There was a weird sound when I woke up in the morning. My cheek was pressed up against the car window and my hands were sweating inside their gloves, tongue tasting the cold and moist open air, whilst a slow, frequent sort of thudding resounded in my periphery. I heard sluggish whispers and muted mumbles and a couple of rough belly laughs, and then three heavy knocks that reverberated sharp and musical through the glass.
Jumping in my seat, I realised what the weird sound was. It was the lack of background noise. For the first time in the last 3 days, I couldn't hear a drop of rain.
I drew away from the window shoulders first, my neck twinging on a trapped nerve and body waking up with the burning in my muscles. Between the clammy unsheathed fingers that rubbed at my eyelids I could see Hassan stirring in a similar fashion – chin craning back from his chest, strands of his hair getting trapped between his eyelashes.
His groan came out guttural and demonic, and I honestly couldn't have agreed more.
"Where the fuck –"
"I don't know."
Squeaky knocking against the window interrupted our croaks and grunts, Hassan jerking his head towards the sound and narrowing his sleep-addled eyes at the policeman stood outside. A strong and audible gust of wind blew suddenly across the landscape and buffeted the high-visibility jackets of the officer and his companions, who were leant up against a small silver police vehicle with the same neon-coloured chevrons pasted across its surface.
"Alright you two?" The policeman crouched to peer at us, his voice muffled as it struggled to penetrate the glass.
"Yeah, yeah." Hassan folded over wearily and let out a slow sigh. "We're good."
The officer gestured for him to roll down the window. A line of tension rippled over Hassan's jaw, but after a second's pause, he obliged.
"What happened to the car, son?" he asked.
"We, uh, we crashed it into a telegraph pole. Last night."
"How'd that happen? Get caught in the storm?"
"Yeah ... I mean, it were an accident, but ..."
The officer paused in his examining of the car to study Hassan's face. "You wasn't intoxicated or anything, was you?"
Hassan snorted. "No."
His lack of a follow-up prompted the policeman to flatten his lips on a sigh of his own. "I'm gonna need you to step out of the car, son."
Despite his hushed and muttered protests, Hassan did as he was told – ditching the cushions of the driver's seat for the gales that continued to whistle on outside. I drew my coat closer around myself as the cold filtered in through the open window and watched them walk the 4 feet to the police vehicle in lazy, languid shuffles. The whole thing seemed highly unnecessary, but then again, I could only imagine what the car looked like from the outside. It was a miracle we were able to get it out of the dip in the road and facing oncoming traffic.
The police officer continued on to dig around for something in his dashboard as one of his lounging cohorts came forward, saying something to Hassan that had him rolling his eyes. I waited apprehensively for the conversation to continue, but the officer seemed quite content to let Hassan lean into the support of his Nikes and tilt his face to the shrouded heavens.
There was a gradient in the clouds that hadn't been there yesterday; lots of bright whites and thick, smoky charcoal, bound and tied together in licks of cinerous ash. It debunked every myth of a silver lining and renegaded every attempt at optimism I had at my disposal. And yet, with his eyes closed, and his hands entrenched deep inside his coat pockets, Hassan looked almost peaceful.
I was so transfixed by the stillness that the soft rap I heard at my window had me screaming bloody murder, choking on the breath left behind.
The third officer mere inches from me looked less than apologetic.
"Alright there love?" His easy, weathered smile twitched into a smirk as I lowered my window, crow's feet shredding the skin around his eyes.
"Um, yes. Thank you." The gruffness in my voice barely got the message across. I coughed uncomfortably and tried my best to clear my muggy throat.
He gestured over to Hassan, who was now drawing 2 diagonal lines from his far-spread index fingers to his nose. "That your boyfriend, then?"
The instinctive reaction was to throw up through the passenger window, but I paused before the reflex could overcome me. What if Hassan disagreed? How much were we supposed to explain to 3 coppers in the middle of nowhere? Sure, he had absolutely no reason to facilitate such a maniacal ruse, but I'd barely woken up yet and I trusted he hadn't either. Adding a police investigation to all of that left us in the precarious position of making the best of a bad set of cards, and knowing how socially-inept Hassan was even when he was running at full efficacy, I could see him taking the path of less resistance just to get everyone to shut up about it and both of us back on the road. Even if Hassan's intolerance for me did not need that much awakening.
