‘But—’
‘Making fun of students with food allergies.’
‘Intolerances …’
‘And students who are vegans.’
Owen closes his eyes and sighs. ‘For God’s sake,’ he mutters under his breath.
Holly narrows her eyes at him, her finger on the last line of her notes and says, ‘Also, excessive blasphemy.’
‘Blasphemy?’ he says. ‘Really? Dear God.’
He realises his faux pas and shuts his eyes.
‘So,’ he says, ‘what happens now?’
There is a brief silence. All three people in the room exchange a glance. Then Holly pulls a piece of paper from her folder and passes it across the table to him. ‘We would like you to attend this training course, Owen. It’s a week long and addresses all the issues we’ve been discussing today. If at the end of the course it’s felt that you’ve properly engaged with the training and have a clearer understanding of what’s appropriate and inappropriate in a workplace with children, we can start talking a return to work. But you have to commit to it. One hundred per cent. Have a read. Let me know what you think. You’re a very valued member of staff here, Owen.’ A rictus smile. ‘We don’t want to lose you.’
Owen stares at the piece of paper for a while. The words swim and swirl before his eyes. The word ‘brainwashing’ passes through his head. A week trapped in a room with a bunch of paedophiles being reprogrammed to think that vegans are superior beings and women can have penises.
No, he thinks. No thank you. He pushes the paper back across the table towards Holly and says, ‘Thank you, but I’d rather be sacked.’
Owen walks aimlessly for quite some time after he leaves Ealing College. He can’t face the thought of the Tube journey home. He can’t face the thought of Tessie peering at him through her horn-rimmed glasses and saying,What are you doing back so early?And then sitting in his lumpy armchair for the rest of the day staring at a screen.
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 fatherbattening down the hatchesinvolved 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?’
