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‘So, Tom, why are you here?’
He jutted his bottom lip out and made a display of considering the question.
‘A friend told me about your service, and I wanted to find out more about it.’
Word of mouth, of course – we don’t advertise.
‘I meant,’ I said, ‘why are you here at the conference? Aren’t there places you would rather be? Back at the office, getting things done? At home with your family?’
‘Aha,’ Tom said. ‘I see where you’re going.’
‘Conferences and trade fairs are hugely costly,’ I said. ‘Tickets can cost more than £200, and on top of that you’ve got travel and hotel expenses, and up to a week of your valuable time. And for what? When businesses have to watch every penny, is that really an appropriate use of your resources?’
‘They can be very useful.’
‘Absolutely. But can you honestly say you enjoy them? The flights, the buses, the queues, the crowds, the bad food, the dull hotels?’
Tom didn’t answer. His expression was curious – not interested so much as appraising. I had an unsettling feeling that I had seen him before.
I continued. ‘What if there was a way of getting the useful parts of a conference – the vitamins, the nutritious tidbits of information that justify the whole experience – and stripping out all the bloat and the boredom?’
‘Is there?’
‘Yes. That’s what my company does.’
I am a conference surrogate. I go to these conferences and trade fairs so you don’t have to. You can stay snug at home or in the office and when the conference is over you’ll get a tailored report from me containing everything of value you might have derived from three days in a hinterland hotel. What these people crave is insight, the fresh or illuminating perspective. Adam’s research had shown that people only needed to gather one original insight per day to feel a conference had been worthwhile. These insights were small beer, such as ‘printer companies make their money selling ink, not printers’ or ‘praise in public, criticise in private’. But if Graham got back from a three-day conference with three or four of those ready to trot out in meetings, he’d feel the time had been well spent. That might sound like a very small return on investment, and it is, but these are the same people who will happily gnaw through cubic metres of airport-bookshop management tome in order to glean the three rules of this and seven secrets of that. Above those eye-catching brain sparkles, a handful of tips, trends and rumours is all that sticks in the memory from these events, and they can get that from my report, plus any specific information they request. Want to know what a particular company is launching this year? Easy. Want a couple of colourful anecdotes that will give others the impression you were at the event? Done. Just want to be reassured that you didn’t miss anything? My speciality.
And if you want to meet people at the conference, be there in person, look people in the eye and press the flesh – well, we can provide that as well. I’ll go in your place. Companies use serviced office space on short lets, the exhibitors here have got models standing in for employees and they use stock photography to illustrate what they do. That pretty girl wearing the headset on the corporate website? Convex can provide the same professional service in personal-presence surrogacy. We can provide a physical, presentable avatar to represent you. Me. And I can represent dozens of clients at once for the price of one ticket and one hotel room, passing on the savings to the client.
Of course I still have to deal with the rigmarole of actual attendance, but the difference is that I love it. Permanent migration from fair to fair, conference to conference: this is the life I sought, the job I realised I had been born to do as soon as Adam explained his idea to me, at a conference, three years ago. It is not that I like conferences and trade fairs in themselves – they can be diverting, but often they are dreary. In their specifics, I can take them or leave them – indeed, I have to, when I am with machine-tools manufacturers one day and grocers the next. But I revel in their generalities – the hotels, the flights, the pervasive anonymity and the licence that comes with that. I love to float in that world, unidentified, working to my own agenda. And out of all those generalities I love hotels the most: their discretion, their solicitude, their sense of insulation and isolation. The global hotel chains are the archipelago I call home. People say that they are lonely places, but for me that simply means that they are places where only my needs are important, and that my comfort is the highest achievement our technological civilisation can aspire to. When surrounded by yammering nonentities, solitude is far from undesirable. Around me, tens of thousands are trooping through the concourses of the MetaCentre, and my cube of private space on the other side of the motorway has an obvious charm.
Tom Graham appeared to be intrigued by conference surrogacy, and asked a few detailed questions about procedures and fees, but it was hard to tell if he would become a client or not. And if he did sign up, I wouldn’t necessarily know. Discretion was fundamental to Adam’s vision for our young profession – clients’ names were strictly controlled even within the company, as a courtesy to any executives who might prefer their colleagues not know that someone was doing their homework for them. Today, for instance, I knew that clients had requested I attend two sessions, one at 11.30 and one at 2.30, but I had no idea who or why. After the second session, my time would be my own – I could slip back to the hotel for a few hours of leisure before the party in the evening.
