The Last Week

The canvassers came down the street on the Friday afternoon in a group of five, with rosettes and clipboards and a candidate in the middle of them, working the shopfronts one at a time like a team clearing a hedge.

Caleb watched them come from the window, where he was putting a new card against the atlas because the ink one had faded too. They did the stationer’s next door, and the stationer came out on to the pavement to argue with somebody, pleasantly, with his arms folded. Then the bell over Pell’s door rang, and the candidate came in alone and left the others outside, which was either good manners or good tactics, and Caleb could not tell which.

She was a broad woman of about sixty in a linen suit, with grey hair cut short and a red rosette, and she looked round the shop the way most people did, as if she had not known it was there. Then she saw Mrs Pell and her face changed.

“Agnes.”

“Delia,” said Mrs Pell, without getting up.

“I didn’t know this was you.”

“It’s been me for forty years. It says so on the window.” Mrs Pell took off her glasses. “You’ve had my vote for ten of them and you’ve never once bought a map.”

“I’ve never needed one. I’ve never left the District.” Delia Marsh laughed, a short loud laugh, the laugh of somebody who had stood at a great many doors. “Agnes, I’m not going to ask you. I know where you are.”

“You don’t know where I am. You think you know.”

“Then I’ll ask.” The Member for New Westminster put her clipboard on the counter. “Can I count on you on Thursday?”

“You can count on me being there,” said Mrs Pell. “You can wait and see what I do when I’m there, like everybody else.”

Marsh laughed again, and turned, and saw Caleb at the window.

“And you?”

“I work here.”

“I can see you work here. Do you live in the District?”

“Yes.”

“Then you’ve got a vote, and I’d like it.” She came across the shop to him and held out her hand, and he shook it. Her hand was dry and strong and she held on a moment too long, the way canvassers did, to make it hard to say no. “Delia Marsh. Labour. I’ve been the member for ten years. What’s the issue for you?”

He looked at her. Behind her, through the window, the canvassers were waiting on the pavement in the heat, and one of them was looking at the card against the atlas, reading it with his lips moving.

“The Territory,” he said.

Marsh let go of his hand. “Everybody’s issue is the Territory. Ten years I’ve been knocking on doors in this city and nobody has ever said the word Loreto to me, and now nobody says anything else.” She looked past him at the window, at the card. “Did you write that?”

“Yes.”

“Nobody knows.” She read it. “Well, that’s true. Nobody knows.” She looked back at him. “I’ll tell you what I tell everyone. I voted with the government in July, and I’d do it again, because I thought a settlement in the middle of a security campaign was a bad settlement, and I still think so. And I’ll vote for a count. The first day, if there’s a vote on it. Because the woman from the Bloc’s right about that, even if she’s right about nothing else.” She took a card from her clipboard and gave it to him. “Will that do?”

“I’ll think about it.”

“That’s what people say when they mean no.”

“It’s what I say when I mean I’ll think about it.”

Marsh looked at him for a moment longer than she had looked at anybody else in the shop, and then smiled, briefly, as if he had said something she approved of without agreeing with.

“Fair enough,” she said. “Thursday. Polls open at seven. The school on Fenwick Street, if you’re on this side of the Axis.” She went back to the counter and picked up her clipboard. “Agnes.”

“Delia.”

“Buy a map one day,” said Mrs Pell. “It won’t kill you.”

The bell rang. Through the window Caleb watched the five canvassers close round her again and move on, to the closed-down tailor’s, where there was nobody to canvass, and past it.

---

Mrs Pell did not say anything for a while. She sold a set of county maps of Vermont to a retired couple, and a street atlas to a courier, and a children’s globe with a light inside it to a man who said it was for his granddaughter’s birthday and then asked whether it came in blue. It did not. He took it anyway.

At four, when the shop was empty and the sun had come round off the window and on to the plan chests, she took her glasses off and folded them and put them on the order book, and looked at him across the length of the counter.

“Have you got a vote?” she said.

He was pricing a box of guides. He stopped, with the pencil in his hand.

It was the first question she had asked him in two years about himself.

“Yes,” he said.

“I thought your lot didn’t.”

He put the pencil down.

She was looking at him steadily, the way she looked at a map she was pricing, with no expression at all. She had said your lot in the same voice in which she had said the third drawer, not the second, and she was not going to say it again, or explain it, or take it back.

“Everybody has a vote,” Caleb said. “Every citizen. It’s in the Rights Act. It isn’t only a right, it’s guaranteed, and nobody can take it away from you for anything, including being given a title. A peer can’t sit in the Commons. He can still vote for the people who do.”

Mrs Pell considered that for a while.

“That’s the first sensible thing I’ve ever heard about the House of Lords,” she said.

“There are others.”

“I’m sure there are. I haven’t heard them.” She put her glasses back on. “You’ll vote, then.”

“Yes.”

“Good,” said Mrs Pell, and went back to the order book, and that was all.

He stood with the pencil in his hand for a long time. Then he priced the guide he was holding, a guide to the walking country of Cascadia from about 1995 that was probably worth less than the paper, and put it on the pile, and picked up the next one.

She had known all along, then. Or for a long time. Or since Samuel. He did not know, and would not ask, and she would not tell him, and he understood, standing there in the late sun with the guides, that the not asking had been something she was doing on purpose, every day, for two years, and that she had just stopped doing it for exactly one question, and then started again.

“Mrs Pell.”

“Mm.”

“Thank you.”

“For what?” said Mrs Pell, without looking up. “I haven’t done anything. Price those guides.”

---

He worked late in the back room every evening that week, with her permission.

