The Petitioners
Page 9
‘Can’t be trusted,’ he said. ‘None of them can. Watson at least remembers his responsibilities as a doctor – not to harm people. I suspect he knew they had finished with your mother, and that they would want her disposed of, which is why he brought her to us instead. But he works for them all the same, and he could be broken under pressure.’
Not wanting to ask any more about this, I looked at Will. ‘Are you coming too? To the next safe house?’
‘I’ll help you get on your way, but I need to come back here. This is where I live. I don’t want to leave unless I have to.’
‘Do you know who’s after us?’ I asked Jeff.
‘Forces of the old regime,’ he said. ‘That’s my best guess, anyway.’
It was a bit too vague for my liking. I had gathered from my parents that the old regime had been in the process of splintering into pieces even before the storm. But I didn’t think he would tell me any more, so I didn’t press him. If my mother had been awake and alert of course, it would have been a different story. I blinked back tears again and tried not to imagine that she might never be awake or alert again.
I went in and watched her as she slept. I hadn’t often done this, although it had happened a few times while we were in the hospital. I wondered if her sleep then had been drugged as it seemed to be now. I wished my father were there. He might be able to bring her back from the threshold of whatever nightmare world she was in danger of entering. I didn’t have any confidence in my power to do so.
GAVIN
Once again I had slept through all the excitement.
Others hadn’t been so lucky, I discovered in the morning almost as soon as I left my hut, where I had stayed in preference to huddling with others in the tent we had all wrestled with. The first thing that happened was that I fell over a body.
It wasn’t the ideal start to the day.
Things became even worse, if that was possible, when I saw the big tent lying in a heap on the ground, and recognised the things scattered about as the remains of the provisions Tanya and the team had left us.
Was anybody still alive in the chaos? Moving with some caution, as if there were going to be enemies round every corner, I searched the farm ruins, going from one building to another with dwindling hope. The last building I went into was Mrs Swan’s old home, the tumbledown barn nearest what was left of the farmhouse. At first I thought there was nobody there, but as I walked round the stone wall that was the only part of the interior to have survived the storm, I saw a small movement under some sacks in the corner, and heard a faint groan.
It was too big to be a rat, so I was brave enough to go over and fling back the sacking, to find Mrs Swan gazing up at me with big watery eyes.
‘Gavin!’ she whispered. ‘You’re alive!’
‘I think so,’ I said, giving her a hand to get to her feet.
‘Have they gone?’ she said, still in an undertone.
‘Yes, seem to have. Where are the others?’
‘Poor old Mr Jackson. He tried to stand up to them.’
‘Yes, I’ve seen him. What’s left of him.’
She closed her eyes against the horror.
‘Do you know who they were?’ I asked.
‘No. Raiders. I’ve never seen anything like it, Gavin. They were like wild animals –no, worse than that. They may have taken some people with them. I think…’
There was a thud as something large came down from the hayloft which, amazingly, still formed a second floor in the place. I made the futile gesture of shielding Mrs Swan with my body, until the dark shape resolved itself into Mark Sutherland, still in his cycling gear.
‘They took the young ones away with them,’ he said. ‘I don’t know about the other old man.’ He swallowed. ‘He’d only hold them up. I doubt if they’d take him very far before ditching him.’
‘I didn’t know you were up there!’ said Mrs Swan indignantly, sliding past me and going up to him. ‘Why didn’t you say something?’
‘I didn’t know if they were really gone… How did you manage to sleep through it all?’ he asked me, accusation in his tone.
‘Just my clear conscience and unblemished morals, I guess,’ I said.
He obviously didn’t appreciate the situation being taken lightly, if the glare he gave me was anything to go by.
‘Can you give me a hand outside for a bit?’ I added. I wasn’t all that keen on the task of burying the old man who had died in the night while I slept not a stone’s throw away, but it was better than coming across him later with his face eaten off by a fox or a magpie.