I found myself turning back to the police officer and giving him my most elastic attempt at a cocky smile. "Does it matter?"
It seemed to have the desired effect. But the greasy grin he shot me in reply and the eyes that roved over the folds of my coat definitely triggered the acid reflux I'd been missing out on earlier.
A slam of a car door broke the need for further eye contact, and I took it with a low-brow leap. I slid over far enough in my seat that I was practically sitting on the handbrake and fixed my gaze out the windscreen at the tapering plateau – fields of deep mossy clovers and thinning pastures finally discernible under the guise of daylight, as well as the ruined farm structures and barnyards dotting out into the horizon. In the foreground Hassan continued to answer the questions of the officers stoically and unfazed, the policemen seeming only marginally more engaged in the examination.
He eventually withdrew one of his hands from his pockets to point and gesture at where I sat in the passenger seat, causing their gazes to switch over to mine and appraise my performance accordingly. I gingerly gave them a wave. The officers returned it with half-hearted delay, and Hassan only snorted.
"What was that about?" I asked him as he got back into the car.
He didn't say a word whilst he settled himself back in. "They was suspicious," he stated, smearing the words beneath the click of his seatbelt. "I told 'em the car got stranded in the middle of the storm. They wanted to call my bluff."
I furrowed my brows. "Why'd they think you were bluffing?"
The flat line of his mouth twitched in dismissal. "I don't think they did." He shook out his arms before reaching for the rear-view mirror and fought against a grunt of pain. "Some things ain't worth explaining."
"Are you okay?"
"I'm bloody traumatised, clear–"
"No, you twat, I'm talking about your arm," I said, staring at it dubiously. "You crushed it when we slammed into the telegraph pole yesterday. Or did you not realise?"
Hassan paused as his hand wrapped around the mirror. A weird glaze pierced through the murkiness in his eyes.
"Hassan?"
A bellow and guffaw from the officers shattered my amateur investigation, one of them ambling back over with a pad and pen in his grasp. Hassan adjusted the mirror and briefly looked over before he replied.
"I'm fine."
They rehashed Hassan's license details and the registration documents of the car, as well as taking a few photographs of the damage to the driver's side. It turned out that although the ignition and battery were working just fine, the damage to the car had left the chassis imbalanced and the tyres entirely out of alignment. I wasn't completely sure how it worked, but after steering it back onto the road for the officers' approval and being met with a resounding 'no' on all sides, they made the insurance call on Hassan's behalf off of one of their mobile phones.
"Where they taking you?"
"Didn't say. Closest place with a garage, I guess."
"And where were you originally headed?" The officer looked up to lock eyes with Hassan. "Sorry; think that one must've slipped my mind."
The tension in Hassan's jaw continued to coil like a well-wound spring. "North," he said brusquely. "Just north. We haven't dec–"
"Lake District," I butted in. "We're headed to the Lake District."
Hassan turned to face me, and the officer's gaze flitted between us.
"Thank you." A few more scribbles echoed from the notepad. "Just the two o' you, correct?"
With Hassan still staring unflinchingly at me I had to swallow and shuffle back for him to take back the reins.
"Yeah. Just us." Levelling his tone, he swivelled delicately to glower at the steering wheel instead. "Important to get in that quality time when you can, you know?"
The officer chuckled and smirked knowingly at him in reply. "Of course."
Ignoring the maggots feasting on my entrails and the sour burn the bile left behind in my throat, we bid goodbye to the officers who'd unwittingly given us our freedom and watched a plume of exhaust mark their anxiously-awaited exit. Quiet and distance filled out the edges of the landscape as well as the space inside the car.
A couple of minutes or so into the ride, sandwiched between Hassan and the burly R.A.C. engineer who was far too chipper for someone asked to drag a partially-digested hatchback 15 miles to the nearest town, I noticed Hassan begin to drift back off to sleep. It was far from ideal given the rate at which we bumped along the debris-strung roads – only second to the machine-gun rate at which Jerry was firing off anecdotes and openers – but for once, I decided to keep quiet. Incessant conversation seemed to be the lesser of 2 evils when I could feel the hole my scowling, seething jailor was burning into the seat.
