Tally

The count centre is the leisure centre. It's always the leisure centre. They put the badminton nets away and roll out the long tables and the boxes come in from the polling stations sealed with tape, and for one day a year, or some years not at all, the whole constituency's business is done on a floor that smells of chlorine. My father tallied for the party for forty years. Tallying, if you've not seen it, is this: when the boxes are opened and the ballots are unfolded and sorted, before any official count, people from every party stand behind the barrier with clipboards and count what they can see over the counters' shoulders. First preferences. Box by box. You get a number out of it hours before the returning officer does, and by lunchtime the whole hall knows who's in and who's out and the official result at nine at night is a formality with speeches. He died in the spring. The party rang in October and said they were short in Ballyduff and would I. I said I'd never done it. The man said, "You've stood beside him, though," and I had, since I was old enough to hold a pen. Eight a.m. The boxes open. You get your table, your box, and you stand there in a coat with a biro and a sheet with the candidates down the side in the order they're on the ballot, and the counter, who is usually a woman from the council with reading glasses on a chain, lifts each paper and shows it, half a second, and you mark the stroke. It's fast. It's faster than you'd think. You get one in ten wrong at the start and one in fifty by the second box. Your hand cramps. The man beside you from the other crowd, who you've known since school, is doing the same thing with the same face, and every so often you look at each other's sheets, because there's a thing where you check each other. You're rivals and you're colleagues. There's a word for it and I don't know what it is.

Box 11 was our fella's home box. His own townland. My father would have said you could tell the whole election from the home box, because if a man can't carry his own parish he's not carrying anything. I marked it. Two hundred and eleven papers. He got a hundred and four. The woman with the glasses turned the last one and I did the stroke and I stood there and thought, forty-nine per cent, at home, and knew. The lad from the other crowd looked at my sheet. Then at me. "Sorry," he said. And meant it, and also didn't. By half eleven the tallies were in and the hall had the number and our fella, who I could see across the badminton lines in a good coat with his wife holding his arm, was going to lose his seat on the ninth count or the tenth. He'd been in for sixteen years. He knew before we did, I think. He was shaking hands. I found the party man who'd rung me. I gave him my sheets. "Your father'd have had them in faster." "He would." "Same numbers, though." "Same numbers." The official result came at ten past nine. Our fella lost on the tenth count by three hundred and four votes. He made a speech that was better than his winning ones. There was clapping. There was a man crying near the doors and I don't know whose he was. I drove home and put the clipboard on the hall table where my father used to put his, and the biro beside it, and went to bed.