The Way Inn. Will Wiles

dismal phatic chitchat for as long as possible, repeating the same old clichés and phrases and saying as little as possible that was new or interesting until one of us cracked and stopped and we could talk about things that actually mattered.

      ‘That was quick.’

      ‘I can’t take any more small talk. I’ve just come from a funeral. My father died.’

      ‘Oh. I’m so sorry.’

      ‘Bzzzt. Phatic.’

      ‘Damn! Checkmate, really. What else is there to say?’

      ‘It’s OK. I didn’t know him very well, my parents divorced and he travelled a lot.’

      ‘And you thought: that’s the life for me?’

      I laughed. ‘Yeah, kind of.’

      When I met Adam, before he founded Convex, I worked for a firm of cost consultants in the construction industry. They specialised in ‘value engineering’: professional corner-cutting, driving down the expense of projects by simplifying designs and substituting cheaper materials. When a building is completed and only barely resembles the promotional images revealed by the architects years before – more plain, more clunky, more drab; graceful curves turned into awkward corners; shining titanium and crystalline glass replaced with dull panels of indeterminate plasticky material – then my old firm, or one like it, has been wielding its shabby art.

      Ugly work, literally. I preferred not to reflect on it, and I focused hard on my particular minor role, which was to scour trade fairs for those cheaper materials. What could stand in for stone, what would do in place of copper, what was the bargain-basement equivalent of hardwood? All my life I have been interested in what the world was truly made from; if not all my life, then at least from the very early age when – looking at the chipped edge of a table at home, a wood-grain veneer over a crumbling, splintery inner substance – I discovered that surfaces were often lies.

      ‘Fake walnut interior,’ my father once said to someone over the phone, winking merrily to me as he did so, letting me in on a joke I did not understand. ‘Better than the real thing.’ It was years before I connected this remark to cars, years spent wondering why someone would fake the interior of a walnut, and how the results could possibly improve on an actual walnut. Years of imagining tiny fabulous jewelled sculptures in walnut shells, not inexpensive automobiles. Then years of suspicion in cars. Real or fake? Suspicion everywhere, which eventually gave way to fascination.

      I trawled the fairs, learning the trade names of all the different kinds of composite panels, all of which looked alike and inscrutable – cheap façade materials having gone from fiction to encryption, no longer pretending to be something else and instead trying to be unidentifiable. At one of the fairs I met Adam. He worked for a trend-forecasting company, in the normal course of things a world away from builders’ merchants and anodised zinc cladding. This company built meticulous indexes of every last shoe and shawl shown by every label at every fashion week, databases you could subscribe to and see exactly who had launched what and not have to sit through endless catwalk shows. The company had dreams – wild and hopeless dreams – of doing the same for construction materials, and Adam was part of the team building this library of Babel for uPVC drainpipes.

      It was a tedious waste of time, and he knew it; but it had given him the idea for conference surrogacy. ‘One man representing thirty, forty executives – imagine the savings! All this sentimental bullshit that gets dished out about face-to-face, firm handshakes, eye-to-eye … all these body parts that are supposedly so important … it’s all just so …’ He reached for an insult. ‘… So fucking analogue.’

      When he quit the trend analysts to set up Convex, I joined him. The thirty thousand pounds I inherited from my father, that joined too, invested in the business. It was all I had and, with a value-engineered salary mostly paying for a one-bedroom flat, and none of the clubbability that men like Laing have, it was all I had been likely to have, ever.

      Once the discussion started, Laing stopped staring at me to join in. I was too distracted by his presence on the stage to listen to what was being said. Graham was a false name; Graham was Laing; and Laing was the man behind Meetex, the man who had found exhibitors for the fair and set the programme for the conference. Why would he want to know about conference surrogacy? He had to be here; it was his gig. If anyone loved fairs and conferences, it was him. I knew where I had seen him before now: not from personal acquaintance, but in photographs – photographs in the welcome pack, photographs in Summit, photographs everywhere. Laing shaking hands, Laing cutting ribbons. He was a true believer, and I had told him about Convex. It was unnerving.

      The panel were discussing intellectual property. Businesses in the Far East were sending people to trade fairs to photograph the products and fill wheelbarrows with brochures, so they could manufacture knock-off products based on the information. Furniture and consumer goods manufacturers were worried – could anything be done to protect them from the copycats? Laing had not made a contribution for a while. Then he leaned in and spoke.

      ‘It’s not just our exhibitors who should be concerned about piracy,’ he said. ‘We should as well. Conference pirates exist. They exist, and they’re here now.’

      A murmur of uneasy amusement passed through the audience. Maurice flipped his notebook over to a fresh page.

      ‘I’m quite serious,’ Laing said, addressing the hall. ‘Conference pirates. I met one earlier today.’ He had been scanning the audience, and as he said this his eyes fixed on me.

      My first instinct was to laugh. Pirate – it was absurd. The modern meanings of the term – downloaders and desperate Somalians and Swedish political parties – were well known to me. But all the event director’s invocation of it generated for me was a burst of kitsch imagery: peg legs, parrots, rum, X marks the spot. Not me at all.

      ‘He works for a company called Convex,’ Laing continued. ‘They say they can give their customers the benefit of attending a conference without actually having to attend. They send someone in your place – a double, let’s say. And it costs less than attending the conference because this … double … can represent several people. You get a report. Meanwhile we only sell one ticket where we might have sold ten or twenty – it’s our customers being skimmed off. And they denigrate the conference industry, say that conferences are a waste of everyone’s time, while selling a substandard product in our name.’

      All this time, Laing had stared me, and I began to fear that others in the hall might be figuring out who he was talking about. One other pair of eyes was certainly on me: Maurice was rapt.

      Laing’s attention flicked away from me. He was warming to his theme, wallowing in his own righteousness, letting his oration build to a courtroom climax. ‘Lawful or not,’ he said, high colour apparent in his cheeks, ‘this practice, this so-called conference surrogacy, is piggybacking on the hard work of others in order to make a quick profit – which is on a natural moral level dubious, unhealthy, unethical and simply wrong!’

      I was being prosecuted. Unable to respond, I wriggled in my seat and felt my own colour rise to match Laing’s. How dare he! Flinging slurs around without giving me a space to reply, naming our company in particular – it was unbearable. I imagined springing to my feet, challenging Laing, giving him the cold, hard, facts right between the eyes. We identified a need and we are supplying a service that fulfils it. That’s the free market. If Laing’s events were more interesting, more useful, less time-consuming and less expensive, there would be no need for us. Conferences and trade fairs are almost always tedious in the extreme. People would pay good money to avoid going to them. They do pay good money – to me. All this moral outrage was just a smokescreen for the basic failure of his product. The muscles in my legs primed themselves. I was ready.

      ‘I’ve got to run,’ I whispered to Maurice. And with that I scuttled from the room. I have no idea if anyone other than Laing and Maurice even noticed.

      From the lecture hall, I marched down one of the concourses of the MetaCentre conference wing, passing many people strolling between venues or talking in small groups, that damned