What with everything that had taken place so far, I was really starting to regret casting a deal with this particular breed of devil.
~
We pulled into a Halfords station sometime around noon. The veil of fog above us was permeated by a single drop of sunlight, a sure sign if any we were far from the boundaries of Suddington, even if we didn't know how or where, and the smudge of blue we could see of the sky tinted the undersides of the clouds. Jerry made sure to comment on it as we all piled out of the rescue truck.
Hassan paid him the cash for the excess fee directly from a zippered pocket of his infamous rucksack. I couldn't help but sigh, resignedly, as it reappeared in my vision like a bad omen, and thanked my lucky stars the police officers hadn't paid any extra attention to it when they'd been examining the contents of the car.
The Leon was in the shop for a long time. Definitely longer than I'd expected to wait. I spent a great deal of the first 20 minutes after Jerry left watching Hassan argue with the girl behind the reception desk whilst I stood dumbly in the middle of the foyer, making an executive decision halfway through to head over to the water dispenser and fiddle with the paper cups. By the time I'd finished arranging them in a zigzag over the top of the machine and ruined the formation to grab some for myself, Hassan had disappeared.
"Hi," I said, tentatively, approaching the desk as she sniffled over a stack of documents.
The girl looked up with a sharp little scowl and pretty blue eyes surrounded by puffy skin. "What?"
"Um ..." I swallowed. "The guy, who was here? Do you know ... where he went?"
Her chin trembled again in response. "He's in the garage," she replied, pointing out of the glass doors to the workshops on the other side of the yard lined with corrugated sheet metal and weatherworn advertising. "They're working through your repairs now."
Turning back to thank her, I found myself taking a breath before ignoring all of my instincts. "I'm sorry," I said, handing her the cup of water I'd filled. "I know he's, uh – he can be a bit of a prick."
She stared at me with her glassed-over eyes for a second before taking the water from my grasp. "Thanks."
"He's just had a long day, you know?"
The sigh that left her mouth over the rim of the cup was as dismissive as it was aggravated. "I mean, if you say so." Her plastic nails grazed the paper before setting it down at her station. "But you know they have organisations out there, for people like you."
"What are you talking about?"
She caught my gaze meaningfully before resuming the typing at her keyboard with loud, antagonising clacks. "They call 'em battered wives clubs. Here they meet every Thursday – it might be sometime different, where you're from."
I could not have faked the look on my face even if I'd wanted to.
Human beings are supposed to be fundamentally social creatures, but Hassan and I didn't say a word to each other once we left the garage that day. It might have had something to do with the furious glare mashing all his features into one central, gnarled knot in the middle of his face, and it might have had something to do the fact I was appalled he'd made a grown woman cry with absolutely no remorse. But the sun was just toppling from its perch at the highest point in the sky when our warhorse came back from the infirmary, sleek and shiny and probably in better condition than it had been when Hassan had rocked up to collect me yesterday night, and the guy barely stabbed a pen at the collection papers before strapping himself in at the driver's side and sputtering it crudely to life.
It was a good thing I got in when I did, because no later than me slamming the door on my re-entry to the Leon's plush seats did Hassan shoot off across the yard, flashing his taillights as a belated thank you to the mechanics who'd resuscitated his noble steed. I managed a cold snort for me and a silent prayer for my life before grasping onto the grab handle in the roof.
Since I'd decided I, too, was no longer talking to the cad accompanying me to sure and certain purgatory, it freed up a lot of my attention and single-minded worrying to look at the world we'd ended up in. It was hard to tell which direction from Suddington the roads had taken us. With the miniscule, incremental amount of sun we'd received you'd think we were headed down south towards the coast, but the roads were shifting from concrete to cobbles, and the population only increased as we soared past at a Ruparelia-approved 'fuck you' to the speed limits.
