Pirate Cinema (49 page)

At 12:39 A.M., they hit the bridge. The graffiti kids were just putting the final touches on their mural, which was really a hell of a piece of work -- running right up the whole side of the stairway and twining out over the archway, a jungle scene in psychedelic colors, all manner of slavering beasties peering out from between the foliage. When the green laser-dot began to quiver uncertainly over their mural, they were sure it was the cops, but then they caught sight of Dog, solemnly directing Chester and the reflector. Then Dog was looking at Parliament through his binox and calling out, "Higher, lower, right, right, left a bit, higher, stop."

The graffiti kids demanded to know what was going on. Dog and Chester ignored them utterly. Then,
wham
, the silvery bowl Chester was holding began to glow like a spotlight, and across the river, the video ran yet again on the walls of Parliament. Chester and Dog busied themselves with the adhesive and bits of wood and rock they'd gathered, cursing as they jiggled the reflector while trying to fix it in place.

Now
the graffiti kids seemed to get what was going on, and they ran all around the embankment, picking up pieces of rubbish that might help fix the reflector into place, crowding around to give "helpful" suggestions in awed tones. With their help -- or perhaps in spite of it -- Dog and Chester got the reflector set before the first run-through.

"Now what?" one of the graffiti kids -- sixteen, green hair, face-mask, a paint-smeared white disposable boiler suit -- asked.

"Now we scarper," Chester said. "And you never saw us, right?"

The painter laid a finger alongside his nose and shouted, "Skip it, lads!" and the graffiti kids vanished into the night.

"Right," Chester said, "let's shoot the crow, shall we?"

They changed into their tourist outfits and sauntered away, wet armpits and wet palms and fluttering hearts and all.

The plan said we'd all go back to the Zeroday when we got done with our part, but Rob never checked in, so for all we knew, the Zeroday was swarming with nabmen in blue. Plus -- tell the truth -- we couldn't any of us bear the thought of missing the show. So like dogs returning to their vomit, we stupid criminals returned to the scene of the crime. When Hester and Lenny sidled up alongside of us with their sheepish grins, we knew we weren't the only ones who lacked the discipline of hardcore urban paramilitary guerrillas. This was our greatest opening ever, and we wanted to be there. Luckily, there was a damn huge crowd to get lost in. Westminster Bridge was well rammed with gawpers, staring at the looping video on the side of Parliament, holding up their phones to video it or get the QR code and visit the site.

"How'd you go, then?" Hester said, her eyes shining.

"I think we did all right," I said.

"Brilliantly," 26 confirmed. "How about you?"

Hester assumed a mien of absolute nonchalance. "Nothing too collywobbly," she said. "Bit of running around, though, yeah?" She gestured at Lenny. "This one could bring home the gold for Great Britain in the half-mile men's depulsion. Right sprinter. Nearly left me behind."

Lenny affected not to hear and paid attention to his mobile instead. "Eleven million," he said.

"Cor," said Hester.

"Blimey, too." 26 agreed.
Eleven million
views! It wasn't even six in the morning yet! Who knew that many people were even
awake
at this hour!

We fell silent as another run of the video ended and the crowd shuffled around the stopped traffic. There were cops somewhere nearby, blowing whistles and telling people to move along. No one seemed to hear or care. People had snapped the QR code and landed on the website and were reading out the potted history of TIP-Ex to one another. An official car fought its way through the crowd. Someone started chanting "It's not fair!" at it, and the crowd picked it up. It was a kind of carnival atmosphere, not angry, but there was no mistaking the crowd's feeling on the matter of the morning's vote.

The car used its horn to push through a forest of arms holding mobile phones; half were taking snaps of the frosted windows and the grim-faced driver; the other half were showing the video to whatever luckless sod was in the back set.

As the car swung into Parliament Square, the crowd cheered, and another round of the video began. Traffic was picking up on the bridge, but there were too many people to fit on the pavement or even the lane closest to the video -- both of the eastbound lanes were now shut down, and the horns began to honk. Over the river, we could see flashes of police lights and hear snatches of siren as they searched for the now-abandoned projector.

"So," I said, looking at the mission mobile, which showed the "1" the projector team had sent when they evacuated. "Nothing from Rob, then?"

Everyone looked at their shoes. "Nicked," Hester said. "Musta been."

That's when Chester and Rabid Dog reached us. It was hugs and back-slaps all 'round as the video rolled again, and no, they hadn't heard from Rob, either.

It was another forty-five minutes before Jem and Dodger made it. They had eggs and fried mushrooms on their breath and down their fronts. When Jem gave me a hard hug, I said, "You bastard, you stopped for breakfast!"

He laughed and dug around his carrier bag and came up with a paper sack of drippy bacon sandwiches that we handed around. "Fantastic builder's caf just around the corner from there," he said.

"You are the coolest customer in all of London," I said.

"You're not so bad yourself, old son," he said, and put me in a friendly head-lock that had me choking on my bacon buttie. I finished choking just as the video cut out, mid-play. The crowd groaned and people started asking one another whether the video would start up again. A sizable portion apparently believed it wouldn't, and we took advantage of the general exodus to slope off and find a bus home to the Zeroday.

