Will Wiles - The Way Inn

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 over-generous 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-coloured 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 centres, 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 towards 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 realised 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 centre 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 centre?’

‘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 centre 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 each other as neat as icons on a computer desktop. ‘The conference centre 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.