The Petitioners (5 page)

She wasn’t wearing a suit this time but a sort of set of overalls. They looked better on her than they did on her little band of assistants, who were mere teenagers of both genders. Maybe Dan would unexpectedly bond with them and we would all form one big happy family.

‘Thought I’d better come along and see them settled in,’ she said. ‘Can you recommend somewhere for us to set up the tents?’

‘Um, not really. Maybe Declan…’

I glanced over at Declan’s hut. No sign of life. Had he and Fiona sneaked out the back way and vanished into the wilds already? Just then the jeep started up, over behind the old farmhouse. There was a kind of track that led down towards Bonaly, or they could take the rougher road the water company used to use, that led over to the next reservoir and from there down to Balerno. I had heard the river had engulfed most of the village, so unless he knew something I didn’t know…

‘What’s that?’ said Dan, shifting uneasily beside me. ‘What have you done?’

He turned and looked at accusingly. I noticed he had grown, apparently overnight, so that he was now very nearly as tall as me. That revelation didn’t help.

The sound of the jeep died away again.

‘Out of fuel,’ I murmured.

Ms Fairfax was watching the interplay with evident amusement. ‘Can we help?’

‘Not really,’ I said. My reply covered almost everything I needed help with, from my relationship with Dan to the endless and probably fruitless task I was doing, to our whole hopeless situation.

‘I think we can,’ she said briskly. At one gesture from her, the team moved forward as one, lugging lots of heavy bags with them. She followed them, making more gestures, and they began to unpack the bags and extract tent poles, tents, folding camp chairs and beds, and everything anyone could possibly need to sustain life in an army camp for months on end.

I had never had any ambition to live in an army camp, but even I was impressed. The same couldn’t be said for Declan, who came out from behind the farmhouse and stormed over to me.

‘This is all your doing,’ he said. ‘We can’t even get away because we’re completely out of fuel. What do you think? If we pleaded with Tanya would she siphon some out of the helicopter for us? Just to get us out of her beautifully sculpted hair?’

Dan didn’t say anything, but he stared at both of us as if we had betrayed him, and walked off as if he couldn’t stand to be around us any longer.

I would have preferred not to be around me either, but I had no choice, obviously. We didn’t even have an alcohol stash, so I couldn’t drink myself into oblivion.

I took refuge in words.

‘I didn’t notice it was beautifully sculpted,’ I said, trying to wind him up. ‘Won’t Fiona be jealous?’

‘No, she won’t,’ said Fiona, arriving on the scene right on cue. ‘Are those tents for everybody?’ she added, watching the teenagers work together to start putting up the first one. ‘Or are they reserved for celebrities like Gav?’

‘Nothing to do with me,’ I told her. ‘I expect it’s first come, first served. Better put your name down for one right away.’

‘Hey, wait a minute!’ said Declan as she began to move towards Tanya Fairfax and the crew. ‘What’s wrong with the home I’ve built for you with my own fair hands?’

I breathed a long sigh of relief. For some reason he must have decided to be conciliatory for once in his life. I hoped Dan would start to see it the same way once he had thought things over and worked out the advantages of having proper shelter and food supplies and help.

I was very much afraid he wouldn’t.

2. Looking for Mr Goodfellow

EMMA

Jen wasn’t all that impressed when I talked to her about Mr Goodfellow.

‘Oh well,’ she said, ‘I suppose some of the things that have happened just lately could have driven anybody nuts.’

I was disproportionately upset by this comment.

‘It’s just that I remember him being so sharp and alert. With his mind on the goal all the time. He helped me a lot on that project. It wasn’t his fault we couldn’t push it through between us. I remember your father telling me not to stress – he nearly drove me nuts too.’

She laughed. ‘You’re so different from each other. I can’t believe you ever got together at all. How did it happen?’

‘I’ll tell you one day.’

‘What about Mr G, then?

We were down in the kitchen. The cook, Jeff, didn’t seem to mind. He might have been a spy, for all we knew, and yet there was something about his casual manner and focus on the task in hand that calmed my suspicions and made him seem trustworthy. Or maybe I had been lulled into it by the trifle. As we talked in the corner near the wood stove, he just got on with what he was doing, which involved real vegetables and some meat of unknown origin. Or maybe it was soya. We hadn’t seen meat for a long time, despite living in a country famous for its beef cattle. I knew most of it had been exported, and when I thought about it, I suppose the rest must have gone to the people who knew somebody.

‘He worked in the Cabinet Office. In Edinburgh. He’d been there for ages. I think he was one of the people who drafted the original constitution. I mean the one that expressed the ideals of the founding fathers, before the totalitarians got hold of it.’

‘You worked for those totalitarians, Mum.’

