‘No,’ Holly had said. ‘I’m afraid not, Owen. It needs to be face-to-face.’

He fishes the dreaded shoes out from under the bed where they’ve been lurking ever since he kicked them under there two weeks ago. They appear, trailing a family of dust bunnies in their wake. He appraises them in the light of two weeks’ absence. No, he decides, they are bad shoes. He will not wear them again. He puts on his comfy, rubber-soled black lace-ups instead, the ones he’s had to glue the soles back on to twice.

He gets himself some breakfast in the kitchen: a slice of toast and a slice of cheese. Tessie appears as he’s putting the butter back in the fridge. She’s back from Italy and has been in a strange mood ever since she returned.

‘Aren’t you going to be late?’ she says. ‘You know it’s nearly ten o’clock.’

‘I’m not due in until eleven,’ he says.

He hasn’t told her about his suspension. Why would he? She would just judge him, say something about his mother, make everything 10 per cent worse than it already is.

‘All right for some,’ she says, brushing past him to the sink where she takes an upturned tea cup from the draining board and examines the inside of it before rinsing it and switching on the kettle.

Tessie is his mother’s big sister. His mother is dead. She died when Owen was eighteen. Owen’s father lives in south London with another wife and another son. Owen lived with them for a month after his mother died. It was the loneliest month of his life. He remembers Tessie, at his mother’s funeral, touching his arm and saying, ‘Remember, I will always have a room for you if you need it.’

Turns out she didn’t really mean it. But now she’s stuck with him, fifteen years later and counting. She was forty when Owen moved in. Now she is fifty-five, but she acts as though she is sixty-five. You wouldn’t catch her in Lycra leggings and a hoodie. Her hair is steel grey and frothy and she shops at odd boutiques in Hampstead that sell voluminous linen tunics and trousers with baggy crotches and floppy hats.

‘I bumped into Ernesto last night,’ she says.

Owen nods. Ernesto is a single man of a certain age who lives in the flat above theirs.

‘He said there was a visit from the police a couple of weeks back. Saw you talking to them on the front step. What was that all about?’

Owen breathes in hard. ‘Nothing,’ he says. ‘Some sort of attack in the area. They were doing door-to-doors.’

‘Attack,’ she says, narrowing her eyes. ‘What sort of attack?’

‘I don’t know.’ He throws his crusts in the bin. Thirty-three years old. He really should be able to eat crusts at his age. ‘An assault, something like that.’

‘Sexual?’ she asks.

‘Yes,’ he replies. ‘Probably.’

There is a tiny but significant silence. Inside the silence he can hear the little intake of his aunt’s breath; sees a thought passing through her mind so fast that it makes her head roll back slightly. Her eyes narrow again and then it passes.

‘Well,’ she says. ‘I hope they caught whoever it was. I don’t know what’s happening to this area. It used to be so safe.’

After a tense five-minute wait in the reception area at the college, Owen is shown into the same office he was shown to last time. Jed Bryant is there, once again, with Holly and Clarice. And there is another woman, small and sharp, who is introduced to him as Penelope Ofili. She is an adjudicator.

‘Why do we need an adjudicator?’ he asks.

‘Just for transparency.’

Transparency. Owen blinks slowly and sucks in his cheeks.

‘Please,’ says Jed, ‘take a seat.’

‘How’ve you been?’ asks Holly. ‘Hope you’ve had a chance to relax.’

‘Not really,’ he says. ‘No.’

The smile freezes on Holly’s lips and she turns away abruptly and says, ‘So, thank you so much for coming in again, Owen. As you know, we’ve been working very hard to investigate the claims made by two of your students regarding your behaviour at the Christmas party last December.’

Owen wriggles slightly in his chair, uncrosses his legs, crosses them again. He’s been over the events of that night a hundred times since the allegations were made and he still cannot find the point at which his behaviour breached the line between jovial and abusive. Because that is the bottom line here: in order for all these people to be sitting in this room together, taking time out of their own days, calling in the services of an independent adjudicator, there must be some fundamental belief that abuse has taken place.

He uncrosses his legs for a third time and is aware that this will look edgy and uncomfortable, which is understandable but might also make it seem that he is feeling guilty. He should have spoken to someone, he realises that now. Things have escalated rather than de-escalated since he last sat here.

‘We’ve spoken to several people who were there on the night,’ Holly continues. ‘I’m afraid, Owen, that they all corroborate the original accusation.’

He nods, his eyes cast downwards.

‘Several people saw you touch the girls in question. Several other people report being present when you splattered the girls with the sweat from your forehead. They all attest that it was a deliberate action and that you did it more than once when asked by the girls to stop.

‘Furthermore, we’ve had several reports backing up the claims of inappropriate teaching: favouring boys, belittling girls, ignoring them, marking them more harshly in some cases or not prioritising their work in others. Some usage of inappropriate language in the classroom.’

He glances up. ‘Like what?’

‘Well.’ Holly looks at her notes. ‘Using terms such as “man up”. Referring to certain pieces of code as “sexy”. Referring to female students as girls. Referring to other students as “insane” and “mental”.’

‘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.’