The Petitioners (9 page)

‘Cultivating your own garden?’ she said. ‘I think you’ll find that’s more difficult than you can possibly imagine, Mr Hepburn.’

It was by no means said in a threatening way, and yet her words chilled me.

EMMA

I must have been asleep for a long time, but I didn’t feel at all rested. Maybe I could just nestle back down under the irritatingly lightweight covers and doze for a little longer…

My eyes snapped open and I saw a man standing over me.

It was Mr Goodfellow – and yet not Mr Goodfellow. This man was taller and broader, and surely quite a bit younger. But he had Mr Goodfellow’s face…

Was this a dream, or a nightmare?

As soon as he spoke, I knew which it must be.

‘Mrs Hepburn. I wish I could say this was a delightful surprise.’

He had Brad McWhittle’s voice. Who was he?

‘The wrong face,’ I stuttered, pressing myself back against the very meagre pillow to try and get as far away from him as I could.

He smiled, or at least arranged the face that didn’t belong to him into the approximation of a smile.

‘Yes, it’s weird, isn’t it? Wouldn’t you like a new face too, Mrs Hepburn? We’ve got one waiting for you.’

‘No!’

I was still screaming when Dr Watson, who must have been waiting at my other side, advanced on me. I heard the faint click of a button before I began to fall back down into unconsciousness.

3. Cultivating your own garden

JENNIFER

It wasn’t like Ravernie, where we just unearthed potatoes from wherever we found them, cooked them in the embers of our improvised fire and ate them from our fingers. In this garden we had to plant the potatoes first – and the seeds of the other vegetables. Preparing the soil for them all was hard work that I wasn’t used to. After a day or two of it, I had so many blisters that by lunchtime I could hardly hold the cutlery to eat, but there was something satisfying about it all the same. Will was in charge of the garden. Jeff didn’t do as much of the cooking as I had expected. He often disappeared for hours on end, and Will would only tell me he was ‘talking to his friends’. I didn’t know what that meant. Was he networking in the nearest village – or back at the hospital? Did he have a means of communicating with the outside world? If so, I wished he would share it with the rest of us. I would have liked to see if I could get a message through to Dad. It wasn’t that I exactly looked forward to doing so, what with the guilty knowledge that I had left Mum behind on her own in the hospital. I knew, though, that it would only have been fair to tell him about our current situation, even if there was nothing he could do about it. We had managed to get a personal message played on a radio station a couple of weeks before, but that was only because Dr Watson happened to know the hospital online radio operator, who happened to have a friend who was a presenter on one of the main internet radio stations.

I frowned, considering Dr Watson and whether he was on our side or not. He had seemed so nice and helpful. Maybe I could get back into the hospital somehow without the security men seeing me, and ask him to smuggle me in to see Mum and also to ask his friend to broadcast our message. Or would he let Mum leave, if we could bring her here to recuperate? I had thought she was recovering up until that last day, but she had been very sleepy and even a bit confused, which wasn’t at all like her.

Could we trust Dr Watson with the location of this secret hideout? Would it be fair to give him the responsibility? What if he were to be tortured?

I laughed at myself.

‘What the hell were you thinking about just now?’ said Jeff, coming up the garden path towards me. ‘It looked as if you were running through almost all possible human emotions in about two minutes.’

‘Sorry. I didn’t realise it all showed on my face.’

‘Don’t be sorry. It’s great. If you worked in the kind of place I mostly do, where everyone hides their feelings, you’d be happy to see someone who isn’t afraid to be angry, or amused, or whatever.’

‘Or in a panic,’ I said.

‘A panic,’ he said. ‘Are you fretting about your Mum again?’

‘Of course I am! Wouldn’t you be?’

He was silent for a moment, evidently mulling it over. A sudden unwelcome thought came to me. What if he had lost his mother recently, maybe even in the storm I thought of as ours, but which must surely have affected other parts of the British Isles almost equally? I felt totally self-obsessed. Why hadn’t I even considered this before? Looking back, we always seemed to have been fussing about Scottish politics and the unrelenting rain and the rise in sea levels around our own coasts, and not even thinking that Norfolk, for example, might even now be completely under water.

‘I wouldn’t be fretting,’ he replied at last. ‘There’s no point in that. You do all you can, and then you stop worrying about it.’

