ve disappeared. You on your own?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Well, not entirely, no. I’m talking to you.’

‘Did you have a good day?’

‘Not really,’ I said. A bit of vulnerability and candour would help me here, I calculated. ‘One of the sessions I attended turned out to be a premeditated attack on my business, and on me personally.’

‘What, an attack on conference surrogacy?’

My glass almost slipped from my hand. The ball-bearing of anxiety that had been spinning at high speed in my abdomen broke apart, sending splinters ripping through my viscera. She knew? How? Was it common knowledge already?