The Way Inn (2 page)

But as I scanned the room looking for the right spot I realized, with a twinge of embarrassment, that I was not only looking out for people to politely evade—I was also trying to find the red-haired woman. But without luck. She was not in the restaurant.

A good spot presented itself. It was in a rank of small tables connected by a long banquette upholstered in white leather—a flexible seating arrangement, designed to suit both groups and lone diners. Two people I recognized were already sitting at one of the tables, and the chemistry of our acquaintance had about the right pH level. Phil's company built the scanners that read bar codes and QR codes. We had talked at length before—it helps me to understand that sort of technology. His companion I knew less well—her name was Rosa or Rhoda, perhaps Rhonda, and she worked for a databasing service. I nodded to them as I sat, an acknowledgement carefully poised between amity and reserve. Let them make the first move. They smiled back, and their low-tempo conversation resumed. Were they sleeping together? Phil was at least fifteen years Rosa/Rhoda's senior, and the ring finger of his left hand had shaped itself to his wedding band, but that meant almost nothing. Industry conventions dissolved other conventions. These events were often the Mardi Gras of their fiscal years: intervals of misrule, free zones where the usual professional and social boundaries were made fluid. At their worst they resembled the procreative frenzies of repressed aquatic creatures blessed with only one burst of heat per lifetime, seething with promiscuity and pursuit. And then, bleary-eyed, the attendees sat quietly on their planes and trains home, and opened their wallets not to buy more drinks, order oysters on room service or pay for another private dance, but to turn around the photos of their kids so they once again face outward. What happened in Vegas, Milan, Shanghai, Luton, stayed there; it stayed where they had stayed, in Way Inn, Holiday Inn, Ibis, Sofitel, Hilton, where nonjudgmental, faceless workers changed their sheets. But the body language between Phil and his companion didn't support my hypothesis. Pretending to read the information pack I had been given, I watched them—I am of course adept at observing unobserved. There was no surreptitious touching, no encrypted smiles. They had the easy manner of friends, but they were talking business—data capture, facial recognition, RFID, retrieval technologies. Little of what they said conflicted with what I knew already.

Since I was staring at the conference program, pretending to read it, I decided that I could divert some attention its way and give some thought to the day ahead. A couple of sessions on the timetable had been flagged up by my clients as mandatory—routine fare such as “The Austerity Conference” and “Emerging Threats to the Meetings Industry”—but it was always good to attend a few extra to get a rounded view of an event. No one expected a comprehensive report from every session—there were three halls of different sizes at the MetaCenter, with talks going on simultaneously in each, and further fringe events in function rooms in the hotels. All I needed was a sample. “Trap or Treat: Venue Contract Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them.” To avoid, I think. “China in Your Hands: Event Management in the Far East.” That could be worth attending. By which, I don't mean I expected to find it interesting—or that I did not. The things that interest me are not necessarily the things that will interest my clients. And these trade fair conferences are nearly always very boring. If they were not, I wouldn't have a job. The boring-ness is what fascinates me. I soak it up: boring hotels, boring breakfasts, boring people, boring fucks, boring fairs, the boring seminars and roundtables and product demos and presentations and launches and plenary sessions and Pecha Kuchas, and then I . . . report. These people, the people sitting around me, the people whose work involves organizing and planning the conferences I spend my life attending: if they knew what I was doing, and how I felt about what they did, they might not be pleased.

A tuft of polythene sprouted from a joint on the underside of my table. It had only just been unwrapped. That chemical smell rose from the white leather of the banquette, adulterated but not hidden by the breakfast aromas. Was it real leather or fake leather? Its softness under the fingertips, its overgenerous tactility, felt fake, designed to approximate the better qualities of leather rather than actually possessing them, but I had no way of telling for sure. New leather, certainly. Everything new for a new hotel. Scores of identical chairs and tables. Multiplied across scores of identical hotels. It's big business, making all those chairs and tables, “contract furniture” they call it, carpet bought and sold by the square mile—and I attended those trade fairs and conferences too. If the leather was real, equipping all the hundreds of Way Inn hotels would mean bovine megadeath. But I remembered what the woman had said about the paintings in the bar, and thought instead of a single vast hide from a single unending animal . . .

