26 took it from me and studied it, sniffed it, and grinned. “Not tonight! Wild boar! How medieval!”
And the harvest began. There were mountains of food to choose from, and we set aside the choicest morsels for our enjoyment, making a pile that, in the end, was more than we could hope to eat. Still, we took it all up in a couple of cartons we found behind one of the skips and set off again.
“We’ll give the extra to tramps,” I said, and sure enough, before we’d reached London Bridge again, we’d already given away all of the surplus and tucked the rest into our rucksacks.
I chanced another look at Twenty as we climbed onto a bus and walked up the stairs to the upper deck. She was grinning ear to ear, and I remembered how I’d felt when Jem had taken me to Waitrose skip for the first time. Like there was a secret world I was being admitted to: like someone had just taken me through the back of a wardrobe into Narnia.
“I liked your idea,” she said as the streets whizzed past us. “About doing all the MPs and record execs and that for piracy? I thought that would be lovely, a really cool bit of theater.”
“Annika said it wouldn’t work,” I said, but inside I was glowing with pride.
“Oh,” she said, waving her hands. “I don’t think any of it is going to work. They’ve been at this for years. Every time the bastards from the film and record companies buy a new law, we all get out into the streets, make a lot of noise, call our MPs, go to their offices, write expert analysis of why this won’t work, and then they pass it anyway. Parliament’s not there to represent the people, or even the country. Parliament’s there to represent the rich and powerful—the bosses and the rulers. We’re just the inconvenient little voters and you and I aren’t even that for a couple years. What’s more, once they put you in jail, you don’t get a vote, so the more of us they lock away, the fewer of us there are to vote against them.”
“That’s depressing,” I said. “What a load of B.S.”
Then she kissed me again, not for very long, just a peck on the lips that still got my heart pounding again. “Don’t be so down. This just means that we’re going to have to, you know, dismantle Parliament to get any justice. Which, when you think about it, is a lot more fun than writing letters to your MP.”
Chapter 3
FAMILY/FEELING USELESS/A SCANDAL IN PARLIAMENT/A SCANDAL AT HOME/WAR!
One morning, I woke up and realized that I was home. The Zeroday was quiet—it was only two in the afternoon and I was the first out of bed—and as I padded downstairs in a dressing gown that I’d found in a charity shop for a pound, I saw the signs of my new family all around me. Jem was a pretty fair artist, and he’d taken to decorating our walls with gigantic, detailed charcoal murals, working late into the night, drawing whatever struck his fancy, blending scenes of London’s streets into elaborate anatomical studies he copied out of books into caricatures of us and the people we brought home, me with my nose huge and my teeth crooked and snarled; Dog with his spots swollen and multiplied all over his face; Chester so horsey that he had pointy ears and a tail. Most of all, he caricatured himself: scrawny, rat-faced, knock-kneed, grinning an idiot’s grin with a dribble of spit rolling off his chin, clutching a piece of charcoal, and drawing himself into existence.
We’d got tired of getting splinters from the floor and had gone on a painting binge, with Chester leading the work—he’d helped out his dad, who was a builder, back home. We sanded and painted the floor a royal blue and it was as smooth as tile under my bare feet. The dishes were drying in the clean rack beside the sink, and I picked up my favorite coffee cup—it was a miniature beer stein, studded with elaborate spikes and axes, an advertisement for some fantasy RPG, and we’d found eight hundred of them in a skip one night—and made coffee in Jem’s sock-dripper, just the way he’d shown me. The fridge was full, the sofa had a Cecil-shaped dent in it that I settled into with a sigh, and the room still smelled faintly of oregano and garlic from the epic spaghetti sauce we’d all made the night before.
I heard another person’s footsteps on the stairs and turned to see Twenty picking her way down them, dressed in one of my long T-shirts and a pair of my boxers and looking so incredibly sexy I felt like my tongue was going to unroll from my mouth across the floor like a cartoon wolf.
“COFFEE,” she said, and took my cup from me and started to slurp noisily at it.
