All the Things You Are (27 page)

Good to see him, though.

Danny and Dave today.

‘Ralph Cowley,' Danny says – blurts, in fact.

Dave's eyes do nothing, and Danny wonders if he heard him, if his words are actually audible. A little nod from Dave suggests they are. ‘Ralph Cowley,' Danny repeats, before coming to a stop again, caught between recounting the story of his visit and announcing the fact of his death.

‘How is Ralph?' Dave says. ‘You know, I hardly ever see the guy?'

Danny lets his gaze sidle out the window to take in the rush-hour traffic streaming below, the dark oily swirl of the Chicago River alongside.

‘He came to see me,' Danny says. ‘All worked up.'

‘That's Ralph,' Dave says. ‘Sit down, Danny. It's good to see you. Would you like something to drink?'

Danny runs through the things he'd like to drink: scotch, bourbon, gin. He doubts whether Dare To Dream keep any of them, even for clients. Not that he is a client. He had asked Dave to do a logo for Brogan's once, years back, when everyone thought they needed one, when branding became king. Dave had done something involving Japanese comic book figures, the kind of thing the girls like, manga-style, big eyes, and used the colors of the Irish flag, green white and orange. It looked hideous, garish and vaguely pornographic, the worst of at least two kinds of national kitsch, although, Danny reflects now, the girls would probably adore it. So if business in Brogan's ever gets so bad they need to hustle for the custom of the under-twelves' market, maybe he'll roll it out. As it was, he just pretended the whole thing had never happened, and Dave had never mentioned it again. They'd had scant contact since, in any case.

‘Tea,' Danny says. ‘English breakfast?'

‘Milk or lemon?'

‘Milk.'

Dave presses a button on the desk phone and asks someone called Lauren for two English breakfast teas with milk.

‘All day breakfast,' he says, and smiles. ‘Make you feel at home.'

‘We don't do breakfast,' Danny says, smiling himself. ‘Breakfast in a bar, it's not an auspicious concept.'

‘It's not that you don't want problem drinkers.'

‘We'd just prefer them a little later in the day.'

‘Let their breakfast problems be someone else's problems.'

‘We're not in the breakfast solutions line.'

‘You could offer a breakfast solution, but it would come with vermouth.'

‘Well. It would have shared a shelf with vermouth.'

‘Breakfast: the most important drink of the day.'

‘Two olives with mine.'

‘Two? Steady. Don't want to soak it up entirely.'

Danny and Dave, the banter boys. They kept themselves amused.

‘I don't see any paintings, Dave.'

‘I don't do that any more.'

‘No? You were good.'

‘I put it to work here,' he says, and gestures down out towards the agency floor. ‘There's a time when you put away childish dreams. Isn't that right? Take you, Dan. You wanted to be an actor.'

‘Not really. My wife was the actor.'

‘Oh now. At school, you did a lot of acting. Said you were going to try out, give it a shot, see what happened. But … you grew up. You accepted your lot. You knuckled down. So did I. Not like Ralph.'

‘What do you mean, not like Ralph?'

Dave gives Danny a keen look, an I-am-taking-a-good-look-at-you look.

‘Things didn't really work out for Ralph. Not the way they have for you and me.'

Dave is still smiling. You and me. Danny remembers this side to Dave, all you and me, all I-know-what-you're-thinking-because-I-am-thinking-it-too. Danny feels uncomfortable, like he should know about Ralph, about how things didn't work out. But he doesn't, or at least, hadn't until last Sunday, doesn't know anything about any of the guys, or rather, he just assumes, or assumed, they were the way they always had been: Dave with his designers, Gene with his sportswear business, Ralph teaching high-school English literature. Lack of curiosity? Perhaps. Equally, Danny wouldn't have relished anyone checking up on Brogan's year by year, given that he is doing essentially the same things he was doing fifteen or twenty-five years ago. Dave would have formed a view though. Dave always formed a view, had been the one to assign the roles: Danny, the pleaser; Gene, the captain; Ralph, Gene's right-hand man; Dave … what had Dave been? The jester? The artist? The class cut-up?

