discomfort. Rosa/Rhoda’s expression was harder to read; mild offence? Social awkwardness? Disappointment, or even sexual jealousy? I hoped the latter, pleased by the possibility alone.
‘Neil made a friend last night,’ Maurice said. ‘I found him trying it on with this girl …’ he paused, eyes closed, hands raised, before turning to Rosa: ‘… excuse me, this woman … in the bar.’
‘Jesus, Maurice,’ I said, and then turning to Rosa and Phil: ‘I ran into someone I know last night and was chatting with her when Maurice showed up. Obviously, at the sight of him, she excused herself and went to bed.’
Maurice chuckled. ‘I don’t know. You looked pretty smitten. Didn’t mean to cock-block you.’
‘Jesus, Maurice.’
‘You’re a dark horse, Neil,’ Phil said.
‘Just a friend,’ I said, directing this remark mostly at Rosa/Rhoda.
‘Of course, of course,’ she said. Then she stood, holding up her phone like a get-out-of-conversation-free card. ‘Excuse me.’
‘So, what’s her name, then?’ Maurice asked. ‘Your friend.’
A sickening sense of disconnection rose in my throat. I didn’t know her name. Against astonishing odds I had re-encountered the one truly memorable stranger from the millions who pass through my sphere, and I had failed to ask her name or properly introduce myself. I had kept the contact temporary, disposable, when I could have done something to make it permanent. Maurice’s arrival in the bar had broken the spell between us, the momentary intimacy generated by the coincidence, before I had been able to capitalise on it. And now I was failing to answer Maurice’s question. He surely saw my hesitation and sense the blankness behind it.
‘Because you could ask the organisers, leave a message for her. They might be able to find her.’
‘She’s not here for the conference,’ I said, relieved that I could deviate from this line of questioning without lying.
‘Not here for the conference?’ Maurice said, now blinking exaggeratedly, pantomiming his surprise in case anyone missed it. All of Maurice’s expressions were exaggerated for dramatic effect. When not hamming it up, in moments he believed himself unobserved, his expression was one of innocent, neutral dimwittedness. ‘She must be the only person in this hotel who isn’t! Good God, what else is there to do out here?’
‘She works for Way Inn.’
‘Oh, right, chambermaid?’ Maurice said, and Phil barked a laugh.
I smiled tolerantly. ‘She finds sites for new hotels – so I suppose she’s checking out her handiwork.’
‘So she’s to blame,’ Phil said. ‘Does she always opt for the middle of nowhere?’
‘I think the conference centre and the airport had a lot to do with it.’
‘Aha, yes,’ Maurice said. Without warning, he lunged under the table and began to root about in his satchel. Then he re-emerged, holding a creased magazine folded open to a page marked with a sticky note. The magazine was Summit, Maurice’s employer, and the article was by him, about the MetaCentre. The headline was ANOTHER FINE MESSE.
‘I came here while they were building it,’ Maurice said. He prodded the picture, an aerial view of the centre, a white diamond surrounded by brown earth and the yellow lice of construction vehicles. ‘Hard-hat tour. It’s huge. Big on the outside, bigger on the inside: 115,000 square metres of enclosed space, 15,000 more than the ExCel Centre. Thousands of jobs, and a catalyst for thousands more. Regeneration, you know. Economic development.’
I heard her voice: enterprise zone, growth corridor, opportunity gateway. That lulling rhythm. I wanted to be back in my room.
‘Did you stay here?’ Phil asked.
‘Nah, flew in, flew out,’ Maurice said. ‘This place is brand new. Opened a week or two ago, for this conference I’m told.’
‘So they say,’ I said, just to make conversation, since there appeared to be no escaping it for the time being. To make conversation, to keep the bland social product rolling off the line, word shapes in place of meaning. While Phil again explained the unfinished state of the pedestrian bridge and our tragic reliance on buses, I focused on demolishing my breakfast. Maurice took the news about the buses quite well – an impressive performance of huffing and eye-rolling that did not appear to lead to any lasting grievance. ‘The thing is,’ he said, as if communicating some cosmic truth, ‘where there’s buses, there’s hanging around.’
There was no need for me to hang around. My coffee was finished, my debt to civility paid.
‘Excuse me,’ I said, and left the table.
Back in my room, housekeeping had not yet called, and the risen sun was doing little to cut through the atmospheric murk beyond the tinted windows. The unmade bed, the inert black slab of the television, the armchair with a shirt draped over it – these shapes seemed little more than sketched in the feeble light. Before dropping my keycard into the little wall-mounted slot, which would activate the lights and the rest of the room’s electronic comforts, I walked over to the window to look out. It wasn’t even possible to tell where the sun was. Shadowless damp sapped the colour from the near and obliterated the distant. The thick glass did nothing to help; instead it gave me a frisson of claustrophobia, of being sealed in. I looked at its frame, at all the complicated interlayers and the seals and spacers holding the thick panes in place: high-performance glass, insulating against sound and temperature, allowing the hotel to set its own perfect microclimate in each room.
A last look as I recrossed the small space – the brightest point in the room was the red digital display of the radio-alarm on the bedside table. I slid the card in the slot and the room came alive. Bulbs in clever recesses and behind earth-tone shades. Stock tickers streamed across the TV screen. In the bathroom, the ascending whirr of a fan. I brushed my teeth, stepping away from the sink to look at the painting over the desk, the only example of the hotel’s factory-made art in my room. The paintings in the bar had seemed so threatening last night – remembering the moment, the threat had come not from what lay within their frames but from the possibility of what lay outside them.
You have to look at the bigger picture, she said – and she meant it literally. If the paintings were simply scraps of a single giant canvas, they could be reassembled. And if they were reassembled, what picture formed? We were being fed, morsel by morsel, a grand design. ‘A representation of spatial relationships’ was how she described it. Her work, she said, involved sensing patterns in space – finding sites that were special confluences of abstract qualities, where the curving lines of a variety of economic, geographic and demographic variables converged. A kind of modern geomancy, a matter of instinct as much as calculation. She had a particular gift for seeing these patterns, any patterns. And the paintings formed a pattern. She was certain.
After midnight and after whisky, the idea found some traction with me. But in the morning, with the lights on, it sounded absurd. The artwork before me was simply banal, and I could not see that multiplying it would do anything but compound its banality. A chocolate-coloured mass filled the lower part of the frame, with an echoing, paler – let’s say latte – band around it or behind it, and a smaller, mocha arc to the upper left. Assigning astral significance to such a mundane composition was, frankly, more than simply eccentric, it was deranged. She had spent too long looking for auspicious sites and meaningful
