by Will Wiles
“Not quite.”
She thrust out her arms and grabbed my shoulders. For a second I thought she was about to embrace me, but her seriousness was all wrong, threatening, and she grabbed with force.
“What—”
In a fluid, practiced movement, she stepped past me, hooked her leg behind mine and, pushing from the shoulders, knocked me to the floor. Any protest I might have made was stifled by the air again being forced from my lungs. The eruption of agony in my side was so severe I felt consciousness waver. She straddled me, pinning my arms. A hand into an inner pocket of the leather jacket.
The steak knife emerged, streaked with Hilbert’s blood. She must have taken it from my jacket when I changed clothes. It was raised it over me, point down.
“What the hell are you doing?” I gasped. Somehow I freed an arm from under Dee’s knee and with it grabbed her wrist, staying her hand.
“You hesitated,” she said. There was no emotion in her words, it was nothing more than a plain statement of fact. “In or out, you didn’t know.”
“I was scared! I couldn’t think straight!” She was strong, stronger than I was, and she had gravity and poise on her side. As she shifted her weight she sent paralyzing waves of pain through my chest. And at just the moment I wanted to prove my lack of temptation to Dee, to myself, I found I yearned for the power the hotel gave its servants.
“You wavered.”
I wavered. My arm buckled and the blade came down. I closed my eyes.
I opened my eyes. No impact, no pain. Impossibly, she had missed. The knife had gone under my armpit, into the space between my chest and left arm, piercing only my jacket and the carpet.
Pushing down on the knife, Dee cut with it, opening a long tear in the back of my jacket. She then stood, grabbed the jacket by the tear, and pulled. More tearing, more pain from my ribs.
“It’s ruined,” Dee said. “Take it off. We’re getting rid of it.”
I sat up, cowed, and slipped the jacket off my shoulders.
“Trousers too,” Dee said, working the knife into the seam that connected one of the sleeves to the jacket, amputating it. “All of it. You have a change of clothes, don’t you?”
I nodded. A damp suit, but also the travelling clothes I had arrived in, the outfit I had been wearing when I first saw her in the bar. Those would do. I undid the fly and slipped off the trousers. Dee took them, stood on one leg and, holding the other leg, started sawing through the crotch with the knife.
“That’s a disturbing sight,” I said, dressing.
“Castration imagery got you down?” Dee said, raising an eyebrow. “It’s for your own good.”
“Not all that reassuring.”
Once the suit was no more than shreds, Dee pierced the yellow membrane and cut a slit into it, revealing the constellation of white lights adorning the MetaCenter. She stuffed the remains of the suit through this hole, more mystery rags for the roadside. Then she turned to me and made a “hand it over” gesture.
There was no doubt what she wanted. I gave her the black keycard. Without ceremony she bent it back and forth until it snapped and flung both pieces out into the rain-streaked motorway air.
We stood in silence. Not silence, not with the song of articulated freight beneath our feet, but with no words. Then Dee took out her own keycard, the white one, broke it apart like mine, and it, too, disappeared through the hole, along with the steak knife.
“Souvenirs are for serial killers,” Dee said.
The ill-mannered breeze that elbowed into the skywalk through the tear in the plastic scattered the fine black particles that marked the spot where Hilbert had ceased to be. The sky above us was primed for dawn.
Crystalline cubes of pulverized safety glass scrunched underfoot as we returned through the first-floor lobby. Panels of drywall had been crushed and heavy furniture tossed aside by Hilbert’s final charge. I paused to straighten a painting.
“This had better not end up on my bill.”
“Maybe we should leave another way,” Dee said. “We have many exits to choose from. Where’s home for you?”
By the time we reached the lobby of the Royal Docks Way Inn in East London, breakfast was being served in the restaurant. As suits queued up for their sausages, more suits waited at the front desk. Trestles were set up, scaly with laminated credentials. Flat-screens scrolled through schedules of talks and seminars in the business center.
“Well, this is my stop,” I said.
“For home?”
“For a start. Then the emergency room, I think. Then I might visit my mum. How about you?”
“I might as well leave here as well. Been awhile since I’ve been to London. If you don’t count ExCel, Earl’s Court, Olympia, Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted . . .”
“But you have somewhere to go?”
She fixed me with a mocking look. “I’ve got three postgraduate degrees and four years’ salary in the bank. I’ll be fine.”
“Won’t Way Inn want you back?”
“I don’t think so. I think Way Inn has achieved exactly what it wanted to achieve. Two unreliable servants gone at once. You, however—it might miss a promising prospect like you, if it’s capable of regret.”
“No. It lost three unreliable servants at once. I think it knew that. I’ve changed.”
“I know.”
“It’d be great to see you again some time.”
“Maybe I’ll give you a call.”
