‘Go on, then.’ He was waiting. Hamza was light-headed, his breathing shallow. The cries of gulls overhead strange and threatening. ‘I said, GO ON!’ The boy was shouting now. Hamza pulled at the chain around his neck, lifted it over his head. Tried to centre himself, find Mecca. His fingertips were freezing. The wind seemed brutal. He couldn’t get the pin to settle. It seemed to move as he laid the compass flat on his palm. He sensed Owens’s fury growing but the pin would not find direction. He turned around to see if it would help. The wind was strengthening. Hamza could feel it pulling on him, on his clothes. It was no good.

Then, he felt the baton on the back of his knees and his legs buckled. The compass dropped to the floor. Hamza gasped. The touch of the earth raw and startling. Owens bent over and picked up the compass. Hamza’s head snapped up.

‘Give it back to me.’ His voice came from somewhere deep inside.

Owens half smiled.

‘I said, give it back.’

‘If you want it back, pray.’ He spat out the words slowly, deliberately.

A sudden heat flashed through Hamza’s body. The boy closed in on him.

‘Come on, then.’

Hamza clenched his jaw. Swallowed down his rage.

‘I said, come on, then!’

Hamza looked up at him, his hands trembling. Tried to push him away with his mind. The heat still coursing through his body. He tried to steady his breath, raised his hands to his ears.

‘Allahu Akbar.’ He looked down, his lips trying to find the words. He drew them up from deep inside like water from a well, more from instinct, the need to survive, than from memory. Then they dried up. Evaporated in his mouth. Owens was circling him now.

‘Allahu Akbar …’ He tried to centre his attention on his intent to pray. ‘Subhana Rabbiyal A’la …’

Owens’s boots on the gravelly soil.

‘I can’t hear you!’

‘Subhana Rabbiyal A’la …’

‘I said, I can’t hear you!’

Adley threw down his cigarette, interested now.

Every time Owens passed Hamza’s face, he would swing the compass carelessly. Dangerously. Hamza tried to bring his mind back to the prayer. Fragments of words he had repeated a thousand times. Words that once were like bread. Sustenance. Taught to him by his grandfather. Gently. Words that he had formed as he was taught to speak so that prayers and language were intertwined. But now they lay broken on his tongue. Retreating further with Owens’s every irritated step. Owens was sneering at him. Hamza bowed in sujood, touched the ground with his forehead for a moment before raising himself to sitting again. He looked up at the guard.

The boy looked down at him.

‘Was that it?’

Hamza remained silent. Owens pressed open the case, looked at the inscriptions before glancing over at Adley and smiling. ‘This doesn’t even make any sense.’