Pirate Cinema (12 page)

He hit the ground a moment later and hissed "
Run
!" He took off and streaked for the nearest estate tower. I took off after him. Behind us, I finally heard the shout: "
There!
" and then "
Stop!
"

Jem planted one foot, spun, changed directions and ran off at right angles, toward the distant road, across the open ground. I'd never seen him run before, barely saw him now out of the corner of my eye, but even so, I could see that he could
run
, powering up like a cartoon character.

He was leading the chase away from me. What a friend. What an idiot. Feeling like the world's biggest coward, I kept going, heading for the estate, for the door where the lock was broken, for the maze of corridors and buildings that I could disappear into.

Loyalty is the greatest of the virtues, don't you think? The loyalty of a hard-working scribe, a family man who pays his mortgage and puts food on the table through the sales of his books, trusting his readers and giving them free, freely distributable ebooks. The loyalty of those readers, having enjoyed ten years' worth of free ebooks, paying it back by ordering hardcopies or DRM-free ebooks online, or by dropping by
your local bookstore
to get one. Better, still, paying it
forward
by
donating a copy
to a school or library.

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Jem didn't answer my e-mails, didn't show up again at Old Street Station, didn't turn up at the skips we'd haunted. Dodger's phone was out of service -- he'd either been caught or had really and properly gone underground. The rest of my housemates had melted into the afternoon and vanished as though they'd never existed.

Back to the shelter I went, feeling a proper failure, and I slept in a room with seven other boys, and I got free clothes and a rucksack from the pile, ate the stodgy meals and remembered the taste of eels and caramelized leeks, and found myself, once again, alone in the streets of London. It had been nearly six months since I'd left Bradford, and I started to ache for home, for my parents and my sister and my old mates. I made a sign like Jem's, with kleenex and sanitizer and gum and little shoe-polish wipes, and made enough money for a bus-ticket home in less than a day.

But I didn't buy a bus-ticket home. I gave all the money to other tramps in the station, the really broken ones that Jem and I had always looked out for, and then I went back to the shelter.

It's not that life was easy in the shelter, but it was, you know,
automatic
. I hardly had to think at all. I'd get breakfast and dinner there, and in between, I just needed to avoid the boredom and the self-doubt that crept in around the edges, pretend that I wasn't the loneliest boy in London, that I was living the Trent McCauley story, the second act where it all got slow and sad, just before the hero found his way again.

But if there was a new way, I didn't know where it was. One day, as I sat in Bunhill Cemetery, watching the pigeons swoop around the ancient tombs -- their favorite was Mary Page: "In 67 Months, She Was Tapd 66 Times - Had Taken Away 240 Gallons of Water - Without Ever Repining At Her Case - Or Ever Fearing the Operation" (I wasn't sure what this meant, but it sounded painful) -- and I couldn't take it anymore. Call me a child, call me an infant, but I had to talk to me mam.

I watched my hands move as though they belonged to someone else. They withdrew my phone, unlocked it, dialed Mum's number from memory, and pressed the phone to my ear. It was ringing.

"Hello?" The last time I'd heard that voice, it had been cold and angry and fearful. Now it sounded beaten and sad. But even so, it made my heart thump so hard that my pulse was like a drumbeat in my ears.

"Mum?" I said, in a whisper so small it sounded like the voice of a toddler. First my hands, now my voice -- it was like my entire body was declaring independence from me.

"Trent?" She sucked in air. "
Trent
?"

"Hi, Mum," I said, as casually as I could. "How're you?"

"Trent, God, Trent! Are you alive? Are you okay? Are you in trouble? Jesus, Trent, where the bloody hell are you? Where have you been? Trent, damn it --" She called out,
Anthony! It's Trent!
. I heard my father's startled noises, getting louder.

"Look, Mum," I said. "Hang on, okay? I'm fine. I'm just fine. Missing you all like fire. But I'm fine. Healthy, doing well. Mum, I'll call again later." Calling now seemed like such a stupid idea. I hadn't even been smart enough to block my number. Now I'd have to get a new prepaid card. What an idiot I was.

