Conor looked like he was asleep. The press of the crowd had kept him upright, but now a gap had formed. And he fell.

The back of his head struck the concrete of the path.

Richard felt Conor’s fall as a kind of consummation. He remembered the intimacy of fighting, the need to be close to another human body, like lovemaking but with the opposite intention: the intention to cause harm, the intention to silence, the intention to punish.

Conor, dying, fell to the ground and did not get up.

One witness remembered seeing a young man rush into the melee at this point and deliver a swinging kick to Conor’s chest. Then he ran away. This young man has never been identified.

Laura was shouting. She had started to cry. People were running away. By now only three boys were near enough to do Conor any damage.

Bang.

Was it Stephen O’Brien who took the first running kick, as though aiming for the conversion in a Senior Cup final?

Bang.

The second kick – I can say with reasonable confidence – was Barry Fox’s. He admitted as much during his first interrogation.

Bang.

Was this Richard? Was it? Believe it if you want. It’s up to you.

‘This can’t be happening,’ Laura said. ‘This can’t be happening.’

Time seemed to gulp down an obstruction and resume its normal pace.

It was 3.16 am.

‘Oh, you think you’re such a big man,’ Laura said to Richard Culhane.

‘Christ,’ said Barry Fox. ‘I think we should call an ambulance. Guys, I fucking think we should call an ambulance.’

‘We fucking showed that little cunt,’ said Stephen O’Brien.

55

I seem to have gotten bigger, since Conor died. I don’t mean that I’ve put on weight. I mean I feel bulkier, more physically formidable, as though there is now a great deal more of me to carry around. And, of course, there is: now I carry Conor, too, who cannot carry himself. Brother, you were so big, and you left so much behind. My spirit sags with all your heft. There is so much I have to haul out of bed every morning, so much excess baggage. And things matter more to me, or seem to. Grief is supposed to make things matter less, but now I seem so raw, I feel things so acutely – raindrops, windshear, hunger, thirst – that every small sensation seems to kick me in the guts. A heavy spirit incurs heavy damage. But my damage is no match for yours, not yet. Until I go to Inishfall I will be an amateur of pain. And you were the professional, of course, the deft absorber of all those shocks. In your last three hours you condensed a lifetime of suffering – almost neatly, it seems to me now, with hardly any waste or fuss.

Goodbye, brother. Sorry I couldn’t do more.

56

Conor lay on the tarmac for almost two hours, sporadically attended by friends and passers-by. He was still breathing. His throat made a pulpy sound as he inhaled. After that wait – that terrible, terminal two-hour wait – the fluorescent men in their screaming ambulance brought Conor to the hospital, and he died. For half an hour – no more – the plastic clothes peg of the heart monitor was clamped over his right index finger. The doctors and nurses looked at his face and head and realized that they were probably dealing with massive internal bruises, and possibly a fractured skull. Conor’s airway was partially obstructed – all this is from the emergency room report, cited in several papers. They pumped him full of adrenaline and they intubated him. They scheduled an MRI for noon. But Conor didn’t last that long.