The Mother (4 page)

The name Ryan means “little king”; if he'd been a girl I would have named her Estelle, “a star.”

Nipa is back, sitting beside Lorna when I return. She smiles at me and moves over, creating a space for me to sit between them like a sandwich filling.

“They didn't have egg mayo,” she says, “so I just chose a couple of different baguettes and hoped they'd be okay.”

“Thanks,” I say, picking up the glass of white wine on the table beside the baguette in front of me.

“I left you the tuna-sweetcorn,” my sister says, giving me a fairly hard poke in the side with her elbow. It's how she would have done it when we were children, discreetly, with no outward sign to alert any adult in our midst to her actions. The tuna-sweetcorn would have been my preference and she knows that, just as I know that it would have been her first choice for herself. My anger has completely dissipated. Mocking offense, I elbow her back. I say, “You would!”

KWAME JOHNSON IS FORTY-TWO AND
has been coaching Ryan's football squad since Ryan started playing regularly at eight. Ryan always liked and respected him, and as a consequence, so have I. Many of the boys he coaches are Afro-Caribbean and he is hard on them, dishing out punishments for lateness or attitude or bad sportsmanship, balancing this zero-tolerance approach with a wicked sense of humor. All the boys call him “sir” and his relationship with them is great.

The first time I ever saw Kwame dressed in anything other than sports gear was at Ryan's funeral. That day, those awful days around it, meld in my mind into a Valium haze, but I remember my surprise, later on, at the wake, when I realized it wasn't the drugs making Kwame look so different, it was the first time I'd ever seen him formally dressed. I'm reminded of that day looking at him now, standing in the witness box, wearing a suit. As usual, his dreadlocks are pulled back into a ponytail that falls midway down his back and they are the only thing about him that feels normal. His eyes dart around the courtroom taking everything in. His expression is solemn.

Quigg is in her element. She exudes confidence, has everything under control. We learn Kwame's age and occupation, that he's been coaching for almost nineteen years, and that, in addition to the training he does in the evenings at the Sports Ground, he works with excluded kids in special schools and pupil referral units. In fact, it was at a pupil referral unit two years ago that he first met the defendant. I wasn't aware of that. I never really thought about how Kwame knew Tyson Manley, but if I had thought it through, a pupil referral unit would have been exactly where I would have imagined their paths had initially crossed. Kwame coached him as part of a group once a week, excluding school holidays, for a period of six months, up until a year ago.

“And when you stopped coaching him, was it because your coaching contract came to an end?”

“No.”

“You were still coaching other young people at that same pupil referral unit?”

“Yes.”

“Would you please then tell us why the coaching stopped?”

I feel Lorna nudge me as a woman is steered to a seat at the end of our row. It is Ms. Manley, who has finally showed up to support her son. I have seen her before at the hearings when her son was charged, denied bail, but we have never spoken. She is late for the afternoon court session, alone, and wearing celebrity sunglasses. She sits down and puts her designer handbag on the seat beside her, pulls off her scarf, her coat, drapes them over its top. I can smell her perfume from where I am sitting. I'm sure everyone in the gallery can.

Kwame is saying, “Tyson stopped coming. His attendance had always been a bit iffy. In the end it just kinda petered out.”

Tyson Manley has noticed his mother, gives her the briefest of smiles, returns to his normal expressionless poise, continues watching Kwame in the box. You might almost think he was oblivious to everything going on around him. His acknowledgment of his mother is the first indication I have had that he is not.

Quigg asks, “Would you say that during the time you coached Mr. Manley you came to know him well?”

“I suppose so.”

“Mr. Johnson, do you recall making a statement to the police on March 19, on the morning following Ryan Williams's murder?”

Kwame nods his head.

“Please answer aloud.”

He clears his throat. “Yes.”

“In that statement you said that you had tried very hard to build a relationship with the defendant because of his family circumstances.”

“Yes.”

“Would you please tell the court what these were?”

“I knew his brother, the older one, Vito. He got killed, shot in front of the family, two, three years ago. After that Tyson started getting in trouble and didn't seem to be able to get out of it. I guess I kinda wanted to help him.”

“Thank you. Would it be fair to suggest you had a special interest in the defendant?”

“Yes.”

