Idiopathy by Sam Byers

he was? Was this what everyone was, in the end, a collection of buried, ignored, suppressed detritus that remained stubbornly on the tideline after everything else had receded?
    Thinking about it now, in bed, with his hand over his eyes and a childish tremble in his upper lip, he realised that this was why Katherine’s call had unnerved him so thoroughly. Here, at the sight of a single name scrolling across a screen, was the feeling of everything he’d buried being exhumed without dignity. Yes, he had let Nathan down towards the end, of course he had, they all had. Yes, he had cut Katherine off in a manner unbefitting their five years together, giving her the sense, as she had said in her last letter to him just under a year ago, that none of it had mattered, that it had all been a mistake. And yes, most of all, he had lied to Katherine, had cheated on her in no uncertain terms. This was the crux of it. This was what troubled him, and this, if he was honest, was the main contributing factor in his unease around Angelica: the fact that he had, although he had never discussed it, walked out of the bar the night he’d met her, after all those epic, idealistic conversations, feeling what he knew to be the first stirrings of something he’d long thought lost to him, and gone home, to Katherine, with whom he had not yet parted, and told her, just as he had
this
very evening told Angelica in an uncomfortably similar way, that he had spoken to ‘no one’ the whole evening. And yes, he had called Angelica when Katherine was at work the next day, and yes, he had in fact fucked Angelica some weeks later, still without having ended things with Katherine, and when Katherine had asked if there was anyone else, that night, when it had all come to an end, he’d told her, with a straight face, that he would never do that to anyone, that he didn’t believe in it, and yes, that had been when Katherine had told him, as if she knew (did she know?) never to say never, and had indeed uttered the words that still haunted him now, as he lied and pretended and hid his self-disgust behind disgust at the shortcomings of others:
the higher the horse, the harder the fall
.

T he café in which Nathan sat was, to the naked eye, perfectly square. Its lino floor was a black-and-white check, as were, confusingly, the tiled lower halves of its otherwise off-white walls. The tables were square and topped with white Formica, giving a stiflingly uniform appearance against which streaks of ketchup and eggy breakfast remnants stood in garish relief. The chairs were cheap and flimsy and bowed when taking a larger person such as Nathan’s full weight. They were also small and made a large person feel larger, a feeling at dissonant odds with the fact that they were low and so made a person of any size feel smaller due to the resulting height of the table. Some tables were placed side by side in order to seat four. One assumed that a party of five or more would need to make their own arrangements. One table had only salt while another had only pepper. The ketchup was dispensed from a fake plastic tomato almost four times the size of an actual tomato. The salt and pepper pots were miniature people with either black or white hats depending on their contents whose blank expressions seemed eerily incongruous given the fact they were stood next to a giant and no doubt slightly threatening tomato. The café was of the cutlery-will-be-dispensed-along-with-food-and-not-before school of hospitality. There were no napkins as these were offered as a scabbard for the cutlery. Nathan’s black Nescafé had been served in a black mug. When he leaned over the mug it had the appearance of a dark vacuum into which he might fall or from which something unspeakable might emanate. At least one person in the café was staring at him. The winter sun was level with the roofs of the opposite buildings, allowing its light to stream uninterrupted through the glass door and broad window