The Petitioners (3 page)

I recognised them as being from government security. Dark blue suits in the style of several years ago, shiny black shoes that I had no doubt they could see their faces in, blank expressions that might have belonged to men who had been thoroughly brainwashed in some Soviet prison cell. I knew their kind. In a past that was so distant now that I wondered if it had ever really happened at all, I had been protected by men like that.

They glared at us in unison as Jen and I glanced through the open door.

One of them stepped forward in a threatening manner.

‘Somebody important in there?’ I enquired casually.

Their faces became, if it was possible, even more devoid of expression. I wondered if they had practised in front of a mirror.

Jen tugged at my sleeve. ‘Come on,’ she muttered. ‘We don’t want any trouble.’

‘Trouble? How could we possibly get into trouble in a hospital?’ I said to her as we went on our way. I tried not to limp. Something told me not to show any sign of weakness in front of these two.

‘Wow! Who is that in there?’ she said once we had turned the corner and were presumably out of earshot.

‘Somebody they don’t want us knowing about.’ I frowned. ‘I wonder if we can sneak a look at the medical records.’

‘Hmm,’ said Jen. ‘Pity they have them all built into their stethoscopes these days. Or were you forgetting that? Did you think they still had paper copies at the medics’ station that we could riffle through?’

‘I was kind of hoping for a database we could hack into,’ I said, feeling a little nostalgic for simpler times.

‘Hack into? Oh, please,’ said Jen. ‘It’s never been that simple, has it? Except for the nerdocracy.’

‘Is that a word?’

‘It was in the latest edition of the Wiktionary,’ she said smugly.

‘Maybe we can steal a stethoscope, then,’ I said.

‘But they’re personalised, aren’t they?’ said Jen. ‘They react with the doctor’s and patient’s DNA to permit access to certain information. I read all about it once, I forget where. I was in a bus queue or something.’

I ignored the bus queue comment. Jen liked to pretend to be less alert and intelligent than she really was. What with Dan acting like a cross between a teenage secret agent and an elderly rebel, bringing them up had been a bit of a trial. I don’t know what I would have done without Gavin, even if he himself had a tendency to behave like a tiresome three-year-old a lot of the time.

‘We’ll have to try and worm it out of somebody, then,’ I said as we were almost back at the ward. ‘Pity they don’t have cleaners any more.’

‘Cleaners?’

‘Yes, at one time there would have been real people manoeuvring the machines round under the beds and so on,’ I said, amused by the idea that she had never come across human cleaners. ‘Of course, the robots do a much better job at the actual cleaning, but I can remember there was a huge fuss when they took over.’

‘I guess they used to chat to people as they went along,’ said Jen.

‘They were the only ones who ever had time to chat,’ I told her. ‘Now there’s nobody to spread all the gossip.’

She folded back the sheet for me and I dutifully got back into bed.

‘Hmm,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘I’m surprised they haven’t programmed the robots to engage in meaningless chatter, to make up for it.’

I gave her a look. ‘Sometimes I wonder if you’ve spent too much time with your father.’

She laughed.

Dr Watson chose that moment to appear, putting his head round the curtain and saying with annoying cheerfulness, ‘Everything all right in here?’

‘Yes, of course it is,’ said Jen a bit snappily. ‘Why wouldn’t it be?’

He came right round the corner, smiling. ‘No reason. How are you, Mrs Hepburn? I hear you walked right down to the drinks machine today.’

‘My goodness,’ I said, ‘news travels fast around here.’

‘It doesn’t really,’ he said, making a face as he perched on the end of the bed. ‘It’s your location tracker.’

He indicated the bracelet on my wrist. I had forgotten about it, but I must have known all along that it was there. Or had I? There were some blurry moments in my memories of the past couple of weeks. I thought they had been caused by fever, but maybe not…

I pulled myself together. There was no need for any conspiracy theories now. We were all in this together – in the same boat, so to speak. Nobody was spying on me, and certainly nobody was keeping me a prisoner here.

