The Way Inn Read Free

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 program, 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 MetaCenter, 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 organizing 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 overgenerous 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