The Petitioners

by Perry, Sheila

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ said Will. ‘I think you’ll find a lot like me – especially in remote areas.’

  It wasn’t fair of him to wind up Mark but I couldn’t blame him.

  ‘Any sign of this echo?’ I asked, remembering we were meant to be looking for Emma’s double. ‘Can you tell if it’s getting closer or further away?’

  ‘Oh, very close,’ said Will immediately. He didn’t even pretend to be listening to something in his head or to paste a far-away expression on his face. That was what convinced me, I think. It seemed so real and normal to him.

  ‘Where is she?’ Emma demanded.

  I wanted to tell her to calm down, but I knew from bitter experience what the results of that would be.

  We went through a door and suddenly we were surrounded by guards. They were real ones this time, and they swarmed towards us when we came out of the last of the interlinked rooms and into a larger space which I recognised as the last stop on our route out of the Castle when Jen and I had last been here.

  I saw one of them talking into a device. I had given up trying to understand which device did what, but the purpose of this one was obviously communication. He was asking for instructions about what to do with us. I hoped the reply wasn’t going to lead to a mass execution. I could almost picture the scene. If they did it right here in the corridor, and caught us all together, there wouldn’t be nearly so much mess to clean up afterwards. They could roll us into the carpet, swab down the walls and ceiling and there would be no evidence left, or at least none that it wouldn’t take forensic teams which probably didn’t exist any more too uncover.

  I came back to reality with a start as Emma spoke.

  ‘I hope you’re planning to take us to the meeting, because otherwise there are going to be repercussions.’

  I wanted to cheer. Emma was back, with a vengeance.

  The man who had been talking into the device made the mistake of laughing. He cut it short as her focus swiveled round towards him like a velociraptor seeking its prey.

  ‘Serious repercussions. We have friends in high places. Take us to the meeting now.’

  ‘I can’t do that,’ he said. He was a braver man than I had at first thought.

  ‘Why not?’ she snapped.

  ‘Because – because you’re already there, Mrs Hepburn,’ he said.

  She gave a short laugh. ‘Oh, really? Would you like to bet your job on that? Your life?’ She swept her arms round to take in the whole group. ‘All your lives?’

  As if on cue, the outside doors swung open and a different set of armed men in different uniforms – grey instead of green – marched in, headed by Tanya Fairfax. Maybe there had been a cue. I was too confused to work it out. Whose side was she on? Whose side were we on, for that matter? Would they arrest Jeff, for being an English agent?

  The men in grey swiftly overpowered the rest and took them away. I wanted to warn them not to try and keep anybody prisoner in the bird hide, but I was afraid of being shot for inappropriate levity.

  Tanya marched up to Emma. She didn’t salute, but then that wasn’t her style. ‘Mrs Hepburn? We’ve been looking for you?’

  ‘According to him,’ said Emma, glancing at the officious man with the communicator, ‘I’m already in this meeting, whatever it is.’

  ‘The Council of War and Peace,’ said Tanya, nodding. Obviously things made sense to her. It must have been all that flying about by helicopter that had given her an overview of what was going on. Or something. Her gaze moved to Jeff, who seemed to be trying to hide behind Jennifer. ‘Why aren’t you in there with the others?’

  ‘Unavoidable delays,’ he muttered.

  ‘What about you?’ She seemed to be looking at Mark now. What did he have to do with anything?

  ‘Same sort of thing,’ he told her. ‘We got held up by Mrs Swan.’

  ‘Ah – Mrs Swan. I see.’

  Just as well Tanya Fairfax did see. It all made even less sense to me now than it had done two minutes before. Emma must have sensed something of my bewilderment, for she took my hand and squeezed it hard. I didn’t even understand this – was it a signal to me to keep quiet, or a reassurance that things were getting sorted out, or what?

  Mark looked over at me. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ve been working with Jeff and Tanya.’

  ‘So you’re all English envoys?’ I enquired, trying not to let hostility creep into my tone. I really wasn’t hostile to the English. After all, I had been born in England and I had never subscribed completely to the Scottish independence dream, especially after it turned into a nightmare for me and my family.

