Acts of Rebellion

By Ali Abbas

“We should get up.” A whisper. It curled from Sorcha’s mouth across Samir’s chest. 

Overhead the sky had turned from indigo to black. The unseasonably balmy March evening had cooled. Occasional spears of rain now scattered blossom around them like confetti.

Sorcha paced her breaths to Samir’s heartbeat, head resting on his shoulder. If she’d sent her hand scissoring through his button fly he would not have stopped her. She didn’t. If he’d reached up under her dress she would not have stopped him. He didn’t. It was enough to know that they could if they wished.

“I feel like I’ve been planted here. I could take root in this orchard.” His answer tickled across her fringe.

“You’re a windblown seed.” She traced a finger around a shirt button, testing her desire to open it. “You’re thousands of miles from your motherland. Your roots in England are only as old as you are. You could be transplanted anywhere.”

“You make me feel like I belong.”

“I’m no wee poster child for belonging myself.”

He didn’t understand, so he pressed a kiss to her forehead. She leaned up on her elbow. 

“I’m Catholic, I’m Irish and my roots go deep into Derry,” she said, “But they won’t let it be my Ireland. The place I belong to isn’t mine.”

“Two rootless vagabonds. Did our souls call to each other?” His melodramatic tone made her giggle. He rested his hand on the dip of her waist. 

“I’m serious. It’s a question of belonging to something more. No one belongs to a place. Especially not this one anyways. We’re just passing through.”

“So we could belong anywhere.” He smiled. His palm dropped to her belly. “We could plant our own roots.”

Sorcha stroked his shin with her toe, leaning further in. She didn’t move his hand. 

“You’re on the edge of it. It’s not about where you belong, it’s about who you belong to.” 

“To you?”

“To your family, and you know they won’t let you belong to me. Just as I belong to my family. They’d have just as hard a time with you.” She pinched his chin and gently shook his head. “And these desert bones might not last in the wet and cold of Ireland.” 

He rubbed her stomach. The spectre of rejection by the tight bonds of family haunted their moments together. It pressed them into a caution that reinforced their self-imposed limits. 

“And what about love?”

“I’m Catholic, love is sacrifice. Because of our love for our families, we’ll sacrifice our love for each other.” 

“That should go both ways.”

“I’m sure your family has sacrificed plenty for you. I know mine has for me.” 

His head settled into the dense turf, conceding to her insight.

 “We both have lectures tomorrow. Take my bike, you’ve got a long way to go.” She gave him a conciliatory kiss before standing.

Sorcha left. She walked the short, muddy route to her halls of residence, arriving a little before ten. Rain wet and barefoot, mussed, and in a slightly too-large leather biker jacket. These details were marked with whispers and assumptions. Women outnumbered men at Homerton, a poor cousin to the wealthy and ancient colleges of Cambridge. Her fellow students had absorbed enough American culture to understand the symbology of the loaned jacket: Sorcha had herself a man from one of the hallowed institutions. They saw Cinderella’s glass slippers on her muddy feet and a ball gown in her rumpled dress.

Samir’s journey was longer. He pedalled the long slog of Hills Road and on through the town centre. His wet hair slicked to his head and shirt stuck to his skinny frame. He coasted through the back gate into St. John’s College, locked Sorcha’s bike in the underground store and slipped into his rooms unnoticed. It was an in-between time. Those embroiled in serious study were at their desks now that the libraries were closed, everyone else drinking until the college bar shut.

*

Sorcha and Samir first met in a poorly lit student room. An inter-collegiate writing group had expanded for the evening with the promise that Ben Okri would attend. Samir saw Sorcha across the room, as uncomfortably out of place as he was. She was ivory and auburn, saffron dropped into a glass of milk. She held a smudged wine glass close to her chest. Where others saw apparent hauteur, Samir recognised brittle insecurity. 

Sorcha saw Samir, the only brown boy, the only one not drinking the sharp supermarket wine. Both were adrift in this room where ambition was louder than ability.

Ben Okri did not come. The crowd thinned, leaving the two in separate oases. Their courses collided at the door. He gave her an uncertain smile, gestured to her college scarf and asked, “Trinity Hall?”

“No, Homerton.” 

She was accustomed to the resulting puzzled look. Here among the Tudor buildings, by the sedate river, few had heard of Homerton or even knew the University had a teacher training college. 

There was only curiosity in his gaze as she explained, not the condescension she experienced from others. 

“My mum’s a teacher,” he said, “Little kids, five and six-year-olds.”

“That’s a tough gig, so it is.” She waited at the top of the stairs, letting others go by. “I’d like to aim a little older.”

“What subject?”

