I wasn’t completely over the moon in my enthusiasm for reunion, obviously. I would leave all that side of it to Emma. My task, as I saw it, was to look after the family as we headed south, and to back her up in whatever she wanted to do. As ever.
JENNIFER
I was pleased we were going with Jeff, even though I hadn’t wanted to sound as if I was jumping at the chance.
My life really wasn’t turning out the way I had expected it to at all. This time last year I had been worrying about my exam grades, and whether I would get into the university I wanted, and maybe a bit about whether Mum and Dad were all right and what Dan was up to. Then there were the people at school and whether they liked me or not, and if I had worn the right kind of jeans that time when we went on the class trip to the wave power station at Cockburnspath.
Now there were big things to worry about, like whether we would get to England all right and what the government there would think about our pathetic little efforts to gather petition signatures, and whether we would all end up living in shacks and scratching a living from a little patch of infertile ground as our ancestors had probably done.
Oddly enough, I thought my father would probably survive better in a shack than anybody else in the family. I remembered again the way he had found the potatoes at Ravernie, and smiled to myself.
‘What were you thinking about then?’ said Jeff, who had been walking along beside me while the long-suffering horse pulled Mum and Dad along in the cart. ‘Happy memories?’
‘Sort of,’ I said. ‘It was when Dad and I went up to the hills together – before the storm – and found some left-over potatoes in the ground.’
‘So what were you doing in the hills?’
I told him the story of how we were hounded out of our home in Cramond and forced to go on the run. His eyebrows rose higher and higher as I went on.
‘You know,’ he said thoughtfully once I had finished, ‘I would never have imagined you leading such an exciting life.’
‘Neither would I,’ I said. ‘I was supposed to be the normal one of the family, who went through school without a murmur and then straight on to university to study the subject of my dreams. Once it all went wrong, though, it went totally wrong. I was just wondering what would happen next when I remembered about the potatoes.’
‘Your ancestors probably lived on potatoes,’ said Dad from where he lounged above us on the cart.
‘What about you?’ I asked Jeff. ‘Had you led an interesting life before you came up here and got shot?’
‘Hmm. I suppose so. I hadn’t been shot before – that was a first. I was with the Embassy in Washington before the first lot of floods came. Then they brought me back home to re-train. As a spy,’ he added in a whisper just for my ears. I was about to squeak something silly when he put one finger to his lips. ‘Need to know,’ he warned me.
There was something intensely annoying about his manner. He was treating me like a four-year-old. I wanted to stamp my foot and run off into the distance, but I was too scared of what I might encounter round the next corner.
There were lots more corners before we got to the spot on the River Tay just outside what was left of Perth where apparently Dad, Mark and Dan had last seen Declan’s friend’s fishing-boat. Dad was over-excited about it being still there.
‘I’d never have thought he’d wait for us,’ he said when we spotted it, not exactly hidden but camouflaged a bit by trees along the river bank. It must have been difficult to navigate even with the river waters so high, because none of the previously existing harbours were any use, being way under water of course.
It was late afternoon by then. We had made good time. Of course nobody on board the boat knew we were coming, and I was surprised they were still there. But maybe, like us, they had nowhere else to go and nothing else to do. Did they spend all their time now ferrying people like us about, finding new routes and working out where the safe mooring-places were?
There was no sign of life on board. Maybe the members of the crew were asleep, making the most of a quiet spell before they had to spring into action again.
Dad tried to scramble down from the cart while it was still moving, but Jeff stopped him. It was just as well as my father wasn’t the most agile of men and would quite likely have fallen flat on his face on the road at some stage during the operation.
‘Wait a minute,’ Jeff told him. ‘We’d better check this out – let me do that. You can pick up the pieces if anything goes pear-shaped.’
I shuddered.
‘You’d better get on the cart with them,’ he said to me. ‘For a quick getaway.’
If he thought we were going to make a getaway and leave him lying injured again, he was fooling himself. I still had a vivid mental image of him on the hillside above Balmoral, apparently dying in front of me.
Jeff advanced towards the boat.
‘Take care,’ I called at the last moment.
Unfortunately, it was as he half-turned to me that somebody appeared on deck.
It was an elderly woman, armed with a lethal-looking weapon which she pointed straight at him.
‘Mrs Swan,’ my father breathed, beside me. ‘Get down.’
‘Who’s Mrs Swan when she’s at home?’ said my mother in her clearest, most carrying voice.
‘Sssh!’ said the rest of us.
‘That’ll be me,’ said the woman with a harsh laugh.
‘Mrs Swan?’ said Jeff, apparently puzzled.
‘Irene Swan. Employee of the real Scottish government. Licensed to kill, and so on.’
‘Really?’ he said.
‘Don’t test me,’ she warned him.
Behind me on the cart, something was stirring. Dan! I didn’t dare turn round to see what he was up to. Instead I kept very still. I would have hoped he didn’t do anything silly, but years of living with him had taught me just to hope instead that he didn’t get hurt. Unfortunately he had got away with too much over the past couple of years, and tended to think he was invincible.