I felt a familiar ball of a soft memories rolled in shrapnel start to bob at the back of my mouth like a ball-gag; shopping centres, high streets, the odd chain restaurant and busker by a park bench – with an amp and open guitar case instead of the cap of change they passed around at the rec grounds and outside Suddington's sixth form college. I even caught a glance of a preacher on a soapbox screaming about the end of the world before we took a left coming up to the turnpike. It hadn't occurred to me that places like Norwich could exist outside of my small and limited experience of the world, but then again, the only reason I'd closed off that possibility in the first place was moving to the dreary rear end of a backwards-facing southern town; a step towards my supposed future that had only jolted me further back in my cage.
I was still staring, wide-eyed and agape, at what appeared to be a city centre when Hassan suddenly killed the engine. My entire body rocked forwards in my seat, but I managed to brace a hand against the dashboard in time.
"What are you –"
SLAM. The muffled sounds of traffic and chatter escaped through the car door for a second before it shut in deafening resilience. I shuddered at the impact. And then I waited, because there was nothing else I could do.
I'd finger-brushed my curls at least 4 times and picked at each of my cuticles before Hassan returned, his late-afternoon shadow preceding his way in, as well as the belly-aching aroma of freshly fried food. Several items slapped down across the compartment behind the handbrake; a roadmap, concertina-folded, a toothbrush and some deodorant, and 2 bags of golden-brown potato fries, hash browns and terracotta cuts of breaded chicken.
When I glanced up at Hassan again he was peeling off his gloves and pulling the bags of food onto his lap, removing the articles from their packaging.
"This is your plan?" I asked, trying to get some bearings on the situation. "Grab a bite, figure out where we are and get back on the road?"
To his credit, he didn't waste any time going through the motions of one of his agonised eye-rolls or tortured inward sighs. He just shrugged. And stared directly at the feast in front of him as he ferreted out a chicken wing and licked his lips in anticipation.
"I don't give 2 shits about a plan," he said. "I just needed a whiz – and to grab a few snacks for the road. The map's all yours, seeing as you clearly don't know where you're going."
I didn't like the way he was stating these things. "What do you mean?"
He jerked his chin up at the long and narrow street in front of us before sinking his teeth in and devouring half the wing. "There's a postal office down there. Managed to get some tourist pointers. This place looks quite nice, think I'm going to stay a while – then I'm heading back home."
For the first time since we'd arrived in this godforsaken sunlit Gomorrah, Hassan looked straight into the depths of both my eyes. I felt a pang in my stomach that was more than just the hunger.
"Wait, what –"
"You can find your own way to Hamilton from here."
"Hassan, NO."
"Why not?"
"Because I can't do this without you!" I found myself yelling at the selfishness of his utter insanity. "I already told you that!!"
"Yeah, well a FAT lot of help you've been about the whole thing." His eyes had tightened into vicious little slits, greasy fingertips curling around a fistful of paper and plastic. "You're supposed to be running this whole enterprise and all you've done is sat your fucking arse down, sort out the train fare and wait for me to solve every single bloody issue we've run into along the way. I ain't your fucking P.I., Ada, and I'm sure as hell not gonna be your chauffeur anymore. You nearly totalled my car."
"I didn't do shit!" I exclaimed. "Me? Total YOUR car? I was the one who told you not to drive the fucking thing and you were the one who said it was our best bet at making it to the station in one piece!"
"Well did it ever occur to you that we wouldn't have had to get to station, if you hadn't come up with this stupid, unbelievable, apeshit plan in the first place??" That sardonic, mocking incredulity was back in his voice, soaking through his words like venom. "This was YOUR bloody idea. And I told you from the beginning it wasn't going to work. You stock shelves and make messes and get on everyone's damn near last nerve, and it's like that's all you've ever fucking been able to do."
"Oh, really?" I could feel my nostrils flaring and the heat rushing to the tips of my ears. I was pretty sure I was as red as the flames consuming both my sense and my patience. "That's a beautiful sentiment Hassan, really, I'm touched, but we both know that neither of us would have to be here if you hadn't fucked up and screwed your best pal's girl. We both know that's the real reason she left, and that's the only reason any of this is happening."
"If you don't want me to put a fucking shiner on your face, you'll shut up about that," he growled. "You know I'll do it. I don't give a crap about you being a girl, nor Jezza's girl at that. 'Cos that whole thing was accident, whereas this –"
He pointed a finger at me; a single, tremoring finger, wrought with all the force I knew he was capable of.
