The Petitioners
Authors: Sheila Perry
The Petitioners
Sheila Perry
Kindle edition
Copyright Sheila Perry 2015
All rights reserved
CONTENTS
1. Counting the Cost
GAVIN
It was almost like Ravernie all over again.
Except that instead of having Jen with me, and getting along with her without even trying, I had been left with Dan, who was spiky and awkward and could start an argument in an empty room. Not that we had empty rooms to spare. We were camping in what was left of a farm outbuilding up in the Pentlands, high above what was left of the city of Edinburgh.
I had been down several times to see the devastation for myself since we had made our way through the battered ruins of the South Side to reach our present sanctuary. Dan had been back more often, of course. Impossible to keep him from doing it, even although I knew he would see nightmarish sights that would haunt him for the rest of his life. Or until they were overlaid by even worse sights that I couldn't even begin to imagine.
The urge to get to higher ground had affected many of the survivors of the great wave. It made sense even for people who had lived in the higher parts of the city and had escaped the general rise in sea levels that had followed the storm. After all, as some of the older people were fond of saying with wise nods or sometimes shakes of the head, it would get worse before it got better.
In my opinion if it was going to get any worse I would be content to lie down in the path of the storm and be swept away.
Needless to say, my son wasn't in agreement with me on this point.
‘You're such a defeatist,’ he said with a sigh when I unwisely confided in him one evening. We were sitting round a makeshift stove that would never have passed any kind of health and safety regulations. I smiled to myself as I imagined the fuss the authorities would have made about me exposing a child to the fumes, fire hazard and other risks.
Be thankful for small mercies. There weren’t any authorities any more – for now, at least.
‘Why do you just accept everything?’ Dan continued. ‘Why don’t you ever fight?’
I shrugged. ‘No point. The world keeps on turning. Nothing we have in our power to do will ever make a real difference.’
He glared at me. ‘I thought you’d changed. At the castle – you saved all our lives.’
‘Just chance,’ I said modestly.
‘That isn’t what Declan says.’
‘Fine.’
I closed my eyes for a moment. Let Declan adopt Dan as his own. I knew Dan would have preferred him as a father. Man of action, natural rebel, Declan tended to rush into situations like one of King Arthur’s knights, so determined to do what was right that he didn’t think about who might get hurt in the process. I knew Declan was as restless as Dan in our present situation.
I opened my eyes again and surprised an odd expression on Dan’s face. It seemed to be a mixture of scorn and wistfulness. Was he wishing he had Declan as a father?
As if I had conjured the man up, Declan appeared silently in the doorway. We didn’t have the luxury of a door, but then again, this had probably saved us from being suffocated by wood smoke.
Fiona wandered in behind him. I wondered what they wanted.
‘Hi,’ said Declan.
‘Hi,’ said Dan with the air of someone who didn’t care whether his hero deigned to visit us or not.
In other circumstances I thought Declan could probably have become the leader of our group, if it deserved to be classified as such. I wasn’t even sure how many other little groups of survivors like us were scattered about the hills in this area at the moment. The number seemed to vary as families arrived and others moved on. I didn’t know where they moved on to. Did some of them have ambitions to cross the border and settle in England? Would that be prevented or encouraged by the English authorities, and what would happen to migrants from Scotland who settled there illegally and were caught doing it?
I hadn’t thought about this much up until this moment. The daily work of surviving and my self-imposed task of counting the cost took all my energies. I don’t know how Dan imagined I might have any energy left to fight. Of course he was a young man who couldn’t see any end to the increase in his strength or his enthusiasm for a fight.
There wasn’t even anything to fight about.
Or at least so I fondly imagined.
‘There’s been another raid,’ said Declan, frowning.
‘What did they take this time?’ said Dan.
‘A truckload of canned food from the store. Mrs Carmichael saw them doing it too. Only she wasn’t keen on confronting them herself,’ said Declan. ‘I guess we need to post guards day and night.’
I almost groaned out loud. I could imagine how much fun it would be standing guard over the food store all night. That was all I needed, on top of my daytime activities.
‘Maybe you could fit in a shift or two, Gavin,’ said Declan.
I knew he didn’t think my task of counting and recording was real work. But I saw it as the start of a kind of Scottish Domesday Book, an exercise that wouldn’t just commemorate what we had lost but record what we still had. I knew somebody would thank me for it one day. But it wasn’t going to be one of those three. I made an attempt anyway.
‘It’s no use all of us spending our time just surviving,’ I said. ‘If we’re ever going to live in a civilized country again, we’re going to have to hang on to our heritage as well as just our lives.’
‘What do you mean, just our lives?’ said Fiona, speaking for the first time. ‘Our lives are all we’ve got – we need to survive before we can do any of the other stuff.’
I got to my feet, with difficulty – I had been hunched over a table all morning and most of the afternoon, working on the inventory I hoped they would take a bit more seriously one of these days.
‘We might as well not survive at all if we’re going to revert to living in the Middle Ages,’ I said.
‘Well, anyway,’ said Declan, evidently reluctant to waste time on an argument that must have seemed utterly pointless to him, ‘I don’t see why we should break our backs scavenging food supplies just for some thugs in a truck to come along and grab the lot. We can’t afford that. I’ll be taking my turn on guard duty, that’s for sure.’
‘And me,’ said Fiona and Dan in the same moment, and they all laughed.
Declan walked out again, with one reproachful, or perhaps even disappointed, glance at me.
‘You’re not going to let him do it on his own, are you?’ said Dan.
‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘I’m winding him up, that’s all. He takes himself much too seriously.’
‘Well, it is a very serious situation,’ said Dan.
