The Whistle My Uncle Found on the Flats

My uncle Colm did fourteen years as a warden on the tidal defences out past Wells-next-the-Sea, walking the sea wall at night checking the sluice gates hadn't jammed. He told me this story maybe three times over the years, and it never came out quite the same, which is partly why I believe it and partly why I don't.

First time he told it, we were shelling peas in my nan's kitchen. He said he'd found a whistle half-buried in the mud below the wall, brass, no maker's mark, the kind you'd use for training a dog except it made no sound when you blew it. He put it in his coat pocket and forgot about it till a slow shift a fortnight later. Standing at the rail with nothing to do, he blew it just to hear the nothing. After a minute there was a sound out on the flats, a kind of suck and drag, like something pulling its foot out of wet ground. Long way off. He said he didn't think much of it at the time. Tide does strange things to mud, he told me, twice, as if I'd argued.

Second time he told it we were in his car outside the crematorium waiting for the rest of the family, and the story had grown a bit. Same whistle, same wall, but now he said he'd blown it twice that night, not once, because the first sound hadn't satisfied him. He wanted to know what it was. Second time, the sucking sound came again, and it was closer, close enough that he could hear it stop and start, like the thing pausing to get its bearings. He went home and didn't touch the whistle for a week. Kept it in the biscuit tin with his fishing weights, an old Huntley & Palmers tin gone soft at the corners, which struck me as an odd place to keep something you were frightened of.

Third time was the last time he told it, at my mother's sixtieth. Half a glass of red in him, everyone else talking over the top of the story so I had to lean in. He said there was a third night. He'd told himself he wasn't going to use the whistle again, but the shift was long and the wall was cold and he had it in his pocket out of habit, the way you carry a lighter you've quit needing.

He blew it once. This time there was no waiting.

The sound came from directly below the wall, right at the base, close enough that he felt it through the concrete under his boots. It didn't sound like something pulling free of mud anymore. It sounded like something climbing.

He said he didn't look. He put both hands over the whistle in his pocket like that would undo it, and walked the rest of his round with his eyes fixed on the middle distance, not stopping till the depot lights came into view. He wouldn't say how long that walk took. Longer than it should have, was all he'd give me.

I asked him what happened to the whistle. He said he threw it back over the wall the next morning at low tide, as far out as he could manage, past the last groyne, out where the mud takes three days to firm up enough to walk on. Then, almost as an afterthought, he mentioned his dog wouldn't go near that stretch of wall afterwards, wouldn't even the following spring, and never explained what that had to do with anything, and neither did I ask.

He still had the mark on his palm from gripping his coat pocket so hard the fabric had bitten into the skin. He showed it to me across the table, a thin white line across the base of his thumb, and went back to his cake, cutting it into smaller and smaller pieces without eating most of them.