So on the southside the kids continued to do what they had always done. They went to rugby games and hockey matches and they went shopping for Debs dresses and tuxedoes (this was September–October, after all, Debs season), they went out drinking, they went to school and church, they did their homework.

In telling this story I am breaking the pact of silence that was our unanimous response to the arrests. People have told me that this story would be better left untold, that in telling it I will merely cause more suffering, more grief. But this story is all I have. My motives in telling it have been purely selfish, and have had nothing much to do with propriety or with the need for good manners. In this account, subjective and partial though it must inevitably be, I’m talking about people who need to be talked about. I’m talking about people who think pain and grief are things you should bury, people who fear and despise the public airing of sorrow, people who have no sense that stories are our simplest – perhaps our only – way of talking about the things that hurt us. I’m talking about men and women who try to live as though suffering was something that happened to other people, never to them.

These are my people. I love them, for what it’s worth.

46

This story is too hard to tell.

But I can’t escape it now, not yet.

Nearly there, nearly there.

Soon I’ll go away, I think, to that cramped and rainy island in the lonely west. Soon I’ll leave for Inishfall.

47

Two weeks into the trial Peter Culhane woke up at four o’clock in the morning, panicking and covered in sweat. His left arm was paralysed and his chest was tight and sore. He stumbled along the landing to the room where Katherine slept.

‘I’m having a heart attack,’ he said. ‘I can’t breathe.’

Katherine was immediately awake. She called an ambulance and waited with Peter in the kitchen. He sat in the yellow light clutching his chest and breathing loudly.

‘I was dreaming,’ he said. ‘I dreamed about Richard.’

‘Shh,’ Katherine said.

Richard was in his room upstairs. He wasn’t asleep, though the family’s GP had prescribed him some heavy-duty tranquillizers. He listened as the ambulance arrived and took Peter away. Peter and Katherine had an argument in the driveway about whether Peter should go to the hospital alone. ‘You stay with him,’ Richard heard his father say. ‘You need to get him to court.’ When the ambulance had gone he heard his mother walking slowly up the stairs. She put her head around the door of his room.

‘Your father’s gone into hospital,’ she said.

‘I know.’

‘It’s probably stress.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Are you sleeping, at all?’

‘A little bit.’

‘Alright, so. I’ll call you in a couple of hours.’

It was probably stress, the doctors in the emergency room said, once they had taken Peter’s blood pressure and checked his lung capacity. ‘Are you under any great strain at the moment?’ they asked.