That was why she was in the bar: she had been photographing the paintings. It was late, past midnight already, and I wanted a quick nightcap before going to my room. One of the night staff served me my whisky and returned to the lobby, where he chatted quietly with a colleague at the reception desk. I had registered that I was not alone in the darkened bar, but no more than that. What made me look up was the flash of her camera. I kept looking because I knew at once that I had seen her before—and, too exhausted for subtlety, I let the meter run out on my chance to gaze undetected, and she raised her head from her camera's LCD display and saw me.

We had met before, I said—not met, exactly, but I had seen her before. She remembered the incident. How could she forget something like that? Naturally, as a mere spectator, I was not part of her memory of what had happened; I was just one of the background people. Her explanation of how she came to be there, in that state, made immediate, obvious sense, but left me embarrassed. To close the horrible chasm that had opened in the conversation, I asked why she was photographing the paintings.

A hobby, she said. The paintings were all over the hotel—in my room, here in the restaurant, out in the lobby, in the bar. And so it was in every Way Inn. They were all variations on an abstract theme: meshing coffee-colored curves and bulging shapes, spheres within spheres, arcs, tangents, all inscrutable, suggestive of nothing. I had never really examined them—they were not there for admiring, they were there simply to occupy space without distracting or upsetting. They were an approximation of what a painting might look like, a stand-in for actual art. They worked best if they decorated without being noticed. All they had to do was show that someone had thought about the walls so that you, the guest, didn't have to. An invitation not to be bothered. Now that she had drawn my attention to them, I could see that she was right—they were everywhere. How many in total? I felt uncomfortable even asking.

“Thousands,” she had said, as if sharing a delicious secret. “Tens of thousands. More. Way Inn has more than five hundred locations worldwide. They never have fewer than one hundred rooms. Each room has at least one painting. Add communal spaces. Bars, restaurants, fitness centers, business suites, conference rooms, and of course the corridors . . . At least a hundred thousand paintings. I believe more.”

I could see why this was a calculation she delighted in sharing with people—the implications of it were extraordinary. Where did all the paintings come from? Who was painting them? With chairs, tables, carpets, light fixtures, there were factories—big business. But works of art? They weren't prints; you could see the brush marks in the paint. It was thoroughly beyond a single artist.

“There is no painter,” she said. “No one painter, anyway. It's an industrial process. There's a single vast canvas rolling out into a production line. Then it's cut up into pieces and framed.”

As she said this, she showed me the other photos on her camera, the blip-blip-blip of her progress through the memory card keeping time in her conversation. She was tall, taller than my six foot, and leaned over me as she did this, red hair falling toward me—a curiously intimate stance. The paintings flicked past on the little screen, bright in the gloom. The same neutral tones. The same bland curves and formations. Sepia psychedelia. A giant painting rolling off the production line like a slab of pastry, ready to be stamped into neat rectangles and framed and hung on the wall of a chain hotel . . . there was something squalid about it.

“Why?” I asked. “Why collect something that's made like that? What's so interesting about them?”

“Nothing, individually, nothing at all,” she said. “You have to see the bigger picture.”

“Late night?”

A second passed before I realized that I had been addressed, by Phil. His conversation with Rosa (or Rhoda) had lapsed. She prodded at her phone. Not really reading, not really listening, I had slipped into standby mode and was staring into space.

I made an effort to brighten. “Quite late,” I said. “I got here at midnight.” And then I had talked to the woman—for how long?—until Maurice detained me even later. Hotel bars, windowless and with only a short walk to your bed, made it easy to lose track of time.

“I got here yesterday morning,” Phil said. “We're exhibiting, so there was the usual last-minute panic . . . got to bed late myself. Slept well, though. Did you get a good room?”

