The Swing and the Sweep

I was thirty-three last November when I decided my life needed a hard reset, and the way I did it was to agree to house-sit for my friend Maren's cottage in Crest Bay while she spent the winter working in Dublin. Maren had offered it months earlier, back when I was still with Burt, and I had laughed and said sure, maybe someday. Then Burt and I blew up our two years together in the ugliest way, all shouting in a stairwell and a shoe thrown at a wall, and I called Maren from a coffee shop the next morning with my voice still rough and said, actually, is that cottage thing still on?

She said it was, and that the heat in the keeper's cottage worked fine, and that the clock tower next door only chimed on the hour and you got used to it. I did not believe her about the chiming. I have since learned to sleep through it, mostly.

Crest Bay is a small resort town on the Irish coast, the kind of place that is packed solid in July and half empty by November. I had been there exactly once before, when I was twenty-one, twelve years ago, on a family trip I barely remember except that I got seasick on a boat trip and ate chips on the harbor wall while my parents argued about the map. I could not have found the chip shop again if you paid me. The town remembered nothing of me either, which was exactly what I wanted. I wanted long walks on the empty beach, and a kitchen where nobody had ever said something unforgivable, and a lot of tea.

The cottage sits at the foot of the old ornamental clock tower, which Maren's aunt had looked after for the town before her, and which apparently came with the sitting arrangement in some way I never fully understood and did not ask about. The tower is grey stone with a green copper top, and the cottage is small and warm and smells of peat, and on my first real morning there I made coffee and went out to explore the garden.

The garden is not much of a garden. It is a walled square of patchy grass with a gnarled old pine in the corner, and the pine has a thick rope hanging out of it with a wooden seat knotted at the bottom. A rope swing. An actual rope swing, in a grown woman's rental garden, looking like it had been there since the town was built.

I sat on it, because of course I did, and it held my weight fine, and I swung out over the frost-browned grass with my coffee going cold in my hand like an idiot. There was a note from Maren on the kitchen table when I went back in, propped against the toaster, and I had skimmed it the night before but now I read it properly. Halfway down it said, and I quote, the swing on the pine is old but sound, Dunne from the pub used it in the winter talent show one year and nearly took out the bird feeder, please do not repeat this.

I read that line about four times. The winter talent show. I filed it away under things that sounded charming and possibly made up.

I settled into the town faster than I expected. I learned the bakery closes at two, and the beach is best at half four when the light goes gold, and that the neighbors say hello to you whether or not they know you, which took some getting used to. And I learned that the Harbor Inn, the pub down by the water, runs a quiz every Thursday, and that in the off-season a stranger showing up alone is not strange at all, it is just somebody for the team.

So on my third Thursday I walked down to the Harbor Inn in the dark with my coat buttoned wrong and put my name in the solo column on the sign-up sheet. A woman at the bar named Aoife, sixty if she was a day, immediately claimed me for her team, and I let her, and she was ruthlessly good at the sport questions and hopeless at everything else.

The quiz was halfway through its second round when the landlord tapped the mic and said there would be an intermission demonstration. I expected a raffle. Instead, four men and one woman walked onto the little stage in dark clothes and brushed jackets, carrying long black poles with wire brushes on the ends, and the landlord announced them as the Crest Bay Chimney Sweep Guild, here to show us all how it was done, since half the town still had old flues and half of those were choked with jackdaws' nests.

They went through it like a little play. One of them held up a brush rod and mimed sweeping a flue, another held a dust sheet, and the crowd, half of whom I now realized were in on it, hooted and heckled. And then the woman at the front took off her cap and shook out her hair, and I nearly knocked my gin over.

I knew her. Fifteen years gone and I knew her instantly. That was Robyn Emerson, who had been in my class at school, who I had not seen or thought about properly since we were both eighteen and she went off to do something with her hands and I went off to do something with museums. She was thirty-three now and looked, honestly, better than any of us had a right to look, broad-shouldered and tanned across the nose even in winter, soot smudged along one jaw like she had done it on purpose.

She was mid-bit, telling the crowd about the time a jackdaw flew out of a flue in the middle of her sweep and landed on the mayor's head, and the crowd was roaring, and then her eyes swept the room the way a performer's do, checking her audience, and they stopped on me.

I watched it happen. Recognition, then surprise, then this slow spreading grin that made me feel warm in a way I had not felt in a long time and had not missed, or had told myself I had not missed. She pointed the brush rod straight at me across the pub like a saber and shouted, "Hayley Rios, as I live and breathe!"

The whole pub turned to look at me. Aoife patted my arm and said, "You know our Robyn then?"

