The Way Inn (18 page)

Only the on-ramp remained to be crossed, but it presented the biggest challenge. I could not see the cars approaching—they came at an angle, hurtling around the roundabout, and it was seldom clear if they were going to keep on circling or peel off and pelt down the ramp. If they were heading for the on-ramp, they tended to be accelerating, anticipating communion with the glorious rush of the motorway. The distance I had to cover seemed, now, vast. Each vehicle that passed was like a door slammed in my face. They would never slow down, flash their lights and let me cross, not in a million years. I doubted the drivers even saw me, and if they did it was as a troubling glimpse, not as an overture to communication and courtesy. By the time I figured in their mind, they would be down the ramp, and I would be a forgettable memory already. Walking it and challenging them was a suicide as sure as jumping off the bridge—no time to see, no time to brake, no way to evade. It would have to be a dash.

I went for it. A burst of energy. The rough concrete surface felt loose and gritty under the pounding soles of my shoes, and my only thought was
I shouldn't be here, I don't belong here, this is not a place to be
. All through today I had been compelled to run, and how often did I run in normal circumstances? And as soon as the fact that I was running and had to continue running had properly registered, it went from being a natural reflex to being a vastly complex feat of conscious coordination, and I thought how easy it would be to trip and fall and die on the on-ramp, roadkill smashed by tire-treads and ground into the surface. My legs abruptly felt a couple of inches shorter than they were meant to be. I turned my head to see a pair of cars vectoring out of the orbit of the roundabout, accelerating into an escape velocity, aiming for me. Their headlights were on—the weak, alien sun was gone. The lead car sounded its horn as I hit the stony shore on the far side of the ramp and the furious blaring note Dopplered away behind me, ricocheting off the precisely formed flanks of the embankment. This was it—the far side, my destination, safety. Part of me wanted to sink to my knees in thanksgiving, but the ground—not pavement, just left-over dirt verge—was muddy and sown with litter and debris from the road. Cracked hubcaps and crisp packets; a coiled item of clothing, blackened and pressed into the dirt by the rain. Clothes abandoned by the road always had a sinister air, suggesting sex crime or self-destruction, arising from the question of how they got there and who they had left unclothed. After a few moments to regain my breath, I trudged on.

The permanent rush of traffic could not obscure the death of the old road. Fresh concrete gave way to potholes and smashed paving stones. Still I was the only pedestrian. On the far side of the road was a wide two-storey office building, with
TO LET
and a telephone number spelled out in big fluorescent characters in the windows all along its upper level. A secondhand car dealership farther along the road was winding down toward closure. Its lot was half-empty and the glass walls of the showroom displayed only red and black posters proclaiming
EVERYTHING MUST GO
and
FINAL REDUCTIONS
. A Suzuki Jimny dangled from a cherry picker by the roadside—a carnival tactic to grab the attention of passing trade in better times that now resembled a corpse on a gibbet. The microboom that the motorway, the MetaCenter and the hotel were supposed to unleash clearly had yet to arrive. Hundreds of millions in public and private investment. Gateway. Hub.

The MetaCenter was on my side of the road. Not the building itself, merely the edge of its immense site, an edge marked by a landscaped ridge of bare flower beds topped by the word
METACENTER
spelled out in big white blocks like children's toys. A billboard on a mast advertised Meetex. The great white bulk of the center was down an access road that was the parallel twin of the road to the hotels. Before reaching it, a succession of huge, empty car parks had to be passed, each separated from the next by another low earthen ridge planted with saplings in their plastic surgical braces. Only sections E and F had cars parked in them. The first living souls appeared: smokers clustered under the canopy shielding the main entrance. One of the main entrances: Entrance A1. The skywalk passed overhead nearby, a gangway connecting to a sparkling ocean liner. But they never built any ocean liners this size. A man in a foam rubber mobile phone outfit was handing out leaflets, face showing through a hole in place of one of the app icons.

