Heretics' Table
· by AnyoneButSam
The Anchor had survived three recessions, a smoking ban and a kitchen fire by refusing to change a single thing about itself. Sticky tables. A dartboard with more holes in the wall around it than in the board. A television over the bar playing a football match on mute that nobody was watching. Rain against the windows. Friday night, and every seat was taken.
Ari and Robin had the corner table by the fireplace. Two pints and eleven years of history. They'd met at a job neither of them had anymore, and once a year, usually around the third drink, they had some version of the same argument.
Tonight it started with a phone.
Robin was scrolling a dating app, laughing, and turned the screen across the table. A profile. The last line of the bio read: If you're not left, don't even talk to me. Seriously. Swipe on.
"Honestly? Same," Robin said. "Saves everyone time."
Ari looked at the screen for a long moment.
"Read it again."
"What?"
"Read it again. Slower. Out loud."
Robin rolled their eyes and read it. "If you're not left, don't even talk to me."
"Now swap one word. If you're a feminist, don't even talk to me."
"That's different."
"Why?"
"Because being left is about believing people deserve basic dignity. Feminism is about basic dignity. You can't just swap them like they're the same kind of thing."
"Every creed that ever existed describes itself as the one about basic dignity," Ari said. "Nobody's ever started a church for the purpose of being cruel. The cruelty comes later. With the membership rules."
Robin put the phone face down. "It's a filter. I'm allowed to filter who I date."
"Filter all you like. I'm not arguing about your right to do it. I'm pointing at the shape of it. You don't filter for kindness. You don't filter for honesty, or whether someone's good to their mother, or whether they tip. You filter for a team. You'd take a cruel person who votes right over a kind one who votes wrong."
"A kind person wouldn't vote wrong."
Ari didn't say anything. Just waited.
Robin heard it about two seconds after saying it. The circle closing. Kind people vote my way, so anyone who votes the other way isn't kind, so I don't need to check whether they're kind.
"That's not what I meant."
"It's exactly what you meant. It's what everyone means. It's the most comfortable sentence in the world. It means you never have to meet anyone."
---
Robin grew up in a village with one church, one pub and one opinion, and left all three at eighteen. Ari grew up in a country where the wrong opinion at the dinner table could get your uncle a visit from a man with a clipboard, and left at fourteen, in the back of a van, with a bag and a mother who didn't speak for the whole drive.
They'd both walked out of something. They just remembered it differently.
"You want to know what I see when I read that bio?" Ari said. "I see my grandmother's church. I see it so clearly it makes my teeth hurt."
"Oh, here we go."
"Your grandparents had sin. You have privilege. They had original sin, born guilty, nothing you can do about it. So do you. They had confession, on your knees, in a box. You have the public apology, posted in the notes app, screenshotted, with the little paragraph about how you're 'committed to doing the work.' Doing the work. That's penance, Robin. That's Hail Marys."
"That's a cheap comparison."
"They had heretics. You have the cancelled. They had excommunication. You have 'I don't associate with people like that.' They had the elect, the saved ones. You have the right side of history." Ari leaned forward. "That's not even a metaphor. The right side of history is prophecy. It's the Book of Revelation with a hashtag. It's you, telling me you know how the story ends and you're in the good part."
"The difference," Robin said, sharper now, "is that religion asks you to believe things nobody can prove. My politics are based on evidence. Pay gaps. Violence statistics. Who gets stopped by the police. That's data."
"Some of it is. Some of it's solid. I'll give you that without a fight." Ari took a drink. "Now tell me what happens when a study comes out on the wrong side. When the data says something your side doesn't like."
Robin hesitated.
"You don't update," Ari said. "You ask who funded it. You find out the author once liked the wrong post. You decide it's 'being weaponised.' That's not science. There's a word for defending your conclusion before you read the evidence. It's apologetics. The church invented it. You just kept it."
---
At the next table, a woman with a canvas tote bag and a lanyard still around her neck had stopped talking to her friend about three exchanges ago. She turned her chair halfway round.
"Sorry," she said, not sorry at all. "But silence is violence. People who refuse to take a side are complicit."
Ari looked at her. Not unkindly. More like a doctor looking at a rash.
"Is it? Then everyone in this pub who hasn't spoken in the last five minutes is violent. The barman's violent. The couple by the window are violent. That dog under the table by the door is a war criminal."
A few people laughed.