‘But I don’t think I’ve done all I can,’ I said.

‘Ah – you want a rescue operation. I can see it in your face. You’re wondering why Will and I haven’t rushed in there, guns blazing, and got her out.’

‘Not exactly – you don’t have guns, do you?’

‘Not exactly,’ he said, and laughed.

‘Do you think Dr Watson would help?’

‘Better not to put that responsibility on him,’ said Jeff after another pause for thought. No wonder he was a man of few words – he spent all his time thinking and didn’t have enough left to express anything.

I wondered if that was code for ‘I don’t trust him’. Certainly Jeff seemed like the kind of person who would naturally be reluctant to trust anybody else. Self-sufficient and self-reliant. I gave a sigh.

‘Tired?’

He took the garden implement out of my hand and put it down somewhere. He led the way back down the path and into the cottage.

‘Have you finished the planting?’ Will demanded as soon as we got inside.

‘Don’t hassle the girl, she’s not used to this new life as an agricultural labourer.’

‘Ha!’ teased Will. ‘She doesn’t have to get up before dawn and milk the cows before ploughing all morning and then cleaning the tractor all afternoon – she doesn’t know she’s born.’

‘Tractor?’ I said.

‘You know, thing with big wheels, drives along in front of you for hours pulling a hay cart,’ said Jeff with a wink.

‘You’re not old enough to remember that kind of thing – are you?’ I said uncertainly. Maybe Jeff was older than he looked. Maybe the English had discovered the secret of eternal youth and had chosen to keep it from us for political reasons. Or was it that they still did have tractors and petrol to fuel their cars, and all the things Mum and Dad talked about from when they were young?

‘Perhaps,’ said Jeff. ‘Sit down – I want to run something past you.’

We sat round the kitchen table again as we had the first night. I felt a twinge of trepidation. I hoped I was up to whatever he might be going to ask me to do. There must be something. He and Will hadn’t taken me in out of the goodness of their hearts – surely.

‘I haven’t explained what I meant about being an envoy,’ he started.

‘Are you going to tell her?’ said Will, sounding incredulous.

‘She needs to know,’ said Jeff.

‘I’m not sure I want to,’ I said hastily. ‘Don’t feel you have to explain if it’s against the rules or something.’

‘No – I can use my own judgement about who to trust,’ said Jeff. ‘It’d be impossible otherwise.’

He hesitated anyway. I guessed he was working out how much he needed to tell me. As little as possible, I hoped.

‘This shouldn’t put you in danger,’ he said. ‘It isn’t treason or espionage or anything, if that’s what you’re worried about. It’s a sort of diplomatic initiative.’

‘That’s good to know,’ I said. Mum had told me about so-called diplomatic initiatives her parents  had been involved in when she was growing up, during the early years of the new relationship being forged between England and Scotland, and they didn’t sound all that harmless to me. But maybe this was different.

‘All it is,’ he continued, ‘well, almost all, is a petition.’

‘A petition?’

‘I forgot, you probably haven’t even heard of any such thing,’ he muttered. ‘It’s a request to the government, signed by thousands of people. We – in England – have a system for submitting them online or in person, once a year at the House of Commons. There’s a lottery to decide whose petition is given consideration that year.’

‘It sounds a bit random,’ I said, trying not to be too scathing. He grinned, looking a lot younger as he did so.

‘You see,’ he said, lowering his voice, ‘and this is the part I’m not meant to tell people, we’re in trouble. I mean England. Most of our agricultural land’s under water, there’s civil unrest and so on. Between you and me, the government’s worried about revolution.  They want reunion.’

‘Reunion?’ I squeaked. ‘But that’s… I think that’s treason, strictly speaking.’

‘Told you,’ said Will smugly.

‘There are forces at work that want to mount a quick invasion and take back Scotland,’ said Jeff, ignoring his friend. ‘To distract people’s attention and give us a bit more useable space. Land that isn’t under water, I mean.’

‘Invasion?’ This was getting worse by the minute. My father and Dan were very much closer to the border than I was. I would have to try and get word to them.

‘If your voice gets any higher only the dogs will be able to hear it,’ said Jeff kindly. ‘Don’t panic. We have a solution… We know the Scots won’t give in without something new entering the equation. That’s where the petition comes in.’

