Richard would have had his arm around a girl. This is the girl I’ll get to soon. She was wearing a hoodie, black but spangled with silver stars. Conor would have recognized this hoodie.

Conor would have said something to Richard about the girl. The two boys would have started shouting.

Richard’s friends saw what was happening and muscled over. Among them, looming largest, were Barry Fox and Stephen O’Brien. It was the end of the night. Everyone was drunk.

It isn’t clear who threw the first punch. Richard always denied it was him. It might even have been Conor. But the punch was thrown and very quickly Conor was on the ground. Only one witness reported seeing him fall. He was surrounded by six to ten people, and they were still hitting him as he fell.

Not all of these people were kicking. Eyewitnesses would later be able to positively identify only three attackers who were kicking as well as punching.

Bang. Bang. Bang.

Two hours later Conor Harris was dead. He never regained consciousness. The next day in college someone would tell me that Conor had woken up in the ambulance long enough to say his exgirlfriend’s name. But this can only be a rumour, the sort of romantic legend that surfaces and quickly dies in the aftermath of a terrible event. Whatever Conor was thinking about during those two unconscious hours, I very much doubt it was Laura. They’d been broken up for several months, after all. I don’t think people have properly understood that.

4

‘THREE MEN ARRESTED IN NIGHTCLUB DEATH CASE’, said the headline in The Irish Times, but we didn’t think of them as men, and I doubt they thought of themselves that way, either. They were boys: the memory of school was still fresh for them, they could still show up for college badly shaven or with spots ripening on their chins. When we saw their pictures in the paper, we were shocked, I think, by how young they looked, how guileless and weak. The papers used the digital photo from Richard’s UCD student card, and he looked blurry and anonymous, like any number of Quinn School jocks, his eyes dark under the gelled and lacquered hair. They used Debs photos of Stephen O’Brien, Barry Fox and Conor Harris, cropped so that the girls beside them disappeared, except for a female arm in gilded fabric at the western edge of the frame. I still have these pictures, clipped from various papers and magazines. I line them up in front of me. Bizarrely, it looks like the boys are all on the way to the same party. Here is Barry Fox, his cheeks still carrying their reassuring cargo of puppy fat, his eyes trained on the middle distance. Of the three, only Barry doesn’t smile. The others offer uniformly those irrelevant grins: neither genuine nor posed, but simply an aspect of having your photograph taken. Here is Stephen O’Brien, with his rakish haircut and massive shoulders, looking like a man who’s always in trouble. And here is Conor Harris, with his tiny girlfriend’s bare shoulder dwarfed by his huge loose-limbed frame. These photos, in their ubiquity, have achieved the status of documents of fate: the doom of their subjects seems written in their amateurish lack of focus, in the goonish smiles of the tuxedoed boys, in the grim familiarity of the pose and the backdrop. Here they stand in various suburban living rooms, the killers and their smiling victim. Oddly, the use of his student ID picture seems somehow to remove Richard Culhane from involvement in the photos’ fateful narrative; lined up next to the other three, he appears to belong to a different story, to be alone in his solitary drama, the odd man out.