Entity story · 4 min read · Set in Fenwick ·
Carried by a Majority of One
The borough abolished its council in 1973, but the hall's speakers still call a session to order each Tuesday at seven, vote without hands, and are obeyed, and the seventh chair is never named.
The borough of Fenwick dissolved its town council in 1973. The notice went out, the last minute book was closed, and the members went home. The committee itself did not receive the notice. Nobody at the time understood that sentence; it is understood better now, and has never been explained.
The sessions have run every Tuesday since, from the ring of brass horns over the old council table in the hall: the gavel falling without a hand, the Chair's voice dry and thin in the old speakers, the motions read out at 19:00 precisely. The business before it is small and mostly correct. The lamps at the ferry steps come on when the Committee resolves that they shall, fifteen minutes ahead of the photometer. A boundary wall dispute between two households on Thackeray Lane was *taken as read* one August and adjourned to terms both signed by the Friday. A dog licensed in error was un-licensed, and does not go out on Tuesdays now, which the owner has stopped remarking on.
Petitions are entertained. The procedure is exact and has been posted — no one knows by whom — beside the lectern in the public gallery since the seventies, in the same thin grey hand that the minutes are kept in: in writing, delivered to the lectern, on the hall's own paper, using the hall's own blotters. The reply comes not as a letter but as a motion, read into the record the following Tuesday at seven. Agnes Sowerby learned all of this the costly way. Her first petition, regarding the light at the ferry steps, out since the storm, was returned *not entertained* for want of a seconder; there is no such requirement printed anywhere, but it is evidently a real one, and it is evidently being applied to her. She rewrote it three times. In the end she learned, from the caretaker, the hall's grammar: you must move something, and someone must second it, and the someone cannot be only you, writing, you must leave room on the form for a seconder who is not you. The third petition she wrote with a blank line ruled under her name, purposely. At 19:04 the PA read out, *Motion: that the light at the ferry steps be restored.* A voice seconded. The vote was called. Six for. One against. Carried.
The light came on on Wednesday, and the dogs of Ferry Lane have sat themselves at the kerb at dusk ever since, in a row, facing the steps.
Here is what nobody in Fenwick mentions in company. The division has stood at six to one for fifty-one years. Agnes has the bound volumes — the burgess's archive in the hall cellar, all the minute books — and the story of the votes is in front of any reader: motions on fences, motions on ferries, motions on chimney smoke, carried six to one, six to one, six to one, whatever the matter, whatever the weather, whatever the year. The volumes have a line under the speaker for attendance, and the attendance runs *six, and the Chair*, and no matter how many chairs stand in the ring — seven, and Agnes has counted them in daylight and counted them again after dark — the minutes record a seventh member at every session, present, not voting. The seventh member 's name in each volume is blacked out. It is not inked over in a hurry. It is gone in the same grey as the typing, the grey of the minutes themselves, the grey of the hall's one mind's own hand, so that even a lamp held low in the cellar will not pick up what was under it.
Edwin Coles, the caretaker, was born in the hall's cellars in 1951 and has the cheery vagueness of a man who has been paid to keep the same building for fifty years. He refills the blotters and changes nothing else. When Agnes asked him straight, in the broad daylight, whether the Chair was a person, he considered the question for a long moment and said the gavel counts as one of the seven, which is somewhere between acid help and no help at all.
The question she asked at seven was ruled out of order, kindly, the way an usher holds a door. She has not asked again. But the hall has begun sending things back to her in her own hand, and what she cannot reconcile — and what she keeps in her handbag now, on the back of a meter card, where her father kept his racing pages — is the arithmetic. Six speak, and six are obeyed. One dissents, every time, on every matter, and the hall has never once named the one; and the seventh is present, not voting, in a chair Agnes has touched on nine Tuesday evenings at 19:09, with her fingertips, and never found cool.