The phone rang at three seventeen in the morning.
He knew before he answered. Not the specifics. Not the who or the how or the where. But the body knew. The body understood what a phone call at three seventeen in the morning meant, the specific frequency of a ringtone in the dark that was different from every other ringtone, the sound carrying information before the words did.
Nicole stirred beside him. "Your phone."
He picked it up. The screen bright in the dark room. The caller ID: Beverly Jones.
Kofi's mother.
Beverly Jones had never called him. In fourteen years of friendship with her son, Beverly had never called Armani directly. She had spoken to him through Kofi. She had spoken to him at the dinner in Kingston after the Honduras match. She had spoken to his mother on the phone, the two women's friendship running parallel to their sons'. But she had never called his number.
He answered.
"Beverly?"
The sound on the other end was not a voice. It was a sound that the human body produced when the human mind could not produce words, the raw, physical, unprocessed sound of a woman whose body was expressing something that her language could not contain.
"Beverly. What happened."
"Kofi." The name came out broken. Split into two syllables that were separated by a gap that should not have existed, the gap filled with the sound that was not a voice. "Kofi. Armani. Kofi."
The room changed temperature. The bed beneath him became a surface he could not feel. Nicole sat up. Her hand found his arm. The contact registered without meaning.
"What happened to Kofi."
"A car." The words arriving one at a time, each one costing something. "A car. On the highway. He was driving home. From training. A car crossed the median. Head on."
The words were sounds. The sounds were information. The information was not possible.
"Beverly."
"He's gone, Armani. My boy is gone."
The next hours existed outside of time.
He did not remember hanging up the phone. He did not remember Nicole's arms around him. He did not remember the sound he made, though Nicole would tell him later that the sound was the worst thing she had ever heard, a noise that came from a place beneath language, beneath thought, beneath the civilized architecture of a person who had learned to process things through words and who had, in this moment, lost access to words entirely.
He remembered the wall. At some point he was standing in front of the wall. The grandfather's shirt. The Jamaica shirt. The Wembley medal. The Lens shirt. The Orlando photograph. Kofi's Cincinnati top, which had been draped over the chair in the Chiswick flat and which had traveled to Knowle and which was now hanging on the wall beside the photograph, the two items that were Kofi's, that carried Kofi's presence, that were, as of three seventeen this morning, the only physical evidence of Kofi that existed in this house.
He touched the Cincinnati top. The fabric. The badge. The specific texture of a training shirt that had been worn and washed and worn again, the material softened by use, carrying the shape of the body that had worn it even though the body was no longer wearing anything.
Nicole was behind him. He could feel her there. Not touching him. Present. The specific quality of a person who understood that some moments could not be shared, only witnessed, and who was choosing to witness without intruding.
"I need to call my mother," he said.
His voice was not his voice. His voice was a thing that came from his body the way sound came from a machine, the production mechanical, the emotion absent from the output even though the emotion was the only thing inside the machine.
He called. Sharon answered on the second ring. She was awake. Beverly had called her first.
"Mama."
"I know, baby. I know."
"Kofi."
"I know."
The silence that followed was the silence of two people connected by a phone line and by blood and by the specific, terrible understanding that the world had changed while they were sleeping and that the world that existed on the other side of the change was a world they did not know how to live in.
"How," he said.
"A truck. On the interstate. The driver fell asleep. Crossed the median. Kofi was driving home from training. Six thirty in the evening. The sun was still up."
The sun was still up. The detail arrived and lodged itself in his mind with the specific permanence of details that should not matter but that became, in the context of loss, the things that mattered most. The sun was still up. Kofi had been driving home from training with the sun still up. The ordinary act of driving home from work, the thing that millions of people did every day without consequence, the thing that Armani himself did every day, the fifteen minute drive from Bodymoor Heath to Knowle, the route through the Warwickshire lanes, the routine that was so familiar it was invisible.
The routine had killed Kofi. Not the routine. A truck driver who fell asleep. But the routine had placed Kofi on the road at the moment the truck crossed the median. The routine was the context. The context was the thing that made the death not just tragic but ordinary, the collision between the exceptional cruelty of the event and the mundane circumstances that surrounded it.
"When," he said.
"Yesterday evening. Cincinnati time. Beverly was at home. The police came to her door."
The police at the door. The knock. The uniforms. The words that the officers would have used, the specific language that law enforcement was trained to deliver, the sentences constructed to communicate the fact without the feeling, the professional distance between the person delivering the news and the person receiving it.
Beverly receiving it. Alone. In her house in Cincinnati. The house where the care packages were assembled and the scotch bonnet peppers were wrapped and the photographs of Kofi in his Cincinnati shirt were on the walls.
"I need to go," Armani said.
"Where?"
