The Petitioners

by Perry, Sheila

  ‘Get a move on – we’re going round to the front of the house,’ he told the others after a brief conversation on some sort of invisible communications device. ‘There’s something going on. Now!’

  They abandoned us in the corridor. The last we saw of them was their backs whisking out of sight through the next set of double swing doors.

  We looked at each other.

  ‘What’s happened?’ I wondered aloud.

  ‘Never mind that – let’s make sure they don’t find us here when they get back. We’ve got to get to a staircase.’

  He headed off in the opposite direction from the guards.

  ‘But we don’t know what’s along this way,’ I protested, working hard to keep up with him.

  ‘It’s about time we found out, then,’ he said over his shoulder.

  We had arrived in a posher part of the place where there were huge fireplaces and long windows, and one room led into the next. It was impossible now to tell what the purposes of the rooms had been. They had probably had names like the Tweedy Sitting-Room or the Stag’s Head Gun Room at one time, but there was little sign of their original use at all, or of any subsequent use by the government, who now apparently owned the place. Considering the number of people who had entered the Castle, this part of it was oddly deserted. It was sad in a way, but I supposed it was symbolic of the triumph of democracy too, as opposed to the monarchy we used to have anyway. Jeff tried some of the closed doors we passed. They probably just led to the Outer Library, or the Large Porridge Room, or the Principal Ceilidh Room. It was a random search, and I thought it was unlikely to turn up anything useful. But then, we hadn’t meant to find Mum’s old adversary Brad McWhittle when we were wandering about the hospital. I began to try doors too, the ones that led off this corridor of interlinking rooms at the other side from the ones Jeff was trying.

  In the end we did strike gold, or pay dirt, or whatever the expression is. I was getting bored with opening doors, and just wanted to get to the end of the place so that we could look for a way out. Only of course there was no way I would go anywhere without my mother. The real one, that is.

  I managed to get a bit ahead of Jeff, who had got distracted by a little library we came to along the way. It held a few bookshelves that were still loaded with books. Not the leather-bound, dusty tomes you might have found in the traditional aristocratic collection, but some paperbacks from the middle of the twentieth century or thereabouts. There was an upper level you could reach by pulling a long library ladder across. He was eyeing this arrangement and, I thought, working out if it would take us anywhere useful, when he spotted something on one of the shelves.

  I was in the middle of trying to open a door at the side of the little library that must surely lead to a spiral staircase that led to a turret room or something equally fascinating, when he said, ‘Look at this! A first edition Biggles!’

  ‘Biggles?’ Was it really a word? I didn’t want to demonstrate my complete ignorance by questioning him about it. Instead I turned my attention to the door, which was either locked or jammed.

  Jeff came over and rattled the doorknob.

  ‘Why should this one be locked?’ he mused. ‘Stand back – if it’s important enough to lock, then we’d better break in.’

  He barged at it, shoulder first, and it swung open.

  ‘Wow!’ I exclaimed.

  There was indeed a staircase behind the door. It might even be a spiral one. Certainly it twisted back on itself within a few steps, and when I put my hand out to hold on to something, I felt the cold strength of stone instead of the panelling and tiles we had come across elsewhere. I just had to find out what was at the top.

  ‘Wait,’ said Jeff. ‘We don’t know what’s up there. Let me go first.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said, half over my shoulder. ‘There’s nobody here. And maybe we can see outside and find out what’s going on.’

  He gave a sort of grunt and followed me. As we climbed, we came to slits in the walls, where the cold night air came in, swirling around us. It wasn’t unpleasant after our captivity.

  There was another door at the top, but it wasn’t locked. I pushed it open, and gasped.

  I was so taken with the little round room, like a fairy-tale illustration, that it took me a while to realise there was somebody on the floor under one of the windows.

  I was at her side in a moment, Jeff right behind me.

  ‘Mum?’ I said.

  ‘Emma!’ he said sharply.

