The Petitioners

by Perry, Sheila

  ‘Are you all right, Mum?’ I said to her, deciding some carefully worded questions might bring out the truth.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said. It wasn’t quite Mum’s voice either. So she had come out of the room with a different voice, a different appearance and a different way of addressing me. Could she still be the same woman? Was there a copy of my mother walking about and if so, which was the copy and which the real person?

  ‘I see they’ve done something about the scars,’ I said. ‘You must be pleased about that.’

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  ‘Do you remember when I fell off my bike and cut my head open?’ I reminisced, making it up as I went along. ‘It took much longer for the scar from that to heal. But I suppose there must have been medical advances since those days. After all, I was only – what, six or seven? – at the time. Or was I a bit older?’

  ‘Oh, seven, I think,’ she said.

  I had always been an unnaturally cautious child and had never even attempted to learn to ride a bike. This masquerade, if that’s what it was, seemed less and less convincing. I hesitated, unsure of whether to play along with it in the hope of finding out the truth from this woman, or whether I should try and escape, or raise the alarm, or fight… I hated these moments of decision. I was conscious too that this seemed like a life and death thing, and that choosing the wrong way could mean disaster for my mother as well as for myself.

  If only Dad were here – or even Dan, for that matter. Somebody to share the responsibility. For the first time in my life, I felt quite alone. I squashed a memory of Jeff that suddenly strayed into my mind. He couldn’t help me now.

  ‘So what happens next?’

  She gave me a blank look.

  ‘I mean, can we go now? Or is there something else we need to do around here?’ I said. I didn’t really expect to be allowed just to walk out, but I thought maybe if I played the innocent bystander card then that would seem more realistic. Of course I really was an innocent bystander as far as their power games were concerned. Just because of what Mum had been involved in before, I didn’t consider myself to be any more important or useful than any other storm survivor.

  I realised they probably only needed me to verify that this woman was my mother. I wondered if I could put on a convincing enough show of believing it.

  ‘We wait,’ she said, after such a long pause that I had just opened my mouth to break the silence when she spoke.

  Quite apart from the fact that she didn’t sound like my mother, her speech was stilted and false. Either she was an android, straight from the pages of a sci-fi novel, or she was under hypnosis. I suppose Dan would have preferred the first of these hypotheses to be true but I leaned towards the second.

  She sat down on one of the porridge-coloured chairs as if preparing for a long wait.

  I prowled about the room. The window wasn’t shuttered or curtained. It was getting dark outside, though. I peered out anyway. We overlooked the far side of the Castle, and I saw a stream of people walking away. Were they the others who had come to register as part of the census? Were we the only ones left in here? I couldn’t suppress a shiver. Me on my own against all these people with evil intent. I didn’t have much chance of recruiting help to rescue my mother, even assuming I could escape my captors.

  I didn’t think I had heard the door locking behind us when we came in, but of course the locking mechanism might have been one of these modern, noiseless ones. It didn’t have to be the ominous click of a proper big iron key in an ornate medieval lock to keep us confined. There might even be a guard outside, for all I knew.

  There was only one way to find out.

  Gathering all my courage – which I realised didn’t go quite as far as I would have liked it to – I went to the door and pulled at the handle.

  It opened smoothly. The man who was pushing from the other side almost fell into the room.

  He glared at me as he straightened, trying to pretend he hadn’t stumbled.

  ‘Safe room. Now,’ he said to the woman who probably wasn’t my mother.

  ‘Is there trouble?’ said the woman.

  ‘We’ve got to keep you out of the way while we get the others into the room. They could have back-up for all we know.’

  ‘She’ll have to come too,’ said the woman, getting up from the chair. She didn’t even look at me.

  ‘Where?’ I asked as he grabbed me by the arm and hustled me out of the room.

  ‘You’ll see when we get there,’ he said grimly.

  I tensed, expecting a dungeon. It was worse than that.

