Legend. In the pubs and on the estates, on the internet, in all the places where people still said what they thought and weren’t afraid of being locked up for saying it, they’d be heroes. It would be a life lived in the shadows, one step ahead of the cops. He’d be the conquering hero, Robin Hood, famous for dealing this mighty blow; showing the foreign fanatics that they weren’t the only ones who could draw blood, that not all Englishmen were too frightened to fight back. That there was a resistance. That resistance would win.
He looked sideways and recognized the fear Larry was trying to hide. That was okay. All Larry had to do was what he was told, and he’d do that because he wasn’t currently capable of independent thought.
If he was, it would have occurred to him that they’d stand a better chance of getting away if there was only one of them doing it.
But Larry kept driving.
This darkness was smaller than the last. Hassan was hooded again, with a handkerchief stuffed in his mouth, his knees tucked up to his chest, and his hands bound.
When he flexed them, the cord dug into his wrists. But even if it snapped, what would he do? He was in the boot of a moving car. His captors still had him.
They’d brought him up from the cellar, into the kitchen, and there it had been, on the table. A human head. It sat in a pool of blood. What else could he say about it? It had been a head, and Hassan had seen films in which severed heads had been displayed, and had laughed at how ‘unrealistic’ they were, without it ever occurring to him that he had no frame of reference for the level of realism achieved. And now he did. And all he could think was that a real severed head was little different from a movie severed head, with one critical difference: it was real. The blood was real. The hair and teeth were real. The whole thing was real. Which meant that what he’d been told,
He had wet himself, and the jumpsuit clung to his legs. He wished he could remove it, and dry himself off. Wished he could have a shower, and change, and go to sleep, somewhere which wasn’t the boot of a moving car. If he were going to make wishes, perhaps that was the end he should start at. He should wish he were free and safe, and could worry about changing his trousers in his own sweet time.
The comedy voice in his head had fallen silent. There were issues that were not suitable for comedy. This argument had weekly been shot down in flames at the student stand-up society; try putting forward that point of view, and you’d be accused of fascism. Freedom of speech mattered more than notions of taste and propriety. Hassan Ahmed had agreed with that. How could he not? When the moment came, and he took his stand at the mic, it was all going to come out. Daring, edgy stuff. Nothing off-limits. That was the contract between stand-up and audience: they had to know you were baring your soul. Except now Hassan had encountered a severed head on a kitchen table, and had immediately understood that this was not something that could ever be the subject of a joke. And even if it could, it was not a joke that Hassan could make. Because it proved that the people holding him were capable of cutting off heads.
The thumps and jolts and crashings would not stop. The cord binding his wrists would not fray. Hassan would not find himself unleashed, but would lie suffering until the car reached its destination, and then he too would reach his destination. This was his last journey.
So even if he could. Even if he could make the best joke ever. Even if he could make the best joke ever, with its subject the decapitation of unwilling humans, this was not a joke Hassan could ever make, because Hassan was never going to make jokes again. Not that he had made that many to begin with. Because if he were to be uncompromisingly harsh on himself—if he were to tell the truth, observing the contract between stand-up and audience—Hassan would have to admit this too: that he had never been particularly funny. He could make jokes, yes. He could ride riffs. He could unreel a comedy thread and wrap it round the usual observation posts: quips about old people shopping, and teenagers texting, and how nobody smiles on buses. But only in his head. He had never been himself in public. And now never would be. Doing so would remain forever on the list of things Hassan had intended to do in his twenties; a list which would never grow longer and never grow shorter, for Hassan’s twenties were not going to happen.
Because these people were never going to let him go. Not without killing him first.