  ‘Not envoys, exactly,’ said Tanya, at about the same time as Mark said,

  ‘Not English, exactly.’

  They caught each other’s eyes and laughed.

  ‘Can somebody explain what’s going on here?’ said Fiona.

  I was glad she had piped up and stopped me making a fool of myself as usual by asking stupid questions.

  ‘Not now,’ said Tanya. ‘We need to get Mrs Hepburn into the meeting. And get rid of this imposter. Before she does any permanent damage to the process. That’s what we’re here for, after all.’

  She picked out some men to help her and they hustled Emma away from us and up the stairs.

  ‘Gavin!’ said Emma, halfway up. ‘Come with me!’

  ‘Not now,’ said Tanya. ‘They won’t want any bystanders in there.’

  To my amazement, Jen pushed past me and began to go after the small party. ‘I need to be with Mum,’ she said. ‘She can’t be on her own in there.’

  Jeff and Mark caught up with her, one on each side. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll take care of this,’ Jeff called up to Tanya. She didn’t look convinced, but carried on up the stairs, her hand under Emma’s elbow.

  I considered whether to follow them or not. The fact that there was a man in grey standing right in front of me with some sort of weapon pointing at my chest helped me to make up my mind not even to try.

  ‘What about the rest of us?’ said Declan, who had been suspiciously quiet up to now.

  The soldier who had been left in charge shrugged his shoulders.

  I looked round for somewhere to sit down. It seemed to me we might be in for a long wait.

  JENNIFER

  I don’t know what made me brave enough to follow the others up the stairs, but once Jeff and Mark joined me, I knew it would be all right. I wasn’t too worried about leaving Dad and my brother behind. They were with Declan and Fiona – and Will. He would look after them. My father wouldn’t let Dan get into any mischief in any case.

  ‘So what’s this about then, Jen?’ said Jeff on the way. ‘Are you just being nosy, or do you really think your Mum still needs looking after?’

  ‘A bit of both, I suppose,’ I said after a moment’s thought.

  ‘Looking after?’ scoffed Mark. ‘We all saw her facing up to the guards. I’d heard she was one scary woman, but I didn’t believe the stories until now.’

  ‘What stories?’ I asked, puzzled. It was news to me that my mother’s activities were known even as far afield as England. Of course we had always known within the family that she took no prisoners when it came to any kind of confrontation, but the idea that she was internationally famous would just have caused us to fall about laughing.

  ‘Where do you want me to start?’ said Mark.

  ‘Not now,’ said Jeff. ‘We’ll tell you all about it later, when things calm down a bit.’ He gazed ahead of us, to where Tanya, my mother and the guards had stopped outside a door. ‘That must be where the meeting is.’

  ‘The Council of War and Peace,’ I said slowly. ‘It sounds like something out of a fantasy novel.’

  ‘A fantasy will be all it is, if certain people have their way,’ said Jeff.

  I tried to get ahead of the others. ‘I need to go and find out what’s happening.’

  Jeff held me back. ‘I don’t think so. Not yet. Let’s see if your mother gets in first.’
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br />   Tanya came towards us. ‘You’d better wait in the ante-room,’ she said to Jeff. ‘They’ll be calling the envoys in at some point, if things go according to plan. The others are there already. It’s just down the hall on the left there. Mark, you too.’

  ‘What about me?’ I asked, trying not to sound like a plaintive six-year-old who didn’t want to be left out of a trip to the seaside. I watched Jeff and Mark move away and worried that I would be sent back downstairs.

  ‘Hmm.’ Tanya frowned. ‘Stick with your mother and me, and we’ll try and bluff it out.’

  ‘Who are you?’ I said to her. ‘How do you know my father?’

  ‘We met in the Pentlands,’ she said. ‘I run a special regiment of the English Army.’

  ‘So is this an invasion?’ I asked.

  She didn’t answer that.

  We joined my mother at the door.

  ‘You don’t have to come with me,’ said Mum. ‘It’ll just be boring people in suits in there. I’ve been in meetings like this before.’

  ‘With all due respect, I don’t think you have, Mrs Hepburn,’ said Tanya. ‘There are people in there trying to change history.’

