The Way Inn (15 page)

Once seen, this quirk in the video could not be unseen. I shifted in my seat in an effort to exclude the screens from my field of vision, then moved to another armchair so I had my back to them. Still, I turned the apparent coincidence over in my mind, feeling its weight and the questions attached to it. Its defiance of easy answers made me want to simply turn away from it, as I had turned away from the screens. Just as I wanted to do with the obstinate memory of the woman meditating in a sunlit courtyard at 3 a.m. This—how to even describe it?—this vision had been very real to me and my recollection of it was rich in detail when so many other aspects of the previous evening were smudged in retrospect. It had all the qualities of a lucid dream—not that I was familiar with lucid dreams, but this had been lucid, and it must have been a dream, so those were the most important points covered. I had exhausted myself running through the hotel and had slipped briefly into oblivion. My subconscious had obligingly furnished me with a bit of wish fulfillment, the wish being my devout longing to see the red-haired woman again. At some point I regained my wits and returned to my room. The neutral corridors of the hotel had proven ideal for masking the edge of sleep, making it possible to cross the boundary between reality and unreality without noticing. In her sleepwalking, she herself had shown this to be possible. This was the rational palisade I built around what I had seen in the courtyard.

“Mr. Double?” It was John-Paul, calling across the lobby.

“Yes?” I answered him from the chair, then stood to approach him at the front desk.

Perplexity was written across his face. “There's a problem with the taxi, Mr. Double.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. They can't find the hotel.”

“What? How come?”

“They can't find it. On sat nav. It's not showing up.”

I frowned. “How can that be?”

“Well, this is a new hotel—in fact this whole area is new, the street, the motorway spur, everything. And sat nav hasn't caught up yet, the software hasn't been updated. The access roads from the motorway junction do appear, but they all share a postal code, so they appear as a single road, not two parallel roads.”

“So what?” I said. “He can still get here, can't he?”

John-Paul swallowed. I think my face was already set in a cast of thunderous disbelief, and he seemed apprehensive.

“As I say, the sat nav considers the access road serving the hotels and the access road serving the MetaCenter to be the same road. And apparently that means they can't put the route into the sat nav, because it sees the point of departure and the destination as being the same place, a journey of zero miles, which they can't log for fare purposes.”

“I don't care.” I kept my tone as level as possible. I was going to be confident and assertive and remain in control, and not let my anger rule me. “Where is the driver now? We can direct him by phone. Cash in hand for a three-minute drive. He can tell his bosses anything he likes.”

“I'm sorry, sir, he never set out—they said a journey that short wasn't worth their time.” John-Paul was clearly in real distress at the whole affair, or doing a very convincing impression of being distraught. My own feelings were complex but not uncommon: I felt the visceral frustration and uselessness of a person confronting a bureaucratic obstacle, the same feeling that had afflicted me while speaking with “Fran” from Meetex customer services. It was a feeling analogous to discovering that the open road ahead is not in fact an open road at all but a hyperreal photograph of an open road printed on a satiny smooth, completely impervious surface—a prospect utterly closed, without any hope of appeal, but presenting a mocking mirage of free access. This was rage; towering, futile, empty rage. John-Paul's distress was perhaps related to his innocence in the matter. If it was Way Inn that was placing the senseless barrier in my path, I was sure he would be more placid and satisfied. That is the way of the corporate wall.

“OK,” I said. I felt curiously short of breath, as if the air had been forced out of me by the fury within.

“I know,” John-Paul said, grimacing. “It's frustrating.”

The front desk no longer seemed able to assist me—the services it offered were now startlingly irrelevant. But I did not move from my spot. There had to be a way of arranging transport to the center. This defeat seemed premature. John-Paul was looking at me as if he had just been told by his parents that the family dog's increasing senility meant it would have to be put to sleep, and I was the dog.

“I have an idea,” he said.

“Yes?” I said, hoping I didn't look too pathetic in my eagerness to hear what he had to say. “Go on.”

