The Seventh of September

The school on Fenwick Street was a red-brick primary school of the eighteen-nineties with GIRLS carved over one door and BOYS over the other, and the polling station was in the hall, through the door marked GIRLS, because the door marked BOYS had been bricked up in nineteen seventy.

Caleb was there at twenty past seven. There was a queue already, out of the door and along the railings, about thirty people in the early light, most of them on their way to work and looking at their watches. A man with a dog. Two nurses in uniform coming off a night shift, leaning on each other. A woman with a baby in a sling who was reading a paperback held up over the baby’s head. Nobody spoke much. It was the quietest queue he had ever stood in. People in it did not look at each other, the way people do not look at each other in a church.

On the railings outside somebody had tied a hand-lettered sign on a piece of cardboard: POLLING STATION. NO CAMPAIGNING WITHIN THE RAILINGS. Beyond the railings, on the pavement, a young man in a Bloc rosette stood with a clipboard, very correctly, exactly one step outside them, and said good morning to everybody who went past and nothing else. On the other side of the gate a Conservative teller sat on a folding stool with a thermos and did the same. They had clearly been there since before six and had clearly been talking to each other, because when Caleb came past the young man from the Bloc was laughing at something the Conservative had said.

The queue moved. The hall smelt of floor polish and children’s paint and the faint warm smell of the radiators, which had not been on since May and had been turned on for the morning by a caretaker who did not trust September. There were climbing bars folded flat against one wall, and a piano under a cover, and paintings by the infants pinned to a board by the stage, a row of houses with smoke coming out of all the chimneys. On the stage, under the paintings, were four plywood booths with curtains, and a black tin ballot box with a padlock, and a long table with three officials behind it and the register open in front of them.

“Name?” said the woman at the table.

She was in her sixties, in a cardigan, with a pair of glasses on a chain, and she had the register open at the right page before he had finished saying it.

“Whitlock. Caleb James.”

She ran her finger down the column. “Whitlock, Caleb James. Flat four, nineteen Orchard Row.” She made a mark beside it with a ruler and a pencil, very neatly. “Thank you, Mr Whitlock.”

Nobody looked up. The man beside her tore a ballot paper off a pad, stamped it on the back with a small brass stamp, and handed it across. Caleb took it and went up the three steps on to the stage and into the booth at the end, and pulled the curtain behind him.

---

The booth was a plywood shelf at chest height, with a pencil on a string tied to a hook. The string was very short. Somebody had worn the pencil down almost to the end and somebody else had sharpened it with a knife.

The ballot paper had seven names on it.

NEW WESTMINSTER, it said across the top, and underneath, in black type, the names in alphabetical order, each with the party beneath it and a box at the right. A Conservative, a woman whose name he did not know. A Green, a man whose name he did. Alternative for the Realm, a name he had seen on a leaflet that had come through the door of the flat and gone straight into the bin. A Liberal Federal Democrat. Delia Marsh, Labour and Social Democratic Party. A candidate for the Left and Solidarity Bloc, a young man called Okafor whose leaflet had said nothing on it at all except the two words and his name and a telephone number. An independent who wanted the District made a polity.

One X. That was the whole of it. One mark, which elected the member for the District and also fed the count that decided the top-ups, though in the District there were no top-ups to decide, because the District had one seat and the floor did not apply to it. One mark for one seat for six hundred and eighty thousand people.

He held the pencil and looked at the paper for a long time.

COUNT THEM. The Bloc’s box. He had said it first, if Oliver was right, in the Lords on the afternoon of the twenty-seventh of July, and a woman in Minnesota had put it on every hoarding in the Realm, and it was the only promise any party had made about the Territory that meant anything. He looked at the box for a long time.

Then he thought about a café across the road from the shop, and a woman in a red jacket putting two sugars in her coffee. She was the only one of them who ever asked us what we thought it should be. She asked it as if she wanted to know.

