As far as I’m aware, neither of them ever mentioned Richard’s fall in each other’s company again. Certainly they never mentioned Conor’s laughter.

When school resumed in September, Conor and Richard were no longer friends.

Richard never told anyone about what had happened on Inish-fall. Conor, I think, told Laura. And he told one other person, who had no way of checking if it was true.

I adduce it now as one more reason, one more unsettled score. Is it enough? Did Richard Culhane kill Conor Harris outside Harry’s Niteclub in Blackrock on 31 August 2004, because when they were eleven years old Richard fell on his backside and Conor laughed? Is this enough of a reason? Is this why Conor had to die?

(‘Harry’s Niteclub’. How inured I’ve become to that tritely pervasive misspelling. When I think about it now it seems to have become emblematic of the Harris case in all its garish mundanity: a glaring error in gleamingly permanent neon.)

No. What happened on Inishfall isn’t enough of a reason for Conor’s death. Perhaps no reason is sufficient in itself. Perhaps they don’t even add up to a satisfactory whole. Perhaps – though I find this notion hard to take – there simply is no reason, none at all, not even the usual, rudimentary suspects like It was an accident, or It was meant to happen, or It was just his time, man. It was just his time.

Bang.

Bang.

BANG.

Richard’s fall. I wonder about this. He had fallen only seven or eight feet and had landed, rocks notwithstanding, mostly on soft sand. The cuts and scrapes on his hands and arms looked bad, but they healed in a couple of days. What was wounded, of course, was his dignity, that aspect of his character that Richard, even as a child, treated with the most respect, that quality that was sometimes mistaken (by the media, for example) for pomposity. Richard had elected himself Conor’s superior, in knowledge, in money, in maturity. And here was Conor, laughing at his pain. To Richard, this was not a forgivable offense.

But I don’t know if he brooded on it for longer than the two days it took him to make his peace with Conor. I don’t even know if Richard, in later life, remembered his fall from the bluff, or Conor’s reaction to it. There is no way of knowing, because he never brought it up.

Nonetheless, it’s an image that keeps coming back to me, Richard Culhane falling from the edge of a sandy bluff above a windswept beach. Again and again I see it, Richard falling, Richard vanishing from sight, Richard dropping though a gap in the ground and suddenly, painfully, disappearing, as if he had been pulled back into the earth by something that badly wanted him there – gravity, perhaps, or fate.

29

When Laura hadn’t eaten, her breath would smell like sour milk, and Conor would try to avoid her kisses. She had explained about her problems with food, which to Conor’s family was like having problems with furniture or air. You don’t question the elements, his mother would say from behind the clattering turret of her sewing machine. And Conor agreed with her, although he was in love, and positive that Laura’s problems didn’t matter.