“English.” It could have ended there, a natural pause in a conversation where she turned one way, and he another. Instead, she offered a little more. “I want to prepare the next generation for university maybe. Set their sights a bit higher.”

“Somewhere in Ireland?”

“Derry.” That was a conversation killer. There was a romance to the Republic here in England, but the North was a painful subject, one best ignored in the hope it would solve itself. She waited for the inevitable judgement, at which point she would walk off. 

The judgement did not come. They stepped out of the college and into the busy evening streets.

“Why English?”

“Oh, I know we need doctors and engineers and that, but there’s so much bullshit, y’know. I want to teach kids how to really listen to what they’re hearing and critique it.” Winter blew in ice winds across the fens. She opened her coat, passion for her subject making her hot. 

“Is there a chance for peace?”

“There has to be. Where we are now isn’t sustainable, we can’t go into the next century like this.” 

They shared some minutes of silence after that, dodging other pedestrians and weaving cyclists. 

“So, what about you?” Sorcha asked.

“Asian boy, the only possible careers are doctor, lawyer, engineer or accountant.”

“In that case, I’m going to guess you’re an ASNAC.” She caught his querying look. “Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic.”

His laugh was warm. 

“Proves my point, I didn’t even know of it. I’m a medic. It’s my second year.”

“What brought you out tonight?”

“My sister, she wanted a signed book.” He pulled a copy of The Famished Road from the inside of his jacket. The jacket looked as out of place on him as he had been in the room, heavy black leather adorned with badges.

They had found their way to a small courtyard, lined with closed stores and one busy coffee shop. It was only then she realised they were a long way from where her bike was chained to a fence.

“The apple pie here is good,” he said. He was still holding the book. It was new, spine unbroken, the whole curved from being in his pocket. 

“Have you read it?” she asked. 

He shook his head. 

“OK.”

“OK what?” he asked.

“OK, let’s try that apple pie.” She led him inside and for the next hour precised the book, flipping the pages to her favourite passages. That was where it began, the Muslim medical student and the Irish Catholic trainee English teacher. 

*

The morning after their evening in the orchard, Sorcha went back to look for her shoes. The scattered blossoms outlined where they had lain. She paced around the tree but there was no sign of her black ballet pumps. The detour made her late. She pushed away her worry at the cost of replacing them and hurried to her lectures.

A large carrier bag waited for her at the porters’ lodge when she came back to the residential block a little after midday. Inside she found her old shoes, half dried, a shoebox with an identical pair, and the key to her bike lock. In her room, she kicked off her trainers and socks and tried the new shoes on. The leather was stiff, the fit perfect, but they lacked the comfort that long wear had put into her old pair. Warmth spread through her as she looked at them.

She made herself an instant coffee. Samir did not have much more money than she did. This would make things tight for him. She worked out his probable movements. He’d have taken her shoes home with him in the basket of her bike. Perhaps he tried to dry them for her on his radiator. This morning he’d have cursed the cracked leather and peeling soles, then cycled to the market square, bought the new shoes as the shops opened at nine, cycled to her college and walked back. That meant he had missed at least two lectures. Whether he could afford the cost was secondary to whether he could afford the lost study. 

She skipped lunch, ploughing through her own work before going to the supermarket. That evening she would go to him. They’d cook, eat and work together. She would help him make back his lost time. 

“It’s lucky I have two plates,” he said when they had thrown together the simple staples of pasta and tuna. A skull perched on his small square dining table. He juggled it in one hand while setting down the crockery. “Bad luck, Bertie. It’s the bookshelf for you.”

“Why did you give the skull an English name?” she asked.

“Because that’s the name of the guy whose skull it was.”

“It’s not real.”

“Is so.” He lobbed it at her and ducked back into the kitchenette. She caught the skull one-handed, looked at it in sudden horror and dropped it on the sofa.

“That’s gross.”

“Under the skin, we all look like that.” He picked up the skull and put it on the shelf. 

“Anyways, I bet his name wasn’t Bertie, so it wasn’t. Maybe call him Imran, or Javed.”

“My uncles Imran and Javed would go nuts.”

She laughed as he emptied the pan onto their plates. 

“It’s a good question though. There must be an Asian name that my relatives don’t have, why did I default to an English one?” He came back to the question between bites.

“Change it.”

“How about something Irish, Bono?”

“Is that the best you could do?” She gave him a steady look to which he replied with a disarming grin. She could not hold back another laugh and dug a fork into her pasta.

They studied after dinner, Samir at his desk transcribing notes from the lectures he had missed, Sorcha lying on her front on a patterned rug he had brought from home, feet crossed in the air behind her, new shoes lying to one side. 