"– this is bloody intentional." Hassan pursed his lips for a second to stop his own venom from poisoning himself. "You designed this entire get-up to rip my life apart."
"Bullshit." I was so confused I forgot what we were fighting about for a second. "I don't care about you! I couldn't – I literally could not give 2 flying monkey craps about any of that stuff. What I'm HERE for is finding out what the heck happened to Trisha."
"So do that on your own," he snarled.
"Well if I could drive, you imbecile, and if I had a car, obviously that's what I'd be doing," I spat back. "But you're the one who bought in on this, so you don't get to back out now. I don't care how much you fucking hate me."
Hassan let out a low, dark chuckle. "You have no freaking idea."
"DON'T I?!" I shrieked. "DON'T I?!! WHEN IT CAN'T POSSIBLY BE AS MUCH AS I HATE YOU??!!"
I didn't realise I was slamming the car door and running away until I felt the wind on my face, streaking my tears and singeing my broken skin.
~
Once a church girl, always a church girl. I'd sinned all my life, but somehow, some way, I always found myself making that long and treacherous walk of shame back down this centre aisle and to the 14th pew on the left. I was sitting in the 14th pew on an afternoon in October praying for Mum to come home from the hospital, and on the 14th October 1996, Tiffs came back with her.
The church was practically empty, and I was definitely attracting strange looks from members of the clergy most likely preparing the room for the evening prayer session, but I couldn't bring myself to care. Dad was probably shivering in his grave at the mere idea of me setting myself down inside a house of Catholicism, but I knew he'd be trying to suppress his opinions. Despite the odd moment where he succumbed to human skepticism, Dad had always done as much as he could to accept all the ways in which people loved the Lord.
Guiltily, I couldn't help but glance around and acknowledge how much nicer this place was than most Baptist churches. Steep arched windows were inset high up in the neatly-plastered walls, biblical framework and intricate staining filtering a kaleidoscope of colours down onto the altar at the front, and the golden, gilded pillars holding up the tapering ceiling work were nothing short of majestic. I'd dusted off my boots and coat as best I could when I walked in, and now, with the trapped heat of the static atmosphere and plush carpet beneath my feet, I felt like I could almost fall asleep.
I knew that would be definitely get me kicked out though, so I instead focused on nodding respectfully to the men of the cloth who passed by, and counting all the hues of blue in Mary's rippling cloak. Sometime later my thoughts turned to how the heck I was supposed to get all the way to Hamilton with a measly £40 in my pocket and no feasible address of the woman I'd made it my sole, immediate purpose to confront. Whether it was worth it in the first place. If I was even doing it for the right reasons.
I found myself muttering beneath my breath, fixing my gaze on the pew a few rows down from me.
'Our Father, who art in Heaven,
Hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come, thy will be done,
On Earth, as it is in Heaven.'
I shut my eyes and breathed in, deep.
'Give us this day our daily bread,
And forgive us all our trespasses,
As we forgive those who trespass against us.'
A cynical, grated sigh came out of my mouth. Forgiveness. Dad could do it. Tiffs as well. But me, I ... I was still holding onto a grudge from 18 years ago with the woman who'd brought me into the world, who'd given me the best life she could. A woman who hadn't known family and had done what was possible with her meagre view of self-worth, running from the regimen of a strict and exacting religion and the only man she'd ever loved. Forgiveness wasn't something I'd ever been able to get my head around. I doubted if that, amongst a million other things, was something I was even capable of.
"Hey."
I shot upright, the finger an inch away from the base of my neck along my shoulder bone spooking me far before I heard the voice. I'm sure in reality the two occurred milliseconds apart, but I still made a sudden thunk as my shoulder blades connected sharply with the back of the pew.
"Jesus – fuck."
"AHEM."
A loud cough came from the other side of the church, so I kept my lungs at ease, my breathing low and my voice as quiet as possible.
"Hassan – what the heck are you doing here?"
"What's it look like; I came searching for you."
Still attempting to look as gentle and inconspicuous as possible, I turned slightly in my pew so I could regard him in the row behind. Hassan was slumped forward on the lean and varnished oakwood, fingers interlocked in an X between his knees, and his collar turned up beneath his windswept hair.
