The Petitioners (12 page)

Mark smiled evilly. ‘I’ll get you there.’

‘We don’t have a boat,’ I said.

‘We will have,’ he told me.

I resigned myself to facing a watery grave. Oh well, it couldn’t be worse than being massacred by armed raiders in the hills, could it?

DAN

I felt bad about not telling Dad, but Fiona said it was for his own good.

‘If he breaks under torture, he’d feel terrible if he incriminated you, wouldn’t he?’

‘Nobody said anything about torture,’ I muttered.

‘I’m joking, you idiot. But if he knew, he’d try and stop you, wouldn’t he, and we’d never get anywhere.’

We made a temporary camp in a hut in the middle of a golf course the first night. Fiona had said we were heading up to Spittal of Glenshee to meet the others, but I couldn’t work out how we were planning to get that far without any transport, or any roads or bridges in some places. Whatever.

I still enjoyed sleeping rough, for the novelty and because it was better than being shut up in the old barracks where I had spent a bit of time before the storm. I liked the freedom and the feeling of being able to decide for myself what direction my life took. I didn’t think my sister would enjoy that so much, but she had been carted off to hospital with Mum, so she wouldn’t have to worry about all that for a while. In hospital, as in prison, they decided things for you.

It wasn’t that I wasted any time on these thoughts from day to day, just that sometimes at night before I went to sleep they would come to me. I used to let myself spend a few minutes on them and then will myself to sleep. It had worked so far.

I supposed we were walking towards the sea, but I couldn’t understand the point of that when we didn’t have a boat or, so I imagined, any way of getting hold of one. Even if the great waves had swept boats inland by some fluke, they had probably been battered to bits somewhere or washed back out to sea. It was unlikely that we would stumble across one.

And yet… Fiona definitely had a plan. She walked on with purpose, not too fast but steadily. I didn’t ask questions. I trusted that she was on the side I wanted to be on. I waited to see what would happen next.

It wasn’t until Declan caught up with us, halfway through the second day of our trek, that I understood a bit better.

We had just crossed a raging torrent she said had once been the Braid Burn before the sea levels started to rise, when we heard somebody shouting behind us. Fiona turned her head and said, ‘It’s Declan. Thank goodness.’

They had one of those silly reuniting scenes when you’d think they hadn’t been together for years, and then we all started walking together. Declan didn’t tell us anything then, but once we had picked our way through the ruins of Newington and could see Salisbury Crags looming in front of us, he began to divulge his cunning plans.

‘Some of the gang are bringing a boat to take us out of Leith and round to the Firth of Tay,’ he said. ‘We’ll get beyond Perth going upriver, and we can walk the rest of the way. Hope you’ve brought your climbing boots,’ he added to me. It was a joke, because he knew I always wore the lightweight shoes Mum had once brought back for Dad from America in the days when she used to travel a bit. Over there they had invented shoes that were practically indestructible, but pressure from the shoe manufacturers meant they never got into the shops here. Or that was what Mum had told me, anyway, when I finally grew into them.

‘I’ll be fine,’ I said.

‘I’m sure you will,’ said Declan with a wink.

‘What are we going to do when we get there?’ I enquired. I had held back on asking Fiona about that, because I thought she would refuse to tell me until Declan said it was all right. Sometimes women are their own worst enemies. Or maybe that was just an outdated myth I had heard about from my father. It happens sometimes.

He and Fiona exchanged glances. Then they both nodded in unison, which looked a bit weird.

‘We’re going to meet with the group and review our options,’ he said.

‘What do you think the options are?’ I asked.

He frowned. ‘Honestly – it’s very hard to tell. It depends a lot on what certain other people do, or plan to do. From what we can gather, there’s no real government right now. That could work to our advantage. But,’ he added as we began to climb up through Holyrood Park, ‘I don’t know if we want to fill that gap or not.’

‘No,’ I said. Even I could see that a group of former rebels might not be up for the task of running a country – especially one that had got into such a bad state. They were more likely to take exception to whatever happened next, and work against it. I pushed this idea aside. I had already made up my mind to go with what Declan and Fiona wanted to do. It was no use having second thoughts now.

I closed my mind to anything my parents might want to do or participate in. My mother had been out of action for a while but she would undoubtedly get back into things sooner or later. There was no knowing whether she would come down on the side of any legally constituted government, if there was going to be one, as she normally would, or whether she might for once consider rebelling.

I smiled as I imagined that scenario. I almost pitied Declan if it came to the point where Mum started a rival revolution.

‘How close will they be able to bring the boat?’ said Fiona.

‘That’s what we’re climbing this hill to see,’ said Declan.

We saved our breath for the ascent. Once we got to St Margaret’s Loch, now at least twice its former size, it was no distance to the minor peak behind it, from where there was a panoramic view across the Forth and out to the North Sea.

I hadn’t even pictured the scene until then. The port of Leith itself, formerly right by the river, had been under water for years, of course, but now the sea had claimed almost the whole expanse of land from Dunbar to Queensferry, and was lapping around Arthur’s Seat itself, not far from where we were standing.  Of course I knew that didn’t necessarily mean it was safe for shipping. Even from here we could see one or two church spires still sticking up from the water, and the tops of a few high rise buildings that hadn’t completely crumbled in the onslaught of the waves. You’d almost need a new set of navigators’ maps to get through it without wrecking your boat.

‘Radar,’ said Declan, as if reading my thoughts.

‘They should be able to do it,’ said Fiona. ‘Daylight would be best, but even at night it isn’t impossible.’

‘It’ll be at night,’ said Declan. ‘We don’t want everybody and his dog seeing what we’re doing.’