The Prime Minister had lost. It did not matter now what she had thought. Delia Marsh had voted with her in July and would do it again, she said, because a settlement in the middle of a campaign was a bad settlement, and she would vote for a count on the first day. His father had voted Labour quietly for forty years and never discussed it at the table. His mother was voting Labour with her eyes shut.

He thought about Valdez standing at the despatch box with her hands flat on it, saying that the difference between her and the members who would vote against her was not that they believed it and she did not.

He put his X in the box beside Delia Marsh’s name, firmly, with the short pencil on its short string, and folded the paper once, the way the notice on the wall of the booth said, so that the mark was inside.

He did not feel anything in particular. He had thought he might. He came out of the booth and down the steps and put the folded paper in the slot of the black tin box, and the woman in the cardigan at the table said, “Thank you, Mr Whitlock,” without looking up, and he went out through the door that said GIRLS, into the morning.

The young man from the Bloc said good morning. So did the Conservative on his stool. Caleb said good morning to both of them and walked up Fenwick Street in the sun, towards the shop, with his hands in his pockets.

---

Mrs Pell was eating her boiled egg when he came in at eleven.

She was eating it at the counter, out of an egg cup shaped like a hen, with a small silver spoon, and a slice of toast cut into fingers on a plate beside it, and she did not stop when the bell rang.

“Did you vote?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Don’t tell me.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“Good.” She took the top off the egg with one stroke of the spoon, very cleanly, the way she did everything. “Nobody should ever tell anybody. My husband used to say a vote you tell people about is a vote you’ve spent twice.” She looked at the egg. “I voted at a quarter past seven. There was a queue. There’s never been a queue. Forty years, and never a queue before eight.”

“There was one on Fenwick Street.”

“There was one everywhere. It was on the radio.” She ate some egg. “Turnout’s going to be the highest since nineteen sixty-four. That’s what they said. Everybody’s come out to say something about a place most of them couldn’t find on a map.” She looked across the shop at the window, at the atlas on its easel. “Well. They could now. We’ve sold sixty-one of those.”

“Sixty-one.”

“I counted,” said Mrs Pell. “It seemed appropriate.”

---

The day was very long and very quiet.

Nobody bought anything much. People came in with the look of people who had voted and did not know what to do with the rest of the day, and walked round the plan chests and looked at the globes and went out again. A man bought a map of the Shenandoah and said he was going walking until it was over and he did not want to hear a word about it until Saturday. A girl of about twelve came in alone and asked if they had a map of Loreto she could have for school, and Mrs Pell gave her an old one from the second-hand drawer for nothing and told her to bring it back when she had finished with it, and the girl went out holding it as if it were made of glass.

At one Oliver telephoned the shop.

Mrs Pell answered it, and said “Pell’s,” and listened, and held it out to Caleb across the counter without a word.

“The Ledger,” said Oliver. “Ten o’clock. Bring money. I’ve got a table if I can hold on to it, which I can’t, so get there early.”

“The Ledger’s full of staffers.”

“The Ledger’s full of everybody. That’s why we’re going. I want to watch their faces.” Oliver’s voice dropped. “The exit poll’s at nine. I’ve seen the private numbers. Whit, nobody’s going to win this.”

“Everybody says that before every election.”

“Everybody’s never been right before,” said Oliver, and rang off.

---

The Ledger was a long bar on the corner of Ledger Square, under the arcade where the public accounts of the Realm had been posted on boards since 1792 for anybody to read, which nobody did. It had been a bar since about the same date and a bar for the people who worked on Charter Hill for most of that time. The panelling was dark, the ceiling was very high and very brown, and on an ordinary night there were perhaps forty people in it, most of them in suits, most of them talking about each other.

Tonight there were three hundred. They were standing on the pavement outside under the arcade with their drinks, and in the doorway, and on the stairs to the gallery, and three deep at the bar, and the noise when Caleb came in at a quarter to ten was like the noise in the central lobby on the night of the division, but warmer and louder and with glasses in it. There were television screens at both ends of the room and one over the bar, all on the ABC with the sound down, and a large board somebody had chalked up on the wall by the stairs with the names of the six parties down the side and nothing in the columns yet.

