But they’d worn him down, Monique and Maisy – Don’t be so boring, sir, life’s too short – and he’d capitulated eventually.

  He’d stayed until the end, in the event. He’d had shots. He’d danced. He’d raised a sweat – Ew, sir, you’re really sweaty! – he’d taken a late Tube home feeling a strange mixture of triumph and shame, and woken the next morning with a head like a wet tea towel. But he’d had fun, he’d felt, upon reflection. It had been a night worthy of its aftermath.

  ‘Two female students maintain that you made’ – Clarice refers to her paperwork again – ‘inappropriate comments regarding their sexual preferences.’

  Owen rocks slightly in his chair. ‘I made …?’

  Clarice cuts back in. ‘That you described your own sexual preferences in excessive detail. That you touched them inappropriately.’

  ‘I—’

  ‘Around their shoulders and their hair. Apparently you also flicked some sweat from your forehead and hair on to the girls’ faces, deliberately.’

  ‘No! I—’

  ‘Not only that, Owen, but there was a more general suggestion of a certain way of talking to women in lessons, a dismissive tone.’

  Owen’s hands are curled into fists on his lap. He looks up at Clarice and he says, ‘No. Absolutely not. I talk to all my students the same. One hundred per cent. And as for the sweat, that was an accident! I was dancing, I spun round, some sweat flew off my head! It was absolutely not deliberate! And those girls, I know exactly which girls you’re talking about, they’ve been pestering me, winding me up for months.’

  ‘I’m afraid, Owen, that we’re going to have to launch an investigation into this. At the moment it’s your word against theirs. The girls in question claim they have others willing to testify to your sexism in the classroom. And to your behaviour at the Christmas party.’

  Owen feels a hard lump of fury pass through his consciousness. He wants to claw it out of his head and hurl it at the disciplinary panel, particularly at Clarice who is staring at him with an antagonistic blend of pity and embarrassment.

  ‘There was no “behaviour” at the Christmas party. I don’t do behaviour. I am utterly professional at all times and in every situation. In the classroom and out of it.’

  ‘Well, Owen, I’m terribly sorry, but we will be launching an investigation and to that end, I’m afraid, we will have to suspend you from work while that is ongoing.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘We cannot run a fair investigation while you’re still in the classroom with your accusers. It’s policy. I’m really, really sorry.’

  This came from Jed, who, to his credit, did at least look really, really sorry. Mainly, Owen suspected, because now he was going to have to rework all his timetables to ensure that his classes were covered, which, given that Ellie Brewer, Owen’s counterpart, was about to go off on maternity leave, would prove very problematic.

  ‘So, what … I mean, how long?’

  ‘We’ll start with two weeks and then be in touch. But I doubt it will be longer than a month. Assuming, of course, that the outcome is in your favour.’

  ‘And so, do I just …?’

  ‘Yes, take what you need from your office and Holly will be waiting for you in the foyer to say goodbye.’

  Owen closes his eyes, then slowly opens them. He is to be escorted from the premises. Yet he has done nothing wrong. He wants to pick up the chair on which he’s sitting and chuck it through the window behind Jed’s head, watch it smash a hole through the plate glass, see the shards sparkling in the fallen snow in the car park below. He wants to walk into classroom 6D where he knows that Monique and Maisy are currently halfway through a lecture in micro services and stand before them mustering as much of his five feet nine and a half inches as possible and shout into their stupid faces. Instead he gets slowly to his feet, all his rage held tight inside his stomach, and he leaves the room.

  It’s stopped snowing when he leaves the Tube station at Finchley Road an hour later. His rucksack weighs a ton on his back; it now contains the contents of his desk, including his lava rock lamp. He should have left it behind; he’ll be back in a couple of weeks, but something had made him pick it up, a little voice saying, What if they’re right?

