‘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 tostop 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 despisedby 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. Theycall 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.’
Owen looks at Bryn, questioningly.
‘I’m talking about war, Owen. Are you in?’
Owen lies on his back on his single bed. He stares upwards at the ceiling, eight feet overhead. Strands of cobweb dance about up there, blown by the draught from the window. It is midnight. He is tired, but he cannot sleep.
Every moment of his night out with Bryn is playing and replaying through his thoughts. Bryn’s words roll about his mind like an upended bucket of marbles, skittering about deafeningly.
Even now, two hours after getting home, an hour after getting into bed, Owen cannot quite fathom the meaning behind Bryn’s words. Bryn was unclear, his thought processes didn’t seem to keep pace with his words, he seemed a bubbling geyser of ideas and anger and excitement and purpose, without any clear focus or intent. The one key thing he kept coming back to was the idea of a revolution.
Eventually he’d passed Owen a small pot of pills, with the words, ‘If you can’t get it legally, then just fucking take it. While they’re sleeping.’
Owen had looked back at Bryn. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said.
‘Oh, you do understand,’ said Bryn. ‘You totally understand.’
He sat back, his arms folded across his chest. He eyed Owen triumphantly for a second and then leaned in again. ‘Imagine,’ he said, ‘a whole army of us lot doing this. Hundreds of us. Do you see? Do you see?’
Owen felt his lunch rising gently up the back of his throat.
Bryn leaned in even closer and looked at him urgently. ‘This isn’t about sex, you know that, don’t you? This is aboutus. Fuck, if we were an endangered animal there’d be a charity out there doing everything they could to keep us alive. They’d be sending us every fucking fertile female animal they could throw our way to preserve our species. So why should we be any different? Why should we get a worse deal than a fucking animal, Owen?’