  ‘You can’t change what’s already happened,’ I said to her. ‘That’s just wrong.’

  ‘I don’t mean in the sense of rewriting past history,’ said Tanya. ‘I mean changing the future course of history.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘Jen, this isn’t the place for arguments about language,’ said Mum.

  ‘It seems to me it’s exactly the place,’ I said, facing up to her. It struck me for the first time that I was now a little taller than she was. I suppose it must have been the case for a while, but it hadn’t seemed significant before.

  She looked at me as if she had realised this too and was reassessing my age and maturity. ‘You know, Jen, sometimes I think you’ve taken after your father too much, but just now I can see myself in you too.’

  I didn’t know whether to take this as a compliment or not. I didn’t think she had meant it as one.

  The door opened as I was wondering whether she expected an answer to this or not.

  ‘Mr Goodfellow has asked me to tell you to keep the noise down out here,’ said a young woman, not that much older than me, as she closed the door behind her. ‘This is a top-level meeting and it’s unacceptable for it to be interrupted by people squabbling.’

  ‘This is Mrs Hepburn,’ said Tanya Fairfax. ‘She’s an important delegate to your top-level meeting, and it’s unacceptable for her to be kept waiting out here.’

  The younger woman opened her mouth and shut it again. She went back into the room quickly.

  ‘This shouldn’t take long,’ said Tanya and winked at me. ‘She’ll be consulting another of the assistants to the chief assistant to the secretary to the minister.’

  Mum sighed. ‘That brings back memories all right.’

  ‘Do you think it’s really Mr Goodfellow in there?’ I asked hesitantly.

  ‘It’s Brad McWhittle,’ said my mother. ‘With Mr Goodfellow’s face.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘I don’t know what made them think they’d get away with it.’

  ‘They reckoned without you,’ I told her.

  ‘Without all of us,’ she said modestly.

  ‘We’re not out of the woods yet, remember,’ said Tanya, but she was smiling.

  This time a middle-aged man appeared in the doorway. I wondered if he was the chief assistant to the secretary or whether the secretary himself had deigned to come and greet us.

  ‘Come this way, please,’ he said, walking across the hallway to another doorway. ‘We have a slight – situation in the meeting.’

  ‘If it’s to do with my double already being in there impersonating me, we know about that already,’ said Mum, not moving an inch.

  He raised thin eyebrows and tried to look menacing despite his slight build and mousy looks. But I knew Mum could out-menace him by quite a long way if she put her mind to it.

  ‘Well, the thing is that we can’t be sure,’ he began.

  ‘Yes, you can,’ said Tanya Fairfax. ‘This is Jennifer Hepburn. Do you think she doesn’t know her own mother?’

  ‘Well, all the delegates had to provide DNA fingerprints and so on… I’ll see what I can do,’ he added quickly, perhaps having seen the darkening expression on my mother’s face, and moved back towards the door to the meeting room.

  My mother, who had evidently had enough of all these delaying tactics, moved in front of him, and was through the door in a flash. I followed on her heels, and I knew Tanya was right behind me.

  We stopped in a huddle just inside the room.

  It wasn’t exactly the United Nations in there. Or even the Scottish Parliament. In fact it wasn’t much bigger than one of the classrooms at my school had been. Only the desks were arranged in a vague U shape and occupied by a random collection of around twenty people, some in politicians’ suits and others in scruffy jeans and jumpers that might have been salvaged from the floods. My eyes went to the place where my mother’s double sat, still showing a bland face to the world.

  Mum nodded to the man who stood by the table at one end of the room. ‘Mr McWhittle.’

  ‘But that’s Mr Goodfellow…’ The mousy man’s voice diminished to nothing as he stared at her.

  ‘It’s Brad McWhittle. He led us to disaster once, and now he’s going to try and do it again,’ she said to the assembled throng.

  One of the women stood up and came towards her. ‘Emma. Thank goodness it’s really you this time – I thought I’d fallen down a rabbit-hole and got into some sort of alternate reality. Frank McDonald said I was imagining things.’

  The woman who wasn’t my mother stood up in her turn. ‘Please. Don’t let this imposter ruin everything… Jennifer. Tell them.’

