The Way Inn (19 page)

Outside, the rain was falling again. Wherever it had been all morning, it had returned reinforced and chilled. Umbrellas were on sale in the MetaCenter lobby: £10, hazard yellow, covered in Meetex logos and the emblems of sponsor organizations and trade bodies. Precisely the confederacy the event director intended to raise against me. Just no, no way.

By the time I reached section C of the MetaCenter car park, the rain had evenly saturated my jacket and the shirt underneath. I did not believe that I could get any more wet, but each additional step proved me wrong. At the height of the afternoon it was darker than dusk. A shuttle bus, passing me on its way to the hotel, seemed full of glowing smoke—its windows misted by its interior warmth, diffusing its interior light. At least the condensation made me invisible to its passengers. The new asphalt of the access road ran with water, as if even the puddles were fleeing for cover. Perhaps this was it, the end, and all the naked dirt landscaping would wash away, the tarmac would split and wear thin, and all the shiny new boxes would be swept into the channel of the motorway, draining toward the sea. Planes would circle like gulls above submerged runways.

I remember little of the walk back to the hotel. Waiting for the right moment to cross the on-ramp, blinking water from my eyes as headlights swept by, I realized that a suicidal person might accidentally kill themselves trying to get to the bridge to do the job properly. Did that still count as a suicide? What was on the other end of that phone number on the notices on the bridge? A reassuring voice, one who would tell you that everything was all right? That was a pleasing thought, and tempting, until it struck me that even if I wanted to call the number, I couldn't. The woman still had my phone.

The glowing red sign of the Way Inn, bright and blur-edged against the gloomy sky and through veils of rain, was my only source of comfort. The hotel was warm and dry. The hotel valued my custom and loyalty. The hotel wanted me.

A hotel shower, so hot my scalp crawled, the skin on my shoulders tingled and I felt a band tightening across my forehead, just under my hairline.

My jacket and shirt were soaked through—the jacket so much that its lowest edges were swollen and shining, laden with moisture. I put them both on hangers, but these were hookless, theft-proof, hotel hangers, so there was nowhere to hang them but in the wardrobe, where I feared lack of air might slow down their drying and leave them smelling moldy. After some prevarication, I left the door open. Steam from the shower and the hanging wet clothes made the room feel muggy and used. Lived in. The extractor fan in the bathroom whirred. The room had been cleaned in my absence, but there were too many of my possessions in it now for it to feel
truly
clean. A red baseball cap had been neatly placed on the plumped pillow of the bed. It took me a moment to figure out what it was and where it had come from—I had picked it up in the lobby when attempting to slip past the bus driver. That was three hours ago. It could have been months ago. The cap must have been left on the bed, found by the chambermaid and carefully relocated. Thought had gone into where to place it. And now I casually tossed it onto the armchair where some of my clothes were draped, and lay on the bed in my boxer shorts.

The scent of my underarm deodorant reached my nose. I had rolled it on after the shower without thinking too much about it, just routine. Why? For whom? Who was I going to see this afternoon?

Finished. I was finished. The event director's word. Banned. Blacklisted. Finished. But I was alive. My job was finished, maybe Adam's whole enterprise was finished—and with it my investment, destroying my one substantial asset—but I would go on.

No. It didn't seem possible. I knew it to be true, that my life would continue—no motorway bridge for me. But I couldn't picture it. Another job. A return to my flat in Docklands, a CV . . . What made it so hard to consider was that this near-future version of me, a very near-future version of me, was not doing
this
job. This job was ideally tailored to me. I would not have called it a good job, but it was the perfect job. And it was gone. Finished.

Into this bleak reverie, the clock radio injected a sudden chorus of modem burping and yelping and hissing—leakage from dying stars, planes of sense grinding against one another, mystery spectra made audible. My phone, I thought, and I tensed for the ringtone or the chime of a new message before recalling that it was gone, and feeling its loss all over again. I am told that grief works that way—the bereaved forget that someone is missing from their life, and a place or a joke or a book reminds them, and it's a new death all over again. And this continual forgetting and remembering is first suffered daily, perhaps even several times a day, their loss not a single blow against them but many blows; a volley of death, lasting for years, until remembering covers the forgetting.