Kwame is the sort who would. He had an interest in all the kids. I think about Ryan at fourteen. Under duress, we bought him his first mobile phone when he was eleven, replaced it with a smartphone for his fourteenth birthday.
Then I spent months worrying about him watching porn on it, being bullied on Facebook or social media sites, talked about the permanence of everything that goes onto the Internet, that nothing should ever be sent to friends that he would not want to see hung up on display during whole-school assembly, especially pictures of his willy with some girl's name wonkily written on it in felt tip (this last was a result of an article I'd read in the paper about young people texting photographs of intimate body parts to people they fancied). Maybe while we'd been having those discussions Tyson Manley's brother was being gunned down, Ms. Manley was identifying her son's body in the morgue, burying him, another statistic, just another young murdered black boy to add to the tally. One son dead and the other on trial facing life, another day, just another chapter in the dysfunctional life of this family. I watch her, straining my eyes in their sockets so I don't have to noticeably turn my head, wanting to see whether she is moved, teary-eyed, at this disclosure. The sunglasses make it difficult to gauge her feelings. They render her face as expressionless as her son's.

Thus far Quigg has merely been setting the backdrop. Now she steers Kwame to that day, that terrible day that began so normally but by its end changed everything in my world, the day I am still trying to understand, that my husband can't bring himself to face.

Training practice was normal. They finished at six precisely. He is confident of the exact time because he's very strict about timekeeping, thinks punctuality is an important message to send to the kids he works with. Afterward, everyone went straight to the changing rooms except him. He hung around and had a discussion first with a new parent who was
hoping to sign her son up for his sessions. He gave her times and prices, went to the changing room, chatted with the boys briefly as he collected his bags, then went back out to pack up his balls and equipment, get it all ready to take to the car.

Everyone seemed normal. There were no unusual tensions. The boys shouted goodbye to him as they were leaving the grounds, including Ryan. For the next ten minutes Kwame finished gathering his gear together, hoisted it all up, then started walking to his car.

The discussions of the lighting go on for some time. It was mid-March. Sunset on that evening was at ten past six. There were no lights directly onto the football pitch, but light was cast from the lampposts along the pathway. The jury is directed to the detailed Sports Ground map, where the lampposts can be seen along the borders of the path, twenty-five meters apart. As you head toward the high street, there is also lighting from the street. Here the road is well lit, the lampposts twenty meters apart, with additional lighting from cars and traffic and the shops and flats on the other side. It was not as bright as day, but visibility was good. Kwame is still on the path, nearing the exit, when he sees Ryan walking back along the path toward him. He's eating chicken and chips. He appears relaxed, nothing untoward in his bearing. He tells Kwame he's left his boots in the changing room. Kwame says he'll wait for him, give him a lift home. Ryan says it's fine, it's only a five-minute walk, he'll see him next week.

These are the moments, the minutiae of which have consumed me these last seven months, going around and around my mind till I thought I would be driven mad, the moments when normal things were done and casual words said where microscopic alterations would have changed the direction of
everything to come. If Kwame had been slower gathering his bags and balls and equipment, he would still have been at the murder site when Tyson Manley caught up to Ryan, he could have stopped him, and my son would still be alive. If Ryan had been as forgetful in the afternoon as he had been that morning, if he had not remembered the boots he'd left behind in the changing room, forgotten about them till he had PE at school two days later, or football practice the following week, by then he would probably have discovered they'd been nicked and I could have scolded him for being irresponsible while I bought him a brand-new pair and he promised to take better care of them, and he would still be alive. If Ryan had accepted the lift Kwame offered him, if Kwame had insisted despite Ryan's refusal and taken him home, if it had been raining that day and training was canceled,
any
of these, if any of these had happened, my son would still be alive.

Instead, as Ryan passed him, making for the changing room, and Kwame exited the park and turned left, headed toward his car, he saw a figure wearing a brown sweat top monogrammed in gold, and the lights from the other side of the road that illuminated the back of the hood simultaneously cast a shadow over the wearer's face, obscuring it. The person crossed the road at an angle that landed him on the pavement so he was now behind Kwame, who looked back. Despite not being able to see the person's face, he knew it was Tyson Manley.