"Cincinnati. Jamaica. I don't know. I need to go somewhere."
"You need to stay where you are. For tonight. You need to stay in your house with Nicole and you need to let the night pass and in the morning you will know what to do."
"I don't know what to do."
"I know you don't. Nobody does. Nobody knows what to do when this happens. You just do the next thing. The next breath. The next minute. The next hour. You do the next thing until the next thing becomes something you can hold."
"Mama."
"I'm here. I'm not going anywhere. I'm here."
He sat on the floor of the bedroom, his back against the wall beneath the shirts, the phone pressed to his ear, his mother's breathing five thousand miles away, the sound that had been the constant of his entire life, and the constant was the only thing that was holding him together because everything else was coming apart.
Dawn came. The Warwickshire dawn, grey and slow, the light arriving through the south facing windows that Nicole had chosen because they let the morning in. The morning arrived and Armani was still on the floor and Nicole was beside him, sitting, not speaking, her hand on his back, the contact maintained through the hours, the physical presence that was the only thing she could offer and that was, in its simplicity, enough.
The phone had been buzzing since four. Messages arriving from people who had heard. Bailey. The Villa squad. The Jamaica squad. Deon. Felix, from Barnsley. Schopp, from wherever Schopp was now. Morrison, from Barnsley. Callum Edwards, from Barnsley, a message that was one sentence long: "I am so sorry about Kofi."
The messages were kind. The messages were genuine. The messages were insufficient, the way all words were insufficient when the thing they were trying to address was the absence of a person whose presence had been so fundamental that the absence was not a gap but a wound, the specific tearing of the fabric of a life that had been woven with another life for fourteen years.
He read none of the messages. Nicole read them for him. Told him who had written. He nodded. Did not respond. The responses would come later. The responses required a version of himself that did not yet exist, the version that could interact with the world, that could form sentences, that could acknowledge condolences with the grace that condolences deserved.
At seven, he called Bailey.
"I heard," Bailey said. The voice was different from Bailey's usual voice. Quieter. The volume reduced, the way people reduced their volume in the presence of something that loudness could not accommodate. "I'm so sorry, Armani."
"I need to go to Cincinnati."
"I'll talk to the manager. The club will arrange it. Don't think about football. Don't think about the squad. Don't think about anything except what you need to do."
"What do I need to do?"
"You need to go to your friend. You need to be with his mother. You need to do the thing that friendship requires when friendship is the only thing left."
The club arranged it. Within three hours, the sporting director had contacted the airline, the travel department had booked the flights, the manager had authorized the absence without a time limit. "Come back when you're ready. Not before."
He flew from Birmingham to Chicago to Cincinnati. Nine hours. The journey conducted in the specific numbness that the body produced as a defence against the mind's overload, the physical systems shutting down the emotional systems the way a building's electrical system shut down the non essential circuits during a power surge, the conservation of energy directed toward the single task of continuing to function.
Nicole stayed in Knowle. He had asked her to come. She had said: "This is between you and Kofi. And between you and Beverly. I'll be here when you come back."
The wisdom of it registered without being felt. The feeling would come later. Everything would come later. For now, there was only the next thing. The next breath. The next minute. The next hour.
Cincinnati in August was hot. Not Jamaican hot. Different. The American Midwest's specific heat, humid, heavy, the air thick with moisture that the river produced. The city spread out beneath the approach, the Ohio River brown and wide, the buildings of downtown visible, the stadium where Kofi had played visible, the geography of a life that had been lived here for two years and that had ended on a highway six miles from the training ground.
Beverly was at her house. The house in Over the Rhine that Kofi had described, the neighbourhood that had been rough and was now full of coffee shops, the apartment building where Kofi had rented the unit on the third floor, the unit where the care packages arrived and where the barbecue sauce accumulated and where the Cincinnati FC training top that was now on Armani's wall had been worn and washed and hung on a door hook.
Beverly opened the door and Armani looked at her and the woman he had met at the National Stadium in Kingston, the woman who had laughed at dinner with Sharon, the woman whose face was Kofi's face, was not the same woman. The woman at the door was older by years in the space of hours, the grief having aged her the way grief aged everyone who carried it, the specific physical toll of losing a child visible in the skin and the eyes and the posture, the body carrying a weight that the body was not designed to carry.
"You came," she said.
"Of course I came."
She stepped aside. He walked into the house. The living room was full of flowers. Arrangements sent by the club, by the MLS, by the Jamaica Football Federation, by people whose names were on cards that nobody had read. The flowers were everywhere, covering every surface, the specific American response to death, the transformation of a living room into a garden, the beauty of the flowers a contrast to the ugliness of the reason they were there.
