Pirate Cinema (25 page)

26 called me first.

"Hi," I said.

She didn't say anything. The silence on the line was proper intense.

"I'm sorry, all right? I'd never done that before, and I don't plan on doing it again. I guess I just -- you know, got overexcited. It was stupid of me. I'm sorry."

Still nothing.

"Look," I said. "Look, it was just one mistake. It wasn't even that good --" Except it was, it had been fantastic in a way that was kind of scary and not altogether unpleasant. "Okay, tell a lie. It
was
good. It made me feel like I could rule the world." I swallowed. My mouth was off on its own now, talking without any intervention on my part. "But I've felt that good before. When I'm with you." It was easily the soppiest thing I'd ever said and until I said it, I had no idea that I was about to say it. And then I said it and I knew it was true.

"You're an idiot," she said. I could tell that she wasn't angry anymore.

"I am," I said. "Can I be your idiot?"

"Come over to my flat tonight. I've got to revise for a maths quiz tomorrow. Calculus. Ugh."

"I'll help you revise," I said.

"By doing your usual impression of Cecil the Human Boob-Juggling Octopus? You will come and sit in the corner and contemplate your sins, young man. If you're very good, you might get a crust of bread and a tiny snog before I send you home. I expect you to be very grateful for this."

"I will be," I said around the grin that was threatening to split my head in two. What a lass.

I felt like a huge weight had been lifted from my chest, like I'd been holding my breath overnight and could finally exhale properly. I could hear the Germans stirring downstairs and muttering in their language. I skipped down the stairs and said good morning and played host, making tea, bringing out some of the nicest treats in my larder. They were remarkably easy to chat with, and fun besides, and had had plenty of adventures in Berlin. Berlin was apparently the land of a thousand squats and they were well up for me going out and visiting them there.

I was daydreaming about how I could swing it -- I'd have to wait until I could apply for a passport on my own in a few months at least -- when Rabid Dog poked his head in the pub room. He scanned the room, blushed to the tips of his ears, and retreated up the stairs.

"'Scuse me," I said, and set off after him.

I ran him to ground on the top-floor landing, headed into the big loft room where we stashed the spare bits of furnishing that we scrounged off London's curbs and in its skips.

"Dog," I said, "got a sec?"

He wouldn't meet my eye, but he didn't say no (nor yes, of course), and I took this for assent. I perched on a wobbly tabletop and thought hard about what to say next.

"Look," I said. "Jem was in to chat with me this morning. About your situation, like. Your dad and brother and that. I guess I just wanted to say that I think it's shit what they done to you, and it was, like, uncalled for." The opposite of what had happened earlier with Twenty was unfolding now, my mouth running away with dire stupidity while my brain looked on in horror. "I mean, Christ, I don't care who you shag. Shag anything. It's none of my business, is it? Whatever makes you happy. Course, not if it's like a kid or an animal or whatever, that's wrong. Not that being gay is like wanting to stick it in a dog!" I closed my mouth and stared at him.

He was staring back at me with a look of such unbelieving horror on his face that he'd forgot to be shy. I understood where he was coming from. I couldn't believe the miserable, bizarre stuff I was spouting. I clamped my mouth shut tighter and did the only thing I could think of.

I punched myself, as hard as I could, across the jaw. It turns out that despite the awkward angle, you can really hit yourself
very
hard in the face. I hit myself so hard that I knocked myself off the table and onto the floor.

Hitting yourself in the face as hard as you can is an experience I actually recommend, having done it. Not because it feels good, but because it feels bad in a bad way that nothing else you'll ever experience feels bad. I've actually been punched very hard in the face by someone else, when I wasn't expecting it, and that was terrible, but not nearly as terrible as this (though I think he actually hit me harder than I did). I think it was the knowledge that I had inflicted this pain on myself, deliberately. The stupid, it burns. Or throbs, really.

I rolled around on the floor for a moment, waiting for the stars to stop detonating behind my scrunched-tight eyelids.