We made an odd group, with our shining eyes and trembling bodies, our touristy garb and hats. But London was full of odd groups just like us, and that was the point, wasn't it? I don't reckon anyone gave us a second look the whole way home.

"Nothing from Rob, then?" I said for the fiftieth time as we came through the door and began to collapse onto sofas and chairs and cushions and rugs. Jem chucked his balled up builder's trousers at my head.

"I'll make the tea," he said, and went into the kitchen before I could retaliate.

We stayed awake hitting "reload" and listening to Radio 4 streams for as long as we could. The hit-counter went gradually berserk -- by 9:30 A.M., it had hit eighty million, which was greater than the population of Great Britain, which meant that either people were watching more than once, or we had foreigners tuning in, or our hit counters were unreliable. It didn't matter, because a) the number was still rocketing up and; b) it was a
rattling
huge number.

What we
really
wanted to do was hear what was going on in Parliament, but, apart from a few tantalizing tweets from MPs on their way into work, it was a black hole. None of us had thought to sign up for seats in the gallery, and there had already been four tour-buses' worth of out-of-towners queued up to sit in when we left. We didn't dare call Letitia because we had already decided we wouldn't outright admit to her that it had been us. And we didn't dare call Rob in case some fat-fingered sergeant had Rob's phone rattling around in his trouser pocket, waiting to answer it and see who it was that was calling this gentleman in their cells.

Sleep demanded that we spend some time with it. We didn't even make it upstairs. The whole crew -- even Aziz, who pulled up not long after we got in -- ended up asleep in the parlor/pub room, the shutters closed against the blinding spring day outside. What woke us, of course, was Rob thumping on the door. He wheeled his bicycle in, looking remarkably well-slept and cocky for a man who'd been in police custody all night.

After we'd finished giving him back-slapping hugs and someone'd pressed a cup of tea into his hands, he sat back on the sofa, crossed his ankles in front of him and said, "Tell you what, I might be all butterfingers when it comes to the old reflectors, but I'm the very spit of perfection when it comes to playing thick for the Bill. Soon as I was picked up, I started in like, what was the big deal, I was just trying to get up high to get a look at the lights on the Thames cos I wanted to maybe do a photo-shoot up there some day. I laid it on proper posh, talking all this rubbish I half-remembered from the one year I spent at art-school, and so on and so forth. They took my DNA and cloned my SIM -- I assume you all had the good sense to ditch yours, yeah? -- and forgot about me for the next eight hours. So I slept like a baby, didn't I? My solicitor came and got me out at nine sharp, and I went home for a shower and a change of clothes, which, frankly, the rest of you might consider, no offense. Looks like I might be in for a whopping fifty pound fine, though my solicitor says he's sure I can beat it if I want to pay him ten times that to defend the claim." He laughed like it was the funniest thing in the world, and he was almost right, at that point.

Here's how we found out we'd won: a reporter from the
Guardian
rang me on my mobile to ask me how I felt about the surprise outcome of the vote. "How'd it come out?" I said. She laughed and said that she assumed someone would have told me, of course: "Only forty-six of them bothered to turn up, but twenty-four of them voted for TIP-Ex, and that makes it the law of the land!"

"Only forty-six of them turned up for work?" I said, and everyone in the pub room looked at me. I covered the mouthpiece. "We won!" I said, my fingertips and the tips of my ears tingling. The roar from my mates was deafening -- Jem frisbeed the plate he was holding into the dead fireplace and shouted "Hopa!" as it shattered.

When I could hear the phone again, the lady from the *Guardian* was laughing hysterically. "Yes, seems like most of the MPs heard about those videos this morning -- you
do
know about those?"

"I heard about them," I said. It was clear from the way she asked that she was sure I was behind them, but I wasn't going to admit anything.

"Right, I'm sure you have. Anyroad, they heard about the business with the videos, and
then
they heard from their constituents, telling them that they'd better not vote against TIP-Ex. But, of course, the whips had told them they had to do this. So most of them solved the problem by pulling a sickie and staying home. So they barely had quorum when the question was called -- the Speaker delayed the vote as long as she could, I suppose so that more MPs might straggle in, but at forty-six, they were quorate, and your Letitia Clarke-Gifford called the question; and oh, didn't she get the filthies from her party leader. But when it came to the vote, twenty-four MPs went for TIP-Ex -- eight from the ruling party, ten from the opposition, and the six independents. And now, you've got the law you've been campaigning about. So now that you're all caught up, I wonder if I might ask you some questions?"

I have no idea what I told her, but apparently I was coherent enough that she was able to get a couple paragraphs' worth of quotes from me that didn't make me sound like I was boasting about the savage bollocking I'd just given to the horrible old content dinosaurs, which is precisely what I spent the rest of the afternoon doing.

WHEW! How's that for a conclusion? It's not over, you know. There's an epilogue yet to come. It wasn't an easy epilogue to write, either. I would have loved to have ended the story here, but Trent had more to say, as you'll find out in a moment.

