by Max Porter
MAN I would be done grieving?
BIRD No, not at all. You were done being hopeless. Grieving is something you’re still doing, and something you don’t need a crow for.
MAN I agree. It changes all the time.
BIRD Grief?
MAN Yes.
BIRD It is everything. It is the fabric of selfhood, and beautifully chaotic. It shares mathematical characteristics with many natural forms.
MAN Like?
BIRD Where to begin. Oh, feathers. Turds? Waves? Honeycomb? String? Intestines? Bones? Feathers, said that, cat-flaps, wait, no, wait, hats, maps, traps, books, rooks, creeks, peek in my beaks in my …
MAN This is ridiculous.
I feel that if my wife’s ghost had ever haunted me, now would be the time she’d start whispering, ‘You need to ask Crow to leave.’
BOYS
This is what we know of Dad. He was a quiet boy. He drifted off on family walks, he doodled and drew and his feelings were easily hurt by rough kids at school. He didn’t have a head for sums. He spent the first twenty years of his life reading books, being not-bad-but-not-skilled at football and waiting for Mum. He loved the Greek myths and Russians and Joyce. He was waiting to be our Dad.
And then our Mum and Dad were in love and they were truly dry-stone strong and durable and people speak of ease and joy and spontaneity and the fact that their two smells became one smell, our smell. Us.
Afterwards he was quieter. He was, for two or three years, by all accounts, very odd. He had the perpetual look and demeanour of someone floating, turning in the beer-gold light of evening and being surprised by the enduring warmth. A rolled-over shoulder half-squint half-smile. Caught baffled by the perplexing slow-release of sadness for ever and ever and ever. Which I suppose, looking back, was because of us. He couldn’t rage. He couldn’t want to die. He couldn’t rail against an absence when it was grinning, singing, freckling in the English summer tweedle dee tweedle dum in front of him. Perhaps if Crow taught him anything it was a constant balancing. For want of a less dirty word: faith.
A howling sorry which is yes which is thank you which is onwards.
DAD
My little book on Ted Hughes did well enough. It got reviewed in the TLS:
‘In its point-blank refusal to be constructively critical either of Hughes or his poems, it will certainly delight true fans of both.’
My scruffy Manchester-based publisher took me for lunch.
I told him my idea for a complete works of Ted Hughes annotated by Crow.
‘How about a book on Basil Bunting?’ he said.
I explained that Crow would violate, illustrate and pollute Ted’s work. It would be a deeper, truly wild analysis, a critical reckoning and an act of vengeance. It would be a scrapbook, a collage, a graphic novel, a dissolving of the boundaries between forms because Crow is a trickster, he is ancient and post-modern, illustrator, editor, vandal …
‘Shall we get the bill?’ said my publisher. ‘You have to move on. How about a little book on Piper and Betjeman?’
So I went home to talk to Crow about parting company.
I couldn’t find him. I did find that the boys had flung wet balls of toilet paper onto the bathroom ceiling, which pissed me off because I’d told them that it stained the paint, and by the time I’d cleaned it up and cooked their dinner and put them to bed I realised, of course, that Crow was gone.
CROW
Permission to leave, I’m done.
Shall I final walk the loop, the Boys/Dad boundary, hop/look/hop/stop.
Shall I final follow hunches, mourn hunt with pack lunches?
I dreamt her arm was blue when I found her,
Red where I touched, reacted, peck-a-little, anything?
Nonsuch matte podginess gave way to bone,
Accident in the home.
She banged her head, dreamed a bit, was sick, slept, got up and fell,
Lay down and died. A trickle of blood from an ear.
Hop/look/sniff/taste/better not. Total waste.
Lifeless cheek, lifeless shin, foot and toe. Wedding ring. Smile.
The medics arrive, the kids at school are learning, learning.
As you were, English widower, foliate head,
The undercliff of getting-on, groans, humps, huffs and puffs,
Wages, exams, ball-drops, lies and ecstatic passages,
All dread dead as the wildflower meadow. Starts again in proper time.
Some dads do this, some dads do that. Some natural evil, some fairly kind.
Pollarded, bollarded, was-it-ever-thus. Elastic snaps, a sniff and a sneeze and we’re gone.
Coppiced, to grow well.
Connoisseurs, they were, of how to miss a mother. My absolute pleasure.
Just be good and listen to birds.
Long live imagined animals, the need, the capacity.
Just be kind and look out for your brother.
BOYS
Dad said it was high time we sprinkled Mum’s ashes.
He phoned the school in the morning to tell them we had a sick bug. I’m in a plague house, he joked with the secretary, it’s bad in here, they’ve got it both ends if you know what I mean.
Gross. We laughed.
Out you hop kids. Coats on, hats on, let’s do it.
DAD
We went to a place she loved. I told them in the car on the way that I realised I had been an unusual dad since Mum died. They told me not to worry. I told them that all the nonsense about Crow was over, I was going to get a bit more teaching work and stop thinking about Ted Hughes.
They told me not to worry.
We parked the car and walked diagonals into the wind.
We pissed and the wind blew our wee back against our trousers.
While the boys were digging in the shingle I dozed off and when I woke up they were asleep, next to me, like guards, with their hoods up. I was warm.
I didn’t wake them. I walked to the shoreline. I knelt down and opened the tin.
I said her name.
I recited ‘Lovesong’, a poem I like a great deal but she never thought much of. I apologised for reading it and told myself not to worry.
The ashes stirred and seemed eager so I tilted the tin and I yelled into the wind
I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU
and up they went, the sense of a cloud, the failure of clouds, scientifically quick and visually hopeless, a murder of little burnt birds flecked against the grey sky, the grey sea, the white sun, and gone. And the boys were behind me, a tide-wall of laughter and yelling, hugging my legs, tripping and grabbing, leaping, spinning, stumbling, roaring, shrieking and the boys shouted
I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU
and their voice was the life and song of their mother. Unfinished. Beautiful. Everything.
About the Author
Max Porter works in publishing. He lives in South London with his wife and children. This is his first book.
Copyright
First published in 2015
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2015
All rights reserved
© Max Porter, 2015
The right of Max Porter to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Cover design by Faber.
Cover and inside illustrations © Eleanor Crow
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be
liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–32377–7
