by Will Wiles
These thoughts kept with me as I buttoned my shirt and fastened my belt. As I tied my tie, I went to the window to move my mind along; to address the day I was facing, not the day that had passed. The only credit that could be given to the weather was that it was an improvement on yesterday. A pale blot in the muesli-milk clouds betrayed the approximate position of the sun. Puddles wrinkled in the wind, but were not presently accepting new drops of rain. The streetlights were off. As I completed the knot at my neck, a plane descended into view, heavy and close and slow, easing itself into the airport. Only the faintest vibration sounded through the glass.
I was stalling—I knew it. I did not want to return to the MetaCenter, where the witnesses to my humiliation yesterday were all boxed up together. But I had to do my job. Just two more days, then this toxic concentration of people who knew me would be safely diffused into a more palatable, homeopathic solution. Until then, there were stands to visit, there was information to gather. It was a shame about the lost bag, and the duplication of effort it entailed, but at least I had a spare tote, from another conference last year, and I would not have to pick up one of the nauseating yellow MetaCenter bags.
When I left my room, I hung the “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door handle, turned to the “Please Clean My Room” side. The chambermaid was busy in another room; I did not see her, just the open door onto a stranger’s disordered sheets, her multistorey hygiene pantechnicon out in the hall, stacked with soaps and toilet rolls, a mobile fetish-altar for a religion based on cleanliness and making the past invisible. Complex, nonionic, surfactant scents rose from it like incense. The glimpse of another room, resembling mine but occupied by someone else, felt at once intrusive and utterly discreet, like seeing the open cavity of a body undergoing surgery, their face covered by green cloth. A vacuum cleaner was running, bumping against furniture. Power cords trailed along the floor. The lift, when I entered it, smelled of air freshener. The world was being made over. It raised my spirits. Everything that had happened yesterday—the event director’s trap, the disaster with Lucy, my distressed nighttime excursion—had all taken place in an earlier, prototypical universe, one that had been superseded by this latest, improved model.
Way Inn red had replaced MetaCenter yellow as the dominant color in the lobby. It was an improvement. The chain was taking maximum advantage of its captive audience and had set up a promotional stand where the registration desk had been yesterday. And it had clearly spent more on the effort than the conference center: there were wide-screen plasma TVs, freestanding displays, a cornucopia of merchandise and a couple of brand-enhancement agents in tight white T-shirts and red hot pants and baseball caps. With the morning mêlée long gone, these brand agent, booth babes, whatever, were underemployed, and one bounced toward me as I walked toward the exit.
“Attending Meetex, sir?”
“Yes,” I said. Of course, what else?
She thrust a flier into my hand. Big smile. “Way to go!”
“Thanks,” I said. The flier was hook-shaped so it could hang from a door handle, like the “Do Not Disturb” sign, but printed with details of the convention facilities available at Way Inn hotels: “THE PERFECT ENVIRONMENT FOR BUSINESS.” It folded out into a grid showing the different formats of space that the chain offered, and their availability and capacity at nearby locations: meeting room, theater, parliament, boardroom, U-shape, classroom, cabaret, reception, dinner, dinner-dance. A thesaurus of human congregation. The range of different configurations was so comprehensive, so varied, it was curiously deadening. It stamped on alternatives: this was all that was possible to achieve in a room. Another column gave the distance from each location to the nearest airport. “Way Inn, any way you want.”
The restaurant was being set up for lunch already, and the bar had opened with early trade from a few coffee-drinkers. Every trace of the party was gone, and the space it had occupied had been repartitioned and repurposed.
Outside, under the undulating glass canopy, a coach was waiting, door open to the curb. The sallow daylight carried no warmth and I hunched against the biting air. A short sit in a bus with its heaters on was a prospect I found unexpectedly pleasant. I hopped aboard nimbly and turned to find a seat, but was halted by the voice of the driver behind me.
“Excuse me!”
