Waving Goodbye to Daniel
©  Suzanne Bosworth
Published by Plume and Takahe

  "Hey, Gerard! Drag harder on that cigarette. C'mon harder!"
  Daniel's voice. Caught me right on the inbreath with the shock, hearing that New Jersey accent. Well it would do, wouldn't it, seeing Daniel's been dead for years.
  This is what happened: I'd been digging around in an old suitcase and slipped what I thought was John Lee Hooker into the tapedeck, not reading the label on the cassette.     And instead there's this voice, his voice, Daniel's, pushing out into all the corners of the room and scraping up against the windows.
  I hit the rewind just to make sure.
  The elastic twang of a guitar tuning to find F sharp and some laughing and there he is.
  "Hey, Gerard! Drag harder on that cigarette. C'mon, harder!" 
  Daniel on a tangent to irony: he never could understand smokers. Smoking, he'd say, had about as much point as glueing yourself by your feet at a ninety degree angle to the forehead of the Statue of Liberty. Sooner or later you were going to come unstuck.
  I'm squatting down by the tapedeck as still as rock with these pictures going off in my head like Roman candles. The band jamming one Sunday afternoon in a London suburb ten years ago. Spicy red splashes of geraniums under a deep blue sky, grass brown and scratchy and smelling of hot dry hay. Echoes of laughter and half heard conversation.
  A soft tap and shuffle on taut drumskin creeping up the back of the neck and down the skin of arms and legs. Gerard: greying hair, wiry, beard like a goat, sitting with his limbs and joints stuck out at angles with the drums between his feet. Another stringy roll-up on his lip, eyes closed, head back, swaying to a silent and secret calling.
  "Hey, where's my beer."
  Daniel, tall and angular in espadrilles and roomy blue linen shorts, standing on the cracked stone steps of his flat. You have to pay attention to him; his voice cuts through everything but nobody minds because he's vivid and sparking with energy and he makes you pay attention to the absurdity of living. You're dragged right out into the open by the scruff of your neck with your eyes stretched wide and he shakes you up and down and he points at things like white sliced bread and billions starving and yells, "Look! Life is absurd! See it, feel it, goddamit, shout in its face!"
  You either loved him or he drove you nuts.
  "OK nobody moves a muscle. My beer, please,if you would be so kind...."
  He had this thing about the English never pronouncing their words right. Especially words with 'r' in them. He'd apply serious attention to the business of saying words like "beer". "Forever." "Rearguard." You felt every syllable, every vowel, every consonant; you heard his blood and muscles forming the sound.
  Some nights we'd all sit in the pub with Daniel, his arms and hands and fingers sculpting the air, teaching us how to speak English. The night we were thrown out and banned was the night eight of us fell into singing part songs and got loud. After some discussion with the landlord we finally agreed that fifteen minutes of anyone, anyone at all, singing Gaudete was a menace, let alone a swaying bunch of beerheads braying it in the middle of the saloon bar.
  It tugs like a barb caught on skin: the uncomplicated sweetness, an ease, a splashing in the shallows. No need, then, to engage in any deeper connection other than being in the same place at the same time.
  There's a rush of notes on a sax like cola splashing over ice, and then long and slow: cream running down a spoon and sinking into dark brandy. Jal - we called him the Latin American, well he was from New York and he spoke fluent Latin, and he played the sax so good, God and the angels would've stood in line to pay on the door.
  "Are we taping this?"
  "Who's unplugged my gee-tar?"
  "Man, that heat."
  In amongst the knockabout foolaround my own laugh flickering up like a small flame, catching for a second, a fizz on a dry twig. Watching a scratchy old home movie and connecting with the eyes of a younger self smiling back and waving: a milestone marking the distance.
  A guitar whining and a sudden crackle: Martin, short and intense, peering at the jack plug. Another burst of crackle, a sprint up and down the neck, the guitar wow-ewow-ewowing like a hot cat at midnight.