"You know what violence is?" Ari went on. "Violence is when my cousin didn't come home one night and we found out why a week later. That's what the word is for. If silence is violence, then the word means nothing, and the people who've actually been hit deserve better from your vocabulary than that."
The woman went red to the ears and turned back to her friend. Her friend very carefully studied a beer mat.
Robin sighed. "You didn't have to do that."
"She walked into it. She wanted a slogan to do the work of an argument. Slogans are prayers. You say them to feel safe, not to get anywhere."
"But she's not wrong about the idea. Not choosing a side is choosing a side." Robin sat up. "Desmond Tutu. 'If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.' That's not a slogan. That's a man who lived it."
"He did. He was talking about apartheid. Pass laws. Men with guns deciding which bus you could ride and which beach you could stand on. That's a situation where neutral means something." Ari set the glass down. "You're using his words on a guy who won't put a flag in his Instagram bio. When everything is apartheid, nothing is. You're spending his moral currency on your group chat, and you're devaluing it for the people who actually need it."
"So there's no such thing as a side you should have to take?"
"There are some. Very few. And they're obvious. Nobody needs to be bullied into being against slavery. The moment you have to bully people into a position, it's because the position isn't as obvious as you're pretending."
Ari turned the glass slowly on its mat.
"And you want to know the funniest thing about 'not choosing a side is choosing a side'? It's not new. It's not even modern. 'He who is not with me is against me.' Matthew, chapter twelve, verse thirty. You didn't leave the church, Robin. You kept the best lines."
---
By now the pub had changed pitch. Not quieter exactly. Tuned. The noise from the corner had become the noise the room was listening to. Two lads at the bar had turned on their stools. An older man by the fruit machine had stopped feeding it coins. The barman, a big man with forearms like hams and a tea towel over one shoulder, was drying the same pint glass for the fourth time.
Robin noticed the audience and got braver, the way people do.
"Fine. Here's what I think actually bothers you. It's not the religion thing. It's that women got loud. Women were told to shut up for ten thousand years, and now they've finally got a microphone, and you don't like the volume."
"I don't mind the volume," Ari said. "I mind the list."
"What list?"
"The microphone came with a list. Of who's allowed to talk back." Ari leaned back. "And since you brought it up, yes. Let's talk about who's holding it. Look at who's loudest. Not the people these fights are supposedly for. Most of the working-class immigrants I know, including my own family, are more conservative than your entire group chat. They're not the ones with 'don't talk to me' in their bios. The loudest, most certain voices are young, educated, comfortable, and a lot of the time, white women. The people with the least to lose from being loud, and the most to gain from it."
"Wow."
"Don't 'wow' me. Look at it. It's not even new. A hundred years ago it was the same kind of women running the temperance leagues. Nice, respectable, churchgoing ladies who walked into saloons and smashed the bottles with hatchets. Same certainty. Same enemy. Men, and the places men went. They were absolutely sure they were saving everyone. They got Prohibition. You know how that went."
Robin almost laughed and hated that they almost did.
"That's a stereotype, and you know it."
"It's a pattern. The difference is I'll change my mind about a pattern if you show me a better one. Will you?"
"Here's my better one. Maybe women moved left because they had the most to lose. My body is literally on the ballot, Ari. Whether I can make decisions about my own body is a thing strangers vote on. That's not a hobby. That's not a costume. I don't get to be neutral about that."
Ari was quiet for a second. Then nodded.
"That's real. I'll give you that one completely. When your body's on the ballot, politics isn't a costume. If that was where it stopped, we wouldn't be sitting here."
"But?"
"But it didn't stop there. It never does. The dogma swallowed everything. What you eat. What shows you're allowed to like. Which words. Which jokes. Which comedian you're allowed to laugh at, and which one you have to pretend you never laughed at. Who you're allowed to be seen having a pint with. That's not a position anymore. That's a lifestyle with a catechism. You can't be pro-choice and still eat meat and still think one or two of the new rules are nonsense. You have to buy the whole package or you're out. That's not politics. That's a religion with a very long list of commandments and no mercy for the one you break."
---
One of the lads at the bar, rugby shirt, pint in hand, finally couldn't hold it in.
"That's the problem though, innit," he called over. "Women just vote with their feelings, mate. That's the whole thing."
A few people groaned. Ari didn't even turn fully around.
"You just did the exact thing we're talking about," Ari said. "With worse grammar. You took half the planet and made one sentence about how their brains work. That's the same move as the bio on that phone. It's just your team's version." A beat. "Sit down. You're making my argument look bad."
