The Petitioners

by Perry, Sheila

  Will had made the tea, in an old-fashioned brown teapot with a knitted cosy, of course, and was bringing it across to the table when the knock came.

  He almost dropped the teapot, which would have been a shame as it was probably one of the few remaining examples of its kind in the country. Jeff was over at the door before I had completed this random thought. He flung it open. The front door led straight from the kitchen, so there was nowhere to hide.

  ‘I’ve brought somebody to see you,’ said Dr Watson. He gestured to someone outside. Two medical orderlies, if that was what they were, carried a stretcher into the room.

  Its occupant, lying there with her eyes closed, swaddled in blankets that seemed a lot weightier than the standard hospital issue ones she had been complaining about earlier, was my mother.

  ‘She’s all yours,’ said Dr Watson, and the three of them left.

  We stared down at my mother. What on earth were we to do with her?

  GAVIN

  Tanya Fairfax and her troops, as I was starting to think of them, vanished the night after Declan left, stealing away under cover of darkness like thieves. They took their tents and equipment with them. I couldn’t think why I hadn’t woken up when they were preparing to go. They must have made quite a bit of noise. Had she drugged me? I didn’t remember her giving me any suspicious bedtime drinks, such as cocoa, but then I suppose the drug could have wiped out my short-term memory as well as sending me off to dreamland for hours.

  When I first emerged from my hut and noticed the tents had gone, I hoped this would mean Declan, and the others too if they had indeed left of their own free will, would come back. But after a while I realised that not only had that not happened, but the other members of our little community had gone off too.

  Had Tanya taken them with her? That must have meant a lot of persuasion and organizing, especially in the case of Mrs Swan. Or had she merely hinted they would be better off elsewhere and they had trotted meekly away like lambs to the slaughter.

  No! I tried to erase that image from my mind before it took root and sprouted other morbid pictures.

  Had the same anonymous raiders who were supposed to have spirited Fiona and Dan away come back for the rest of us? In which case, why hadn’t they snatched me in mid-slumber while they were at it? I had the usual moment of feeling quite unwanted, but I was old enough now to brush it aside and concentrate on what I was going to do next.

  I got our improvised stove going again – luckily I found some matches lying on the dry side of the wall. I boiled water and hunted about for my private coffee stash. Maybe everything would seem better after I had recaffeinated myself.

  No such word, said the petty part of my brain that reveled in the minutiae of archaeology, in recording tiny finds and mapping them to the nearest millimetre.

  It’s my camp now, and I’ll decide which words are used, argued the part that tried to find overall patterns in everything and to deduce things from other things.

  Alone for ten minutes and already your personality is separating out into its components, scoffed my inner cynic. I was quite glad to hear from him. I knew I had been trying to suppress this side of myself while Tanya Fairfax and company were about in case they took me seriously and reported me to the authorities for treason.

  The coffee had an odd effect on me on this occasion.

  I began to hallucinate.

  First of all I thought I saw Mrs Swan in the distance, marching towards me down the hill from the direction of the reservoir. She was wearing the silly floral hat she seemed to think was appropriate post-apocalyptic wear, and a turquoise track-suit surely bequeathed to her by a grandmother with very poor dress sense.

  Then she was followed in a kind of procession by two old men, a man in cycling gear and a young couple literally wrapped up in each other. That seemed to be it. I blinked, imagining they would disappear, but when I looked again they had drawn closer to me. I glared into my coffee cup. Had Tanya Fairfax and her minions desecrated that too with their mind-altering drugs?

  I was on the point of getting out the garlic and the crossed silver – both figments of my imagination in themselves, since I hadn’t seen anything like either of these since I had left the house in Cramond, and even then I would probably have had to ferret around in the attic to find the family silver – when Mrs Swan spoke to me.

  ‘Gavin! You’re awake after all. I thought you were dead.’

