2

I can’t tell this story. Let’s be clear about that from the beginning.

I wasn’t there. I didn’t see it happen. This is by way of an apology. I’ve had to piece it together, after the fact, from available sources, from newspapers, radio, television, magazines. And people spoke to me, too, usually in whispers, always in private, sometimes with a look of furtive shame, more often with a kind of half-concealed pity or sadness. Teachers and parents, interested parties, witnesses and friends: somehow they were always eager to talk, once I’d brought the subject up, once I’d declared an interest. In the hush of a southside living room, say, as afternoon wanes and turns to evening, at what Stephen O’Brien’s popular parents always called the cocktail hour (as they tolerantly mixed the gin and tonics for some visiting college friends), people will often be amenable to sharing their memories of the night it happened, or the moment they heard it had happened, or their thoughts on what life must be like for the various families in the protracted and wearisome aftermath. They pay attention to their hands, as they talk. They seldom look at me.

You encounter resistance, too, of course. Many of my friends and acquaintances told me their parents had forbidden them to talk about the case. Recently I asked a girl I knew if she’d ever met the boy who died. ‘We don’t talk about that,’ she said, looking alarmed.

I didn’t press any further.

No, I wasn’t there on the night itself. But I might have been. It might have happened to anyone, at any time, on any night. Nights out in Dublin have a sameness, a predictability. A pattern is followed, every time, without fail. Drinks in someone’s house. A pub. A club. Kebabs or chips. A taxi home. But I don’t want you to think of the central event of my story as something contingent, as a random occurrence, a freak of chance. You should remember that this event, one way or the other, was inevitable. It would have happened anyway, no matter what factors were different, no matter what people might have done differently.

Or so I’ve come to believe.

Violence is always an unspoken possibility on these nights out, despite our fondness for the pattern. We do a great deal of concealing, when we’re on the town. We conceal our spots and our badly cut fringes, the T-shirt lines of our builder’s tans. We conceal our anxieties, our insecurities. We conceal facts, too: facts about who we’d like to sleep with, who we’d like to kiss, who we fear and who we despise. And we conceal more disturbing things: a cigarette burn, self-inflicted; a scar from a razor blade, the same; a problem with food or drugs. But the most secret thing, the thing we go to the greatest lengths to hide, is the possibility of death, the possibility that one of us will go too far and not return, or that we will all go too far, that we will go too far because that’s what everybody else is doing, because we’d be afraid to say no, afraid to hold back, afraid to ask the simple question – Why? Since Conor’s death a lot of people have been asking why – in reading through those newspapers and magazines I come across it often, the anguished interrogative – but motives are something that happen afterward, they are what we read back into the inevitable. Motives are a way of finding sense where none was meant, where none was even looked for at the time.