from a box beside her, but she had not offered one to me. A shrewd move on her part; I was pleased by her reading of my level of MetaCentre-tote-desire, which was clearly broadcasting at just the right pitch.
Breakfast was served in the restaurant, separated from the lobby by a sliding glazed wall. Flexible space, ready for expansion or division into a large number of different configurations. A long buffet table was loaded with pastries, bread, sliced fruit and cereals. Shiny steel containers sweated like steam-age robot wombs. Flat-screen TVs with the news on mute, subtitles appearing word by word. Current affairs karaoke. I poured coffee into an ungenerous cup from a pot warming next to jugs of orange, grapefruit and tomato juice, and put an apricot Danish and a fistful of sugar sachets on a plate. Then I started my hunt for somewhere to sit. Perhaps half of the seats were taken – lively conversation surrounded me. When a hotel is filled with people all attending the same conference, breakfast can present all sorts of diplomatic hurdles. I am rarely gregarious, and at breakfast time I am at my least social, always preferring to sit alone. This was in no way unusual – the hubbub disguised the fact that many of the diners here were alone, studying phones or newspapers or laptops. The first morning of an event can be the least social, before people fall into two-day friendships and ad hoc social bubbles. But I still had to be careful not to blank anyone who had come to recognise me. At other conferences, I might run into the same people once or twice a year. This one was different. These people I see all the time, everywhere; I am getting to know some of them; far worse, they are getting to know me. My detachment is a crucial part of what I do – these people don’t understand that. They love to think of themselves as a ‘community’; they thrive on ‘relationships’. No ‘community’ includes me. But try telling them that. Or rather, don’t try. Try telling them nothing. Adam had been most specific: keep a low profile.
But as I scanned the room looking for the right spot I realised, with a twinge of embarrassment, that I was not only looking out for people to politely evade – I was also trying to find the red-haired woman. But without luck. She was not in the restaurant.
A good spot presented itself. It was in a rank of small tables connected by a long banquette upholstered in white leather – a flexible seating arrangement, designed to suit both groups and lone diners. Two people I recognised were already sitting at one of the tables, and the chemistry of our acquaintance had about the right pH level. Phil’s company built the scanners that read bar codes and QR codes. We had talked at length before – it helps me to understand that sort of technology. His companion I knew less well – her name was Rosa or Rhoda, perhaps Rhonda, and she worked for a databasing service. I nodded to them as I sat, an acknowledgement carefully poised between amity and reserve. Let them make the first move. They smiled back, and their low-tempo conversation resumed. Were they sleeping together? Phil was at least fifteen years Rosa/Rhoda’s senior, and the ring finger of his left hand had shaped itself to his wedding band, but that meant almost nothing. Industry conventions dissolved other conventions. These events were often the Mardi Gras of their fiscal years: intervals of misrule, free zones where the usual professional and social boundaries were made fluid. At their worst they resembled the procreative frenzies of repressed aquatic creatures blessed with only one burst of heat per lifetime, seething with promiscuity and pursuit. And then, bleary-eyed, the attendees sat quietly on their planes and trains home, and opened their wallets not to buy more drinks, order oysters on room service or pay for another private dance, but to turn around the photos of their kids so they once again face outwards. What happened in Vegas, Milan, Shanghai, Luton, stayed there; it stayed where they had stayed, in Way Inn, Holiday Inn, Ibis, Sofitel, Hilton, where non-judgemental, faceless workers changed their sheets. But the body language between Phil and his companion didn’t support my hypothesis. Pretending to read the information pack I had been given, I watched them – I am of course adept at observing unobserved. There was no surreptitious touching, no encrypted smiles. They had the easy manner of friends, but they were talking business – data capture, facial recognition, RFID, retrieval technologies. Little of what they said conflicted with what I knew already.
Since I was staring at the conference programme, pretending to read it, I decided that I could divert some attention its way and give some thought to the day ahead. A couple of sessions on the timetable had been flagged up by my clients as mandatory – routine fare such as ‘The Austerity Conference’ and ‘Emerging Threats to the Meetings Industry’ – but it was always good to attend a few extra to get a rounded view of an event. No one expected a comprehensive report from every session – there were three halls of different sizes at the MetaCentre, with talks going on simultaneously in each, and further fringe events in function rooms in the hotels. All I needed was a sample. ‘Trap or Treat: Venue Contract Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them’. To avoid, I think. ‘China in Your Hands: Event Management in the Far East.’ That could be worth attending. By which, I don’t mean I expected to find it interesting – or that I did not. The things that interest me are not necessarily the things that will interest my clients. And these trade fair conferences are nearly always very boring. If they were not, I wouldn’t have a job. The boring-ness is what fascinates me. I soak it up: boring hotels, boring breakfasts, boring people, boring fucks, boring fairs, the boring seminars and roundtables and product demos and presentations and launches and plenary sessions and Pecha Kuchas, and then I … report. These people, the people sitting around me, the people whose work involves organising and planning the conferences I spend my life attending: if they knew what I was doing, and how I felt about what they did, they might not be pleased.
A tuft of polythene sprouted from a joint on the underside of my table. It had only just been unwrapped. That chemical smell rose from the white leather of the banquette, adulterated but not hidden by the breakfast aromas. Was it real leather or fake leather? Its softness under the fingertips, its over-generous tactility, felt fake, designed to approximate the better qualities of leather rather than actually possessing them, but I had no way of telling for sure. New leather, certainly. Everything new for a new hotel. Scores of identical chairs and tables. Multiplied across scores of identical hotels. It’s big business, making all those chairs and tables, ‘contract furniture’ they call it, carpet bought and sold by the square mile – and I attended those trade fairs and conferences too. If the leather was real, equipping all the hundreds of Way Inn hotels would mean bovine megadeath. But I remembered what the woman had said about the paintings in the bar, and thought instead of a single vast hide from a single unending animal …
That was why she was in the bar: she had been photographing the paintings. It was late, past midnight already, and I wanted a quick nightcap before going to my room. One of the night staff served me my whisky and returned to the lobby, where he chatted quietly with a colleague at the reception desk. I had registered that I was not alone in the darkened bar, but no more than that. What made me look up was the flash of her camera. I kept looking because I knew at once that I had seen her before – and, too exhausted for subtlety, I let the meter run out on my chance to gaze undetected, and she raised her head from her camera’s LCD display and saw me.
We had met before, I said – not met, exactly, but I had seen her before. She remembered the incident. How could she forget something like that? Naturally, as a mere spectator, I was not part of her memory of what had happened; I was just one of the background people. Her explanation of how she came to be there, in that state, made immediate, obvious sense, but left me embarrassed. To close the horrible chasm that had opened in the conversation, I asked why she was photographing the paintings.
A hobby, she said. The paintings were all over the hotel – in my room, here in the restaurant, out in the lobby, in the bar. And so it was in every Way Inn. They were all variations on an abstract theme: meshing coffee-coloured curves and bulging shapes, spheres within spheres, arcs, tangents, all inscrutable, suggestive of nothing. I had never really examined them – they were not there for admiring, they were there simply to occupy space without distracting or upsetting. They were an approximation of what a painting might look like, a stand-in for actual art. They worked best if they decorated without being noticed. All they had to do was show that someone had thought about the walls so that you, the guest, didn’t have to. An invitation not to be bothered. Now that she had drawn my attention to them,
