'The test' by Ben Smart
It was my first big success. The show that made me. Everyone was there. William Hart, the art correspondent from the Observer, Tom Lyon from the Sunday Times, Robin Nicholls from Frieze magazine, journalists from Texture and Flash, a new up-and-coming writer from Art Now whose name I still cannot remember; Susan Morgan, who had been short-listed for the Turner Prize that year, Brian McCoyne who had won the previous years Insight award. And they all liked it. They all said it was my best work to date, that I was working to my full potential now, my style and technique improving all the time, but now there was a real weight, a real power to the paintings. It may have been the subject, of course, my father, his illness, but even so it required real skill, real artistry to make it work. They all agreed, said it was the first show they had seen in a long time that really meant something, that was more than just a simple exercise in style. Five rooms. Fifty-two pictures. Life-size figures, portraits, close ups. All of my father. One for each week of the last year of his life, showing his slow decline, the illness as it took him, the withering of muscle and flesh.
Sarah was pleased. She had been all day. Filled with an odd kind of happiness. I thought it was because of the exhibition. But there was something else. And late on in the evening she took me to one side to tell me.
She could hardly speak she was so happy. I thought she was drunk. There was noise all around us, music playing and all those journalists. She started talking about the past. She often did this. When she was drunk or happy or both. A reverie of memory. And it was always the same story, about how we first met at art college and how she had known even then that I would be a success. I had the talent, the potential. A gift. God given. Everyone else was studying, learning how to paint, herself included, but I was in the process of becoming an artist, she said. I was the real thing.
That was the story. That was the past. And now here we were. The two of us together, after all this time, and all the things that had happened between us, and now, she said, catching her breath, her eyes holding mine, there was something she had to tell me.
‘I’m pregnant,’ she said. ‘We’re pregnant.’
I do not think she noticed my reaction. We both wanted children, didn’t we? We had both talked about it plenty of times before and now it was happening. It was really happening. Wasn’t it amazing? She kept saying. Wasn’t it amazing?
‘Are you sure?’ I said.
‘I tested myself twice.’
‘Tested?’
‘A kit from the chemists.’
‘Do those things really work?’
‘Twice. I did it twice.’ She squeezed my hand. ‘Isn’t it amazing? The start of something new, between us. A new life. A new life together.’
There was nothing more either of us had to say. And she let me go then. To be alone, she said. To take it all in. I wandered off. Not knowing where I was going or where I could go. I could not leave. I had already arranged an interview with the writer from Art Now, a cover piece. An important piece.
It was then that I saw my mother. She was standing alone in a room filled with portraits, sepia tinged miniatures painted to resemble antique photographs, my father’s face caught in a series of criminal mug-shots from what looked like a hundred years ago. I had forgotten she had decided to come. She looked lost. She looked like she had been crying.
‘No of course not,’ she said, offering me a hurried smile. ‘It’s the air in here. It’s very dry.’
‘You found the place all right.’
‘Yes. It’s a nice part of town. Very expensive.’
‘It’s a good space.’
‘You’ve done very well for yourself.’
We both stood a moment nodding in silence. I noticed she was holding a glass of wine. I thought she had given up alcohol. I remembered her telling me she had, just after my father first fell ill.
‘So what do you think?’ I said.
‘You’ve done very well for yourself. I told you.’
‘I mean the paintings.’
She looked around. Her eyes flitted from floor to ceiling, artist to journalist, spotlight to exit, missing the paintings every time.
‘Oh… I don’t know. I’ve never been very good with your art. I’ve never really understood it. You know that.’
‘You don’t have to understand it.’
She took a sip of wine.
‘Well, they don’t really look like him, do they?’
‘Some of them do,’ I said. ‘They’re not all meant to.’
‘What’s that?’
She was pointing at a painting in another room. A copy of a computer generated image, a strand of DNA. My father’s DNA. The one painting in the exhibition that was not recognisable as some part of his body.
‘It’s his…signature,’ I said. ‘A sort of, coded message from him to me. Only I can’t read it.’
My mother nodded as if she understood.
‘Mrs Lawton asked after you.’ The sips of wine were coming more frequently now.
‘Who?’
‘She said she met you at the funeral. She said she was concerned about you. I didn’t understand. She wanted to know if you were better.’
‘Better?’
I remembered.
