The Way Inn Read Free Page B

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 center 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 center?”
    â€œNo, 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 center 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.
    â€œI 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 one another as neat as icons on a computer desktop. “The conference center is two minutes away, but you have to take a bus?”
    â€œThere’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.”
    â€œWhat 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 toward 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 realized 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 theaters, 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