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The judge only deliberated for forty-five minutes. I wasn't surprised -- the dinosaurs' case was iron clad. After all, I was guilty. All I could really say in my defense was that I thought it was real art, and that Scot would have approved. Katarina even went into the witness box and said so. But, of course, neither Scot nor his descendants were entitled to approve of my little films, and so guilty I was.

His Honor was kind, though: he reduced the damages to £152.32: one penny per charge. The entire courtroom laughed when that was announced, and I had to hide my grin. Roshan looked furious and patted me on the shoulder, but the dinosaurs' lawyer was even angrier as the giggles turned into roars of laughter. I didn't care. I wouldn't have cared if it was ten million quid.

We'd won the real fight.

That's
why the crowd was laughing. Everyone -- the judge, the claimants and their expensive barristers -- knew that the real fight had been settled two weeks before, in Parliament, not during the long, drawn out, stupendously dull copyright trial. I'm sure that some clever lobbyist had decided, back when, that it would be incredibly effective: first, they'd defeat TIP-Ex; then they'd get a judgment against me for millions, then they'd bring criminal charges against me and put me in jail, and every horrible pirate in the land would tremble in terror at the awful fate awaiting anyone who crossed the almighty Content Barons.

But TIP-Ex was law, there would be no criminal prosecution, and the election was on in three weeks and not one single "rogue MP" had been chucked out of her or his party. Letitia had already promised another Private Member's Bill, if re-elected, that would legalize remix videos. She told me that half the party power-brokers wanted to sack her and the other half wanted her to be the next Prime Minister. In any event, her constituents had turned up to her surgeries in hordes to tell her how happy they were with her.

I reckon I'll work on the election. Here in Bow, our MP was one of the ones who took the day off work, which is better than having voted against us. Maybe I'll campaign for her. Or maybe I'll go to Bradford and help Cora campaign for the poor bastard whose office she'd been haunting ever since I went to London.

"Are you coming out to Hester's cinema night?" I asked 26. I'd been texting her all day without a reply, so I finally broke down and called her. I knew she was working at the bookstore, but I needed to know so I could make plans with Chester and Dog, who each had a film in at the screens Hester had got permission to stick up in a community center in Brixton, where she lived.

"No," 26 said, tensely.

"You okay?"

She covered the mouthpiece and I heard her have a muffled conversation with someone. "Just a sec," she said, and I heard her go into the back room of the store and up the little stairs that led to the tiny store-room and loo.

"Cecil," she said.

I could tell from her tone of voice that this was going to be bad. I got that tingly feeling again, but this time there was nothing at all pleasant about it. "26?"

"I've decided on where I'm going to go for uni," she said in a tiny voice.

"Oh," I said.

"The thing is, I had this talk with my dad -- my biological dad -- and he told me loads of stuff he'd never said before, about how terrible he felt about letting me down, and how not getting to know me was the biggest regret in his life, and --"

I could hear that she was crying. I wished I could be there to hold her.

She snuffled. "Sorry. Sorry. Okay, well, the thing is, I don't think I ever got over his going away, never got over feeling rejected. I mean, like, I
thought
I had, but when I spoke to him --"

"So you're going to go to Glasgow?"

"No," she said. "That would be a little
too
close. But Edinburgh has a brilliant law school. And I'd sent them an application, just as a kind of Plan B, and, well, they accepted me, and --"

"Scotland's not that far away," I said.

She made a choked sound. "It's far, Cec. I know loads of girls who graduated last year and went away to places that are close, Reading or Oxford, and none of them stayed with their boyfriends. It was a disaster for all of them."

"We're different --"

"Everyone thinks
they're
different."

"But you and I, all the things we did, they
are
different -- did any of your mates get a bloody
law
passed before moving away to bollocky Reading?"

I was marshalling my arguments, laying them out in my head, getting ready to deliver them like it was a debate, and I was going to use logic to convince her.

She made the tiniest of laughs. "I know, I know. But Cecil, I have to do this, do you understand that? Dad called me when he heard the news about TIP-Ex, told me how proud he was of me, told me all these things I'd waited so long to hear, and --"

And I realized this wasn't a debate. It wasn't a discussion. It was an announcement. The world dropped away from me and my whole body started to shake.

She didn't say anything else. Inside, I wanted to shout, "He
abandoned
you! He's a
copper
! It's
cold
in Scotland!" I also wanted to whimper:
Don't leave me all alone.
But I said neither.

"Course I understand," I said. "Course I do." I swallowed hard a couple times. "You coming to Hester's, then?"

"You go without me," she said. "I've got to break it to my parents."

"See you soon then?"

"Sure," she said.

But we didn't. Something happened -- growing up, winning, her dad -- whatever, and for me, it was the summer of heartbreak. There was plenty of work to do, plenty to keep busy with, but I didn't make another film until the winter finally set in and the sun started to set at four in the afternoon and the rain shitted down your neck every time you left the house.

And then, I
did
make a film. And another. And another.

And now, I've got to go and make another.