‘Don’t you start anything, Daniel Hepburn.’ Mrs Swan barely raised her voice. ‘Just because everybody else is pretending they can’t see what you’re up to, doesn’t mean I won’t shoot you in your tracks if you do something stupid.’
I risked a glance round. Mum had grabbed Dan by the arm and was holding him back.
‘What do you want from us?’ she said to the other woman.
‘I want to get rid of you before you pose a real threat,’ said Mrs Swan casually. ‘They were meant to keep you at Balmoral. Waiting for trial. But I think the interests of Scotland would be better served by exterminating the lot of you.’
‘You could start a war with England by doing this,’ said Jeff.
She laughed again. ‘I don’t think the disappearance of one little English agent is going to make any difference in the scheme of things. Anyway, they’ve got their own problems. I’m afraid your death won’t cause more than a ripple in the great river of time.’
It was the way she laughed that made me think she was mad. But the part about the river of time wasn’t very reassuring either.
‘Where did she come from?’ I whispered to Dad.
‘She was in our group in the Pentlands for a while,’ he muttered, ‘but then she held me up on the boat.’
‘Enough talking amongst yourselves!’ said Mrs Swan, waving the weapon vaguely in our direction. ‘You can all get down off that cart right away.’
‘I’m not sure if I can walk,’ said Mum.
‘Oh, I think you can,’ said Mrs Swan unpleasantly. ‘Given the chance.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Dad in an undertone as we got clumsily down from the cart. ‘She’s well outnumbered.’
Yes, but she had the gun, or whatever it was. Mrs Swan chose that moment to demonstrate what sort of weapon it was by blasting a hole in a tree. The thing operated soundlessly, which was if anything more unnerving than if it had made a huge bang.
It was a sign of how we had adapted
to the events we had lived through so far that none of us jumped out of our skins at that point.
Instead Mark Sutherland, who had crept round to the side while the woman was focussing on us, calmly jumped aboard the boat and tackled Mrs Swan to the deck. The weapon went off again, but she fired straight up in the air this time. There was a sort of disturbance somewhere above us, but that was it.
Jeff, Dan and my father joined in the struggle on board. I held Mum back from adding to the mayhem.
Once Mrs Swan was thoroughly overpowered, Mark straightened and said to Dad, ‘What the hell are we going to do with her?’
‘I don’t know – send her up to Balmoral by horse and cart?’
‘Throw her in the river,’ suggested Dan.
‘Tempting,’ said Jeff. ‘But I like the Balmoral idea. If I thought we could trust the horse to go the right way…’
On cue, Will appeared from the direction we had travelled in. ‘
‘Is everything all right?’
Jeff grinned at him. ‘It is now. Would you like to drop something off near Balmoral for us? It doesn’t have to be right on the doorstep – within half a day’s walk would do nicely.’
Mrs Swan struggled in Mark’s grasp. Will looked at her suspiciously.
‘We’d tie her up of course,’ said Jeff. ‘In fact I think we might even gift-wrap her, if you know what I mean.’
‘I’ll come along for the ride,’ said Mark. He grinned at us. ‘I’ve always wanted to use that unarmed combat training they gave me when I joined the service.’ He nodded to Dad. ‘Might see you later then – we can have a pint at Jack Straw’s. They’ve built the new Parliament about there so you get a bit of political riff-raff in, but it’s not too bad apart from that.’
He, Jeff and Will went off together with Mrs Swan. At first we could hear her protests from where we waited, and then they were suddenly cut off.
‘Hope they’ve killed her,’ said Dan.
‘We’d better check the boat for any unwelcome surprises,’ said Dad. ‘Come on.’
After a while Jeff came back, assuring us he hadn’t done any permanent damage to Mrs Swan, just the usual gagging and tying up to make sure she didn’t bother Will and Mark on the way, and then Dan and my father came up from inside the boat, followed by two sheepish-looking men who turned out to be the owners. Mrs Swan had locked them in somewhere when she had taken over.
‘She must have got off the customs boat just before it sank,’ said Dad. ‘Maybe another boat picked her up after that. I thought she was a goner.’
‘She should have been,’ growled Dan.
One of these days, I thought, we would have to do something about my little brother and his blood-lust. Or maybe he would grow out of it naturally.
GAVIN
It seemed we were all set for the voyage south. The skipper and mate assured me we had enough power to take us there and back again – I believe the craft was powered by some sort of fusion that none of us understood enough to worry about – and they had laid in food supplies in Perth while they were waiting. We didn’t enquire closely into the source of the food supplies either. It was enough that Emma, Jen, Dan and I were all together again, even if we were on the move and Jen turned out to be the one member of the family who didn’t take to the wide open seas. I suppose we had never had the chance to establish this fact before. She was mortified to admit to feeling sick in front of Jeff, but Emma whisked her off to be ill in private, or as near private as the cramped living quarters would allow.
