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 apologise.
‘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 saynice 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 beinga dour observer and an overenthusiastic participator 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 defences. 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 on to 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, adismissive 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 per cent. 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 behaviour 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.
‘Therewasno “behaviour” at the Christmas party. I don’tdobehaviour. 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 favour.’
‘And so, do I just …?’