The Irishman shakes his head and thinks, One day, I’m gonna get that bastard.

22

Stephen O’Brien used to boast that he had fucked at least one girl from each of the Dublin private girls’ schools. ‘I’m missing Mount Anville, man,’ he would complain to the Brookfield boys. On nights out in Russell’s or the Wicked Wolf Stephen would tell his friends to prowl the dance floor in search of a Mountie, and to let him know if they found one.

If he was known as a swordsman, it was in the affectionate, even condescending way that people reserve for a man they don’t entirely trust. No one ever quite knew whether to believe Stephen’s stories about his conquests. The stories were too unverifiable, too problematically private.

‘Met this girl at a tutorial last week,’ he would say. ‘Went for coffee. Bam, twenty minutes later she was sucking my cock in the toilets beside Dramsoc.’

‘The O’Brien strikes again!’ Barry Fox would shout.

The boys would high-five.

The problem with these stories was that they might just have happened. And Stephen was a good-looking guy. He wasn’t as universally adored as Richard Culhane, but on nights out he would score almost as often. Like Conor Harris, he had a penchant for scoring other peoples’ girlfriends. But Stephen made a point of it. He said he was doing it just to be a cunt.

Stephen was the first Brookfield boy in his class to lose his virginity. It happened one night after the Wesley Disco, in the back seat of Maurice O’Brien’s BMW, which was parked in the driveway of the O’Briens’ house at the time. Stephen had taken a St Anne’s girl named Ailbhe Connor home in a cab. Seeking proof that this story was true, Barry Fox and Richard Culhane drove over to Ailbhe Connor’s house the next afternoon and asked her about it.

She told them the story was true but that Stephen O’Brien hadn’t been her first time.

This was when Stephen O’Brien was in his fifth year at Brookfield. He was at that stage of teenage boyhood where blushes come unbidden at the faintest innuendo, the tiniest mistake. But when Steve told the story of how he had lost his virginity, he didn’t blush.

For his Leaving Cert. year Stephen transferred to Merrion Academy because a place had opened up and Maurice O’Brien, a Merrion boy, wanted Stephen to graduate from the same school that he had gone to.

What Stephen O’Brien really wanted was a steady girlfriend. Like almost everyone else at Brookfield, he believed in a chivalric code of commitment and respect. And like all misogynists, he was sentimental about women.

Private schools depend for their continued existence on the inculcation of a conservative sentimentality in their pupils. Settle down with the girl of your dreams, stay happy, stay faithful.

Semper et Ubique Fidelis.

Stephen’s first girlfriend was a St Brigid’s girl named Aisling Kelly. St Brigid’s, Killiney, was famous for its businesslike traditionalism, and the girls were famous for their virtue. This, I think, was what appealed to Stephen O’Brien about his first serious girlfriend.