"Why?" The distaste wasn't hard to keep hidden; it was fully upstaged by the bafflement on my face. "I thought you were going tonight."
Hassan didn't say anything for a second. It seemed that the eye-contact was supposed to convey something he couldn't. But when the pause continued and I remained waiting for him to explain himself, I saw a twinge of confusion on his own furrowed brow.
"I was."
I waited some more. "Okay ..."
Eventually another line of tension crawled its way across his jaw and those heavy eyes closed on a tempered sigh. "I wasn't gonna just leave you here. Without knowing where you was headed."
I felt my frown getting deeper. But before I could say anything he butted in again.
"I'm not an animal, Ada. Yeah you pissed me off. Majorly. I ... said some hurtful things too." The fingers between his knees closed in on each other until they were massaging their palms. "Let's just agree not to do that again."
"What, piss each other off? What universe do you live in?"
"Yeah alright, alright, let's just ..." he grappled with another low breath. "Let's just ... not run away again. Okay? We can't do this without each other, so ... something's gonna have to give."
When he looked up, with finality, those cool pools of brown didn't look as lifeless as they did before. Something in them did, at a stretch, look almost human.
"Fine."
I moved to pick up my stuff, but in the middle of all the shuffling I noticed him holding out his hand.
"What's that?"
"It's a Big Mac."
"A Big Mac?"
"It's a burger, Ada. Take it or leave it; I finished all the chicken wings."
"Excuse me, sir." The clergy officer walking through the centre aisle stopped dead at our side and fixed Hassan with a disapproving stare. "There's no eating in this church."
Hassan's own stare kept him walking, even though the look on his face seemed more disbelieving than predatory. "No eating in church?" he echoed, as I strung my arms through my coat. "So what do they call that whole thing with the bread and the wine?"
I took the Big Mac from his hand and grimaced sympathetically. "This is a Catholic church. They believe it's blood and body of Christ."
"You're joking. It's bits of day-old bloomer, not a bacon sarnie."
"Hassan!"
"What?"
I grabbed him by the elbow and forced him up to his feet. "We're leaving, now, before they burn you at the stake or something."
He had the gall to smirk at me as I tugged him out of the church. "That's the wrong crime, Ada."
"Oh shut up."
I didn't realise how far I'd run or travelled in my frenzy to get away from Hassan and the car earlier. Hassan had the photographic memory of a gnat, and I of course had only stumbled upon the church through sheer coincidence, so getting back to the Leon turned out to be a bit of an undertaking in itself. In the end we had to ask a couple of locals for stringent directions towards two bollards and a bush my eagle-eyed comrade remembered parking next to earlier – me doing most of the negotiations as Hassan scowled in a corner – our slow and tedious game of pinball eventually leading us towards the doctor's surgery he'd managed to park in front of and the hefty fine we'd accrued during our day's worth of wandering around.
Cursing out whatever evil genie or spirit had been following us since we'd taken to the road whilst I discreetly tried to dispose of my burger wrapper, Hassan ripped the notice to shreds and buckled himself into the driver's seat. He revved the engine once as a warning for me to hurry up, so I quickly made do with tying it into a little cape around the arching trellis leading to a cottage.
"Done?" he asked once I'd shut the passenger door behind me.
"Yes."
He didn't ask any further questions, handing me the roadmap, keying the ignition and just about glancing into the rear-view mirror before tearing off down the street.
Hassan hadn't even given me a destination, much less a strategy for further movement. All he said to me when I finally managed to switch on the overhead light and open up the Pandora's box of concertina folds was to find our current position, direct us north, and try to use as many A-roads or cross-country routes as possible. I had a feeling we were skipping the first part of the operation and focusing solely on getting to Bath, maybe to resume our original travel plans from there. But it was hard enough trying to find my inner cartographer and figure out the miniscule lettering that bordered each of the squiggly lines on the paper.
I managed to pinpoint our whereabouts when we passed by a Christmas tree farm on a B-road following the northbound passage of the River Frome, only noticing the road at all because of my preoccupation with the Christmas tree farm.
"It's so weird," I mused out loud, "that there are farms for this. You know. They're just trees."