A few hours of leisure … The thought of my peaceful room, its well-tuned lighting, its television and radio, filled me with a sense of longing, the strength of which surprised me. It was almost a yearning. Right now, I imagined, a chambermaid would be arranging the sheets and replacing the towel and shower gel I had used. Smoothing and wiping. Emptying and refilling. Arranging and removing. Making ready.
Also, a return to the hotel would give me another chance to encounter the redheaded woman – a slim chance, but it was an encounter I was ever more keen to contrive. Her continual reappearance in my thoughts was curious to me, and almost troubling – a sensation similar to being unsure if I had locked my room door after I left. Her shtick about the paintings might have been a sign that she was a miniature or two short of a minibar, but it had only increased her mystique. She was unusual – of course, that had been obvious the first time I saw her, years ago. Beautiful, too. And there was something about the rapture with which she described the potential of the motorway site, its existence at the nexus of intangible economic forces … she knew these places, she had some deeper understanding of them.
After I had said my goodbyes to Tom and left the muffled solemnity of the Grey Labyrinth, the jangling noise and distraction of the fair were unwelcome, so I fled into the conference wing to find the first session. There, I found some peace. The seats were comfortable, the lighting was dimmed for the speaker’s slides. It was straightforward stuff: business travel trends in the age of austerity. I jotted down a few of the facts and statistics that were thrown out. Tighter cashflow, fewer, shorter business trips and less risk-taking meant potential gains for the budget hotels. Michelin stars in the restaurant and the latest crosstrainers in the gym were much less important than reliable wifi, easy check-in and a quiet room. Good times for Way Inn, and for me. It was reassuring, almost restful, stuff. For some of the session, I was able to come close to drowsing, letting my eyelids become heavy and enjoying being off my feet. The end of the talk was almost a disappointment. Applause was hearty.
I was beginning to feel that a peaceful routine had been restored – a sensation that was a surprise to me, because until that point I had not realised that my routine had been disrupted. Maybe I wasn’t getting enough sleep. Maybe, instead of pursuing Rosa or the redheaded woman into the night, I should get to bed early, spend some quality time in the company of freshly laundered hotel linen.
But first, lunch. There were various places to eat in the MetaCentre, and like an airport or an out-of-town shopping centre – anywhere with a captive audience, in fact – they were all likely to be overpriced and uninspiring. Rejecting branded coffee shops and burger joints, I headed for the main brasserie. In less image-conscious times, this would simply be called a canteen: big, bright and loud, serving batch-prepared food from stainless-steel basins under long metres of sneezeguard. A hot, wet tray taken from a spring-loaded pile and pushed along waist-height metal rails; a can of fizzy drink from a chiller, a cube of moussaka from a slab the size of a yoga mat; green salad in a transparent plastic blister. It might sound awful, but it was fine, really, just fine. I was eating alone and had no desire to linger – there was no need for me to be delighted by exotic or subtle flavours, and any attempt to pamper me would surely have been a delay and a provocation. It was good, simple, efficient, repeatable, forgettable. For entertainment, I sorted through some of the fliers and cards I had picked up from the fair. To carry these, I had brought my own tote bag, one from a fair last year which had unusually low-key branding. In my line of work, you never run short of totes.
In the MetaCentre’s central hall, even within the perplexing grid of the fair, navigation was not too hard: giant signs suspended from the distant ceiling identified cardinal points, and if you somehow managed to really, truly lose your sense of where you were, you could simply walk towards the edge of the hall and work your way around from there. In the wings of the centre, formidable buildings in themselves, a little more spatial awareness was needed. To find the venue of the second session on my schedule for the day, I had to consult one of the information boards that stood helpfully at junctions in the miles of passage and concourse. Before me, the conference wing was sliced into its three floors, splayed out like different cuts at the butcher’s and gaily colour-coded. I began to plot my course from the brasserie to the correct auditorium: Meta South, east concourse, S3 escalators …
This locative reverie was obliterated by a hard, flat blow between my shoulder blades, delivered with enough force to knock the strap of my tote bag from my shoulder. I wheeled around, part ready to launch a retaliatory punch even as I experienced sheer unalloyed bafflement that anybody could be so assailed in a public place, in daylight. What greeted me was a wobbly smile, wrinkled linen and strands of blond hair clinging to a pink brow.
