The Petitioners (24 page)

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.

But when we finally made landfall in an improvised harbour between two high walls, a group of men approached us, and they didn’t look all that friendly.

‘You can’t leave that there boat here,’ said one of them, sounding a bit like a character in an Ealing comedy, but without the happy smiling face to go with it.

‘We’re not leaving it here,’ said Jeff, leaping off and confronting them. ‘The skipper’s going to take it away again just as soon as the passengers disembark. And by the way, I’m on a government operation and I’ve got authority to have all of you locked up and the key thrown away.’

He flashed some sort of electronic ID in front of the nose of the apparent leader, who backed off with his hands raised, muttering something like ‘Sorry mate, didn’t realise…’ as he went.

The others followed like sheep. I wondered if Jeff’s ID had somehow hypnotized them all into obedience. It would be a useful thing to have. I fantasised briefly about having a gadget like that of my own and being able to lord it over the rest of the family.

‘Come on, then,’ said Emma, giving me a little push. ‘Let’s get on with it.’

That’s all it was, evidently – an idle fantasy.

We encountered a few similar groups on our way to St Albans, and Jeff managed to get past them in the same way, not to mention obtaining an aged Land Rover for us to travel in. Apparently it had been converted to run on some sort of fusion energy, just as the boat had.

When I asked him about the electronic gadget, he denied that he was using it to hypnotise people. ‘They’re just generally impressed by someone in authority,’ he said. ‘There isn’t a lot of it about in these places. You wouldn’t want to go up north. They’ve reverted to the Stone Age there. I blame the Viking DNA.’

He had mixed up his historical references, but I forgave that under the circumstances.

‘It’s the same in the Borders,’ I told him. ‘We were driven out by raiding parties. And Mrs Swan, of course.’

‘Yes, Mrs Swan,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘I’ll see if we have any intelligence on her, once I get round to it.’

We had to take it more slowly than we might have wanted, because of the state of the roads – muddy and full of potholes in many cases, inundated with flood water in others – but before nightfall we were approaching London from the north. I felt very nervous about the whole thing. Jeff, on the other hand, seemed to think our mission’s success was a foregone conclusion. He had already explained that England wanted reunion – or at least, the government did. Nobody seemed too sure about the people, but it didn’t seem as if that was a problem. We kept fairly quiet when we encountered other people in case anybody noticed our Scottish accents. It may not have been strictly necessary, but it seemed like a good idea.

I remembered Hampstead Heath from trips there years ago, when we had lived in London for a while. Its green open spaces had often felt like the only place we could breathe properly. It was quite different now, of course. As we approached, I saw lines of tents. A refugee camp, then. Well, that fitted our needs quite well.

‘I’m not leaving you lot in a tent,’ said Jeff. ‘Emma would have everybody organised to do something mad in no time, and Dan would probably start plotting to fight against the government or assassinate the King.’

‘The King?’ said Dan. ‘There’s a King?’

‘Of course there’s a King,’ said Jeff. ‘We hung on to him when you left. It wasn’t supposed to work like that, but we quite like him.’

This was among all the other things we hadn’t really paid attention to. If we were going to move back into a monarchy, I thought, it would be a bit of a culture shock but we could get used to it.

‘There he is now,’ said Jeff, pointing at a small figure that moved between the tents with a trolley. ‘He’s taking the evening meals round.’

‘You mean he’s not just sitting back in his palace counting his jewellery?’ said Dan, laughing.