Oliver had the table. It was a small round one in the corner under the gallery, with two chairs and a third chair with a coat on it, and he was sitting at it with a laptop open and his phone propped against a glass and a pint of beer in front of him that he had not drunk, and he was writing on a beer mat with a pencil.

“You’re early,” he said, without looking up.

“You said early.”

“I didn’t think you’d listen. Nobody listens to me.” He took the coat off the third chair and put it on the floor. “Sit. The exit poll was at nine. You missed it.”

“I heard it on the radio in the shop.”

“Then you know.” Oliver turned the laptop round so that Caleb could see it. A table of figures, ranges with dashes between them. “The Conservatives first, about a hundred and seventy. Labour down by thirty. The Alternative nearly doubled. The Bloc doubled. The Liberals lose half. The Greens lose a third.” He took the beer mat and turned it over. On the back, in pencil, very small: 168 + 62 = 230. “The Conservatives and the Alternative together. If the poll’s right.”

Caleb looked at it.

“Two hundred and thirty,” he said.

“Two hundred and thirty,” said Oliver. “Three short. The same number as the division.” He sat back. “If they broke the cordon, if the Conservatives went into government with the Alternative, which they’ve sworn on everything holy they won’t, they’d still be three short of a majority. The cordon doesn’t matter. Nobody has to keep it. It just doesn’t get anybody anywhere.” He picked up his beer at last and drank some of it. “I’ve never seen anything like it. I’ve done this sum twenty times since nine o’clock and it comes out the same every time.”

At the next table, four young men and a woman in Conservative rosettes were looking at the same figures on a phone, and as Caleb watched one of them did the same sum on a napkin and showed it to the others, and their faces changed one at a time, the way a row of lights goes out.

---

The first results came in at half past ten. They were from the eastern cities, the places that counted fast, and they came in on the ABC screens one at a time with a sound like a bell that nobody in the bar could hear, and the room watched each one in silence and then made a noise about it.

A Labour seat in Boston, held, on a much reduced majority. A small groan from a table of Labour staffers by the window. A Liberal Federal Democrat seat in Connecticut, lost to the Conservatives. A louder groan, from the other end of the room, and a young woman there put her head down on the table. A Conservative gain in New Jersey. Cheering from the Conservative table next to them, and then, as they remembered the sum on the napkin, less cheering.

At ten to eleven the screens showed the District.

NEW WESTMINSTER, it said. LABOUR HOLD. And underneath, smaller, the figures. Delia Marsh, a reduced majority, about four thousand down on last time. The Bloc’s young man, Okafor, second, with more votes than the Bloc had ever had in the District by about three times.

A small cheer went up from somewhere near the bar. Caleb watched the screen.

Oliver watched Caleb.

“You voted for her,” Oliver said.

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to.” Oliver looked back at his laptop. “You’ve got the face you had in second year when you’d voted for the wrong person for captain of boats and he won.”

“He was a good captain.”

“He was a terrible captain. He put us on a sandbank.” Oliver typed something. “It’s all right. I’m not going to ask why. I know why. It’s the same reason you do everything. You’d worked out what the honest thing was and you did it even though it wasn’t the clever thing.” He hit a key. “Labour’s going to lose thirty seats tonight and you’ve voted for them. That’s very you.”

“Who did you vote for?”

“Reporters don’t vote,” said Oliver. “We’re not allowed to have opinions. It’s in the contract.” He drank some beer. “That’s a lie. I voted Bloc. Don’t tell my editor.”

---

By midnight the board on the wall by the stairs had numbers in it, chalked up by a barman on a stepladder every quarter of an hour to cheers and groans, depending. Conservatives ahead. Labour falling. The Alternative climbing, seat by seat, through the south and the plains, and every time the barman chalked up another one a table by the far wall where a group of men in dark suits had been sitting all evening without rosettes made no sound at all, but drank.