I turned. The driver was leaning out of his seat, craning around to see me, looking me up and down expectantly.
“Yes?” I said.
“D’you have your pass?”
I did—it was in my jacket pocket. I found it and handed it over. The driver scrutinized it with a level of care it had not been subjected to before. Then he took a gray plastic handheld device from a pocket in the door on his side of the bus and positioned it over the QR code on the pass.
Bip, said the device. Bee-baw.
The driver tried again. Bip. Bee-baw.
“This pass is voided, sir, I can’t let you travel.”
“What?”
“Your pass,” the driver said, louder and slower, disdain now clear in his eyes, “is voided. It’s been voided. You can’t come on board.”
“Voided?” I said. I couldn’t get a grasp on the word. It meant nothing to me.
“Voided. It’s void. You’ll have to get off the bus.” The driver’s expression blended boredom and implacability. His eyes were lidded. I felt the edge of coercion, the implicit possibility of force.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “It was fine yesterday, now you’re saying it’s invalid?”
“Voided, yeah,” the driver said.
“But it was fine yesterday,” I said.
“Yeah, well, since then it’s been voided.”
“This has to be a mistake,” I said. While we had been having this exchange, another conference-goer had arrived at the step of the bus and was waiting to board. I was blocking his way, and his patience was visibly diminishing. He clasped his credentials, bit his lip, looked tautly between the driver and me. I felt other eyes on me, from the seated passengers waiting for the shuttle to depart.
“This has to be a mistake,” I repeated. “I’ve paid for the whole three days.”
“Look,” the driver said, “all I know is I can’t let any voids on. You’ll have to get off. Go to registration, if it’s a mistake they’ll be able to sort it out.”
“How am I expected to get to registration if you won’t let me travel?” I said.
“That’s not my problem,” the driver said, the professional, customer-facing tone of synthetic respect gone from his voice, which was now pure civilian scorn. My invalid pass was clearly, as far as he was concerned, damning evidence of my degenerate character. “Please, get off the bus.”
“What about people who just arrived?” I asked, scenting a loophole. “They can’t register at the hotel, how are they expected to get to the show?”
“Preregistration guests can travel without a pass,” the driver said. “Courtesy service.”
“So that’s fine!” I said. “I’m going to reregister.”
“You can’t register. You’ve got a pass already,” the driver said, holding the laminated square up.
I snatched my pass from the driver and stuffed it into my pocket, catching a finger on its rough, unexpectedly sharp edge. “There! It’s gone. I don’t have a pass. I’m going to register.”
“Sir,” the driver said, his eyelids descending still farther, more dangerous blandness seeping into his voice, “you have a pass. I can’t let you travel with a voided pass.” Under their lids, his eyes dropped to my pocket. “I can see the ribbon.”
“But someone without a pass can travel?”
“Sir, if you’re going to get aggressive . . .”
I pulled myself in and spoke evenly. “I’m not getting aggressive, I just don’t know why I can’t come on this bus to get this . . . mistake fixed if you let everyone else travel.”
“Everyone else has a pass, or they don’t have a pass.”
“I have a pass!”
>
“Your pass has been voided.”
“This is crazy!”
“Sir—”
“I know, I know, I’m not getting aggressive,” I said, closing my eyes and rubbing my face.
“Excuse me!” The man waiting to board the bus broke in. The driver beckoned him on, paying only the slightest attention to his pass. Another passenger followed. They squeezed past me without much consideration.
“I’m not starting the bus with you on board,” the driver said. I heard an exaggerated sigh behind me, and a loud tut.
“So what do I do?” I knew I had lost.
“Call the organizers, I suppose,” the driver said, his expression making it plain he didn’t care if I lived or died.
“Right,” I said.
The doors hissed and quivered closed as soon as I stepped back onto the curb. I watched the coach’s swollen rear maneuver around the Way Inn’s drive and onto the service road. Its departure left me alone. Even the smokers were gone. Again, the freezing air took me by surprise after the stuffy warmth of the bus. I pulled up the lapels of my jacket but did not go back inside.
