The Way Inn (6 page)

After I had said my good-byes to Tom and left the muffled solemnity of the Gray Labyrinth, the jangling noise and distraction of the fair were unwelcome, so I fled into the conference wing to find the first session. There, I found some peace. The seats were comfortable, the lighting was dimmed for the speaker's slides. It was straightforward stuff: business travel trends in the age of austerity. I jotted down a few of the facts and statistics that were thrown out. Tighter cash flow, fewer, shorter business trips and less risk-taking meant potential gains for the budget hotels. Michelin stars in the restaurant and the latest cross-trainers in the gym were much less important than reliable WiFi, easy check-in and a quiet room. Good times for Way Inn, and for me. It was reassuring, almost restful, stuff. For some of the session, I was able to come close to drowsing, letting my eyelids become heavy and enjoying being off my feet. The end of the talk was almost a disappointment. Applause was hearty.

I was beginning to feel that a peaceful routine had been restored—a sensation that was a surprise to me, because until that point I had not realized that my routine had been disrupted. Maybe I wasn't getting enough sleep. Maybe, instead of pursuing Rosa or the redheaded woman into the night, I should get to bed early, spend some quality time in the company of freshly laundered hotel linen.

But first, lunch. There were various places to eat in the MetaCenter, and like an airport or an out-of-town shopping center—anywhere with a captive audience, in fact—they were all likely to be overpriced and uninspiring. Rejecting branded coffee shops and burger joints, I headed for the main brasserie. In less image-conscious times, this would simply be called a canteen: big, bright and loud, serving batch-prepared food from stainless-steel basins under long meters of sneeze guard. A hot, wet tray taken from a spring-loaded pile and pushed along waist-height metal rails; a can of fizzy drink from a chiller, a cube of moussaka from a slab the size of a yoga mat; green salad in a transparent plastic blister. It might sound awful, but it was fine, really, just fine. I was eating alone and had no desire to linger—there was no need for me to be delighted by exotic or subtle flavors, and any attempt to pamper me would surely have been a delay and a provocation. It was good, simple, efficient, repeatable, forgettable. For entertainment, I sorted through some of the fliers and cards I had picked up from the fair. To carry these, I had brought my own tote bag, one from a fair last year which had unusually low-key branding. In my line of work, you never run short of totes.

In the MetaCenter's central hall, even within the perplexing grid of the fair, navigation was not too hard: giant signs suspended from the distant ceiling identified cardinal points, and if you somehow managed to really, truly lose your sense of where you were, you could simply walk toward the edge of the hall and work your way around from there. In the wings of the center, formidable buildings in themselves, a little more spatial awareness was needed. To find the venue of the second session on my schedule for the day, I had to consult one of the information boards that stood helpfully at junctions in the miles of passage and concourse. Before me, the conference wing was sliced into its three floors, splayed out like different cuts at the butcher's and gaily color-coded. I began to plot my course from the brasserie to the correct auditorium: Meta South, east concourse, S3 escalators . . .

This locative reverie was obliterated by a hard, flat blow between my shoulder blades, delivered with enough force to knock the strap of my tote bag from my shoulder. I wheeled around, part ready to launch a retaliatory punch even as I experienced sheer unalloyed bafflement that anybody could be so assailed in a public place, in daylight. What greeted me was a wobbly smile, wrinkled linen and strands of blond hair clinging to a pink brow.

“Afternoon, old chap. I say, I didn't take you off guard, did I?”

“Jesus, Maurice,” I said. “What the hell do you think you're playing at?”

Maurice put up his hands. “Don't shoot, commandant!” He chuckled, a throaty, rasping gurgle. “Don't know my own strength sometimes, it's all the working out I do.” Comic pause. “Working out if it's time for a drink!” The chuckle became a smoker's laugh, and he broke his hands-up pose to wave me away, as if I was being a priceless wag.

“You startled me,” I said, stooping to pick up my bag.

