Witness account · 4 min read · Set in Wakeham ·
The Sweep of My Street Returns
A night sweeper finds his own stretching dry again by the middle of the round, whatever the rain insists.
- reliability: corroborated
- witness: "Edwin Marsh, street sweeper"
I have swept Wakeham's low end for eleven years, and the round I run is the round I was given, no more to it than that. You start at the harbor stair at half past ten and work uphill against the gulls, and the last stretch before the depot is the top of Rope Street, where the cobbles hold the wet like a held breath. I am not a man for noticing things. I am a man for a clean kerb. But what happened through October came to me the way arrears come, quietly and all at once, and I will set it down the way it went, without dressing it.
The rain that month came sideways off the water and never once let up properly. In that weather a sweeper's work is a joke; the gull litter washes back, the leaf rot comes down the channels in brown ropes, and by two in the morning the street behind me is as bad as the street ahead. Any sweeper will tell you that is the shape of the thing. You do not look behind. There is no point.
What there was, was this. Halfway down my round there is a phone box by the old bakery, and I have always used it as my halfway mark, because the bakery clock stopped at some time I never learned and the box stands where the light from the lamp falls flat. From that box to the top of Rope Street is eleven years of knowing exactly how long the rest of the work is, and I know it the way you know your own teeth.
On the fourth of the month I stopped at the box to rest my hands, and because the rain had eased for a moment I happened to look back down the hill. The street behind me was dry. Not clean-and-wet, which is normal; dry, the way it is at the end of August, with the leaf rot standing in neat piles at the kerb as though someone had carted it off and stacked it for me out of kindness. I put it down to the wind. The wind in Wakeham runs one way only, off the water, and it could not have dried a street any more than it could have folded the piles.
I finished the round. The top of Rope Street was, as always, filthy, and I filthied my way through it to the depot and logged off at four. On the fifth it was the same, except that when I looked back I was further along than the box, closer to Rope Street, and dry road ran all the way down to the harbor stair. On the sixth I did not look back until the top of Rope Street, and there was nothing left to do at all. My stretch, swept dry, in the rain. The piles at the kerb were evenly spaced. Spacing is not kindness. Spacing is arithmetic.
I did what a man does. I said nothing, and I swept my mile of it anyway, pushing dust along wet cobbles like a man pushing water uphill, because the town does not pay me to be dry, it pays me to be finished. By the third week the round had drawn in from both ends and my halfway mark moved past the bakery to the chandler's, then past the chandler's to the bottom of Rope Street itself. I still worked. I want that set down plainly. I still put in the hours on a street that no longer needed them, because I did not know what else my hands were for.
The last night of October I arrived at the top of Rope Street at ten past two and stood in the rain on a street of dry stone. I could see the whole of my run below me, pale and empty and stacked, and the sea beyond it, and I thought about the eleven years and what they had been for, and I did not like the answer the night was offering. I signed off early for the only time in my life. The foreman marked it down without a word, as though early departures were a thing he had rehearsed.
I asked my relief man on the first of November whether he had ever looked back down Rope Street mid-round. He said he had, once. I asked whether the street had been dry. He said the street had been worse than wet, but that was all he would say, and he washed his hands while he said it, and nobody else on the crew has ever confirmed anything, one way or the other.