"Holy God, that
hurt
," I said, and got to my feet. Dog was watching me with his jaw literally resting on his chest. "Oh, excuse me, Mr. Horror Film Gorefest. You've never seen someone break free of an intense attack of the stupids by beating the piss out of himself?"

He laughed aloud. "That was literally the stupidest thing I've ever seen," he said. "Well done, mate."

"Yeah," I said, and rubbed at my jaw. I could already feel the swelling there. "Well, someone had to do it and you're clearly too much of a pussy to punch me when I deserve it."

He laughed and as I was laughing, he managed to flick a finger, hard, square into the bruise that I was developing on my chin. "Pussy, huh?"

"Right," I said. "Let me try this again. First, let me say this: who you fancy or shag or whatever? That is none of my business. Next: also, I have nothing but the utmost respect and admiration for your sexual proclivities and congratulate you on them without reservation."

He gave me a golf-clap, but it was a friendly one, and he was smiling. "You're an idiot, Cecil," he said.

"So I've been told. But at least my heart's in the right place, right?"

"You are forgiven," he said. "Look, just so you know, I don't fancy you, okay? So you don't have to worry."

"Are you saying I'm not fancyable?"

He rolled his eyes. "No, Cecil. I'm sure that there are many boys who weep for the fact that you go for the ladies. But I'm not one of them. Ego satisfied?"

"Yes," I said. "That will do nicely."

He came over shy again, looking at his toes. "Cec," he said so quietly I could barely hear him.

"Yeah?"

"Just, well, it was nice of you to say that. Means something, okay?"

"Okay," I said and found that I had a lump in my throat.

True to her word, 26 showed up with six of her friends in tow at exactly 7:15 P.M. We met in the shadow of Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square, the one hundred and sixty-nine-foot-tall pillar topped with a bird-spattered statue of Lord Admiral Nelson, a bloke who apparently did something important involving boats at some point in the past several hundred years.

It was a good place to gather. By day, Trafalgar Square was a favorite with the tourists, and there were always people coming and going. Human spammers were common, and you often saw them taking their lunch breaks on the steps or benches or in the shadow of the National Portrait Gallery at the top of the square.

We huddled up tight and went over the plan together, 26 leading the lesson, making each person recite his or her part of the plan, along with three escape routes. It was simple enough: "I pull down my shirt and put on the hat and turn on the lights and make my way to Leicester Square. I pick a spot in the Odeon queue and work my way down it, saying 'Free films, free films,' handing out the thumbdrives as fast as I can. Don't argue with anyone. Don't stop to talk. Keep my face down. After seven minutes or when I run out -- whichever comes first -- I walk quickly away. My first escape route is down through Trafalgar Square. My second is up to Chinatown. My third is east to Covent Garden. I step into the second doorway I pass and take off the hat and shirt and put them in my bag, then head
back
the way I came, toward Leicester Square, and go around it to my next escape route. We regroup in Soho on Greek Street at 7:25. Any trouble, call 0587534525 and enter my serial number, which is 4."

The phone number was one of those free voice-boxes. It came with a touch-tone or voice-menu, and I could access it using my prepaid mobile if someone didn't turn up within ten minutes of the appointed time.

"If I think I'm being followed, I go to the nearest tube station and board the first train, ride five stops, get out, and check to see if I can still see my tails. If they're there, I sit down on a bench and read a book for half an hour and see what they do. If not, I get back on the tube and go home, after leaving my serial number, which is 4, at 0587534526." We'd got another voice mail drop for this eventuality.

Once we'd each said it, quickly and perfectly, we put on our shirts and hats, openly, just as we would if we were any other gang of human spammers who'd just been given the night's briefing by our manager. Then we trooped in a loose line up to Leicester Square, the purple shirts hanging down to our knees, the hatbrims obscuring our faces. Other peoples' attention slid away from us as they avoided eye-contact with a potential handbill-shover. I wished I'd thought to get some handbills from some real human spammer for us to carry into battle. Nothing made Londoners get out of the way faster than the sight of someone trying to give them an advertisement for some takeaway curry house or discount fitness club.

