Pirate Cinema

  I turned around, feeling like I’d been caught in a horror film. He was absolutely poker-faced, no trace at all of his affable, absent normal expression. I remembered that he was a high-powered barrister by day. Then he burst out laughing.

  “Oh, son, you should see your face! Christ on a bike, you looked like you thought I was going to go and get my shotgun!”

  26’s mum rolled up her newspaper and hit him on the back of the head several times with it. “Rosh, that was very cruel.”

  He waved her off. “Oh, our Cecil here is a fighter. I’m sure he’d have survived.” She swatted him again. “Oh, okay, fine. Sorry, Cecil. I just wanted to tell you that, well, we like you. You don’t need to tiptoe around us when you’re here. 26 has told us a little about you, and it sounds like you’ve had some bad breaks. We saw your picture in the papers, you know, and 26 showed us your film. It was bloody good stuff, too! 26 hasn’t always had the best taste in boys, but you’re doing very well for yourself, so far. In any event, you needn’t skulk around like a thief when you stay over.”

  I was at a total loss for words. That might have just been the nicest thing anyone ever said to me. I smiled awkwardly and said, “Thank you,” then fished around, and said, “you know, thank you. A lot.” Not my finest moment, but it seemed to satisfy 26’s father. I had a thought, as long as we were all getting along so well. “Can I ask you something?”

  He made a go-ahead gesture.

  “What’s her real name?”

  He snorted and 26’s mum started to stay something, but he hushed her. “I’m afraid I’ve been sworn to confidentiality on that score. It’s true that 26 isn’t the name we gave her at birth, but she chose it for herself very early, and to be honest, it’s what we’ve always called her. I expect she’ll change it by deed poll sooner or later.”

  I escaped from the kitchen after shaking both their hands (her mum even gave me a little, but warm, hug), got dressed and showered and slipped out the door and went home to the Zeroday.

  * * *

  I climbed the fire escape and slipped through the window, dropped my bag off in my room, and headed downstairs. There were voices in the pub-room, some I didn’t recognize, and one I hadn’t heard in quite some time.

  I came into the room to find Chester and Rabid Dog on the sofa with their arms folded, looking worried, Jem perched on the arm, and sitting on the bar was the speaker, whose voice I hadn’t heard in months and months: it was Dodger!

  I almost didn’t recognize him at first. He’d cut his hair, and while he was still wearing jeans and work boots, they were clean and free from holes, and his boots actually gleamed in the pub lights.

  Standing beside him was a young man in a smart jumper and a little narrow-brim pork-pie hat and expensive trainers—your basic Bow hipster—watching it all with an intent, keen look.

  Everyone turned to look at me when I came in. I waved—”Hi, hi,” I said. “Dodger, mate, where’ve you been? Nice hair!”

  He grunted and waved at me. “Cecil,” he said, “meet Mr. Thistlewaite,” he said, gesturing at the hipster, who waved back and said, “Call me Rob.”

  “Hi, Rob.”

  Jem turned to me. “Dodger was just explaining how Mr. Thistlewaite has this incredible offer for us all.”

  “Oh, yes?”

  Dodger shook his head. “Jem, listen to me, will you? Before you come to conclusions?”

  Jem folded his arms again.

  “Right,” Dodger said. “Right. Okay. Here’s the story. Rob here is a property developer, specialized in derelict buildings.”

  I started to see why everyone else was looking so upset.

  “What he does, right, is he buys them off the council or whomever for cheap and does them up when he can, and sells ’em off. But when he gets one like this, in a neighborhood that’s too crap to sell anything in, he likes to wait for a while, cos there’s no sense in spending a lot of money doing a place up if no one wants to live in it.”

  “I figure if a place is cheap enough now, I’ll have a flutter on it, put some money down, wait and see if the neighborhood improves.” Rob didn’t seem to be embarrassed to be talking about how much money he had, which was unusual. I knew lots of hipsters were rich, but I didn’t think most of them could talk casually about buying and selling whole buildings.

  “Right. So Rob here reckons that Bow is going to come up nice, and so he’s bought this place.”

  That was quite an announcement. I could tell that he’d already got that far with the other lads, and this certainly explained why they were looking so murderous.

  “You working for landlords now, Dodger?” Jem said. “You show him which places to buy, grass out your old mates, sell our homes out from under us?”

  Dodger shook his head. “That’s the part you’re not getting, Jem. Listen, okay? Just listen. Yeah, I give Rob help finding good places to buy. All the best places are squatted, cos we’re all so clever about finding them, yeah? But a place like this, Rob doesn’t want to do it up any time soon—it’s going to take years before this dump is worth anything. And in the meantime, you get to live here.”

  That got our attention.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Right. Rob wants to know that there’s someone responsible living here, that it’s not being used as a sugar shack or for tarts to turn tricks, that no stupid kids are going to burn it down cooking rock. He wants you to be tenants.”

  Jem still looked suspicious. “Don’t tenants pay rent?”