He sat on the sofa. Beverly sat beside him. They did not speak for a long time. The silence was not the silence of two people who had nothing to say. The silence was the silence of two people who had too much to say and who understood that saying it would not change the fact that required the saying.
"He was driving home," Beverly said, eventually. "From training. The same route. Every day. The same highway. Six thirty. He called me at six fifteen. Said he'd be home in twenty minutes. Said he was going to cook. He was making rice and peas. He'd been practicing. He wanted to get it right."
The rice and peas. The thing his mother made. The thing he had been learning to cook in Cincinnati because Cincinnati's restaurants did not make rice and peas the way Jamaica made rice and peas and because some things you had to make yourself.
"The police said it was instant. The truck came across the median. Head on. They said he would not have felt anything."
Armani did not believe this. The statement that the dead did not feel anything was the specific comfort that the living offered each other, the construction that allowed the surviving to process the dying without imagining the pain. He did not believe it but he did not challenge it because the belief was Beverly's and Beverly needed it and taking it from her would have been a cruelty that the situation did not need.
"He talked about you every day," Beverly said. "Every single day. Armani this. Armani that. The hill. The beach. The promise. He said you were going to play for Manchester United and he was going to be in the stands for your first match and he was going to scream louder than anyone had ever screamed."
The tears came. Not the controlled crying of a man managing his emotions. The open, complete, devastating crying of a person whose best friend was dead and whose body had finally, nine hours after the phone call, allowed the grief full access, the defences crumbling, the numbness dissolving, the pain arriving with a force that made the previous hours feel like a rehearsal for this moment.
He cried on Beverly's sofa in Cincinnati with the flowers around him and the woman who had lost her son holding his hand the way his mother held his hand, the grip firm, the skin warm, the contact saying what the words could not: I am here. We are here. He is not here. And we will carry that together because carrying it alone is not possible.
He stayed in Cincinnati for five days.
He did not go to the training ground. He did not go to the stadium. He went to Beverly's house every morning and he sat with her and they talked about Kofi. Not about the accident. About Kofi. About the boy who tackled everything that moved, including his sister. About the teenager who ran dawn laps behind Cornwall College and who said "Yuh fast but yuh can't tackle" and who meant it as a joke and as the truth. About the young man who went to the University of South Florida and who ate barbecue at four cookouts and who signed for Cincinnati and who called his mother every evening and who sent care packages in reverse, the American snacks and the Cincinnati FC merchandise traveling from Ohio to Montego Bay.
They looked at photographs. Beverly's phone was full of them. Kofi at training. Kofi at matches. Kofi at a barbecue with teammates, holding a plate of food that was drowning in sauce, his face carrying the specific expression of a man who was tolerating the sauce situation with diplomatic patience.
Kofi in his Jamaica shirt. The photograph from Orlando. The same photograph that was on Armani's wall in Knowle. The two of them, arms around each other, sweat on their faces, grass on their knees. The photograph that his mother had said she would frame and that Beverly had also framed and that now sat on Beverly's mantelpiece beside the flowers, the image of two boys who had promised each other the world.
One of them was gone. The promise was broken. Not by choice. Not by failure. By a truck driver who fell asleep on an Ohio interstate at six thirty in the evening with the sun still up.
The funeral was on Saturday. In Montego Bay. Beverly had decided that Kofi would be buried in Jamaica, in the place he came from, the island that was home regardless of where the career had taken him. The body was flown from Cincinnati to Kingston. The arrangements were made by the Jamaica Football Federation, who treated the death of a national team player with the specific institutional gravity that the occasion demanded.
Armani flew from Cincinnati to Jamaica. The flight over the Caribbean, the water below blue and endless, the same water that Kofi had grown up beside and that Armani had grown up beside and that connected the two places the way it connected every island in the archipelago, the sea the thread, the islands the beads.
The church in Montego Bay was full. Not with famous people. With people. The ordinary, specific, irreplaceable people who had constituted Kofi's life: schoolmates from Cornwall College, teammates from the University of South Florida, coaches from Cincinnati, members of the Jamaica squad who had flown from their clubs across Europe, family members whose faces Armani recognized from childhood, from the yard behind Kofi's mother's house, from the Sundays when the families had gathered and the children had played and the adults had talked and the food had been cooked and the life had been ordinary and whole.
Sharon was there. Sitting beside Beverly. The two mothers, side by side, the same position they had occupied outside the National Stadium after the Honduras match, except now the occasion was not celebration but its opposite, the two women connected not by their sons' success but by their shared loss, the grief binding them the way the joy had bound them.
Nicole was there. She had flown from London. She sat beside Armani in the third row and she held his hand and she did not speak because the speaking was not hers to do.
The service was long and full of music and full of the specific quality that Caribbean funerals produced, the combination of grief and celebration, the mourning of the loss and the honouring of the life, the dual purpose that the culture demanded, the refusal to let death have the final word.
