Chaos Intrepid: In Her Shoes

Prompt the Fifth: Pacing - Procrastination

Pacing - Procrastination

Chaos paced.

And as he paced he smoked. His fingers twitched between finishing one and rolling the next. This was hell, this was. No matter what anyone else said.

In his head, his mother was there, rueful and disappointed, “It was not so in my country.”

In her country, but her country was a faraway place. So far it seemed mystical. And she was this slender woman that fell in love with a man she shouldn’t have – the Persian phrase escaped him like a thousand forgotten but precious things. He’d locked it in a safe place, hidden the key out of caution. But forgotten where the key was, and continually discovered the safe place.

He paced.

And as he paced he muttered. His voice trembled over half loved phrases that almost slipped his grasp. But he must remember them.

“Yeki bood. Yeki nabood.” The treasured phrase, the only one that struck with him, that haunted him. It was like so. And not like so... The beginning to every story from his childhood.

It was so: his skin flushed and warm, beads of sweat trickling along his brow and he was pacing – up and down the street, to hovering by the revolving door, to pacing up and down the street, to hovering by the revolving door.

“Chaos?”

Her voice was a sharp relief. His head whipped up and his eyes instantly landed on Mathilda Lythwaite, who stood with all her usual poise just a few feet from him. As usual she wore a slim fitting dress, dark navy and hugging her slim hips and waist, finishing just below her prominant collarbone where the silver of a scar just crept up from beneath her clothes. No one else might have noticed it. He’d never understood this woman, how she still held her head high the way that she did, knowing as he knew, what she’d been through.

“Matty,” he offered a lopsided grin, felt the sweat on his upper lip as he folded his face into a smile, “What are you doing here?”

“One of my clients lived here.”

He raised an eyebrow, “You’re calling them clients now.”

Sighing, a peculiar mix of humour and exasperation, “You know what I mean.”

“Suuuuure,” he drew out his response. Anything to stop her from asking about him, “You know, Tilly, that dress.”

“Mr Intrepid are you trying to flirt?”

“Flirt madam, moi?”

She laughed, tossing her hair as she did so. It was one of those moves he imagined she must have practised. Could she really flip it over her shoulder the way she did and feel nothing of her past?

“So what are you doing here? You never said.”

“You never asked?”

“I’m asking now.”

“Are you really goading me into this old trope?”

“I think you’re the one deflecting, Kay.”

His hands quickly fumbled for a cigarette, but he couldn’t find a filter. Huffing, he began to rake through his pockets, desperate for some kind of paper that he could use as a roach, anything really for a makeshift filter. Just as he was thinking it, Mathilda’s hand held out fully formed Marlborough gold. He looked up in puzzlement and she shrugged. He stared.

“Come on, I’m giving it to you.”

“You are.”

But he didn’t reach out to take it. Memories kept flicking through his head. He couldn’t remember seeing her smoke before. And she clearly wasn’t going to join him. Puzzled, he took the cigarette, lifted and lighted it, and took a long burning drag. His eyes fluttered closed, relishing the feeling of living, of life, as his body fought for breath in the next instance. Almost instantly, the cigarette began to calm him. He might not have gone inside yet but he was so close. His eyes flickered to the door that span, round and round.

“You’re waiting for someone?”

Clearly the pathologist was not going to just leave him, pacing in the rain that he’d only just noticed had started to fall, outside a perfectly decent building that he was clearly trying to work up the courage to use.

“Oh! Are they waiting for you?” she asked, suddenly interested, “Is this a date?”

“What? No.” He quickly shook his head, “No, no, no.”

“Then...”

“I am trying...” he tried to explain, to make the words come out, “My father... this place... he... I wanted...” His words wavered and tapered until nothing was said and nothing was done.

Matty clearly didn’t understand but she didn’t look at her watch like he expected her to, or draw out a phone or make any sort of calculation. Clearly, she’d decided that for a man with one leg, he was half decent. And that was ok by him.

“You don’t have to tell me.”

A phrase that of course meant he wanted to tell her everything.

He glanced at the revolving door and stepped away again, towards Tilly. She didn’t take a step back. Here was someone like him, he realised, who understood. Unruffled, beautiful in a way despite her mouth that was too wide for her face and her eyes that were tired in the way of war veterans, she understood him.

Perhaps, he thought, she might understand how desperately he wanted to walk into that building, to take the elevator to the fifth floor, to knock on the twelfth door, to see... what... ideas that he pilfered from other artists, ideas from another era, far past their sell-buy date... his father who never moved past 1995 when Soraya disappeared? Why would he do that to himself again? The white father with his pleasent Irish manners, his voice like a song; and the black mother, who laughed at nothing because if she looked too closely in the mirror, she saw the ghost of her daughter staring back at her.

Instead, he turned his full gaze to Mathilda and her patience.

“Wanna share your client with me?”

“Chaos...”

“You know I’ll break in anyway,” he argued, sliding closer and dropping the fag end to the street, “This way, it’s almost legal.”

Matty glowered, “The key word being: almost.”

“It’ll be fun.”

She seemed to think about it, but he knew the answer. It was always yes. Ever since Tilly found him investigating a possible link to her own investigations.

He took a last look at the door and then slid back into Chaos, left Doran in his shadow to think about the parents he could never bring himself to see alone.

“Who’s the vic?”

“Thirty-two year old female, dead at the scene. Looks like she was followed out from here.”

“And you want to find out where she lived?”

“Best place to start is at the beginning.”

Word Count: 1,115