  “I’m only after peppercorn rent,” Rob said. “A pound a year.”

  “Yeah,” Dodger said. “And in return, you keep the place up and go quietly when Rob asks you to, whenever that may be.”

  “What’s in it for him?”

  “I get a caretaker I can rely on. Dodger vouches for you. And who knows, when the time comes, there might be some other empty property I need someone for I can move you to. No promises, but there’s plenty of empty buildings these days in London, in case you haven’t noticed.”

  “Yeah,” Dodger said. “And you keep it up—we keep it up, since I’ll go over everything with you and make sure the wiring isn’t going to burn the place down. And in return, you don’t grass him out to the council for substandard living conditions and whatnot. It’s a fair trade—you won’t find a fairer one, right? Best of all, you get legit, which means you don’t have to worry about getting tossed out on a moment’s notice. Rob here will give you at least a month to get your stuff together, probably more. Honestly mate, this is it, the squatter’s holy grail.”

  Jem nodded slowly. “It certainly sounds like it. You always hear about landlords who work out that the best thing for everyone is to let you stay until it’s time to go. But I’d figured they were an urban legend—like the kindly copper or the hooker with a heart of gold.”

  “Just call me a living legend,” Rob said. He seemed supremely cool and unruffled by all this. I guess if I had loads of money and proper villains like Dodger for mates, I’d be supercool, too.

  I was starting to get my head around what this all meant. “We’ve missed your cooking ’round here, Dodger—you staying for lunch?” I thought it’d be good to get us all thinking about the fact that we were all mates, that Dodger was one of the original Jammie Dodgers.

  He grinned. “Yeah,” he said. “Rob, you want a feed?” Rob looked a little uncomfortable for the first time; my guess was he was a little squeamish about the idea of eating garbage, but to his credit, he rallied.

  “Sure,” he said, and just like that, the tension was broken. Dog and Chester—who, I think, had always felt a little like Johnnie-come-latelies and thus not entitled to speak up on matters of household management—visibly thawed, and Dodger produced a baggy of his insane weed, and someone had papers, and the afternoon got very warm and friendly. Dodger scoured our freezer for gourmet tidbits, and ended up doing marrow bones, cod cheeks, grilled eels, and heaps of veg and beans, all arranged so artfully on the plate you hardly wanted to eat it.

>   Dog hardly wanted to eat it anyway, having no taste for organ meats and that delicacies, but we made such a great show of smacking our lips and groaning in ecstasy that he stopped trying to hide his marrow bone under his lentils and instead dug out the rich, oily brown stuff from within and piled some on the little triangle of brown toast—day-old bread from the deep freeze—with butter and tentatively tasted it. Thereafter, he became some sort of mythic, organ-devouring beast, who scarfed it all up and asked for seconds and then thirds, and there was white wine, and then Jem did coffee things, and Rob told hilarious dirty jokes, and the afternoon raced past and before we knew it, it was evening and our tummies strained at our waistbands.

  By the time we pushed back from the table, we were all fast friends. Rob’s bottomless supply of dirty jokes, Dodger’s cooking, and Jem’s coffee-making-fu had bonded us as effectively as a two-part epoxy.

  “You’re the guy from the Pirate Cinema, yeah?” Rob said. I felt myself blush. Just how many people saw the cover of Time Out and The Guardian, anyway? A lot, it seemed.

  “We all did it,” I said. “I just did the talking at the beginning.”

  Chester blew a raspberry. “Cecil there’s the genius auteur around here. The rest of us are dogsbodies and hacks.”

  “I was gutted that I’d missed it,” Rob said, grinning. “I had so many mates that went along, but I thought it all sounded too dodgy, going off to the sewer and that. Figured that it would be some wanky art-student film and I’d be stuck in the shit-pit with it. Downloaded it, though, afterward. Good stuff! Really brilliant!”

  I blushed harder.

  “You shoulda been there,” Chester said. “It was a hundred times better with the whole crowd and all.”

  “Well,” Rob said. “You’ll have to let me know the next time you do one.”

  Jem got a sneaky look. “You wouldn’t happen to have any derelict buildings lying about that you wouldn’t mind seeing used as a theater now and again, would you, Rob?”

  I opened my mouth to tick Jem off—Rob was already giving us a free spot to live, what more did we want?—but before I could, Rob got a faraway look in his eye. “Gosh,” he said. “Now that you mention it, I rather suspect I do.”

  Dodger let out an evil chuckle. “You’ve got a devious mind, Jem-o,” he said.

  “He does, doesn’t he?” Rob said. “I can see I’m going to have to watch out for you, young master. But you know, I’ve always fancied being a patron of the arts. This sounds like it’d be miles better than getting your name on a sign in a dusty wing of a museum.”