‘What happened to Ralph?

‘Ralph had a lot to put up with, Danny. Teaching school wasn't what he had hoped for. He had a novel he was writing, I don't know if it was the same one all along, or a succession of different ones. The cliché, you know, the teacher with a novel, “I have a suburban dream”. And I don't know what was worse for us, for all of his friends, his continually referring to it over the years, when the novel is finished, when the novel is published, so on, because even if it had grown embarrassing, everyone pretending to believe in this novel and its fate, even Ralph pretending, the strain of all that was somehow preferable to how he was when he finally gave up believing in it. I heard a shrink say once, to preserve mental health, it's vital to believe in something, not necessarily God, maybe anything, as long as it keeps you on the road. And when Ralph stopped believing in his novel, he had nothing left. It was like someone had taken his engine out, and all he could do was coast along, freewheeling, hoping for a steady downward incline to see him home.'

‘He's home now,' Danny says. ‘He's dead, Dave. Ralph was murdered. They found his body in my backyard.'

Lauren, brown curly hair and a trace of freckles, in blue jeans and rope wedges and a floral print wraparound top, exuding a Zen mixture of artiness and efficiency, comes into the office with the tea, and there is much politeness and business with cups and milk and so forth. When she goes, Dave abandons his drink and moves to the window, staring down toward the river. His cell phone rings, and he looks at it and frowns and presses a key. After another moment or two, he looks up, frowning.

‘What the fuck?' he says. ‘Ralph, murdered? What kind of … what happened? You said he came to you … what was the deal?'

‘A week ago,' Danny says. ‘He was, as I said, all worked up … about the past. About the Bradberry fire, specifically.'

Dave nods, his face seemingly held steady by an act of will.
He looks like he's afraid I'm going to ask him for money
, Danny thinks. Maybe that's how we'd all look. Don't talk about it, don't mention it, don't remember it.

‘That's all ancient history at this stage, surely?' Dave says.

‘Well. In one way, of course.'

‘I mean … Christ, it just goes to show what kind of state Ralph was in, that he should be brooding about the past like that.'

Danny shrugs. ‘I don't know. Age we're at, I find the past more and more rears its ugly head.'

‘Don't look into its eyes, is the trick, Dan. Or it'll look back at you. And then you'll be lost.'

‘That's some kind of quote, isn't it?'

He thinks of Claire, the quote-mistress; more than a thought, a pang, an ache. No matter what, he misses her.

‘It's a paraphrase of a quote. What did Ralph say?'

‘Well. He said … he said that he couldn't stop thinking about it all. The fire, the dead children. How he had tried to deal with it in a creative way … I didn't understand what he meant by that, but I got the impression that the novel he was writing, or failing to write, he told me about it too, was maybe about the fire.'

Dave rolls his eyes.‘Jesus.'

‘He said he felt guilty that he'd allowed us all to think one way about the fire. When there wasn't just one way to think.'

‘I haven't thought one way about it,' Dave says. ‘I haven't thought about it at all.'

Dave's face settles into a skeptical half-smile, as if all this tragedy and melodrama are a bit
much
,
and looking out through the glass walls at the room full of workers, the creativity, the industry, the
normality
, Danny can't help agreeing, can't help feeling just a little absurd, as if the whole thing is too febrile, and somehow unmanly. He is reminded of his childhood, of trying to keep in with the guys, the effort it took, all the unspoken rules: don't show any emotion, don't obsess about things, don't over-explain, or over-think, don't go off on one. Moderation in all things, and while you're at it, shut the fuck up. Danny learned it all well, too well, had become almost incarcerated within it. But not now. He thinks of Ralph, and Jeff, of the money he's lost and the house he stands to lose, of his family life in danger of falling apart. It may feel like melodrama, but for Danny, it's the new normal, and he's living it.

‘Maybe not, but that doesn't mean there wasn't an agreed version of what happened. A version in which I was the … the guilty party, I suppose you'd say. I was the one who lost his head, who got carried away, and not content with scaring the Bradberrys half to death, I suddenly decided to go the whole hog, to fling a fire bottle at the back door and burn the whole house down. That's … later that night, back in your place, that was what had happened, that's what became the Authorized Version, right?'