Later they moved to the sofa, books balanced on their knees, trading facts. The bells tolled every quarter hour as their talk slowed and they fell asleep, leaning into one another, slumping in a tangle of limbs that shuffled with drowsy mumbles. 

Long after the bells fell silent, Samir woke. For a while he contented himself with the weight of Sorcha against him and the herbal smell of her hair. Eventually, he disentangled himself, brought the duvet from his bed and draped it over her. He lay fully clothed on the cold bed sheet alone. 

Somewhat later, Sorcha rose to go to the bathroom. On her return, she picked up the duvet and crept beside Samir on the bed, dragging the duvet over them both. That was the first time they slept together, a chaste act of rebellion. 

*

Easter was a hiatus. They returned to their respective homes and wrote letters, every second or third day. Their love revealed itself in small details. If Samir’s sister noticed him waiting for the postman, she said nothing of it to their parents. If Sorcha’s sister noticed Sorcha’s shoes no longer slipped off at the heel, she said nothing either. 

Their return and Summer term brought the spectre of exams. Cambridge bloomed as its students wilted. The river and the gardens sang siren songs of temptation, while libraries festered, airless and burdened with dread.

The second time Sorcha came to stay was awkward. She kept a toothbrush in her bag but no pyjamas, unwilling to give away her intent with the obvious bulk. Samir was tentative, unsure how to recreate the organic, drowsy serendipity from before. Their concentration faltered through study, judging the right time to push the books aside and seek out each other’s arms. 

“Sod this,” Samir said at last. He snapped his book shut and plucked the pen from Sorcha’s hand. She raised an eyebrow before falling into him with a laugh. The tension broke. 

From then, two or three times a week, Sorcha would cycle up in the afternoon. They were introduced to each other’s friends. Soft social cues were given that they were a couple. 

One evening they tried to switch to Sorcha’s room. Samir brought finger food to spare them the scrutiny of the communal kitchen. They picnicked on Sorcha’s bed. The risks to their self-imposed limitations had been growing over the weeks. Their shared understanding was that the various forms of sex were the boundary where their relationship would fall foul of their faiths. But tactile proximity, the acclimation of their senses to each other’s presence, they accepted as the corollaries of love. 

The crisis, when it arrived, began as a game. Samir was naming bones and tendons, starting with Sorcha’s phalanges and metatarsals. His body was above her when he stopped at her mandible with a kiss.

Her breath filled him with a revelation. He knew the heart as a muscle. The brain no more than an electrochemical computer. He realised, in a drenching flash that flattened his gut, that Sorcha was now in him somewhere at the cellular level. She would be in the dust left by his body a thousand years from now. 

“Marry me,” he said.

Green eyes to brown. Sorcha always found deeper depths to plumb in the ocean of Samir’s eyes. This evening there was a current that swept her understanding of their predicament far ahead of his own. 

“No.”

“I mean it, marry me. We’ll make it work.”

“No.” She flexed her hips, accommodating his in an uncompromising invitation. Denim on denim. “Make love to me.”

“No.”

She held his face in her hands. Kissed and was kissed. She pushed his head back a fraction.

“This is all that we can have and we can have it all, right now,” she said, searching for anchorage on his seabed, something that would hold them together.

“I don’t just want it now. I want it forever. Marry me.”

Her body was pinned to the bed not by his weight, but by the enormity of what he asked, what she had offered in return. He meant it. So did she. She stroked his cheekbones with her thumbs to soothe the blow to come. 

“My family are a bunch of racists. I couldn’t marry a Prod from a mile away, let alone a Muslim. I can’t remember the last time I saw dark skin in Derry. And your family are a bunch of racists too.” She held his head against its shake. “You bloody know it. I’ll either be a triumph because you caught a white girl or a dynastic tragedy.”

“We’re not like that.”

“We aren’t, the people we love and need are, but this isn’t some ‘Through the Barricades’ fantasy. We don’t belong, Samir. All we have, all that sustains us, are the people we belong to. How long do you think you could go on without them?”

“What happens to us without each other?”

“Maybe we’ll die. Maybe we won’t. But we’ll never forget.”

Samir closed his eyes in acceptance. It was a tainted relief: she had had the courage to say it, he had not. His body teetered on the edge of an uncontrollable shudder.

In her flush, in her breath he could tell her body ached for him, as his so obviously ached for her. He eased off her and squeezed into the space against the wall.

She pulled up her knees.

“I couldn’t ask for a better man. And no one will ever love you like I do.”

“A gipsy curse?” he asked, the dregs of bitterness accelerating ahead of his sensibilities.

She ran a foot along his leg. She waited.

“Sorry,” he whispered.

