Will Wiles - The Way Inn

He would be at the party tonight, of course. The party. With so much looking back – dismantling, examining and reassembling the recent past – I had neglected to look forward. For a brief while I considered not going to the party. But that wouldn’t do – hiding away, acting as if I had something to be ashamed of, was not the way to behave. It would be business as usual. And I would have an opportunity to prove to myself that I remained anonymous. And besides, I wanted to go: my ego had taken a knock, and a few drinks and some flirting would set that right. There would be girls there, for sure. Things had been going pretty well with Rosa – maybe something could happen there tonight, and I could hang the Do Not Disturb sign on my door. That would certainly restore the natural balance of my interior ecosystem. The aggressive energy generated by Laing’s subterfuge had left me restless. I had obtained my day-long desire, to be back in my hotel room, and I was almost ready to leave it again.

After finishing the beer, I dozed on the bed, letting the painting on the wall in front of me focus and unfocus. An idea coalesced. My mobile phone was on the bedside table: I picked it up and used it to take a photograph of the painting on the wall. One more for the woman’s collection – one she could not have seen, because it was in a guest’s room, not a public area. If we did run into each other again, I would have something to say to her, a way to show interest in her pastime, and if she wanted the picture she would have to give me a mobile phone number or an email address. I would not lose contact with her again.

Around me, I could sense the hotel filling with life as people returned from the conference in greater numbers. Footsteps and fragments of muffled conversation sounded in the corridor. From the room next to mine, 217, I could hear music playing faintly through the wall, drifting in and out of the realm of perception in a way that was more distracting than if it came through loud and clear. I switched on the television. It had reset to the hotel welcome page, the smiling staff, the weather for tomorrow and the latest from the restaurant, which was ‘Closed for private party’. I turned to a news channel and ordered a sandwich from room service. Forty-five minutes to an hour – they were busy. I half-watched the news, which was fretting over a lacklustre economic statistic – a poker-faced little number representing the aggregate of thousands of individually bland decisions made in fabric-covered cubicles, all added together, up a fraction of a per cent, down a fraction of a per cent … while along the motorway, more and more boxes were built to accommodate those people and their nano-consequential impulses and resolutions, their planning, their decisions.

As a child, I marvelled at office blocks – what could they possibly find to do in all that space? Office interiors were generally such anti-climaxes, just desks and filing cabinets and telephones. I saw men in suits on the street and elsewhere and they only ever seemed to be talking or reading, never really doing anything – not like people driving trains or building buildings. There were so many of them, men and women, doing impossible-to-tell jobs. This impression was particularly forceful in unfamiliar cities where, I was amazed to discover, life also went on as normal, wrapped up in this arcane charade of offices and paper and neckties. On the occasions he was available for questioning, I would quiz my father, the only representative of this world I had at hand. ‘But what do you do ?’ I would wheedle and insist. Sell auto parts, he would say. But what do you do , I would repeat, meaning what actions does this involve, what is said and heard, how on earth can anyone fill days and weeks just doing that one thing, or any one thing? Maybe more detailed explanations were forthcoming but I don’t remember them, so they can’t have satisfied me. Or, depending on his mood, he would say that he put food on the table, and that was that. I asked my mother, too. Her answer was ‘he travels’, which was no answer at all. But I did not like to pursue enquiries about him with her; she became chilly before long, although it was some time before I realised that she was concealing her lack of knowledge, not a grand secret. Or perhaps that was the grand secret, that she knew so little about the man she’d married.

These questions – like my concerns about the actual substance of the world – at times bother me to this day. I can see from the world of trade fairs and conferences that every tiny thing has an industry behind it; all things from the grandest to the tiniest are backed by thousands of people in scores of competing companies resting their livelihoods on the rise or fall in sales of that thing, and having conferences and trade fairs devoted to the endeavours and future of their enterprise, which naturally they regard as central, pivotal and vital to the national interest. Conferences and trade fairs, for all their expansive rhetoric, were insular, introverted, exercises in commercial navel-gazing and solipsism. So what did it mean to attend all of them?

My food arrived, a well-stuffed BLT. The paper napkin that accompanied it would also have its day, its market share and prospects earnestly discussed at Caterex and Snackcon and Bulk Ply Paper Products Forum and Mouth Hygiene Expo. Once I had finished my sandwich, I showered, imagining many showers taking place in the hotel at that moment in the early evening, particulates from the MetaCentre and the motorway being washed from many bodies and swept into the drains beneath the Way Inn; all the new infrastructure that had so excited the redhead, the new connections being made and the exotic ridges and spikes of potential they generated on her maps and charts – development gateway, investment zone, emerging regional hub. As she said these phrases, these pert word couplings charged with promise and yet light on immediate meaning, a change had come over her. She had slipped from detachment into deep trance-like concentration. ‘Enterprise opportunity corridor … public-private gateway zone … motorway halo …’ A new link, a new pathway through cheap land; octopus-like journey-time diagrams flex and stretch out their tentacles, and the ground is sown with tax breaks and more infrastructure and superfast broadband and hey presto I’m taking a shower, eating BLTs and watching rolling news thirty feet above undistinguished frozen dirt.

My lift to the ground floor was shared with other party-goers. The doors, when they opened on my floor, burst a bubble of heavily perfumed air; three men in suits with slicked hair, two women in cocktail dresses, all doused in scent and aftershave. It looked crowded in the small compartment, and I indicated that I’d wait for another lift, but they laughed and huddled up together and coaxed me with homely quips like ‘Room for a small one!’ and ‘The more the merrier!’ They held the doors and would not depart without me, so I had to board. When the doors slid closed on us, the cube rapidly filled with volatile hydrocarbons and laughter. A sequinned rear end was pressed, by obligation of the close quarters, against my right thigh. Was I here for the conference, the owner of the rear end asked me. Of course, I said.

‘Of course he’s here for the conference, Jan!’ said one of the men. He was around my age and looked like ‘Hapless Dad’ from an advert for cleaning products, but here he was on form, in his element and revelling in it. ‘You’re going to the party, yeah?’

Yeah. The lift arrived in the lobby, the doors opening like a breach in a containment facility for hazardous materials under pressure. My companions in descent and I chatted as we joined the line of people filtering past clipboard-bearing PR brunettes into the party. They all worked together, naturally, in the kind of intimate environment that breeds in-jokes, so nothing more than a cryptic half-comment or a facial expression could set them all off laughing. Their purpose was to promote a provincial city, a ‘fast-emerging destination’ – there was a stand in the MetaCentre, had I seen it? I said I had probably been by, which was probably true, and that I would look out for it tomorrow. Don’t come by too early in the morning, they said, all laughing as one, before accusing each other of being intent on intoxicated mayhem, and of inability to moderate their alcohol consumption.