  "Shine on me, baby," Daniel calling into the sky, "soak up those rays, people, it's gonna be a killer."
  The grey sweetness of tobacco rising slowly like silk gauze; the sharp tickle of sweat.    A couple of false starts: Gerard missing a cue. Martin not paying attention.
  "Go!"
  "A-one, a-two, a-one" and Jal's in on the upbeat, an alchemy of three short notes climbing the scale and the fourth spreading like fire before falling down through the scale again and we're driving along through Funky Nassau.
  Daniel's on vocals, yowling and growling like he was born to it. Sweat runs down his brow and sternum, his pale, smooth skin pink in the heat.
  "Hit it!"
  Jal's away on a chariot, winging and soaring, casting nets of gold threaded with beads of molten metal trembling in the still blue haze.
  Minutes, years drift on, rocking on a Sunday afternoon, until a final thrum and flutter and a sax bubbling sweetly like spring water up through rock.
  "Jeez!"
  "Alright!"
  "Man, that was cool."
  Dreaming along with the moving picture show, cold beer sharp and pricking on the tongue, wood smoke drifting
           the end of the take
           the end of the recording
           no warning
  The tape winding on empty and hissing like a gas leak.
  An absence of noise crowds round and elbows intrusively into the light, bright images, shifting the focus and freezing them into badly shot snapshots, faces indistinct, voices not quite so clear; the music half remembered, filling and emptying the space with an ebb and flow, carried on a half heard inspiration.
  Other images come slinking in. The horror movies. This thing, this lump on his skin about the size of a seedless grape, gripping Daniel just over his left kidney. Bleeding and crusted and raw; pushing and probing its grim, greedy fingers around his body.
  He knew and I knew what this thing was. He knew and I knew he'd left this far too long: this was serious, no knockabout foolaround, no beerfest. Striking out into infinitely deeper water than either of us knew how to survive, we played the game so as not to name it.
  "You think I should see someone?"
  "Yes."
  "Well OK." Silence. He walked in a circle a couple of times. "GodDAMMIT." He hit the wall, hard, with his fist. You felt every vowel, every syllable, echoing up through the empty house. You felt your blood and muscles screaming with him.
  He caught my eyes just the once, cutting in like flint. "Gotta be on my own for a bit.."
  He went back into his flat and shut the door with deliberate care.
  He raged. I heard him. I sat on the floor in my flat in the dark, hearing him raging, my face wet and stretched in a silent rictus. He raged and swore and threw things at walls.    Then he went out.
  They cut out what cancer they could, grafted skin, sewed him up.
  For a while he stayed still, watching, waiting, like a deer breathing imperceptibly among trees, scenting the stealthy hunter.
  My mother died round about then: another killer roaring in on other targets.  Daniel and I fell away, apart; each battered by our own monstrous, scything nightmares. Each avoiding the elephant filling the space; I the frightened mourner and he afraid of being the next to go.
  He married. I moved away. Abroad. Travelled Europe for a bit.
  The night I heard he'd died I was visiting friends; we'd gone out to eat and I saw the old gang over by the door. They looked beaten. Spiritless.
  He's gone, they said.
  I said, no.
  Really, he's gone, they said.
  No. It's some weird-awful joke. You're having me on. I expected him to leap out from behind the curtain: "Hey! What the hell you doin' here, you old wanderer, you old fly-by-night, you footloose, fancy-free thang you. Hi, hi, hi!"
  He's gone. They said it quietly. Sadly.
  He'd be forty now.
  The first time I ever saw him he was in the garden and he said, "If we're gonna be neighbours you'd better like cornbread," and I said, "Well what are neighbours for."
In the hissing silence I imagine remembering him: my attention caught by a colour, a smell, a tone of voice, rocking along in a crowded underground train or missing a beat in a conversation.
  I think of his angular face, the forsythia that he loved so much in spring, his blueprints for condo bird boxes, and how sometimes he drove me nuts.
  And how once, he held my hand in the park.