  There’s a small and very steep hill leading from the Finchley Road to his street. At the top of this hill there are two private schools. He realises as he starts his ascent that it is three thirty, that it’s the end of the school day. The hill, consequently, is swarming with small, meandering children, mothers strolling behind clutching tiny rucksacks and brightly coloured water bottles. While the snow on the ground has turned to slush it still lies in thick coats on car bonnets and the children scoop off handfuls and hurl them at each other. They weave about and wander blindly into his path. He nearly loses his footing and has to grab hold of a wall to stay upright. The mothers are oblivious; Owen hates these mothers, these school mums with their weird leggings and blown-out hair, their fat winter coats with rabbit-fur hoods, their fading winter-holiday sun tans, box-fresh trainers. What do women like this think about, he wonders, when it’s just them and the kids are in bed, and they’ve got one of those gigantic fishbowls of wine in their hands? What are they when they’re not at the gym or collecting their children from school? Where do they exist on the scale of humanity? He cannot imagine. But then all women are an eternal mystery to him, even the ordinary ones.

  Owen lives in a cavernous first-floor flat carved out of a grand mansion on one of the finest streets in Hampstead. In front of the house is a driveway, unkempt and unused, except as a storage area for bins and things the other residents of the house don’t want in their homes. There has been an armchair sitting on the lawn in front of the house for almost a year now. No one complains because no one really cares; it’s a building full of old people and recluses.

  The flat is owned by his aunt, Tessie, and is the largest apartment in the building, boasting the highest ceilings, the tallest windows, the solid four-panel doors with fanlight windows above that the other floors of the house don’t have. Owen’s bedroom is at the back-left corner of the flat, with a window overlooking the scruffy communal garden that no one takes responsibility for and a wasteland beyond a dividing wall where a grand mansion once stood. The house is an aberration on this street of glossy new apartment blocks and shiny mansions with security gates. The freeholder is a mysterious Scotsman known only as Mr G, who appears to have washed his hands of his responsibility for the upkeep of this once beautiful building. Tessie has tried writing to him but has received no response.

  Tessie is currently away; she has a house in Tuscany, equally as rundown as her London apartment, and is there for substantial periods of time. When she’s away she locks each door of her flat apart from the bathroom and kitchen. She says it’s to keep her things safe from burglary but Owen knows it’s because she thinks he’s going to go through her things. Even when she’s here she locks doors behind her and Owen has never, not even on special occasions, gone beyond the door of her elegant, high-ceilinged sitting room.

  Now Owen lets himself into the apartment and breathes in the familiar, faintly toilety scent of the economy fabric conditioner Tessie uses on all her washing, the stale aroma of old cushions and dusty curtains, the sweet smoke of the dead ashes in her grate.

  It’s already starting to get dark at this, the bleakest time of the year, and Owen turns on lights, flicking the yellowed Bakelite switches that fizz alarmingly beneath his fingertip. Dirty lightbulbs give off a sad, jaundiced light and it’s freezing cold. Owen’s room contains an electric storage heater, but Tessie doesn’t run the heating when she’s not here, and rarely even when she is, so he also has a plug-in blow heater hidden behind his wardrobe that Tessie would make him get rid of if she discovered it, convinced as she is that it would send her electric bill through the roof.

  He drops his rucksack on to his bed and flops heavily into a small floral armchair. He reaches down to the blow heater and switches it on. Because of the height of his ceilings it takes a while for the room to heat up, but once it does, he kicks off his new shoes, so that they disappear beneath his bed. He does not want to see the shoes again, let alone wear them. For some inexplicable reason he feels that the shoes are to blame for the events of the afternoon. They have made him someone that he is not: a man capable of inappropriate sexual comments to his students, a man in need of being walked off premises.

  He pulls off his sweater and then runs his hands down his static-filled hair; Owen has fine hair. He tries to wear it in a side parting but it always flops into a middle parting and he ends up looking as though he’s deliberately chosen to wear his hair that way, like that tall bloke in The Office. Not that Owen looks like the bloke from The Office. Owen is much better-looking than him. No one’s ever told him he’s good-looking. But then no one’s ever told him he’s ugly, either.