‘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.’
‘Damn! Checkmate, really. What else is there to say?’
‘It’s OK. I didn’t know him very well, my parents divorced and he travelled a lot.’
‘And you thought: that’s the life for me?’
I laughed. ‘Yeah, kind of.’
When I met Adam, before he founded Convex, I worked for a firm of cost consultants in the construction industry. They specialised in ‘value engineering’: professional corner-cutting, driving down the expense of projects by simplifying designs and substituting cheaper materials. When a building is completed and only barely resembles the promotional images revealed by the architects years before – more plain, more clunky, more drab; graceful curves turned into awkward corners; shining titanium and crystalline glass replaced with dull panels of indeterminate plasticky material – then my old firm, or one like it, has been wielding its shabby art.
Ugly work, literally. I preferred not to reflect on it, and I focused hard on my particular minor role, which was to scour trade fairs for those cheaper materials. What could stand in for stone, what would do in place of copper, what was the bargain-basement equivalent of hardwood? All my life I have been interested in what the world was truly made from; if not all my life, then at least from the very early age when – looking at the chipped edge of a table at home, a wood-grain veneer over a crumbling, splintery inner substance – I discovered that surfaces were often lies.
‘Fake walnut interior,’ my father once said to someone over the phone, winking merrily to me as he did so, letting me in on a joke I did not understand. ‘Better than the real thing.’ It was years before I connected this remark to cars, years spent wondering why someone would fake the interior of a walnut, and how the results could possibly improve on an actual walnut. Years of imagining tiny fabulous jewelled sculptures in walnut shells, not inexpensive automobiles. Then years of suspicion in cars. Real or fake? Suspicion everywhere, which eventually gave way to fascination.
I trawled the fairs, learning the trade names of all the different kinds of composite panels, all of which looked alike and inscrutable – cheap façade materials having gone from fiction to encryption, no longer pretending to be something else and instead trying to be unidentifiable. At one of the fairs I met Adam. He worked for a trend-forecasting company, in the normal course of things a world away from builders’ merchants and anodised zinc cladding. This company built meticulous indexes of every last shoe and shawl shown by every label at every fashion week, databases you could subscribe to and see exactly who had launched what and not have to sit through endless catwalk shows. The company had dreams – wild and hopeless dreams – of doing the same for construction materials, and Adam was part of the team building this library of Babel for uPVC drainpipes.
It was a tedious waste of time, and he knew it; but it had given him the idea for conference surrogacy. ‘One man representing thirty, forty executives – imagine the savings! All this sentimental bullshit that gets dished out about face-to-face, firm handshakes, eye-to-eye … all these body parts that are supposedly so important … it’s all just so …’ He reached for an insult. ‘… So fucking analogue.’
When he quit the trend analysts to set up Convex, I joined him. The thirty thousand pounds I inherited from my father, that joined too, invested in the business. It was all I had and, with a value-engineered salary mostly paying for a one-bedroom flat, and none of the clubbability that men like Laing have, it was all I had been likely to have, ever.
Once the discussion started, Laing stopped staring at me to join in. I was too distracted by his presence on the stage to listen to what was being said. Graham was a false name; Graham was Laing; and Laing was the man behind Meetex, the man who had found exhibitors for the fair and set the programme for the conference. Why would he want to know about conference surrogacy? He had to be here; it was his gig. If anyone loved fairs and conferences, it was him. I knew where I had seen him before now: not from personal acquaintance, but in photographs – photographs in the welcome pack, photographs in Summit, photographs everywhere. Laing shaking hands, Laing cutting ribbons. He was a true believer, and I had told him about Convex. It was unnerving.