“We could call a taxi for a round trip—pickup here, go to the airport, then to the MetaCenter. It'll cost more—”

“Brilliant,” I said, slapping my fingers on the desk surface, uninterested in the cost. “Do it. Please.”

John-Paul smiled—and this, I believed, was a real smile, not a service smile. It was an outward sign of true pleasure in cracking the problem. “Certainly, sir. I'll call you when it gets here.”

“Excellent, John-Paul, excellent. Thank you. I'm going to get an espresso—I'll be in the bar.”

The thought of a taxi—my taxi—heading toward the hotel lifted my spirits. Taxis were a personal service of a kind I adored. Even though they were a routine part of my working life, they still felt wickedly decadent and grown-up, a wild and daring prodigality. They were the realm of my father and his expenses. And my few childhood memories of taxis are also memories of my father. My mother, when she was present in the back of the cab, could not have been more out of place. Every drawn line on her face and tensed muscle screamed of a desire to be elsewhere. She would watch the progress of the meter as if its every accumulating flicker was an insult.

That stare of my mother's: I remember it so clearly, her severity in the face of the slightest expenditure, the icy laser with which she strafed supermarket shelves. Even today, tearing a piece of clothing makes me fearful; a memory of her exhausted anger if I damaged one of the few items in my wardrobe. All-new outfits still have an almost mystical significance for me. Her watchfulness for extravagance and hypervigilant conservation of every last dull copper in the household budget was essential, of course. We had very little. Expenses were the problem—my father's expenses. His basic salary was never large, his employers preferring to reward him with a generous travelling budget as compensation for having to spend the bulk of his life away from home and loved ones. But this left the marriage unbalanced. While he ate in restaurants and slept in comfortable hotel rooms, my mother was stretching postage stamps of cling film over half-cans of baked beans and resisting turning on the central heating until past the first frost. We were not poor—not in any sense that keeps the word meaningful—but my childhood was one of constant secondhand and second-best. What made this unbearable for me was its obvious necessity. There was no parental illogic or arbitrariness or double standard to rage against, just blunt, gray, unarguable household facts, picked over at length during the continual acrimony that accompanied my father's sojourns in the family home. All the tawdry details of budgets and economies and pleasures downgraded or deferred were paraded in front of me at the dinner table as my parents growled and hissed at each other. To my gravest embarrassment, I was dragooned as an ally by my mother: my involuntary sacrifices, my diminished experience of life, exhibited as the result of my father's choices and unwillingness to change course. I suspected that to be obliged to spend one's life travelling, away from the hearth and family life, might not be such a sacrifice. The dreams I fostered in these dreary circumstances were modest indeed: taxis, hotels, to buy something as small as a drink and think nothing of it.

Then the arguments stopped: the marriage was over, a few weeks before I reached my teens. Although the paperwork wasn't formalized for two or three years, my father never set foot in that small house again. The privation did not stop, of course; my mother went out to work and strained every particle to ensure that my conditions did not worsen. But my father's permanent, engulfing absence was a new and unbearable, inconceivable impoverishment. Unlike the others, I saw it as one my mother had chosen, one she had deliberately and unnecessarily brought down upon us. And resentment took root.

Coffee was the primary scent in the air of the Way Inn bar, backed with a hint of a chemist's approximation of a pine forest. I ordered an espresso—consciously thinking nothing of it—and scanned for somewhere to sit.

She was there. The redheaded woman. She was neglecting a cappuccino, hunched over a sprawl of papers covered in excitable doodles. Her hair was tied back, and everything about her pose said deep thought. It was as if the designs in front of her had just unexpectedly danced on the page, and she was waiting to see if they would repeat the trick.