“I’d like that.” Was there any more to say? All around us was the self-satisfied human meshing of the first day of a fair: the hellos, the hugs, the shrieks and backslaps, boasting and teasing. Jokes known by their punch lines, haka of feint and dodge. In that froth of reunion, we were saying good-bye.
“Are you going to the station?” Dee asked.
“This is what I hate most of all,” I said. “At the end of an event, there are all these people you half-know from spending a few days with them and you say good-bye to them. But you’re all going in the same direction: check-out, bus, airport, train . . . you run into the people you’ve just said good-bye to, and you have to linger in their company while you wait for the shuttle to arrive or for your bags to come around the carousel. There’s no fixed point where you can say a proper, real, final good-bye. You can’t make a clean break, it’s all smeared out.”
“Liminal.”
“Quite.”
“And what you want is a proper, real, final good-bye?”
“A proper one, yes. From you, however, maybe not a final one.”
Dee smiled. Then she hugged me, firmly and warmly, her chin cupped against my shoulder. My ribs howled complaint and I didn’t care.
“Good-bye, Neil.”
“Good-bye, Dee.”
She released me, but was still looking over my shoulder. “Isn’t that your friend?”
I knew exactly who she meant before I turned to see. Maurice had been queuing at the front desk, three bags attached to different parts of his body, brow shiny with sweat. He was leaning out of the queue, looking at us, mouth slack. When he saw my face he gave an open-mouthed smile and darted toward us with surprising speed.
“Neil! What a delightful surprise! Or is it? A surprise, I mean—of course it’s a delight!”
“Hello, Maurice. Nice to see you. How have you been?”
“How have I been?” He ostentatiously examined his watch. “In the, what, twenty-four hours since we last met? Not much to report, old thing. Same old, same old. You look like you’ve been in the wars—she been beating you up?”
“No, we . . .” I looked to Dee, but she was gone. My heart stopped and raced at once. But she was gone, gone from my side, gone from the lobby. No lingering.
“Away like a grayhound,” Maurice said, seeing my astonishment. He winked at me. “I’m beginning to take it personally.”
“We had just said good-bye.”
“I’m sure you’ll run into her again. Always the way with these things. The usual suspects. I
take it you’re here for the conference?”
It was impossible to answer. All I could think of was Dee’s voice, her face.
“No,” I said. “No, I’m not.”
Never was Dee more beautiful than when she gazed deep into the patterns and tessellations of the hotel. In those moments she lost the wariness and hardness that had built up during years alone. She lived for harmony and recursion. Not to leave something incomplete.
Maurice creased his brow. “So what are you doing here?”
I smiled at him. Nothing. That was the answer. Nothing left to do but leave.
“I’m checking out,” I said.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I owe my agent, Antony Topping, far more than just thanks. His advice and moral support have shaped and buttressed this book since its earliest stages. I’m grateful also to Chris Wellbelove at Greene & Heaton and Jim Rutman at Sterling Lord Literistic in New York. At Fourth Estate, Mark Richards put his faith in the book and made excellent edits; Nicholas Pearson guided it toward publication with much kindness. Thanks also to the rest of those on the publishing side at Fourth Estate and elsewhere: Stephen Guise, Michelle Kane, Tara Hiatt, Anne O’Brien, Jo Walker and, at Harper Perennial in New York, Barry Harbaugh.
James Bridle and I had several useful conversations about conferences, stock photography and network unreality. And he gave me “wet polymers.” More prosaic information was gleaned from Meetings and Incentive Travel magazine and the Economist Intelligence Unit’s 2009 report The Austere Traveller, some of which is quoted in Part One. My former employers Christopher Turner and Daren Newton were kind enough to grant me a three-month sabbatical, and indirectly contributed to research by putting me in a lot of hotels. James Smythe and Lee Rourke read an early draft and gave me helpful notes.
The seed of the idea probably came from Rem Koolhaas’s essay “Junkspace.” J. G. Ballard, the greatest writer of the twenty-first century, was here first—the swimming pool is for him.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
WILL WILES is the author of the novel Care of Wooden Floors and is an architecture and design journalist in Great Britain. His writing has appeared in Cabinet magazine, New Statesman, and other UK publications. He lives in London.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
MIND-BENDING ADVANCE PRAISE FOR
The Way Inn
“Dark and clever. . . . The Way Inn is Terence Conran meets H. P. Lovecraft. It is Bulgakov staged in the Tate, Kafka as a new Ikea furniture range. Wiles writes beautiful prose, stages exquisitely painful set-piece scenes of high comedy, and in Neil Double has created a John Self for the Marriott generation. The Way Inn is funny, clever, and thrilling, its central conceit disturbing enough to demand that you read it outside, if you can.”
—The Guardian (London)
“An ingenious and smartly funny novel.”