The panel were discussing intellectual property. Businesses in the Far East were sending people to trade fairs to photograph the products and fill wheelbarrows with brochures, so they could manufacture knock-off products based on the information. Furniture and consumer goods manufacturers were worried – could anything be done to protect them from the copycats? Laing had not made a contribution for a while. Then he leaned in and spoke.
‘It’s not just our exhibitors who should be concerned about piracy,’ he said. ‘We should as well. Conference pirates exist. They exist, and they’re here now.’
A murmur of uneasy amusement passed through the audience. Maurice flipped his notebook over to a fresh page.
‘I’m quite serious,’ Laing said, addressing the hall. ‘Conference pirates. I met one earlier today.’ He had been scanning the audience, and as he said this his eyes fixed on me.
My first instinct was to laugh. Pirate – it was absurd. The modern meanings of the term – downloaders and desperate Somalians and Swedish political parties – were well known to me. But all the event director’s invocation of it generated for me was a burst of kitsch imagery: peg legs, parrots, rum, X marks the spot. Not me at all.
‘He works for a company called Convex,’ Laing continued. ‘They say they can give their customers the benefit of attending a conference without actually having to attend. They send someone in your place – a double, let’s say. And it costs less than attending the conference because this … double … can represent several people. You get a report. Meanwhile we only sell one ticket where we might have sold ten or twenty – it’s our customers being skimmed off. And they denigrate the conference industry, say that conferences are a waste of everyone’s time, while selling a substandard product in our name.’
All this time, Laing had stared me, and I began to fear that others in the hall might be figuring out who he was talking about. One other pair of eyes was certainly on me: Maurice was rapt.
Laing’s attention flicked away from me. He was warming to his theme, wallowing in his own righteousness, letting his oration build to a courtroom climax. ‘Lawful or not,’ he said, high colour apparent in his cheeks, ‘this practice, this so-called conference surrogacy, is piggybacking on the hard work of others in order to make a quick profit – which is on a natural moral level dubious, unhealthy, unethical and simply wrong!’
I was being prosecuted. Unable to respond, I wriggled in my seat and felt my own colour rise to match Laing’s. How dare he! Flinging slurs around without giving me a space to reply, naming our company in particular – it was unbearable. I imagined springing to my feet, challenging Laing, giving him the cold, hard, facts right between the eyes. We identified a need and we are supplying a service that fulfils it. That’s the free market. If Laing’s events were more interesting, more useful, less time-consuming and less expensive, there would be no need for us. Conferences and trade fairs are almost always tedious in the extreme. People would pay good money to avoid going to them. They do pay good money – to me. All this moral outrage was just a smokescreen for the basic failure of his product. The muscles in my legs primed themselves. I was ready.
‘I’ve got to run,’ I whispered to Maurice. And with that I scuttled from the room. I have no idea if anyone other than Laing and Maurice even noticed.
From the lecture hall, I marched down one of the concourses of the MetaCentre conference wing, passing many people strolling between venues or talking in small groups, that damned yellow bag seemingly on every other shoulder. I felt extremely hot in the hands and face. I was moving without a destination clearly in mind, moving forward to keep the unsteadiness from stealing into my muscles. All I wanted was to clear the area of Emerging Threats before the hall emptied out; then, all I wanted was to be off the concourse, away from the other conference-goers, the sight of whom filled me with hatred. Laing had tricked me, and trapped me, and it was hard not to implicate everyone at Meetex in the deed.
When I saw the sign for some restrooms, I stopped. In the frosty fluorescent light of the toilets, I splashed cold water on my face, trying to get my surface temperature back down and gather myself together. A couple of other men were using the urinals and the other sinks – I ignored them, trying to weaponise the normal mutual invisibility pact that pertains at urinals so that they would literally disappear. There was no way they could have been in the same hall as me, no way they could have seen what just happened to me, but I still didn’t want them looking at me, the pirate gnawing away at their livelihoods. I looked at myself in the mirror above the sink, pale though not red-faced as I had feared, skin wet, a drop of water clinging to my chin. Tired, maybe. The tube lights flickered and stuttered – an item on a contractor’s to-do list, one of the hundreds of glitches that infest new buildings. Plasma rolled in the tubes. Sometimes it’s new buildings that have ghosts, not old ones; new buildings are not yet obedient. New buildings are not yet ready for us. I wanted to be back in my room at the Way Inn, and I realised that it was already that time. Leaving now was no kind of retreat; it was what I always planned to do.