I hesitated. I wanted to approach her very much, but I was wary, after what had happened with Lucy, of making another blunder. This was the second time I had seen this woman in this hotel—not counting my vision of her sun-worshipping in the light well—and we were almost acquaintances. Almost, but not. We were still in the default interpersonal mode: strangers. The best kind of strangers, maybe—old, close strangers—but strangers. And the protocol for one stranger to approach another in a public place is delicate and fraught with risk, especially if one stranger is male and the other is female. I did not want to be a pest, not with her. But while my frontal cortex measured the situation, my instinct, and what felt like every other part of me, howled its eagerness to
go on, go ahead, talk to her, this is what you want, the thing you want most, she's sitting right in front of you, what are you waiting for? How many other chances are you going to get? Do it however you want, but do it, don't delay!
In the past I would never have waited long before yielding to that more base voice, confident that the embarrassment of a rebuff would be short-lived and I would soon be on to other places, other hotels, other women. But my purpose here wasn't a quick liaison; I was seeking a lasting connection.

“Can I help?”

She had seen me prevaricating and intervened, solving my immediate problem. But her expression was not kindly and her inquiry seemed intended to move me along rather than inviting me to linger.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “We spoke the other night. About the paintings.”

“I remember,” she said, not exactly smiling, but no longer frowning.

The barman appeared with my espresso. “Are you sitting here, sir?”

“Do you mind if I join you?” I asked, trying to keep it light. “Only for a moment, I'm waiting for a taxi.” I hoped this lessened the sense of intrusion—I wouldn't be around for long.

“Sure,” she said. And this time I did get a smile—or part of a smile, a limited half-mouth lip-twitch, which might have been a smirk at my puppy-dog deference. Somewhere in this social fog were boundaries separating the pathetic from the winning, and friendliness from creepiness. Their location was hard to pinpoint.

I sat, and the barman arranged the tiny coffee cup, a nanojug of milk and a thimble containing misshapen brown sugar lumps in front of me. A slip of paper was proffered—I signed next to my room number. The barman receded.

“I didn't mean to interrupt you . . .” I said, indicating the sheets of graph paper she had been working on. They were covered in columns of numbers and interlocking circles.

“It's nothing,” she said, swiftly squaring the sheets together, folding them twice and stuffing them into the front pocket of the sweatshirt she was wearing. She was dressed for the gym. When her eyes returned to me, they were piercing and interrogatory. “But you clearly did intend to interrupt me, didn't you? Let's not gloss it. That's what you wanted, yes? It's not a problem, I just want to be clear about that.”

“I was considering the etiquette of a situation like this,” I said. “A public place, someone you've met before, but you don't really know them . . .”

“What did you conclude?”

“I didn't conclude anything, you interrupted me.”

“Right,” she said. “My fault. I didn't mean to. If I had known that I was intruding on vital work in the field of social anthropology . . .” It was hard to read her mood. She was not wearing makeup. Her eyebrows matched the cinnamon dust at the rim of her coffee cup and her lips had a ghostly suggestion of arterial blue about them.

“I'm sure I would have concluded by saying hello,” I said. “You know, when you're in a hotel, unlikely to see a person ever again, where's the harm?”

“Yeah, I've noticed guys are less inhibited about striking up conversation in a hotel bar. Guys in general. In hotels in general. I've always assumed there was some slow-witted male equation at work. Unaccompanied woman in hotel bar equals prostitute. Or slut, anyway.”

This remark didn't seem to be pointed at me, so I smiled in response. “Could be. For some men.”

She shrugged. “It's a building that also contains beds. Maybe that confuses them. They think, well, this woman is already sleeping somewhere in this building, surely it won't make much difference to her what bed she's in or who's in there with her.”

“I think it might be related to my anthropological conclusions,” I said. “Where's the harm? There's less danger of lasting social embarrassment from saying hello to a stranger in a hotel bar, because if it turns out badly you can go and hide in your room and the next day you both check out and that's that. It's a completely disposable moment. And prostitution promises a similar deal, in its way—it's completely disposable sex, no lasting traces, no aftermath.”

“For the man, anyway,” she said with a grimace. “Apart from a nice STD, maybe. And, I should hope, a hell of guilt.”