“Yes,” I said. In truth I was indifferent to it, precisely as the anonymous designers had intended. Indifferent was good. “It's a new hotel.” The same faces, the same conversations. People like Phil—inoffensive, with few distinguishing characteristics and a name resonant with normality. The perfect name, in fact. Phil in the blanks. Once I put it to a Phil—not this Phil—that he had a default name, the name a child is left with after all the other names have been given out. He didn't take it well and retorted that the same could be said of my name, Neil. There was some truth to that.

Phil rolled his eyes. “Too new. Like one of those holiday-from-hell stories where the en suite is missing a wall and the fitness center is full of cement mixers.”

The hotel looked fine to me—obviously new, but running smoothly, as if it had been open for months or years. “There's a fitness center?”

“No, no,” Phil said. He stabbed a snot-green cube of melon with his fork, then thought better of it and left it on his plate. “I don't know. I'm talking about the skywalk. The hotel is finished, the conference center is finished, but the damn footbridge that's meant to link them together isn't done yet. So you have to take a bus to get to the fair.” The melon was lofted once more, and this time completed its journey into Phil. He gave me a disappointed look as he chewed.

“I don't understand,” I said, patting the information pack in front of me, a pack that contained a map of the conference facilities, lined up next to one another as neat as icons on a computer desktop. “The conference center is two minutes away, but you have to take a bus?”

“There's a bloody great motorway in the way,” Phil said. “No way around it but to drive. We spent half of yesterday in a bus or waiting for a bus.”

“What a bore,” I said. So it was; I was ready to bask in it. It's part of the texture of an event, and if it gets too much there is always something to distract me. In this case it was Rhoda, Rosa, whatever her name was, still plucking and probing at her phone, although with visibly waning enthusiasm, like a bird of prey becoming disenchanted with a rodent's corpse. Cropped hair, cute upturned nose—she was divertingly pretty and I remembered enjoying her company on previous occasions. If there was queuing and sitting in buses to be done, I would try to be near her while I was doing it. Sensing my attention, she looked up from her phone and smiled, a little warily.

Behind Rosa, a familiar figure was lurching toward the cereals. Maurice. It was a marvel he was up at all. The back of his beige jacket was a geological map of wrinkles from the hem to the armpits. Those were the same clothes he had been wearing last night, I realized in a moment of terror. I issued a silent prayer: please let him have showered. But maybe he wouldn't come over, maybe he would adhere to someone else today. He picked up a pastry, sniffed it and returned it to the pile. A cup of coffee and a plate were clasped together in his left hand, both tilting horribly. My appalled gaze drew the attention of Rosa, who turned to see what I was looking at—and at that moment Maurice raised his eyes from the buffet and saw us. We must have appeared welcoming. He whirled in the direction of our table like a gyre of litter propelled by a breeze. Despite his—our—late night, he glistened with energy, bonhomie, and sweat.

It pains me to admit it, but Maurice and I are in the same field. What we do is not similar.
We are not similar
. We simply inhabit the same ecosystem, in the way that a submarine containing Jacques Cousteau inhabits the same ecosystem as a sea slug. Maurice was a reporter for a trade magazine covering the conference industry, so I was forever finding myself sharing exhibition halls, lecture theaters, hotels, bars, restaurants, buses, trains and airports with him. And across this varied terrain, he was a continual, certain shambles, getting drunk, losing bags, forgetting passports, snoring on trains. But because we so often found ourselves proximal, Maurice had developed the impression that he and I were friends. He was monstrously mistaken on this point.

“Morning, morning all,” he said to us, setting his coffee and Danish-heaped plate on the table and sitting down opposite me. I smiled at him; whatever my private feelings about Maurice, however devoutly I might wish that he leave me alone, I had no desire to be openly hostile to him. He was an irritant, for sure, but no threat.

“Glad to see you down here, old man,” Maurice said to me, not allowing the outward flow of words to impede the inward flow of coffee and pastry. Crumbs flew. “I was concerned about you when we parted. You disappeared to bed double-quick. I thought you might pass in the night.”