Will Wiles - The Way Inn

‘Afternoon, old chap. I say, I didn’t take you off guard, did I?’

‘Jesus, Maurice,’ I said. ‘What the hell do you think you’re playing at?’

Maurice put up his hands. ‘Don’t shoot, commandant!’ He chuckled, a throaty, rasping gurgle. ‘Don’t know my own strength sometimes, it’s all the working out I do.’ Comic pause. ‘Working out if it’s time for a drink!’ The chuckle became a smoker’s laugh, and he broke his hands-up pose to wave me away, as if I was being a priceless wag.

‘You startled me,’ I said, stooping to pick up my bag.

‘So what’s in store next?’ Maurice asked, leaning over me to examine the map. I became uncomfortably aware of the proximity of my head to his crotch. The crease on his trouser legs was vestigial, its full line only suggested by the short stretches of it that remained, like a Roman road. ‘You going to “Emerging Threats”?’

‘Yes,’ I said, straightening. I wanted to curse. Trapped! It would be impossible to avoid sitting next to Maurice, and there was no way to skip it: ‘Emerging Threats to the Meetings Industry’ had, after all, been requested by a client. Sitting next to Maurice meant having to put up with his fidgeting, lip-smacking and sighing, and a playlist of either witless asides or snores. It had all happened before. And afterwards he would ask what I was doing next and if I said I was going back to the hotel there was a very real risk he would think that a fine idea and decide to follow me, and we would have to wait for a bus together and sit on it together, or I would have to spend time devising an escape plan, inventing meetings and urgent phone calls … the amount of additional energy all this would consume was, it seemed to me, almost unbearable. I wanted to lock the door of my hotel room, lie on the bed and think about nothing.

‘Bit of time, then,’ Maurice said, looking at his watch. ‘I’m glad I ran into you again actually, there’s something I keep forgetting to ask you. Do you have a card?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘A card, a business card. I’m sure you gave me one ages ago but’ – he rolled his eyes in such an exaggerated fashion that his whole head involved itself in the act – ‘of course I lost it.’

For a moment I considered denying Maurice one of my cards – it would be perfectly easy to claim that I hadn’t brought enough with me that morning and had already exhausted my supply – but I decided such a course was pointless. The cards were purposely inscrutable and were intended to be given out freely without concern. Just my name, the company name, an email address, a mailing address in the West End and the URL of our equally laconic website. I gave Maurice a card. He made a show of reading it.

‘Neil Double, associate, Convex,’ Maurice recited in a deliberately grand voice. ‘Ta. What is it you do again?’

‘Business information,’ I said. I am quite good at injecting a bored note into the answer, to suggest that nothing but a world of tedium lay beyond that description.

Maurice blinked like an owl. ‘What does that entail?’ he asked. ‘I’m sure you’ve told me all this before, sorry to be so dense, but I don’t think I’ve ever really got a firm handle on it. Strange, isn’t it, how you can know someone for years and never be clear what their line of work is?’

I smiled. There was no risk. ‘Aggregating business data sector-by-sector for the purposes of bespoke analysis.’

‘Right, right …’ Maurice said, his vague expression indicating I had successfully coated his curiosity with a layer of dust. ‘Great … Well, we had better get moving, I suppose. Aggregating to be done, eh?’

We started our trek towards the lecture hall. People streamed along the MetaCentre’s broad concourses and up and down the banks of escalators, redistributing themselves between venues. Homing in on the right room, narrowing the range of possible destinations, finding the right level, the right sector, the right group of facilities, I felt a rush of that peculiar, delightful sensation that comes in airports sometimes: of being an exotic particle allowed to pass through layers of filters, becoming more refined. Except that Maurice, a lump of baser stuff, was tagging along after me. And all the way, he kept up a monologue – inane business gossip, his opinions of the MetaCentre, what else he had seen that day and what he thought about it.

The lecture hall was larger than the previous one, with ranks of black-upholstered seats fanning out from a modest stage, where chairs and a lectern were set up. Almost half the seats were taken when we arrived, well ahead of the starting time, and most of the remainder filled as we waited for the session to begin. There was an expectant babble of conversation, although I wondered if that might be more due to the fact that everyone had just eaten – or drunk – their lunch, rather than due to any treat in store. I took the schedule from the information pack in my bag and examined it again, to see if there was anything particularly alluring about the talk. The title, ‘Emerging Threats’, was so ill-defined that it might have lent the event broad appeal. Next to the listing was the logo of Maurice’s magazine, Summit – it was a sponsor. He hadn’t mentioned that. I glanced at Maurice, who had seated himself next to me. He was staring into space, mouth slightly open, notebook and digital recorder on his lap. Like me, apart from the open mouth. He was uncharacteristically quiet, even focused.

Electronic rustling and bumping rose from the audio system: the three speakers had arrived on the stage and were being fitted with radio microphones. I closed my eyes and wondered how much of the discussion I could pick up through a drowse if I let myself slip into one. A grey-haired man was introducing the speakers – the usual panel-fodder from think tanks and trade bodies; middle-aged, male and stuffy. One of whom was very familiar. It took me some moments to establish that I really was looking at the person I thought it was, and while I stared at him, he found my eyes in the audience and smiled at me. It was Tom Graham, hands interlaced in his lap, legs crossed, sleek with satisfaction.

‘Last of all,’ the master of ceremonies said, reaching Tom, ‘a man who really needs no introduction – a fairs man through and through: Tom Laing, event director of Meetex.’

Applause.

‘Always the same old faces at these things.’

‘We must stop meeting like this.’

‘Small world.’

‘Groundhog day.’

‘Another day, another dollar.’

‘Are you here for the conference?’

‘Why else?’

‘All well?’

‘Fuck, stop, just stop, I can’t stand it.’

Adam and I felt the same way about male small talk: we hated it. He introduced me to the term ‘phatic utterance’, words said purely as social ritual, not to convey any real meaning: when you’re asked ‘how’s it going’ and not expected to reply. Noise, he said, useless noise; a waste of human bandwidth. Trim out all the phatic utterances and interaction could be made a lot more efficient. That was the way he thought, and I loved it. Away with all that hopeless banter and rib-jabbing. But we had turned this shared belief into our own form of banter – a private game, where, on running into each other, we would try to keep up the dismal phatic chitchat for as long as possible, repeating the same old clichés and phrases and saying as little as possible that was new or interesting until one of us cracked and stopped and we could talk about things that actually mattered.

‘That was quick.’

‘I can’t take any more small talk. I’ve just come from a funeral. My father died.’

‘Oh. I’m so sorry.’

‘ Bzzzt . Phatic.’