People spoke. Beverly spoke. Sharon spoke. The Cincinnati coach spoke, a video message played on a screen, the American man's voice breaking as he described Kofi's quality as a player and as a person, the two things inseparable, the defender who organized the defence and who organized the changing room and who organized the barbecues and who was, in every dimension of his life, the person who held things together.
Armani was asked to speak. He stood at the front of the church and looked at the congregation and the words that he had prepared dissolved and the words that replaced them came from the place beneath preparation, the place where the truth lived, the place that could not be edited or rehearsed.
"Kofi was the first person who told me I was fast," he said. "We were six years old. On the beach. He said: 'Yuh fast. But yuh can't tackle.' And he was right. I still can't tackle. He spent fourteen years trying to teach me and I never learned."
The church laughed. The specific laughter of grief, the sound that broke through the tears because the tears could not be sustained indefinitely and because the laughter was true, was a real memory of a real person, was the specific evidence that Kofi had existed and had been funny and had been loved.
"He was my best friend. He was my brother. He was the person who knew me before I was anything and who knew me after I became something and who treated me exactly the same in both versions. He didn't care about the Premier League or the Champions League or the goals or the assists. He cared about the person. About whether I was eating properly. About whether I was sleeping. About whether I was happy."
He paused. The church was quiet. The light coming through the stained glass windows, the colours falling on the stone floor, the specific beauty of a church in the Caribbean, the warmth and the colour and the sound of the sea audible through the open doors.
"We made promises on a hill behind our school. When we were fourteen. We said we were going to be professionals. We said we were going to wear the Jamaica shirt. We said we were going to do things that people from Montego Bay don't usually get to do. And we did them. All of them. Both of us."
He looked at the coffin. The wood. The flowers. The Jamaica flag draped over it, the black and green and gold, the colours of the country that Kofi had represented and that was now saying goodbye to him.
"I don't know how to do this without him. I don't know how to run without him beside me. I don't know how to stand on a hill and look at the view and not hear his voice telling me something wise that he pretends isn't wise."
He stopped. The tears arriving. The words stopping because the tears needed the space that the words had been occupying.
"But I know what he would say if he were here. He would say: 'Stop crying. Score a goal. That's how you thank me.'"
The church laughed again. And cried. Both at the same time. The specific sound of a community saying goodbye to one of its own, the grief and the love and the laughter all present, all tangled together, all belonging to the same moment.
He sat down. Nicole's hand found his. His mother's hand found his other one. The two women holding him together the way the walls of a building held when the foundation shook.
After the funeral, after the burial, after the gathering at Beverly's family home where the food was served and the stories were told and the photographs were passed and the specific work of communal grieving was conducted with the thoroughness that Caribbean culture demanded, Armani went to the hill.
Alone. In the evening. The sun going down over Montego Bay, the sky doing the thing it did every evening, the colours changing, the light shifting, the world continuing its work regardless of who was there to observe it.
He climbed the hill behind Cornwall College. The same path. The same stones. The same gradient that had been the gradient of every dawn run he and Kofi had ever done, the route memorized by his body, the muscles knowing each incline and each turn and each flat section without the mind needing to direct them.
He reached the top. Stood where they had always stood. Looked at the view that had been the view of every significant conversation: the sea and the mountains and the city below and the sky above, the four elements that constituted the landscape of their friendship.
Kofi was not beside him. For the first time in fourteen years, Kofi was not beside him. The space on his left, the space that Kofi had always occupied, was empty. The emptiness was physical. He could feel it the way you felt a missing tooth, the space where something had been, the gap that the tongue returned to again and again, confirming the absence, verifying the loss.
He stood on the hill and looked at the view and the tears came one more time, the final ones, the ones that the evening produced, the private tears that were different from the public tears at the funeral, the tears that belonged to him and to the hill and to the fourteen years that had begun here and that had ended on an Ohio interstate.
"I'll score a goal," he said. To the hill. To the view. To the empty space on his left where the boy who had been his brother had stood. "I'll score a goal for you. And then I'll score another one. And another one. Until there are no more goals to score. And every one of them will be yours. Every one."
The sun went down. The sky changed colours. The sea darkened. The city lit up. The evening arrived in Montego Bay the way every evening arrived: slowly, then all at once.
He walked down the hill. Through the dark. Alone.
The boy from Montego Bay. Without his brother.
Still running. Because the running was the only thing he knew how to do. Because Kofi had told him to run and he was going to run.
But the running would never sound the same. The footsteps on the path would always have a gap in them, the missing beat, the absent second pair of feet that had been the rhythm of his life and that was now, forever, silence.
He walked home. The night was warm. The sea was there. The hill was behind him.
Kofi was gone.