The mission went
perfectly
. We hit the queue in an orderly mass, half of us on its left, half on its right. It was drizzling out, which was normal for autumn in London, and the early September twilight mixed with the water made the whole square dark and gloomy. The forest of unfurled umbrellas provided excellent cover from the CCTVs and PCSOs and coppers with their hat-brim cameras. We efficiently went up and down the line, barking "Free films!" and handing out our little footballs. I could hear little surprised noises rippling through the queue as some people read the ribbon's message and worked out what they'd just been given, but by then I'd given out my lot of sixty-seven footballs. I checked my phone: less than seven minutes had elapsed.

I wadded up the nylon carrier bag I'd brought the boodle in and shoved it into my pocket, then turned on my heel and struck out back to Trafalgar Square. Again, I wished I had some fliers I could hold to make the crowd part -- it was getting thick. I kept checking my reflection in the drizzle-fogged windows of the restaurants and office buildings on the way out of the square, looking for a tail, but I didn't see any. I concluded, tentatively, that I'd made it out of the square without being followed.

Back to the rendezvous, Greek Street, with its pre-theater Soho throng and the office people who'd gone home and changed into their woo-party! outfits trickling back in, and we were just a bunch of teenagers, giggly and bouncy. Everyone made it. We got on the tube and headed back to the Zeroday, absolutely drunk on delight.

What breathtaking precision! In and out, no messing about, everyone gets away clean. Makes you want to take a victory lap, huh? Why not celebrate with a little (ahem) retail therapy, by patronizing one of the
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We all had theories about what would happen next. I thought that the cinema people would go well mental and announce a fatwa on all of us, releasing weird, blurry CCTV footage of our costumed army with our fuzzed-out heads; cut to apoplectic industry spokesdroid who'd call us terrorists and declare us to be the greatest-ever threat to the film industry, while solemnly intoning the millions we'd cost them with our stunt.

All the rest of the night, and then the rest of the weekend, we reloaded as many news-sources as we could find, searched on every search term. All we found were a few bemused tweets and that from people who'd been in the queue; almost everyone, it seemed, had discarded the booty we'd distributed or not bothered to plug it in.

In hindsight, I could see that this made perfect sense. No one cared about what a human spammer shoved into your hands, it was assumed that anything you got that way was junk. That's why they had to hand out so many brochures to get a single person to sign up for a gym membership or whatnot. Add to that the antique media -- you couldn't even do a rub-transfer, you had to fit it to a USB connector, and half the PCs I saw these days didn't even have one -- and the risks of sticking dodgy files on your computer and it was perfectly reasonable that nearly all of our little footballs went in the bin.

What a misery.

"I'm a flop," I said, lying awake and rigid on Sunday night, while Twenty sat up and worked on her chem homework for the next morning. "I might as well go back to Bradford. What a child I was to think that I could beat them. They're sodding
huge
. They practically run the government. They're going to shut down every channel for showing around video except the ones they control, and no one will be able to be a filmmaker except through them. It's just like music -- the way they went after every music download site they couldn't control."

26 gave no sign of even hearing me, just working through her problem-set, tapping on the screen and at the keyboard.

"The worst part is that I got all those people out there, used up all their time, put them all at risk, and it was for nothing. They must think I'm an absolute tosser. I want to stick my head in the ground for a million years. Maybe then, everyone will have forgot my stupidity and shame."

Twenty set down her laptop and blew at the fringe of her mohican that fell across her forehead. She'd died it candy-apple red that week. "Cecil, you're wallowing. It is a deeply unattractive sight. What's more: it is a piece of enormous ego for you to decide that we all were led into this by you, like lambs led by a shepherd. We went into Leicester Square on Friday because we
all
thought it would work. You didn't make the plan, you got it started. We all made the plan. We all cocked up. But do you see RD or Chester or Jem moping? Look at the freaking Germans! They're out in Hackney tonight, trying to sneak into all-hours clubs and planning on drinking their faces off no matter what! So leave it out, all right?"