So I am told, anyway. I had lost few people close to me—a couple of grandparents while too young to understand, an aunt and an uncle since, neither of whom I knew at all well, and whose passing necessitated dull trips to distant cities. The mountainous exception to this rule was the death of my father, and it had not matched up to that experience of forgetting and remembering. Our relationship was a varied catalogue of absences.

The worst of these was while he was still alive, after the end with my mother and before I left home. He was alive, somewhere, but I was obliged to behave as if he was not, as if in fact he had never existed. He was invoked only as a form of original sin, the basis of our family's fallen state. If he had visitation rights, they were not exercised. As my A-levels progressed and my departure from home to go to university approached, I insisted on a talk about his whereabouts and status. When it came, this talk was brief and unpleasant. I was told, not asked, not to communicate with him. There was no argument: just an immediate, silent resolution on my part to contact him as soon as I had the opportunity, and to keep the fact secret.

University gave me the cover I needed. At last I was beyond the bounds of home. After a modicum of amateur sleuthing—phone calls to employers—I had an email address, which I wrote to, incandescent with excitement. I forget what exactly it was I wanted, and it's possible I didn't know at the time, but I remember how desperately I wanted it. The want was pure and physical, almost painful. I yearned to have a complete, cohesive view of the man, something I had glimpsed only in fragments, and to have time with him; time enough, not snippets cut short. In place of trailers and clippings, I wanted the whole film.

Instead, I got more fragments. We exchanged emails that were basic in form and elusive in detail. Mine were little more than the outlines of the long, eloquent, moving messages I meant to send—I would fill three short paragraphs with news about my studies and then find it hard to expand on those. His replies, rather than supplying his own news, would offer acknowledgements of mine: Good to hear from you, son, that's great about the course, proud of you. He had settled in a distant, unfamiliar city, one where we had no family connections or history. A couple of times he came to visit me—we drank pints and ate a bland Sunday roast out of a freezer in a large, echoey pub near the railway station. It had remnants of a past glory—high ceilings and ornate glass, brass and moldings—but had been absorbed by a national brewery company that was part of an agribusiness multinational. English heritage by way of a Canadian-Swiss pesticide giant.

“Never drink in the pub nearest the railway station,” my father said. “I suppose that's the kind of advice I should have been giving you all along.”

Our conversations were monosyllabic, elliptic, phatic. Even when I was out of university, earning a living for myself, doing the kind of work I thought he would understand and respect, the signal passing between us faltered and carried little.

He absconded for good when I was in my late twenties, an ultimate absence.

The electronic gurgling and percussion from the clock radio showed no sign of abating. Hadn't I asked the front desk to fix or replace it? And still it chattered in that sickening, impossible way. My listlessness was abruptly supplanted by a furious energy. I swung off the bed, knelt down on my bare knees, and reached under the bedside table for the clock's plug.

The plug was not in the wall socket. It was lying on the floor beside it. I held it dumbly in my hand, as it dangled on its flex like a head on a broken neck. The radio buzzed and made coughing birdcall sounds—staticky tinfoil-feathered birds raised in wire-wool nests found in electricity substations. Power was clearly flowing within it—the clock face read 3:33, but the red glowing numbers pulsed on a slow beat, implying the device had lost power at some point and had reset to midnight. Was it half past three? That was quite plausible—my instinct was to check my phone, and I felt another incision of loss. Instead I turned on the TV.

WELCOME MR. DOUBLE

An angry black cloud shedding three blue drops of rain was the icon indicating today's weather. No kidding. It was the same for tomorrow, and for the “Weekend Prospect.” Tonight's special in the restaurant was spaghetti carbonara and the soup of the day was French onion. The time was 3:51. Close, then: Had the hotel staff been in to fix or replace it, thereby stopping the advance of the clock for twenty-two minutes? Or had it been left undisturbed since I unplugged it last night? If there was a hidden backup battery, as I had suspected earlier, it was a good one.