In something like a trance I left the MetaCentre, its fire-minded evacuation conduits directing me without fuss to the departure point for the shuttle buses. Between the canopied assembly area outside the conference centre and the bus, there was the briefest moment of weather, something the planners of the site had made every effort to minimise but which still had to be momentarily sampled. It came as a shock after hours in the climate-controlled halls. The dead white sky was marbled with ugly grey, and in the coach the heater was running. Barely half a dozen other passengers accompanied me; the late-afternoon rush back to the hotels had yet to truly begin, and we got moving almost immediately. I sat slumping in my seat as my memories of what had just taken place flexed and froze. It was all malformed in my mind: instances running together with no clear impression of what had been said or what it meant. We passed through acres of empty car parks, like fields razed black after harvesting.
The sign for the Way Inn, a red neon roadside obelisk on an unplanted verge, was as welcome as the lights of a tavern on an ancient snow-covered mountainside. It was a breath of everywhere, offering the same uncomplicated rooms and bland carpet at similar rates in any one of hundreds of locations worldwide. On seeing it, I smiled, perhaps the first time I had smiled naturally all day. And then, as I tried to recall where I had stowed the keycard for my room, I realised that I had left my bag under the chair in the lecture hall. Nothing of great value was lost – my keycard, wallet, mobile phone and other significant personal possessions were all in my pockets. But the leaflets, press releases and advertising materials I had gathered, the price cards and fact sheets, and the Meetex information pack with its maps and timetables, were all gone. Would they be found and moved to a lost property office? Unlikely. Fliers and brochures look like litter in the slightest change of light. A day’s work thrown away – the bag had contained my pages of notes, too. I would have to cover much of the same ground again tomorrow. This was frustrating, even infuriating, but somehow it managed to refresh me. The debilitating tangle that had hobbled my thoughts was cut straight through by the loss, which felt somehow auspicious – a way of severing my connection to that catastrophe of a day and leaving it in the past. As I walked through the glass doors of the Way Inn, my mood was much restored.
The hotel lobby was almost empty. Flat-screens showed the news without sound. Behind their desk, the reception staff were chatting in lowered voices. Other than them and the handful of returning conference-goers – who drifted, unspeaking, towards the lifts and stairs – there were a couple of lone, suited men sitting in the blocky black leather-and-chrome armchairs, reading newspapers or studying laptops. No one sat at the Meetex registration table – the information packs, tote bags, lanyards and other bric-a-brac had been cleared away, and only the banner remained, now clearly false. You can no longer register here.
I took the stairs to the second floor, not wanting to find myself cooped up in a lift with any Meetex people. But when I reached my floor I became disoriented. It was not that the hallway was unfamiliar – on the contrary, it looked equally familiar in both directions, and I couldn’t readily tell which way lay my room, number 219. For a moment I tried to figure it out from where the lift stood in relation to the stairs in the lobby, and where I stood now, but it was not possible. I was thrown by the stairs’ dog-leg between floors, the way they doubled back on themselves to end above where they began. And I could not be at all certain of my other calculations regarding the relationship between my room and the lift shaft – walking casually, following signs to the lift, it was quite possible to make a turn without thinking, and certainly without remembering it. Ahead, opposite the stairs, windows looked out onto a courtyard containing one of those neat little Japanese meditation gardens. Across the courtyard was a row of windows, tinted metallic blue and opaque to me. This was definitely the courtyard that was next to reception – where was that in relation to my room? Was there more than one courtyard?
