The Petitioners
Page 2
‘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. ‘H
e 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.
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 pla
n 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.