Mark agreed to help, and even double-checked to make sure the man was actually dead, whereas I had been going by the greyness of his face and the rigidity of his body. Our grim task wasn’t easy on the rocky ground, so it took us a couple of hours to make a hole big enough. Before burying him, we wrapped him in a section of the tent just to make it more difficult for animals and insects.
Mrs Swan stayed out of the way while we did all this. Maybe she was from a generation in which it was mostly men who took part in the rituals of death. Or maybe she was just squeamish.
I had been squeamish until quite recently, but since then I had seen too much of death in various forms to be at all sickened by it. That was probably a bad thing, and it certainly wasn’t something I wanted to have as a permanent feature of my character, but I suppose it was only to be expected in the circumstances.
Mark preserved a stony silence as he helped me. He still hadn’t forgiven me either for sleeping through the raid, or for joking about my failure to wake up. Or he just didn’t like me very much. I hoped we might have the opportunity for an amicable parting before too long. If only I had known…
‘We’re going to have to move on,’ said Mark when we were finished.
I nodded, reluctant to agree but conscious that the three of us couldn’t possibly withstand another raid. I hadn’t a clue where we would go or what we would do when we got there. Maybe Tanya Fairfax would find us again. Maybe we could catch up with Declan or find Fiona and Dan – or all of the above. I had no wish to leave here, or to abandon my self-imposed never-ending task of recording who we had been in the hope that we would one day be able to start from that point instead of reverting to the standards of previous, less civilized times, but even I could see our situation here was untenable.
‘Where are we going to go?’ said Mrs Swan when we broke the news to her.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘The Highlands?’
‘Big place,’ said Mark, poking at the fire we had lit to get warm, although despite the physical effort we had engaged in I felt as if I was chilled to the bone and would never be warm again.
‘I knew some people who lived near Spittal of Glenshee,’ I said vaguely. I hadn’t really planned on ever going back there, but needs must. And maybe the other three were even now on their way back to the rebel stronghold. ‘My wife’s been taken to hospital near Pitlochry. We could head up that way and then decide as we go along.’
‘I like Pitlochry,’ said Mrs Swan, the light of reminiscence in her eyes. ‘We used to go to the theatre there in the summer – when it was still up and running.’
‘When we still had summers,’ said Mark.
‘They said on the cloudcast the dam had burst in the storm,’ said Mrs Swan. ‘I hope people managed to get out of the way in time.’
Just like they didn’t in Edinburgh when the waves came, I mused grimly.
‘How would we get up there?’ she continued.
‘Last time I was up that way we got a boat across to Fife, and a train up to Leuchars,’ I said, remembering my flight with Jen months before. ‘Then we went overland, some of the way in a cart and the rest walking.’
Mark was scornful. ‘Hmph! Trains in Fife? I don’t think so. Might as well go all the way by boat now.’
‘By boat?’ said Mrs Swan uncertainly.
‘Most of Fife’s under water. Or near as dammit. Best way’s to sail round what’s
left of the coast and up the Tay as far as you can.’
‘Sail?’ I said. My record with travelling by boat wasn’t great. I had capsized a small sailing boat in the Forth when I was a beginner, and since then I tended not to trust ships of any size. Apart from the time Jen and I had been ferried over the Forth, that was. I had been too scared about everything else then to worry about being in a flimsy shell tossed around on the waves.
Mark smiled evilly. ‘I’ll get you there.’
‘We don’t have a boat,’ I said.
‘We will have,’ he told me.
I resigned myself to facing a watery grave. Oh well, it couldn’t be worse than being massacred by armed raiders in the hills, could it?
DAN
I felt bad about not telling Dad, but Fiona said it was for his own good.
‘If he breaks under torture, he’d feel terrible if he incriminated you, wouldn’t he?’
‘Nobody said anything about torture,’ I muttered.
‘I’m joking, you idiot. But if he knew, he’d try and stop you, wouldn’t he, and we’d never get anywhere.’