“So what's in store next?” Maurice asked, leaning over me to examine the map. I became uncomfortably aware of the proximity of my head to his crotch. The crease on his trouser legs was vestigial, its full line only suggested by the short stretches of it that remained, like a Roman road. “You going to ‘Emerging Threats'?”

“Yes,” I said, straightening. I wanted to curse. Trapped! It would be impossible to avoid sitting next to Maurice, and there was no way to skip it: “Emerging Threats to the Meetings Industry” had, after all, been requested by a client. Sitting next to Maurice meant having to put up with his fidgeting, lip-smacking and sighing, and a playlist of either witless asides or snores. It had all happened before. And afterward he would ask what I was doing next and if I said I was going back to the hotel there was a very real risk he would think that a fine idea and decide to follow me, and we would have to wait for a bus together and sit on it together, or I would have to spend time devising an escape plan, inventing meetings and urgent phone calls . . . the amount of additional energy all this would consume was, it seemed to me, almost unbearable. I wanted to lock the door of my hotel room, lie on the bed and think about nothing.

“Bit of time, then,” Maurice said, looking at his watch. “I'm glad I ran into you again actually, there's something I keep forgetting to ask you. Do you have a card?”

“Excuse me?”

“A card, a business card. I'm sure you gave me one ages ago but”—he rolled his eyes in such an exaggerated fashion that his whole head involved itself in the act—“of
course
I lost it.”

For a moment I considered denying Maurice one of my cards—it would be perfectly easy to claim that I hadn't brought enough with me that morning and had already exhausted my supply—but I decided such a course was pointless. The cards were purposely inscrutable and were intended to be given out freely without concern. Just my name, the company name, an email address, a mailing address in the West End and the URL of our equally laconic website. I gave Maurice a card. He made a show of reading it.

“Neil Double, associate, Convex,” Maurice recited in a deliberately grand voice. “Ta. What is it you do again?”

“Business information,” I said. I am quite good at injecting a bored note into the answer, to suggest that nothing but a world of tedium lay beyond that description.

Maurice blinked like an owl. “What does that entail?” he asked. “I'm sure you've told me all this before, sorry to be so dense, but I don't think I've ever really got a firm handle on it. Strange, isn't it, how you can know someone for years and never be clear what their line of work is?”

I smiled. There was no risk. “Aggregating business data sector-by-sector for the purposes of bespoke analysis.”

“Right, right . . .” Maurice said, his vague expression indicating I had successfully coated his curiosity with a layer of dust. “Great . . . Well, we had better get moving, I suppose. Aggregating to be done, eh?”

We started our trek toward the lecture hall. People streamed along the MetaCenter's broad concourses and up and down the banks of escalators, redistributing themselves between venues. Homing in on the right room, narrowing the range of possible destinations, finding the right level, the right sector, the right group of facilities, I felt a rush of that peculiar, delightful sensation that comes in airports sometimes: of being an exotic particle allowed to pass through layers of filters, becoming more refined. Except that Maurice, a lump of baser stuff, was tagging along after me. And all the way, he kept up a monologue—inane business gossip, his opinions of the MetaCenter, what else he had seen that day and what he thought about it.

The lecture hall was larger than the previous one, with ranks of black-upholstered seats fanning out from a modest stage, where chairs and a lectern were set up. Almost half the seats were taken when we arrived, well ahead of the starting time, and most of the remainder filled as we waited for the session to begin. There was an expectant babble of conversation, although I wondered if that might be more due to the fact that everyone had just eaten—or drunk—their lunch, rather than due to any treat in store. I took the schedule from the information pack in my bag and examined it again, to see if there was anything particularly alluring about the talk. The title, “Emerging Threats,” was so ill-defined that it might have lent the event broad appeal. Next to the listing was the logo of Maurice's magazine,
Summit
—it was a sponsor. He hadn't mentioned that. I glanced at Maurice, who had seated himself next to me. He was staring into space, mouth slightly open, notebook and digital recorder on his lap. Like me, apart from the open mouth. He was uncharacteristically quiet, even focused.