‘Thanks for the reminder. I didn’t see it like that. I was trying to do my best for everybody.’ I slumped against the kitchen table suddenly. ‘I ended up not doing the best for anybody, didn’t I? Oh, God, I’m sorry.’

She gave me a small shake. ‘Don’t be silly, the important thing was you tried. Didn’t you always say it was better to be on the inside trying to reform the system than on the outside throwing – tomatoes?’

‘I’m not sure about the tomatoes,’ I muttered, and then followed the direction of Jen’s gaze. ‘Real tomatoes! How did he get hold of them?’

Jeff flashed a grin at us and winked.

‘He doesn’t say much, does he?’

‘Mum! He can hear you! You’re not old enough yet to get away with that kind of thing.’

‘Not old enough… I suppose that’s something.’

‘Is there any more?’

‘More? Oh, about Mr Goodfellow. Well, I first got to know him during one of those spells when we had our heads above the parapet. In my department, I mean. He helped me to draft a section in the Environmental Awareness Bill. He wasn’t very taken with the government of the day. I think he thought the rot had set in when all the parties fragmented. There was nobody to keep them in line, you see.’

‘In line? But it was good for democracy, wasn’t it? Giving people a voice? That kind of thing. Keeping them in line sounds as if they were all school kids.’

‘I suppose so… Anyway, it’ll be good to have a proper chat with him some time while we’re both here. I’d be interested to hear what he thinks about things.’

But apparently I wasn’t destined to find that out.

When we got back up to the ward, Mr Goodfellow wasn’t there and, more worryingly, neither was the nurse in the corner, whom I now thought of more as a security guard.

‘I expect he’s gone for some medical procedure,’ said Jen.  ‘He’ll be back soon.’

But he wasn’t back at all that day. I had a bad feeling that this development might have something to do with what we had talked about earlier. Was Jeff a spy after all? Was the kitchen bugged? The answer to the second question was almost certainly ‘yes’. Why would they bother bugging the rest of the place and leaving a gap in their surveillance in a room where the usual occupant was openly behaving in a subversive manner, with his hand-chopped tomatoes and crafty little trifles?

In the morning there was still no sign of Mr Goodfellow.

‘Maybe they’ve let him go home,’ said Jen uncertainly.

‘If he still has a home to go to,’ I said, thinking of the house we used to live in, now almost certainly under water along with most of our possessions. Still, we were all alive, I told myself for comfort. I knew thousands of people had lost their lives in the storm and the subsequent flooding. And that was just here in our own little country. The death toll across the world probably ran into millions. We were the lucky ones. The survivors.

I shivered.

‘Are you all right?’ said Jen. ‘Will I get Dr Watson?’

I knew she was worried about my fever recurring. It must have been frightening for her, not knowing what to do as the infection gradually got worse and worse. Even in the helicopter on the way to this hospital I had still been burning up and hallucinating.

‘I’m fine. I’d rather he hadn’t gone yet though. Now that I’ve remembered who he is, I was looking forward to having a chat.’

‘Maybe he’s left to avoid you!’ Jen teased.

There might be more in that than she thought. He might not want to be reminded of occasions in his past life, which presumably was gone for ever. I would have quite liked to catch up with him, though. Maybe he had just gone to the operating theatre for some procedure and then he might have been sent to a different ward. I would probably see him again later.

At about mid-morning the following day, once she was convinced I didn’t have a fever after all, Jen whispered that she was popping back down to the kitchen to say hello to Jeff. I wondered if she was falling for him, if that was the right phrase these days. I didn’t entirely disapprove. I didn’t know much about him, since he hadn’t shared any information about himself, but at least he had a steady job and seemed like a pleasant person. She could do worse. I must confess I hadn’t imagined her getting together with a cook – or did he call himself a chef? – but maybe he even had a first class degree in catering or something. It was more than she had, thanks to unforeseen delays and the storm. I wondered vaguely if she would ever get to university. It didn’t seem to matter too much at the moment. Our horizons didn’t stretch much further than the walls of the hospital.

After taking the medication that seemed to pop up from somewhere inside the little table without human intervention – we hadn’t yet investigated that fully – I was nodding off to sleep to the sound of soothing synthetic music when she came rushing back.

‘He’s gone!’

‘Gone?’ I twitched more or less into full consciousness again. ‘Not Jeff?’

So much for planning my daughter’s wedding.

‘There’s a different cook. She claims not to know anything about him.’ Jen lowered her voice and spoke in a doom-laden tone. ‘She’s making soup from a capsule.’

‘Oh, dear.’

‘And she isn’t using any labels. Everybody’s getting the same.’

‘No point in looking forward to lunch, then.’

Jen’s hands were on my shoulders and she was shaking me again. ‘Mum! Wake up! You sound just like Dad.’

This was serious. If only I could get my brain in gear, I could…

What could I do? What could any of us do? I laughed aloud at the idea of us taking on the might of whatever random combination of survivors had taken on the mantle of government. Good luck to them, was all I could think.

