The Way Inn

by Will Wiles

The scent of my underarm deodorant reached my nose. I had rolled it on after the shower without thinking too much about it, just routine. Why? For whom? Who was I going to see this afternoon?

  Finished. I was finished. The event director’s word. Banned. Blacklisted. Finished. But I was alive. My job was finished, maybe Adam’s whole enterprise was finished—and with it my investment, destroying my one substantial asset—but I would go on.

  No. It didn’t seem possible. I knew it to be true, that my life would continue—no motorway bridge for me. But I couldn’t picture it. Another job. A return to my flat in Docklands, a CV . . . What made it so hard to consider was that this near-future version of me, a very near-future version of me, was not doing this job. This job was ideally tailored to me. I would not have called it a good job, but it was the perfect job. And it was gone. Finished.

  Into this bleak reverie, the clock radio injected a sudden chorus of modem burping and yelping and hissing—leakage from dying stars, planes of sense grinding against one another, mystery spectra made audible. My phone, I thought, and I tensed for the ringtone or the chime of a new message before recalling that it was gone, and feeling its loss all over again. I am told that grief works that way—the bereaved forget that someone is missing from their life, and a place or a joke or a book reminds them, and it’s a new death all over again. And this continual forgetting and remembering is first suffered daily, perhaps even several times a day, their loss not a single blow against them but many blows; a volley of death, lasting for years, until remembering covers the forgetting.

  So I am told, anyway. I had lost few people close to me—a couple of grandparents while too young to understand, an aunt and an uncle since, neither of whom I knew at all well, and whose passing necessitated dull trips to distant cities. The mountainous exception to this rule was the death of my father, and it had not matched up to that experience of forgetting and remembering. Our relationship was a varied catalogue of absences.

  The worst of these was while he was still alive, after the end with my mother and before I left home. He was alive, somewhere, but I was obliged to behave as if he was not, as if in fact he had never existed. He was invoked only as a form of original sin, the basis of our family’s fallen state. If he had visitation rights, they were not exercised. As my A-levels progressed and my departure from home to go to university approached, I insisted on a talk about his whereabouts and status. When it came, this talk was brief and unpleasant. I was told, not asked, not to communicate with him. There was no argument: just an immediate, silent resolution on my part to contact him as soon as I had the opportunity, and to keep the fact secret.

  University gave me the cover I needed. At last I was beyond the bounds of home. After a modicum of amateur sleuthing—phone calls to employers—I had an email address, which I wrote to, incandescent with excitement. I forget what exactly it was I wanted, and it’s possible I didn’t know at the time, but I remember how desperately I wanted it. The want was pure and physical, almost painful. I yearned to have a complete, cohesive view of the man, something I had glimpsed only in fragments, and to have time with him; time enough, not snippets cut short. In place of trailers and clippings, I wanted the whole film.

  Instead, I got more fragments. We exchanged emails that were basic in form and elusive in detail. Mine were little more than the outlines of the long, eloquent, moving messages I meant to send—I would fill three short paragraphs with news about my studies and then find it hard to expand on those. His replies, rather than supplying his own news, would offer acknowledgements of mine: Good to hear from you, son, that’s great about the course, proud of you. He had settled in a distant, unfamiliar city, one where we had no family connections or history. A couple of times he came to visit me—we drank pints and ate a bland Sunday roast out of a freezer in a large, echoey pub near the railway station. It had remnants of a past glory—high ceilings and ornate glass, brass and moldings—but had been absorbed by a national brewery company that was part of an agribusiness multinational. English heritage by way of a Canadian-Swiss pesticide giant.

  “Never drink in the pub nearest the railway station,” my father said. “I suppose that’s the kind of advice I should have been giving you all along.”

  Our conversations were monosyllabic, elliptic, phatic. Even when I was out of university, earning a living for myself, doing the kind of work I thought he would understand and respect, the signal passing between us faltered and carried little.

  He absconded for good when I was in my late twenties, an ultimate absence.

  The electronic gurgling and percussion from the clock radio showed no sign of abating. Hadn’t I asked the front desk to fix or replace it? And still it chattered in that sickening, impossible way. My listlessness was abruptly supplanted by a furious energy. I swung off the bed, knelt down on my bare knees, and reached under the bedside table for the clock’s plug.