She nodded, cheek pressed to his lips. His tears or hers, she could not tell, dripped into her mouth. Their bodies sagged, as if a storm of crisis had swept through them.

“Promise me we’ll do better by our children,” he asked.

He meant separate children by future partners. Her ear stalled on “our children”. A fruit their love would never bear. 

“I promise,” she replied, her voice a mumble through tears that would not stop. They lay in wretched, exhausted silence. Sorcha thought Samir had fallen asleep until he spoke.

“Come to the May Ball with me,” he murmured into her ear.

“We can’t afford it.”

“I don’t care.”

“I haven’t got anything to wear.”

“I don’t care.”

“Neither have you.”

“I don’t care.”

“OK. I love you.”

“I know. I love you too.”

*

An unencumbered fatalism replaced the tension that had been building through Samir. The pressing urgency to do the right thing was gone. In later years, he would wonder how different things might have been, had he not forced the burden of the decision on Sorcha. Later still, as an older, weary man, he would be haunted by her courage.

At that moment, with Cambridge in the heady madness of the last weeks of Summer term, he let go and immersed himself in being in love. 

Everything made sense and came easy, as if his mind was now free to operate at an unconstrained capacity. He glided through his exams, a bursary application was swiftly approved, giving them the wherewithal to buy tickets and hire clothes for the Ball. 

As soon as the exams were over, Sorcha tried on rental ballgowns, sniffling with the summer flu that had dampened her own exams. She settled for one in deep green, cut low over her shoulders, disappointed not to have exactly what she wanted for this special night, then chiding herself that she had never worn anything so fine. 

She moved into Samir’s rooms. A flirtation with cohabitation, retaining their clothed, chaste intimacy. Time pressed upon her, with the nagging insistence of the flu that would not go away. She fought the draining, dragging edge of a fever, knowing the summer holidays would bring separation. They would have letters, but their intimacy would be attenuated for almost three months. 

There was more. She had a growing certainty that their time was now, that there might not be a next year. It was up to her to squeeze the most out of every moment they shared.

St. John’s emptied on the day of the May Ball. Students left their rooms in the afternoon, loaded with their evening wear as security gates went up at the myriad entrances. 

They rolled the gown across town draped on Sorcha’s bike, Samir’s tuxedo lying above it. In Sorcha’s room, her gown dominated the little free space. They edged around it and each other, sipping coffee, nibbling biscuits. Nervous.

It was Samir who broke the tension.

“Guess we better get ready,” he said, pulling off his t-shirt. His torso was the limit of their nudity; its topography imprinted on her fingertips. 

She lifted a cardboard box from the shelf, opened it. Tissue spilled out, from its midst she plucked new underwear.

“I bought these for the occasion,” she said. Turning away from him she unbuttoned her dress and let it pool at her feet. She had never been this exposed with him before. What he had felt shyly, each time awaiting permission, had been blind, beneath clothes in the dark. 

She reached around to unclasp her bra. It fell beside the dress. She was suddenly aware of the cross around her neck, cool silver against her fevered skin. Let it stay, she thought, I’m not ashamed. She picked up the new bra, certain he could hear her own gulps of trepidation, it wrapped around without straps. 

“Help me?”

His hands were on her shoulders. She dropped the bra; it was inconsequential now. She leaned back into him. 

“I want you to,” she offered, an unequivocal invitation.

“I want to,” he replied, his voice hoarse.

She turned around.

*

They took a taxi to the Ball, floating on a cushion of air. They danced, ate, weaved through the increasingly drunk crowds to watch comedians and musicians. The only picture of them together was as a tiny blur at the edge of the end-of-Ball survivors’ photo, taken as dawn glinted on baroque stone walls behind them.

*

At the end of the term, they waited until the last possible day to leave, making excuses to their families and waving goodbye to friends. At the station, her Homerton life packed into a rucksack and two more bags at her feet, Sorcha held onto Samir until the train doors closed, trying to soak some strength from his spare frame into her own. Something more than desire called from her body to his and refused to let him go. 

He squeezed her in return, bruising, crushing. Through the smoky glass he stared in horror as her pale face turned ghostly. How had he not noticed she had grown so wan?

She wrote to him while waiting for the ferry. He wrote to her from the back of his parents’ car, crammed in with his possessions, deflecting questions from the front seats. 

It was late July when Sorcha’s letters abruptly stopped. Samir had sensed a weariness to her tone, a drag in her round handwriting. When he asked, she wrote that it was just fatigue, with long hours spent stacking shelves at her local pharmacy. She joked she had the pick of the best flu meds, and none of them worked, just as he’d said.