What was the matter with me?

‘Damn,’ said Jen. I began to laugh all over again at her use of such an old-fashioned expletive. She didn’t seem to have a modern bone in her body.

Bones… I felt as if mine were made of liquid, or that rubber stuff that bendy toys used to be made of. Maybe this was a new way of healing them. If so, I liked it. I could just lie on this bed bending myself from one side to another, undulating like a snake or moving individual limbs to make myself look like a… what?

‘Damn,’ said Jen again. She was the one bending my limbs now. I struggled against her hands. She was probably trying to help, but this wasn’t helping. Maybe I should just go to sleep instead of undulating. I had never really wanted to be a snake anyway.

My last thought before drifting off was that it was always a mistake to put yourself in the hands of doctors. I had known it all along – why had I given in?

JENNIFER             

It was scary seeing Mum hallucinate again. I should have asked Dr Watson about it as soon as I suspected she was getting feverish. But we hadn’t seen Dr Watson, or any other doctor, that day. Not that it was unusual. They often left us alone for hours, with only the robot cleaners and the nurse in the corner to look after the patients. I should have done more myself before it got to this point.

I went out to the corridor to try and find medical help.

It was quiet at first, but as I got closer to the side room where we had seen the men Mum had said were security guards, it became obvious that something was happening inside. The guards weren’t at their previous posts, so I peered in through the half-open door. There were two beds in there and what looked like two whole medical teams in surgical scrubs clustered round the patients with different types of scary-looking equipment, none of which I recognised. The security men were just inside the door, and they surged forward as they saw me.

What was going on? Who was the other patient and what were the medical teams doing? I had already taken a step into the room without even really meaning to do so, and I couldn’t tear myself away from the scene, even at the risk of being caught.

Just as one of the guards reached out towards me with a large and powerful-looking hand, I heard an urgent whisper from behind me.

‘Jennifer! Get out of there!’

I took a couple of quick steps backwards, ducking out through the door again.

Jeff was in out in the corridor. He didn’t look like a cook any more. He had his hair slicked back and he was wearing a dark close-fitting outfit and he held something that was almost certainly a weapon – not a traditional gun, but a modern device that I hoped would only stun and not kill, although I couldn’t exactly tell from its appearance.

He pushed the door shut.

‘Come on, that doesn’t give us much time.’

Who was he anyway?

I guessed it wasn’t a good time to start questioning him. Instead I let him grab my hand and tug, and we both broke into a run. A shout came from behind us. I glanced over my shoulder. One of the security men was now out of the room again and seemed to be levelling a weapon at us.

‘Halt – or we’ll fire!’

Jeff ducked into a side corridor that led to a glass door – that looked as if it might lead to the outside world. The sky – the air.

He pointed the device in his hand at the door and it opened for us. Thank goodness, it wasn’t a weapon after all, was the only thought that had time to get through to my brain before we were through the door and out, and I was overwhelmed with feeling – the feathery touch of the faint breeze against my skin, the brightness of the sky that no artificial lights could replicate.

But almost as soon as I began to enjoy the fresh air, I remembered I had left my mother behind in the hospital.

‘No – I can’t! Mum… I’ve got to go back.’

‘Getting yourself killed won’t help her!’ he snapped.

Ignoring my feeble attempts at resistance, he headed for a clump of pine trees that adorned what I now saw was a fairly steep hillside. Below us was a great loch. I was only vaguely aware of where we might be. Somewhere in the Highlands. Away from the floods. The sun even looked as if it might be struggling its way through the clouds.

‘No time to look round,’ he told me, speeding up.

Behind us, I could hear the hue and cry of pursuers. I had never really thought about what a fox must have felt when it was being hunted – fox-hunting having been abolished before I was born – but I knew I felt like that now. How would we get away from them? How had I managed to get into this dangerous situation just by walking down the corridor? How would I get back to rescue my mother?

The questions hurtled through my brain as a panicky echo of our footsteps.

The clump of trees didn’t look big enough to hide us for very long. Instead of using the narrow path, Jeff pushed through the branches, wading through the undergrowth and still towing me in his wake. My foot caught on a twisted tree root and I almost fell, but he pulled me upright.

‘OK?’ he asked, but didn’t wait for the reply, which was just as well because I didn’t have much breath left to speak.

We came to a hollow in the ground where a massive tree had fallen right over. Instead of circumventing it, he plunged straight into the hole where the tree roots had been. For a few terrifying moments, I thought of the rabbit hole in ‘Alice in Wonderland’. We fell straight downwards. The hole was quite a bit deeper than it looked, but luckily there weren’t any magic rabbits or potions ordering me to drink them when we got to the bottom, landing on a haphazard pile of prickly pine branches.

‘Ow!’