She was right, of course. Not that I felt any better about it. "All right, you're right. It's not just about me. But it's still awful and rotten and miserable. What do we
do
? They buy the laws, attack our families, put us in prison --"

26 picked up her laptop again. "Cecil, I don't want to talk to you when you're like this. You know the answer as well as I do: you're doing something that they want you to stop. They fear what you do. They fear what we all do. So long as you keep doing it, you're winning. You don't need to go on a commando raid to beat them: you just need to keep on making your own films."

I don't think anyone ever said anything more important to me than those ten words: "you just need to keep on making your own films."

I threw myself into the project, stopping work only long enough to eat and snatch a few hours sleep, or to go out for a little fishing in the skips to find some food. I hardly left my room apart from that. My skin grew pale from the hours indoors, and I noticed that when I went up and down the stairs, I felt all sorts of awkward pulling and pinching sensations from deep in my muscles, especially around my bum and back and neck. 26 said I was sitting too much and made me download some yoga videos, which we did together in my room when she could force me off the box.

But she wasn't pissed at me. No one was, that was the amazing thing. I was editing furiously, putting together films in ways that just seemed to appear behind my eyes and in my fingers -- first a scene with Scot fighting vampires that pulled together all kinds of vampires from more than a century's worth of filmmaking, including the magnificently creepy Max Schreck, upsampled for some retrospective festival that the BFI had done. Rabid Dog spent an afternoon watching over my shoulder as I worked, and he was
amazing
-- I'd never dreamt that anyone could know that much about vampire films. By the time the scene was done, I had a new appreciation for vampire films, and I decided that I would expand my scene into an entire short film, in which Scot is a distressed older gentleman, alone in the world, who befriends a young boy (also Scot, which worked surprisingly well), and discovers that vampires are on the loose in his town. Unlike the other videos I'd done, I didn't really play this one for laughs: it was straight up action-horror, and it took the combined might of my encyclopedic knowledge of Scot's thousands of hours' of footage and Dog's insane horror obsession to pull it off.

We worked on it for three weeks straight, editing and editing, subjecting our housemates to rough cuts. The idea was to polish out all the seams, all the places where it became clear that these were footage from different films. I dropped them all into black and white to correct for the different color balances in the different sources, then I punched up the shadows on a frame-by-frame basis, giving it the dramatic contrast of some of the older, scarier horror films that Dog made me sit through. Some days I spent hours just shaving out individual pixels, rubbing out the edges, until one day, I watched all twenty-two minutes of it and realized it was
perfect
.

"This is as good as anything I've ever seen at the cinema," 26 said from her perch on the sofa-arm. "Honestly."

"But no one'd show this at any cinema," Jem said. "Not in a million years. Too weird. Wrong length. Black and white. Sorry, mate, but I think the best you'll do is a couple bazillion hits on ZeroKTube or similar."

I didn't say anything. Some old ideas I'd had were knocking together in a new way. I restarted the video and we all watched it through again. It was damn scary. The kind of thing that made the hairs on your neck stand up -- partly that was the way the organ music worked. That was another Dog find -- it had come from a fifth-rate monster film, but the director had scored it in a huge old cathedral with the original organ, and you could really hear the reverberations of the low notes in a way that was flat-out
spooky
.

"Imagine seeing this somewhere
really
spooky," I said. "Someplace that actually feels haunted. Not on some tetchy laptop screen -- somewhere
dangerous
."

"Like the graveyard," Chester said. "That night we all met up. That was brilliant. But it's too cold and wet for that sort of nonsense right now, mate. It'd have to wait for next summer."

"Someplace
like
the graveyard, but someplace indoors. Underground." I snatched up my laptop and went back to my favorite infiltration site. There was a whole subculture of mentalists who spent their nights breaking into boarded up tube stations, forgotten sewers, abandoned buildings, and other places you just aren't meant to be. They lovingly documented their infiltrations with video uploads and maps, carefully masking their faces and voices. It was fantastic watching, all this brilliant mountaineer's ropework, expert lockpicking, and the thrill of discovery as these modern explorers invaded modern ruins that human eyes hadn't seen for generations.