Dave grimaces, as if it's childish and silly to be raking over these dead leaves.

‘The only reason we even talked about it was because you hit your head, you knocked yourself out. So you were all, “how the fuck did that happen, guys?” I mean … should we have not told you? Maybe it would have been better if … because honestly, we brought the fire bottles along, what were we, not gonna use them?'

‘We had agreed not to throw them at the house. We had ruled that out. The deal was we would use them if there were trees, we could set some trees ablaze. They were the conditions we set. That they wouldn't get anywhere near the house. We took care to set the fires on the lawn some way back from the perimeter for the same reason. I mean, we talked all that through, Dave, absolutely we did.'

Dave flushes, as if he had forgotten, or, more likely, Danny thinks, because he is embarrassed by Danny's vehemence, by the freshness of his recall, by how raw it clearly still is for him.

‘So Ralph said that's not the way he remembers it now. That he wasn't sure what he had seen in any case. But that the guys were so sure that it had been me, he took it for granted.'

Dave is shaking his head, pacing about the room, holding his hands up as if he is about to speak and then stopping and sighing and pacing about some more. He reminds Danny of an actor who's been allowed too much freedom on stage, and as a result looks like a less than convincing version of himself.

‘Ralph is dead? Fuck, man, what happened?'

‘I'll get to that,' Danny says. ‘First, I want to talk about what he told me, all right?'

Dave doesn't quite flinch, but he looks unprepared for Danny to be quite so firm, and something flashes in his eyes: resistance, it looks like.
Welcome to the physics of my world, baby.

‘You mentioned the novel he was writing, I think that's the way to understand what Ralph meant. He kept saying things like, that was the original version, how he couldn't get beyond that, but then he tried to see it from the angle of the other characters – meaning us – and that was when he began to revise it, to see that it was more complicated than it originally appeared.'

‘Go on,' Dave says, head down, voice muffled.

‘OK, well, he said that, once we had the yard blazing, and we were kind of running around through the flames—'

‘We were
dancing
around, like little savages—'

‘We were dancing around. We had done it. And the two little kids' faces at the window, staring out the window, Ralph remembered that, how frightened those kids looked. But that wasn't enough for the little savages. We were going to scare them even more. We had the fire bottles, each of us had one, and Ralph said we were picking out trees to pitch them at, and, and …'

‘And you lit yours, I remember this, actually, you fired yours up and you ran at the tree, the big sycamore in the corner by the fence we piled over, you ran headlong at it as if you were going to fling yourself into it, but there was a blaze in your way, a skull or something, the flames kicking high, and you just looked like you thought you could run through it.'

Dave is nodding his head now, almost smiling, as if relieved he too can see it plain, as if the smoke has cleared.

‘You swerved to avoid the fire, and whichever way you did it, arms flung out to keep your balance, the fire bottle left your hand and hit the house, and you blundered headlong into the tree and knocked yourself out.'

Danny is shaking his head. ‘That's not the way Ralph saw it.'

‘That's the way I remember it, Dan. And that way, it clears you of any … not that anyone “blamed” you, we were all—'

‘I blamed myself. All these years.'

‘It was an
accident
. You ran, you slipped, it left your hand the wrong way, I can see it clearly. If we had, because what you call the official version—'

‘The Authorized Version—'

‘OK, like the Bible, very good, and we all authorized it, but after all this time, if we had only talked about it, if you had called me up, said, let's meet, let's try and piece together what happened. Instead of, because we were scared, panicking, frightened kids, and we were angry too, I guess—'

‘Angry at me. Gene was angry. Gene was furious.'

‘Gene was the one,' Dave says, and nods, and Danny feels like high-fiving him. ‘Because I, I was never sure …'

‘We all agreed, but Gene was the one that led the charge.'

‘Man, he was righteous … because he was like, Sheriff in the White Hat, Dudley Do-right, Gene made a call and it was like, the tablets coming down from the mountain, it was written in stone.'