Doors

The sheet says fourteen doors on Alder Close and the app says the same, and the app also says "3 min max per door," which is a target set by someone who has never stood on Alder Close in March. I'm not the candidate. I'm the candidate's friend from work who said yes at the Christmas do because there was wine. The candidate is Priya, who is thirty-eight and runs a nursery and has decided that the reason the recycling gets missed every third week is that nobody on the council has ever had to put out a bin themselves. That's her platform, more or less. Bins, the bus that stopped, the play park with the broken swing. She's not wrong. Door one, nobody home. Door two, a man who said "no" before I'd said anything. Door three, a woman with a baby on her hip who took the leaflet and said "is this the bins one" and I said yes and she said "good" and shut the door, and I stood there and counted that as a win. The rule is you're not there to argue. You're there to ask if they've heard of Priya, tell them one thing, and ask if they're likely to vote. Three minutes. You write a number on the sheet. Then you go. Door eleven was a bungalow with a ramp. The man who opened it was about eighty, cardigan, slippers, and he looked at the rosette and said, "Which lot are you?" I told him. "Hm." He didn't shut the door. "Come in, then. It's freezing." You're not supposed to go in. I went in. His name was Ron. His wife had died in November. He had a chair by the window with a view of the close and the bins in it, and it turned out he'd been keeping a log. An actual log, in a diary, of every collection since August. Which weeks they came. Which weeks they didn't. Which weeks they came and took the black bin and left the green one, which happened more than you'd think. "Nobody comes round here," he said. "Not your lot, not the others. You're the first since the general."

"That was three years ago." "I know when it was." He showed me the log. Twenty minutes. He'd rung the council seven times and had a reference number for each one, written in the margin, and he'd never had a reply that wasn't a text message telling him his query was important. He wasn't angry, exactly. He was a man who'd been doing something carefully for months and had nobody to show it to. I asked if I could take a photo of the log for Priya. He said I could take the log. I said no, I'd take a photo, and he watched me do it and then made me a cup of tea I didn't have time for and I drank it. At the door he said, "I'll probably vote for her. Don't tell anyone I said probably." I wrote a 4 on the sheet. Then I crossed it out and wrote a 5. Doors twelve to fourteen took nine minutes between them. The app would be pleased. Priya rang that night to ask how it went. I told her fourteen doors, six contacts, mostly positive, and one man with a diary. She was quiet for a second and then said, "Send me the photo," and I did, and the next morning she'd already rung him. I don't know if she'll win. It's a by-election in March. Nobody knows there's a by-election in March. But Ron does.