  I looked up and she was really there, standing in front of me as large as life, which was quite a bit larger than her ideal weight, as far as I could tell. It was a bit of a shock to see her, a figment of my imagination come to life.

  I was about to tell her the boot was on the other foot when she continued, ‘I see Ms Fairfax has run off again and taken some of our people with her. I knew she’d do that sooner or later. She didn’t seem like the sort to hang about with the likes of us. But I found those very nice people up by the reservoir, and they don’t seem to have anywhere to go, so I thought they could move in with us for a while, until we decide what to do next.’

  She spoke as if there were several options set out in front of us, a kind of menu from which we could choose either to have a starter and main, or a main and dessert, or all three courses if we were particularly greedy. In fact it was more the case that we had come home to an empty house with no dinner waiting, and we had to decide what to eat and then create it ourselves. It was worse than that too: we didn’t even have anything very much in the larder. Literally. I didn’t even know how I was going to feed myself in the next day or two, never mind supporting a small band of other people.

  ‘I expect Ms Fairfax will have left us some supplies,’ said Mrs Swan unexpectedly. ‘I’ll go and have a forage around.’

  She introduced her companions before she set off on her foraging expedition, but most of the names went in one ear and out the other, except for that of the cyclist, who didn’t have a bike with him. That might have been useful.

  His name was Mark Sutherland. I recognised it from the sporting world – not that I took a lot of interest in sport but you couldn’t really miss it in the news. He was a former cycling champion. Well, that really didn’t seem all that useful in the circumstances, but at least it explained why a grown man would be gallivanting around the hills encased in the skin-tight, breathable, waterproof fabric that had been hailed as a breakthrough in sport technology when it first came out. That was in the days when the Scots weren’t too proud to adopt ideas invented by other people, of course. A good while ago. It was a good while since we had produced any ideas of our own that weren’t to do with weaponry, and even longer ago since we had produced any sporting champions.

  I hoped he didn’t have a massive appetite. I doubted if we could provide four eggs and a steak for breakfast, for instance.

  Mrs Swan came back to report that Tanya had left a couple of boxes of food concentrates in the barn, along with something that looked like a dismantled tent. She couldn’t be sure about the tent without putting it up, and she couldn’t do that without the help of a young man, because of the weight of the poles.

  She looked expectantly at me. I realised they were all looking expectantly at me.

  If they thought I was going to take charge and tell everybody what to do, they were going to be sadly disappointed.

  ‘Right, then,’ said Mark eventually, ‘I’ll come and give a hand with the tent. What about the food? Is it safe in there?’

  He went off with Mrs Swan. I experienced an odd feeling of shame, but I pushed it aside. I had no responsibility for those people. They were all old enough to look after themselves. I wasn’t used to being a leader. There were always others who thought they could do it better, and I was happy to leave it to them.

  I did wonder, though, how long we would be able to stay here. It was all very well for Tanya to leave us food to be going on with, but what would we do once it ran out? Some of the others had been trying to cultivate a bit of land, but being halfway up a hill, the g
round wasn’t ideal for growing vegetables or anything, though I did wonder about potatoes. I knew nothing about farming, however, apart from the fact that I had dug in a lot of fields in my time in the search for archaeological remains, and I could identify certain ancient types of grass if they fell into the right time span for my level of expertise. I had a feeling none of my previous skills would be of much use.

  I spent a bit of time wondering where we could go if we had to come down from the hills for some reason. I hadn’t worked out what the reason could possibly be, but I would know it if I saw it.

  Meanwhile Mrs Swan, Mark and the young man and woman who had been so closely entwined when they arrived had lugged the components of the tent outside and assembled them into something resembling a shelter.

  ‘I thought some of us could sleep in here,’ she called over, as if asking for my approval. I recalled that Mrs Swan herself had been sleeping in a corner of an extremely dilapidated farm building. She probably welcomed the opportunity to upgrade to a tent. I felt guilty all over again, and this time I went over to give them a hand.