  The plug was not in the wall socket. It was lying on the floor beside it. I held it dumbly in my hand, as it dangled on its flex like a head on a broken neck. The radio buzzed and made coughing birdcall sounds—staticky tinfoil-feathered birds raised in wire-wool nests found in electricity substations. Power was clearly flowing within it—the clock face read 3:33, but the red glowing numbers pulsed on a slow beat, implying the device had lost power at some point and had reset to midnight. Was it half past three? That was quite plausible—my instinct was to check my phone, and I felt another incision of loss. Instead I turned on the TV.

  WELCOME MR. DOUBLE

  An angry black cloud shedding three blue drops of rain was the icon indicating today’s weather. No kidding. It was the same for tomorrow, and for the “Weekend Prospect.” Tonight’s special in the restaurant was spaghetti carbonara and the soup of the day was French onion. The time was 3:51. Close, then: Had the hotel staff been in to fix or replace it, thereby stopping the advance of the clock for twenty-two minutes? Or had it been left undisturbed since I unplugged it last night? If there was a hidden backup battery, as I had suspected earlier, it was a good one.

  I picked up the clock to inspect it more closely and it squealed in response—the kind of noise a theremin might make if you gave it a nasty fright—before degenerating into a low growl.

  WOWWwwwrrr . . .

  This startled me and I almost dropped the clock. It was vibrating very slightly, a shiver I found innately distasteful and sinister. There was a removable panel on its underside but it was fastened with small screws. For a moment I was gripped by an urge to fling the clock across the room, to smash it and hear the noise it made then. Its continual gibbering was annoying enough, and the more time I spent with it, the more it perplexed and annoyed me. And there was another angle to my puzzlement, one I thought absurd, but one which nevertheless heightened my wish to be rid of the device: the undeniable note of fear I felt rising within myself.

  I put the troubling object down, picked up the phone and called reception. A woman answered and I complained that my clock radio was still malfunctioning. She said someone would be right up.

  Someone would be right up. Boxer shorts would not be appropriate. I put on my last full change of clothes, casual gear meant for travel and downtime: chinos, a blue shirt, a gray jumper. No knock at the door. I glanced at the clock radio, to see how much time had elapsed since I had made the call. The display still read 3:33.

  Not possible. At least a minute had passed—and more like five or ten. 3:33. I stared at the screen. It was, I realized, not 3:33 that burned against the black plastic but 3 33, without a dot or a colon separating the hours and the minutes. By looking closely, I could make out the ghost recesses of the unlit elements in the display, and there were darkened dots between the hours and the minutes. Perhaps 3 33 wasn’t a time at all, but a warning of a fault, like ERR on a calculator. A fault that could be guessed at and easily corrected. I knelt again and plugged the clock back in.

  The warbling and whining ceased immediately. I came to my feet and looked again at the clo
ck. Blinking before me was the time 12:00, a silent, obedient default. No need to set the time—one of the hotel staff would be up shortly, after all.

  I was still staring at the radio when it emitted a loud, piercing electronic peal, causing me to jump. What now? Was this the alarm? I thought of the alarmed doors in the corridors, a whole hotel stitched together by twitching nerves and sensitive tendons. The woman’s face behind safety glass, daring me to follow her.

  The peal repeated. It wasn’t the clock radio at all—it was the phone. I answered it.

  “Mr. Double?” An unfamiliar voice, not John-Paul or the young things at the front desk—older, precise, mid-Atlantic.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m pleased to have caught you,” the voice said. “My name is Mr. Hilbert. I’m with the hotel. I wonder if you would be able to join me in the Gallery Room for a brief chat.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The Gallery Room is part of the conference facilities available at this Way Inn. You will find it on the first floor, in the business suite. This will take no more than a few minutes of your time, I’m sure you must be busy.”

  This last remark pained me like an insult. No, not busy, not busy at all. Nothing to do, in fact. Across the motorway the fair and conference would be going on without me. Was that the reason for this call? Adam knew what had happened and had cut short my stay at the Way Inn—my prepaid room was cancelled and I would have to leave, go home, go through the postmortem of my career in something like disgrace. Could my life unravel so completely so quickly? Was there so little to it?