  She opened her eyes to stare at us in the dim light that filtered in through the windows. The moon was up. Her eyes had a scary, blank expression about them, and I almost didn’t want to speak. Then she gave herself a shake, and she was my mother again, though with a hint of terror about her that wasn’t like her at all.

  ‘I thought they’d killed me,’ she said. She gazed round the room. ‘Just as well you’re here, otherwise I might have thought I was in God’s waiting room or something!’

  Yes, this was definitely the real Emma Hepburn. I breathed a long sigh, and took her hand. ‘Are you all right?’

  She looked up at Jeff. ‘Are you all right?’

  He laughed. ‘OK, that’s enough of that. Where are we going from here?’

  ‘Don’t ask me,’ she said, trying to heave herself up from the floor. ‘I’m out of my mind on drugs again.’

  ‘What do you mean, again?’ said a new voice from the staircase behind us. ‘What have you been up to?’

  We hadn’t heard any footsteps following us, but now my father and Dan stood framed in the doorway. For a moment our mutual amazement seemed to suspend time. I don’t know how long we spent staring at each other. It was almost like a taste of infinity.

  ‘Jen!’ said my father, slightly out of breath. ‘Emma!’

  ‘Gavin!’ said my mother, with a sort of moaning sound.

  I went over and flung my arms round Dad. There was no doubt that he was real, anyway. He had called me Jen, and he had that look of a clever man reduced to half-wittedness by events, that was unique to him. Dan grinned at me. I couldn’t remember when he had ever seemed pleased to see me before. Wonders would never cease.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked. ‘You’re supposed to be on the Pentlands, living off the land and sleeping in some mouldy old hut.’

  ‘It wasn’t all that mouldy,’ said Dan. ‘Anyway, you and Mum are meant to be in hospital.’

  Another man appeared in the doorway behind Dad. For some reason he looked vaguely familiar, although at the same time I couldn’t remember meeting him before.

  ‘This is Mark Sutherland,’ said Dad, waving a hand towards the man. ‘He’s a cyclist. Mark, my wife Emma and daughter Jen.’

  ‘We’ve met,’ said Jeff unexpectedly.

  Mark lifted a hand and gave a little wave. ‘What a coincidence,’ he said politely. I wasn’t sure if I liked him or not.

  ‘How on earth do you two know each other?’ I said to my father and Mark.

  ‘No time for that,’ said Dad. He disentangled himself from me and went over to help Mum to her feet.

  He sighed. ‘I thought you were both safe in that hospital. I’d never have let you go otherwise.’

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ I said. I think it was the secret patient who caused all the trouble.’

  ‘The secret patient?’ said Dad, patting my mother down as if frisking her for weapons. I knew he was just checking she was really able to stand and walk. ‘Sounds like a good book title.’

  ‘Come on, we’d better get out of here again,’ said Mark, ‘before all hell breaks loose.’

  ‘All hell?’ I enquired.

  ‘Tell you later,’ said my father, holding Mum’s hand in his. I was glad there hadn’t been a mushy scene. But then, they weren’t really like that. And they knew my brother would have made fun of them if they had been all over each other.

  ‘What’s happened to Declan and Fiona and co?’ I enquired.

  ‘Later,’ said Da
d. He gave my mother’s hand a tug. ‘Are you with us, Sleeping Beauty?’

  ‘I won’t be with you for long at this rate,’ she told him with a frown that surely must have been faked. She couldn’t be cross with him already.

  ‘Did you see Mum’s double?’ I asked as we made our way back down the spiral stairs.

  Dad nearly tripped over his own feet.

  I sighed. There was such a lot to tell them.

  DAN

  It was weird seeing Jen and Mum again. I hadn’t expected that when we found an unlocked window and entered the Castle through it. Looking for the others – Declan, Fiona and Will – we had seen somebody disappear through the door to the spiral stairs, and followed them. There must be a story behind Jen and Mum having got here, but there just wasn’t time to listen to it. And what was that about Mum’s double? I didn’t think my sensible sister could be making something up, especially something as mad as that, and yet it sounded a bit unlikely. Anyway, God help us all if there was another version of Mum out there.

