He could call the college, recant his resignation, agree to the training course. There are avenues still open to him. But if the best-case scenario is that he gets his job back and has to come into work every day and look at the faces of those two girls across his classroom and be surrounded by revolting teenagers who all think he is a pervy fascist then really, what is he fighting for?

  Owen has savings. Tessie charges him what she charged him fifteen years ago when he was a newly bereaved teenager: twenty-five pounds a week. He has no social life, no expensive hobbies, and he certainly hasn’t been spending his hard-earned money wining and dining a string of ladies over the years. He has thousands in the bank. Not enough to put down a deposit on a nice flat, but more than enough to live on for a few months. He does not want his job back. He does not want to fight for it.

  He calls his father.

  ‘Dad,’ he says, ‘it’s me.’

  He hears the tiny pause, his father subconsciously recalibrating his mood to take his son into account.

  ‘Oh hi, Owen,’ he says, ‘how are you?’

  ‘I haven’t seen you for ages,’ Owen begins. ‘It’s been, like, months.’

  ‘I know,’ says his father apologetically. ‘I know. It’s awful, isn’t it, how the time just slips away.’

  ‘How was your Christmas?’ Owen asks this sharply, not wanting to give his father any more opportunity to blame anything other than his own uninterest for their lack of communication.

  ‘Oh, it was, you know, hectic. I’m sorry that—’

  ‘It’s fine,’ he interjects again. He doesn’t want to go over it all again: the sick mother-in-law, the half-brother having some kind of pathetic Generation Z crisis to do with drugs and gender dysphoria, all a bit much this year, son, we’re going to batten down the hatches. The idea that his father battening down the hatches involved the exclusion of his firstborn son had been bad enough when it was first announced and it hasn’t improved with the passage of time.

  ‘Did you … How was your …?’

  ‘I spent it alone,’ Owen says.

  ‘Oh,’ says his father. ‘I assumed you’d be with Tessie, or …?’

  ‘No. Tessie went to Tuscany. I spent it alone. It was fine.’

  ‘Right,’ he says. ‘Good. Well, I’m sorry. And hopefully next Christmas will be a bit less …’

  ‘Hectic?’

  ‘Yes, a bit less hectic. And how’s … how’s work?’

  ‘I resigned from my job today. They were accusing me of sexual misconduct.’

  ‘Ouf.’ He hears his father wince.

  ‘Yes, apparently I stroked a girl’s hair at the college disco, and apparently I use triggering language in lessons and apparently being a normal man is no longer an acceptable thing to be in the classroom. Apparently we all have to be like robots these days and think about every last word before it leaves our lips. Apparently modern women cannot cope with anything, with anything at all.’

  He’s shouting. He knew he would shout. It was why he’d called his father. His father knows he’s let Owen down, he knows he’s been a shit, shit dad. He lets Owen shout at him from time to time. He takes it. He doesn’t fix anything, but he takes it. And that’ll do for now.

  ‘Oh, Owen, it’s all so bloody ridiculous, isn’t it? Political correctness,’ he tuts. ‘It’s madness, it really is. But do you think resigning was the right response, really? I mean, how will you get another job?’

  Owen winces against the unpalatable question. Then he thinks of YourLoss, strolling around his poncey little market town, writing his existential blog, doing his boring shitty office job. He seems happy enough. He seems to have it all under control.

  ‘I’ll get another job,’ he says. ‘It’s all just so …’

  ‘I know,’ says his father, ‘ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous.’

  There’s a significant pause. Owen feels the onus is on him to fill it somehow. But he can’t and he doesn’t. Instead he leaves the way completely clear for his father to say, ‘Well, Owen, it’s been good talking to you. I’m sorry to hear you’re having a bad time of it. And we must get together soon. We really must. I mean, your birthday …?’

  ‘Next month.’

  ‘Yes. Next month. Let’s do something.’

  ‘Yes. Let’s.’

  ‘And Owen?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘These allegations. The, you know, sexual impropriety. I mean, there’s nothing to them. Is there?’

  Owen sighs, lets himself sink to his haunches, his back against a wall. ‘No, Dad. No.’

  ‘Good. That’s good. Bye, Owen.’

  ‘Bye, Dad.’