  Amongst us, once we had finished with the tent and selected supper ingredients from what Tanya had left us, we managed to make the encampment look busier and more inhabited again. It was oddly comforting. I even imagined Dan’s return and his relief at finding things hadn’t gone right downhill in his absence.

  I got a good night’s sleep again. Two nights in a row – a new record.

  It was only a short respite.

  JENNIFER

  Even Jeff was completely taken aback.

  Will was the first of us to recover enough to go and kneel by my mother on the floor and check her vital signs. I guessed he had maybe worked in the hospital at one time in some capacity or other. He certainly looked professional as he took her pulse – the old fashioned way – and rolled back her eyelids, presumably to see if she might be drugged.

  Seeing him there on his knees, I went and crouched at her other side. ‘Mum! Are you all right?’

  I suppose it was a ridiculous phrase to use. Jeff became alert instantly and gave a derisive snort. ‘Does she look as if she’s all right?’

  ‘Sssh, she might hear you,’ I told him.

  I stared at my mother’s face, willing her eyes to open with a flash of recognition in them when she saw me.

  ‘What’s this?’ I asked Will, tracing a line of stitches just in front of her hairline with my fingers.

  ‘Just a minute,’ he said. He had rolled back her sleeve to inspect some puncture marks on her wrist and further up her arm. He was frowning hard.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I said.

  ‘Was she due to be operated on in the past week or so?’

  ‘Not that I know of.’

  ‘It looks very much as if she has been.’

  ‘Can’t we put her to bed? It seems awful just leaving her lying about the floor like this.’

  Jeff moved to the head end of the stretcher. ‘Come on then, Will, you heard the lady.’

  Will made some noises about not moving her, and Jeff shut him up, commenting that she had already been moved across the uneven ground between the hospital and here, so going from one room to another shouldn’t be a problem. ‘Anyway, how are we going to get a doctor to come out and give the all clear? You’re the nearest we’ve got. Make yourself useful.’

  They carted her off into the other room. It was where Jeff and Will usually slept. I supposed I would have to move in there with her while they came in here for the night. I would miss the heat from the stove.

  I tried to follow them in but they closed the door firmly in my face. I wanted to hear what they were saying about her. If it was something they thought I shouldn’t hear, I wanted to hear it even more.

  I looked for a keyhole to listen at, but there wasn’t one, and the only result of leaning forward to try and hear something was that I almost fell into the room when Jeff opened the door.

  ‘Don’t worry, we weren’t talking about you,’ he teased.

  ‘Why don’t you go and sit with your Mum for a bit?’ suggested Will. He still had that worried expression on his face, although at least he had lost the heavy frown.

  ‘Do you think she might come round?’ I asked eagerly.

  ‘She could do,’ said Will.

  ‘We’re just popping out for a while,’ said Jeff. ‘I’ll lock up behind us, so don’t worry.

  ‘The trapdoor?’

  ‘Bolted from this side. You’ll be fine. It’s like Fort Knox.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Back soon,’ said Jeff, ignoring my final panicky question. I heard the click of the lock just after they had gone out. I was alone with my mother.

  When I thought about it rationally after a few moments that verged on hysteria, I realised they must have gone after Dr Watson and the others. It must be a worry to them that the doctor had found his way so easily to their front door, after all.

  I took a deep breath and walked into the room where my mother lay on one of the single beds with one of Will’s blankets and a comfortably faded quilt over her. She would be so pleased when she woke up and found she wasn’t under one of the thin hospital covers. But how would we look after her if she needed further medical care? I had gathered Will wasn’t exactly a doctor, though I thought he might have been one of the nurses who had received extra training to fill the gap in medical and social care services once so many of the English and other immigrants had left during the past decade. I had been too young to pay very much attention to this but I could remember my parents discussing it. As usual Dad had pretended not to be too bothered, saying the day he had to rely on a doctor to diagnose what was wrong with him was the day he gave up hope and turned his face to the wall, with Mum countering that even if he wasn’t bothered on his own account he should be worrying about Dan and me.