Well, I’m glad that’s clear, I told the tiny paranoid creature who lived in a secret compartment in my mind. I can just concentrate on my recovery and stop worrying about things I have no control over.

‘It was an interesting walk,’ I heard myself saying. ‘We passed a couple of armed guards on the way.’

He started back slightly. ‘Armed guards? What do you mean?’

‘They were guarding the man of mystery,’ said Jen, obviously failing to sense my unspoken instruction not to put her oar in here.

‘The man of mystery?’ His voice became fainter for a moment, but he made a reasonable recovery. ‘We’d better start monitoring your temperature as well, Jennifer. It seems to me you could be developing a fever too.’

‘It was just Mum’s joke,’ Jen mumbled.

He rolled his eyes and took his stethoscope from his pocket. It buzzed slightly. I wondered if it was adjusting to the presence of my DNA or something. One of these days I might catch up with my daughter’s technological knowledge. Maybe if I waited for enough buses…

‘That’s fine,’ he said. ‘All within normal range. We’ll need to watch your blood sugar though, with all this sitting about you’ve been doing. I think you could be ready for one of the exercise machines in a day or two.’

‘Make that three or four,’ I groaned.

He shook his head. ‘It’s the only way. Got to rebuild that muscle mass somehow.’

I didn’t think it was possible to rebuild something you’d never had in the first place, but I didn’t argue with him. After all, I had a feeling Jen had a soft spot for the man, and I thought we might be able to use that to find out more about my mysterious stranger.

It was a tantalisingly slow process, much like my recovery. The fact that Jen seemed oblivious to my plan to use her as a pawn in my evil game made it worse. I could hardly force her into Dr Watson’s arms, after all. In the end I had to pretend to do something bad so that the two of them would gang up against me.

I bribed one of the patient care assistants, whose job it was to ‘welcome’ people back from anaesthetics and make sure they didn’t get terminally bored, to smuggle in some home-made wine of which, I had established, his grandfather had a secret stash kept for emergencies. My reasoning was that this was a dire emergency. If my curiosity wasn’t satisfied soon I would probably die of impatience.

All this shows how easily bored I get, and how excess boredom can look like selfishness to the neutral observer.

It didn’t work anyway, or at least not to my immediate advantage. I was sentenced to a session on the exercise machines, and the physiotherapist kept me working away at them until I got all the techniques right, which took some time. At the end of the session I was so tired that I just wanted to crawl back into bed and pull the covers over my head. Not that the covers were comforting fuzzy blankets like the ones I remembered from my childhood, though. Some diabolical inventor had created thin lightweight sheets that were supposed to keep you as warm as real blankets, only without the warm snuggly effect.

I was lying there with the featherweight of this thing over my head when Jen suddenly whisked it away and whispered, ‘I’ve got a surprise for you.’

I sat up. ‘Man of mystery?’ I said hopefully. ‘Has Dr Watson come up with the goods?’

She smiled an evil little smile. ‘Not exactly.’

She brought her hand round from behind her back and presented me with a trifle. It was a real trifle in a little ceramic pot, not one of their meals in a packet or pill or potion. It had a distinctly home-made look about it. The swirl of cream on top was lopsided and there was a lovely smell of strawberry jam.

‘Mmm, thanks,’ I said, mouth watering.

She held it up just out of my reach. ‘Want to know why I got you this?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Just give me it.’

‘I’ve been in the kitchen,’ she whispered.

She glanced round to see if anybody was about, but the place was almost deserted, except for a nurse in the corner who seemed to be asleep. We all knew he was only there to stop Mr Goodfellow when he got out of bed on his own, which happened at regular intervals, day and night. But Mr Goodfellow was off for his physiotherapy, lucky man, and the nurse probably needed to catch up on his sleep.