She didn’t go to confession. Her soul felt light as a feather. She could not find it in herself to be penitent. She loved someone who loved her back, she wanted to shout: what more before the Lord is marriage? 

She learned things working at the pharmacy. Things that were denied in Northern Ireland, that other girls, from both sides of the divide and cloaked in desperation, sidled in to ask. When the time came to put that knowledge to use herself, she did not hesitate. Once she acknowledged she was pregnant, her decision to face the consequences alone was immediate and unwavering. She steeled herself on a dingy side street in Belfast with a reminder that love was sacrifice. 

It is possible to be courageous and to cry. She cried for three days, quietly in her room, before she was admitted to hospital. 

When she did confess, it was to her sister Sinead. She had to tell someone. Samir’s letters and little gifts were carefully stowed in her room. Sorcha would, to the end, shelter Samir. From the decision she had taken, and from her parents’ grief and ire.  

It was Sinead who took the initiative. She wrote to Samir, her own courage wrapped tight in the fist that held the pen. The day Samir’s flight landed, Sinead sent her parents home from the hospital to rest, promising to call if there was any change. She held his hand along the length of the ward, past the curious stares of the nurses and the other patients. She drew the curtain around the bed. She gave them an hour to say goodbye. 

*

Samir sorted through an old box of cufflinks while his wife, Ana, read on the sofa beside him, the book resting on her swelling belly. 

Sorcha’s cross dropped out of a desiccated tissue. He’d known it was there, he could have found it in minutes any time over the last two decades. A reckless urge made him bring it into the light now. Sorcha’s premonition had been cruelly edged. Life had given her no chance to know any other, better man; and Samir had wrapped the shadow of her love around his heart, a bar against letting anyone know him or what drove him. 

The silver cross was tarnished, grey and black. 

“What’s that?” Ana asked.

He showed her, pooling the cross and chain into the palm of his hand.

“Why do you have a cross?”

“It belonged to a friend of mine. Sorcha.” He dropped the cross into a spare cufflink case and snapped it shut.

“She’s the one who died while you were at college?” 

“Yeah. Pneumonia.” It was a lie, the only lie Sorcha had told him. In their last hour together, he had not thought to check her charts and medication. “Complications arising from pneumonia” was also the lie written on her file after her death, signed by the doctor and the complicit coroner, silently agreed on by the nurses. It was how they kept their oath to do no harm. 

Samir learned the truth years later. He never practiced medicine, instead went straight into research, devoting himself to diseases of the lungs. He weathered his parents’ disappointment as his due. After years of delaying, he accepted his brokered marriage to a Pakistani girl with expensive, flawless English. All his passion, he poured into his work. Only sometimes did exhaustion allow him to pause and pity Ana, who devoted herself to a reserved, considerate man but never won his confidence. Nor did it occur to him that he could find solace through her, so absorbed was he in his self-made purgatory. 

He took no joy in his academic success, merely leveraged his seniority to request an old patient file to feed his research. The truth was coded in Sorcha’s treatment. A back-street abortion gone wrong, a veil drawn to preserve the illusion of religious rectitude. 

Only once had they not been careful, that first time when Sorcha offered herself with her back turned. Once was enough, their bodies desperate for what their rational minds denied: to seed their own belonging, to give them a child to belong to. 

He snapped the box open, snapped it shut. 

“Your voice goes funny the few times she’s mentioned,” Ana said, her own voice neutral, its moderated tone knowing.

Samir could have told her, trusted her with a confession and been absolved, but the premonition had become a promise of fidelity. He would not let himself know a love other than Sorcha’s, her words were a vow he would not put asunder because he had no wish to be forgiven.

It was not influenza that had killed Sorcha, it was Samir himself. He had killed her with something primal, something ancient and carnal that was his to control. Sorcha had the courage to forestall their civil union, Samir had lacked the strength to restrain their physical union. Their act of rebellion set her on the path to her grave.

Sorcha’s cross lay in a box in his palm. Ana shifted, her palm settling their unborn child. Samir pondered the risk and loss. How much harm would the truth do, that his wife could not fill him, infect him, inhabit him in the same way as a woman twenty years dead? He’d never wielded a knife, it was not in him to start now. 

“It’s one of those tricky Irish names,” Samir said at last, careful from then on not to mention Sorcha again. 

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Ali Abbas is the author of two novellas: Silent Running (Lost Colony Magazine) is a hard sci-fi thriller, and Like Clockwork (Transmundane Press) is a steampunk mystery. His shorter fiction has been widely published. A full list of stories is available on his author site at www.authoraliabbas.weebly.com . A selection of stories and essays on art, business and society can be found on his blog at www.aliabbasali.com.

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