The Petitioners

by Perry, Sheila

  The door behind me burst open again and Mark emerged on to the deck next to me, gasping for breath.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘We’re about to sink,’ I said, clinging mindlessly to the railing, which was now the only secure spot in my universe.

  Mark started to laugh.

  ‘It’s no laughing matter,’ I said.

  ‘You’ve got to laugh,’ he said. ‘You’d think the customs people would look where they were going.’ He peered over the side. ‘There’s another boat down there. We must have hit it.’

  I had half-closed my eyes so that I wouldn’t see the full enormity of our situation but now I steeled myself to look. There was a fishing boat only a few metres away from us, moving up and down on the waves in a way that made me feel dizzy. I hoped I wasn’t going to be sick. That would be a fine way to spend my last moments.

  ‘Dad!’ shouted somebody, sounding as if they were in a tunnel quite a long way away. This was it. My life flashing before my eyes.

  ‘Look – he’s waving at us,’ said Mark, nudging me. ‘Do you know him?’

  As I didn’t seem to have died yet, I opened my eyes wider again and dared to look. Dan was waving frantically from the deck of the fishing-boat. Was it Dan or was it a mirage, or whatever the seagoing term for that was?

  ‘Dan,’ I said.

  ‘Dan? It’s your son? Well, it must be our lucky day after all.’ Mark laughed again. It was beginning to irritate me.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I shouted. My words probably got whisked away on the wind, but at least I had spoken them.

  ‘Get over the side!’ shouted Dan. ‘You’re going down.’

  Over the side? Was he mad? I made the mistake of glancing down at the swirling water below us. And then Mark heaved me over the rails and I was falling down into a whirlpool that would suck me under and separate me from my family for ever…

  DAN

  It was all a bit scary. After making sure Declan was still alive, which he was, I had gone up on deck to see what was what, and the only thing in my line of vision was a slightly larger boat looming over us, but at an odd angle, and then I saw Dad hanging on to the rails of the other boat and looking as if he was about to be sick.

  Luckily the man with him had a bit of sense and did exactly the right thing, which was to get Dad off the sinking ship and into the water where we could pull him out, once he came back to the surface that was. The skipper and mate of the fishing boat, who had come out of the wheelhouse briefly to see what was going on, threw him and Mark a line each. Fiona was on deck too by that time, helping.

  Amazingly, the other boat seemed to have sustained more damage than we had in the collision. I found out later that this wasn’t just an ordinary fishing-boat. Surprise, surprise – how did Declan always manage to know just the right people?

  ‘Is Declan all right?’ I said to Fiona once we had managed to drag Dad and his new best friend on to the deck and were trying to squeeze some water out of their lungs.

  ‘Declan? Where is he anyway?’ she said, trying to stop Dad from getting to his feet too quickly.

  ‘He’s down below. He bumped his head.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me in the first place?’ she exclaimed crossly, and hurried off, leaving me to deal with both men.

  ‘Dan – this is Mark,’ said Dad, still sounding a bit waterlogged. ‘Mark – my son Daniel.’

  ‘How did you get here?’ I asked. I was grateful we weren’t the kind of family who hugged each other. That would just have been irrelevant at this point. I didn’t bother asking who Mark was, either. There wasn’t time.

  ‘Better get below in the warm,’ I suggested. Both men showed signs of wanting to hang about on deck, which was a bit worrying. Just as the words left my mouth, there was a sharp bang and something ricocheted off the side of the boat. It looked as if somebody didn’t want us to live long enough to tell the tale.

  I pushed and shoved my father into the wheelhouse out of the way, then went back for Mark, only he was quicker and I met him in the doorway. It was getting a bit crowded in there.

  ‘They’re shooting at us,’ I told the skipper. ‘Better get out of here.’

  ‘That’s what I’m trying to do, pal,’ he said. ‘We’re caught on something… Better throw a few more logs on the fire,’ he added, to his mate. The engines increased their noise and suddenly we surged forward. My Dad and Mark fell over, of course. When I was sure we were out of firing distance, I wrapped them in scratchy grey blankets from one of the lockers and took them down to the cabin.

