‘Sure keep us in mind when you’ve got the old degree in your arse pocket,’ Maurice O’Brien said when Richard left to go to college.

Richard Culhane’s future was immaculate. Of how many of us can that be so easily said?

9

The first time I saw Laura Haines was outside Simmonscourt Pavilion in Ballsbridge in the late May of 2003. The first thing I saw her do was take off the aviator shades she had been using as a hairband and pat down her hair to make sure it hadn’t been disturbed. It was a perfect summer’s day. Cars and trees and buildings looked spruce and clear in the afternoon light. Laura was carrying a green apple in her left hand and over her right shoulder was a pink Adidas rucksack. She was wearing three-quarter-length cut-off jeans in pale denim and a white string top that showed off her freckled shoulders. When she put the sunglasses on her face and looked up into the sun she looked impossibly aloof, impossibly beautiful, impossibly cool.

She also wore gold ballet pumps. She would be wearing these gold ballet pumps on the night Conor Harris died.

Simmonscourt Pavilion is a cavernous convention centre that belongs to the Royal Dublin Society. It’s where the UCD exams are held at the end of every academic year. I had just come out of my final paper, and I was conscious of that strange sadness that always comes with the beginning of summer, with the apprehension that the next three months of perfect weather will contain nothing but work and wasted time.

The exam hall had been fusty with the generational airlessness of an old school classroom, but outside the sun shone and the air smelled of fresh-cut grass and sunstruck brick. Laura Haines, conspicuously alone, was standing by the main gate, waiting for a lift. As I looked at her she began to eat the apple, her eyes unknowable behind the aviator shades.

Her final Radiography paper had gone badly. She would spend an hour that afternoon in the kitchen with her mother, working through her post-exam anxiety.

From a radio in the security guards’ cabin by the main gate came a song, ‘California’ by Phantom Planet, that accompanied a popular TV series, a TV series to which Laura and her friends were at that time obsessively devoted.

Students filed past, jocular and brash, but I was watching Laura.

To some of us, Laura Haines seemed to embody everything that was good about our generation. She was confident and she had style. She was self-possessed. She was keenly aware of social distinctions. She was concerned about the environment and she was, I once heard someone say, ‘very good with children’. She was also beautiful. Everyone at Brookfield wanted to fuck Laura Haines. Everyone at Merrion Academy wanted to fuck her, too. So did everyone at St Michael’s and at Blackrock College and at Gonzaga. But you didn’t dare to think that fucking Laura Haines would actually be possible. Fucking Laura Haines was something an entire generation of middle-class Dublin boys thought about entirely in the abstract.