The Petitioners (22 page)

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.

I gave a heave and clambered back to my feet.

The security guard stayed down. He had a hand to his ear and his face, in contrast to Mr McWhittle’s, was contorted in apparent agony.

I looked round the room again. There were others with hands to their ears. They didn’t seem to be suffering in quite the same way as the security guard, apart from the woman who wasn’t my mother, who had slumped over the table in front of her.

‘Listen to me,’ I said as loudly as I could. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Brad McWhittle advancing on me. I pushed past some chairs, ducked round behind the tables where the delegates were sitting, and carried on speaking. ‘He’s been hypnotising you all through the implants in your ears. I’m guessing most of the effects will wear off quite quickly. Then you’ll be able to do what you should have done in the first place and throw him out of this meeting. He may have been a figure of power in the past – before the storm – but he doesn’t have any place in our future.’

I paused for breath. I found myself trembling like the orphan of a storm.

‘There are important decisions to be made that are going to affect everybody’s future for years to come,’ I continued, without even knowing where the words were going to come from, ‘and you need to be sensible and have a proper debate without just following party lines that were never very much use to start with. Nobody has ever been in this exact situation before, so you have to think about it in a completely new way. There won’t be any place for misguided outdated loyalties or party slogans or blindly following a leader. You’re the only ones left, so it’s up to you.’

My mother gave me an approving nod and took over where I had left off.

Of course Brad McWhittle was still never going to be ejected without a fight, and neither was the woman who wasn’t my mother. But even once that was all over, and the two of them had been escorted firmly from the room by a few of Tanya’s private army, or the English troops, as I should probably start thinking of them, there was a lot more fighting to go. There was an attempt to have Tanya and me ejected, but that fizzled out. They must have decided we weren’t a serious threat to them. Of course they were wrong in Tanya’s case, but I wasn’t going to be the one who pointed that out.

A man called Frank McDonald took over in the chair, if that’s what the position was called, but even that simple act was the outcome of various resolutions and counter-resolutions and caused quite a lot of voices to be raised at one bend of the ‘U’ where it seemed the militants and discontents hung out. I amused myself by trying to match people with their political parties. The ones who had protested loudest about Brad McWhittle’s eviction must be the members of his own party, the Eco-Nationalists. There were only two of them, though, a man and a woman, and they were shouted down quite easily by some wild-looking men from what I couldn’t help thinking of as the naughty corner. I thought they might represent the Scottish Republican Socialists. There was a quiet little woman at the side who didn’t say anything for a while. Was she from the weirdly named Neo-Puritans? She wore dark colours and looked a bit like a nun, but I wasn’t sure.

It took another lot of resolutions and counter-resolutions before they agreed that my mother could be present, and yet another debate before they agreed she might be allowed to speak. If this was what politics was like, I hoped I never had any more to do with it. Whatever genetic mutation made Mum so interested in it must have passed me by. On the other hand, I supposed I should feel honoured in a way to be present at these discussions which might decide the whole future of the country.

If it had a future, and not just a past.

EMMA

Unexpectedly, transforming myself in an instant from doting mother to consummate political animal was one of the hardest things I had ever done. It was unexpected mostly because I had never thought of myself as a doting mother in the first place until that moment when Jen, obviously taking her courage in both hands, stood up and spoke to the assembled surviving leaders of Scottish politics as if she had been born for this moment.

Maybe she had.

Anyway, I had a hard act to follow when I started to speak. Maybe they were still a bit dazed after their abrupt release from Brad McWhittle’s hypnotic power, but they listened meekly enough for a while as I outlined the petition project and the advantages of entering negotiations with England at this point.

Of course it couldn’t last.

There were mostly token objections from Janet Drummond, Frank McDonald and a couple of others in the same party, the Republican Nationalists. They had a valid point when they questioned the role of the monarchy in future, and another one when they accused the English of wanting to move millions of their own survivors into the Highlands.

‘The land can’t support that many,’ said Frank when he took the floor. ‘Everybody knows that. It goes right back to the Clearances. And no doubt His Majesty would be wanting some space left for his grouse moors.’

‘Right enough,’ shouted one of the Republican Socialists. ‘He’ll be wanting to hunt peasants outside the grouse season and all.’

‘Pheasants,’ said Frank.

‘No – peasants.’

The group in the corner laughed raucously. I wondered if they had managed to get their hands on some alcohol. Maybe the castle housed secret whisky stores left over from royalist times.

Frank sighed and frowned and carried on regardless. ‘Is there a timescale to this project of yours?’

‘It isn’t my project,’ I said. ‘I’ve come into things quite late on, well after it started. Maybe we should bring in some of the envoys at this point. They’ll be able to explain it better than I can.’

‘Envoys from England?’ said Frank. His tone implied I might as well have suggested bringing in Martians.

‘They don’t have three heads,’ I said sharply.

‘Aye, but maybe they think ours button up the back,’ said one of the Eco-Nationalists, who had freaked me out a bit until then by glowering silently from the back of the room.

‘We should at least give them a hearing,’ said Janet Drummond, one of the few women in the room. What had happened to all the strong Scottish women we used to have in government? Surely they couldn’t all have been out in the storm while their menfolk were tucked up cosily in safe locations?

After a moment’s thought I realised the strong Scottish women were mostly of a past generation. The new parties that had splintered off from the mainstream had been driven, almost without exception, by young fiery men with lots of time on their hands, inspired by the arrival of Scottish independence to demand more and more reforms, amounting in many cases to revolution. The exception was…

‘Could I just say something?’ said the quiet woman in the corner. I couldn’t say I recognised her, but then as a mere civil servant, albeit with my own department for a while, I hadn’t always noticed the people on the fringes of politics.

‘Certainly,’ I said, understanding that she was actually waiting for permission from me. She stood up. Her voice was so quiet that I hoped she wouldn’t be drowned out by the rowdy group in the corner.

‘It goes without saying that we’re all in mourning for everybody who has been lost. But this could be our big opportunity to make a new Scotland exactly the way we want it, without any outside interference. There are few enough of us now to make it possible to live off the land, using some of the deserted settlements where our ancestors lived, and not depending on modern technology or gadgets or great scientific advances or oil revenues… We could be completely self-sufficient.’

She sat down again suddenly.

There was an uneasy silence in the room. Well, it was uneasy on my part, anyway. I had a horrible feeling that the Republican Socialists might want to take her up on those ideas.

‘That’d only work if everybody was equal,’ said one of them cautiously.

‘Equal plots of land for all,’ said another, nodding.

‘To each according to his need,’ said a third, although what that had to do with it I didn’t know.

‘Nonsense!’ said Janet Drummond. ‘We’d be setting ourselves back two hundred years. At least. Three or four hundred, more like. You’ll be suggesting those settlements of yours are run by the Kirk next – and then where will we be.’