"I went to school with her," I said, which was true and also somehow not the half of it, given the look on Robyn's face.

She finished the demonstration at double speed and came straight over while the landlord read out the round scores. She was still in the brushed jacket with the sleeves rolled, and there was soot on her forearm, and she stood in front of me with her hands on her hips like we were sixteen again, except that neither of us was sixteen, we were two grown adults in a pub and my heart was doing something embarrassing.

"Hayley Rios," she said again, like she was checking the words still worked. "The museum girl. What are you doing in Crest Bay?"

"House-sitting. Maren Dolan's place, by the clock tower."

"No," she said, and then, "the swing cottage," and then she laughed, this big open laugh that turned heads again. "I know that swing. I helped put that swing up, actually, back when Maren's aunt still ran the tower. That was the talent show act. Dunne on the swing, me and two others pulling the ropes."

"You nearly took out the bird feeder," I said.

"Who told you that? It was the rose bush, and I'll die before I let the record say otherwise." She pulled out the chair beside me without asking, which felt right, and dropped into it. "Sit with my team after this. The guild drinks together. You can catch me up on fifteen years."

Aoife leaned past me and said, "You'll want her on your team, love, she's useless at sport but she knows every film ever made."

The quiz wrapped, our team came third out of five, and Robyn carried two pints over from the bar and set one down in front of me and settled in across the table, soot still on her jaw, looking at me like I was the interesting part of her whole week.

"Right," she said. "Start talking."

So I talked. I told her about the museum job, the collection I managed back in the city, the grant reports and the school groups and the broken dehumidifier that ran my life for a year. I told her I was thirty-three now and single, and I said it in a light way that fooled neither of us. She listened the whole time with her elbow on the table and her chin in her hand, which is not how people listen at a busy pub table, and she did not once look over my shoulder for somebody better to talk to.

"Your turn," I said. "What happened after school? Last I heard you were doing something with ropes."

"Apprenticeship, then the guild. Old fella named Peadar trained me, and when his knees gave out I bought the business off him. I run the guild now, which sounds grander than it is. It's me, four part-timers, a van, and nine rods." She turned her pint a slow half circle on the coaster. "I'm still single, if that's the next question, and before you ask, no, the soot does not put people off the way you'd think. It's the hours. Nobody loves a woman who smells of smoke and is up a chimney in January."

"You smell fine," I said, and then heard it, and she heard it too, and she grinned and let me off the hook by drinking instead of answering.

"And you? Fifteen years and you've turned up alone in the dead season. What's the story?"

"Breakup. Two years with a man called Burt, ended badly in October, so Maren offered me her cottage and I said yes before she finished the sentence." I shrugged, and it came out smaller than the thing actually was. "I wanted somewhere quiet to be boring for a while."

"Well, you've picked the right town for boring. Though the talent show's in three weeks, so brace yourself for that." She drained half her pint and wiped the foam off with the back of her wrist. "Actually, here's a thing. Since you're living at the tower. I do the works twice a year, oil and check the escapement, and I'm due. Want to see it? The mechanism's older than the town charter and most people never get past the door."

"Right now?"

"Why not. The pubs here stay open till the last one leaves, they'll not miss us."

So we walked, and it was a proper Crest Bay night, cold enough that the air hurt a little and the stars came out hard over the water, and our breath hung in front of us the whole way up the lane. The tower rose out of the dark with its lit clock face and I pointed at it as a tour guide would and said, "I live at the foot of that," and Robyn said, "I know, I've swept the pub chimney forty times and watched you carry shopping in twice," which I chose not to examine too closely.

She had a ring of keys that clinked like a jailer's and she let us into the tower's base, where there was a narrow door and a spiral stair that went up past the clock faces on the inside. It smelled of dust and old oil, and every couple of steps the stair gave a little shudder under our feet. "It moves with the wind," she said when I grabbed the rail. "You get used to it. Maren's aunt used to say the tower breathes."

"It breathes," I agreed, a bit breathless, and we kept climbing.

The mechanism room was smaller than I expected, a box of a room under the clock faces with brass and iron filling one wall, gear trains and weights and a pendulum swinging slow and patient like a metronome for a piece of music nobody else could hear. Robyn got a stepstool out of a corner and showed me the escapement, ticking back and forth, and she explained it in the plain unglamorous way she obviously explained everything, this gear nudges that one, the weights run down, I wind them back up Tuesdays.

"You run the whole guild and the whole clock," I said. "Do you ever sleep?"

"Wednesdays," she said, deadpan, and I laughed harder than the joke deserved, because I was up a dark tower with her and some old feeling had come back from school and set itself down between us as a third person would.

Then she pointed at a hatch in the ceiling, above the