Read Online The Way Inn by Will Wiles - Free Book Online

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.
    â€œFake 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 anodized 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 analog.”
    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 clubability 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 program 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 knockoff 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.
    â€œIt’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