“Good morning, beautiful,” I said, sticking my face up the shirt’s hem and kissing her little tummy. She squealed and pushed my head away and gave me a kiss that tasted of sleep and warm and everything good in my world. She sat down beside me and picked up her lappie and opened the lid, rubbed her finger over the fingerprint reader until it recognized her. “What’s happening in the world?”
I shrugged. “Dunno—only been up for five minutes myself.” She snuggled into me and began to poke at the computer. And there and then, cuddling the woman I loved, in the pub I’d made over with my own hands and with the help of mates who were the best friends I’d ever had, I realized that this was the family I’d always dreamed of finding. This was the home I’d always dreamed of living in. This was the life I’d always wished I had. I was as lucky as a lucky thing.
And pretty much as soon as that feeling had filled me up like a balloon and sailed me up the ceiling, I remembered my parents and my sister and the life I’d left behind, and the balloon deflated, sending me crashing to the ground. I made a small noise in the back of my throat, like a kitten that’s been separated from its mum, and 26 looked into my face.
“What is it?” she said. “Christ, you look like your best friend just died.”
I shook my head and tried for a smile. “It’s nothing, love, don’t worry about it.”
She tapped me lightly on the nose, hard enough to make me blink. “Don’t give me that, Cec. Something’s got you looking like you’re ready to blow your brains out, and when you’re that miserable, it’s not just your business—it’s the business of everyone who cares about you. I.e., me. Talk.”
I looked away, but she turned my head so that I was looking into her bottomless brown eyes. “It’s nothing. It’s just.” I really wanted to look away, but she wouldn’t let me. “Okay, I miss me mam. Happy?”
She tsked. “Boys are such idiots. Of course you miss your family—how long has it been since you saw them?”
I did the maths in my head. “Ten months,” I said. Then I thought again. “Hey, I’m turning seventeen next month!”
“We’ll bake you a cake. Now, how long has it been since you called ’em?”
I shook my head. “I haven’t, not really. Once, but only for a few minutes. Didn’t work out so well.” I’d told Twenty about how I came to leave Bradford, of course, but I hadn’t told her much else about my family. I didn’t like to talk about them, because talking about them led to thinking about them and thinking about them led to misery.
She glared. “That’s terrible! How could you go that long without even calling? Your mum and dad must be beside themselves with worry! For all they know, you’re lying dead in a ditch or being forced to peddle your pretty arse in a dungeon in Soho.” She got up from the sofa and faced me, hands on her hips. “I know you, boyo. You’re not a bastard. It can’t feel good to be this rotten to your parents. You owe it to yourself to call them up.”
I spread my hands with helplessness. “I know you’re right, but how can I do it? It’s been so long? What do I say?”
“You say sorry, idiot boy. Then you say I love you and I’m alive and doing fine. Do you think it’s going to get any easier if you keep on procrastinating? Call them. Now.”
“But,” I said, and stopped. I was fishing for an excuse—any excuse. “If I call them from my mobile, they’ll have my number and they’ll trace me. I’m only sixteen still; one call to the cops and I’ll be dragged back home.”
She rolled her eyes with the eloquent mastery of a teenaged girl. “Tell me you can’t think of a way of making a call without having it traced back to you.”
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I grimaced. She had me there. There were only about twenty free Internet phone services. Most of them were blocked by the Great Firewall of Britain, but I’d been routing around the censorwall since before my testicles dropped. “Fine,” I said. “I’ll do it later.”
“What, when all your mates are awake and around and embarrassing you? The hell you will. There’s no time like the present, boyo.”
So I found a headset and wiped it clean and screwed it into my ear and paired it up with my lappie and dialed Mum’s number. It rang four times and bumped to voice mail, and I breathed a huge sigh of relief as I disconnected the phone. “No answer,” I said. “I’ll try again later.”
“Don’t tell me your whole family shares one phone? Are you from the past or something?”
