Chaos Intrepid: In Her Shoes

Prompt the First: Welcome to the Jungle

Along the Fault Line of Culture

Just before dawn one autumn morning, just before the sun crept over the horizon on another crisp blue day that should have been like any other, a murderer spent thirty seconds as a single cell. A man would publish the story of how two angels fell, singing tunelessly, all the way to the bosomy earth, and land him with a fatwa that would ripple through the desert sands until the rain in London turned sirocco red. 

It was 1989. 

The year the retaining wall came down and the webs went up, or so they wrote the world over. It was the year certainty crumbled brick by brick.

Over the next six months, those two fallen angels became a hundred burnt pages blustering in the wind, two hundred, three, whole libraries dissolved into ash. History slipped its tether whilst its victims swam adrift in a fluid landscape, divided and confused, along the fault line of culture. Over the next year, they would struggle to adjust to a world where all the races have been run, but the winner had yet to declare their victory. The sour taste of conviction faded into something like nostalgia, a whole world uncertain what flavour next month would be.

In Tehran, as all things passed, as out of thin air a pair of screaming twins were put to bed with clowns that dangled above their cradle like a half dozen dead men dancing, far away from anywhere,  a white man proposed to his Iranian lover. Knowing her family would rather kill her than let her marry him; he also knew she had no choice. Even if her heart was not full of him, her body was. Her belly was beginning to grow round.

“Come back with me,” he said, sotto voce.

She had not placed him, this man, in her future until the night she plucked the fruit of that forbidden tree, and in apostasy, they lay together for the first time. She condemned herself to be his wife.

“Mr Bingham,” she replied with a voice half full of vibrato, half full of strangled strings. She cleared her throat, “Mr Bingham, I was always coming with you.”

Smiling, perhaps too tightly, “To Ireland?”

“To London.”

Perhaps the tightness eased, she would tell him that that was the moment she knew he was sincere: when his grey eyes softened, accepted their union where neither of their families would.

Yet, years later, when they recounted their story to his unconvinced Irish family, the tension always returned. 

“Let’s face it,” he’d shrug, “It was impossible for us to have met each other.” Just as it was impossible to fall in passion with a black woman who worshiped prostrate facing east or to ignore the camera’s over Europe and the sentence that loomed above their heads should they be caught. And then his eyes would land upon the dark skinned hand on his arm and the glittering ring he bought her from Tiffany's. He'd laugh, “Let’s also face it, that was exactly what happened.” 

To his wife, Bingham was for many years as loving a husband as anyone could wish for, and during these years their baby became a toddler, starting playgroup in Wandsworth with Thomas Tinker and Oliver Florry. Doodling her impression of a face – which looked more like an egg with the yolk falling out – on a t-towel that would later take pride of place on the mantle piece. It was here that she began to grow up, little Soraya, in a house full not of misery but of her mother’s ready laughter and father’s sweet lilting voice.

Later, that t-towel would remain as the only real memento of her ever existing, besides the photo album kept hidden beneath all the others. Because, age five, their child, curled up in the guest bed in her grandmother’s house, after her mother and father kissed her goodnight and shared a small satisfied smile, vanished from her pillows. The saucer of milk remained untouched on her windowsill, but there was no trace of  a honey-haired and almond-eyed girl with hair that fell in glossy waves to her back. After a week of desperate searching, the grandmother politedly asked her son to remove his wife from her home, though the local hotel would never accept a non-Catholic and the young couple was weak with grief and terror.

After a month, the town of Sligo rejected the couple entirely and they traveled to Knock, begging the police to help but receiving nothing but disinterest. The bairn was not a Christian; she wasn’t even white.

They would spend the best part of their lives searching for their daughter, the beloved Soraya Bingham.

And though the walls came down, though the webs came up, though history came untethered, though two unlikely souls met and fell in love and defied family ties so strong the tendrils of their reach could not be untangled even from the relative safety of a town house in South London: in twenty years time it was still a ghost they saw in every sweet smile, every girlish face. Ghosts that had no idea who they were, no sense of their death or untimely resurrection. Ghosts that swam beneath the surface of every child, even their own.

Word Count: 863