Max Porter: Grief is the Thing with Feathers

There’s a feather on my pillow.

Pillows are made of feathers, go to sleep.

It’s a big, black feather.

Come and sleep in my bed.

There’s a feather on your pillow too.

Let’s leave the feathers where they are and sleep on the floor.

Four or five days after she died, I sat alone in the living room wondering what to do. Shuffling around, waiting for shock to give way, waiting for any kind of structured feeling to emerge from the organisational fakery of my days. I felt hung-empty. The children were asleep. I drank. I smoked roll-ups out of the window. I felt that perhaps the main result of her being gone would be that I would permanently become this organiser, this list-making trader in clichés of gratitude, machine-like architect of routines for small children with no Mum. Grief felt fourth-dimensional, abstract, faintly familiar. I was cold.

The friends and family who had been hanging around being kind had gone home to their own lives. When the children went to bed the flat had no meaning, nothing moved.

The doorbell rang and I braced myself for more kindness. Another lasagne, some books, a cuddle, some little potted ready-meals for the boys. Of course, I was becoming expert in the behaviour of orbiting grievers. Being at the epicentre grants a curiously anthropological awareness of everybody else; the overwhelmeds, the affectedly lackadaisicals, the nothing so fars, the overstayers, the new best friends of hers, of mine, of the boys. The people I still have no fucking idea who they were. I felt like Earth in that extraordinary picture of the planet surrounded by a thick belt of space junk. I felt it would be years before the knotted-string dream of other people’s performances of woe for my dead wife would thin enough for me to see any black space again, and of course — needless to say — thoughts of this kind made me feel guilty. But, I thought, in support of myself, everything has changed, and she is gone and I can think what I like. She would approve, because we were always over-analytical, cynical, probably disloyal, puzzled. Dinner party post-mortem bitches with kind intentions. Hypocrites. Friends.

The bell rang again.

I climbed down the carpeted stairs into the chilly hallway and opened the front door.

There were no streetlights, bins or paving stones. No shape or light, no form at all, just a stench.

There was a crack and a whoosh and I was smacked back, winded, onto the doorstep. The hallway was pitch black and freezing cold and I thought, ‘What kind of world is it that I would be robbed in my home tonight?’ And then I thought, ‘Frankly, what does it matter?’ I thought, ‘Please don’t wake the boys, they need their sleep. I will give you every penny I own just as long as you don’t wake the boys.’

I opened my eyes and it was still dark and everything was crackling, rustling.

Feathers.

There was a rich smell of decay, a sweet furry stink of just-beyond-edible food, and moss, and leather, and yeast.

Feathers between my fingers, in my eyes, in my mouth, beneath me a feathery hammock lifting me up a foot above the tiled floor.

One shiny jet-black eye as big as my face, blinking slowly, in a leathery wrinkled socket, bulging out from a football-sized testicle.

SHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

shhhhhhhh.

And this is what he said:

I won’t leave until you don’t need me any more.

Put me down, I said.

Not until you say hello.

Put. Me. Down, I croaked, and my piss warmed the cradle of his wing.

You’re frightened. Just say hello.

Hello.

Say it properly.

I lay back, resigned, and wished my wife wasn’t dead. I wished I wasn’t lying terrified in a giant bird embrace in my hallway. I wished I hadn’t been obsessing about this thing just when the greatest tragedy of my life occurred. These were factual yearnings. It was bitterly wonderful. I had some clarity.

Hello Crow, I said. Good to finally meet you.

*

And he was gone.

For the first time in days I slept. I dreamt of afternoons in the forest.

Very romantic, how we first met. Badly behaved. Trip trap. Two-bed upstairs flat, spit-level, slight barbed-error, snuck in easy through the wall and up the attic bedroom to see those cotton boys silently sleeping, intoxicating hum of innocent children, lint, flack, gack-pack-nack, the whole place was heavy mourning, every surface dead Mum, every crayon, tractor, coat, welly, covered in a film of grief. Down the dead Mum stairs, plinkety plink curled claws whisper, down to Daddy’s recently Mum-and-Dad’s bedroom. I was Herne the hunter hornless, funt. Munt. Here he is. Out. Drunk-for white. I bent down over him and smelt his breath. Notes of rotten hedge, bluebottles. I prised open his mouth and counted bones, snacked a little on his un-brushed teeth, flossed him, crowly tossed his tongue hither, thither, I lifted the duvet. I Eskimo kissed him. I butterfly kissed him. I flat-flutter Jenny Wren kissed him. His lint (toe-jam-rint) fuck-sacks sad and cosy, sagging, gently rising, then down, rising, then down, rising, then down, I was praying the breathing and the epidermis whispered ‘flesh, aah, flesh, aah, flesh, aah’, and it was beautiful for me, rising (just like me) then down (just like me) pan-shaped (just like me) it was any wonder the facts of my arrival under his sheets didn’t lift him, stench, rot-yot-kot, wake up human (BIRD FEATHERS UP YER CRACK, DOWN YER COCK-EYE, IN YER MOUTH) but he slept and the bedroom was a mausoleum. He was an accidental remnant and I knew this was the best gig, a real bit of fun. I put my claw on his eyeball and weighed up gouging it out for fun or mercy. I plucked one jet feather from my hood and left it on his forehead, for, his, head.

For a souvenir, for a warning, for a lick of night in the morning.

For a little break in the mourning. I will give you something to think about, I whispered. He woke up and didn’t see me against the blackness of his trauma.

ghoeeeze, he clacked.

ghoeeeze.

Today I got back to work.

I managed half an hour then doodled.

I drew a picture of the funeral. Everybody had crow faces, except for the boys.

Look at that, look, did I or did I not, oi, look, stab it. Good book, funny bodies, open door, slam door, spit this, lick that, lift, oi, look, stop it.

Tender opportunity. Never mind, every evening, crack of dawn, all change, all meat this, all meat that, separate the reek. Did I or did I not, ooh, tarmac macadam. Edible, sticky, bad camouflage.

Strap me to the mast or I’ll bang her until my mathematics poke out her sorry, sorry, sorry, look! A severed hand, bramble, box of swans, box of stories, piss-arc, better off, must stop shaking, must stay still, mast stay still.

Oi, look, trust me. Did I or did I not faithfully deliver St Vincent to Lisbon. Safe trip, a bit of liver, sniff, sniff, fabric softener, leather, railings melted for bombs, bullets. Did I or did I not carry the hag across the river. Shit not, did not. Sing song blackbird automatic fuck-you-yellow, nasty, pretty boy, joke, creak, joke, crech, joke. Patience.

I could’ve bent him backwards over a chair and drip-fed him sour bulletins of the true one-hour dying of his wife. OTHER BIRDS WOULD HAVE, there’s no goody baddy in the kingdom. Better get cracking.

I believe in the therapeutic method.

We were small boys with remote-control cars and ink-stamp sets and we knew something was up. We knew we weren’t getting straight answers when we asked ‘where is Mum?’ and we knew, even before we were taken to our room and told to sit on the bed, either side of Dad, that something was changed. We guessed and understood that this was a new life and Dad was a different type of Dad now and we were different boys, we were brave new boys without a Mum. So when he told us what had happened I don’t know what my brother was thinking but I was thinking this: