The Bath Novel Award 2016 Winner

TESTAMENT

by

Kim Sherwood

No.1.The number on your tattoo

No.2. The registered number

No.3. Name

No.4. Date of birth (year, month, day)

No.5. Place of birth

No.6. Occupation

No.7. Last address

No.8. Location of ghetto

No.9. The first stop en route your deportation

No.10. In what camps were you interned (from, to)

ONE

 Shake loose the earth

This is the last conversation we will have.

Silk: ‘Where did it go?’

‘Where did what go?’

Silk: ‘It’ – jerking his head at me – ‘it, it.’

‘Me? I didn’t go anywhere. I’m right here.’

A half-smile (he is king of the half-smile), a patient grandfatherly smile that told me I was not interpreting him correctly – I was a poor translator – but that he saw the joke in it, some joke somewhere in his own reduction. The painter whose canvases were said to contain a private language finally cracked and believed his own reviews. Strangely, no one understood him.

‘I haven’t seen it for so long. You.’ A frown as memories shutter-collide. ‘Eva. My girl. Big brain, eh?’ A wink, always sharing a private joke with nine billion people. ‘Did it know I loved it?’

I wanted to peel my hand away from what could be our last touch. I wanted to squeeze so hard I left my mark on the tension cables of his knuckles.

‘I knew – we know you love us.’

A nod, job done. Is that what it comes down to?

Birds performed evensong in the horse chestnut outside his bedroom window. His smile stretched, a genuine smile – just as his love of landscape painting was genuine, even if no one recognised the cultivated ramble of Hampstead Heath refracted through his eyes. I looked over my shoulder at the tree. I thought of Van Gogh’s blossom painted from the window of his madness; I heard the trill of wood pigeons and remembered a line from a documentary. When the birds stop singing, that will be the sound of extinction.

Whistling pierced the bedroom, inside the walls, Van Gogh turning to Hitchcock, and my armpits flooded with sweat. But it was only Silk, his cracked lips pursed. He did it again, a brief wood warbler, a party trick for summer picnics that was so loud and so sustained by the silent house it was like the ringing of a crystal glass.

Silk plucked at my hand.

‘What?’

He whistled again, tugged again. I didn’t want to understand. It might be the last thing he ever teaches me, apart from how to manage death.

But after another nudge I inflated my lungs for an off-tune bastardisation of the roundelay outside. He laughed, did it himself, pitch-perfect. I copied, once, twice, three times, until finally I was good enough and he folded his lips together, shutting a suitcase. Job done. That is all it takes.

Then followed the procedure of medicine, blankets, covering cold toes, switching off the lamp, drawing curtains to shut out pockets of polluted dusk, pockets I released at his protest, before finally burrowing my hand into his ready fist: goodnight. A floorboard creaking told me I was walking away from him, and as with every time I left his presence, I thought: this could be it. Commit the last look, the last words, to memory.

Over my shoulder: ‘I love you.’

In the dark, he might have been winking.

The stage-management of loss. You think you will remember separate moments: the rasp of a final breath; gases released from a trembling gut; the weight of undisturbed morning light across his legs. But the immediacy is dulled. Loss does not keep to its moment. There is keenness about grief, a sharp greed to it, a penetration that endures, secreting itself inside you. The last moments become muddled. The script changes. I cannot remember if this really was our last conversation, our last touch, our last lesson, or whether when I went back to him that night – fearing death had seamed itself into the scars and sores of his body, old and new, which I had discovered in these last weeks’ intrusion into his privacy – whether we maybe exchanged a word, a groan, a joke before he left.

But I do remember this: the birds did not sing again in his lifetime.

Granny Rosemary had passed away in a hospital, and Silk dealt with the fall-out. I was only fifteen then: I made tea and held his hand; I watered her allotment; I cried. There was no time for crying now. There was his body, heavy on the bed. I phoned Dr Pinney, who said I should call the coroner because he hadn’t seen Silk for over two weeks. It counts as unexpected, he said. The coroner arrived with a kind of ambulance. I leant against the grand-daughter clock – called that because it stood under four feet, as I used to, tapping Silk’s knee in search of its wooden hinge – and the brass second hand thrummed against the small of my back, telling me you’ve-grown you’ve-grown he’s-gone he’s-gone, drowning out the coroner’s explanations, as three men heaved Silk from the bed. The sheets snagged on his wayward foot, his amputated toe a red stump. They took him too quickly, and I was left with a silent house, and the smell of panic.

The minute hand urged me to call John and tell him: your father is dead. To call the press and tell them: Silk is dead. But I couldn’t tell the world before I told John, and I couldn’t tell him at all. So I called Mum, waking her up in Melbourne:

‘I’ve got to tell you something he’s gone he’s gone he died in the night – can you call Dad I can’t.’

After long minutes Mum called back: she couldn’t get through to John’s mobile, and there was no answer at the house in Provence.

Then Silk’s phone buzzed: John ringing. I hung up with Mum, following the smudge-swipe of Silk’s thumb over answer.

John: ‘Joseph? Hello?’

‘No, it’s me, Dad. It’s Eva.’

‘Oh. I couldn’t get through on your phone. Your mother’s calling me – doesn’t she know how expensive it is to receive calls from Australia?’

‘Dad, John, we need to talk, I need to tell you something.’

‘Then tell me. Getting your mother to act as a go-between is fucking ridiculous. Melbourne is not between England and fucking France. It’s six in the morning here.’

‘I know it is. Listen. It’s happened. He’s gone. Silk is gone.’