I had been asked to say a few words at the funeral. Explain what my father meant to me. I was supposed to have prepared something. But I turned up late and with nothing to say. In the end I found myself talking about the only thing I could talk about, how different we were. He was a man of science and I was an artist. We had never been close and there was very little that connected us. There had never been any big arguments, no great animosity; we were simply very different people, with very different interests. But of course this wasn’t what people wanted to hear and sensing this I made up something about how impressed I had always been by his lifelong devotion to his career, a science teacher for thirty years. Offers of promotion all declined, happy to continue doing what he was doing, content to live his life within the narrow confines he had created for himself. I did not look at my mother as I said this. I did not mention how she had asked him to at least try for something more, for his own sake, for his own well-being, if not in his job then writing for the science magazines he subscribed to, or attending one of the courses the universities ran. She had always said he was a gifted man, a man with an understanding of how the world works, how it really works. But his gift was easily matched by his incredible stubbornness, his simple refusal to do anything with it.
After the ceremony Mrs Lawton stopped me. She said she was a friend of my parents and that she had known my father for a number of years. She said she simply did not believe we could be that different me and him.
‘There must have been something between you,’ she said. ‘Something you feel he passed on to you, some lasting connection. He was your father, after all.’
I could see she was not going to leave me alone. She needed an answer.
‘An inability to face the inevitable,’ I said. ‘A talent for running away.’
‘Oh,’ she smiled. ‘I don’t think William ever ran away from anything.’
‘That’s what I mean. You didn’t even notice him doing it.’
She kept smiling.
‘Tell her I’m all right,’ I told my mother. ‘Tell her I’m much better now thank you.’
She nodded.
‘And how is Sarah?’
‘Fine.’
‘She looks well. I saw her passing just now. Very happy. I should go and talk to her.’
‘You should.’
‘I told my friends,’ she caught her breath at the words. ‘The women at church. I told them what you were doing - this exhibition. They were all very excited. All very interested. They said it would be a… a fitting tribute. A gift from son to father, father to son. That’s what they said.’
Her eyes were red. The wine almost finished.
I did not see my mother leave and she did not say goodbye. I realised after she had gone that she had not congratulated me on the show. I called her a few days later and she still did not congratulate me. We never spoke about it again.
In the last room of the exhibition there were huge canvases, close ups, details of my father’s body. A knuckle on his right hand, the collection of ruffled lines at the side of his mouth, the raised hairs on a single square inch of his forearm. I was stood looking at a billboard-sized close up of his eyes, painted in black and white, copied from a photograph taken the day before he died, when the writer from Art Now found me. He wanted that interview, he said. We looked at the painting together; the grey eyes bigger than both of us, like twin oceans seen from above, the veins in the eyeballs like black streams, tributaries of a river of the dead.
‘So why did you choose your father as your subject?’ he began.
‘The subject is illness and the inevitability of death,’ I said. ‘The fact that it is my father is really not important.’
‘But it is your father.’
‘Yes.’
‘You don’t think that’s relevant at all.’
‘I was looking for a new project. I started sketching my father. That was how it began.’
‘But these aren’t simple family portraits.’
‘No, of course not.’
‘You turned it into something else, an artistic project.’
‘Yes.’
‘And do you feel guilty?’
‘About what?’
‘This show, it has made you a success.’
‘Not yet. Almost.’
‘But it’s got you noticed. Got you a lot of interest. More so than your other shows.’
‘I have improved a lot in the last few years.’
‘So you don’t feel guilty?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘It’s all quite overpowering. Too much almost. Your father exposed like this, over and over. At his weakest moment. It feels quite… brutal. Like it’s an attack, like you’re attacking him.’
‘It’s the project. It has to be like this.’
‘Okay.’ He turned a page of his notepad. ‘Can you tell me who your father was?’
‘I don’t see that it matters. He was a teacher. He was very good at it. It really doesn’t matter.’
‘The illness is hereditary, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
He paused.
‘It’s strange, no one said. And I’ve read the notes. They don’t say either. There’s a test. I’m sorry, but have you had it, have you had the test?’
I did not answer. I did not know what to say and just then Sarah appeared. She took my arm, slipped it around her waist, pulling herself close.
‘Of course he’s had it,’ she said. ‘He’s had the test. Months ago. He told me. And he’s clear. He wouldn’t be here if he wasn’t. None of us would be here. Do you think he could have done all this, created all this without knowing he was clear?’
She took my hand and placed it on her belly.
‘You’re clear, aren’t you?’ she said.
I looked into my father’s grey eyes, bigger than any of us. And I could not speak.
