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