"Trent, don't you
dare
put the phone down. You come home
immediately
, do you hear me? No, wait. Stay where you are. We'll come and get you. Trent --"

I hung up. The phone rang. I switched it off, took the cover off, took out the SIM, and slipped it in my pocket. I missed Mum and Dad and Cora, but I wasn't ready to go home. I didn't know if I'd ever be. The few seconds I'd spent on the phone had made me feel about of six years old. It hadn't been pretty.

I left the graveyard, and poor Mary Page, who had never repined her case, whatever that meant.

Without realizing it, my subconscious had been scouting for a new squat. I kept catching myself staring at derelict buildings and abandoned construction sites, wondering if there was an open door around the back, wondering if the power was out. There were plenty of empty places. The economy had just fallen into the toilet again, something it had done every few years for my entire life. This one seemed worse than most, and they'd even put the old Chancellor of the Exchequer in jail, along with a couple of swanky bankers. I couldn't see that it had made any difference. There were more tramps everywhere I looked, and a lot of them had the wild look of mental patients who'd been turned out of closed hospitals, or the terrified look of pensioners who'd couldn't pay the rent.

It was strange to think that the city was filled with both homeless people
and
empty houses. You'd think that you could simply solve the problem by moving the homeless people into the houses. That was my plan, anyway. I wasn't part of the problem, you see, I was part of the bloody solution.

I was especially into old pubs. The Zeroday had been a golden find: proper spacious and with all the comforts of home, practically. I found one likely old pub in deepest Tower Hamlets, but when I checked the title registry -- where all sales of property were recorded -- I saw that it had been bought up the week before, and guessed (correctly, as it turned out) that they were about to start renovating the place.

After two weeks of this, more or less on a whim, I decided to ride the bus out to Bow and have a look in on the old Zeroday, see what happened to the homestead, check for clues about Jem's whereabouts. Plus, where there was one abandoned pub, there might be another. Bow was in even worse economic shape than most other places.

From a distance, the Zeroday looked abandoned, shutters back up on the upper stories. The drugs lookouts took up their birdsong when I got off the bus, but soon stopped as they recognized me. I sauntered over to the pub, filled with a mix of fear and nostalgia. My heart sank when I saw the fresh padlock and hasp on the outside of the front door. But then it rose again as I neared it and saw that the lock had been neatly sawn through and replaced. I slipped it off and nudged the door.

It was deja vu all over again. The smell of sugar and spliff and of piss and shite told me that the local drugs kids and sex trade had carried on using the place. I called out hello a few times, just in case someone was in the place, and left the door open half-way to let in some light. I found melted candles everywhere, even on "our" comfy parlor sofa, which was quite ruined, stuffing spilling out, cushions wet with something that made me want to find some hand-sanitizer.

In the kitchen, I nearly broke my neck falling into the open cellar. It was pitch dark down there, but I had an idea that maybe they'd just flipped the big cutout switch that Dodger'd installed and blacked the place out. Which meant that flipping it the other way...

I needed to come back with a torch. And some friends.

There were other kids in the shelter that I sort of got on with. A tall, lanky kid from Manchester who, it turned out, had also left home because he'd got his family kicked offline. He was another video nutter, obsessed with making dance mixes of Parliamentary debates, looping the footage so that the fat, bloated politicians in the video seemed to be lip-syncing. It was tedious and painstaking work, but I couldn't argue with the results: he'd done a mix of the Prime Minister, a smarmy, good looking twit named Bullingham who I'd been brought up to hate on sight (his dear old grandad, Bullingham the Elder, had been a senior cabinet member in the old days when you had to look like a horrible toad to serve in a Tory government) singing a passionate rendition of a song called "Sympathy for the Devil." It was a thing of beauty, especially when he cut out the PM's body from the original frames and supered it over all this gory evangelical Christian footage of Hell from a series called "The Left Behinds" that aired on the American satellite networks at all hours of day and night. He claimed he'd got eighteen million pageviews before it had been obliterated from YouTube and added to the nuke-from-orbit list that the copyright bots kept.

