The next stand along

The packaging fair takes up three halls of the exhibition centre and runs alongside a technical conference that almost nobody attends. It is three days. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, ten till eight.

Cida worked for a plastic film manufacturer out west and ended up running the stand because the sales manager passed a kidney stone the Friday before. She had never done a fair. She was issued a badge with the wrong name on it, "Aparecida" instead of Cida, and spent three days being called that.

The stand was G-42, nine square metres, one counter, two stools and a fabric banner.

G-44, next along, belonged to a sealing machinery firm from the south. Two people: a lad of about twenty-two who was on his phone for three days, and Wagner, forty-seven, nineteen years on the road, who built the stand on his own on the Monday night.

On the Tuesday morning the socket at G-42 didn't work.

This is common and it is nobody's fault. The contractor delivers the power strip the day before and half of them arrive faulty.

Cida spent forty minutes trying to get hold of somebody from support. Wagner crossed the two metres between the stands, looked at the strip, said it wasn't the strip but the breaker in the corridor box, and fixed it in four minutes with an orange extension lead he always carries.

The lead stayed there all three days.

"I'll give it back Thursday."

"Give it back whenever."

A trade fair is a thing nobody properly explains to people who have never done one.

It is ten hours standing on thin carpet laid straight onto concrete. The hall air conditioning is inadequate at eleven and excessive at six. Footfall comes in waves: nobody between ten and eleven, far too many between eleven and two, and from five to eight only the exhibitors, looking at each other.

Those last three hours are when a fair actually happens.

On the Tuesday at half six Wagner pulled one of his stools over near the divider. Cida did the same on her side. They spent an hour and a half talking over a fabric panel a metre sixty high.

Subjects: the price per square metre of the stand, which they both considered daylight robbery. The food court. Cida's manager and his kidney stone. Wagner's daughter, eighteen, applying to read veterinary medicine.

The organisers ran a shuttle from the hall to three partner hotels, leaving at ten past eight and at ten.

They were in the same hotel, which is a coincidence with no romance in it: of the three partner hotels, that one was the cheapest, and they both worked for companies that pick the cheapest.

On the Tuesday they took the ten past eight, with eighteen other people.

On the Wednesday they took the ten o'clock, with four.

On the Thursday they took no shuttle.

The hotel bar shuts at midnight and serves three kinds of beer and a toasted cheese sandwich that takes fifteen minutes to arrive.

On the Wednesday they were there from half eight until twenty to twelve. Wagner had three beers, Cida two and a soft drink. They split two sandwiches.

At twenty to twelve the barman started putting chairs up on the tables at the back, which is the universal way of saying the thing that needs saying.

They went up in the lift together. Her on the sixth, him on the eighth.

On the sixth the doors opened, she stepped out, and he held the door with his hand and asked whether she wanted to carry the conversation on.

She said yes.

There was no second question and no constructed sentence. Anybody who has been forty-seven and thirty-nine knows that is the age at which people stop making speeches.

The room was 617, standard, double bed, a window air conditioning unit with the control chained to the wall.

Both of them had ruined feet from ten hours standing, and that was the first thing that came up, because she took her shoes off and swore, and he laughed, and then he took his off and swore the same way.

That is how it started. Nothing elegant about it.

A window unit makes a lot of noise and cuts out every twenty minutes, and in the quiet between one cycle and the next you could hear the television in 615.

Wagner left the room at twenty to six to shower in his own, because his clothes were on the eighth floor and because the fair opened at ten.

Thursday was the worst of the three days, as it always is. Poor footfall, everybody tired, and the breakdown starting at eight sharp with the contractors pushing trolleys down the aisle.

They worked all day two metres apart and talked normally, about nothing, in front of the lad with the phone and anybody passing.

At ten to eight Cida gave the orange extension lead back, coiled, with the plug held by an elastic band.

"Thanks."

"No bother."

He put it in the tool box.

Breaking down G-42 took an hour and ten. G-44, with the machines, ran until almost midnight.

Cida went back to the hotel by taxi at twenty past nine, slept, and drove home the next morning.

Wagner flew south on the Saturday.

The two of them swapped numbers on the Thursday afternoon, in the gap between one visitor and the next, with the "Aparecida" badge still round her neck.

They messaged about six times over the following month, always about the fair, always with a question at the end so the other had something to answer.

In November there was a plastics fair in the south. They both went. Their companies were in different halls.

The hotel was the same one.