The Liberal Federal Democrats were losing seats so fast that the barman began rubbing out their total and chalking it up again without waiting for the quarter hour, and the LFD table by the far window had gone very quiet and was drinking steadily, and somebody at it had begun, softly, to sing a hymn.

The Bloc was doubling.

It was doubling everywhere, in the upper Midwest and the university cities and the tenant districts of the big cities, and in places it had never stood a candidate who saved a deposit. Every time the screens showed a Bloc gain, a group of young people near the door who had been quiet all evening gave a short, surprised cheer, as if they had not believed it would happen, and then looked at each other and laughed.

At half past twelve the ABC went live to Minnesota. A sports hall somewhere, strip lights, rows of trestle tables with counters at them in shirtsleeves, and a returning officer at a microphone reading out figures. Signe Halvorsen standing on a platform with four other candidates, in her dark jacket, with no rosette. She was returned by a very large majority. The camera stayed on her face while the figure was read. She did not smile. She nodded once, as if confirming a fact she had been told in advance, and when the returning officer asked if she wished to say anything she leaned to the microphone and said, in her flat Minnesota voice, that she would like to thank the counting staff, who had been up since six, and that she would have something to say on Saturday, and stepped back.

The bar went quiet for her. It was the only time all night it did.

“Saturday,” said Oliver. “Why Saturday?”

“Because she wants to see the whole count first.”

“How do you know?”

“It’s what she said on the radio. She has a view about not having a view until she knows what she’s having it about.”

Oliver looked at him.

“You’ve been listening to her,” he said.

“Everybody’s been listening to her.”

“Not like that.” Oliver turned back to his laptop. “Not like you.”

---

At one the counts from the west began, and at a quarter to two the ABC went to the Territory.

It went to Tijuana first. A hall full of people, many more than the counters, standing at the back and along the walls, in a heat that you could see on the screen in the way the men had their sleeves rolled and the women were fanning themselves with leaflets. The returning officer read in Spanish, and the ABC’s Ximena Alcazar translated over him, quietly, a beat behind. Tijuana North. Inés Carrillo, returned, by a very large majority on a very high turnout, the highest in any constituency the Realm had counted that night.

She was on the platform in the red jacket. She did not say anything. She raised one hand, briefly, to the hall, and the hall made a sound the bar could not hear but could see, a wall of people with their arms up.

Then Tijuana South. Mexicali. Ensenada and the Pacific Coast. La Paz and the Cape. All five returned, every one of them on a turnout above eighty per cent, and Alcazar said, in English, over the last of them, that the five members whose right to sit was before a court had been returned by more votes than any five members in the Realm, and that the court had not yet decided whether any of those votes counted.

The bar was quiet again, but differently. At the table of men in dark suits by the far wall somebody said something short and loud that Caleb did not catch, and somebody else at the same table told him to shut up.

Caleb watched the screen.

He had been in that hall. Not that one, but one like it, in March, in the heat, with the committee, asking questions it could have asked by post. He had sat at a table on a platform like that one, looking at a room full of people standing along the walls, and the woman in the red jacket had sat at the witness table with her hands folded and told the committee that the people of the Territory would count themselves, if nobody else would.

“They’ve done it,” he said.

“Done what?”

“Counted themselves. Eighty per cent.” He looked at Oliver. “Nobody’s going to be able to say they didn’t come out.”

---

At two the barman climbed the stepladder for the last time and chalked up the totals with the last results still to come from the far west, and they did not change by more than a seat or two between then and the morning.

CONSERVATIVE AND CROWN UNION 168. LABOUR 124. ALTERNATIVE 62. BLOC 48. LIB FED DEM 32. GREENS 25.

And under them, separately, in smaller chalk, because the barman was a careful man and had looked it up: LORETO (INTERIM) 5.