I picked a direction almost at random, relying on a sliver of instinct, and was rewarded with a promising ascent of room numbers – 210, 211, 212, 213. Between each door and the next hung an abstract painting, all from the same series – intersecting latte and mocha fields. The corridor took a right angle in one direction, and then in the opposite direction. Facing 220, beside a painting of a fudge-coloured disc barging into a porridgey expanse scattered with swollen chocolate drops, was 219. I inserted my keycard in the slot on the door lock and nothing happened. The little red light above the door handle remained red. The door was still locked, the handle was unmoving. I withdrew the card and tried again. Nothing. A lead pellet of frustration dropped in my stomach. I flipped the card over and inserted it again. The red light glowed insolently, refusing to turn green. I tried a fourth time, this time jiggling, cajoling, exercising force of will. The world, or at least my immediate surroundings, remained spectacularly unchanged – the red light; the immobile handle; the sleeping doors of the other rooms; the paintings; the faint perfume of cleaning fluid; the soft background hum of the hotel’s air conditioning, which to my ears now sounded a note of complacency, an indifference to the injustice of the world.
Irritated, I returned down the corridor to the stairs and descended to the lobby. The same suited men in the same armchairs, still reading the same newspapers. The staff at the front desk heard my purposeful approach and looked up, smiling benignly.
‘I’m locked out of my room,’ I said, flashing a brief, formal smile of my own. ‘My keycard doesn’t seem to want to work. It’s two-nineteen.’
The man behind the desk beamed at me. He was young, no more than early twenties, and wore – like all his colleagues – a long-sleeved red polo shirt with buttons at the collar and Way Inn embroidered in white over the breast. ‘This can happen sometimes,’ he said in accented English; Dutch, maybe. ‘Have you had your card in your pocket with perhaps your keys and your cellphone?’ Keish, shelfon. ‘The card can lose its magnetism. Please, let me see it.’
I gave the man the card. It disappeared from sight beneath the counter to be re-enchanted. Seconds passed, and I took in the reception desk. Above it, Way Inn was spelled out in bold perspex letters, lit red from behind. The desk was more a counter on my side, high enough that it required me to raise my elbows if I wanted to rest them on the dark, polished wood.
‘OK then,’ the young man said. ‘That should work just fine now – let’s go see.’ He stood, eagerly, my keycard still in his hand.
‘That’s really not necessary,’ I said. ‘I can let myself …’
But the helpful fellow was up and out from behind the desk, heading towards the rear of the lobby in a determined straight line. Watching the man’s back, I noted with dismay that he was aimed at the elevators rather than the stairs. ‘Surely the stairs …’ I began, again, but the man had pressed the button and smiled a prim little smile at me. We waited together, an awkward, chaste, moment. I tried to look as if I was preoccupied with matters of grave importance; the staffer looked up, as if blessed with X-ray vision and able to see the lift approaching through layers of concrete and breezeblocks.
‘Awful weather today,’ I said. I had to say something.
‘Awful,’ the young man said, shaking his head at the horror of it all. ‘It barely even got light, did it? And it’s already getting dark.’
The lift arrived and we stepped in together. Moody light, mirrored walls and soft music, like a tiny nightclub. Out of the lift on the second floor, the staffer walked briskly down the corridor, throwing my bearings again – I had wanted to see where I was in relation to the stairs, but missed the chance. At the door to 219, the staffer inserted the keycard into the box above the handle and was rewarded with an immediate green light and satisfying clunk. The handle turned and the door opened.
‘If you keep it away from your keys, your cellphone and your other cards, it should be just fine in future,’ the staffer said, handing back the card with one hand and holding the door open with the other.
‘Thanks,’ I said, stepping into my room and sticking the card into its niche in the wall. The room lights turned on.
‘No problem,’ said the young man with a little bow, hand behind his back and smiling broadly. And he turned sharply away, as if relishing the fact that this moment did not call for a tip. The front door closed.
While I had been at the centre, the room had been cleaned. The bedspread was as creaseless and immaculate as the icing on a wedding cake. My few belongings had been organised and now looked absurd and tawdry in the pristine room. A newspaper I had bought yesterday had been neatly placed next to my laptop on the desk, looking filthy and out of date. I had left yesterday’s clothes strewn across the bench at the foot of the bed – they were still there, but folded, their creases a source of shame. The shirt I had draped on the armchair had been placed on a lonely hanger in the wardrobe. On the bedside table, a small heap of crumpled scraps of paper and low-denomination coins was scrupulously untouched like an exhibit in a museum of low living. Everything about the scene suggested to me that the cleaner had been greatly dismayed by the poor quality of the clothes and possessions they had been forced to deal with, but had done their best.
