No, I said, I agree, we are doing just fine.
Crow joined me as I left, shutting the door, and got me in a cosy headlock.
You’re not alone, kid.
BOYS
Once upon a time I am grown up, I have a child. And a wife. And a car. I sound a bit like Dad.
We drive through the Chilterns, the Downs, the Moors, the Broads, singing British Holidays for British People. My Dad did that, he showed us Britain. Cader Idris, Shingle Street, Mallyan Spout. Now my tiny son shouts ‘cra’ when he sees a crow, because when I see a crow I shout KRAAAA.
I tell tales of our family friend, the crow. My wife shakes her head. She thinks it’s weird that I fondly remember family holidays with an imaginary crow, and I remind her that it could have been anything, could have gone any way, but something more or less healthy happened. We miss our Mum, we love our Dad, we wave at crows.
It’s not that weird.
DAD
‘Listen-to-this, too-good-to-miss, rump-pum-pa-pum-paar-rrum.’
Parp!
‘Go away Crow.’
MAN How do you know when you’ve found something worth picking at?
BIRD Well much of it has to do with a state of readiness, which is both instinctual (the hungers, the vices etc.) and pragmatic (nice-looking crisp packet, nice-looking widower). You’ll remember with some of my early work with you, that what appeared to be primal corvid vulgarity was in fact a highly articulated care programme, designed to respond to the nuances of your recovery.
MAN Did I respond as well as you’d hoped?
BIRD Better. But the credit should go to the boys, and to the deadline. I knew that by the time you sent your publisher your final draft of the Crow essay my work would be done.
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.