Inside, past the puffing smokers and the dejected mobile phone, the air had a little more purpose. I too had a little more purpose—I had a job to do. The first session was pretty much a write-off—they would be halfway through already. But the rest of the afternoon could be salvaged, and there was all of tomorrow. A short queue preceded me at the registration desk. I did not let it rankle me. The walk here had been unpleasant, an outrageous imposition in fact, but it had also been cathartic. And the rain had held off for me—events were tilting in my favor. The motorway junction had been a mighty obstacle placed in my path, one that nobody expected me to be able to overcome. They had expected me to simply give up. But here I was, and any further barriers would surely prove as ready to fall. I smoothed my shirt and jacket and tidied my tie. In front of me, a woman was asking if she could get a refund on the last day because she had to leave earlier than expected. She wanted to stay but had to go. I considered giving her one of my business cards and telling her there was a way to get the benefit of the last day without actually attending. But it was probably better to keep a low profile.

A desk opened up. Behind it was a woman in her late thirties, with dark blond hair tied in a bun, a silk scarf around her neck and slightly too much makeup.
MANDY
, said the nametag on her dark blue blazer.

“Hi. My name is Neil Double. My conference pass has been revoked and I'd like to find out how to get it reinstated.”

Mandy gave me an appraising look, one that led me to wonder how often passes were revoked, and for what sins. In Mandy's eyes, I was clearly capable of unfathomable deviancy.

“May I see your pass?”

I took the laminated card from my jacket pocket and gave it to her. She passed it over a device on her desk.
Bip. Bee-baw
.

“Yes, this pass has been voided,” Mandy said.

This wasn't a surprise—what was a surprise was finding that the swollen knuckle of frustration in my chest had not been evaporated by the walk, but was bigger and heavier than ever.

“I know,” I said. “How do I get it unvoided?”

“We can't do that,” Mandy said. “I can't void a voiding. That's not possible.” She sounded mildly impatient, as if other, unvoided customers needed her attention and a void was asking her nonsensical questions about painting the sky another color.

I needed to be calm. “Why was it voided?”

“Any breach of the terms and conditions would render the pass void. This is all quite clear in the terms and conditions. You read and accepted the terms and conditions when you applied for a pass.”

“I might have accepted the terms and conditions, but I didn't read them. Nobody ever does.”

“You stated on the form that you had.”

“I ticked a box. And it wasn't even me, it was my office. Maybe they read the terms and conditions, I don't know. I could call them and ask?” No mobile phone. The woman had it. A pang of loss. “It's not important—can you just tell me why the pass was voided? What part of the terms and conditions did I breach?” I forced a smile, and it felt like twisting a coat hanger into the shape.

“I'm afraid I can't give you that information.”

“Aha! So there is information to give? Why can't you give it to me?”

Mandy's eyes flicked to her screen for a fraction of a second before returning to me. “It's Meetex policy not to share customer information with third parties.”

“But this is information about me! I'm the customer! There is no third party!”

“This information pertains to a customer. You are no longer a Meetex customer. It's data protection.”

“But it's my data! I'm the same person!”

“You are not a Meetex customer. If you were, you wouldn't want your private information shared with a stranger, would you?”

“I'm not a stranger! I'm the same person!”

While this exchange had been going on, the queue behind me had lengthened, and I became aware of increasing numbers of eyes on me. Worse, one of the black-jacketed security men had drifted away from his post by the entrance to the hall and was now watching me from a discreet distance.

“It's OK,” I said, quietly and reasonably. “I understand. But I need to sort this out. I would like to speak to Tom Laing. Would you call him for me?”

“I'm not sure he's available.”

“Find out, would you? Tell him Neil Double would like to talk with him. The least he can do is talk to me in person. Tell him he owes me that.”

Mandy stared at me, lips an over-painted line, an implacable outer surface betraying nothing of the professional algebra within. A server box analyzing my query. Without answering or taking her eyes off me, she reached for her phone and punched in four numbers.

“Abi? Is Tom Laing available?” She turned away from the desk and hunched over, presenting me with a blazered back, and I could not make out the exchange that followed. In less than a minute, though, she turned back and passed the phone handset to me.

