The Petitioners (2 page)

Declan, Fiona, Dan and I stood in a row to greet the people who emerged. The rest of our group huddled in behind us. As far as I was concerned anything could happen, up to and including a volley of machine gun fire. I had a not very highly evolved plan to shove Dan to the ground if that happened. It was all I could think of at the time. It might have been more sensible to make him promise to stay in our hut.

Several men in grey uniforms jumped down, followed by a middle-aged woman in a suit. I was puzzled by the uniforms – but I didn’t mind if they were private security guards, as long as they weren’t under the auspices of some dodgy politician, in or out of power. The woman in the suit was a little more worrying.

‘Hello there,’ she said heartily as she approached. She glanced between Declan and me, maybe trying to work out which of us was the leader. Of course the truth was that neither of us claimed that role, but it would be too much to expect a woman in a suit to understand that.

I wondered where she had been during the storm.

I suppose that was the modern equivalent of wondering what people had done in the two world wars of the twentieth century. But of course, in all these cases chance had played a large part in what individuals’ contributions were.

‘Tanya Fairfax,’ she said, holding out her hand to me. I shook it cautiously. Did this mean I was the leader?

‘Declan O’Donovan,’ said Declan immediately, holding out a hand. ‘This is Fiona. Dan and Gavin.’

‘Gavin Hepburn?’ said Ms Fairfax to me.

I nodded.

‘I was told you were here.’

If anything this piece of information made me even more suspicious than before. Who had told her I was here? Why should anybody be interested enough to pick up that piece of information, let alone pass it on to somebody else? Was there political plotting afoot already?

‘We believe you’re involved in a project to record and document the current situation.’

I still couldn’t make her out. Was she about to have me arrested and dragged off for torture because I’d been interfering in secret government stuff, or did she look as if she was about to put my name down for the Nobel Prize for something or other?

‘I suppose I am,’ I said. ‘It’s on quite a small scale, though. There aren’t enough of us to do it justice. We’ve been working on a bit at a time.’

I glanced sideways at Declan. His expression hadn’t changed.

‘Good,’ said Ms Fairfax. ‘I’m going to get you some more help, Gavin. This is valuable work. A kind of Domesday Book for Scotland.’

I couldn’t help smiling at this echo of my own thoughts.

‘Where’s this help going to come from?’ said Declan suddenly.

‘Oh, we have our methods,’ said Ms Fairfax.

‘It’d be good to know who you are,’ said Declan. ‘Or who you represent?’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Ms Fairfax, not sounding sorry at all. ‘I’m Fairfax Consulting.’

She seemed to expect it to mean something to us. Of course I hadn’t kept up with who was who at the best of times. The company name might have meant something to Emma, but as far as I could remember she had never mentioned it to me. Unless I hadn’t been listening properly at the time. That was all too likely.

‘They thought it would be an idea for me to have a look round, see who needs help, that sort of thing,’ she continued. ‘You’ve got a good set-up here. I think we should be giving you a hand with it.’

Her use of ‘they’ and ‘we’ made me uneasy – and I was the least paranoically suspicious person I knew. I could imagine the dark thoughts that were galloping through Dan’s mind at this moment. I could almost feel the tension that seemed to emanate from his body.

‘The only thing is,’ I said, willing my son to stay quiet, ‘I’m not sure we can support any extra people here. We’re having to spend a lot of our time on basic survival as it is.’

‘No problem,’ said Ms Fairfax. ‘We can help you out with that too. I can get you better equipment, and so on.’

‘Can we have a minute to talk it over?’ said Declan, giving me a hard look. I suppose he thought I would just cave in at the idea of a better roof over my head and the chance to live on army rations for the foreseeable future.

As soon as we were in a huddle, out of earshot of Ms Fairfax and her police escort, he said urgently, ‘This is a trick. I hope you realise that.’

‘In what way?’ I enquired.

‘They’re after something.’

‘What could it possibly be?’ I said. ‘Do you really think we’ve got anything they want?’

‘Well, they want to take us over, then,’ he said, impatient at my apparent lack of understanding. ‘Make us work for them.’

‘Who are they anyway?’ Dan interrupted.

‘Good point,’ said Fiona. ‘Have you ever heard of her before? Or the company?’

The three of them stared at me accusingly. It wasn’t a new experience, but that didn’t help.

‘No,’ I admitted. ‘But can we afford to turn down her offer?’

‘Why don’t we at least find out who sent them?’ said Dan. ‘Maybe it was Mum…’

‘I’m not sure she’s fit enough yet to start organising our lives from a distance,’ I said.

‘Fit enough!’ snorted Declan. ‘We all know that woman would be organising her own funeral from beyond the grave – sorry, Gav. No offence.’

I knew as well as he did – better, really – it was all true. Emma could never resist the opportunity to manage people, especially me. She had probably spotted the opportunity to make my self-imposed, not all that vitally important task into some sort of major humanitarian project. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we discovered Fairfax Consulting was the front for a charity operation that was run not by some tinpot would-be dictator hiding out in the Highlands, as I think the others suspected, but by an international foundation set up by some other popularly elected saint.

I swung round to confront the woman.

‘Who are you working for?’

The other three, caught unawares by my uncharacteristically swift action, turned more slowly.

Ms Fairfax smiled.

‘Fairfax Consulting is employed in this case by a consortium of interested parties.’

‘That isn’t a proper answer,’ scoffed Declan.

‘That’s all I can divulge at the present time,’ said Ms Fairfax, smiling more widely. The old-fashioned turn of phrase was at odds with her smooth forty-something appearance. I wondered if she had ever been a lawyer.

‘We’re not sure we want to associate with somebody whose paymasters are unknown to us,’ said Declan.

