The more I think about the lives that Richard and Conor led, the more it seems to me that their fates were beyond their own control. This never seems to have occurred to either of them. They accepted their lives without a murmur: the private schools, the capable and energetic friends, the beautiful houses.

When you’re a child, school feels less like an experience and more like a destiny. For Conor and Richard (and for everyone else in this story), I think this feeling went far beyond school. I think it extended to their entire adult lives – or would have so extended, given another outcome.

If Conor had lived, for example.

So Richard and Conor arrived in Mary Immaculate in the same year. They had the same teachers and they did the same homework. They didn’t become friends until towards the end of the summer after fourth class. They sat beside each other one afternoon and made each other laugh.

They had both just that month become altar boys at their local church. This meant that their friendship retained its impetus when the school year ended. They played soccer together and rode their bicycles and they climbed trees and did all the other things that boys do on summer holidays. Conor became a fixture at the Culhanes’ house in Sandycove. Richard visited the Harrises’ house less often. Friendships in school often develop an imbalance of hospitality. The boys thought nothing of it, though Eileen Harris often fretted about how little the Harrises did for Richard.

Conor and Richard became best friends, in the offhand way peculiar to young boys. In other words, they didn’t think or talk about each other except when they were spending time in each other’s company.

‘What about calling Richard?’ Brendan Harris would suggest as Conor moped about the house on a Sunday afternoon.

‘Oh yeah,’ Conor would say, as if this thought had never struck him.

When the summer holidays rolled around Richard told Conor he would be going to Inishfall with his parents for six weeks. Eventually – the usual phone calls having been made, the usual bargaining conducted with Brendan and Eileen Harris – it was agreed that Conor could spend two weeks of his summer holiday in the big white house that belonged to Richard’s grandmother.

The Culhanes went down in early June. A week later Brendan Harris drove Conor to the train station.

‘Are you sure you’ll be alright?’ he asked.

‘Dad, I’ll be fine,’ Conor said.

‘You know you can ask the guard for help if you need it.’

‘I’m looking forward to it,’ Conor said. ‘I don’t get the chance to be alone much.’

This was something Conor had heard his mother say a week ago as she prepared for a train journey north to visit her sister.

Peter and Richard Culhane picked Conor up from the station in Tralee and drove Conor out to Inishfall.

The island is a half-kilometre from the country’s western edge. A ferry runs irregularly, even though the village of Inishfall proper is connected to the mainland by a recently built concrete road bridge. During seasonal tides it’s possible to walk to the island from the mainland. On either side of the bridge, as Peter Culhane drove the boys across it, there stretched a scuffed, tan mile of mirrory sand.