Everyone at the Wake Heard the Whistle

My father never knocked, never called out. His arrival anywhere was announced by a two-note whistle — low-high, a falling third reversed — that he'd used since boyhood. You heard it from the gate and put the kettle on. Everyone in our orbit knew it: family, neighbours, the postman, his dominoes club. It was as identifying as his face.

The wake was at my parents' house, forty-odd people, that loud-hushed atmosphere wakes have. Early evening, the garden doors open to let the heat out.

The whistle came from the garden. Low-high. Unhurried. His.

I want to describe the room's behaviour, because the room is my evidence. Conversation did not fade — it CUT, all at once, mid-word, the way sound cuts when a conductor closes his fist. Forty people who knew that whistle turned toward the garden doors together. My mother, who had been upright and gracious for six brutal hours, said, quietly, 'Oh,' — just that — and sat down.

His brother went out. Nothing. Our garden backs onto a paddock; the nearest neighbour was AT the wake, indoors, holding a sausage roll and going white like everyone else. No bird — and every birder in the family has been asked — produces that interval with that timbre; besides, we all know exactly what we heard, the way you know your own name in a crowd.

Two minutes later, as people were beginning to breathe and murmur again, it came once more — from further away this time, fainter, from out past the paddock. Low-high. Leaving.

The kettle was already on; wakes run on tea. My aunt, a woman of granite, lifted it and said to the garden, steady as you like: 'Yours is poured, love. Safe home.'

Forty witnesses. Some of them argue about everything, and have argued about everything since — the will, the headstone wording, whose sponge cake travelled worst. Not one of them has ever argued about the whistle.