The pub laughed properly this time. The lad raised his hands, grinning, and turned back to the bar, where his mate thumped him on the shoulder.
"See, this is what I don't get about you," Robin said. "You just went after him the same way you went after her."
"Of course I did. Did you think I was on his team?"
"Kind of, yeah."
"That's because in your head there are only two teams. Anyone who isn't on yours must be on the other one. I don't want to be on either. The other lot have the same church. Different hymns. They've got the flag instead of the rainbow. 'Real men' instead of 'allies.' 'Woke' instead of 'problematic.' Same heresy trials, same excommunications, same people screaming that the other side is going to destroy civilisation by Tuesday. I wouldn't drink with them either."
"So both sides are the same."
"No. I didn't say that, and I'm not going to let you put it in my mouth." Ari tapped the table. "Same machinery. Not the same thing. A hammer building a house and a hammer through a skull are the same hammer. What I'm saying is the hammer is the problem. The machine that turns a belief into a membership card, a membership card into a uniform, and a uniform into permission to hate the people in the other uniform. That machine doesn't care what you feed it. It'll run on any cause you give it."
---
The older man by the fruit machine spoke up. Flat cap, soft voice.
"It's the internet, isn't it. The algorithms. They make everyone angry so they keep scrolling."
Ari looked at him with something closer to respect.
"You're half right. The algorithm didn't invent the witch trial. People did that fine by themselves with a pitchfork and a rumour. All the algorithm did was make the village infinite. It used to be your village could burn one witch a year. Now the whole world is the village, and there's a new witch every morning, and you can join in from the toilet."
The old man nodded slowly, like that was about what he'd suspected, and went back to his fruit machine.
Robin rubbed their face. "Okay. So what's the damage? You keep saying damage. What damage?"
Ari took a long drink before answering. When the glass went back down, the voice was different. Lower. Less performance in it.
"The damage is men."
"Oh, come on."
"Let me finish. You took men out of the conversation. Not by law. Nobody passed a law. By cost. A man says one wrong thing at work, at a dinner party, on a first date, and the price is his job, his friends, his name in a group chat with a screenshot. Maybe the thing he said was stupid. Maybe it was ignorant. Maybe it was just a question he didn't know how to phrase. Doesn't matter. The price is the same. So he learns. He stops talking."
"Good. Maybe he should listen for once."
"That's what you think silence means. You think it means he's listening. It doesn't. It means he took it somewhere else." Ari leaned in. "And where did he take it? He took it to a nineteen-year-old with a podcast, a rented sports car and a course to sell. Because that kid was the only person in his whole life who ever said, you're allowed to exist, you're allowed to want things, you're not a problem to be managed. And that kid taught him things that are genuinely poisonous. And then you pointed at what he learned and said, see? This is why we can't talk to them."
Robin opened their mouth. Closed it.
"You didn't silence men," Ari said. "You relocated them. You sent an entire generation to the worst possible teachers and then acted surprised about the lessons."
The pub was very quiet now. The barman had stopped drying the glass.
Robin found their voice. "Men aren't victims just because they lost a monopoly. They had the whole conversation to themselves for centuries. Every parliament, every newspaper, every pulpit. Sharing it for the first time isn't persecution."
"The men who had that monopoly are dead," Ari said. "The ones paying for it are twenty-two. They work in a warehouse. They've never had a monopoly on anything in their lives, including their own rent. You're making the grandson pay for the grandfather's bar tab and calling it justice."
"And whose fault is it that men don't talk to each other? That's not on women. Men built a culture where crying makes you weak. Where you'd rather die than admit you're struggling. Women didn't do that. Men did that to themselves."
Ari was quiet for a moment, and then did something the audience didn't expect.
"Fair," Ari said. "That's fair. The loneliness isn't all yours. The factories closed. The unions died. The churches emptied, whatever you think of them. The pubs shut, one a week for twenty years. Men lost almost every room they had where they were allowed to just be in each other's company without a reason. And they did a terrible job of building new ones. That's on them. I'll give you that."
Robin blinked.
"But," Ari said. "Then the last room left, the public conversation, the only place a man could still go to try out a thought out loud, put a bouncer on the door. With a guest list. And a dress code. That part isn't on men. That's on your church."
"You're making it sound like a conspiracy."