  It was more like a cupboard. Or maybe a priest’s hole, except that I happened to know Balmoral hadn’t been built at a time when priests were considered to be dangerous or treacherous. I suppose my father could have turned that into a joke, if he had been there. I wished he could have been.

  The woman who wasn’t my mother and I were at much closer quarters than I was happy with. Going by the way she flattened herself against the wall that was furthest from where I stood, I could tell the feeling was mutual. I tried to stop the man from sliding the panel closed to shut us in, but he was too quick for me – or I was too slow. I stared at the wood in the dim light of the old-fashioned lantern he had left us. The candle inside was already flickering. If it went out and left us in the dark…

  There was a moan from somewhere close by.

  I didn’t want to look, but I turned slowly to survey the extent of this cell, and there, at the back, was a dark heap of blankets that moved.

  My first thought was that it might be a rat. My mother had been obsessed with rats when we first emerged from our refuge after the storm. She insisted rats would have survived even if every other living thing for miles around had been wiped out, and that they would thrive in the ruins, so we had to be vigilant all the time. I think maybe she had already started to hallucinate at that point, but some of her warnings must have stuck with me.

  It was too big for a rat. It started to heave itself up, and a head appeared from under one of the blankets.

  I gave a little squeak.

  ‘What’s that?’ said the woman who wasn’t my mother, flattening herself so hard against the opposite wall that I started to wonder if she could actually demolish it and burst out of our prison just with the power of her fear.

  The man under the blankets raised himself to a sitting position, one hand to his head.

  ‘Blimey, I almost saw stars for a minute there,’ he grumbled.

  ‘Jeff!’ I wanted to fling myself at him, but held back. I didn’t know how badly injured he was. He had looked as if he might be dead, back on the hillside where we left him.

  He blinked. ‘Jen?’

  ‘I thought you were dead.’ My voice didn’t even wobble. I was proud of my self-control.

  ‘Not quite there yet,’ he said. I watched as his gaze moved in the other woman’s direction. ‘Emma?’

  I shook my head very slightly, hoping he wouldn’t see. I wanted him to confirm what I thought, that she wasn’t really my mother, but for it to be convincing I couldn’t prompt him either way.

  He heaved himself to kneeling, but it obviously hurt, because he swayed and put the hand back to his head.

  ‘Are you sure you shouldn’t just lie still for a while?’ I said.

  ‘How do we get out of here?’ he said, staying as he was.

  The woman who wasn’t my mother said, ‘We don’t.’ She gave a sort of grim chuckle.

  Jeff frowned in my direction. I shook my head again, this time hoping the woman wouldn’t see me. But her scary smile broadened and she added, ‘Well, you don’t anyway.’

  I wasn’t sure which of us she was speaking to. She definitely wasn’t my mother. Even under hypnosis Mum would never have made a threat like that and in those tones.

  Jeff and I could rush the next person to open the door, anyway. They wouldn’t stand a chance.

  GAVIN

  Slightly to my surprise, when Tanya Fairfax had t
old two of her minions to take Dan and me behind the lines, that hadn’t been a coded message to them to kill us both. Instead the uniformed men, who were a bit surly but not too rough, hustled us along a track at the side of the loch and then pushed us inside a hut. There was a sort of clanking sound behind me as if they might be barricading the door.

  This wasn’t so bad.

  I sat down and relaxed against the wall. Sooner or later they would come back and let us out.

  ‘Dad!’ said Dan in an urgent whisper. ‘Come on, we’ve got to try and get out of here.’

  I didn’t see why he was so desperate about it. ‘Just chill, Dan, there’s no rush.’

  ‘We need to get back to the others and warn them.’

  ‘They’ll find out soon enough. When we don’t come back they’re going to send Declan to have a look. Or Mark. They probably won’t be stupid enough to get caught.’

  It was too dark to be sure, but I thought he was probably rolling his eyes by this time. He should have known his insistence would just make me dig my heels in.

  ‘The only chance is for us all to stick together,’ he said.

