Will Wiles - The Way Inn

And if you want to meet people at the conference, be there in person, look people in the eye and press the flesh – well, we can provide that as well. I’ll go in your place. Companies use serviced office space on short lets, the exhibitors here have got models standing in for employees and they use stock photography to illustrate what they do. That pretty girl wearing the headset on the corporate website? Convex can provide the same professional service in personal-presence surrogacy. We can provide a physical, presentable avatar to represent you. Me. And I can represent dozens of clients at once for the price of one ticket and one hotel room, passing on the savings to the client.

Of course I still have to deal with the rigmarole of actual attendance, but the difference is that I love it. Permanent migration from fair to fair, conference to conference: this is the life I sought, the job I realised I had been born to do as soon as Adam explained his idea to me, at a conference, three years ago. It is not that I like conferences and trade fairs in themselves – they can be diverting, but often they are dreary. In their specifics, I can take them or leave them – indeed, I have to, when I am with machine-tools manufacturers one day and grocers the next. But I revel in their generalities – the hotels, the flights, the pervasive anonymity and the licence that comes with that. I love to float in that world, unidentified, working to my own agenda. And out of all those generalities I love hotels the most: their discretion, their solicitude, their sense of insulation and isolation. The global hotel chains are the archipelago I call home. People say that they are lonely places, but for me that simply means that they are places where only my needs are important, and that my comfort is the highest achievement our technological civilisation can aspire to. When surrounded by yammering nonentities, solitude is far from undesirable. Around me, tens of thousands are trooping through the concourses of the MetaCentre, and my cube of private space on the other side of the motorway has an obvious charm.

Tom Graham appeared to be intrigued by conference surrogacy, and asked a few detailed questions about procedures and fees, but it was hard to tell if he would become a client or not. And if he did sign up, I wouldn’t necessarily know. Discretion was fundamental to Adam’s vision for our young profession – clients’ names were strictly controlled even within the company, as a courtesy to any executives who might prefer their colleagues not know that someone was doing their homework for them. Today, for instance, I knew that clients had requested I attend two sessions, one at 11.30 and one at 2.30, but I had no idea who or why. After the second session, my time would be my own – I could slip back to the hotel for a few hours of leisure before the party in the evening.

A few hours of leisure … The thought of my peaceful room, its well-tuned lighting, its television and radio, filled me with a sense of longing, the strength of which surprised me. It was almost a yearning. Right now, I imagined, a chambermaid would be arranging the sheets and replacing the towel and shower gel I had used. Smoothing and wiping. Emptying and refilling. Arranging and removing. Making ready.

Also, a return to the hotel would give me another chance to encounter the redheaded woman – a slim chance, but it was an encounter I was ever more keen to contrive. Her continual reappearance in my thoughts was curious to me, and almost troubling – a sensation similar to being unsure if I had locked my room door after I left. Her shtick about the paintings might have been a sign that she was a miniature or two short of a minibar, but it had only increased her mystique. She was unusual – of course, that had been obvious the first time I saw her, years ago. Beautiful, too. And there was something about the rapture with which she described the potential of the motorway site, its existence at the nexus of intangible economic forces … she knew these places, she had some deeper understanding of them.

After I had said my goodbyes to Tom and left the muffled solemnity of the Grey 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 cashflow, fewer, shorter business trips and less risk-taking meant potential gains for the budget hotels. Michelin stars in the restaurant and the latest crosstrainers 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 realised 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 MetaCentre, and like an airport or an out-of-town shopping centre – 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 metres of sneezeguard. 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 flavours, 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 MetaCentre’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 towards the edge of the hall and work your way around from there. In the wings of the centre, 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 colour-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.