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Right Hand Side
The sheer expanses of stone around him had long since ceased to amaze Michael. He came here to this ancient cathedral once or twice a week for some referendum or other, together with half the town’s population. The great buttressed arches echoed with the low hum that any throng of people generates, but Michael kept his head firmly down, and joined his usual queue to make the slow progress along the length of the Cathedral’s hall to the altar.
He would be here for an hour, maybe two, whilst each vote was processed and filed ahead of him. He tried, still bleary in the early morning, to remember what this vote was for. The lifting of prohibition of alcohol, if his reading of the current referendum schedule was correct.
The stone pillars of the cathedral, those at eye level, were cloaked in the red and green banners of the People’s Sovereign Church, the self-styled “saviours of our nation”, and the only government that Michael could remember having ever lived under.
Families, lovers, neighbours and housemates gossiped quietly around him, discussing the latest television dramas, favourite scandals, and re-released pop anthems. Michael, who never attended these votes with anyone, stood quiet and contemplative, shuffling dutifully forward as the queue contined to edge towards the point of voting.
As Michael came closer to the head of his queue, fifteen or twenty people ahead of him now, he became aware, as usual, of the ritual of the voting process. On the dais in front of the queue were a row of Governance Priests, seated before huge piles of voting slips. As each voter reached them, they bent to kiss the priest’s forehead, a reverential gesture designed to signify the peoples’ closeness to their government, and their participation in the great process of governance. The priest would then utter a question, hardly audible, “A cross on the right hand side?”
A “yes” from the voter was interpreted as a positive response to the priest’s question, and a cross would be placed on the right-hand side of the paper, where the “No” vote was indicated. A “No” would simply be interpreted as a “No” vote.
This fact was never spoken of. There was no effective protest to be made against it, no easy way to organise dissent. And curiously, a referendum always seemed to come out 85-90% in favour of the government’s stance on the issue, a relatively low result which was explained, if anyone were to risk asking the right questions forcefully enough, by “clerical errors”.
Now there were two people in front of him. Michael was close enough to hear their responses as each performed the ritual of the vote.
“A cross on the right hand side?”
“Yes.”
“A cross on the right hand side?”
“No.”
Michael stepped onto the dais, and stooped to plant a chaste kiss on the bald forehead of the official seated before him.
“A cross on the right hand side?” the priest murmured.
“No,” Michael said distinctly.
The priest slowly and deliberately marked a large ‘X’ across the “No” on the right hand side of the voting sheet, and finally, something snapped behind Michael’s impassive frown.
“No,” he said shakily. “I answered “no” to your question. I wish to vote “yes” in this referendum. I want prohibition to end.”
The priest had already picked up Michael’s paper from the table, and continued to fold it with slow, infuriating deliberation.
“Are you listening to me?” Michael asked, his voice rising with frustration. He tried to snatch the paper from the priest’s hand, but with a deft movement of the fingers, the priest jerked its edge away from his grasp, without appearing to react at all.
Michael turned away from the dais, and shouted into the crowded hall, “This is all a sham! We don’t actually get to vote! We have no say! We can think what we like about prohibition, adoption, abortion, tax. They’ll just push the vote towards their own desires and carry on. Are we all sheep? What is the point of us even being here?”
The entire hall appeared to freeze in a brief moment of embarrased silence. Suddenly, from high in the arches which Michael had disregarded for so long, four beams of acid-white light leapt into being with a decisive “clunk”. They wavered about the floor of the hall for a moment, a current of awkwardness stalking its way through the voting crowd, until they converged on Michael, pinpointing him on the edge of the platform.
He could sense ripples at the edges of the hall, where stocky Prelates would no doubt now be moving forward in order to apprehend him and take him away. The unassuming, shaven-headed man who had been behind him in the queue moved forward onto the dais, pushing Michael aside as he ascended.
Michael understood perfectly the utter futility of his act. In these last few moments, Prelates still rippling towards him, he stood in his bright isolation, and threw his head back to look up at the great vaulted ceiling above him, which had stood through hundreds of years of oppression and corruption, of joy and song. He marvelled at the actual strength of this revered hallway, and the apparent strength of the system that he could no longer live within. Behind him, his fellow citizens continued to vote.
“A cross on the right hand side?”
