Will Wiles - The Way Inn

Maybe my father moved in that world, where things were actually happening. There was a provisional air to him, as if he was conserving himself for other purposes. Even when he was physically present, he conducted himself in absences. He smoked in the garden and made and received telephone calls, speaking low. I would listen, taking care that he did not see me, trying to learn about the other world from what he said when he thought no one was listening. But he spoke in code: Magneto, camshaft, exhaust manifold, powertrain, clutch. And, rarer, another code: Yes, special, away, not until, weekend, she, her, she, she.

I was missing something.

The other lift passengers and I debarked into a lobby that had filled with people: sitting on the couches, standing in groups, talking on or poking at phones. Normally these communal places – the lobbies, the foyers, the atria – are barely used, inhabited only fleetingly by people on their way elsewhere, checking in or out, perhaps alone on a sofa waiting for someone or something. To see the space at capacity, teeming with people, was curiously thrilling, like observing by chance a great natural migration. This was it: I was present for the main event, when the hotels were at capacity and the business centres hosted back-to-back video conferences with head offices all over the planet. I could see it all for what it was and what it wasn’t. Because even when thronged with people, the lobby is still uninhabited – it cannot really be occupied, this space, or made home; it is a channel people sluice through. Those people sitting on the sofas don’t make the furniture any more authentic than the maybe-virgin seat I had seen by the lift. The space isn’t for anyone. My younger self might have been troubled by this thought, that even the main event could not give the space purpose – but now I had come to realise that the sensation was simple existential paranoia. I recognised the limits of authenticity.

Where there are buses, there is hanging around; Maurice’s dictum was quite correct. The driveway outside the hotel was protected by a porte-cochère. Under this showy glass and steel canopy, three coaches idled while conference staff in high-visibility tabards pointed and bickered, and desultory clusters of dark-suited guests smoked and hunched against blasts of cold, wet wind. The buses were huge and shiny, gaudy in banana-skin livery; their doors were closed. Evidently a disagreement or communications breakdown was under way – the attendants listened with fraught attention to burbling walkie-talkies, staring at nothing, or shouted at and directed each other, or jogged about, or consulted clipboards, but nothing happened as a result of this pseudo-activity.

I was about to retreat behind the glass doors, back to the warmth and comfort of the lobby, when I spotted Rosa (or Rhoda) standing alone among the huddle waiting for the buses, cigarette in one hand, phone apparently fused to the other. She had put on a brightly coloured quilted jacket and seemed unbothered by the cold and the icy raindrops that the wind pushed under the shelter.

‘Hey,’ I said.

Rosa looked at me without obvious emotion, although her neutrality could be read as wariness. ‘Hey.’

‘What’s going on?’ I said, nodding in the direction of the buses, where frenzied stasis continued. She looked momentarily dejected, and shrugged. We would never know, of course. The cause of this sort of hold-up was rarely made clear, it was just more non-time, non-life, the texture of business travel. Hotel lobbies and airport lounges are built to contain these useless minutes and soothe them away with comfortable seats, agreeable lighting, soft music, mirrors and pot plants.

‘I’m sorry we didn’t get much of an opportunity to talk back there,’ I said. Rosa’s edge of frostiness towards me, her shrugs and monosyllables, bothered me. I was certain we had got on well in the past, and she seemed an excellent candidate for some conference sex, if we could get past this froideur . My failure to capitalise on the coincidence in the bar last night had left a sour aftertaste. Some sex would dispel that; it would divert me, at least. If Rosa reciprocated.

‘You seemed busy,’ she said.

‘Nothing important.’

‘Who was that man who joined us?’

‘Maurice? I thought you knew him. A reporter, for a trade magazine.’

‘I’ve seen him around.’

‘He’s hard to miss.’

‘A friend of yours?’

‘Not really.’

‘So this girl he mentioned …’

Sexual jealousy, was it? That was a promising sign.

‘You shouldn’t believe a word Maurice says,’ I said. ‘He was only trying to stir up trouble. I was having a drink with an acquaintance. You know how you keep running into the same people at these things. Which can be a very good thing.’

‘Yeah.’ I was rewarded with a shy smile. Pneumatics hissed – one of the buses was opening its doors at last.

I decided not to overplay my hand – there would be other opportunities. ‘Really good to see you again,’ I said. ‘Let’s talk later.’

‘Sure,’ she said. ‘I’d like that.’ Her mobile phone, briefly removed from the social mix, reappeared like a fluttering fan.

Boarding the bus, I felt heartened by the encounter. It wouldn’t be too difficult after all.

The bus filled quickly, but there was a further mysterious delay before it got moving. Still, it was warm and dry, and the throbbing engine was as soothing as the ocean. The air had a chemical bouquet – new, everything was new. I stared at the patterned moquette covering the seat in front of me. Blue and grey squares against another grey. Hidden messages, secret maps? No, just a computer-generated tessellation reiterating to infinity. People milling around outside. New tarmac. A woman sat in the seat next to mine; I appraised her with a half-glance and found little that interested me. She ignored me and thumbed her phone, her only resemblance to Rosa.

Movement. One of the organisers appeared at the front of the bus, craning her neck as if looking for someone among the passengers. The bus doors closed with a sigh; the organiser sat down. The engine changed its pitch and we moved off.

We drove along an access road parallel to the motorway. The motorway itself was hidden from view by a low ridge engineered to deaden the howl of the high-speed traffic. The beneficiaries of this landscaping were a row of chain hotels: the Way Inn behind us, ahead a Novotel, a Park Plaza and a Radisson Blu, all in the later stages of construction, surrounded by hoardings promising completion by the end of the year. Here was the delayed skywalk: an elegant glass-and-steel tube describing most of an arch over the access road, the ridge and the unseen motorway, but missing a central section, the exposed ends sutured with hazard-coloured plastic. On the Way Inn side of the road, the skywalk joined the beginnings of an enclosed pedestrian link between the hotels at the first-floor level. Eventually guests would be able to stroll to the MetaCentre in comfort, protected from the climate and the traffic, but only the Way Inn section was finished. Perhaps all this construction work was evidence of industry, investment, applied effort – but the scene was, as far as I could see, deserted. There were no other vehicles on the road.

Signs warned of an approaching junction and myriad available destinations. The bus circled the intersection, giving us a glimpse down on-ramps of the motorway beneath us, articulated lorries thundering through six lanes of filthy mist, and then of the old road, a petrol station’s bright obelisk, sheds, used cars. We didn’t take either of those routes. Instead the bus turned onto another access road, again parallel to the motorway, but on the opposite side. A vast object coalesced in the drizzle: eight immense white masts in two ranks of four suggesting the boundary of an area the size of a small town, high-tension steel crosshatching the air above. The MetaCentre. My first instinct was to laugh. For all its prodigious size and expense, and the giddying alignment of business and political interests it represented, there was something very basic about it. It was, in essence, a giant rectangular tent, with guy ropes strung from the masts supporting its roof, keeping the rain off the fair inside. Plus roads and parking. So there it was, the ace card for the economic planning of this whole region: a very big dry place that’s easy to get to. And easy to see – the white masts, as well as holding up the immense space-frame roof, were a landmark to be noticed at speed from the motorway; while from a circling plane, the white slab would glare among the dull grey and brown of its hinterland.