F was my best friend from the ages of 15 to 18, that period when time seems compressed and yet stretched out of all proportion. I can barely remember my own PIN number, but I recall almost every song on the radio and every film released between the years 1984 to 1987. That’s adolescence for you: intensely in-tense, an everpresent present.

I first met F in the schoolyard around the age of 10 or 11. He was 18 months older than me and owned an issue of 2000AD that I coveted (the one in which Judge Dredd was unmasked, his features covered by a censored strip), but we didn’t become close until the late summer of 1984, when he assumed in my life the role of peer and mentor, a tribal initiator who peeled open my mind and introduced me to Muddy Waters and Tangerine Dream and Philip K Dick and Robert A Heinlein. He was the most intelligent and original character I’d ever met, and his influence on me was – and still is – immeasurable.
F became a father in 1987, at the age of 20. He moved to London to make a life for himself and his family, and our paths diverged. We met only once since I moved to Dublin in 1991, but I thought about him often. We exchanged a couple of emails and vowed to stay in touch, but of course we never did.
About a month ago I received a message that F’s 21-year-old son was murdered in London. News reports said the young man was fatally stabbed while protecting his girlfriend in a fight at a taxi rank. You can imagine the reaction amongst our circle.
Yesterday I was out on a walk when a car pulled over and the driver beeped the horn. It was F and his teenage daughter. We drove to my house; the youngster surveyed my books and CDs, laughed and remarked that her father and I seemed more like brothers than friends. We talked for an hour. F spoke of the inexorable, cruel process of waiting for the body to be extradited for burial back in Wexford, and of the kindness shown his family by the locals, and of the beauty of that simple, national expression of condolence: ‘Sorry for your trouble.’
If murder is the ultimate violation of not just the integrity of the individual, but the notion of community, then to outlive one’s own child is a violation of the natural order. We need a license to drive a car, to own a television, a fishing rod, a gun. But anyone can walk into an army and navy or hunting store and, in a premeditated action, buy the kind of blade that in a moment will end a person’s life, and in doing so, rend the ties that bind us and keep us separate from beasts. Such wounds never heal.