  Owen pulls himself back to standing. The anger that he transferred so very briefly on to his father has turned straight back on to himself, twice as hard and dark and sharp. He feels his veins fill with electricity. He walks fast now, towards the Tube station. He’s about to turn into the entrance when he sees across the road the rose-gold glow of a pub window. It’s twenty to twelve.

  Owen is not much of a drinker. He likes wine with a meal or on a night out with colleagues, but not drinking just for the sake of drinking. Then he thinks again of his cold bedroom, of Tessie bumping about resentfully, and he thinks of YourLoss with a pint in a quiet corner of a pub, watching, learning, thinking, being. He imagines him as a tall man, broad-shouldered, short hair, neatly cut, maybe even a short beard or moustache. He imagines him in a button-down shirt and worn jeans and walking boots. He imagines him wiping away a slick of foam from the tips of his moustache, placing his pint carefully back on the beer mat, centring it just so. Lifting his gaze. Watching, learning, thinking, being.

  He turns away from the Tube station, back to the pedestrian crossing, waits for the green man to flash and heads into the warmth of the pub. He orders a pint. He finds a table for one. He sits at it.

  16

  A few hours later Owen pushes his way heavily through the door of the Oriental Star opposite his local Tube station. He waits at the till for a special chow mein and a can of Tango and then takes them to the counter in the window where he watches people pouring from the Tube, wondering at the terrifying unknowability of strangers.

  He uses the noodles to try to soak up the three pints of lager he had while he was in the pub by himself. Being drunk alone was an alarming experience. He’d gone to the toilet and pissed on his shoes, wobbled, laughed at his reflection in the mirror and talked to himself, then bumped into a table on the way out causing the wine in a woman’s glass to slosh over the rim. ‘I am so very sorry,’ he said. ‘Please don’t report me to the authorities.’ And she’d looked at him sideways, unsmilingly, and he’d said fucking bitch under his breath, left the pub and then immediately wished he hadn’t said it.

  After his noodles he ascends the steep hill to his road. The drunkenness is receding, dampened. He looks up and sees the moon shining down between two tall trees, against a navy-blue sky. He takes out his phone and tries to capture it, but the moon refuses to show off for him, imprinting itself as a vague white smudge on the image.

  He puts his phone back in his pocket and then turns, and as he does so a thin figure comes hurtling towards him, shoulders him roughly, nearly knocks him backwards.

  The figure barely slows as it turns backwards. ‘Sorry, mate. Sorry.’

  The figure then reverses and hurtles down to the end of the hill, runs on the spot, then turns and hurtles back up the hill, right up the middle of the road.

  Owen stands and watches him.

  He sees that it is a middle-aged man, wearing tight Lycra leggings and a zip-up jacket with strange black flaps over his ears and wires coming out of a tiny pocket in his jacket.

  A jogger. He throws Owen a strange look, before running back down again. The road is a dead end, separated from the six lanes of traffic on the Finchley Road by a set of stone steps. For a while it is just Owen and the jogger.

  As the jogger reaches the top of the hill for the sixth time he stops and collapses into himself, breathing so loudly he sounds as though he might die. He glances up at Owen. ‘You all right, mate?’ he asks.

  Owen feels something stir deep inside himself, something dark. He looks at the jogger and he says, ‘Are you married?’

  The jogger grimaces and says, ‘Eh?’

  ‘Married?’ says Owen. ‘Got a girlfriend?’

  ‘What’s it got to do with you?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he replies. ‘I just wondered.’

  He starts to head around the corner to his street when the man catches up with him. ‘Do I know you?’ he asks.

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘Are we neighbours? I feel like I’ve seen you …’

  ‘I live there. Number twelve.’ He points at Tessie’s building and shrugs.

  ‘Ah, yes. That’s right. We live there.’ The man points at the house opposite, the one where the teenage girl lives, where the stupid mother with the concerned face lives.

  Owen nods. The man gives him a tight smile before jogging away from him. ‘See you around,’ he says.

  ‘Yeah,’ says Owen. ‘See you around.’

  The TV in Tessie’s sitting room rumbles through the closed door. She’s watching the live feed from the Houses of Parliament. Something to do with Brexit. It sounds like a donkey compound.