She had given it on the Monday in one sentence, which was that he could use the table in the back after hours if he turned the lights off and didn’t touch the kettle, because the kettle was temperamental and she was the only one it trusted. The back room was a narrow space behind the curtain, with a sink and a gas ring and the kettle, and shelves to the ceiling of stock and files and boxes of maps that had come in lots and never been sorted, and a deal table under a single bulb. He sat at the table after six with the committee’s papers spread out in front of him and worked until nine or ten, with the sounds of the street coming through the shop and the bulb ticking over his head.

The committee had lapsed. There was no committee. There would be no committee until the new Parliament met and appointed one, if it did, and there was no certainty he would be on it, or that it would be about the Territory at all. Nobody had asked him to do anything. He did it anyway.

What he was doing was writing down how you would count four million people.

He had started on the Sunday night after Newport, at the kitchen table in the flat, and moved it to the back room because the flat was too quiet. It was not a report. It was notes, in pencil, on lined paper, in the order he thought of them. How many enumerators. Where you would find them: in the Territory, from among the people being counted, who knew the streets and the language and which doors would open and which would not. What the forms should be in, which was Spanish first and English second, and in the indigenous languages of the sierra and the south where those were the languages people spoke, because a count that could not be answered in the language of the person being counted was not a count. How long it would take. What it would cost, roughly, which he did not really know, and wrote down that he did not know.

What you would do about land. That was the hard part. Mexican land law had things in it with no American counterpart: the ejido, the agrarian community, the holding in common that could not be sold in the ordinary way. A count that asked who owns this house would get an answer that meant something in one law and nothing in the other. He wrote three pages on it and crossed out two.

What you would do about people who did not want to be counted. There were some. There would be more. He had heard them in Tijuana and La Paz: people who did not trust a government that had bought them, and did not see why they should tell it who they were. He wrote: A count that compels is not the same as a count that is answered. The second is slower and more accurate. Ask first. Ask twice. Do not fine. He underlined Do not fine.

On the Tuesday night Mrs Pell came back to the shop at half past eight, which she never did, with a cardigan over her arm, and stood in the curtain of the back room looking at him.

“I left my cardigan,” she said, holding it up.

“You’ve got it.”

“I had a spare.” She looked at the table, at the pages, at the pencil, at the cold cup of tea he had made with the kettle she had told him not to touch. “What is all that?”

“Notes.”

“For your committee.”

“There isn’t a committee. It lapsed.”

“Then who’s it for?”

He thought about it.

“Whoever has to do it,” he said.

Mrs Pell looked at the pages for a while longer. Then she came into the back room and put the second cardigan on the back of the other chair, and filled the kettle, and lit the gas ring, and stood with her back to him while it boiled.

“You used the kettle,” she said.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right. It’s never let anybody else use it before.” She made two cups of tea and put one in front of him, and took the cold one away and poured it down the sink. “It must like you.”

She didn’t sit down. She stood by the sink with her own cup in both hands and looked at the shelves, at the boxes of maps nobody had sorted in thirty years.

“My husband did the count,” she said. “In nineteen-ninety. The ordinary one, the national census. He was an enumerator for the old quarter. He walked every street in it with a clipboard for six weeks, in the spring, and knocked on every door, and he came home every night and told me who he’d found.” She drank some tea. “There was an old man on Fenwick Street who hadn’t been counted since nineteen-fifty because nobody had ever found his door. It was round the back, off an alley. Arthur found it. He was ever so pleased.”

Caleb didn’t say anything.

“He said the whole job was finding the doors,” said Mrs Pell. “Not the people. The people are easy, once you’re there. It’s finding the door.” She put the cup down in the sink. “You’ll want to write that down.”

She took the spare cardigan off the chair and went out through the curtain. He heard her cross the shop and the bell ring as she let herself out, and the key in the lock behind her.

He wrote it down. The whole job is finding the doors. He sat and looked at it for a long time under the bulb, and then he underlined it twice, and put it at the top of the first page, above everything else.

---

On the Wednesday, the eve of poll, the shop was quiet all day. Nobody bought anything much. People came in and walked round and looked at things and went out again, as if they wanted to be somewhere with the radio off.

At five Mrs Pell turned the sign on the door, and took the radio down from the shelf behind the till, and turned it on for the news, though it was not a Friday. The last day of the campaign. The Conservatives had held a rally in Philadelphia with a choir. Labour’s leader had spent the day in San Antonio, where she was born, and said nothing new. The Liberal Federal Democrats had issued a statement about the Rights Act that nobody understood. Alternative for the Realm had held a rally in Phoenix at which a man had held up a sign saying FIVE VOTES. NOT OURS. and had been cheered for four minutes. The Left and Solidarity Bloc had not held a rally at all. Its leader had spent the day knocking on doors in her own constituency in Minnesota, and when the ABC asked her why, she had said that it was where her vote was, and that she did not see what a rally was for.

Mrs Pell turned the radio off.

“Tomorrow,” she said, “I’m shut till eleven.”

“All right.”

“I vote at a quarter past seven. Then I have a boiled egg. I’ve done it at every election since nineteen seventy-two.” She put the radio back on its shelf. “My husband used to have two eggs. He said a general election was worth a second egg.”

“I’ll come in at eleven.”

“It’s Thursday. You don’t work Thursdays.”

“Parliament’s dissolved,” said Caleb. “I haven’t got anywhere else to be on Thursdays.”

Mrs Pell looked at him over her glasses.

“No,” she said. “I don’t suppose you have.” She picked up her bag. “Do the blinds. And don’t forget the inch.”

He did the blinds, the inch down and then all the way, and stood in the dim shop for a moment after she had gone, with the plan chests and the globes and the travel guides, and the atlas in the window on its easel with the new card against it, in ink.

THE TERRITORY OF LORETO. About four million people. Nobody knows.

Tomorrow the whole Realm would vote, and he would be one of the people voting.