Now he hosted it, along with his other creations, on ZeroKTube, which wasn't even on the Web. It was on this complicated underground system that used something called "zero knowledge." I couldn't follow it exactly, but from what Chester -- as the lad from Manchester insisted on calling himself, with a grin -- said, it worked something like this: you gave up some of your hard drive and network connection to ZeroKTube. Other 0KT members who had video to share encrypted their video and broke it into many pieces and stashed them on random 0KT nodes. When you wanted to watch the video, you fed a 0KT node the key for unscrambling the video, and it went around and found enough pieces to reassemble the video and there you had it. The people running individual nodes had no way of knowing what they were hosting -- that was the "zero knowledge" part -- and they also randomly exchanged pieces with one another, so a copyright bot could never figure out where all the pieces were. Chester showed it to me, and even though it seemed a bit slow, it was also pretty cool -- the 0KT client had all the gubbins that YouTube had: comments, ratings, related videos, all done with by some fiendish magick that I couldn't hope to understand.

Chester had a street-buddy, Rabid Dog (or "Dog" or "RD") which was a joke of a nickname, because RD was about five foot tall, podgy, with glasses and spots, and he was so shy that he couldn't really talk properly, just mumble down his shirt-front. Rabid Dog was an actual, born-and-bred Londoner, and he was only about fifteen, but had been living on the streets off and on since he was twelve and had never really gone to school. Even so, he was a complete monster for the horror films, and had an encyclopedic knowledge of them stretching back to
Nosferatu
and forward to
Spilt Entrails XVII
, which was the only subject that'd get him talking above a mutter.

Rabid Dog had got his family kicked off the net with his compulsion to rework horror films to turn them into wacky comedies, romantic comedies, torture comedies, and just plain comedies. He'd add hilarious voice-overs, manic music, and cut them just so, and you'd swear that Freddy Kruger was a great twentieth century comedian. He liked to use 0KT as well, but he wasn't happy just to make films: he made the whole package -- lobby cards, posters, trailers, even fictional reviews of his imaginary films. There was an entire parallel dimension in Rabid Dog's head, one in which all the great horror schlockmeisters of history had decided instead to make extremely bloody, extremely funny comedies.

I figured that Rabid Dog and Chester were ready to learn some of the stuff that I'd got from Jem. So one day, I showed them how my sign worked and introduced them round to the oldsters at Old Street Station. The next day, we rummaged for posh nosh in the skip behind the Waitrose (always Waitrose with Jem, he said they had the best, and who was I to change his rules?), and ate it in Bunhill Cemetery, near poor old Mary Page (Rabid Dog, a right scholar of human deformity, injury and disease said that she had had some kind of horrible internal cyst that had been drained of gallons of pus before she expired. What's more, he pointed this out as we were scoffing back jars of custard over slightly over-ripe strawberries. And he didn't mumble.)

The day after, I took the lads to the Zeroday. I'd scrounged a couple of battery-powered torches and some thick rubber gloves and safety shoes, a lucky find at a construction site that no one had been watching very closely. I put them on once we got inside, first putting on the gloves and then using my gloved hands to steady myself on the disgusting, spongy-soft sofa while I balanced on one foot and then the other, changing into the boots. I had no idea whether they'd be enough to keep me from getting turned into burnt toast by the electrical rubbish if I touched the wrong wire, but they made me feel slightly less terrified about what I was going to do.

"Hold these," I said to the lads, handing them the torches and scampering down the ladder into the cellar. It smelled awful. Someone -- maybe several someones -- had used it as a toilet, and my safety shoes squelched in a foul mixture of piss and shite and God knew what else. "Shine 'em here," I said, pointing down at the switchplate on the wall. Dodger had shown me his work after he got done with it: all the wires he'd put in neat bundles with plastic zip-straps, all running in and out of the ancient junction box with its rubber-grip handle. There were ridiculous old fuses, the kind that were a block of ceramic with two screws in the top, that you had to carefully stretch a thin piece of wire between and screw down. When the circuit overloaded, the wire literally burned up, leaving a charred stump at each screw. Dodger had kept threatening to put in a proper breaker panel, but he never got round to it, and we all got good at doing the wire thing, because the Zeroday's ancient electricals rebelled any time we tried to plug in, say, a hair dryer, a microwave, a fan, and a couple of laptops.

The lads played their lights over the switch and I saw that it was in the off position, handle up. Holding my breath, I took hold of the handle and, in one swift movement, slammed it down, jerking my hand away as soon as it was in place, as though my nervous system could outpace the leccy.