Ms Fairfax shrugged her shoulders. ‘Be that as it may. It’s Mr Hepburn we are offering this opportunity to, and he’s the one with the final say as far as I’m concerned.’

I hoped Declan wouldn’t seize on this opportunity to walk out on the whole thing and go back to the Cairngorms, where he and Fiona had once based themselves. But he gave me a quizzical look and said,

‘It’s all down to you then, Gav.’

It wasn’t really a choice. There was no way I could trust a complete stranger with a dodgy cover story over the three people I had been to hell and back with.

I shook my head. ‘Sorry, I can’t do it, Ms Fairfax. We’re all right as we are.’

She raised her eyebrows. ‘Well, I can’t say they didn’t warn me,’ she muttered. She put her hand in the inside pocket of her jacket. For one horrible moment I thought she was going for a weapon, but instead she brought out a small black device and tossed it over to me.

‘My private line,’ she told me. ‘In case you change your mind.’

‘I don’t think I will,’ I said uneasily.

I had a very uneasy feeling about all this. Was she planning to exert pressure to make me re-consider? Did she know something none of the rest of us did? The answer to that second question was almost certainly yes.

It was on the tip of my tongue to call her back as she walked towards the helicopter, but I let her walk away.

If only Emma were here to tell me what to think as she almost always did.

EMMA

I still couldn’t believe we had been brought to the specialist hospital near Pitlochry. I had heard of it before the storm. Much of the research and development that had once been carried out in Edinburgh and Glasgow and Dundee had been transferred there once the water levels began to rise. In this way, if not others, we had been prepared for disaster. The hospital, built on high ground during a brief phase when the government actually listened to its advisors, and sheltered by higher ground to the west, had survived the storm more or less unscathed, and once inside its walls you might imagine nothing much had changed at all.

I knew it was a centre for cloning technology, not in the sense of growing whole new people from a single cell or anything futuristic, but for growing new body parts for people who needed them. I didn’t know why they had brought me here. I didn’t need specialist care, as far as I could tell, just rest and antibiotics, and maybe an odd skin graft or two.

It seemed unfair to be here in these hi-tech surroundings at a time when even electricity was a luxury only available intermittently to the few, and when Gavin and the others had more or less reverted to the living standards of long ago, but before I had even begun to feel depressed or guilty about being so far from the action, I saw a couple of people I knew. They were both terribly ill, of course, but that wasn’t the important thing.

I didn’t recognise the first one, because he was brought in with his face almost entirely covered in bandages. I had seen a few others in this state, and one of the medical staff had told me in a matter-of-fact way that they had been battered against house walls, or rocks, or other unyielding surfaces, until their own mothers wouldn’t know them. I asked the young doctor if plastic surgery was still a possibility or whether they would be horribly scarred. He shrugged and told me that in many cases it was unlikely the patients would survive, so they would only receive palliative care.

I was about to register a protest when I realised all over again the extent of the crisis we were in, although regardless of that, we couldn’t sacrifice all the values of compassion and caring that we Scots, perhaps undeservedly, thought we had cornered the market in.

Jen was more casual about it than I was.

‘They might not survive anyway,’ she said when I tried to talk to her about it. ‘If they get enough drugs, they won’t know any different.’

‘I don’t know where you got that attitude,’ I said reproachfully. ‘Even Gavin…’

‘What do you mean, even Gavin? He saved our lives, remember?’

She slumped into the chair by my bed. I was fortunate enough to have a curtain separating me from the rest of the ward, and a proper hospital bed. I hoped it wasn’t the case that my former power and influence had bought these arrangements for me. Better to be lying on a pallet on the floor alongside all the rest than that.

I sat up in bed, wincing as my good leg touched the other one. The one that, according to the doctors, I was lucky still to have. The amount of pain it gave me day and night, I didn’t feel all that lucky. But at least I didn’t have to face extensive surgery to attach a new one, which I was convinced could never be the same as the original, no matter how much cloning research had gone into its making. I gathered it had been a close call, what with the enforced delay in starting treatment and the infection that had set in subsequently. I wasn’t planning to dwell on that, though.

The new patient with the bandaged face was whisked past us on a trolley and along the ward to where I knew the private rooms were. I glanced at Jen and raised my eyebrows.

‘So much for not wasting resources,’ I said.

‘Must be somebody important,’ she muttered.

‘I wonder who’s important enough for a private room these days,’ I mused.

‘If he was anybody really special he’d have his own hospital, never mind a private room,’ said Jen. ‘He wouldn’t have to come to this dump with all the riff-raff.’

I was on the brink of jumping out of bed and giving her a good shake when I saw that she was holding back a laugh.

‘It’s so easy to wind you up, Mum,’ she said, giving into it and giggling like the school-girl she had been only months before. ‘Like shooting fish in a barrel.’

I had never liked similes about shooting. Or anything else about it, for that matter. But I did wonder who the mysterious new arrival might be. What if it was somebody I knew – from before?

That was when I realised that our lives from now on would be divided into the part before the storm, when everything had been normal, more or less, that is if you didn’t count my son being arrested for being part of a rebel group and my husband and daughter having to go into hiding for no particular reason, and after the storm, when nothing made sense any more. I suppose almost everybody who lived through that time probably felt the same, even if they didn’t create an inner narrative to go with the feeling.

I was surprised, a couple of days afterwards, when I got the chance to find out more about the man of mystery. Not that I knew it was a man, of course.

I was walking down the corridor, accompanied by Jen, on my compulsory daily lap of the hospital, an activity for which the sound track involved a lot of bad language on my part, especially when I got tired and the leg hurt more than ever. Somewhat unexpectedly, we came to an open door. Of course there were lots of doors leading off the corridor, and seeing one open wasn’t anything out of the ordinary either. What was unexpected was that in this case there were two security men standing outside.