Max Porter - Grief is the Thing with Feathers

He arrived three hours too early, so he bought some records in a trendy record shop. He got something he didn’t want because he was too embarrassed to correct the man behind the counter. He went to a pub and drank two pints of Guinness and smoked cigarettes, one after the other. Our Dad was quiet and shifty and romantic and you could smoke indoors then.

Our Dad was disillusioned by the size and modernity of Oxford. He had thought he might bump into Ted, or Peter Redgrove, before the reading. Then he was embarrassed at his own naïveté and had a third pint. He was reading Osip Mandelstam and underlining and folding pages, copying bits into his notebook. He had assumed the pub would be full of young thinkers behaving in the same way, but the pub was empty apart from a man in a Spurs shirt with a beagle.

Our Dad was in a shit pub right by the bus station.

He had bang-up-to-date views on Hughes and Plath. One of those views was that it was all over. It was time to shed all that crap and assess the poetry without partisan biographical bickering. He was pro-Ted, our papa. On the bus to Oxford he had imagined some vigorous arguments in a wood-panelled pub with a gaggle of Plath fans. ‘OK, OK, we’ll accept River ,’ they’d say. ‘Fair enough,’ Dad would say, ‘I’ll have another go at Colossus .’

To be fair to our Dad, he was authentic. Quiet, shifty and tragically uncool. We had to take the piss out of him as hard as we possibly could. We were convinced that it was what our Mum would have wanted. It was our best way of loving him, and thanking him.

He got a free drink with his ticket.

He kept his ticket and still has it in his Ted folder.

He sat halfway from the front.

He waited for his hero.

(Big man with a grubby marked hardback, probably a Barbour jacket, perhaps even the whiff of the Devon farm or a smear of salmon guts on the pocket. The iconic cowslip has fuzzed and faded, Dad knows, but what will his hair be like? A smart Laureate crew-cut perhaps. And will it all be Shakespeare talk, or will there be a poem or two? A new poem or two, Ted? For your young fans? For the boys that have you up there with Donne and Milton?)

Ted, when he did arrive, looked a little unwell.

The talk passed by in a reverential haze. He never remembered much of it, except that it was very, very Shakespeare-heavy, and one of the panel was hostile to Ted.

It was time for questions and our eighteen-year-old Dad already had the hot neck-up blush and sweaty palms of a question-ready fan. At the back, a question about Caliban and empire. Yes, Madam at the side, a question about bad reviews. Yes, Sir, here at the front, a question about Sylvia, met with a sigh from the Ted-savvy crowd, and a polite ‘not relevant’ from the chairperson. Then, joy oh joy, Yes, Young Man, in the middle.

Dad stood up, which was funny because none of the others had. We chuckle at the standing up.

His question was very long and very earnest, and it came out a bit muddled, but it was about nuclear war, and censorship, and pollution and James the First. Ted nodded, smiled, nodded, and the chairperson said, ‘Thank you, lovely, more of an essay than a question, but thank you. I’m sorry to say we’re out of time.’

Dad sat down painfully hard on his bum-bones, crimson, with tears prickling.

Mum apparently cried once when he told this story, but wait! Wait! we all shout. Wait Dad, you tragic twat! You are not left shamed by the chairperson! This is why we love and mock you. There’s a happy coda.

As our Dad was shuffling his way to the exit a vast poet’s hand clapped down on his shoulder and the full-fathom-twenty drone boom-dry loveliness of Ted Hughes’ warm Yorkish accent coated our happy Daddy.

‘Yes,’ said Hughes, looking Dad in the eye.

‘Yes?’ said our Dad.

‘Yup,’ said Hughes, and turned away.

And our Dad forgot what he asked, and Ted Hughes died, and so did our Mum, and my brother tells the Oxford story differently to me.

This is the story of how your wife died.

DAD

I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want to hear it.

CROW

But that’s the whole point. She banged her head.

DAD

Crow, really, it’s fine. I know. I don’t need to know.

CROW

Fancy that.

Dear Crow,

You once stood by my bed and spoke in the voice of black birdcall and told me never to marry again, to seal off my heart and tie up my cock. Us crows are monogamous, you said, and tapped my forehead with your jut-jutting beak.

Then, later, you stood by my bed and told me the story of Ted. You spoke in the voice of a Yorkshire teacher and told me to get back on it, find a lover, buck my ideas up, think of the boys. Crack on, you said. You should shack up with a friendly young thing who likes the sound of ‘Stepmum’. Have a roll in the hay. I flung the duvet off and flailed and swung and spat at you but you were elsewhere and I had to fall asleep crushed between what you’d said and what I thought. No sleep.

Sharp edges.

Bad breath.

Once we were doing some drawing at the kitchen table and Dad said, ‘We can never think too much about how important Picasso is,’ and my brother said, ‘Wankerama Dad!’ and Dad was nearly sick from laughing so hard.

We abused him and mocked him because it seemed to remind him of our Mum.

Once upon a time we went to a secret place with our Gran. It was a huge semi-circular wall of red sand that was once in the sea. Give it a kick and a shell would fall out. This was in the middle of a bright yellow rapeseed field.

Dad did not come. That was something Dad had nothing to do with.

She had flu. It was unusual for her to be ill. The boys were tiny and it had snowed and she couldn’t bear us rampaging about the house so we got dressed and went sledging in the park. We were pathetic without her. The boys didn’t know where their hats were. Couldn’t get their joined mittens through their puffer jackets; didn’t want to see other boys, bigger boys sledging on the hill. I was hopeless. I took them out without wellies so before we’d even got down the road their little toes were aching. They both whinged and we all felt, the three of us, that without her things didn’t work as they should. They pitied me. I felt acutely embarrassed that my brilliance as a father had been exposed as wholly reliant upon her. Perhaps if I’d known it was a dress rehearsal for the rest of our lives I would have said BUCK UP YOU LITTLE TURDS, or HELP ME. Or take me, take me instead please.

Things Crow is NOT scared of:

Ted.

Biographies of Sylvia.

God.

Wind farms.

Motherless children.

Bald eagles.

Tar Baby.

Scarecrows.

Man.

Death.

Things Crow IS scared of:

Divorce.

Plot.

Business.

Catholics.

Barbed wire.

Pesticides.

Gossip.

Taxidermy.

Keith Sagar.

About two years afterwards, far too soon but perfectly timed, I brought home a woman, a Plath scholar I met at a symposium.

She was funny and bright and did her best with a fucked-up situation. We had to be quiet because the boys were asleep upstairs.

She was soft and pretty and her naked body was dissimilar to my wife’s and her breath smelt of melon. But we were on the sofa my wife bought, drinking wine from glasses my wife was given, beneath the painting my wife painted, in the flat where my wife died.

I haven’t had sex with many women, and I only got good at it with my wife, doing things my wife liked. I didn’t want to do those things, or think about whether I should be doing those things or thinking about the thinking, which meant I bashed her teeth, then knelt on her thigh, then apologised too much, then came too quickly, then tried too hard, then not hard enough.