Free Dark Winter by David Mark Page B

happened to her?’
    ‘I think I just asked her one day,’ says Vicki, turning in her seat to try and catch the waitress’s eye. Without thinking about it, McAvoy pushes his own glass across the table and, wordlessly, Vicki takes it in her palm. ‘Like I told you, I’ve done quite a lot of work in countries that have seen conflict and poverty. I was walking between classes with her and she just came out with it. Told me that all of her family had been killed. She was the only one who survived.’
    For a whole minute they sit in silence. McAvoy’s mind is full of this murdered girl. He has investigated lost lives before. But there is something about the butchering of Daphne Cotton that smacks of futility. Of a cruel end to a life that had been unexpectedly reprieved, and which could perhaps have offered so much.
    ‘Read it,’ says Vicki eventually, nodding at the papers on the table in front of McAvoy. ‘She wrote that about three months ago. We’d been talking about drawing on your own experiences to become a better writer. Putting parts of yourself into your work. I’m not sure if she fully understood, but what she wrote just tore me up. Read it.’
    McAvoy unfolds the pages. Looks at Daphne Cotton’s words.
    They say that three years old is too young to form memories, so perhaps what follows is the product of what I have been told, and what I have read. I truly cannot say
.
    I cannot smell blood when I think of my family. I do not smell the bodies or remember the touch of their dead skin. I know it happened. I know I was plucked from the pile of bodies like a baby from a collapsed building. But I do not remember it. And yet I know that it happened
.
    I was three years old. I was the second youngest child in a large family. My oldest brother was fourteen. My oldest sister a year younger. My youngest brother was perhaps ten months old. I had two more brothers and one sister. My youngest brother was called Ishmael. I think we were a happy family. In the three photographs I have, we are all smiling. The photographs were gifts from the sisters as I left to meet my new parents. I do not know where they came from
.
    We lived in Freetown, where my father worked as a tailor. I was born into a time of violence and warfare, but my parents kept us cocooned from the troubles. They were God-fearing Christians, as were their parents, my grandparents. We lived together in a large apartment in the city, and I think I remember saying prayers of gratitude for our good fortune. From history books and the internet, I know that people were dying in their thousands at a time when we were living a happy life, but my parents never allowed this horror to penetrate our lives
.
    In January of 1999, the fighting reached Freetown. When I ask my memory for pictures of our flight from the bloodshed and carnage of that day, there is nothing. Perhaps we left before the soldiers arrived. I know that we went north with a group
of other families from our church. How we reached Songo, the region of my mother’s people, I cannot say
.
    I remember dry grass and a white building. I think I remember songs and prayers. I remember Ishmael’s cough. We may have been there for days or weeks. I sometimes feel I have let my family down by not remembering. I pray to God the Father that I remedy this sin. I ask for the memories, no matter how much they will hurt
.
    When I was old enough, the sisters at the orphanage told me that the rebels had come. That it had been a bright, sunny day. That the fighting was beginning to die down elsewhere in the country, and that the men who passed our church were fleeing defeat. They were drunk and they were angry
.
    They herded my family and their friends into the church. Nobody else came out alive, so nobody can say what happened. Some of the bodies had bullet holes in the backs of their heads. Others had died from the cuts of machetes
.
    I do not know why I was spared. I was found among the bodies. I was bleeding from a