"It's not a conspiracy. Conspiracies are organised. This is worse. It's a mood. Nobody's in charge of it, so nobody can be held responsible for it, so it never has to stop. Men are dying of it, Robin. Literally. Men kill themselves at three, four times the rate women do. Say that out loud at your next dinner party and count how many seconds before somebody says 'but what about women.' That's how you know it's a religion. Some suffering counts, and some suffering is heresy to mention."
---
At the back of the room, a young guy had his phone up, filming.
Ari saw it.
"Put that away."
"It's just..."
"Put it away. You film this and you've proven my whole point. You don't want a conversation. You want a clip. Thirty seconds of it, cut in the right place, with a caption telling everyone which one of us to hate. That's how the village gets fed."
The phone went down. The guy looked genuinely embarrassed. A few people nodded at him, which somehow made it worse for him and better for everyone else.
---
Robin sat back. The anger had burned down into something harder to look at.
"Fine. So what do you actually believe? You've spent an hour taking everything apart. The left, the right, the internet, women, men. You criticise everything and you stand for nothing. That's the easiest position in the world. It's the position of someone who's never had to build anything."
"That's a good hit," Ari said. "Probably the best one you've had all night."
"So answer it."
Ari thought about it. Genuinely thought. The fire cracked. Somewhere near the door, the dog under the table sighed in its sleep.
"I believe you should be able to sit across from someone you think is completely wrong and finish your drink," Ari said. "That's it. That's my whole politics. It's the only one I know of that's never burned anyone."
"That's not a politics. That's a pub."
"Exactly." Ari spread both hands at the room. "Best institution we ever built. No membership test. No catechism. You come in, you buy a round, you can think whatever you want in your own head, and the only rule is you don't start a fight. The man in the flat cap and the lad in the rugby shirt and the woman with the lanyard all drinking under the same roof. They'd tear each other to pieces online. In here, they're just people who want a pint. That's the most radical thing in this building, and it's older than every flag either of us could name."
"So you like people."
"No. I don't like people." Ari said it without a trace of irony. "I don't trust people in any group bigger than this table. One person can be reasoned with. Two can have an argument. Fifty people are a mob with a mission statement. Every horror you've ever read about in a history book was done by people who were sure they were one of the good ones. Every single one. Nobody ever lit a pyre thinking, I'm the villain here."
Robin looked down at the phone, still face down on the table. Didn't pick it up.
"Can I tell you something embarrassing?" Robin said quietly.
"Always."
"When I left the church, I was so relieved. It was full of hypocrites. People who'd sing on Sunday and be vile on Monday. I felt clean for the first time. And then for a while I felt like nothing. Like I didn't belong anywhere." Robin turned the glass. "And then I found this. The politics. The marches. The group chats. And it made me feel like... like I was one of the good ones again."
Ari didn't say anything for a while.
"That's the hook," Ari said finally, gently. "That's the only thing any church has ever really sold. Not God. Not heaven. Just proof you're one of the good ones. And the proof always comes in the same form. Somebody else has to be one of the bad ones. Otherwise how would you know?"
Robin didn't answer.
"You don't have to give it up," Ari said. "I'm not asking you to. Keep your causes. Some of them are good causes. Fight for your body, I'll stand next to you. I'm just asking you to notice when the cause turns into a church. When it starts telling you who you're allowed to sit with."
---
The football on the telly finished, and someone had scored, and nobody had noticed. Slowly, the pub came back. The lads at the bar turned round. The woman with the lanyard started talking to her friend again, but quieter than before, and at one point she glanced over at the corner table with an expression that wasn't quite anger anymore. The old man fed another coin into the fruit machine. It didn't pay out.
The barman came over with two fresh pints and set them down.
"We didn't order these," Robin said.
"From the lad in the rugby shirt." The barman nodded toward the bar. "He says no hard feelings, and he's still not sure what grammar's got to do with anything."
Ari laughed out loud, the first real laugh of the night, and raised the glass toward the bar. The lad raised his back.
Robin picked up the phone at last and turned it over. The dating app was still open. The profile was still there. If you're not left, don't even talk to me.
Robin read it again. Slowly. Out loud, but only under their breath.
"I'm not changing my bio," Robin said.
"Didn't ask you to."
"Same time next year?"
"If you're still talking to me," Ari said. "I'm not left. Not properly. You'd have to swipe on."
Robin looked at the screen for a long time. Then locked the phone, put it in their pocket, and picked up the pint.
Robin didn't swipe on.