Quigg directs the jury to bundle number two and a photograph of Tyson Manley in a brown top monogrammed in gold, lifted from his Facebook page, posted at the end of February, almost three weeks before Ryan was murdered. She asks him to confirm if this was the top the person was wearing, and Kwame says yes. In the picture Tyson Manley is with
a group of four other boys whose faces have been blurred for today's purposes, posing like gangster rappers in a forceful expression of teenage masculinity. It is the kind of photograph I have seen in the newspapers when some young person has died and there is an implication that either the victim or the perpetrator was involved in gangs. I scan the faces of the jury as they look at the image, can feel at least three of them, including the elderly black guy, mentally concluding that Tyson Manley is a gang member, but I don't buy it myself, not on the evidence of one photo. My Ryan was at an age where he was always trying to look cool in photos, desperate to get rid of those he didn't think depicted him as the man he wanted to be seen as by the world. Those same jury members would probably be thinking
gang
if they saw a photo of my son with Luke and Ricardo. It's not that I reject the notion of Tyson Manley being a gang member, I wouldn't be surprised if he was, just that even I, and I have every reason to think badly of him, even I can see the association being perpetuated here, and I'm uncomfortable with it.

Quigg points out that there are probably hundreds of young men in London who own that exact top, asks, “Without seeing his face, how could you be sure that the person you saw was the defendant?”

Kwame answers, “Everything. The height, the build, the way he walked . . .”

“What was it about the way he walked that identified him?”

“He always walked really fast and had a kinda bounce. Lots of the young guys bounce when they walk, but his was very pronounced.”

“Could you have been mistaken? Could it have been anyone other than Mr. Manley?”

“It was Tyson. I could have identified him anywhere, as long as he was moving.”

“Did you see where he went after he passed you?”

“Into the Sports Ground. I looked back after he had passed, saw him go into the Sports Ground.”

“Then you continued to your car?”

“Yes.”

“Put all of your equipment into the boot?”

“Yes.”

“Closed it?”

“Yes.”

“Got into the driver's seat?”

“Yes.”

“But you did not drive off?”

“No.”

“Would you please tell the court why you did not drive off?”

“It's hard to explain . . .”

“Please try.”

“I just had a funny feeling. I knew it was Tyson and he must've seen me. It was weird that he didn't say ‘yow,' wasn't like we'd had a fallout or anything. In fact, it kinda seemed like he'd avoided me, deliberately kept his head down so I couldn't see his face. He was walking really fast, even for him, kinda hyped. I don't know, it was all a bit weird and I knew Ryan was still at the Sports Ground on his own. The whole thing just gave me a bad vibe.”

“So you got out of the car and went back?”

“Yes.”

“Did you run?”

He pauses then answers, shaking his head, “No.”

“You walked?”

“Yes.”

“And what happened next?”

“When I got to the entrance, a woman ran into me full force, nearly knocked me down. She was terrified, looking behind her like she was being chased.”

“And did that woman say anything to you?”

“She was screaming, about an ambulance, to get help. I think she said, ‘He's got a knife.' I wasn't listening properly. I was already running.”

“Into the park?”

“Yes.”

“Along the path?”

“Yes.”

“And what did you see?”

“Ryan was on the ground. There was blood
everywhere
. I could see from the off it was bad . . . proper bad.”

“What happened next?”

“I ran over to check his breathing. He was on his front and I turned him onto his back. I was scared I would damage him even more but I couldn't feel a pulse and he had to be on his back for me to do CPR. I was shouting for help between breaths while I was doing compressions . . . I just couldn't make him breathe. I knew it was too late but I had to try.”

“Was there anyone else around at that time?”

“I didn't see anyone.” He has been speaking to Quigg, addressing his answers to her while glancing at the jury occasionally, but now he faces the jury directly and says, “I should have run, from the moment he passed me I should have run. I don't know why I didn't, I just don't know why.”

The judge asks, “Mr. Johnson, would you like a short break?”

Kwame wipes his eyes, takes out a tissue, blows his nose, shakes his head. The what-ifs are the worst of it. I know the depressing slide of that ride and I feel guilty that I have been thinking only of myself, so wrapped up in my own grief and Lloydie's that I never gave a thought to anyone else, to any of those other people first to the scene. It was as if the trauma started later, with a knock at the door and the lift in a police car to identify my son's body. I've been where Kwame is, such an easy place to get stuck. The what-ifs are infinite, a useless spiral stairway descending straight into hell. What if Kwame had done something other than what he actually did? What if he'd taken more time with Tyson, maybe gone to his house a year ago when he stopped showing up at the pupil referral unit? What if he'd told that parent to come back some other time and sat instead in the changing room with the boys like a mother, checking that everyone had packed everything? What if the what-ifs are nothing more than a coping mechanism, nothing more than a diversion from the onslaught of guilt and grief?