  I laughed. ‘What do you think, the six of us can overpower them?’

  ‘We’d have more of a chance,’ said Dan. ‘We aren’t really going to just sit here in this hut and – wait a minute!’

  I tensed, not knowing what he was about to do. I just hoped it didn’t involve guns, or explosives of any kind, or anything too dangerous that could backfire on us in some hideous way. Emma would never forgive me if…

  He raced past me and jumped up in the air, grabbing on to something further up the wall. A whole section of wooden panelling came down on both of us. So much for being safe in here, was my last thought before something hit me on the head.

  If only it had knocked me unconscious, was my first thought when I realised it hadn’t.

  Dan pulled me out of the wreckage. I would have resisted if I had had the strength.

  ‘It’s a hide!’ he said gleefully. ‘Those idiots have shut us up in a hide.’

  ‘A hide?’

  ‘At the edge of the loch. For bird-watching. Come on, we can get out now. They weren’t to know that panel flapped down so easily.’

  I groaned, not entirely because I now had a lump on my head from where the wooden panel had flapped on to me. I could see there was a big hole at the front of the hut, and Dan had already started to crawl out through it. He was going to land in the water if…

  He splashed down softly and turned back towards me, leaning over the ledge on which, maybe in more tranquil times, twitchers had kept their binoculars. ‘Hurry up, Dad. We’ve only got one chance… Not like that!’

  I heaved myself up and over the ledge while he was still speaking, so his warning came a little too late. I landed face down in the water. I just hoped he wasn’t laughing at me as he dragged me to my feet. I didn’t need much of an excuse to clamber back into the cosiness of the hide and stay there until the world righted itself, which surely to goodness it could do better without my assistance.

  We peered round the corner of the hut to see how the land lay.

  The backs of Tanya Fairfax’s private army – if that’s what it was – were moving away from us in the direction of the house. If she were any kind of a tactician, she would have left a rear-guard, I mused. I was just about to communicate this to Dan when he pushed me back into the shadows and hissed, ‘Sssh!’ It wouldn’t have been so bad if one foot hadn’t landed in the water again.

  ‘What’s that?’ said a voice, too close for comfort.

  ‘A duck,’ said another. ‘Want me to zap it?’

  ‘No, let it be. We’d be in trouble for making a noise. Come on – let’s get caught up with the rest. I’m starting to see things in the shadows.’

  ‘She wanted us to stay back.’

  ‘Never mind. What she doesn’t see won’t hurt.’

  ‘I wouldn’t bank on that,’ said the second one. But his voice was receding, and when we peered out again, there were two shapes just about gaining ground on the mass of soldiers.

  I didn’t think I would like to look out of a window in Balmoral and see an army – or even a regiment, if that’s what it called itself – advancing across the lawns. We didn’t even know who occupied the place at the moment, or which side Tanya had come down on – or would come down on in the future. I was glad, in spite of everything, to have some prior knowledge of the woman, even if it didn’t entirely inspire me with confidence. I didn’t think she was the type to shoot first and ask questions afterwards.

  We crept out from our hiding place. I had a silly urge to walk on tiptoe, but it probably wouldn’t have made any difference on the soft ground. Dan led me back into the brambles, and we made our way as silently as we could back up the hill.

  Mark was there all on his own, standing more or less where we had left him and the others.

  ‘They’ve gone,’ he said, unnecessarily.

  ‘Where to?’ I enquired, wondering just for a moment if Declan had talked the others into retreating up to Spittal of Glenshee after all.

  ‘Oh, they’ve gone down to the Castle,’ he said. ‘I said I’d wait here in case you came back.’

  ‘To the Castle?’

  It seemed like the height of folly to head down to the Castle when it was about to come under siege from an army with unknown loyalties, but of course Declan had never had any fear of folly, and Fiona wasn’t much better.

  ‘Will?’ I enquired.

  ‘Yes, he’s gone with them. Something about people needing him.’

  Mark stared at me. Was he waiting for me to tell him what to do? It seemed unlikely.