"Well what do you expect, people are gonna be satisfied dragging in their juniper bushes and dressing up their houseplants?" Hassan seemed less than interested in the revelation I was having. "Nah. It's gotta look like the movies, don't it."
"Would you dress up your weed plants?" I asked him suddenly.
"What?"
"Your weed plants. If you were growing them over the Christmas period, would you give them little baubles and things? Or like, a Santa hat?"
"Don't be ridiculous, a Santa hat? That would crush 'em." Hassan pondered on it a moment longer. "Might get a festive fertiliser or something, but I don't think I'd do anything more than that."
"Festive fertiliser?"
"Yeah. Might see if ... if I could get some turkey bonemeal or something. Maybe like, some kind of candied sugar solution, to add to the topsoil."
I blinked back at him, incredulously. "You're – you're seriously considering this."
"Well yeah, why not, if it's not too expensive I don't see why –"
A high-pitched beeping sound suddenly emanated from the Leon's dash monitor, causing both of us to wince.
"What was that?"
"I don't know, I ..." Hassan's voice trailed off as he stared intently at the screen. "Aahh, fuck."
"What, what is it?"
Before I could get an answer to my question a raspy, guttering sound began to echo from inside the engine. Hassan immediately ground the car to a halt, pulling us into park and taking a deep breath as he slumped back in his seat.
"We're on empty."
"What?"
He pointed to the monitor, and the tiny bar besides which was the fuel pump icon for Hassan's reference. I couldn't see anything in it because he'd turned the car off. But I could gather what was going on.
"You had a full tank yesterday, right?"
"They drained it when they was doing the repairs at the car shop," he said. "I just – I completely forgot I was supposed to fill it up."
I looked from Hassan's drawn face to the fuel gauge, and the weird air of apprehension that was beginning to fill the car.
"Okay, well ..." I drummed my fingers across the cap of my knee. It didn't make sense to blow up at him about this. My brows furrowed as I thought about it. "Let's just go and get some then."
Hassan looked back at me confusedly. "What?"
"Well we can't go anywhere on an empty car," I stated, gesturing quite clearly at the lifeless screen. "So let's ... let's just go and get some. There must be a petrol station around here. Do you have a jar or anything?"
He continued to stare at me, baffled, before raising one of his brows. "I have a can," he iterated, slowly. "You know – a petrol can, in the boot."
"Well that's perfect!" I was surprisingly pleased about all of this. A problem I actually had the solution for. Who would've thunk? "Shall we – shall we go, then?"
"What, now?"
"Yeah!"
I unclipped my seatbelt without a second thought and freed myself from the warmth of the car, hopping from foot to foot as I walked back into the frigid cold. Hassan appeared moments later, holding himself snug between the roof and driver's side door.
"Are you sure you want to do this? Like – I'm happy to wait, until ..."
My smiled hadn't faded, but Hassan's lack of enthusiasm had me puzzled. "Of course. Don't you? We can't go anywhere if we don't have –"
I watched his gloved fingers jitter across the roof of the car. Suddenly, I narrowed my eyes.
"You're scared."
"I'm not scared, I'm –"
"Yes you are. My God. You're scared of the bloody dark, and you actually want us to wait until morning before we trek God knows how long to find a can of petrol."
"I am not scared of the dark," he snapped. "Alright? Not if I'm ... in a car. Or a house. But we're talking about walking down a deserted road in the middle of nowhere, and if something was to happen to us, it's not like we have a phone – so neither of us can call for help, or nothing, either."
"What do you think is going to happen Hassan? It's barely 8:00pm. The worst-case scenario I can think of is encountering a couple of wolves or badgers if we end up going through the woods."
"What woods??"
I pointed behind me to the blurry backdrop of ink against the pitch. "There. There are the woods."
"You've got to be fucking shitting me."
"Hassan –"
"I've seen enough horror movies to know what happens in them things, I am NOT going through there."
"There is probably a path or something!"
"YOU DON'T KNOW THAT."
"This is fucking ridiculous."
"Well, you know what, I promise to send Jezza the best bits of you I find when I trek out there in the morning. When it's light. And we actually have a chance of getting somewhere. You know what, this is probably what led to that fairy tale about the red girl who goes to meet the big bad wolf."
"OH MY FUCKING GOD."