The beginning

This is the saddest story I have ever heard. And I’ve had my fair share of dramas in the ten years as a journalist in London. I am looking at David’s shaking hands, trying to find the right thing to say. There’s nothing. Here I am standing in front of this broken man, a man who chose me to tell his story to the world. His grey eyes are empty and sunken deep into his skull. He looks diminished, almost a puppet under the worn dark blue covers. There is nothing between us, but a heavy silence pressing hard against my chest.

‘Say something,’ I urge myself, looking around the spartan-furnished room, as if help would come from the small corner brown table, or maybe from somewhere underneath it. But what is there to tell a man who saw his loved ones die? What can you tell a man who witnessed his twelve-year old daughter being raped and burned alive? How can you comfort a man whose toddler son and wife had their limbs cut off while he was watching helpless strapped to a pillar?

For the hundredth time, I open my mouth and try to speak. To comfort him and give him reassurance that his story won’t die, buried among the pages of a tabloid paper, as it happens with most of its kind today. But the words won’t come out. I gasp for air, I try to speak again. After a while, I give up. I just sit there, next to his bed, patting his hand and waiting and wondering at how fast a man who had it all lost everything to fate.

My head is spinning with thoughts without rhyme or reason. They come galloping like white ghosts, one after the other. Thoughts of blood and death from another lifetime, of the smell of burned flash and desperate screams of pain and agony.

I look at the brown file on the steel night stand. There, between the covers are pictures of his assassinated family. Sheila, his wife, has a bullet wound in the middle of her forehead. His daughter, Amy, her hair burned and jaw broken. And Daniel stares sadly into nothingness…