  ‘It’s no use asking me,’ I said. ‘You could never have been my mother. You don’t have a fraction of her personality, even if you’ve stolen her face.’

  ‘Just as this man here can’t possibly be Jim Goodfellow,’ said Mum, walking towards the man she had called McWhittle.

  I didn’t know who most of these other people were. Of course she must have mentioned them from time to time while she was working with them. I knew she had often come home angry and resentful about the way some of them behaved towards her, the way they had disregarded her ideas at the point when they could have made a difference. But like any self-obsessed teenager, I had been too wrapped up in my own concerns to listen to her or to catch any of the news. I had let my father bear the brunt of it. I should have persuaded him to come with her to this room instead of me. He would have understood who everybody was and what their agendas were.

  ‘I’d better go,’ I said in a low voice to Tanya Fairfax as my mother faced up to McWhittle.

  ‘No, stay,’ she said. ‘You’re a real person, not a politician. You can keep them grounded. Make sure they know that whatever decision they make today will be heard outside this closed little group.’

  That was a lot to put on my shoulders.

  ‘I don’t know if I can do that,’ I said.

  ‘There isn’t much to do,’ she told me. ‘You just need to be the odd person out. The grain of sand in somebody’s shoe. The reminder of what they’re doing this for.’

  ‘If you’re sure that’s all…’

  So I gave in and stayed. We sat down on some hard chairs near the door.

  ‘… Somebody get this woman out of here,’ Mr McWhittle was saying. ‘She’s obviously suffering from delusions and could be dangerous.’

  He sounded weary and long-suffering instead of angry. There was a lot of muttering among the others in the room, and then the woman who had spoken to my mother said,

  ‘This woman is Emma Hepburn. I can vouch for her. The other one’s an imposter. And you aren’t Jim Goodfellow either. He wouldn’t ever have suggested interning his own countrymen. And worse.’ She turned and faced the tables where the others sat. ‘You all knew that too, don�
��t you? Who was going to be the first to say anything? Or were you all just going to sit there while he walked all over you?’

  There was more muttering, and some foot-shuffling.

  ‘Interning people?’ I murmured to Tanya Fairfax. ‘Worse?’

  She shrugged. ‘People who didn’t agree with him. He’s mad as a box of frogs, of course.’

  ‘Who’s the woman?’

  ‘Janet Drummond. Republican Nationalists. She’s exactly the kind of middle-of-the-road politician we need to convince. Just as well she seems to like Emma.’

  ‘They were both friends with Fergus,’ I said. Although I hadn’t recognised the woman by sight, her name rang a bell.

  My gaze ranged round the room. I couldn’t understand why more people weren’t speaking up against Mr McWhittle. It was almost as if…

  Mobile phone implants. That was it. In the intervals of glaring at Janet Drummond and ranting about my mother, he was speaking softly and rhythmically, maybe into a hidden microphone, in order to hypnotise the others in the room. I noticed Janet Drummond had the little scar where she had once had an implant that had been removed, like my mother’s and Dan’s. Dad and I hadn’t been able to receive anything on ours for some time before the flood. We had probably been cut off for being English-born or for escaping or something.

  ‘Hypnotism,’ I said to Tanya, and got to my feet. Before she could stop me, I rushed at Brad McWhittle and grabbed for the lapel of his jacket, where I decided the microphone had to be. He was taken completely by surprise – he must have written me off as completely harmless – and staggered slightly under my onslaught. One of the security guards came up behind me and flung his arms round my waist to try and drag me off, but I kept a tight hold on the lapel and as I lurched backwards, the guard still holding on, it ripped apart and we both toppled to the floor. I could feel the outline of ultra-thin wiring inside the double layer of fabric.

  ‘Get the girl out of here!’ yelled Brad McWhittle. Oddly, his face didn’t contort in anger, or go bright red, but stayed in its original bland lines. I guessed the face transplant technology hadn’t been entirely perfected yet. Interesting. I wondered if there were any other snags to it. I hoped so. Maybe it would start to decay and then peel off in stages. That would be attractive in a politician.