  I smiled to myself as I recalled this conversation. It was just so typical of my parents. An outsider coming in on them when they were in full flow like that would have assumed they didn’t get on very well together, but in fact their relationship seemed to be stronger than almost any other I had come across. Maybe airing all their disagreements was the answer.

  While I was thinking, my mother’s eyelids had fluttered open and she was now staring up at me in terror.

  ‘Not my face,’ she said, and repeated it in a louder, higher voice. ‘Not my face!’

  ‘It’s all right, Mum,’ I told her, taking her hand. ‘Your face is fine.’

  ‘No! You can’t! Somebody help me!’

  I patted her hand, feeling helpless. I gazed down at her, my eyes drawn again to the line of what seemed to be stitches. What was that? Had she acquired an injury and had facial surgery in the time between me escaping and Dr Watson dumping her on the floor here? Could she have recovered so quickly from what looked like a fairly major operation?

  She was crying quietly now. I didn’t know how to make it stop. I thought she was re-living some terrible experience. I couldn’t begin to imagine what had happened to her. Maybe Will would turn out to have some knowledge of what kind of medical procedure it could have been. Whatever it was, it had resulted in vivid hallucinations, if that was what she was experiencing. I remembered the drug that had made her so sleepy, and the way Will had examined her arm with its puncture marks.

  I had imagined it would be cosy and heart-warming to be alone with my mother for a while, but I couldn’t wait for the two men to come back.

  ‘Would you like some water?’ I asked timidly. ‘A cup of tea?’

  She flinched away from me. ‘No tea. I don’t want tea.’ She glanced up at me again. ‘Who are you?’

  Shock took my breath away. I tried to draw it in again, and felt myself going dizzy. I clutched at the end of the bed to stay upright. She pushed feebly at my hands.

  ‘Get away from me! You’re all the same – murderers!’

  ‘No, it’s me, Jen,’ I said, at last regaining my voice.

  ‘But who’s Jen
?’ she said, eyes widening in fear.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry – you’ll remember later. I expect.’ I certainly hoped she would remember. What had they done to her? I had thought I trusted Dr Watson, but he must be involved in whatever had happened. I took her hand again and patted it, just for something to do. She snatched it away.

  ‘Get away!... Where’s my face? I can’t see it anywhere.’

  I didn’t want to leave her, but I couldn’t bear to be with her another minute. I turned and went into the other room. I left the door open and I heard her sobbing, but there was nothing I could do.

  I was peeling potatoes when Will and Jeff came back.

  ‘How is she?’ said Jeff.

  I shrugged. ‘I can’t get through to her. I don’t know whether she’s still drugged or whether they’ve done something to her that…’

  I couldn’t say any more. I gulped and looked down at the half-peeled potato in my hand.

  ‘It’s OK,’ said Will. ‘It’s probably a residual reaction to the drugs. I’ll go and have a look.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. I blinked back tears and glanced up at Jeff. ‘Did you find out anything?’

  ‘We couldn’t catch them,’ he said. ‘They had transport waiting… Do you want me to finish these?’ He indicated the pile of potatoes waiting to be peeled. ‘That should be enough to last us until a week next Friday,’ he added with amusement.

  I had taken a whole sack of potatoes from the hut where Will kept them, and emptied them on the kitchen table. I suppose I thought that would keep me busy for long enough to forget about my mother and the sad state she was in.

  Will came back, closing the door behind him. ‘She’s sleeping now. Probably the best thing.’

  ‘I hope she’s more alert by the time we move,’ said Jeff with a grimace.

  ‘Move?’ I said.

  ‘We’re going to have to get to another safe house,’ he told me. ‘The sooner, the better now that they know where we are.’

  ‘But Dr Watson…’