We hadn’t seen very many dogs since the storm. Cats, on the other hand, had begun to come out of wherever they were hiding, and seemed to be leading a useful existence killing vermin. They might even have been glad of the chance to get back to their original purpose and be free of all the coddling and overfeeding they got from the people they lived with… I felt quite an affinity with cats, all in all.

Declan was right. Soon after dark, as we sat on the hill shivering, we saw a couple of small lights glinting off the water below. They got bigger quite quickly as they approached. We started down the other side of the hill and Declan signaled with a torch as we got near the water.

Climbing into the small fishing-boat, I had the sense of having burnt my bridges. Wrong metaphor, but there you go.

JENNIFER

Moving Mum was a difficult and lengthy process. I knew it could go badly wrong at any moment.

We didn’t have any form of transport available, so we had to carry her up hill and down dale to get to the nearest safe house. When I say ‘we’ carried her, of course I mean Jeff and Will carried her using the stretcher she had arrived on, and they wouldn’t let me help. Jeff said they needed me in reserve to keep her steady and calm her down if she woke up.

At the same time we had to look out for anybody trying to stop us. They would have had an easy time following us, because it was impossible to do all this silently. There was a lot of crashing as Jeff and Will manoeuvred the stretcher along narrow woodland paths, bumping into bushes and veering off towards trees, and quite a bit of swearing when one of them stopped suddenly and the other bumped into him. Once or twice I thought they were going to drop the stretcher, but somehow they just about managed not to.

I had imagined the new safe house would be a cosy place like Will’s, inhabited perhaps by a rosy-cheeked middle-aged woman who was able to conjure up tasty meals from nothing as if by magic, and maybe also a gruff but kind-hearted crofter whose mastery of the shotgun would protect us from anybody who came looking for us. Sadly these visions were not at all accurate in reality.

Our new temporary home was a deserted hovel even a rat would hesitate to occupy. Our best hope of remaining hidden was that nobody at all would expect us to take shelter there, especially with an invalid recently discharged from hospital in our care.

Will’s backpack turned out to contain some rations that he said would last us a few days, if we weren’t too greedy. After that we would either have to fend for ourselves or move on.

I favoured moving on, of course. The sooner, the better.

‘We’d better stop here for now,’ said Jeff, after Will had left. ‘It won’t do your Mum any good to move her again so soon. We need to see if she’s any better. Let the medication wear off a bit.’

‘It won’t do her any good to hang around here,’ I said.

‘It’ll be fine once we get the fire going and put the kettle on,’ he said. ‘Nothing a cup of tea won’t fix.’

His Cockney chirpiness was out of place here, I thought grumpily. But it was surprising how much difference the fire made, blazing away in the old blackened grate. And having a hot drink didn’t do any harm either, even if it was only tea. He helped Mum sit up and sip at it as well. She didn’t seem completely awake yet, but her eyes opened and she at least took some notice of her surroundings.

Her gaze lingered on me and she suddenly said, ‘Jen?’

‘Yes, it’s me!’ I ran to her side and took hold of her hand.

‘I wondered where you’d gone,’ she said. ‘They wouldn’t tell me.’

I stroked her hair. She smiled.

Maybe everything was back to normal after all.

Some time during the night, that idea went out the window.

I woke up with a start, to hear unearthly screams echoing in my ears. I had chosen to sleep on an improvised bed made of cushions next to my mother, who occupied the only real bed in the cottage. Jeff was on the worn-out settee in the main room.

‘No!’ Mum was screeching. ‘Not my face! Please! No!’

What was all this about her face? I recalled the line of stitches I had seen, and wondered once again what had gone on in the time between my escape from the hospital and her arrival at the cottage.

For the moment I just got up and tried to hold her hand. She jerked it out of my grasp so violently that her fingernails scratched my palm.

‘Mum, it’s all right,’ I said quietly.

‘No – please!’ she sobbed. ‘My face – my face – please don’t! Not that!’

I tried again to calm her by stroking her hair, but this time she grabbed for my hand and slapped it away. I stepped back. It felt as if my presence was making her more agitated instead of calmer, but what else could I do?

I looked up from the bed and saw Jeff standing in the doorway, watching. He shook his head and beckoned me into the other room.

‘Will left me a sedative in case this happened,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Do you think we should use it?’

I was confused by the responsibility. ‘I don’t know… It can’t be good for her to be in this state. But shouldn’t we try and wean her off medication? We won’t be able to get any more if it runs out, will we?’

‘I’m not sure,’ he admitted. ‘What’s all this about her face? Does she look any different from before?’

‘No. Except for the line of stitches… I don’t know what that was about.’

‘She didn’t have any facial injury before she went into the hospital?’

‘No, it was just her leg. It got infected – she was feverish. She had hallucinations then too, but it was nothing to do with her face.’

‘Maybe she fell out of bed and hurt herself.’

‘Fell out of bed – yes, that’ll be right,’ I said. ‘Sorry – I can’t help being a bit cynical about the hospital, considering everything.’

‘No need to apologise. You do far too much of that as it is… Let’s try and get through the night without the sedative if we can. You never know when we might need it.’

It was a struggle not to use the sedative, as it turned out, but it seemed to be worthwhile, for my mother went back to sleep eventually and was reassuringly awake and normal in the morning. She even wanted to get out of bed, and after a while I gave in and let her do that. She was wearing the really awful old tracksuit she had thrown in her bag the last time she left our house in Cramond. She told me she had worn it all the time while she was expecting Dan. I couldn’t remember, of course.

When I was alone with Jeff again, during the afternoon while she rested, he said to me suddenly, ‘Face transplants.’

‘What?’