‘All the more reason not to let it depress you,’ I told him.
He was quiet for while. I didn’t realise he had been mulling over my words until we were making sure the fire was out before we went to bed, and he suddenly said,
‘You know what, Dad? You’re holding up better than I thought you would.’
‘As your grandmother used to say, I think that’s damning with faint praise.’
‘No, really – I’d have thought you’d fall apart in a crisis. But you haven’t. And all that archaeology of yours did come in useful.’
I didn’t meet his eyes. I didn’t want to turn into some sort of a hero. Heaven forbid he should start modelling himself on me.
I wandered outside once he had gone to bed in his lair, a corner of the hut he had made his own, up to and including the graffiti painted all round the bed, which was raised high on a structure that I worried would collapse under him in the night but which he was inordinately proud of having created himself from old railway sleepers and parts of a redundant signal box we had retrieved from the ill-fated Borders railway line – no sooner restored to full working order than it had been mostly washed away in floods.
The stars… I hadn’t seen much of them lately, the sky having been grey with cloud for most of the last five years, give or take a few days of dazzling winter sunshine here and there.
This time I had imagined it would never stop raining at all. And yet here I was, strolling round the hut, staring up at the little twinkling lights above me. They had been there all the time but I had almost forgotten their existence. It was humbling to look up and to realise how small and insignificant I was. Of course, that was more or less what I had been trying to tell the others earlier.
Right on cue, I walked into Declan, who was doing much the same as I was.
‘The stars,’ I said, gesturing stupidly upwards.
He smiled. ‘Romantic, aren’t they?... Sorry, I forgot. You’ll be missing Emma a lot.’
‘I wasn’t really thinking about her,’ I admitted. ‘Dan and I might argue a bit less if she were here, though.’
‘How’s she doing? Have you heard?’
‘All right, I think. There was a message for me on the radio the other night. She says the physiotherapist’s a complete sadist. Oh, and Jen has a crush on one of the doctors.’
‘She’s probably cutting a swathe through all the young men up there.’
Emma and Jen had been airlifted out of Edinburgh by helicopter and Emma was getting treatment for her leg injury in a hospital near Pitlochry. It was the nearest place with fully functioning medical facilities. I had bribed the crew to take Jen along, even although they weren’t supposed to take people who didn’t need treatment. I just thought she was better out of it all. I suppose I was being a bit over-protective, but knowing Dan’s propensity for running into danger I thought I would do my best to keep one of my children safe. It went against the grain to split up the family again, but once Emma became feverish and started to hallucinate, it was impossible not to put her in the care of the medical experts.
We walked up to one of my favourite spots. It was a bit higher than the place some of us called home but which I thought of as a temporary base camp, and you could look down across the city and as far as the River Forth. It was hard now to tell where the Firth ended and the North Sea began,
There were patches of light scattered about in the parts of the South Side where optimists had stayed in or near their old homes, and at the tops of a few of the hills. There was no official supply of electricity yet, of course, because the storm had knocked out so much of it and nobody had managed to round up enough engineers yet to begin fixing it. The patches of light were mostly bonfires, started in gardens and outside in the streets. There was a short necklace of gleaming street lights in one place. Some amateur electrician must have been at work connecting things up. Another activity that would have been strongly discouraged by the authorities in previous years.
We gazed at the now familiar sight of the ruined Castle on its rock. The waves had receded now but the whole Royal Mile had taken a battering in the storm, and the tenements that had stood for hundreds of years were so badly damaged they were starting to collapse into the streets round about, and the whole area round about there was too dangerous even for intrepid people like Declan and his hardy troop to go into. I thought of my trip to Holyroodhouse not that many months before. Of course the palace now consisted of just a few turrets sticking up above the waters of one of the numerous new lochs that had formed. The sight of roofs and chimney tops emerging from various bodies of water was a constant reminder of the horror that had happened.
Edinburgh had once been such a pleasant, uneventful city. It had seemed immune from the dangers people experienced in more violent parts of the world.
‘Take off your rose-coloured glasses, Hepburn,’ said Declan, suddenly breaking into my thoughts as if he could read them. ‘It was an awful old place. The centre of all tyranny and corruption.’
I tried to work out whether he was serious or not.
‘But then, you know all about that, don’t you?’ he said. ‘You and Emma.’
If I had been a very slightly less civilized, more violent man, I would have punched him in the face at that point. But then he probably wouldn’t have said it if I’d been a different kind of man.
I shrugged my shoulders. ‘Nothing to do with me, mate. Emma handles all that sort of thing.’
‘Sure, I know she does,’ said Declan with a laugh. He often got more Irish when he was embarrassed.
In a way I suppose he was my closest friend. In another way I was constantly on the alert for a sign that we had become enemies.
Everything changed the very next day.
We had been living an anarchic life up in the hills. There were no authorities any more. We decided what to do next for ourselves as a group, a little democracy without any need for elected representatives. I suppose it might have seemed idyllic to a visitor from another planet who hadn’t seen what we had seen down there in the town, or worse.
We were aware of the existence of other groups, but they didn’t bother us and we didn’t bother them. I suppose at some point we were going to have to merge into something bigger. The work we were doing was so pitifully inadequate, emptying out a lake one teaspoonful of water at a time.
Having said that, it was still a shock when the helicopters appeared. At first they circled round for a while, perhaps to allow an observer to assess the situation from above, then flew off somewhere, and then they returned and touched down on the flattest piece of ground near the reservoir.
It had been the reservoir that drew us up here in the first place. Our reasoning had been that the water might be contaminated further downstream, so it was safer to base ourselves close to the source.