  We needed to press on with the search for the others and then preferably get out of there before anything kicked off. After our encounter with Tanya Fairfax and her gang, I knew she would start some sort of a fight before too long. She just wouldn’t be able to resist it.

  I favoured going up to Spittal of Glenshee and hiding out for a while. If Fiona’s rebels were still around, all the better. They sounded like my kind of people.

  Mark Sutherland said we should head for the ballroom end of the castle, which he thought was where all the action would take place. For some reason Jen’s friend Jeff was obsessed with finding another staircase and wanted to carry on towards the other end of the building. He wasn’t too keen on going back the way they had come – apparently he and Jen and this other Mum had all been locked in together and they had only got away by sheer luck. And Jeff’s quick thinking had something to do with their escape, according to my sister. But I could see she thought he was the best thing since cloud computing, so I didn’t want to question this. We’d see how he got on when we came up against something tricky, like…

  ‘Guards!’ hissed Mark, who had gone on ahead a bit to see how the land lay. He had just opened yet another door to yet another of those inter-connecting rooms that seemed to go on and on. I could imagine Dad complaining they were a nightmare to heat. Mind you, this whole castle must have been a nightmare to heat and to clean. At this point I asked myself who the grumpy old person was who had taken up residence in my head.

  Nearly all of us panicked and looked for somewhere to hide, while Jeff stuck his head round the door and then went on through it, striding along nonchalantly as if he were out for a walk in the park. Not Holyrood Park, obviously, as it was under water, but some imaginary park left over from the golden past, of which some people had already begun to forget the downside.

  Mark followed him first, maybe to drag him back, but when sounds of hilarity began to arrive from the next room, we all crept away from the walls we had tried to melt into and went forward to see what was going on. Just before I reached the doorway, I wondered if it had really been laughter we had heard or whether it might have been some random sound of the kind people might make if they were being zapped with a hideous new secret weapon, but by then it was too late so I stepped across the threshold anyway.

  There was another reunion scene taking place in the room. Declan, Fiona and Will had at last turned up. They were dressed up in generic guard outfits, which explained Mark’s warning. At first sight I might have made the same mistake. Green tunics, green caps pulled down over their foreheads. Little black devices in their hands. It was a while since my time locked in the barracks in Edinburgh Castle but it gave me the shivers just to look at them.

  Fiona took off her cap, which helped a bit. ‘We found those in a cloakroom,’ she said. ‘Declan thought they might make us less conspicuous.’

  Jeff and Will greeted each other in an understated way.

  ‘I thought you were still around,’ said Will, not wasting any time on commiserations. ‘I sensed your brain patterns were still active.’

  Jeff rubbed the back of his neck thoughtfully. ‘I’m not sure if I like that or if it freaks me out.’

  ‘Good to see you again,’ said Mum to Will. He glanced at her sideways.

  ‘I’m getting a kind of echo effect when I look at you,’ he said unexpectedly.

  ‘What does that mean?’ said my father.

  ‘I’m not sure. I’m just saying what it feels like. It may not mean anything.’

  ‘It’s the other one!’ said Jen. ‘I told you.’

  Will just sighed.

  ‘It’s probably just the device malfunctioning,’ he said. ‘It’s only a beta version anyway. It’s bound to go wrong sometimes.’

  ‘No, there really is another copy of Mum,’ said my sister. ‘I don’t think she’s a complete clone. It’s only her face. They took her away to a meeting or something… A high-level meeting. That was it.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Mum frowned. She glanced up at my father. ‘I don’t like the sound of that.’

  ‘Do you really want to get involved?’ he said.

  ‘This isn’t the time to stand on the sidelines, Gavin,’ she told him.

  They stared at each other for a few moments. I didn’t really believe in telepathy but unspoken communication was definitely taking place.

  ‘Maybe that’s why Tanya and the troops are here,’ I suggested.

  ‘Tanya and the troops?’ said Mum, laughing. ‘Is that the latest teenage band?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Jen and I in unison.

