The Whistling Man
Chris Spriggs
I am making my way home, walking up from the bottom of town, past Woolworths. I have made this journey a thousand times and more. But this time it’s different. I can hear something distinctive in the distance. It slices through the moaning traffic and verbal pedestrian jabber and homes in on my consciousness. My twisting thoughts are put on pause and the clamour of my heart is shocked into stillness.
Amid the babbling foreign conversation that engulfs me, the growl of cars and squeak of buses held up in frustration, the footsteps thumping impatiently on the street, amid all this, you whistle. Life is unravelling itself right in front of you and you just stand there, and whistle.
You are not famous. I still don’t know your name although I know someone who does. You seem vulnerable, your body swaying to and fro as if held in your mother’s arms, clutching a white stick that tentatively guards the transparent Tupperware box at your feet in which you collect your reward. In fact, I realise you haven’t ever seen the passing people or the money they throw for you. You can’t. I don’t know for how long you have been blind, but it is not difficult to detect.
I continue to pound up the street aware that my high speed day is being slowly hijacked by a simple tune, being whistled without a metronome or accompaniment.
I see you but it’s not the sight that captures me. It’s that tune. My feet change down gears as I approach and I see that the tub is peppered with brown and silver coins. And for you, I imagine, memories, hope, and confusion.
This is a strange and beautiful narrative for my journey home, a soundtrack supplied free from your lips that has my memory spinning . Then it clicks.
‘Make me a channel of your peace; Where there is hatred let me bring your love
Where there is injury your pardon Lord; And where there’s doubt true faith in you
Oh, Master grant that I may never seek; So much to be consoled as to console;
To be understood as to understand; To be loved as to love with all my soul.’
I have been caught unguarded. Somehow I want you to know that your tune did not just evaporate into the black hole of passing pedestrians and angry Ford Escorts. Your tune metamorphosed into a prayer, and there in the middle of Wood Street, at the centre of a bustling tourist town, your whistling prayer invaded me. Now, it is engraved on the inside of my history, not in words but written in crotchets and semi-quavers in a key that heaven knows and understands.