I knew Mr Goodfellow, of course. I had worked with him on one of the ill-fated projects that had encouraged me to fantasise about mitigating the effects of climate change before it was too late. Ha! I didn’t think I’d be reminding him of that now.

We spoke in low voices all the same. There was something about this place that made you think there was a spy round every corner.

She handed me the pot of trifle and a spoon that she fished out of her pocket to go with it.

‘What did you go to the kitchen for? I didn’t even know there was a kitchen!’

I said all this through a mouthful of trifle which, now I came to think of it, was as good a way as any of confusing a spy, real life or electronic.

‘Oh, yes, there’s a kitchen,’ said Jen, making the most of her story. ‘It was when you mentioned cleaners I got the idea. I thought maybe kitchen staff would be just as keen on a gossip as cleaners. But when I went down there, it was just one.’

‘One person in the kitchen for the whole hospital?’

‘Apparently there’s a part-timer who comes in later to help with the preparation for the next day… Anyway, do you want to hear this or not?’

My daughter seemed to be unfairly relishing the situation where I was vulnerable and she had the upper hand. Heaven help me if I lived to be old and in her power. Still, the scenario probably wasn’t all that likely. Me living to be old, that is. Not being in her power – I could foresee that situation quite well.

‘Of course I do!’ I said, scraping the last of the custard from around the inside of the dish and licking the spoon. This was ecstasy. Not the early 21
st
century drug, of course, but the feeling I used to get when I was younger and conquered a new milestone, such as passing my Finals or getting my first job. Instances of ecstasy had been much harder to find as I got older.

‘You’ll never guess,’ said Jen, ‘how they keep track of which food is for which patient.’

She paused. I reluctantly put the ceramic pot down in my lap.

‘No, I won’t.’

‘Labels,’ said Jen, and paused again.

‘Electronic labels that are only readable by security men’s gadgets?’ I said, with growing optimism.

‘Sticky labels with names hand-written on them,’ said Jen, taking a crumpled piece of paper out of her pocket and handing it to me.

‘Wow!’ was the only thing I could find to say.

I uncrumpled the label and read, out loud but in a low voice, ‘B. McWhittle… Holy mackerel!’

‘Holy mackerel? What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Nothing… but… Brad McWhittle! I thought he was dead. I hoped he was, anyway.’

‘Sssh.’

My voice must have risen in my excitement. I glanced over to the nurse in the corner. His eyes flickered open and he glared at me, then rearranged his limbs slightly and went back to sleep.

‘McWhittle might as well be dead,’ whispered Jen. ‘He’s lying there on the edge of a coma. I don’t know why they’re even bothering to prepare food for him.’

‘How do you know that? About the coma, I mean?’

‘The cook knows everything,’ said Jen smugly.

‘Not quite everything,’ said a voice from the other side of the bed. A man stepped out from behind the partially drawn-back screen. He loomed over me in a way I could only interpret as menacing. Jen, who had dropped down to loll at the end of the bed once I had finished the trifle, jumped up. She wasn’t very practiced at looming, but she did her best.

The newcomer laughed.

‘Mr Goodfellow! I didn’t recognize you with your clothes on,’ I said.

‘Best to keep your voice down,’ he said, still smiling. ‘Not that it makes a lot of difference – they can still hear everything you say.’

‘Everything?’ I said, my heart sinking at the thought of all the conversations I would have to replay in my mind to make sure neither Jen nor I had said anything that could get us locked up. I had been hoping the laws that had allowed them to lock people up for nothing had been swept away in the storm, but I always knew that was ridiculously naïve of me. I stared up at him. He stared down at me.

I began to wonder whether he had gone stark, staring mad or I had.

GAVIN

Before the helicopter had turned into a speck the size of a bluebottle buzzing around the sky, Declan started on at me again.

‘What’s that thing she gave you?’ He grabbed the black device out of my hand like a child who wasn’t very good at playing nicely with others. That description fitted him well, in fact. I smiled as I watched him turn it over in his hands.