Owen had been a beautiful child, oddly. His mother had put him in for modelling when he was about four. He hadn’t been taken on because he was awkward in front of a camera. But he’d had a cherubic face: dark eyes, red lips, a dimple.

But the face that had looked so beautiful on a small child had not translated into a good face for a teenager and he’d been a shockingly awkward-looking boy. To this day he cannot bear to look at photos of himself between the ages of eleven and eighteen.

But now, at thirty-three, he feels his features have settled again; he looks in the mirror and a relatively handsome guy looks back at him. He particularly likes his eyes; they are so brown that they are almost black. He inherited them from his maternal grandmother who was half Moroccan.

He doesn’t work out, that is true to say. He has little definition, but in clothes you wouldn’t know that; you wouldn’t know about the softness of the skin around his belly button, the slightly mammary sag around his pectorals. In carefully chosen clothes, he looks just like any average gym-goer.

Owen doesn’t believe that he’s being rejected by women on the grounds of not having a ‘fit bod’. This he could accept. But no woman has seen him undressed. Not once. Not ever. It appears that for some unexplained reason Owen fails to meet the criteria of every single woman in the land. And yet he sees men far worse-looking than himself, every single day, with women who appear to like them, or with children, proving that at some point a woman has liked them enough to let them do that to her, or wearing wedding rings or with photos on their desks of nice-looking women or photos of the children that nice-looking women have let them make inside them and really, it baffles him, it absolutely baffles him.

It’s not as if Owen is fussy. He really isn’t fussy; in fact he would probably say yes to 80 per cent of adult women if they asked him out to dinner. Maybe even 90 per cent.

In Tessie’s bathroom, which is heated by an electric bar above the door that glows as red as a Saharan sunset, and which would probably fail a health and safety inspection, there is a full-length mirror opposite the toilet. Owen has no idea what would possess someone to put a full-length mirror opposite a toilet. But there it is, and over the years he’s grown used to it. He ignores it most of the time. But sometimes he uses it to assess himself, physically. He needs to look upon himself at regular intervals, to see himself, because no one else sees him and if he doesn’t remind himself of his three dimensions, he might just dissolve and disappear. He looks at his penis. He has a nice penis. He’s watched the dating show with the naked men standing in pods being scrutinised by fully clothed women and nearly every one of the men has had an ugly penis. But his penis is nice. He can see that objectively. Yet no woman has ever seen it.

He sighs, puts himself back into his underwear and zips up his trousers. He goes back to his room and to YourLoss’s blog, which Owen had discovered yesterday after clicking a link included in his online comment.

YourLoss’s website is a portal into a world that Owen did not know existed.

He describes himself as an incel. The term is hyperlinked at the top of his website to a Wiki page that describes incels thus:

… members of an online subculture[1][2]. who define themselves as unable to find a romantic or sexual partner despite desiring one, a state they describe as inceldom.[3]Self-identified incels are largely white and are almost exclusively male heterosexuals.[4][5][6][7][8][9]. The term is a portmanteau of ‘involuntary celibates’.[10]

YourLoss is thirty-three, like Owen, and very open about the fact that he has not had sex since he was seventeen.

Owen, on the other hand, has never had sex.

He once had a girl touch him inside his trousers, when he was about nineteen. But it had ended badly and prematurely, with the girl withdrawing her hand rapidly and rushing to find a sink. It was one of the most embarrassing moments of his life. He’d replayed it in his head for years, over and over, like slicing himself over and over with a sharp knife. The more he thought about it, the scareder he’d become of ever putting himself in that position again and he’s blamed himself ever since for the lack of sex he’s experienced, for the women who haven’t looked at him or touched him. As far as he’s concerned, it’s his fault, entirely. But as he reads YourLoss’s blog, he begins to wonder about this.

Because YourLoss doesn’t blame himself. YourLoss blames everyone else and he is really angry.

He’s angry at people he calls ‘Chads’. Chads are guys who get sex. According to YourLoss, Chads don’t get sex because they’re better than guys who don’t get sex. They get sex because they’re looksmaxxing and mugging. This means that they are pumping their bodies artificially to look more attractive than normal guys, that they are fake-tanning and tooth-whitening and getting plastic surgery and having things done to their eyebrows and their skin. They get sex because they are stacking the system unfairly against men like YourLoss. And, Owen suspects, men like him too. They are, apparently, cheating.

But mainly, he’s angry at women. Stacys and Beckys as he refers to them. Stacys are the high-value women, the trophy women, the women who can have any man they want. These women sicken him because they know exactly what they’re doing; they know their power and their worth and use it deliberately to make guys like YourLoss feel worthless. Beckys are the less attractive women who still feel they have the right to reject men like YourLoss whom they deem to be not up to scratch.

YourLoss walks a lot. He walks and he sits on benches and in quiet corners of pubs and he looks and he reports what he sees; the injustices he perceives to be lurking in every corner of the nameless town in which he lives.

Owen clicks on an entry called Snow Joke. He reads:

My town is white today. We’re snowy. It makes me feel for a minute like anything is possible; everything hidden away, like the world’s wearing a uniform. And everyone in their biggest, warmest, least attractive clothes, we’re all equal now.

Except we’re not, are we? Under the snow, that car there is still a Mercedes coupé and that car there is still a Ford Focus and you bloody well know it without having to scrape the snow away; there’s that glint of red paintwork, that particular curve to the bumper, unmistakeable. So even though we’re all wearing our worst clothes it’s still plain to see who’s winning and who’s losing. There’s the sad, sad Becky trailing her squashed old Uggs through the snow; doesn’t she know they’re not waterproof? Sheesh. No, she does not because she is stupid. And, look, there’s a Stacy striding along in a pair of Hunter wellies – ￡100 a pair, don’t you know? Ugly as all fuck. But at least they don’t let in the water. And I’m sure there must be someone out there with a fetish for green rubber footwear … And she’s in full make-up, of course, can’t let a few frozen fractals stop you slapping on the slap. Can’t let your standards drop completely.

This town, this fucking town. Full of poseurs. And if you’re not a poseur you’re a wannabe poseur. And if you’re not a wannabe poseur then you’re a loser, even when you’re a winner.

I go to the gastropub just off the common. It’s only been a gastropub for a few weeks. It was just a pub before that. Or actually an inn, to be precise. The Hunters’ Inn as it was once known. It has lamps outside and a carriageway where horses would once have been tethered. In spite of its gentrification, in the snow, with its glowing lamps, it still looks vaguely Dickensian and for a minute I feel timeless and happy, as if I belong somehow. In the old days every man could find a woman. And if they couldn’t make a woman fall in love with them, there were other ways of finding women and keeping them. Women needed us then, more than we needed them. What the hell happened to this world?

I buy a pint. I sit by the window. I watch the ducks skittering about on the frozen pond on the common. I watch the snow.

Tomorrow it will be gone.

15

Owen puts on a grey button-down shirt and dark jeans. He assesses himself in the mirror on the outside of his wardrobe. He looks fine. Possibly overdue a haircut; his fringe hangs a little limply over his eyes. And he’s very pale. But it is February and he is always pale in February. He is due at a meeting at the college in an hour and a half. It will be the first time he’s left the house for anything other than food shopping in over two weeks. His stomach churns slightly with nervous anticipation. Not just about the thought of going on the Tube and sitting opposite people and walking through crowds of strangers, but also of what they are going to say to him. They have carried out a full investigation into the girls’ allegations. They want him to ‘pop in for half an hour or so’ so that they can give him an update.

‘Can’t you just tell me over the phone?’ he asked.