We made a temporary camp in a hut in the middle of a golf course the first night. Fiona had said we were heading up to Spittal of Glenshee to meet the others, but I couldn’t work out how we were planning to get that far without any transport, or any roads or bridges in some places. Whatever.
I still enjoyed sleeping rough, for the novelty and because it was better than being shut up in the old barracks where I had spent a bit of time before the storm. I liked the freedom and the feeling of being able to decide for myself what direction my life took. I didn’t think my sister would enjoy that so much, but she had been carted off to hospital with Mum, so she wouldn’t have to worry about all that for a while. In hospital, as in prison, they decided things for you.
It wasn’t that I wasted any time on these thoughts from day to day, just that sometimes at night before I went to sleep they would come to me. I used to let myself spend a few minutes on them and then will myself to sleep. It had worked so far.
I supposed we were walking towards the sea, but I couldn’t understand the point of that when we didn’t have a boat or, so I imagined, any way of getting hold of one. Even if the great waves had swept boats inland by some fluke, they had probably been battered to bits somewhere or washed back out to sea. It was unlikely that we would stumble across one.
And yet… Fiona definitely had a plan. She walked on with purpose, not too fast but steadily. I didn’t ask questions. I trusted that she was on the side I wanted to be on. I waited to see what would happen next.
It wasn’t until Declan caught up with us, halfway through the second day of our trek, that I understood a bit better.
We had just crossed a raging torrent she said had once been the Braid Burn before the sea levels started to rise, when we heard somebody shouting behind us. Fiona turned her head and said, ‘It’s Declan. Thank goodness.’
They had one of those silly reuniting scenes when you’d think they hadn’t been together for years, and then we all started walking together. Declan didn’t tell us anything then, but once we had picked our way through the ruins of Newington and could see Salisbury Crags looming in front of us, he began to divulge his cunning plans.
‘Some of the gang are bringing a boat to take us out of Leith and round to the Firth of Tay,’ he said. ‘We’ll get beyond Perth going upriver, and we can walk the rest of the way. Hope you’ve brought your climbing boots,’ he added to me. It was a joke, because he knew I always wore the lightweight shoes Mum had once brought back for Dad from America in the days when she used to travel a bit. Over there they had invented shoes that were practically indestructible, but pressure from the shoe manufacturers meant they never got into the shops here. Or that was what Mum had told me, anyway, when I finally grew into them.
‘I’ll be fine,’ I said.
‘I’m sure you will,’ said Declan with a wink.
‘What are we going to do when we get there?’ I enquired. I had held back on asking Fiona about that, because I thought she would refuse to tell me until Declan said it was all right. Sometimes women are their own worst enemies. Or maybe that was just an outdated myth I had heard about from my father. It happens sometimes.
He and Fiona exchanged glances. Then they both nodded in unison, which looked a bit weird.
‘We’re going to meet with the group and review our options,’ he said.
‘What do you think the options are?’ I asked.
He frowned. ‘Honestly – it’s very hard to tell. It depends a lot on what certain other people do, or plan to do. From what we can gather, there’s no real government right now. That could work to our advantage. But,’ he added as we began to climb up through Holyrood Park, ‘I don’t know if we want to fill that gap or not.’
‘No,’ I said. Even I could see that a group of former rebels might not be up for the task of running a country – especially one that had got into such a bad state. They were more likely to take exception to whatever happened next, and work against it. I pushed this idea aside. I had already made up my mind to go with what Declan and Fiona wanted to do. It was no use having second thoughts now.
I closed my mind to anything my parents might want to do or participate in. My mother had been out of action for a while but she would undoubtedly get back into things sooner or later. There was no knowing whether she would come down on the side of any legally constituted government, if there was going to be one, as she normally would, or whether she might for once consider rebelling.
I smiled as I imagined that scenario. I almost pitied Declan if it came to the point where Mum started a rival revolution.
‘How close will they be able to bring the boat?’ said Fiona.
‘That’s what we’re climbing this hill to see,’ said Declan.