  He tiptoes past, gets himself a pint of water from the kitchen and then locks himself away in his bedroom where he undoes the top three buttons of his shirt, kicks off his scruffy shoes and opens up YourLoss’s blog. There’s a new post up but he doesn’t read it. Instead he scrolls down the page to the link that says Contact. Hi, he types in the contact form:

  My name’s Owen. I love your blog. Would love to chat sometime. I’ve just lost my job. Don’t really know what my next steps are.

  Yo, Owen [comes the reply], what’s going down with you?

  I’m a teacher. I was accused of ‘sweating on a student’ and ‘taking the mick out of vegans’. And I just turned down the chance to attend a ‘retraining course’ and quit.

  No way! Tell me more!

  Owen replies succinctly. The outline of the thing. The party, the tequila shots, the girls, the meetings. The curl of distaste on the mouths of Clarice and Holly every time the word ‘sweat’ was mentioned.

  What’s the deal with you [asks YourLoss]? Are you celibate? Infrequent? Never? What?

  Celibate [he replies]. Never.

  Do you like anyone? I mean, are you romantic?

  Owen considers the question. He can’t find an answer. Eventually he replies:

  I don’t know. I don’t like anyone. But I have liked people.

  Dated?

  Kind of.

  Dinner and flowers? The pub?

  Dinner and flowers. Once.

  And how did that go?

  Shit. She left halfway through the date, said her mum was having an emergency.

  LOL. Fuck that. What fucking bullshit. So, what are you going to do about your job?

  I dunno. Going to take some time out. I’ve got savings.

  And? What will you do with your time out?

  Haven’t really thought about it. Maybe try to start something up, a company. Something like that.

  You need a plan, mate. Otherwise you’ll wake up one morning and your savings will be gone and you’ll have put on a stone and have nothing to show for any of it but a load of trousers that don’t fit you any more.

  I’m not sure I’m ready for making a plan.

  YourLoss doesn’t reply for quite some time. Owen wriggles slightly and clears his throat, worried that he’s said something to put him off. Then there’s a plip and another message appears.

  Where d’you live, Owen?

  North London.

  Righty-ho. Not far from me then.

  Why, where do you live?

  Just outside London. Look, here’s my email address. Write to me. I’ve got a proposition for you. Bryn@hotmail.co.uk. Email me now, yeah?

  Owen opens his email account, pastes Bryn’s email address into the bar and starts typing.

  17

  Owen and Bryn arrange to meet for a pint at a pub near Euston station.

  Bryn has told Owen that he will be wearing a green jacket and has ‘a lot of hair’ and wears glasses. Owen has told Bryn that he will be wearing a black jacket and jeans and then struggled to find any other identifying features to share with him.

  He walks into the pub now; it’s a scruffy mock-Tudor affair, set on a corner, with weather-beaten tables on the pavement and leaded windows. The air is thick with beer and dust. Lone men sit in corners. Owen’s eyes scan the room until they come upon a man on the left, who is looking at him with some semblance of recognition. It doesn’t somehow compute that this man might be YourLoss and Owen’s gaze passes across him. But then the man is on his feet and coming towards him. He has a strange forward-leaning gait and is short. Very short. His hair explodes from his scalp and recedes halfway back like a clown wig. The bald part of his skull is shiny and raw-looking. His green zip-up jacket has a stain on it.

  ‘Owen! Yes? Cool! Nice to see you, mate!’ He grabs Owen’s hand and pumps it up and down.

  ‘Bryn,’ says Owen. ‘Great to meet you too. Can I get you …?’ He gestures towards the bar.

  ‘No. No. I’m good.’

  Owen gets himself a glass of red wine and heads back to Bryn’s table.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ says Bryn. ‘This is a turn-up for the books.’

  ‘It is a bit,’ Owen agrees.

  The last thing he’d been expecting, in fact. Bryn had emailed him back the night before and asked him a bit more about his technical qualifications, abilities, interests, asked him about the circumstances around his resignation from the college. Owen hadn’t quite been able to fathom his intent. Then Bryn had suddenly said: This is kismet, karma, you and I were meant to meet. Drinks? Tomorrow? Euston way?

  ‘How’s your day been?’ he asks now.

  Owen, who is unused to people asking him how his day has been, blanches slightly. ‘Good. It’s been good.’ Then, checking himself, he adds, ‘Yours?’

  ‘Oh, you know. Same old shit.’

  ‘Are you working right now?’

