But I’ve made the mistake of calling him a man again.

They were boys.

Remember that.

5

In the summer of 2003 Richard Culhane’s father had a small heated swimming pool installed in the long back garden of the Culhanes’ house in Sandycove.

Richard was in Ocean City at the time, working as a bartender in a small yacht club on the seafront and sleeping with a sweet New Jersey girl named Megan, who kept promising to visit Richard in Dublin, maybe in September or October ‘if that was cool’. Richard kept trying to dissuade Megan from this plan. Richard already had a girlfriend in Dublin. Her name was Claire Lawrence. She had been to school (I think she was a St Brigid’s girl, one of the ‘Virgins on the Rocks’) with Stephen O’Brien’s cousin Rachel. Richard had been going out with Claire, off and on, since the summer before sixth year, when they were both seventeen.

Before Richard left for America his parents had thrown a going-away party and invited some of his college friends and most of his friends from school. Claire drank half a bottle of Smirnoff and clung to Richard all night, weepy and possessive. Richard was soothing – it was an unexpected gift of his, that ease he had with women. He was secretly proud of his mastery of two languages, the language of jockish derision and the subtler language that women seemed to speak. He told Claire he would always love her. He promised he wouldn’t cheat on her. He swore they would pick up where they left off in September.

As it happened Megan never did come to Dublin. But Richard broke up with Claire anyway, three weeks after he got back. In some way the swimming pool seemed to convince him he had to do it.

Peter Culhane told Richard nothing about the pool. He wanted it to be a surprise. Peter picked Richard up at the airport and drove him back to the house. The Culhanes’ house always smelled of lavender and furniture polish. To Richard this was the smell of home, unchanged after his three months’ absence. It was raining and he was proudly conscious of his American tan. He dumped his bags in the kitchen, next to the island that contained the oven and the second sink, and walked as if in slow motion out through the patio doors to get a look at the pool.

‘Fuck me,’ he said. ‘That’s deadly.’

Later he would be ashamed of this moment of gauche astonishment. When he told his friends about the pool he was careful to be as offhand as possible, as though material success was nothing new to him. That was how you dealt with things like swimming pools, Richard thought: as though you’d seen it all before.

Richard began to mock his father for having bought the pool in the first place. ‘Dunno what the old pair were thinking,’ he would scoff. ‘A fucking swimming pool in Dublin, like. For the two days of sunshine we get every year, you know? Fucking pass me my Ray-Bans, like.’