“Mr. Double?” It was Laing.

“Mr. Laing. Not Mr. Graham?”

“I'm a busy man, Mr. Double.”

“Thank you for speaking with me. I am being denied entry to your conference and, as a paying customer, I would like to know why.”

A sigh. “I should have thought the answer to that was obvious.”

Mandy was shooing me to one side, pulling the coiled flex of the phone over her computer monitor so she could deal with the man queuing behind me. This man—older, haughty, also blazer-wearing—stepped forward, glaring at me.

“Terms and conditions,” I said.

“Yeah, we'll find something in there,” Laing said. “It's all boilerplate legal stuff, there'll be something that means what we want it to mean: inappropriate conduct, activities contrary to our commercial interests, abuse of intellectual property . . . to be honest with you, I haven't read them. But you know why we can't let you in. It's your business. Conference surrogacy. We have to put a stop to that.”

“There's demand for it,” I said. “Huge demand. We serve a useful purpose.”

The event director laughed, a condescending saloon bar laugh. “Oh, I'm sure there's demand for it—I bet there's more demand than you imagine. Being able to get the value out of the conference without being there? It's brilliant. A brilliant proposition. I don't believe it, but many will, possibly enough to eat into our client base, and in the present environment . . . You're a tapeworm, son, and we've got to flush you out before you're ten foot long and we're starving to death.”

Son? Laing was, what, maybe ten years older than I was? His use of that word stalled me, and meant his description of me as a bowel-dwelling parasite took longer to sink in than it should have.

“I don't blame you for being scared when your whole industry is based on a lie,” I said. “This idea that you have to be somewhere in person, that you have to meet people face-to-face . . . it's crap. You make people feel as if they're missing out on something, and their only option is to spend one hundred fifty pounds a day half-asleep in a seminar. And people fall for it because they don't have much choice. Until now.”

“You don't sound like a man asking nicely to be readmitted to one of my events.”

“I am inevitable. That's what I'm saying. It was inevitable that someone would come up with an alternative to hanging round in sheds on the motorway, and now someone has. Give it ten years and there'll be conference-going robots, telepresence drones. All this fucking flesh-pressing will look as antiquated as semaphore. You'll be sucking up to conference surrogates because we'll be the warm, human alternative to wasp-sized camera-microphones. You need to get used to me.”

“Here's the thing,” Laing said, a harder edge to his voice, “I don't think you are inevitable, not at all. I think you will prove pretty easy to squash, mate. You're banned. You'll never again attend a conference or a trade fair organized by my company. And we'll be working with the industry's representative bodies to build a blacklist. Your name will be top of that list, son. We should be able to get you banned from every event in Western Europe. You're finished.”

“We'll use other names. My identity is unimportant. That's the whole idea.”

“I assumed you were using a fake name anyway. Mr. Double? Please. Next time you assume an identity try not to make it so obvious. It's one of the things that made us suspicious in the first place. And it won't work. Our databases are getting better and better. We can put a block on your company address and on the card it uses to pay. A new address and a new card for every event? That should slow you down. The next step is face-recognition software. It's almost there, improving every day. You will be stopped.”

I opened my mouth, but no sound emerged. I had the sense of a threshold being crossed—of moving out from under a shelter I had never even imagined existed into an exposed and wild place. No privacy. Known.

“Still there?” the event director asked. “We understand each other? I think it goes without saying that your request for readmittance is denied. Kindly do not waste any more of my time or my staff's time. Right?”

I didn't respond. Instead I handed the phone back over the desk. My ear was hot and sore—the handset had been pressed against it hard. Mandy was dealing with another conference attendee and did not see me proffering the phone. I let it drop from my fingers and it clattered against her keyboard and the surface of the desk before falling from view, onto the floor. Mandy and the woman she was dealing with stared at me, mouths open, censure written across their faces. And I meant to say something, maybe an apology or an excuse, but I had nothing, so I walked away, toward the exit.