—Daily Mail (London)
“I devoured this impressive and enthralling novel. If you ever explored hotel corridors or played in hotel lifts as a child, be glad it wasn’t in this hotel.”
—Alison Moore,
author of the Man Booker Prize finalist The Lighthouse
“Utterly wonderful. Reminds me of The Man Who Was Thursday. And not much out there does.”
—J. Robert Lennon,
author of Happyland (via Twitter)
PRAISE FOR Care of Wooden Floors
“This darkly humorous novel from UK journalist Wiles involves a nameless protagonist whose eight days of house-sitting turn out to be a lot more hassle than he bargained for. A freelance copywriter in London does his old university friend, Oskar, now a classical musician, a big favor by staying in his ‘nice flat’ located in an unspecified and dour Slavic city. Oskar is a ‘borderline obsessive-compulsive’ who leaves very specific instructions on a number of notes posted throughout the flat, including not only the care of cats Shossy and Stravvy but, of greater importance, that of the expensive French oak floors. Oskar, in LA to deal with divorcing his wife, intends to return soon to his ‘island of perfection.’ Unfortunately, the befuddled protagonist is a hapless caretaker; he lets one of Oskar’s cats die (via piano lid) and, perhaps worse, he spills red wine on the floor. ‘Batface,’ the flat’s bellicose cleaning lady, is no help rescuing the precious floorboard. The narrator is pleased to find that Oskar has a ‘human’ side when he uncovers his hidden porn stash, but the maintenance of the wooden floors soon takes a horrid turn. A strikingly original debut.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“If you are a fan of Kafka, you should enjoy this novel, which is reminiscent of The Metamorphosis.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Thrilling, darkly comic disaster [is] lurking in every movement, wine bottle, and floorboard.”
—Daily Beast
“This novel has everything I look for: line by line the sentences are a pleasure, page by page the story enthralls, and as a whole, the novel is expertly constructed, each precisely cut plank snapping perfectly into place. Clever, funny, creepy, atmospheric, and very entertaining. I realize that’s a lot of adjectives, but read the book and you’ll see.”
—Charles Yu, author of
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
“Funny, beguiling, and quietly profound . . . a wonderfully well-crafted debut.”
—Times Literary Supplement (London)
“If, like me, you’ve ever thought that your productivity and creativity would explode if only you could get organized, let this be a (morbidly funny) wake-up call. . . . A precisely written debut from one who knows the value of letting loose.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Guffaw-out-loud moments . . . married to the horrified recognition that provokes empathy. A very funny novel provoking schadenfreude and belly laughs.”
—The Independent (London)
“Highly idiosyncratic, well-written, with a vivid sense of place—and weirdly compelling.”
—Michael Frayn, author of Skios and Headlong
“One of the funniest and cleverest books of the year. . . . Care of Wooden Floors reads like a farce directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and the novel’s denouement will surprise even the most jaded readers.”
—Washington Independent Review of Books
“Fawlty Towers crossed with Freud.”
—Daily Telegraph (London)
“One of the most brilliant and entertaining literary debuts this year. The precision of his language and the care with which he delineates the characters and their environment is nothing less than astounding.”
—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“A nicely turned satire on the notion that the path to spiritual contentment lies in a pristine set of polished wooden floorboards. . . . Care of Wooden Floors indicates that Wiles has an eye for beauty, but an even more impressive eye for ugliness. It’s a novel full of impeccably stylish writing.”
—The Guardian (London)
“This is a terrific first novel, written with a very engaging deadpan wit and an understated sense of the absurd.”
—The Times (London)
“This novel feels like a blend of Thomas Pynchon’s “Entropy,’ John Cheever’s “The Swimmer,’ Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,’ and any of Robert Coover’s stories that push the limits of realistic actions.”
—North American Review
ALSO BY WILL WILES
Care of Wooden Floors
COPYRIGHT
COVER DESIGN BY JARROD TAYLOR
COVER PHOTOGRAPH © ROBERT DANT / ALAMY
First published in slightly different form in Great Britain in 2014 by Fourth Estate.
THE WAY INN. Copyright © 2014 by Will Wiles. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, do
wnloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST U.S. EDITION
ISBN 978-0-06-233610-1
EPub Edition September 2014 ISBN 9780062336118
14 15 16 17 18 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers Australia Pty. Ltd.
Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street
Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia
http://www.harpercollins.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Canada
2 Bloor Street East - 20th Floor
Toronto, ON, M4W, 1A8, Canada
http://www.harpercollins.ca
New Zealand
HarperCollins Publishers New Zealand
Unit D1, 63 Apollo Drive
Rosedale 0632
Auckland, New Zealand
http://www.harpercollins.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
77-85 Fulham Palace Road
London, W6 8JB, UK
http://www.harpercollins.co.uk
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
195 Broadway
New York, NY 10007
http://www.harpercollins.com