Electronic rustling and bumping rose from the audio system: the three speakers had arrived on the stage and were being fitted with radio microphones. I closed my eyes and wondered how much of the discussion I could pick up through a drowse if I let myself slip into one. A gray-haired man was introducing the speakers—the usual panel-fodder from think tanks and trade bodies; middle-aged, male and stuffy. One of whom was very familiar. It took me some moments to establish that I really was looking at the person I thought it was, and while I stared at him, he found my eyes in the audience and smiled at me. It was Tom Graham, hands interlaced in his lap, legs crossed, sleek with satisfaction.

“Last of all,” the master of ceremonies said, reaching Tom, “a man who really needs no introduction—a fairs man through and through: Tom Laing, event director of Meetex.”

Applause.

“Always the same old faces at these things.”

“We must stop meeting like this.”

“Small world.”

“Groundhog day.”

“Another day, another dollar.”

“Are you here for the conference?”

“Why else?”

“All well?”

“Fuck, stop, just stop, I can't stand it.”

Adam and I felt the same way about male small talk: we hated it. He introduced me to the term “phatic utterance,” words said purely as social ritual, not to convey any real meaning: when you're asked “how's it going?” and not expected to reply. Noise, he said, useless noise; a waste of human bandwidth. Trim out all the phatic utterances and interaction could be made a lot more efficient. That was the way he thought, and I loved it. Away with all that hopeless banter and rib-jabbing. But we had turned this shared belief into our own form of banter—a private game, where, on running into each other, we would try to keep up the dismal phatic chitchat for as long as possible, repeating the same old clichés and phrases and saying as little as possible that was new or interesting until one of us cracked and stopped and we could talk about things that actually mattered.

“That was quick.”

“I can't take any more small talk. I've just come from a funeral. My father died.”

“Oh. I'm so sorry.”

“
Bzzzt
. Phatic.”

“Damn! Checkmate, really. What else is there to say?”

“It's OK. I didn't know him very well, my parents divorced and he travelled a lot.”

“And you thought: that's the life for me?”

I laughed. “Yeah, kind of.”

When I met Adam, before he founded Convex, I worked for a firm of cost consultants in the construction industry. They specialized in “value engineering”: professional corner-cutting, driving down the expense of projects by simplifying designs and substituting cheaper materials. When a building is completed and only barely resembles the promotional images revealed by the architects years before—more plain, more clunky, more drab; graceful curves turned into awkward corners; shining titanium and crystalline glass replaced with dull panels of indeterminate plasticky material—then my old firm, or one like it, has been wielding its shabby art.

Ugly work, literally. I preferred not to reflect on it, and I focused hard on my particular minor role, which was to scour trade fairs for those cheaper materials. What could stand in for stone, what would do in place of copper, what was the bargain-basement equivalent of hardwood? All my life I have been interested in what the world was truly made from; if not all my life, then at least from the very early age when—looking at the chipped edge of a table at home, a wood-grain veneer over a crumbling, splintery inner substance—I discovered that surfaces were often lies.

“Fake walnut interior,” my father once said to someone over the phone, winking merrily to me as he did so, letting me in on a joke I did not understand. “Better than the real thing.” It was years before I connected this remark to cars, years spent wondering why someone would fake the interior of a walnut, and how the results could possibly improve on an actual walnut. Years of imagining tiny fabulous jewelled sculptures in walnut shells, not inexpensive automobiles. Then years of suspicion in cars. Real or fake? Suspicion everywhere, which eventually gave way to fascination.

I trawled the fairs, learning the trade names of all the different kinds of composite panels, all of which looked alike and inscrutable—cheap façade materials having gone from fiction to encryption, no longer pretending to be something else and instead trying to be unidentifiable. At one of the fairs I met Adam. He worked for a trend-forecasting company, in the normal course of things a world away from builders' merchants and anodized zinc cladding. This company built meticulous indexes of every last shoe and shawl shown by every label at every fashion week, databases you could subscribe to and see exactly who had launched what and not have to sit through endless catwalk shows. The company had dreams—wild and hopeless dreams—of doing the same for construction materials, and Adam was part of the team building this library of Babel for uPVC drainpipes.