  ‘Sorry to break into this cosy family chat,’ said Jeff, not sounding at all sorry. ‘But now we’ve got hold of Emma, she needs to be at that meeting.’

  ‘Does anyone know where it is?’ said Mum, looking round at the crowd that we had somehow become.

  Will coughed. ‘We could try following the echo.’

  In the absence of any other helpful ideas, we ended up doing that. I wasn’t sure why we were trusting these two people Dad and I had only just met, but I suppose Mum and Jen knew them and that should have been good enough for the rest of us. I noticed Declan and Fiona lagged behind the rest of us as we stormed through the Castle, flinging open doors confidently and marching through the rooms like an army on the warpath. Not that Tanya’s own regiment couldn’t have scattered us just by clicking their fingers if we had come face to face with them. We were just amateurs by comparison.

  Jeff fell into step beside me and my sister.

  ‘How did the petition go?’

  Jen brought something out of her pocket. It was small and black, like most of these electronic things. Was it a recording device?

  ‘I haven’t collected any names yet,’ she said. ‘Mum got some while we were waiting here. It’s a bit of a flop really.’

  ‘What’s all that about?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ll tell you later.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Will. ‘We’ve been collecting signatures for a while now. At the hospital – round about – people are quite receptive to the idea. I take a recording device with me wherever I go.’

  ‘There are others too,’ said Jeff.

  ‘Others?’ I enquired.

  ‘Other people collecting them,’ said Jeff. ‘I’m not the only envoy.’

  I didn’t want to sound like a complete idiot so I didn’t say ‘Envoy?’ in a voice of awe and wonder. I left that kind of thing to my father.

  ‘Envoy?’ he said, dropping back to join in the conversation. I noticed he still had a firm grip on Mum’s arm. He wasn’t going to let her get away again. I found this quite reassuring.

  ‘He’s an envoy of the English government,’ said Declan from the back of the procession.

  ‘Why not say it louder? I don’t think the private army outside will have caught that,’ said Jeff. ‘Yes, I’m here on behalf of the English government. That isn’t a secret. They’ve sent me to start a process we hope will l
ead to reunion. Any more questions?’

  Nobody said ‘Reunion?’ in a voice of awe and wonder. I think we all knew what the word meant.

  GAVIN

  If anything, I thought Emma was almost in a worse state now than when I had sent her off to that hospital in the first place, which was slightly disheartening. Not that it was entirely my fault. I just knew she had needed to be in a hospital, and there didn’t seem to be a good reliable one any closer than Pitlochry. You’d have thought somebody – the authorities – would set up field hospitals or something similar. But I suppose that was one more sign that government had broken down. We just hadn’t worked out the implications of all these things at first. In retrospect I found the lack of hospitals and even doctors a bit suspicious, considering the previous glut of doctors in Edinburgh which had persisted even through the bad times. Where had they all gone?

  ‘What’s this about reunion?’ I muttered to Emma when I thought none of the others were listening.

  ‘It’s just a pipe-dream,’ she said. ‘Jeff thinks if we get enough signatures on this petition of his, we’ll convince all the doubters that we need to revive the United Kingdom.’

  ‘Will there be doubters?’ I thought about all the devastation we had seen, the inundation of Fife and of other formerly agricultural areas, and the anarchy which allowed rampaging bands to swoop down on people in the night and kill anybody weaker than themselves, and the lack of medical facilities, and the fact that a private army was even now massed on the lawns of Balmoral, quite probably waiting to be told which side to support.

  ‘Gavin, I know you don’t know much about Scottish politics,’ she said, with a flash of her old self which on balance I was quite pleased to see. ‘But surely even you’ve noticed that doubt is endemic to the Scottish character.’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t be too sure of that,’ said Will, who must have been shamelessly eavesdropping.

  Emma’s eyes gleamed with triumphant amusement as they met mine. ‘See what I mean?’

  ‘You can’t really extrapolate from an outlier like Will,’ said Mark, also listening in.