THROUGH THE PLATE-GLASS window of the third-floor reception area, Owen watches flakes of snow tumble lazily from a heavy gray January sky. He hates London snow, the way it promises so much but delivers nothing but treacherous pavements, late trains, and chaos.
Owen teaches computer science to sixteen- to eighteen-year-olds at Ealing Tertiary College He’s been teaching here for eight years. Right now, though, he is not teaching anyone. He is currently waiting to be called into the principal’s office for some unspecified but rather ominous-feeling reason. His stomach roils unpleasantly at the prospect.
Finally, the principal’s secretary calls him in. “Jed’s ready for you,” she says, putting down her phone.
In Jed’s office, Owen is surprised to see Holly McKinley, the head of human resources, and Clarice Dewer, the student welfare officer. The atmosphere is weighty and murky. Clarice doesn’t look at him as he enters, and he’s always thought of Clarice as a friend, or at least as a person who sometimes talks to him.
Holly gets to her feet. “Thank you for coming in to see us, Owen.”
She holds out her hand, and Owen shakes it, aware that his hands are damp, resisting the urge to apologize.
“Please, take a seat.” Jed gestures at the empty chair before them.
Owen sits. He glances down at his shoes. They’re quite new, and this is the first day since he bought them that they haven’t hurt. They’re not his usual style; they’re brown leather, slightly pointy, kind of trendy. He keeps expecting someone to notice them, to say, “Nice shoes,” but so far nobody has. Now he looks at them and wonders why he bought them.
“I’m afraid,” Clarice begins, “that we’ve had a complaint. Well, in fact we’ve had two complaints. Both pertaining to the same incident.”
Owen squints slightly. His brain scrolls through everything that’s happened at work over the past few months for anything that could be described as an incident, but he finds nothing.
Clarice drops her gaze to her paperwork. “On December the fourteenth last year, at the Christmas party?”
Owen squints again. The Christmas party. He hadn’t intended to go. He hadn’t been for the two preceding years. As a member of staff at a students’ party there was a sweet spot between being a dour observer and an overenthusiastic participant, and if you missed the spot it was no fun at all. But he’d bowed to pressure from two girls in his second-year class, Monique and Maisy.
“Come on, sir,” they’d said (they insisted on calling him sir even though everyone else called him Owen). “We want to see your moves.”
There was nothing new about this form of reverse sexual harassment. It happened all the time: because Owen was a quiet man who didn’t like to reveal much about his private life, because he had a tendency to awkwardness and a need to maintain clear lines between his professional and personal personas, certain students made sport out of trying to breach his defenses. Usually girls, and usually using their sexuality to do so.
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 onto 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 percent. 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 behavior 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 ‘behavior’ at the Christmas party. I don’t do behavior. 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 favor.”
“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 realizes 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 colored water bottles. While the snow on the ground has turned to slush it still lies in thick coats on cars 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 suntans, 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 upper-ground-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, 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 run-down 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 light bulbs 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 onto 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.