  Declan was sitting on a chair, and Fiona was mopping his brow with a tea-towel. They glared at me and my father with equal hostility.

  ‘Thought we’d shaken you off,’ growled Declan.

  ‘I was kind of hoping I’d never see you again either,’ said Dad. He sat down at the table and said nonchalantly, ‘I’m quite pleased to find Dan though. Emma would have killed me if anything had happened to him.’

  ‘What are you doing here anyway?’ said Fiona.

  I turned to start up the kettle. I thought Dad and Mark should at least have a hot drink if they were going to be interrogated.

  My father told a complicated tale of Tanya Fairfax abandoning them, raiders killing people and Mrs Swan turning out to be an enemy in the style of these international spies who used to turn up in old movies. I listened with half an ear as I made tea. There were some chocolate capsules Fiona and I had discovered in a drawer earlier, and I felt quite domesticated as I put it all together. First time ever.

  ‘Have you heard anything from Emma?’ said Declan once Dad stopped talking.

  ‘Not recently. But when I was being questioned on that other boat, they said everybody’s supposed to report to Balmoral for some kind of census thing. She’s maybe on her way there.’

  ‘Balmoral,’ said Declan. ‘Yes, we heard about that on the cloud-cast. It sounds very much like a trap to me.’

  Fiona nodded in agreement.

  I wasn’t sure.

  ‘If they’re telling Emma to go to Balmoral, she’ll go there all right,’ said Dad. ‘She won’t want to miss out on anything. Is that where you’re heading?’

  ‘Not really,’ said Declan evasively. ‘Somewhere near there though.’

  ‘You’re going to that old rebel place at Spittal of Glenshee, aren’t you?’ said Dad accusingly.

  ‘What’s that?’ said Dad’s friend Mark. He had been so quiet I had almost forgotten he was there, but when I glanced at him I saw that he was on the alert, leaning forward on the bench with his elbows on his knees. I thought he looked a bit familiar.

  ‘It’s just a place,’ said Declan even more evasively.

  He was right not to trust the newcomer, I thought.

  ‘Oh!’ said Fiona suddenly, staring at Mark. ‘Aren’t you that world cycling champion?’

  ‘Mark Sutherland,’ said Dad. ‘That’s right.’

  ‘How on earth did you two get together?’ she said, rather tactlessly I thought. Even if my father was an archaeology nerd, it didn’t mean he didn’t have any friends in different spheres of life. It was quite cool really. I didn’t mind him being a nerd anyway. Better than being a total idiot, like so many people I could mention.

  Mark shrugged his shoulders. ‘I just tagged along,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, go on,’ said Fiona. ‘I’m sure there was more to it than that.’

  Declan coughed. There was a sort of cross tone in the sound. I don’t suppose he liked the way Fiona was looking at this other man.

  ‘There wasn’t any more to it,’ said Dad. ‘He came along with Irene Swan. That was before we knew about her secret life, of course.’

  ‘What are we going to do about her and the others?’ said Fiona.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Declan. ‘I hope they’re at the bottom of the Forth by now, along with that boat. The skipper can’t have been paying attention. They were definitely in the wrong.’

  ‘Just as well this boat’s tougher
than it looks,’ said Dad with a smile. ‘How do you find those people, Declan?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Declan, laughing. ‘I just seem to come across them now and again.’

  It was all very jolly. After a while, to judge from the engine sounds, the boat slowed down a bit and after a bit longer the skipper came in and said he was preparing to drop anchor for the night and that we were off St Andrews, or at least the place where St Andrews had once been. I would have liked to get up early the next morning to see if there was anything left of the ancient cathedral sticking up from the sea, but in fact I fell asleep on the floor of the aft cabin on another of the grey scratchy blankets, and they didn’t wake me up until we were under way again, which was annoying.