I had wondered if any vestige of the English government could possibly still be based in London, what with all the flooding that had happened there over the past decade or so, but Jeff assured me that although the Thames Flood Barrier had been completely inadequate in the face of the recent storm, there had been years to prepare and move all government functions and Parliament up to Hampstead Heath, from where, I suppose, all the ministers had been able to view the destruction of the city below. A good many of the people who had previously lived in the city had already moved to higher ground, following years of random flooding. Maybe if we had lived through more of these minor flood incidents people might have been a bit more inclined to move out of the Central Belt of Scotland in time and there would have been fewer casualties. Mulling this over as I prowled round on the rather small deck area, I decided it was really the government’s fault for not admitting there might be a problem, and not listening to Emma and her department in the first place. They had been so concerned to keep all the power in their hands that they had forgotten about the responsibility that should have gone with it. She had always said that, of course, but even within her own family none of us had really listened.
I wondered if any of the old historic streets and Roman ruins of London still survived, under water, but that was just pointless speculation. It seemed unlikely they would become accessible again in my lifetime even if some traces did endure.
After a couple of days we had negotiated the River Tay and moved out to sea a little way to navigate southwards so that we avoided the treacherous coast of Fife and the maelstroms where the Forth now tumbled out into the North Sea in a mass of swirling waves, and we ran very much less risk of running into something under water. Jen emerged from her lair, looking pale but apparently now equipped with sea-legs.
She joined me on the small deck for a while.
‘Where are we now, Dad?’
‘I think they said we’re going to be off Dunbar soon. What’s left of it, that is.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t keep saying that.’
‘Sorry. I know, I know, we should all be looking ahead, not back.’
‘I suppose as an archaeologist you can’t help it,’ she teased.
‘It does come more naturally to me to look back,’ I admitted.
It was nice to have Jen with me again. I wasn’t so sure Emma appreciated being with Dan twenty-four hours a day, although it seemed to me that the problem with those two was that they were two of a kind. Both argumentative, fearless and energetic. I couldn’t bring myself to adopt any of these qualities.
‘I’m glad we’re all together again,’ said Jen, maybe reading my thoughts. ‘It was quite scary trying to look after Mum on my own.’
‘I’m sorry now I sent you both away,’ I said.
‘It was the only thing to do at the time,’ she said. ‘I can understand that.’
‘I don’t know. Maybe I should have tried harder to find a doctor close at hand. Goodness only knows Edinburgh has always had more than enough of them.’
‘No looking back,’ she reminded me.
We watched the water churning under the boat for a few moments.
‘Funny, isn’t it?’ she said after a while. ‘I wanted to die for two days and now I feel healthier than I’ve ever been.’
‘I think that’s what happens with seasickness.’
‘Didn’t you even feel a bit queasy?’
‘No – sorry.’
‘I hadn’t noticed this before,’ she said suddenly, ‘but you’re always apologising for something, Dad. I don’t think you’ve got anything to be sorry about.’
‘Everybody does,’ I said with feeling. ‘It’s just that some people will never admit to having made a mistake.’
‘But there’s no need to wallow in it,’ she said.
Hmm. Food for thought.
It took a while to work our way right down the coast. The skipper always tried to stay within sight of land, although for quite a lot of the way there was nothing much there, and once we got to the bulge of East Anglia that had once stuck out into the sea, we had to give it a wide berth for fear of hitting a church spire or something.
Jeff and the skipper agreed that there was no way they were going to risk navigating the Thames and the terrible hazards of London itself. Instead they meant to head for what they called the Chelmsford basin. This turned out to be tricky enough. We all had to remain on deck, on watch for obstacles, as the skipper and mate steered the boat
. Jeff knew there was a deep channel, the River Blackwater, as far up as Maldon, and then some of what had been open countryside beyond until we reached the town of Chelmsford itself. Or the basin, as it now was.
Once we had got there and were safely on land, we would commandeer transport of some sort – Jeff was annoyingly vague about that – and head for St Albans, from where we could drop down towards Hampstead from the north instead of trying to reach it from the old city of London. Of course we had been experiencing our own problems just lately, but I was shocked to realise how little thought we had given to the devastation elsewhere. I suppose that’s what happens with major catastrophes. But when I thought this over I understood what Jeff’s mission had been about.
‘It all makes sense now, doesn’t it?’ murmured Emma as she joined me at my side of the boat.
How did these women learn to read my thoughts? Were they so visible on my face? I must make more effort to hide them in future.
‘Yes, I suppose so,’ I said, reluctant to admit anything.
She smiled. ‘I didn’t think we would ever get to this point. It’s exciting, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t know if that’s exactly the word I would use. Terrifying, maybe.’
‘You’re such a wimp, Gavin,’ she said but in a tone I hoped was gentle and loving, but which could have been scornful and abrasive, for all I knew. Not being female, I had trouble with people’s thoughts. Even my own were often a mystery to me.
Apart from a brief run-in with some people we thought of as Viking raiders, although they were really just people like us, paint smears on the great canvas of being, we hadn’t seen very many other signs of life along the way. I hoped that didn’t mean there had been a mass extinction of English people, whom I generally rather liked.
The Petitioners Page 19