Owen considers the question. He can’t find an answer. Eventually he replies:

I don’t know. I don’t like anyone. But I have liked people.

Dated?

Kind of.

Dinner and flowers? The pub?

Dinner and flowers. Once.

And how did that go?

Shit. She left halfway through the date, said her mum was having an emergency.

LOL. Fuck that. What fucking bullshit. So, what are you going to do about your job?

I dunno. Going to take some time out. I’ve got savings.

And? What will you do with your time out?

Haven’t really thought about it. Maybe try to start something up, a company. Something like that.

You need a plan, mate. Otherwise you’ll wake up one morning and your savings will be gone and you’ll have put on a stone and have nothing to show for any of it but a load of trousers that don’t fit you any more.

I’m not sure I’m ready for making a plan.

YourLoss doesn’t reply for quite some time. Owen wriggles slightly and clears his throat, worried that he’s said something to put him off. Then there’s a plip and another message appears.

Where d’you live, Owen?

North London.

Righty-ho. Not far from me then.

Why, where do you live?

Just outside London. Look, here’s my email address. Write to me. I’ve got a proposition for you. [email protected] Email me now, yeah?

Owen opens his email account, pastes Bryn’s email address into the bar and starts typing.

17

Owen and Bryn arrange to meet for a pint at a pub near Euston station.

Bryn has told Owen that he will be wearing a green jacket and has ‘a lot of hair’ and wears glasses. Owen has told Bryn that he will be wearing a black jacket and jeans and then struggled to find any other identifying features to share with him.

He walks into the pub now; it’s a scruffy mock-Tudor affair, set on a corner, with weather-beaten tables on the pavement and leaded windows. The air is thick with beer and dust. Lone men sit in corners. Owen’s eyes scan the room until they come upon a man on the left, who is looking at him with some semblance of recognition. It doesn’t somehow compute that this man might be YourLoss and Owen’s gaze passes across him. But then the man is on his feet and coming towards him. He has a strange forward-leaning gait and is short. Very short. His hair explodes from his scalp and recedes halfway back like a clown wig. The bald part of his skull is shiny and raw-looking. His green zip-up jacket has a stain on it.

‘Owen! Yes? Cool! Nice to see you, mate!’ He grabs Owen’s hand and pumps it up and down.

‘Bryn,’ says Owen. ‘Great to meet you too. Can I get you …?’ He gestures towards the bar.

‘No. No. I’m good.’

Owen gets himself a glass of red wine and heads back to Bryn’s table.

‘Well, well, well,’ says Bryn. ‘This is a turn-up for the books.’

‘It is a bit,’ Owen agrees.

The last thing he’d been expecting, in fact. Bryn had emailed him back the night before and asked him a bit more about his technical qualifications, abilities, interests, asked him about the circumstances around his resignation from the college. Owen hadn’t quite been able to fathom his intent. Then Bryn had suddenly said: This is kismet, karma, you and I were meant to meet. Drinks? Tomorrow? Euston way?

‘How’s your day been?’ he asks now.

Owen, who is unused to people asking him how his day has been, blanches slightly. ‘Good. It’s been good.’ Then, checking himself, he adds, ‘Yours?’

‘Oh, you know. Same old shit.’

‘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 to stop 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 despised by 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. They call 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.