Will Wiles - The Way Inn

Behind Rosa, a familiar figure was lurching towards 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 realised 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 theatres, 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.’

‘I was very tired,’ I said, plainly.

‘Or,’ Maurice said, leaning deep into my precious bubble of personal space, ‘maybe you were in a hurry to find that girl’s room!’ He started to laugh at his own joke, a phlegmy smoker’s laugh.

‘No, no,’ I said. I am not good at banter. What is the origin of the ability to participate in and enjoy this essentially meaningless wrestle-talk? No doubt it was incubated by attentive fathering and close-knit workplaces, and I had little experience of either of those. At the conferences, I was forever seeing reunions of men – co-professionals, opposite numbers, former colleagues – who had not seen each other in months or years, and the small festivals of rib-prodding, back-slapping, insult and innuendo that ensued.

‘What’s this?’ Phil asked, clearly amused at my discomfort. Rosa/Rhoda’s expression was harder to read; mild offence? Social awkwardness? Disappointment, or even sexual jealousy? I hoped the latter, pleased by the possibility alone.

‘Neil made a friend last night,’ Maurice said. ‘I found him trying it on with this girl …’ he paused, eyes closed, hands raised, before turning to Rosa: ‘… excuse me, this woman … in the bar.’

‘Jesus, Maurice,’ I said, and then turning to Rosa and Phil: ‘I ran into someone I know last night and was chatting with her when Maurice showed up. Obviously, at the sight of him, she excused herself and went to bed.’

Maurice chuckled. ‘I don’t know. You looked pretty smitten. Didn’t mean to cock-block you.’

‘ Jesus , Maurice.’

‘You’re a dark horse, Neil,’ Phil said.

‘Just a friend,’ I said, directing this remark mostly at Rosa/Rhoda.

‘Of course, of course,’ she said. Then she stood, holding up her phone like a get-out-of-conversation-free card. ‘Excuse me.’

‘So, what’s her name, then?’ Maurice asked. ‘Your friend.’

A sickening sense of disconnection rose in my throat. I didn’t know her name. Against astonishing odds I had re-encountered the one truly memorable stranger from the millions who pass through my sphere, and I had failed to ask her name or properly introduce myself. I had kept the contact temporary, disposable, when I could have done something to make it permanent. Maurice’s arrival in the bar had broken the spell between us, the momentary intimacy generated by the coincidence, before I had been able to capitalise on it. And now I was failing to answer Maurice’s question. He surely saw my hesitation and sense the blankness behind it.

‘Because you could ask the organisers, leave a message for her. They might be able to find her.’

‘She’s not here for the conference,’ I said, relieved that I could deviate from this line of questioning without lying.

‘Not here for the conference?’ Maurice said, now blinking exaggeratedly, pantomiming his surprise in case anyone missed it. All of Maurice’s expressions were exaggerated for dramatic effect. When not hamming it up, in moments he believed himself unobserved, his expression was one of innocent, neutral dimwittedness. ‘She must be the only person in this hotel who isn’t! Good God, what else is there to do out here?’

‘She works for Way Inn.’

‘Oh, right, chambermaid?’ Maurice said, and Phil barked a laugh.

I smiled tolerantly. ‘She finds sites for new hotels – so I suppose she’s checking out her handiwork.’

‘So she’s to blame,’ Phil said. ‘Does she always opt for the middle of nowhere?’

‘I think the conference centre and the airport had a lot to do with it.’

‘Aha, yes,’ Maurice said. Without warning, he lunged under the table and began to root about in his satchel. Then he re-emerged, holding a creased magazine folded open to a page marked with a sticky note. The magazine was Summit , Maurice’s employer, and the article was by him, about the MetaCentre. The headline was ANOTHER FINE MESSE.

‘I came here while they were building it,’ Maurice said. He prodded the picture, an aerial view of the centre, a white diamond surrounded by brown earth and the yellow lice of construction vehicles. ‘Hard-hat tour. It’s huge. Big on the outside, bigger on the inside: 115,000 square metres of enclosed space, 15,000 more than the ExCel Centre. Thousands of jobs, and a catalyst for thousands more. Regeneration, you know. Economic development.’

I heard her voice: enterprise zone, growth corridor, opportunity gateway. That lulling rhythm. I wanted to be back in my room.

‘Did you stay here?’ Phil asked.

‘Nah, flew in, flew out,’ Maurice said. ‘This place is brand new. Opened a week or two ago, for this conference I’m told.’

‘So they say,’ I said, just to make conversation, since there appeared to be no escaping it for the time being. To make conversation, to keep the bland social product rolling off the line, word shapes in place of meaning. While Phil again explained the unfinished state of the pedestrian bridge and our tragic reliance on buses, I focused on demolishing my breakfast. Maurice took the news about the buses quite well – an impressive performance of huffing and eye-rolling that did not appear to lead to any lasting grievance. ‘The thing is,’ he said, as if communicating some cosmic truth, ‘where there’s buses, there’s hanging around .’

There was no need for me to hang around. My coffee was finished, my debt to civility paid.

‘Excuse me,’ I said, and left the table.