The boys went into their old school. They went up the main stairs, forbidden to students, and knocked on the door of Pat Kilroy’s office.

On the wall outside hung the framed newspaper article about Richard Culhane’s Senior Cup debut.

Pat opened the door and frowned.

‘Lads!’ he said. ‘Great to see you here. What brings you to these parts?’

‘Hiya Pat,’ Barry said. ‘Can we have a word with you?’

Pat showed them into the office and they sat on the chairs in front of his desk. When they had studied at Brookfield they had only ever sat in these chairs when they were in trouble.

Pat Kilroy sat at his desk and looked at the boys.

‘What’s up?’ he asked.

The boys didn’t look at each other. They looked at the floor or the desk.

Richard said, ‘Did you listen to the radio this morning, sir?’

‘No, why?’ Pat said. ‘Is everything all right, lads?’

They told him Conor Harris was dead.

‘What?’ Pat Kilroy said.

‘We didn’t know he was dead,’ Barry Fox said. ‘We didn’t know he was dead, sir. We didn’t mean to do anything like that. It was just an accident. It was just an accident.’

‘Shut up, Barry,’ Stephen O’Brien said.

There were tears in Barry Fox’s eyes.

‘What are you saying?’ Pat Kilroy said. ‘You’re saying that Conor Harris, who went to this school, died last night?’

Pat Kilroy was very good at his job. He had already thought about the phone call to Conor’s parents, the words he would speak at the funeral if he was asked, the memorial service in the school chapel. Barry’s words about it being an accident hadn’t registered with him yet. That took another minute.

Richard said, ‘We heard it on the news this morning.’

‘And you say there was an accident?’ Pat Kilroy said. He looked searchingly at Barry Fox.

‘Yeah,’ Richard said.

‘We saw Conor at a club last night,’ Stephen O’Brien said.

‘... And what happened to him?’ Pat Kilroy said.

‘There was a bit of a fight, sir.’

Pat Kilroy turned down the corners of his mouth. ‘And were ye three involved in this fight?’

‘Yeah,’ Stephen said.

Pat Kilroy looked at the three hulking children sitting in front of his desk. ‘Ah, lads,’ he said.

This was the only time that Pat Kilroy allowed the fear and disappointment he felt to enter his voice. The boys flinched when he said it: Ah, lads. They had grown up listening to Pat Kilroy bawl at them on the rugby pitch, telling them to get their act together, stop acting like little girls, for Christ’s sake not to be so fucking wussy. But Ah, lads, that was the killer: in that tone of quaking apprehension, that tone of unbearable disappointment.

Stephen O’Brien said afterwards that this was the moment he realized he was really in the shit.

Strange to say, up until this point none of the boys had thought about Conor Harris or his family. They had barely thought about themselves. They had been trained not to examine their own feelings too closely. To Richard and Stephen and Barry, those two words of Pat Kilroy – Ah, lads – instantly overturned fifteen years of education. They were forced to acknowledge that they had trespassed on the world of the irrevocable: of things that could not be taken back.