The video I called up was one I'd watched several times: it showed an infiltration gang making its way into an abandoned sewer under the Embankment, built as a spillover sewer when the river Thames was locked in the nineteenth century. They accessed it by means of an anonymous doorway that guarded a narrow stairway that led down into a maintenance room.

The door was locked, but not very well. The Greater London Authority standard for this kind of door was an old Yale lock, vulnerable to a "bump" attack, which even I could do: you just slid a filed-down key-blank into the lock, then rapped it smartly with a little hammer. The energy from the hammer-blow traveled along the key's shaft and was transmitted into the lock's pins, which flew up into the lock-mechanism for a brief moment, during which you could simply turn the doorknob and open the door. All told, bumping a Yale took less time than opening it with the actual key.

A series of locked (but bumpable) doors leading off the maintenance room took them deeper and deeper into the underground works, including a revolting stretch of catwalk that ran over an active sewer. The explorers wrapped cloth around their faces for this part, but even so, they made audible retching noises as they passed over the river of crap.

Two more locked doors and they were in: a huge, vaulted chamber, like the inside of a cathedral, all Victorian red brickwork with elaborate archways and close-fitted tiles on the floor and running up the walls. As the explorers' torches played over the magnificent room, we all breathed in together.

"There's my cinema," I said.

"Oh yes, I think so," Jem said. "That's the place all right."

We went that night, straight down to the Embankment with reversible hi-viz vests that we'd hung with realistic-looking laminated badges and passes for various municipal entities. They wouldn't hold up if we got hauled into a police station, but in the dark, they'd be convincing enough. We bumped the locks and retraced the spelunkers' route. We'd brought along some paper painter's facemasks and these did the trick well enough when we crossed the active sewer, and when we reached the big room, we strung up a load of white LED lanterns we used during the frequent breaker-overloads at the Zeroday. They lit it up with a spooky light that turned buttery with all the dust-motes floating in the air.

Twenty paced the chamber's length, thinking aloud: "We'd get, what, two hundred or three hundred chairs in here. Put a bar over there. We'll have to clear out the dust; that'll be a ten-person job at least. Need lanterns strung along the route, too. The screen'll go, erm, there, I think, and we'll need to do something about a toilet --"

"It's a sewer, love," Jem said, prodding her in the ribs with a friendly finger as she paced past him.

"Yes, all right, sure, but we can't ask people to crap right here by the bar, can we, now?"

"There's no bar," Jem said.

"Not yet. But there will be. And three hundred people -- that's a lot of wee and poo and that. We need a ladies' and a gents'."

Jem slipped his mask over his face and headed out into the active sewer. He came back a moment later, waving his torch.

"There's a little ledge to either side of the walkway there, just beside the door. Wide enough to build a couple of outhouses, they'd just to have a hole in the floor leading straight down into the sewer, right?"

We all made faces. "That's disgusting," 26 said.

"What? It's where it all goes in the end. Not like we're going to be able to rig up proper plumbing down here, right? The smell'll stop people from lingering in the toilets, too. We'll put some hand sanitizer here, by the door."

"What about a band?" said Chester, finger on his chin.

"What about it?" I said.

"Well, something to get the crowd worked up, before the films, like?"

"Who ever heard of a band before a film?"

"Who ever heard of a film in a sewer?"

"Touché," I said.

"This is going to be brilliant," 26 said. She gave me an enormous hug, and it was all wonderful.

I'd learned a lot about construction and renovations from the work we'd done on the Zeroday, but that was nothing compared to the size of the job we faced in the Sewer Cinema, as we quickly took to calling it. First, of course, was the problem of how to move all the materials in without getting arrested.

Aziz looked at us like we were mad when we asked him about it, but after we talked about how wonderful it could be, and showed him the videos, he nodded. "Yeah," he said, "that could work. But you're going to need some things."

"Some things" turned out to be a portable chain-link fence with opaque plastic mesh, emblazoned "TEMPORARY WORKS - J SMITH AND SONS - CONSIDERATE BUILDER SCHEME - RING 08003334343."