  Through the window Owen can see another flurry of snow fill the tar-brown sky outside, each flake briefly lit on one side by light from the street. He starts to worry about it settling again, about struggling down the hill to the Tube station the next morning, holding on to cars and walls to stop himself from falling. And then he remembers. There was an ‘incident’. He is suspended. The contents of his office are currently in a bag on his bed. He has nowhere to go tomorrow. There is food in the fridge – enough for two days. The snow can fall and settle; he has no reason to care.

  13

  Later that evening Owen opens up his laptop and types in ‘false accusations of sexual misconduct’. He’s looking for some online advice, but instead finds himself reading a human-interest article in the Guardian about the impact on various men of being falsely accused of rape. The accusations levelled against him pale in comparison to what these men were told they’d done. The stories shock him at first, but then the shock recedes into a kind of numb acceptance, a sense that he’d always known this about women. Of course. Women lie. Women hate men and want to hurt them. And what easier way is there to hurt a man than to accuse him of rape?

  He closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. He can feel the supressed rage from his meeting earlier start to rise through his body like mercury. He thinks of Monique and Maisy; they’re not even particularly good-looking yet they act as though he should be so grateful to them for the warped attention they pay him. Maisy’s actually fat (though no doubt thinks of herself as ‘curvy’ in the modern parlance. A curve only exists where a body goes in at the middle as far as Owen’s concerned, not when it sticks out).

  Then he thinks about the previous evening, about that stupid girl who’d got off the Tube at the same time as him, who’d crossed the Finchley Road at the same time as him, who’d taken the same turning off the Finchley Road as him and then acted like he was about to jump on her just because he dared to live on the same street as her. He’d seen her take out her phone and call someone, the breathlessness of her voice, the little turns of her head over her shoulder every few minutes. She’d honestly thought he was deliberately following her. As if he’d have any interest in her. She was just a child. Owen has no interest in children. Owen likes proper women, mature women who grew up when he grew up, women who have good jobs and wear nice clothes and don’t dress like vagrants as teenage girls seem to these days.

  The girl’s mother had been waiting in the doorway for her, her face all screwed up with nerves as she ushered her inside, safe and sound.

  No nasty men in here, darling.

  Owen feels his nails dig into the flesh of his palm and loosens his fist. He stares at the red half-moons and rubs them absentmindedly with his thumb. Then he turns his attention back to the screen and scrolls to the bottom of the article, to the comments. Owen loves the comments, the grey places where the dusty trolls live; he loves to see how low some people will stoop to get the endorphin rush of a reaction. He’s been known to do it himself on occasion. It can feel like sport at the time, though afterwards he feels a sort of pathetic remorse. What has he contributed to the great vibrant soup of humanity? Nothing whatsoever.

  There are some angry men in the comments section of this particular article, but one in particular catches Owen’s eye. His user name is YourLoss and he seems articulate and well informed. He has been through this himself, he says:

  My colleague, who, might I say, was no oil painting, decided that my attempts to offer her advice about her love life (and I can tell you, all this woman ever talked about was her love life. I was locked in a small office with her and another woman who literally talked about men all day long) were actually meant as sexual overtures. And no, of course she did not say this to my face. Of course not, because that would just be civilised and human. No. Straight to Human Resources. They offered her counselling. They offered me nothing but dirty looks and assumptions of guilt. They never proved anything and I kept my job. But this woman asked to be moved to another area of the business, while her colleague swapped offices with someone across the landing and was replaced by a man. This man has a beard and looks at me in disdain. He puts soya milk in his coffee and refers to homosexuals as LGBTABCDXYZs or what the fuck EVER. He has clearly been radicalised by some rampant feminazi in his life. The stupid thing is that I genuinely believe in women’s rights. I believe women should earn the same as men (providing they work as hard as men). I believe they should be allowed to go off and have babies and then come back to work (providing they don’t keep taking time off to go and see little Sally in her nativity play, leaving all their colleagues knee-deep in the shit). I believe they should be free to go out at night and get drunk and wear short skirts without being raped. So yeah, I’m a feminist too. But I’m also a realist. The pendulum has swung waaaay too far imo. It’s time to throw a spanner into the pendulum, stop its trajectory, send it back a little our way. No wonder men want to be women these days. What teenage boy seeing what the future has in store for him wouldn’t prefer to be a lady, to have all the rights and all the protection? Who’s protecting the men? Nobody. Nobody gives a shit about us. It’s time, people, it’s time …

