The Way Inn. Will Wiles

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СКАЧАТЬ had left my bag under the chair in the lecture hall. Nothing of great value was lost – my keycard, wallet, mobile phone and other significant personal possessions were all in my pockets. But the leaflets, press releases and advertising materials I had gathered, the price cards and fact sheets, and the Meetex information pack with its maps and timetables, were all gone. Would they be found and moved to a lost property office? Unlikely. Fliers and brochures look like litter in the slightest change of light. A day’s work thrown away – the bag had contained my pages of notes, too. I would have to cover much of the same ground again tomorrow. This was frustrating, even infuriating, but somehow it managed to refresh me. The debilitating tangle that had hobbled my thoughts was cut straight through by the loss, which felt somehow auspicious – a way of severing my connection to that catastrophe of a day and leaving it in the past. As I walked through the glass doors of the Way Inn, my mood was much restored.

      The hotel lobby was almost empty. Flat-screens showed the news without sound. Behind their desk, the reception staff were chatting in lowered voices. Other than them and the handful of returning conference-goers – who drifted, unspeaking, towards the lifts and stairs – there were a couple of lone, suited men sitting in the blocky black leather-and-chrome armchairs, reading newspapers or studying laptops. No one sat at the Meetex registration table – the information packs, tote bags, lanyards and other bric-a-brac had been cleared away, and only the banner remained, now clearly false. You can no longer register here.

      I took the stairs to the second floor, not wanting to find myself cooped up in a lift with any Meetex people. But when I reached my floor I became disoriented. It was not that the hallway was unfamiliar – on the contrary, it looked equally familiar in both directions, and I couldn’t readily tell which way lay my room, number 219. For a moment I tried to figure it out from where the lift stood in relation to the stairs in the lobby, and where I stood now, but it was not possible. I was thrown by the stairs’ dog-leg between floors, the way they doubled back on themselves to end above where they began. And I could not be at all certain of my other calculations regarding the relationship between my room and the lift shaft – walking casually, following signs to the lift, it was quite possible to make a turn without thinking, and certainly without remembering it. Ahead, opposite the stairs, windows looked out onto a courtyard containing one of those neat little Japanese meditation gardens. Across the courtyard was a row of windows, tinted metallic blue and opaque to me. This was definitely the courtyard that was next to reception – where was that in relation to my room? Was there more than one courtyard?

      I picked a direction almost at random, relying on a sliver of instinct, and was rewarded with a promising ascent of room numbers – 210, 211, 212, 213. Between each door and the next hung an abstract painting, all from the same series – intersecting latte and mocha fields. The corridor took a right angle in one direction, and then in the opposite direction. Facing 220, beside a painting of a fudge-coloured disc barging into a porridgey expanse scattered with swollen chocolate drops, was 219. I inserted my keycard in the slot on the door lock and nothing happened. The little red light above the door handle remained red. The door was still locked, the handle was unmoving. I withdrew the card and tried again. Nothing. A lead pellet of frustration dropped in my stomach. I flipped the card over and inserted it again. The red light glowed insolently, refusing to turn green. I tried a fourth time, this time jiggling, cajoling, exercising force of will. The world, or at least my immediate surroundings, remained spectacularly unchanged – the red light; the immobile handle; the sleeping doors of the other rooms; the paintings; the faint perfume of cleaning fluid; the soft background hum of the hotel’s air conditioning, which to my ears now sounded a note of complacency, an indifference to the injustice of the world.

      Irritated, I returned down the corridor to the stairs and descended to the lobby. The same suited men in the same armchairs, still reading the same newspapers. The staff at the front desk heard my purposeful approach and looked up, smiling benignly.

      ‘I’m locked out of my room,’ I said, flashing a brief, formal smile of my own. ‘My keycard doesn’t seem to want to work. It’s two-nineteen.’

      The man behind the desk beamed at me. He was young, no more than early twenties, and wore – like all his colleagues – a long-sleeved red polo shirt with buttons at the collar and Way Inn embroidered in white over the breast. ‘This can happen sometimes,’ he said in accented English; Dutch, maybe. ‘Have you had your card in your pocket with perhaps your keys and your cellphone?’ Keish, shelfon. ‘The card can lose its magnetism. Please, let me see it.’

      I gave the man the card. It disappeared from sight beneath the counter to be re-enchanted. Seconds passed, and I took in the reception desk. Above it, Way Inn was spelled out in bold perspex letters, lit red from behind. The desk was more a counter on my side, high enough that it required me to raise my elbows if I wanted to rest them on the dark, polished wood.

      ‘OK then,’ the young man said. ‘That should work just fine now – let’s go see.’ He stood, eagerly, my keycard still in his hand.

      ‘That’s really not necessary,’ I said. ‘I can let myself …’

      But the helpful fellow was up and out from behind the desk, heading towards the rear of the lobby in a determined straight line. Watching the man’s back, I noted with dismay that he was aimed at the elevators rather than the stairs. ‘Surely the stairs …’ I began, again, but the man had pressed the button and smiled a prim little smile at me. We waited together, an awkward, chaste, moment. I tried to look as if I was preoccupied with matters of grave importance; the staffer looked up, as if blessed with X-ray vision and able to see the lift approaching through layers of concrete and breezeblocks.

      ‘Awful weather today,’ I said. I had to say something.

      ‘Awful,’ the young man said, shaking his head at the horror of it all. ‘It barely even got light, did it? And it’s already getting dark.’

      The lift arrived and we stepped in together. Moody light, mirrored walls and soft music, like a tiny nightclub. Out of the lift on the second floor, the staffer walked briskly down the corridor, throwing my bearings again – I had wanted to see where I was in relation to the stairs, but missed the chance. At the door to 219, the staffer inserted the keycard into the box above the handle and was rewarded with an immediate green light and satisfying clunk. The handle turned and the door opened.

      ‘If you keep it away from your keys, your cellphone and your other cards, it should be just fine in future,’ the staffer said, handing back the card with one hand and holding the door open with the other.

      ‘Thanks,’ I said, stepping into my room and sticking the card into its niche in the wall. The room lights turned on.

      ‘No problem,’ said the young man with a little bow, hand behind his back and smiling broadly. And he turned sharply away, as if relishing the fact that this moment did not call for a tip. The front door closed.

      While I had been at the centre, the room had been cleaned. The bedspread was as creaseless and immaculate as the icing on a wedding cake. My few belongings had been organised and now looked absurd and tawdry in the pristine room. A newspaper I had bought yesterday had been neatly placed next to my laptop on the desk, looking filthy and out of date. I had left yesterday’s clothes strewn across the bench at the foot of the bed – they were still there, but folded, their creases a source of shame. The shirt I had draped on the armchair had been placed on a lonely hanger in the wardrobe. On the bedside table, a small heap of crumpled scraps of paper and low-denomination coins was scrupulously untouched like an exhibit in a museum of low living. Everything about the scene suggested to me that the cleaner had been greatly dismayed by the poor quality of the clothes and possessions they had been forced to deal with, but had done their best.

      This was paranoia, I knew, but it still needled me. I dropped the newspaper and some of the paper scraps into the СКАЧАТЬ