OWEN LEAVES THE unit in Hammersmith where he’s spent every day for the past two weeks. It’s late March. It’s sunny. It’s his thirty-fourth birthday. He turns to say goodbye to a woman behind him. Her name is Liz. She was in the same course as him. The course was called Sexual Conduct Training and Rehabilitation for Employees and Management. Liz is an HR manager for Ealing libraries. She handled a sexual harassment case earlier this year on behalf of two female employees and did everything wrong. They all know an awful lot about each other after two weeks of role-playing and debating and videos and first-person testimonials. And of course, everyone already knew who Owen was the minute he walked through the door on the very first morning. A surge of energy had gone through the room. An almost audible gasp. It was him, the man who’d been arrested for killing that girl. The incel. The pervert. The weirdo. The creep. He’d seen all the women in the room recoil slightly.
It didn’t matter that he’d been exonerated. It didn’t matter that the girl had been found and reunited with her family. Her smiling face on the front pages of the newspapers had not, for some reason, canceled out his grimacing face from the front pages of the papers. There was still a potency about the image of his face, about his name. It would take weeks, months, possibly years for him to lose the terrible associations of his time as one of the most reviled men in the country.
The police had found Bryn. They’d brought him in for questioning as he left his local pub opposite the duck pond in the leafy commuter town. It was the same day they’d let Owen go home. His name was not Bryn, of course. It was Jonathan. They found more date-rape drugs in his flat. Reams of incel literature. Violent pornography. Drafts of his blog posts on his laptop. They took his prints and matched them to those on the pot of pills he’d given Owen. He’s on their watch list now, as a terrorist threat. That made Owen happy.
Liz smiles at him as she passes him and says, “Bye, Owen. It’s been great getting to know you. I really wish you all the best, all the very, very best. I hope you can put everything behind you. You’re a good man, and I’ve really enjoyed getting to know you.” She kisses him quickly on the cheek, squeezes the top of his arm.
He watches her dash across the street to someone waiting for her in a parked car. She waves at him from the window and he waves back.
The training course has been a revelation. Not just in terms of what it’s taught him about how to behave in the workplace, but what it’s taught him about how to behave, full stop; how women’s minds work, what makes them feel safe, what makes them feel unsafe, what’s banter, what’s creepy.
Earlier in the week a woman had come in to talk to them about the sexual harassment she’d experienced from a former employer, how he had seemed so nice at first, but after a while she’d realized that every single second of every single encounter, whatever they were doing, whatever they were talking about, he was seeing her as a woman, not a human being. That had really hit Owen dead center. He’d been doing that all his life, he realized. He had never, ever had a conversation, an interlude, an encounter with a woman without the primary thought in his head being that she was a woman. Not once, not ever.
He’d put up his hand and he’d asked her how to stop doing it.
The woman said, “You can’t simply stop doing it; if you consciously try to stop doing it, you’ll still be putting the woman’s gender at the top of your encounter. The only way,” she’d said, “to stop doing it is to acknowledge to yourself when it’s happening, to own your reaction. To work around it. Think about something else. Say to yourself, ‘This is a human being wearing a red jacket.’ Or, ‘This is a human being with a northern accent.’ Or, ‘This is a human being with a nice smile.’ Or, ‘This is a human being with a problem who needs my help.’ Own your reaction. Work round it.” She’d smiled at him encouragingly, and he’d put her advice into action immediately. He turned his sensation of talking to a young, reasonably attractive woman into the sensation of talking to a human being with brown shoes on. It had worked. It broke the spell. He’d smiled at her and he’d said, “Thank you. Thank you so much.”
And so now, pending confirmation from the course directors that he has passed the assessment criteria, Owen will have his job back at the college. He has written to Monique and Maisy, explained, without expecting pity or even understanding, that he suffers from fragmentary blackouts when he’s drunk even a small amount of alcohol, that his recollection of the night in question is very different to their recollection, but that he wholeheartedly believes and accepts their version of events. That he is abject with regret and sadness that he made them feel uncomfortable and that he chose to disbelieve them when they had the courage to tell the truth. It was a wordy missive, but from the heart and worth doing properly, he’d thought, so that no one could ever accuse him of just doing it for the sake of getting his job back. He wants to be able to face them in the classroom next week and for there to be a bond between them, not a divide.
Owen no longer lives with Tessie. He’s renting a studio flat in West Hampstead, just for now. He’ll make proper plans soon. But in the short term it was important that he escape from her and her poisoned view of him. She tried to pretend she was sad that he was going. But she wasn’t. Owen has a sofa now, not an armchair, a double bed, not a single, and he keeps his home as warm as he wants it to be.
He heads toward the tube to take the Piccadilly line to Covent Garden. Just before he descends the escalator, he gets out his phone, finds Deanna’s number, and sends her a text. Just getting on the tube, it says. Be there in twenty minutes.
He waits a beat to see if she’ll reply. Then there it is: See you in twenty minutes, birthday boy!
He switches off his phone, smiles, and heads into the underground, toward dinner, with his girlfriend, on his birthday.