had said, as if sharing a delicious secret. ‘Tens of thousands. More. Way Inn has more than five hundred locations worldwide. They never have fewer than one hundred rooms. Each room has at least one painting. Add communal spaces. Bars, restaurants, fitness centres, business suites, conference rooms, and of course the corridors … At least a hundred thousand paintings. I believe more.’
I could see why this was a calculation she delighted in sharing with people – the implications of it were extraordinary. Where did all the paintings come from? Who was painting them? With chairs, tables, carpets, light fixtures, there were factories – big business. But works of art? They weren’t prints; you could see the brush marks in the paint. It was thoroughly beyond a single artist.
‘There is no painter,’ she said. ‘No one painter, anyway. It’s an industrial process. There’s a single vast canvas rolling out into a production line. Then it’s cut up into pieces and framed.’
As she said this, she showed me the other photos on her camera, the blip-blip-blip of her progress through the memory card keeping time in her conversation. She was tall, taller than my six foot, and leaned over me as she did this, red hair falling towards me – a curiously intimate stance. The paintings flicked past on the little screen, bright in the gloom. The same neutral tones. The same bland curves and formations. Sepia psychedelia. A giant painting rolling off the production line like a slab of pastry, ready to be stamped into neat rectangles and framed and hung on the wall of a chain hotel … there was something squalid about it.
‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Why collect something that’s made like that? What’s so interesting about them?’
‘Nothing, individually, nothing at all,’ she said. ‘You have to see the bigger picture.’
‘Late night?’
A second passed before I realised that I had been addressed, by Phil. His conversation with Rosa (or Rhoda) had lapsed. She prodded at her phone. Not really reading, not really listening, I had slipped into standby mode and was staring into space.
I made an effort to brighten. ‘Quite late,’ I said. ‘I got here at midnight.’ And then I had talked to the woman – for how long? – until Maurice detained me even later. Hotel bars, windowless and with only a short walk to your bed, made it easy to lose track of time.
‘I got here yesterday morning,’ Phil said. ‘We’re exhibiting, so there was the usual last-minute panic … got to bed late myself. Slept well, though. Did you get a good room?’
‘Yes,’ I said. In truth I was indifferent to it, precisely as the anonymous designers had intended. Indifferent was good. ‘It’s a new hotel.’ The same faces, the same conversations. People like Phil – inoffensive, with few distinguishing characteristics and a name resonant with normality. The perfect name, in fact. Phil in the blanks. Once I put it to a Phil – not this Phil – that he had a default name, the name a child is left with after all the other names have been given out. He didn’t take it well and retorted that the same could be said of my name, Neil. There was some truth to that.
Phil rolled his eyes. ‘Too new. Like one of those holiday-from-hell stories where the en suite is missing a wall and the fitness centre is full of cement mixers.’
The hotel looked fine to me – obviously new, but running smoothly, as if it had been open for months or years. ‘There’s a fitness centre?’
‘No, no,’ Phil said. He stabbed a snot-green cube of melon with his fork, then thought better of it and left it on his plate. ‘I don’t know. I’m talking about the Skywalk. The hotel is finished, the conference centre is finished, but the damn footbridge that’s meant to link them together isn’t done yet. So you have to take a bus to get to the fair.’ The melon was lofted once more, and this time completed its journey into Phil. He gave me a disappointed look as he chewed.
‘I don’t understand,’ I said, patting the information pack in front of me, a pack that contained a map of the conference facilities, lined up next to each other as neat as icons on a computer desktop. ‘The conference centre is two minutes away, but you have to take a bus?’
‘There’s a bloody great motorway in the way,’ Phil said. ‘No way around it but to drive. We spent half of yesterday in a bus or waiting for a bus.’
‘What a bore,’ I said. So it was; I was ready to bask in it. It’s part of the texture of an event, and if it gets too much there is always something to distract me. In this case it was Rhoda, Rosa, whatever her name was, still plucking and probing at her phone, although with visibly waning enthusiasm, like a bird of prey becoming disenchanted with a rodent’s corpse. Cropped hair, cute upturned nose – she was divertingly pretty and I remembered enjoying her company on previous occasions. If there was queuing and sitting in buses to be done, I would try to be near her while I was doing it. Sensing my attention, she looked up from her phone and smiled, a little warily.
Behind Rosa, a familiar figure was lurching towards the cereals. Maurice. It was a marvel he was up at all. The back of his beige jacket was a geological map of wrinkles from the hem to the armpits. Those were the same clothes he had been wearing last night, I realised in a moment of terror. I issued a silent prayer: please let him have showered. But maybe he wouldn’t come over, maybe he would adhere to someone else today. He picked up a pastry, sniffed it and returned it to the pile. A cup of coffee and a plate were clasped together in his left hand, both tilting horribly. My appalled gaze drew the attention of Rosa, who turned to see what I was looking at – and at that moment Maurice raised his eyes from the buffet and saw us. We must have appeared welcoming. He whirled in the direction of our table like a gyre of litter propelled by a breeze. Despite his – our – late night, he glistened with energy, bonhomie, and sweat.
It pains me to admit it, but Maurice and I are in the same field. What we do is not similar. We are not similar. We simply inhabit the same ecosystem, in the way that a submarine containing Jacques Cousteau inhabits the same ecosystem as a sea slug. Maurice was a reporter for a trade magazine covering the conference industry, so I was forever finding myself sharing exhibition halls, lecture theatres, hotels, bars, restaurants, buses, trains and airports with him. And across this varied terrain, he was a continual, certain shambles, getting drunk, losing bags, forgetting passports, snoring on trains. But because we so often found ourselves proximal, Maurice had developed the impression that he and I were friends. He was monstrously mistaken on this point.
‘Morning, morning all,’ he said to us, setting his coffee and Danish-heaped plate on the table and sitting down opposite me. I smiled at him; whatever my private feelings about Maurice, however devoutly I might wish that he leave me alone, I had no desire to be openly hostile to him. He was an irritant, for sure, but no threat.
‘Glad to see you down here, old man,’ Maurice said to me, not allowing the outward flow of words to impede the inward flow of coffee and pastry. Crumbs flew. ‘I was concerned about you when we parted. You disappeared to bed double quick. I thought you might pass in the night.’
‘I was very tired,’ I said, plainly.
‘Or,’ Maurice said, leaning deep into my precious bubble of personal space, ‘maybe you were in a hurry to find that girl’s room!’ He started to laugh at his own joke, a phlegmy smoker’s laugh.
‘No, no,’ I said. I am not good at banter. What is the origin of the ability to participate in and enjoy this essentially meaningless wrestle-talk? No doubt it was incubated by attentive fathering and close-knit workplaces, and I had little experience of either of those. At the conferences, I was forever seeing reunions of men – co-professionals, opposite numbers, former colleagues – who had not seen each other in months or years, and