“You’re too damned clever for your own good, 26. Fine, fine.” I called Dad’s number. Four rings and … voice mail. “No answer,” I said cheerfully. “Let’s get some breakfast—”
“What about your sister, what’s her name, Nora?”
“Cora,” I said. “You really paid attention when I told you about my family, didn’t you?”
“I always pay attention,” she said. “That way, I can tell when you’re lying to me, or yourself. I pay attention to everything. It’s my superpower.”
I dialed Cora’s number with a heavy heart, then held my breath as the phone rang: once, twice, three times—
“Hello?”
“Cora?”
“Who is this?” Her voice sounded thick, like she’d been sleeping. But it was the middle of the afternoon. I’d figured on her being at school. It was a Wednesday, after all. The school jammed all pupils’ phones (though teachers and heads got special handsets that worked through the jammers).
“Cora, it’s me.” I didn’t want to say my real name. It’s silly, but I hadn’t introduced myself to 26 as Trent yet. It’s not like it was a big secret—I’m sure my roommates had grassed on me—but I felt weird being anyone apart from Cecil in front of her.
“Trent?”
“Yeah.” There was silence. “So, how are you?”
“Holy shit, I can’t believe it! Trent, where the hell have you been? Mum and Dad think you’re dead or something!”
“No,” I said. “I’m alive. I’m doing fine. You can tell them that.” There was stunned silence from the phone. “So,” I said. “So. How are you, then?”
She snorted. “Oh, we’re all bloody wonderful here in old Bradford. Dad’s still out of work, Mum’s still fighting to get her benefits without queuing up at the Jobcentre, and I’ve just failed three of my subjects.”
It was like an icicle through the heart. I wanted to throw the laptop across the room. Instead, I took a deep breath and squeezed my hands into fists and then let them go. “How could you be failing in school, Cor? You’re a supergenius.”
“It’s just hard, okay? How many days could I skip breakfast to study at the library? How was I supposed to do my assignments late at night when the library was shut? Besides, who the hell cares? It’s not as though I’m going to go to my deathbed whispering, ‘If I’d only got better marks in GCSE Geography.’”
The icicle twisted. I used to say that line about deathbeds every time I brought home a failing grade. My little sister had learned well from my example.
“Say something,” she said.
“I—” I closed my eyes. “Cora, you need to do better in school. You’ve got too much brains to be failing. I know it’s hard but—”
She interrupted me. “Oh, shut up your stupid hypocritical noise. You’ve got no idea how hard it is. As soon as things got bad, you buggered off to wherever you’re hiding out. Don’t you be lecturing me about my life. You’re swanning around the world having adventures and I’m stuck—”
She broke up and I could hear that she was crying. I didn’t know what to say. I looked with helpless anger at 26, who’d made me make this call. Her expression was full of sympathy and that softened me, made my anger turn to misery so that I thought I might start crying, too.
“I’m really sorry, Cora,” I said. “You’re right, one hundred percent right. It’s all my fault. I’ve got no call to lecture you on your behavior, not when I’m so far away.”
“Where are you, Trent? We’re all so worried about you. It’s all Mum and Dad talk about, when they’re not getting at me about my schoolwork or shouting at each other about money.”
“I’m—” I shut my mouth. “I’m not ready to tell you that, yet. I’m sorry, Cora. I just can’t take the risk. But how about if I give you a phone number where you can leave me a message?” As I talked, I went to a free voice-mail service and signed up for an account, using a dodgy browser plugin that automatically generated a fake name and address in France, along with a one-time fake email that it signed up for using the same details. A few seconds later, I had a phone number in Ghana.
“You’re a suspicious sod,” she said. “Fine, give me the number.”
I read it to her. “Get a calling card from a newsagent to call it, otherwise it’ll be a fortune. I’ll check it once a day and get back to you, all right?”
She sighed. “It’s good to hear your voice again, Trent.”
I smiled. “It’s good to hear yours, too, Cora. I’ve missed you. All of you. Where are Mum and Dad, anyway?”
“Oh, they’re at school. The head wanted to ‘have a word with them’ about me. I’m apparently on the slippery slope straight to hell.”
