I was walking home from school one afternoon. It was about twenty past five and I remembered that this was the exact time I would normally have been on my way to the Portman for my session with Roan.

Suddenly, I found myself turning right instead of left, walking those familiar streets towards the Portman Centre. The sun was just setting and I was wearing a big black Puffa over my school uniform, black tights, black shoes, hair scraped back, hood up. I crept between the trees in the parking area to the front and peered up at his window.

Do you know how long I stood there for?

I stood there for nearly an hour.

It was March and it was cold. Really, really cold.

I saw occasional suggestions of movement, then I saw the lights ping on in all the consulting rooms and I realised it had turned to night-time. My teeth were chattering but I felt like I’d been there so long that I couldn’t go now, that I couldn’t go until I’d actually seen him.

He finally appeared about twenty minutes later. He was wearing a big black coat and a pull-on hat. I could see his breath even from a distance, the yellow cloud of it in the street light. He smiled then and I thought for a moment that he’d seen me, but he hadn’t, he was smiling at someone else, a girl coming behind him. She looked about eighteen, nineteen. He held the door for her, then the girl lit a cigarette and I watched them share it. I thought: You don’t share a cigarette with someone unless you know them really well. I also thought that I’d never seen Roan smoke, not once in all the years I’d been his patient.

After they’d finished smoking the cigarette they went back into the building, Roan held the door for her again and he seemed to press himself against her as he followed her through. I saw her turn and smile at him.

I’d come to the Portman to sate some weird need for the familiarity of him, but I had set my eyes upon him and I had seen him as another person, a person who smoked, who stood too close to young women.

I was not sated. If anything, my appetite for seeing him was increased. I stood outside for another half an hour, until the car park began to empty out, the front door opening and shutting constantly as staff left for the day, calling out cheery goodbyes, talk of a quick one, comments about how cold it was. I recognised some of the people, the secretaries, receptionists, nurses I’d dealt with over the years. And then Roan reappeared. He was with the young girl again. Again, he held the door for her, chivalrously, and she exited beneath his outstretched arm, like a move in a dance, smiling at him as she did so. I took a photo. Call me weird, but it just seemed like something I needed to be able to study at my own leisure in the privacy of my own room. I needed to analyse the girl’s body language and Roan’s smile and work out what was happening, what I’d seen.

I kind of expected them to go somewhere together, but they didn’t. They had a little hug, a kind of half-embrace, where only their shoulders and cheeks touched, then she hitched her bag up on her shoulder and walked away in the direction of the Tube station. Roan stopped for a moment, pulled out his phone, tapped his screen a few times. I saw his face in the glow of the screen; he looked old. Then his face lifted and lightened and he put his phone away and he turned and caught up with the girl and they were close enough now for me to hear him call out to her. ‘Wait, Anna, hold up,’ he said.

She stopped and turned and I could see the glitter of multiple earrings in her ear.

‘I’ve got half an hour,’ he said. ‘If you’re not dashing home, maybe we could have that coffee? Or something stronger?’

He sounded nervous, like a bit of an idiot.

But the young girl smiled and nodded. ‘Sure,’ she said, ‘yes. I’m not in a rush.’

‘Great,’ said Roan. ‘How about that new place that’s just opened, opposite the Tube?’

‘Fab,’ said Anna.

They fell into step, their footsteps ringing out in the cold dark against the tarmac, and away on to the street, me still there, frozen to the core, invisible between the trees.

12

OWEN

Through the plate-glass window of the third-floor reception area, Owen watches flakes of snow tumble lazily from a heavy grey 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 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 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 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, 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 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.’