2017 was of course the year of the election we lost but which felt like a victory. We were so sceptical, so used to disappointment that we had already told ourselves it was irrelevant, didn’t matter, the work would go on regardless and that what was really important was the local project we were involved in. A Labour victory would help to facilitate things but we should expect vested interests to throw everything they could against any attempt to pull the status quo round in our favour. I decided to ignore the results, and while most of our local groups were watching it in the pub I decided to sit it out at home, pretending to be busy reading something and furtively clicking refresh on the BBC news page. Chris was waiting it out at the kitchen table, also feigning disinterest. We were too tense to sit in the same room comfortably together.
He saw it first: hung parliament and shouted through from the kitchen, voice a little incredulous. Really? I asked back with equal protective scepticism but there it was. We were in power, almost, perhaps. Or if not, within an inch of it and all of it done with the full weight of the media and the powers that be against us. We had known something was building but had never anticipated this. We met in the hall, both of us roiled by an emotion we couldn’t express, by a relationship to things we had never known, victory or as sure as it could be. Now we just had to wait for the results to come in and relish them. Our phones buzzed multiple times in the rooms behind us, messages coming in from the rest of the crew. We have done it.
We. My crew. Our victory. But what had my role been in it really? I had done some canvassing, proven reasonably adept at it, helped to man the stall in the town centre on occasional Saturday afternoons, some leafletting. Still, I wanted to celebrate. Chris looked at me, eager but a bit uncertain, I had a tendency to stamp down on moments of excitement and enthusiasm, hope and joy were painful to me. I had got so used to living without them. Too many false dawns.
Should I go and get a few beers, he asked, apprehensive, almost as if he were asking my permission to celebrate.
I had more or less stopped drinking around that point, the hangovers got worse and worse, physically and psychologically. I had drunk too much in my twenties probably when I was at my most lost and even a couple of pints had me feeling anxious and queasy for the next few days. But just as in my twenties I knew the optimism, the endorphin release would carry me through, so different to the last election of 2015 when the next day in work there had been nothing but tight despair on everyone’s face. Well, except for the economics teachers. As we stood in the hall Jay came back from wherever he’d been, the Laundry we assumed, sitting around after his shift had finished just to have somewhere to be that wasn’t with us.
He stood there in the hall blinking at us. I laughed for some reason. I was filled with enthusiasm I suppose and it seemed to be the first time I had seen him in a long while. He looked older, as though the entry into adulthood had finally happened, physical maturity long delayed by the sheer misery of the previous circumstances we had still never really discussed. He had a wispy little moustache developing and had put weight on, face rounder, stomach getting a bit bigger despite all the physical work he did and despite how little he ate. Terrible food in general, pies, crisps, soft drinks, chips.
He looked alarmed, he was probably already sick of living with us by then, our boring sniping at each other and general sullenness, obsessive arguments over books and politics when we weren't just lying about absorbed in our laptops. Alarming to see us in such high spirits I suppose, the election was meaningless to him, he was unaware probably that it had even taken place at all.
We took advantage of him being so much younger, I suppose, turned him around on the doorstep with a tenner in his fist, told him; 6 cans of Stella for a fiver, hurry up it closes at ten thirty, and off he dutifully trotted.
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