‘I don’t understand at all,’ I admitted. At least it sounded like a peaceful solution, though. If it was indeed a solution.

‘We know the Scots won’t give in without a fight,’ he said. ‘They’re so stubborn that if we try to persuade them they’ll go the other way and we’ll end up at war with each other. The only way is to harness the power of the people inside Scotland. The reasonable ones – the silent majority – who can see not only that peace would be better all round, but also that we need to band together and pool our resources.’

‘Are there enough of those reasonable people?’ I murmured doubtfully.

‘Maybe,’ said Will.

‘Of course there are!’ said Jeff. I wouldn’t have taken him for a naïve optimist but then he couldn’t possibly know my fellow-countrymen the way I did.

‘How much of England is under water?’ I enquired.

‘That’s the whole point,’ said Jeff. ‘People need to move to higher ground. To feel safe.’

‘So you want to annex Scotland to get more space for English people?’ I said. I wasn’t sure why I felt so indignant. I knew my parents had made valiant efforts to bring me up to see people everywhere as equally deserving, equally empowered. It wasn’t their fault that these beliefs were contradicted on every street corner.

Jeff carried on manfully in the face of the glares he received from me and from Will, who seemed to be having a similar instinctive reaction. ‘We can bring a lot of resources to the Union.’

‘The Reunion,’ I corrected him.

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘I can see the original terminology won’t work. The Reunion. We’ve still got a stronger economy, better infrastructure and everything, even allowing for the fact that England is geographically quite a bit smaller than it used to be. Some of the land may be able to be reclaimed eventually, but we mustn’t count on that. It could take years, or several lifetimes. We’ve had some help from outside.’

‘The Americans,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘And others. But they have their own problems. There are plenty of others worse off than we are. But that’s another reason for reuniting. Together we can be strong enough to recover. Separately, we could be at each other’s throats.’

‘That’s quite a presidential speech,’ I said.

‘Imperial, even,’ said Will.

Jeff frowned at us. ‘I’ve got no ambitions of that kind.’

‘So what’s this petition about?’ I asked.

‘Well, basically the idea is that we gather signatures in support of our cause, and use them to convince the government – the English one, that is – and whatever powers are left in Scotland that reunion would be a popular option.’

It sounded so simple when he put it like that. I pounced on one of numerous weak spots in his argument.

‘When you say we gather signatures, who are you saying would do the work?’

‘Ah,’ he said, rubbing his forehead.

‘My mother isn’t in any fit state at the moment to go round the country collecting signatures, if that’s what you had in mind.’

‘No, I realise that,’ he said. ‘We may need a bit of a change of plan there.’

‘I could help,’ I said. It was one of those moments where you say something almost reflexively and then regret it immediately. What on earth was I letting myself in for?

He smiled. ‘I don’t think so. Nice of you to offer, though.’

I decided to take offence at his dismissive tone. ‘I could do it. I don’t mind travelling round and – explaining it all to people – and whatever else you need.’

I wasn’t at all clear about what I was trying to sign up to, but fortunately Jeff had a more defined vision of what he wanted.

‘Sorry – I didn’t mean you’d be no good at it. But we already have teams on the ground in other parts of the country. Only once we’ve collected as many signatures as we can, we’ll need the help of someone who knows how things work and how to convince people on both sides of the border that the petition means something. That’s where your mother can still come in. We’ll need it all to work really quickly, go viral if you like, without wasting any more time, and to get that under way we have to have the right contacts. I believe your mother may have that kind of network, people she knew in all her previous roles – even the people known to her family, from before. That’s what made me track her down in the first place.’

I thought this over for a few minutes, conscious of his eyes on me.

‘Anybody for tea?’ said Will cheerfully while I was still pondering.

‘If you must,’ said Jeff.

Despite the enormous din Will made filling an old-fashioned black kettle and placing it on the wood-fired stove, I was glad of the interruption. Bizarrely, I found it easier to think straight with all the background noise than I did in the expectant silence with everybody waiting for me to express an opinion.

‘So you think my Mum could do what you want her to do?’

‘Your old lady can do whatever she sets her mind to,’ said Jeff, either faking confidence very well or feeling extremely confident.