  “What is this concerning?” I asked. I realized that the very last thing I wanted to do was to leave the hotel. That would be the ultimate humiliation. Even if matters could not be patched up with the event director, I could not bear the idea of cutting short my stay. I wanted to enjoy this existence awhile longer if I could.

  “We like to meet with our most loyal guests from time to time, to make sure we are doing everything we can for you,” the voice, Hilbert, said. “And you are a most loyal guest.”

  I was weary. The day had drained me. “Is this necessary? I’ve never had a meeting like this before—it has been a very trying day, I would prefer—”

  “Just a few minutes of your time,” Hilbert said, his clipped tone making the interruption with patrician assurance, as if he believed himself to be constitutionally incapable of rudeness. “I think you will be pleasantly surprised by the number of ways in which the hotel can come to your assistance and improve your stay. Ways you might not expect. Gallery Room, first floor. I’m there now.”

  I was ready to reply, to defer and delay, but the line was dead.

  Several large rooms comprised the business suite, all alike, with names that conveyed their very slight differences. The Vista Room, the largest, overlooked the motorway and the MetaCenter. The Garden Room overlooked one of the hotel courtyards. The Sunrise Room faced east. Each room could be configured in a vast variety of ways, depending on whether one wanted to hold a seminar, negotiate around a table, give a presentation, conduct a stockholders’ meeting or any number of other corporate activities. Some of the rooms could be combined or subdivided, all to reflect the spatial desires of guest companies. Flexibility. A fully serviced environment. The options were all laid out in the welcome pack in each bedroom; a menu of different interactions—breakout session, AGM, Q&A, summit—that foreclosed on the possibility of any form of activity beyond those catered for.

  The Gallery Room was one of the smallest in the suite. It was a rectangular space with a door at one end and a couple of windows looking onto the courtyard at the other. Hanging on the longer walls were a total of eight of the hotel’s abstract paintings. In the middle of the room was a large oval table, seating eight.

  When I arrived, the door was propped open. Hilbert—I could safely assume it was Hilbert—was at the far end, a black streak against the gray light from the window. He was looking out over the courtyard and I could not be sure that he had heard me enter.

  “Mr. Hilbert?”

  The dark figure turned and smiled at me. Hilbert was a tall man, perhaps six foot two or three, and his height was given emphasis by his skeletal thinness. His suit, an obviously expensive black pinstripe, hung on him as if from a wire coat hanger. The blackness of the suit was matched by his railing-black hair, swept over to one side and glistening with old-school barber product. This was an uncomfortable contrast with his pale skin which, like the suit, hung somewhat loosely off the frame beneath. Could the hair be a wig?

  Hilbert’s smile was enduring, his teeth long and plentiful. “Mr. Double. Thank you so much for coming. Please, close the door and make yourself comfortable. Can I offer you a drink? Coffee?” He extended a slender white hand toward a small table in the corner that bore mugs and glasses, jugs of water and a Nespresso coffee machine.

  “No, no thank you,” I said, shutting the door. Whatever Hilbert had said on the phone, I remained intensely suspicious of this meeting. It had all the hallmarks of “About your bill . . .” or “Unusual activity on your account . . .” I chose a seat at the side of the oval table, near the door. Hilbert sat opposite me. My eyes flickered to his hair and probed its edges. Wig? Not a wig? It was hard to tell—the front of a wig is always the most convincing part; the back, where the join is obvious, gives it away.

  “Now, then,” Hilbert said. “Thanks again for coming down. And thank you for your custom over the years. We really do value your loyalty.”

  “It’s nothing,” I said. “My work involves a great deal of travel.”

  “Yes. You’re here for the conference, I take it?”

  “Yes,” I said. Why else would I be here? Then it occurred to me that this was no longer true. I was no longer here for the conference. Why was I here? What was I doing?

  Hilbert laid a black leather document folder on the table and unzipped it. “Our records show you have stayed in forty-one different Way Inn hotels in thirteen countries since becoming a My Way loyalty cardholder in 2006,” he said, reading from the papers before him.