  YourLoss’s comment ends there, on something of a cliffhanger. Time for what? Owen wonders. Time for what?

  Owen goes to the kitchen to get himself a cup of tea. He stands with his back against the counter as he waits for the kettle to boil. The tiled floor is icy cold beneath his socked feet. There’s a huge curtain of thick cobweb hanging across the top of the kitchen window. Tessie used to have a cleaner but she died three years ago and was never replaced. Owen does what he can, but that doesn’t extend to climbing up stepladders with a feather duster.

  He thinks about YourLoss’s post as he waits. He feels strangely energised by it. He senses a connection with the author: a man of a similar age to him, living somewhere bourgeois in the south, dealing with the aftermath of being wrongly and unfairly accused of sexual misconduct by a vile-sounding woman. The kettle clicks off and he makes his tea. He opens a cupboard and takes out a packet of Tessie’s special Italian biscuits. She’s not due back for a week; they’ll be stale by then. She’ll probably have a little dig about it, but he doesn’t care. He’s got bigger things to worry about right now than Tessie’s precious biscuits.

  Early on Tuesday morning, five days after his suspension from work, a man appears at Owen’s door.

  He is tall, six feet four or so. He towers over Owen and Owen immediately feels threatened.

  ‘Good morning, sir, I’m DI Robert Burdett. I’m investigating an incident, last night.’

  An incident. That word again.

  ‘Are you, Mr Owen …’ He examines his notepad. ‘Pick?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Great, thank you. Yes. A young girl, a teenage girl, was sexually assaulted last night. Here.’ He turns and gestures towards the crossroads. ‘Just outside the wasteland. I wondered if you heard anything? Saw anything?’

  Owen flushes red. He feels immediately guilty. Not because he’s done anything, but because he might have done something. He’s spent his whole life feeling like he might have done something wrong.

  He breathes in hard to try to bring down the colour in his cheeks but it makes it worse. He blows the air back out and says, ‘No. No. I heard nothing.’

  ‘Your living room.’ The policeman nods his head towards the front window to the left of the door. ‘It overlooks the street. Maybe you noticed something without quite realising what it was?’

  ‘I wasn’t in my living room last night. I mean, it’s not even my living room.’

  ‘Ah, you live with someone else?’

  ‘Yes. My aunt. Tessie McDonald. It’s her living room. I never go in there.’

  ‘Might she have seen something?’

  ‘No. She’s in Tuscany. She has another property. She’s often there. She’s there now.’

  He’s burbling. Tall men make him feel this way. Policemen make him feel this way.

  ‘Right,’ says DI Burdett. ‘Anyway. It was at about eight thirty p.m. Maybe you were watching something on the TV about that time? Maybe that would jog your memory? Something untoward you noticed? A strange noise? Someone walking down the street who made you feel alarmed in some way?’

  ‘No. Honestly. I was in my room all day yesterday. It’s at the back of the house. I haven’t seen anything or heard anything.’

  ‘A neighbour claims …’ DI Burdett glances down at his notebook again, ‘to have seen you, on your driveway, at approximately four thirty p.m. yesterday.’

  Owen clamps his hand to his forehead. He has barely processed the accusations he’s suffered at work and now there are anonymous neighbours spying on him and reporting his movements to the police in relation to a sex attack.