The room looked at it. Three hundred people, mostly drunk by now, mostly tired, most of them employed by one of the parties on the board, looked at the six numbers and the five, and did the arithmetic in their heads at the same time, and arrived at the same place, and for a moment nobody in the bar said anything at all.

Oliver had stopped typing. He turned the beer mat over and wrote on the clean side, very neatly, in pencil, and turned it round and pushed it across the table.

233 needed.

CCU + Alt = 230. No.

Lab + Bloc + LFD + Grn + Loreto 5 = 234. Majority of 1. The three parties the country just punished, held up by a party they wouldn’t have and five votes a court hasn’t decided.

CCU + Lab = 292. The two parties that spent six weeks telling everyone what was wrong with each other.

Nothing else.

Caleb read it twice.

“Two ways,” said Oliver. “Two ways to a majority, and both of them are the thing the country just voted against. The Realm’s got a majority. It’s sitting there on the board. Nobody’s willing to be in it.” He took the beer mat back and looked at it. “I’ve never written a sentence like that in my life and I’m going to have to write it at six o’clock this morning for the first edition.”

“What’ll happen?”

“Talks. Four days of talks, maybe a week, at Blackjacks or somewhere like it, while the Governor-General waits and everybody pretends there’s no hurry. Then either somebody does the thing they swore they wouldn’t, or there’s another election in December.” He put the beer mat in his top pocket. “Or somebody thinks of something.”

“Like what?”

Oliver looked at him across the little round table for a long moment, with the noise of the bar going on around them and the chalk numbers on the wall behind Caleb’s head, and the ABC on all three screens showing a map of the Realm coloured in by party with nothing in it that added up.

He didn’t say anything.

“Like what?” said Caleb again.

“I don’t know,” said Oliver. “Something nobody’s thought of.” He closed the laptop. “Come on. I’ve got to be at the bureau at five and I want to walk. Walk with me.”

---

They walked out across Ledger Square at a quarter past two.

The square was full of people coming out of the bars, in twos and threes and larger groups, some of them singing and some of them arguing and most of them quiet. Under the arcade the boards of the public accounts stood in their frames where they had stood since 1792, lit by the lamps, columns of figures that nobody had read all night either. A Bloc poster had been pasted on a pillar, with nothing on it but the two words, and somebody had written under them in marker pen WE DID, and somebody else had crossed it out and written NOW WHAT.

They walked down towards the Axis. Charter Hill was dark except for the dome of Parliament House, white against the sky at the end of it, lit as it was every night, for nobody, over an empty building that would not be filled again for ten days. The air was cooler than it had been for weeks. There was a smell of rain coming, from somewhere over Virginia.

Oliver walked with his hands in his pockets and his laptop bag over his shoulder and said nothing for a long way, which was unlike him.

At the corner of Orchard Row, where Caleb turned off for the flat, he stopped.

“Did you buy beer?” he said.

“What?”

“Beer. For when things happen. I told you to buy some.”

“I bought some.”

“Good,” said Oliver. He looked at Caleb under the streetlamp, and then away, up the street towards the dome. “Keep it in the fridge. Something’s going to happen. I don’t know what yet.” He hitched the bag on his shoulder. “Call me if it does.”

“Nothing’s going to happen to me, Oliver. I sell maps.”

“I know,” said Oliver. “That’s what I keep thinking about.” He raised a hand. “Good night, Whit.”

He walked off down towards the bureau, and Caleb watched him go until he turned the corner by the dark ministries of the Civic Triangle, and then went up Orchard Row and climbed the three flights of stairs to the flat, in the dark, quietly, because it was half past two in the morning.

He did not turn on the radio. He stood in the kitchen for a while without turning the light on, with the city beyond the window and the dome at the end of it where you had to lean to see it. Then he opened the fridge. Six bottles of beer, unopened, in a row on the bottom shelf, cold, where he had put them on Tuesday after work because Oliver had told him to.

He looked at them for a while.

Then he closed the fridge and went to bed, and lay awake until the rain came at four, over the roofs from Virginia, and listened to it, and slept.