A mistake. That had to be it. This was a mistake, not malice; not a personalized strike against me. A glitch. It was impossible to believe the alternatives. No one could be so petty. Could Laing really be so insecure? Just weighing the possibility made me furious and ready to lash out. But as quickly as this thirst for vengeance arose, it subsided, weighted down by my realization that readmittance was more important than retaliation. There were sessions I had to attend, material and impressions I had to gather for clients. Contracts, turnover, repeat business; all depended on me getting back into the fair.
In the minute or two I spent brooding on my options, nothing passed on the access road—not a single car or van, and certainly no pedestrians. The motorway, sunk behind its embankment, produced a steady hoarse roar, a Niagara of activity that balanced the stillness but did not dispel it. I only appreciated how empty the road had been when a vehicle finally appeared: a canary-yellow bus, another of the conference shuttles on a return leg. A different bus with a different driver.
Before the new driver saw me waiting, I ducked through the sliding doors of the hotel. This new bus would not have many customers—not only was there no one outside, the half-dozen men and women scattered around the Way Inn lobby didn’t look as if they were in a hurry to get to the conference center. The bus would linger a few minutes before again crossing the divide.
The booth babes were standing to attention by the Way Inn promo stand. One hopped on tiptoes in a caffeinated manner.
“Can I have one of those baseball caps?” I asked the closest babe.
“Sure!” she said, brandishing a form. “But you have to sign up for our conference services e-newsletter.”
“I’m a member of the My Way program,” I said, taking my wallet from my back pocket and producing the red membership card. “You have all my details. Can I have a hat?”
The babe smiled uncomfortably and again offered the form. “Sorry, it’s for the conference services—”
“—E-newsletter, got it,” I said, taking the form. “No problem. Can I have a pen?”
The form didn’t take more than a couple of minutes to complete. I considered giving fake information, but the creativity involved would take more effort than simply telling the truth. I had a “fake” email address which I handed out freely, and gave my “real” email to almost no one. But I had to check the “fake” account, on the possibility that important leads were going there, and to supplement research. Because it got more traffic, I had to check it more often than my pristine, quiet “real” account. Consequently, Adam now wrote to that account knowing that I would see his messages sooner there. I had to wonder which was really the fake account. And trying to go incognito seemed to be a source of bad luck for me at present. Still, the necessity of offering up more personal details to the world brought out a mischievous streak in me. Under “Nature of job” I put “disgraced back channel.” Under “What Way Inn services would you like to know more about?” I wrote “Satanic art conspiracies.”
Information. Everyone just wants more information from everyone else, that’s what Lucy had said. Your personal details aren’t the new currency, but they are the new price of admission. I recalled her face, that delicate face twisted with hurt and anger, after she ran out of insults but before she threw her drink at me. A situation caused by information that had been improperly stored and proved impossible to retrieve. A databasing specialist should have been able to appreciate the problem. Or perhaps not.
In return for this latest dribble of data into the corporate networks, I got a hat—a red baseball cap, and a good one too; cloth, not synthetic foam with that horrible plastic netting at the back. Way Inn embroidered in white thread at the front. Quality merch.
The view through the glass doors was still eclipsed by the flank of the bus. I exited the hotel, putting on the cap and pulling the brim low over my eyes, flashing my pass casually, holding it so my index and middle finger “accidentally” obscured much of my mug shot.
“Wait, wait,” the driver called to me as I hurried past her. I froze.
“Yes?” I said, half-turning, showing her no more than part of my face in profile.
“I need to see your pass,” she said. “We’re checking passes.”
I handed over my pass, resigned to the inevitable.
Bip. Bee-baw.
“I’m sorry, sir—”
“Voided, right?”
“Yes.”