I picked up the clock to inspect it more closely and it squealed in response—the kind of noise a theremin might make if you gave it a nasty fright—before degenerating into a low growl.

WOWWwwwrrr . . .

This startled me and I almost dropped the clock. It was vibrating very slightly, a shiver I found innately distasteful and sinister. There was a removable panel on its underside but it was fastened with small screws. For a moment I was gripped by an urge to fling the clock across the room, to smash it and hear the noise it made then. Its continual gibbering was annoying enough, and the more time I spent with it, the more it perplexed and annoyed me. And there was another angle to my puzzlement, one I thought absurd, but one which nevertheless heightened my wish to be rid of the device: the undeniable note of fear I felt rising within myself.

I put the troubling object down, picked up the phone and called reception. A woman answered and I complained that my clock radio was still malfunctioning. She said someone would be right up.

Someone would be right up. Boxer shorts would not be appropriate. I put on my last full change of clothes, casual gear meant for travel and downtime: chinos, a blue shirt, a gray jumper. No knock at the door. I glanced at the clock radio, to see how much time had elapsed since I had made the call. The display still read 3:33.

Not possible. At least a minute had passed—and more like five or ten. 3:33. I stared at the screen. It was, I realized, not 3:33 that burned against the black plastic but 3 33, without a dot or a colon separating the hours and the minutes. By looking closely, I could make out the ghost recesses of the unlit elements in the display, and there were darkened dots between the hours and the minutes. Perhaps 3 33 wasn't a time at all, but a warning of a fault, like ERR on a calculator. A fault that could be guessed at and easily corrected. I knelt again and plugged the clock back in.

The warbling and whining ceased immediately. I came to my feet and looked again at the clock. Blinking before me was the time 12:00, a silent, obedient default. No need to set the time—one of the hotel staff would be up shortly, after all.

I was still staring at the radio when it emitted a loud, piercing electronic peal, causing me to jump. What now? Was this the alarm? I thought of the alarmed doors in the corridors, a whole hotel stitched together by twitching nerves and sensitive tendons. The woman's face behind safety glass, daring me to follow her.

The peal repeated. It wasn't the clock radio at all—it was the phone. I answered it.

“Mr. Double?” An unfamiliar voice, not John-Paul or the young things at the front desk—older, precise, mid-Atlantic.

“Yes?”

“I'm pleased to have caught you,” the voice said. “My name is Mr. Hilbert. I'm with the hotel. I wonder if you would be able to join me in the Gallery Room for a brief chat.”

“Excuse me?”

“The Gallery Room is part of the conference facilities available at this Way Inn. You will find it on the first floor, in the business suite. This will take no more than a few minutes of your time, I'm sure you must be busy.”

This last remark pained me like an insult. No, not busy, not busy at all. Nothing to do, in fact. Across the motorway the fair and conference would be going on without me. Was that the reason for this call? Adam knew what had happened and had cut short my stay at the Way Inn—my prepaid room was cancelled and I would have to leave, go home, go through the postmortem of my career in something like disgrace. Could my life unravel so completely so quickly? Was there so little to it?

“What is this concerning?” I asked. I realized that the very last thing I wanted to do was to leave the hotel. That would be the ultimate humiliation. Even if matters could not be patched up with the event director, I could not bear the idea of cutting short my stay. I wanted to enjoy this existence awhile longer if I could.

“We like to meet with our most loyal guests from time to time, to make sure we are doing everything we can for you,” the voice, Hilbert, said. “And you are a most loyal guest.”

I was weary. The day had drained me. “Is this necessary? I've never had a meeting like this before—it has been a very trying day, I would prefer—”

“Just a few minutes of your time,” Hilbert said, his clipped tone making the interruption with patrician assurance, as if he believed himself to be constitutionally incapable of rudeness. “I think you will be pleasantly surprised by the number of ways in which the hotel can come to your assistance and improve your stay. Ways you might not expect. Gallery Room, first floor. I'm there now.”