There were older reminders, too, on his flesh. The scars on his knees from when he fell flying kites with his brother when they were children. The fierce competition between them. His brother’s athletic ability, his own scholarly ambitions. The soft shoulders his father had leant his arm upon the day Hamza completed his education. The way his father did not speak of his pride after the dinner their mother had prepared that evening, but showed it in his gentle teasing of his sons, the way he touched his wife’s hand as she cleared the dishes. Then there was the knee, the knee his bachelor friend had ceremonially pricked with a needle the morning of his wedding to Fatima, in the hope that he too would soon find himself a bride. Hamza felt the history of his flesh around him once more. His limbs numb and heavy as if life, in its return, wanted to sting him with its strength, show him how far he would have to come. He sat in his dirty clothes, his thoughts centring on Fatima.

He had tried to be what she wanted, to say what she wanted him to, but she became like a book in a language unknown to him. He could see the marks on the page, where sentences and paragraphs fell, but he did not understand her. She blamed it on his upbringing, the coldness of his mother, but Hamza had never thought his mother cold. She just did not waste her words. Fatima disappeared between his arms. He stopped sleeping. Became critical. She would be loyal, of course, but one day he caught her washing their clothes, a stillness about her as she hung them on the line to dry, as if setting out her family or an approximation of who they were under the sun, and his heart ached for her although he would never say as much. So, they had held their son between them, held him up to the light and watched as he bound them together in their admiration. They would tell him stories. Weave their words around him so that all three would be spellbound, as present in the story as they were absent from the real world. Hamza felt again for his pulse under his fingertips. The breakfast he had eaten making him nauseous, his whole body aching with the decision to live.

The door opened.

‘Come on.’ It was Owens. His uniform pressed. Hamza thought he was there to collect the breakfast tray, but no. ‘I said, come on!’ Hamza stood up, his legs adjusting a moment, kept his head low as the blood rushed to it. He moved towards the door, brushed past him. ‘You stink,’ Owens muttered.