“I had a feeling.” And I did have a feeling: a rising fountain of stomach acid, a bubbling horror summed up by the words not a mistake.
The bus was empty. I glanced wistfully at its tidy ranks of paired seats before I descended the steps back to the forecourt.
Fretful that others in the lobby might have noticed my repeated failure to board a bus, and my erratic peregrinations in general, I walked to an armchair with exaggerated ease and sat in it. The air I wanted to project was one of total purpose, as if all my movements that morning were part of a grand plan developed some time ago and proceeding better than anticipated. No one, in fact, took the slightest interest in me, but still I felt myself surrounded by animus and censure. There was decreasing reason to doubt that the sudden scrutiny the drivers were applying to delegates’ credentials had nothing to do with any al-Qaeda threat and a lot to do with me personally. I had drastically underestimated the event director’s vindictiveness. He wanted me to know that he had the ability to stop me doing my job, and that he wanted to stop me. The drivers would have been looking for me alone.
Laing, then, was proving to be an officious swine. And I had a job to do. Clients had requested that I attend three sessions today—two presentations by experts and a panel discussion. A full afternoon, and the first of these scheduled entertainments started in about two hours. I had never missed an event scheduled by a client, until yesterday anyway. I had never taken a sick day or missed a flight. Did Convex even have a procedure for a situation in which its surrogate could not attend what he had agreed to attend? There must be some arse-covering clause in the contract invoking force majeure and exceptional circumstances. But how would Adam react? He worked out of a tiny, subterranean office in the Business Design Center in Islington, growing his company client by client through late nights and personal recommendations. His whole pitch was based on reliability, on being in the right place at the right time regardless of circumstances, of being present when the client was absent. And this setback was, I had to admit, at least in part my own fault—I had failed to keep a low enough profile. Adam would not be pleased.
I returned to room 219, looked up the Meetex customer service line in the booking documents and called it. As soon as I pressed the call button on my mobile, a cacophony of barking and gibbering interference rose from the clock radio, and did not subside. When the call was answered by an efficient female voice, I could barely make it out. As well as the
robotic stuttering and deranged kazoo-chorus from the radio, there was a deep boiling rush on the mobile connection itself, UHF rapids around transmitter-tower reeds.
Preferring not to shout and repeat myself, I ended the call without saying a word. The radio was intolerable, it would have to go. The noise would be bad enough at the best of times, and in my present unhappy state it was an aggravation too far. What’s more, there was a quality about it, a deeper tone in the general din, that I found detestable. It had a foul edge.
But first things first. I dialled Meetex on room 219’s landline phone—possibly an exploitative addition to the bill, but I was beyond caring.
“Meetex, this is Fran.”
“Hello, Fran,” I said. Normally I find it creepy when people use the first names of service staff in this way, but I was hopeful it would generate an iota of extra goodwill. “I’m a ticketed Meetex delegate and I’ve just been prevented from boarding one of the shuttle buses at the hotel. The driver said that my pass had been voided. I don’t know what that means. Could you find out what the problem is please?”
“Yes, sir, I’ll check that for you,” Fran said. “Your name and booking reference, please.”
I supplied the information. There was a pause—not silence, but the sounds of keys being pressed and a few scattered mouse clicks. In the background, a colleague of Fran’s was unpicking a billing dispute of some kind: “Yes . . . yes . . . I can’t override the charges now, but if you . . .”
“Sir?”
“Hello.”
“Yes, I’m afraid your guest pass has been voided.” Fran’s voice had been efficient before, and so it remained, but the edge of service-industry solicitude had gone. She was all business. And as this expression came to mind, it stalled me. All business? Surely she was all business earlier? I wasn’t an old friend ringing to reminisce about old times. What had changed was not the disappearance of actual geniality from her voice, but the cessation of simulated geniality. Deriving any comfort from the simulation was as pointless as warming my hands on a photograph of a log fire. But if that generated the impression of warmth, what was the true difference between the placebo and the real thing?