I groaned. This was clearly all my fault.
“Oh, stop it,” she said. “You messed us over when you got the net cut off, but they cut the net. It’s not as though you committed a murder. Hell, Tisha’s brother’s in jail for murder and he gets to use the Internet! He’s doing a degree in social work through the Open University. They’re the bullies and the bastards. You’re just an idiot.” She paused. “And we miss you.”
Tears were leaking out of my eyes and running down my cheeks. I was embarrassed to be crying in front of 26, but I couldn’t stop. I swallowed snot and tears, snuffled up a breath. “I miss you, too, Cora. All of you. But especially you. Call me, okay?”
She made a small, crying noise of her own that I took for assent and I disconnected.
I glared at 26, furious at her for making me go through that ordeal. But she put her arms around me and pushed my head against her neck and shoulder and made a “shh, shh,” sound that went straight to the back of my brain and I felt like I was five years old again, with a skinned knee, being comforted by a teacher as I bawled my eyes out. I couldn’t stop. I didn’t want to stop. It was like my brain had been filled with poison and pus, and it was finally all running out. I let it go.
* * *
The thing Cora said to me—They cut off the net. They’re the bullies and the bastards—resonated in my skull for the rest of the day. Who were they? I hadn’t really thought about the people who got the laws passed that had changed my life forever—not the bigwigs at the film and record companies nor the MPs who showed up and voted to mess over even more of the voters who lived in their districts.
When I tried to picture them, my image of them got all tangled up with all those educational copyright videos they’d made us watch in school, where big stars came on and told us how awful we all were to download their stuff without paying for it, and then they’d trot out some working stiffs—a spark, a make-up artist, a set builder—who’d drone on about how hard he worked all day and how he needed to feed his kids. We’d just laugh at these—the ancient, exquisitely preserved rock star we saw getting out of a limo crying poverty; the workers who claimed that we were taking food out of their kids’ mouths by remixing videos or sharing music, when every kid I knew spent every penny he could find on music as well as downloading more for free.
But now I tried to imagine the men who bought and sold MPs like they were pop songs, who put laws into production like they were summer blockbusters, and got to specify exactly what they’d like the statute book to say about the
people they didn’t like. I realized that somewhere out there, there were gleaming office towers filled with posh, well-padded execs who went around in limos and black cabs, who lived in big houses and whose kids had all the money in the world, and these men had decided to ruin my family for the sake of a few extra pennies. There were actual human beings who were answerable for the misery and suffering of God knew how many people all around the world—rich bastards who thought that they alone should own our culture, that they should be able to punish you for making art without their permission.
“What are you thinking about?” 26 said. She was sitting in the pub’s snug, laptop before her, earpiece screwed in. She’d been on the phone and email all day to Annika, planning some kind of big event for the next day, when they were hoping that people from all over the country would descend on their MPs’ offices to complain about the Theft of Intellectual Property Bill. All kinds of groups had joined in, and volunteers were contacting long lists of members and supporters to see if they’d commit to going out. I couldn’t join in, of course: I wasn’t on the voter’s roll. I didn’t, technically, exist. Technically, the Zeroday was an abandoned building and no one lived there.
“I’m thinking about how all this work you’re doing, it’s all because some rich bastards want to get richer.”
Chester made a little tootling noise like he was blowing a bugle and Jem began to hum some revolutionary anthem I vaguely recognized—that French song, the one that they used in the advert for the new Renault scooters. Even Rabid Dog rolled his eyes. They were okay about 26 coming by—she was good company—but they hated it when I talked politics. They seemed to think I was only interested in it because 26 was. Mostly, I think they were jealous that I had a girlfriend.
Twenty ignored them, as usual. “Well, yeah. ’Course.”
“So why don’t we do something to them? Why are we mucking around with Members of Parliament, if they’re not the ones who make the laws, not really? Why not go straight to the source? It’s like we’re trying to fix a leaky faucet by plastering the ceiling below it—why don’t we just stop the drip?”