  This felt uncomfortably like an interrogation. I feared somehow incriminating myself. “That sounds plausible. I’ve stayed in a hot of Hiltons and Novotels and Holiday Inns too. That’s the kind of work I do.”

  “Nevertheless,” Hilbert said, lips withdrawing over those long, straight teeth, “we are truly grateful for your business. For instance, I see sixteen stays at Way Inn Royal Docks in London.”

  “It’s right by the ExCel Center,” I said. “There are a lot of conferences at the ExCel Center.”

  “Of course,” Hilbert said. “Your home address is in Westferry, London E14?”

  A chill. “Yes.”

  “That’s not far from the ExCel Center. And yet you choose to stay at Way Inn rather than at home.”

  I didn’t say anything. There was an implication there, for sure, and I didn’t much like it.

  “We really do place a premium on that kind of superlative loyalty,” Hilbert said. “It’s one thing when a customer chooses us over our competitors but quite another when he chooses us over his own home, his own bed . . .”

  “May I ask what this is about?” I said sharply. There was always the chance that there was no hostile agenda behind Hilbert’s remarks, and that he really had invited me here solely in order to kiss my arse. Another time, I might have enjoyed a bit of corporate sucking-up, but today it felt like an intrusion and a waste of time. “I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m having rather a bad day.”

  Hilbert’s mouth turned down at the corners with mime-artist sadness. “I’m most sorry to hear that, Mr. Double. Not a problem with the hotel, I trust?”

  “No, not at all.”

  “Is it perhaps something we could assist with?”

  “I don’t see how.”

  “The hotel is able to assist its most loyal customers in a surprising number of ways,” Hilbert said. “Try us.”

  I shifted in my chair. It was a heavy modern
thing like the one in my room, with a woven seat and back supported by a tubular chrome frame, and it did not shift with me.

  “You’re busy,” Hilbert said, holding up his hands respectfully. As he moved his limbs, the razor-fine white pinstripes on his suit bled into one another and tricked the eye unpleasantly, like a pattern glitching on an old television. I dropped my eyes to the folder on the table. What else was in there? “Forgive my circumlocution. I will proceed to the heart of the matter. Our mutual interest. You asked the hotel for assistance. You wanted to contact a certain woman.”

  Hilbert’s eyes glinted like coal. When he saw that he had my complete attention, he smiled. “As luck would have it, our interests coincide. This is so often the case. What do you know about her?”

  There wasn’t the slightest doubt he was talking about the same woman, the woman who had filled my thoughts for two days. Could it be that she was in trouble, not me? That would explain this inquisition, and if she had been running around pinching guests’ mobile phones and setting off alarms, it didn’t seem unlikely.

  “I don’t know much,” I said. A narrow path had to be trod—I had no desire to accuse or incriminate the woman, but I wanted to get my phone back, and perhaps see her again. “I know she works for the hotel. I believe she’s staying here as well. Beyond that, very little.”

  “How do you know her?”

  The memory caused me to smile. “We met . . . We didn’t actually meet until the day before yesterday. But I had seen her before. Years ago. It was at the Way Inn in Doha, Qatar.”

  “There are now three Way Inn branches in Qatar,” Hilbert said. “Please go on.”

  “Right. I was at a conference, and I was waiting for a shuttle bus in the lobby. Where there are buses, there is waiting around. She walked in and . . . Well, she wasn’t wearing anything. She just stood there, completely naked, eyes wide, like she was standing to attention. She didn’t say a word at first, but within about ten or twenty seconds everyone in that lobby was looking at her. Total silence. I have never heard anything like it. And then the staff at the front desk went crazy. They started shouting at her, running about, trying to find something to cover her up. Obviously Qatar’s an Islamic country, very conservative—I mean, there would have been a commotion anywhere, but there . . . They had cushions, towels, all kinds of things, to cover her up. When the shouting began she didn’t move, but she looked less composed, more frightened and, still staring into space, she mouthed something. Then they reached her and grabbed her, carrying all these towels and jackets, and she screamed, terrible repeated screams, each one tearing all the air out of her lungs. I’ve never heard anything like it. Before, she had seemed strong, serene, and then it was as if all her muscles failed at once. She just slumped to the floor, screaming.”