Laura’s popularity was of the kind that never seems likely to survive the end of school. In Laura’s case it did. (Even fate, it seemed then, would make exceptions for Laura Haines.) She remained as aloof, beautiful and cool when she transferred to UCD, as she had been in fourth, fifth and sixth year at Ailesbury College. It seems likely that all the boys at UCD who knew Laura Haines wanted to fuck her. I don’t know this for sure. Things become less clear when you get to college. Faced with all that blossoming individuality, you find it harder to successfully generalize. But Laura was the kind of girl who walked down the bustling hallway to a silent soundtrack of outraged groans – the suppressed sound that men make, the sound that roughly translates as, That’s not fair. Beauty that extreme just isn’t fair. So I’m sure everyone still wanted to fuck her, despite the multiplying variables.

I should make it clear that Laura Haines seldom fucked anybody. She was neither frigid nor slutty. She dated boys and broke up with them and sometimes she slept with them and sometimes she didn’t. Her sexual morality was as close to normal as you could get, in that time, at that place. Of course she had grown up in the same subtle, twilit world as all the other girls we knew, a world full of anxiety about sex (a worryingly invasive procedure, as far as fifteen-year-old Laura was concerned), a world nourished by Disney films and fairy tales, a world pointed towards the inevitably conjugal happy ending, and towards an odd practical sentimentality that mixed the robustly sensual with the dreamily fictitious. But Laura was the happy opposite of the frosty girls who walked with their arms folded, who demanded attention in ways that we could barely comprehend. Laura was forthright and slightly mysterious. Her beauty seemed to imply nothing hidden. Everything seemed to be on the surface.

(Of course, the group mind always simplifies things – and that’s what I’m trying to conjure here, Laura as perceived by the group mind. But I’m simplifying things, too, as I go along. You should remember, as you read, that everything I say distils a plenitude of contradictions, that I am shaping and omitting, and that the truth around which I circle is, like all human truths, largely delusory to begin with.)

Since that moment outside Simmonscourt Pavilion, I’ve learned a great deal more about Laura Haines.

I’ve learned that she pronounced ‘ground’ and ‘pound’ as though they rhymed with ‘grained’ and ‘pained’.

I’ve learned that she liked to dance to Justin Timberlake and OutKast and that she had a half-secret fondness for saccharine ballads like ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’. Her bedroom was still full of the CDs that had been popular when she was at school: Blur, Oasis, Pearl Jam. These groups were too boyish for her now.

I’ve learned that in school she had a mild eating disorder. By the time she arrived in UCD, she told Conor and later Richard, this had petered out to almost nothing.