The sand is hot, burning your knees through the stiff synthetic material of the jump suit – the cords around your wrists chafe. Your eyes smart in the harsh sunlight and your belly gripes – they gave you a greasy piece of flat bread and a handful of figs before they dragged you out here, but you’ve had diarrhoea for months and the smell of it lingers in your nostrils, together with the stench of the jihadists’ hair gel and the perfume of the attar they rub on their hands. The long and desperate whispered conversations at night, as you huddled with your fellow hostages – all this whirls about your head: all that speculation about rescue or escape or ransom … is over, it all ends here. Unless … unless … a helicopter comes dallying in over the desert, and special forces troops plummet, avenging angels, from its open doors … But there’s nothing: only the sough of the wind and the dry rasp of your own voice as you inveigh against the rescuers who never came for you … How will it feel, the knife? Of course you’ve thought about it – naturally you’ve considered the pain, weighed it in the soft pink palm of your hand. What’s bothered you most in recent weeks, as your captors have grown tenser, still more arbitrarily brutal, is not the pain itself, but whether you will conduct yourself well, with dignity … with composure … It would be too awful, you thought, to scream or plead hysterically, the shit trickling down your legs … Yet now, as you fall silent, and he steps forward to say his snide and crazy bit, none of that troubles you – any more that it bothers you who he and his fellow fighters are … You spoke to them – you tried to engage them, but there was a moment when their eyes flickered and you saw through them … into the void. You had imagined … what? That in these last few moments your psyche would stretch out its immaterial but ever-so-sensitive fingers to caress the faces of those you love and have loved … That you would give up your soul in a great gasp of exaltation and gratitude for all you’ve ever felt and seen and thought and smelt and tasted and given and received – for your life … Instead there is only the churning in your belly, the gnawing at your wrists, the grit on your cheeks, the rose-watering of your eyes – and the knife … How will it feel, the knife? Will you sense the individual serrations nipping then slitting skin, gristly trachea, snaking carotid artery … Will you focus desperately on its plastic handle as it passes your eyes, searching for the manufacturer’s logo to remind you of Sunday lunchtimes ..? But no: it’s too late for that now – his hand has grabbed your hair. It is said that no man may stare at the sun or know the hour of his own death – yet here you are, staring up at the sun, and this … this is the hour of your death … This great beautiful wide world you have carried around inside you, never really understanding what it is, or whether it’s the same as anyone else’s world … This world is coming to an end … The globe teeters on its axis – topples into the void … This is what it feels like: the knife …