arrived, a well-stuffed BLT. The paper napkin that accompanied it would also have its day, its market share and prospects earnestly discussed at Caterex and Snackcon and Bulk Ply Paper Products Forum and Mouth Hygiene Expo. Once I had finished my sandwich, I showered, imagining many showers taking place in the hotel at that moment in the early evening, particulates from the MetaCentre and the motorway being washed from many bodies and swept into the drains beneath the Way Inn; all the new infrastructure that had so excited the redhead, the new connections being made and the exotic ridges and spikes of potential they generated on her maps and charts – development gateway, investment zone, emerging regional hub. As she said these phrases, these pert word couplings charged with promise and yet light on immediate meaning, a change had come over her. She had slipped from detachment into deep trance-like concentration. ‘Enterprise opportunity corridor … public-private gateway zone … motorway halo …’ A new link, a new pathway through cheap land; octopus-like journey-time diagrams flex and stretch out their tentacles, and the ground is sown with tax breaks and more infrastructure and superfast broadband and hey presto I’m taking a shower, eating BLTs and watching rolling news thirty feet above undistinguished frozen dirt.
My lift to the ground floor was shared with other party-goers. The doors, when they opened on my floor, burst a bubble of heavily perfumed air; three men in suits with slicked hair, two women in cocktail dresses, all doused in scent and aftershave. It looked crowded in the small compartment, and I indicated that I’d wait for another lift, but they laughed and huddled up together and coaxed me with homely quips like ‘Room for a small one!’ and ‘The more the merrier!’ They held the doors and would not depart without me, so I had to board. When the doors slid closed on us, the cube rapidly filled with volatile hydrocarbons and laughter. A sequinned rear end was pressed, by obligation of the close quarters, against my right thigh. Was I here for the conference, the owner of the rear end asked me. Of course, I said.
‘Of course he’s here for the conference, Jan!’ said one of the men. He was around my age and looked like ‘Hapless Dad’ from an advert for cleaning products, but here he was on form, in his element and revelling in it. ‘You’re going to the party, yeah?’
Yeah. The lift arrived in the lobby, the doors opening like a breach in a containment facility for hazardous materials under pressure. My companions in descent and I chatted as we joined the line of people filtering past clipboard-bearing PR brunettes into the party. They all worked together, naturally, in the kind of intimate environment that breeds in-jokes, so nothing more than a cryptic half-comment or a facial expression could set them all off laughing. Their purpose was to promote a provincial city, a ‘fast-emerging destination’ – there was a stand in the MetaCentre, had I seen it? I said I had probably been by, which was probably true, and that I would look out for it tomorrow. Don’t come by too early in the morning, they said, all laughing as one, before accusing each other of being intent on intoxicated mayhem, and of inability to moderate their alcohol consumption.
Normally I would expect to hate these people. I would find their ease with one another and with me intolerable and I would want to be elsewhere. But at this time I appreciated their temporary inclusion of me in their group. It was reassuring – there would be thousands of people here who were unaware of my ‘unmasking’ earlier, and who in all likelihood would care little if they heard of it. And this sense I felt of no longer being anonymous, no longer having to guard myself, was tantalising. Much as I like to be unknown, I was drawn towards candour as if the ground sloped that way. Our ideology, as a business, was after all to ease the flow of information.
The clipboards were closer now. My new friend from the provincial chamber of commerce asked me: ‘What brings you here?’
‘I’m a pirate,’ I said.
He enjoyed that, immediately wading into what he imagined was a joke on my part. ‘Oh yeah? Where’s your parrot, then?’
‘Upstairs. Flat battery.’
‘Eyepatch?’
‘Don’t need one. Laser eye surgery. It’s transformed piracy.’
He laughed. ‘What do you do then? Go around nicking other people’s ideas, or what?’
‘No, nothing like that. I’m a conference surrogate. If someone doesn’t want to go to an event like this, they pay me to go instead. Some people consider that piracy.’
Chamber of commerce digested this. ‘Doesn’t make a difference to us, I shouldn’t think.’
‘Yeah, that’s what I thought.’
‘So you go to conferences? That’s all? Nothing else?’
‘Nothing else.’
‘Are there lots of conference surrogates?’
‘As far as I know it’s just me. But the company I work for wants to expand. Are you interested?’
‘Not for me, mate,’ he said. Perhaps concerned that my feelings were hurt, he quickly clarified his remark. ‘I mean, we go to four or five of these things a year and they’re always a great time’ – he looked towards his colleagues, who had hurled themselves deep into the party, and who were already dancing together – ‘but they’re a getaway, you know? Something different. Doing nothing else would do my head in, quite frankly.’
I regarded him sympathetically. ‘I think it takes a particular kind of person,’ I said.
A rare kind of person. We were past the PRs, and I excused myself, telling chamber of commerce that there were people I should say hello to, releasing him to rejoin his colleagues. It occurred to me that the reason I found it hard to mix with the people I saw every day was that I didn’t see much of myself in them.
For the party, the hotel restaurant and bar had been combined – a sliding partition was all that separated them, and it had been pushed back to make one large space. Not for the first time, I admired the careful design of the hotel: its adaptability, its multiple possible configurations and reconfigurations, its promiscuity as a venue. Features refined through hundreds of repetitions of the same basic form. I took a glass of champagne from a passing tray, drained it swiftly, and found another, which I preserved. With this prop, I made an unhurried circuit of the room. The person I really wanted to see was Maurice – strange, after so long trying to avoid him – but his uncanny ability to manifest himself whenever I had no desire to see him had, it seemed, an unfortunate corollary: when actually needed, he was absent, or at least not apparent. There was free booze to be had, and he was nowhere. It defied reason.
The party was hosted by the Way Inn group and the promotional point was heavily made. WAY INN WELCOMES MEETEX read a banner that ran the length of the glass wall of the lobby. Fatty clusters of red balloons were suspended from the ceiling, each adorned with the Way Inn logo. In one corner a stand had been set up and a young woman sat behind it handing out fliers, USB sticks and ballpoint pens and other merch. I took a pen. A display related the history of the chain: America in the 1950s, giant cars, ranch-style motor courts, flamboyant neon-Aztec roadside signs, the development of the interstate highways. Then, nothing but growth, growth, growth – the end of the display, the end of history, was a map of the world freckled with red markers indicating Way Inn branches. Hundreds of markers on six continents, with coastal America and north-western Europe completely obscured. WAY INN EVERYWHERE, read the closing caption.
It was approaching nine already – I had spent longer lounging in my room than I had realised. The party had been going more than an hour and the ice was well broken – the air pulsated with chatter, laughter and amplified music, as if this mutual sound was a medium in which we all swam. In this buoyant scene, I could usually pass unnoticed, and would be