We saved our breath for the ascent. Once we got to St Margaret’s Loch, now at least twice its former size, it was no distance to the minor peak behind it, from where there was a panoramic view across the Forth and out to the North Sea.
I hadn’t even pictured the scene until then. The port of Leith itself, formerly right by the river, had been under water for years, of course, but now the sea had claimed almost the whole expanse of land from Dunbar to Queensferry, and was lapping around Arthur’s Seat itself, not far from where we were standing. Of course I knew that didn’t necessarily mean it was safe for shipping. Even from here we could see one or two church spires still sticking up from the water, and the tops of a few high rise buildings that hadn’t completely crumbled in the onslaught of the waves. You’d almost need a new set of navigators’ maps to get through it without wrecking your boat.
‘Radar,’ said Declan, as if reading my thoughts.
‘They should be able to do it,’ said Fiona. ‘Daylight would be best, but even at night it isn’t impossible.’
‘It’ll be at night,’ said Declan. ‘We don’t want everybody and his dog seeing what we’re doing.’
We hadn’t seen very many dogs since the storm. Cats, on the other hand, had begun to come out of wherever they were hiding, and seemed to be leading a useful existence killing vermin. They might even have been glad of the chance to get back to their original purpose and be free of all the coddling and overfeeding they got from the people they lived with… I felt quite an affinity with cats, all in all.
Declan was right. Soon after dark, as we sat on the hill shivering, we saw a couple of small lights glinting off the water below. They got bigger quite quickly as they approached. We started down the other side of the hill and Declan signaled with a torch as we got near the water.
Climbing into the small fishing-boat, I had the sense of having burnt my bridges. Wrong metaphor, but there you go.
JENNIFER
Moving Mum was a difficult and lengthy process. I knew it could go badly wrong at any moment.
We didn’t have any form of transport available, so we had to carry her up hill and down dale to get to the neare
st safe house. When I say ‘we’ carried her, of course I mean Jeff and Will carried her using the stretcher she had arrived on, and they wouldn’t let me help. Jeff said they needed me in reserve to keep her steady and calm her down if she woke up.
At the same time we had to look out for anybody trying to stop us. They would have had an easy time following us, because it was impossible to do all this silently. There was a lot of crashing as Jeff and Will manoeuvred the stretcher along narrow woodland paths, bumping into bushes and veering off towards trees, and quite a bit of swearing when one of them stopped suddenly and the other bumped into him. Once or twice I thought they were going to drop the stretcher, but somehow they just about managed not to.
I had imagined the new safe house would be a cosy place like Will’s, inhabited perhaps by a rosy-cheeked middle-aged woman who was able to conjure up tasty meals from nothing as if by magic, and maybe also a gruff but kind-hearted crofter whose mastery of the shotgun would protect us from anybody who came looking for us. Sadly these visions were not at all accurate in reality.
Our new temporary home was a deserted hovel even a rat would hesitate to occupy. Our best hope of remaining hidden was that nobody at all would expect us to take shelter there, especially with an invalid recently discharged from hospital in our care.
Will’s backpack turned out to contain some rations that he said would last us a few days, if we weren’t too greedy. After that we would either have to fend for ourselves or move on.
I favoured moving on, of course. The sooner, the better.
‘We’d better stop here for now,’ said Jeff, after Will had left. ‘It won’t do your Mum any good to move her again so soon. We need to see if she’s any better. Let the medication wear off a bit.’
‘It won’t do her any good to hang around here,’ I said.
‘It’ll be fine once we get the fire going and put the kettle on,’ he said. ‘Nothing a cup of tea won’t fix.’
His Cockney chirpiness was out of place here, I thought grumpily. But it was surprising how much difference the fire made, blazing away in the old blackened grate. And having a hot drink didn’t do any harm either, even if it was only tea. He helped Mum sit up and sip at it as well. She didn’t seem completely awake yet, but her eyes opened and she at least took some notice of her surroundings.