  I had been awake in the middle of the night, worrying about Mum and Jen. It wasn’t like me to worry about them – I knew Mum was well able to take care of herself and my sister without any help from the male side of the family at all – so then I worried that they had somehow sent me a telepathic request for help.

  I didn’t even believe in telepathy, which made me feel even sillier about the whole thing.

  JEN

  I tried to wait for Mum. I stood there as if glued to the spot while people detoured around me, in a hurry to get to the next stage, whatever that was. After a while two men in green uniforms came along and took me away. We didn’t go through the door my mother had been taken through, but they rushed me up the stairs, to the landing at the top where almost everybody else had been heading.

  The room that led off the landing was like a large movie theatre. It was a while since I had been in a real one. We didn’t get movies from outside Scotland any more. I had been too young to notice anything at the time, but apparently it had started when we weren’t allowed movies made in England, and then the Americans refused to send us theirs because of the embargo on English ones, and then the Scottish movie companies which the new laws were intended to benefit mostly went out of business because people stopped going to see their output. Then we were left with government information films, which were always a barrel of laughs.

  The one showing in this room was no exception.

  It was a sort of disaster movie, I suppose, except it was for real.

  Even having lived through the storm, we hadn’t really known the full scale of it or the devastation that resulted, particularly on the west coast, so I was interested to see it, at first. The pictures on their own would have been impressive, but unfortunately somebody had imagined it was a good idea to add a soundtrack. Not just wild stormy music, but a voiceover which re-formulated the whole narrative of the event in a way that was obviously skewed in a certain direction. Apparently it hadn’t been our own government’s fault that we were so ridiculously unprepared for the storm. It seemed to have been mainly the flood prevention measures taken in England that were to blame.

  There were some seats available but after I had stood watching for a few minutes I wasn’t sure if it was worthwhile sitting down just to hear all this nonsense. However, there was a tough-looking uniformed man between me and the only exit, and I thought it might be safer to wait until other people left so that I would have a better chance of being invisible in the crowd. I even started to look around for possible groups I could tag along with.

  Of course, if Mum had been with me, she would have used the opportunity to collect signatures for the petition. I gritted my teeth and prepared to approach some complete stranger and ask them to commit possible treason.

  Luckily, before I had done anything of the kind, I became conscious just in time of a movement behind me. I glanced over my shoulder to find that my mother had come into the room.

  She didn’t speak to me or show any sign of recognition, not even when I gave her a tentative smile. There was something wrong. Either she knew somebody was watching, or she had been instantly drugged or brainwashed… Another option unexpectedly popped into my head, but I didn’t get as far as putting it into words.

  I tightened my grip on the recording device. I could tell this wasn’t the right time to bring it out. Maybe that was why she didn’t say anything – she was trying to communicate some sort of unspoken warning. I couldn’t see anybody in the room who was taking any notice of us, but of course there would be electronic surveillance going on all the time, and computer-based analysis of the footage that would automatically recognise the faces of people who were known to the authorities, in a bad way that was.

  My mother moved a little closer to me in the crowd. I stared at her, willing her at least to show a sign that she had recognised me. But there was nothing. I could only see blankness in her eyes. This couldn’t be good.

  While my head was still turned to watch her, someone took hold of my arm.

  It was the security guard from the doorway.

  ‘This way, Ms Hepburn,’ he growled. He led me towards my mother. ‘Here she is, Mrs Hepburn. We told you she wouldn’t have gone far.’

  ‘Oh! – yes, Jennifer, of course,’ said Mum in an unfamiliar, cool voice. Her eyes were still blank. ‘Thank you.’

  There was something different about her. Not just the blank expression and the failure to acknowledge me until forced to, but something else. I stared at her for a moment too long. The security guard gave me a little shake.

  ‘You can stop staring now, you’ve seen her before,’ he told me. ‘Let’s get on with it.’

  ‘With what?’ I asked.

  ‘With finding out what you’re up to,’ he said.

  He led me and my mother to the exit door and down a long corridor which looked as if it had once been decorated in some ornate manner – maybe when it had been a long gallery filled with pictures of royalty.