  ‘Yeah. I am. Just come straight from the office in fact. Unlike you, you lucky bastard, you gentleman of leisure. How did you spend your day?’

  He shrugs. ‘Slept late. Had a long bath. Watched a few episodes of a show. Ate a bowl of pasta.’

  ‘Oh, you lucky, lucky fucker. Fuck, I’d kill for a day like that. Anyway.’ He raises his pint of something murky-looking towards Owen’s red wine and says, ‘Cheers.’

  He is absolutely nothing like Owen had imagined. But he has a certain charisma, a cartoonish charm. He has self-confidence, a touch of cockiness, which confounds Owen as he’d always been under the impression that self-confidence was what attracted women to a man and that it was his own lack of confidence that was scuppering his chances.

  Owen’s eye falls to the stain on Bryn’s jacket; it’s unidentifiable. It looks like it’s been there for so long that Bryn no longer sees it. He pictures himself pulling Bryn’s jacket off and shoving it in a washing machine on a hot setting. He pictures himself with a pair of shiny snip-snip scissors, chopping off the ludicrous curls, yanking off his unfashionable glasses, telling him to stop smiling like that. He’s strangely furious with Bryn for sabotaging himself and then making himself the mouthpiece for men like Owen who try and do everything right; who don’t have stains on their jackets and clown hair yet still can’t get a woman to look them in the eye.

  Bryn doesn’t have a clue, Owen thinks. He doesn’t have a clue what it feels like to be totally normal yet be overlooked by the world for no discernible reason. He seems to want to be despised by women. He thinks again of Bryn’s comment under the article about being accused of sexual misconduct at work and he thinks of the women in Bryn’s office, and for a moment he feels sorry for them.

  But he hides these misgivings from Bryn and smiles and says, ‘Cheers. It’s great to meet you.’

  ‘So.’ Bryn rubs his hands together. ‘I suppose you’re wondering what this is all about?’

  He nods.

  Bryn lowers his voice and glances around the pub. ‘I wanted to meet up, face-to-face, because what I want to discuss with you. It’s kind of … sensitive. I don’t want to leave anything in my trail. You know.’

  Owen nods again.

  ‘So. You and me. I feel there’s a kinship, yes?’

  Owen nods for a third time.

  ‘I’m looking at you, and I see a nice-looking fella. You’re nicely dressed. But you’re telling me that you’ve never, you know, you’ve never been with a woman.’

  Owen smiles apologetically.

  ‘So, what does that tell you about the world?’ Bryn doesn’t wait for Owen to reply. ‘It tells you that the world is wrong. The world, Owen, is just totally fucking wrong. And why do you think that is?’

  Again, he doesn’t wait for an answer.

  ‘It’s a conspiracy. And I’m not some nutjob conspiracy theorist. I promise you that. But this, the shit that guys like you and me have to deal with. It’s a conspiracy. Full-blown. End of. They call us “incels”.’ He makes the quotes with his fingers. ‘Like it’s just bad luck. You know. Like there’s nothing anyone can do about it. But that’s the thing, Owen. They are doing this to us – deliberately. The media are doing this to us. And they’ve got the liberals and the feminists eating out of their hands. The world’s collective brain is shrinking. People are becoming more and more stupid. More and more fixated on detail. Fucking eyebrows. There’s a whole industry out there dedicated just to eyebrows. Did you know that? Multi-million-pound industry. And meanwhile the gene pool is shrinking and shrinking without men like you and me in it. Extrapolate another three generations into the future and what are we going to end up with? Nothing but a billion Stacys and Chads. And that’s bad for the world, Owen. It’s bad for the planet. We’ll die out, the likes of us. It’ll be a world full of people with shiny teeth and tattoos, all fucking each other and making more Stacys and Chads. In days gone by, there was a woman for every man, because women needed men. Now women think they rule the world. They get to pick and choose while men flail around waxing their eyebrows and pretending they’re OK with their girlfriends calling them useless wankers. The world’s destroyed, Owen, totally destroyed. And I’ve got a platform; I have over ten thousand subscribers to my blog. And it’s building by the day, by the minute. I can use that platform, target people who might be on the same page as me. I mean, obviously we’re all angry about the way we’ve been fucked over by the world. But it’s a matter of targeting people who might be prepared to step out of their boxes and do something about it. Start a revolution.’