Laura would only get her hair done at certain hairdressers’. She would only shop at certain boutiques. When she was fifteen she asked a friend of her father’s if he had ever been to the Dundrum Town Centre. When he said he hadn’t, Laura said, ‘My God, you haven’t lived.’ The family laughed about this, but Laura had been utterly serious.

She bought a new mobile phone every six months. Her favourite was a microscopic Japanese camera-phone with a baby-pink casing.

She bought earrings and necklaces and bracelets and forgot about them. Her bedroom was generally pristine – white walls and bare boards, stuffed animals in precise ranks – but her walk-in wardrobe was a chaos of discarded jewellery and clothes worn only once.

Laura dressed in a way that anyone raised in south County Dublin during those years would have found immediately recognizable. ‘Essential elements of this uniform’ – I quote now from The Irish Times, 1 December 2007 – ‘are a ladies’-fit Leinster jersey (£49.99) and palomino pony Ugg boots (£249), both from Arnotts.’

Every September Laura went to Paris with her mother to shop for clothes they couldn’t get in Dublin.

She ordered American Eagle hoodies and Abercrombie sweatpants over the web. In winter she wore a scarf by DKNY.

Laura and her friends had various names for people who had less money than they did, or who had not been able to go to private schools. They called them ‘povvos’ or ‘knackers’ or ‘chavs’ or ‘skobes’. Distinctions of dress were frequently made. Pink tracksuit bottoms by themselves did not make you look like a skobe. But pink track-suit bottoms with a pink tracksuit top certainly did. These distinctions were rigorously policed. Laura was one of the people who did the policing.

Girls who wanted to know what to wear consulted Laura Haines’s Bebo page. Laura would say: ‘I wish I was as thin as Mischa Barton.’ Other girls would say, ‘I wish I was as thin as Laura Haines.’

Laura bought perfume by Prada and deodorant by Ralph Lauren.

It’s tempting to regard these things as added extras. But really they were fundamental. They were sine qua non.

21

In school we used to tell a joke about the difference between Irish people and American people.

An American drives past an enormous house on a hill. The American sees a swimming pool and a heated jacuzzi and a sports car and an SUV and a landscaped garden. He sees stables out back. And he sees the man who owns all this, standing on his front porch, holding hands with his beautiful wife and watching the sun go down on his vast estate.

The American shakes his head and thinks, One day, I’m gonna be just like him.

Five minutes later an Irishman drives by the same house. He sees the swimming pool and the heated jacuzzi and the sports car and the SUV and the landscaped garden. He sees the stables out back. He sees the man and his beautiful wife, watching the sun go down.