  There was no royalty in Scotland any more.

  EMMA

  I knew things had gone badly wrong as soon as I spoke my name. If only I had thought to use an alias. One of the men at the table nodded to the other one, and then pressed a button that was built into the surface of the table. Then the door behind them opened and another man, in uniform, came through it. He took my arm and hustled me out. I was too shocked to fight or scream. The only thing I could think of was to call out to Jen. I hoped they wouldn’t get hold of her too.

  The uniformed man hurried me along a corridor. It must at one time have been part of the servants’ quarters in the castle, because it was decorated plainly with white tiles and brown woodwork, and it led in a straight line past several other rooms.

  We went into the last room, and I came face to face with a man who was sitting behind a desk there.

  ‘Mr Goodfellow!’ I exclaimed. ‘We wondered where you had gone.’

  I looked again. It was my former colleague Jim Goodfellow, last seen at the hospital, and yet at the same time it couldn’t be. This man seemed quite a lot younger, with hair that hadn’t gone quite as grey, and hands that hadn’t acquired age spots or gnarled knuckles. But the face was Jim’s face.

  I put my hands up to my own face as I remembered the last thing that had happened in the hospital.

  ‘You’ve stolen his face!’

  ‘Please don’t think of it as theft, Mrs Hepburn,’ said a voice which resonated in the small room. A voice I had heard before. ‘The doctors merely cloned his face from a cell or two. Unfortunately he didn’t survive the experience. Unlike you.’

  ‘Me?’

  So that was what the screams in the night and the persistent sensation that somebody meant to harm me were all about.

  The man who wasn’t Mr Goodfellow smiled unpleasantly. ‘Don’t worry, Mrs Hepburn. You haven’t lost your face – yet. We merely cloned it, and you were lucky enough to make it through the cloning process.’

  I noticed there was somebody else in the room. She stood at the window, looking out. She was about the same height and build as me, with a similar hairstyle – or lack of style, as I hadn’t been to the hairdresser for almost a year – and, as she turned towards us, I saw something else.

  She had my face.
<
br />   I gasped, but I couldn’t speak. It was just too uncanny.

  The man who wasn’t Mr Goodfellow smiled again.

  ‘Mrs Hepburn – may I introduce Mrs Hepburn? I think the two of you will get along well together. You’ve got such a lot in common.’

  ‘But – why?’ was all I could think of to say.

  ‘We’ve had you and your family under surveillance for some time,’ said the man. ‘Surely you don’t think we would give up on that just because of the storm?’

  ‘I don’t understand any of it,’ I said. ‘We’ve always been perfectly harmless and law-abiding.’

  ‘All of you?’ he said. ‘Including your son Daniel?’

  ‘He’s only a boy. What damage can he possibly do to any of you? It’s a complete over-reaction.’

  ‘Oh well,’ he said with a nonchalant shrug. ‘We’ve got the power – might as well use it.’

  ‘Brad McWhittle,’ I breathed. ‘You haven’t changed, even now you’ve got his face.’

  His smile broadened a little – it couldn’t do much more than that now – but didn’t become any less sinister.

  ‘But do any of us ever change, Mrs Hepburn? Having said that, I don’t think you’re as sharp as you once were. Is the result of the anaesthetic, I wonder?’

  He nodded at the other woman – the one with my face. ‘Time to go now. We don’t want to keep Jennifer waiting, now do we? Or the other very important people who are about to arrive for the meeting.’

  ‘No!’ I cried. ‘You can’t do this.’

  ‘Just watch us, Mrs Hepburn… Off you go now, Mrs Hepburn. Play your part well and you’ll be rewarded.’

  ‘No! I won’t let you!’ I lunged forward to try and grab the doppelganger by the arm or the hair or any part of her that I could reach. But there was somebody else in the room. I hadn’t noticed him before but as I started forward he stepped out from the shadows behind the door and pointed something at me. I felt a sharp pain in my arm and then a numbness that spread from there into all my limbs, slowly and inexorably. I was going to fall – something caught me. That was all.