  ‘What do you think, Dad?’ said Dan unexpectedly.

  He was staring at me too. For heaven’s sake, surely my own son knew how much I hated telling people what to do.

  ‘So much for sticking together,’ I muttered at last. ‘OK, we might as well go down the hill. But carefully. If we move along the edge of the undergrowth, but a bit behind the troops, we might get away with it.’

  ‘Why don’t we head the other way from them, round to the far side of the house?’ suggested Mark. ‘There’s bound to be other entrances somewhere about.’

  ‘Maybe they’ll split up though,’ I argued.

  He shrugged. ‘Better wait and see.’

  I didn’t think for a minute we would get away with anything, especially in the light of what the two men who had passed us near the hut had said about zapping the duck, but I knew Mark and Dan wouldn’t be content to stay on this benighted hillside for long, and it was better that we move in a considered, organised way than that they should fling themselves down the slope in a frantic dash to get away from me.

  For the first time for a little while, I thought about Emma and Jen, and hoped they were really at the safe house Will had mentioned. It was disconcerting, after living through an era when everybody had been in touch with everybody else at the tap of a finger on keyboard or screen, to be so completely cut off from my own family.

  We should all have stayed together somehow. I should have made more of an effort to ensure that.

  I swatted the thought out of my mind as if it were one of the sub-tropical insects we had seen more and more often at Cramond over the past decade.

  ‘Just go slowly,’ I warned Dan. ‘If we go blundering about, somebody’s bound to see us. And remember, we don’t know enough to be sure whose side we want to be on – if any. Take it easy.’

  ‘Yeah, whatever,’ said Dan, but I noticed he went carefully down the hillside not far ahead of me, and didn’t gallop as I had been afraid he would. Maybe some of my innate caution had rubbed off on him after all.

  ‘He’s learning,’ said Mark, right behind me.

  JENNIFER

  We didn’t have to wait long for our chance.

  There was a lot of noise in the room just beyond the sliding doors – no sound-proofing, I noted – and they suddenly opened again.

  �
�He’s awake!’ said one of the men, peering into the safe room from just outside.

  ‘Watch him,’ snapped the other. He grabbed the woman who wasn’t my mother and hustled her out. She didn’t protest at all. Maybe she was expecting this.

  After the two of them had gone, Jeff moved towards the doors, and the other man barred his way. ‘Not you,’ he said.

  ‘It’s all right, I just wanted to…’ Jeff moved again, and the other man fell to the ground, as abruptly as if one of his legs had given way under him. I couldn’t see what Jeff had done. ‘Hurry along there,’ he said to me. ‘The effects won’t last more than a couple of minutes.’

  He held out a hand to me and I took it gladly.

  It seemed a bit too simple, and indeed it was. When we opened the door to the outer room, there were two more guards outside in the corridor. They were looking the other way, but one of them half-turned as if he had heard something, and then the one we had left on the safe room floor lumbered up behind us. We were surrounded. Jeff raised his hands to show he was unarmed, although I found that hard to believe.

  ‘We just want to see where you’re taking my mother,’ I said.

  ‘Ah – your mother?’ said one of them.

  ‘The woman who was in the safe room,’ I said.

  They looked at each other and smiled.

  ‘You can’t go with her, dear,’ said one of them in a condescending tone. ‘She’s to go off to some high-level meeting up the stairs. You’ll see her later.’

  Of course there had been laws against gender discrimination for decades, but nobody had ever managed to pass a law that would ensure men didn’t patronise women, though personally, although I was generally against violence. I would have favoured the death penalty for that particular offence.

  ‘Can we wait for her outside?’ I asked, widening my eyes to try and achieve a look of naivety – both sides could play at the condescension game, I decided. ‘Just outside the meeting room, I mean?’

  I didn’t hear the crackle of a radio – the modern ones didn’t give themselves away like that – but suddenly one of the men was speaking to somebody else, and it sounded urgent.