  “Plus you wouldn’t believe the girls that turn up at this sort of thing,” Dodger said, though as far as I knew, he’d never been to a Confusing Peach night, but he spoke with the utter confidence of a lifelong bullshit artist. And anyway, Rob was old, twenty-five or thirty, and most of the people at a Confusing Peach party were my age. Whatever—if he could get off with some lady, who was I to look askance?

  * * *

  26 rang me from work; she’d been pulling the late shift at the anarchist bookstore more and more, as she tried to juggle all the crazy film stuff, her schoolwork, and, erm, me.

  “Why don’t you come pick me up?” she said. “Annika’s around and she’s really interested in Sewer Cinema.” My fame had no bounds, it seemed.

  “I’ll come straight over,” I said. Any residual intoxication from the wine and the weed had been burned away by Jem’s coffee, which had the ability to cook away booze remnants like a flamethrower crisping a butterfly.

  I went to my room to dress and dumped out the bag of Bradford clothes I’d taken home from my room. I contemplated it, lying limp on my bed, and realized that before I came to London, I’d dressed like a total burk. Honestly—shiny wind-cheaters with the names of sports teams? I didn’t even like sport! T-shirts with rude slogans? Transparent kicks with fat electroluminescent laces that strobed like the most pathetic disco ever? Seriously—how had my family allowed me to leave the house looking like such a, a … hick? Like someone who dressed himself by studying the Primark adverts on the bus stations? Well, at least the underpants and socks were salvageable, just.

  So I put on my Bradford underwear and slipped on a pair of oversize green trousers, cut with that funny midleg wibble that made it look a little like you were wearing kneepads; a pair of cut-down black wellies trimmed to sneaker-height; a crewneck sweater embroidered with nylon fishing line hung with mismatched buttons and a huge, waxed-cotton coat that started out as a surplus butcher’s smock, carefully waterproofed by rubbing it over and over again with soft wax. I looked at myself in the dirty mirror beside Jem’s mural in the corridor and grinned: I looked like a proper Londoner now. No one in Bradford dressed like this.

  The bookshop was just shutting when I got there. 26 was selling a hippie-looking old dude a thick book on African history. He chewed a lock of his hair while she rang it up, then paid her in pound coins that he carefully doled out of his pocket, counting them aloud. He was about par for the course at the bookshop—all the customers were a bit odd. That was okay: I’d decided I’d rather be where the odd people were. They had more fun.

  Annika was checking the stock and dusting shelves and doing all the other closing-down things that 26 usually did at the end of the night. As soon as the hippie guy was gone, she helped 26 count out the till while I made tea and scrounged some organic multigrain agave-sweetened vegan biccies that tasted only about half as horrible as they sounded. Annika put the cashbox away in its hiding place—a nook in a shadow under the stairs to the cellar, a box that had once held the gas meter for the shop when it had been a flat. They deposited the previous day’s cash every day at lunchtime, because no one wanted to carry around a couple hundred quid in late-night east London.

  Then we all sat down and Annika sipped her tea and dipped her biccie and I watched the elaborate, tentacled tattoo writhe around her skinny throat and down her skinny arms. “Cecil,” she said, “I’m really glad you came down tonight. You see, I’ve heard about the Sewer Cinema you and 26 and your friends put on, the films you showed, the things you said. I wanted to tell you what an absolutely wonderful job you did. I don’t know what you could have done to make it any better, honestly—it’s got everyone talking about the right thing.”

  26 kissed me below the ear and squeezed my shoulders and I felt my ears turning red. I could see why 26 liked Annika so much; she was so calm, so assured, and she was very beautiful (though not as beautiful as 26, I hastily told myself). “Thank you,” I said. “It wasn’t just me, you know.”

  “Oh, I know. It’s never just one person. But you’re the one who’s got his face in the papers and on the news. Which means that you’re the one they’ll be looking for when the time comes.”

  I gulped. “When the time comes?”

  She shook her head. “You know what I mean. We’re kicking the hornets’ nest. That’s good. I’m all for kicking hornets’ nests! But when you do that, the hornets come out and swarm. I think it’s a good bet that the coppers’ll be looking for you before long.”

  I sighed. “Of course,” I said. This had been in the back of my mind all along, ever since I’d seen the papers. “Do you think they’ll try to put me in jail?”

  She shrugged. “Depends on how chummy the coppers and the entertainment types are that day. They might charge you with criminal trespass on the sewer, or they might charge you with criminal copyright infringement. Or both. Impossible to say.”

  I nodded. “Yeah. But they tried to shut down Confusing Peach and they failed. We took the private Pirate Cinema and opened them to the public. So we lost the TIP vote—maybe that means we’ll just have to beat them outside of Parliament.”

  She smiled broadly and radiated approval. I basked in it. “That’s the stuff,” she said. “Why not—we could get hit by a bus tomorrow, after all. But there’s no sense in you going to jail if you don’t have to, yeah? So here’s what I was thinking: there’s a lot of us around here who’ve been at this f
or a long time. Why don’t you teach us how you do your cinema nights, and we’ll help with the work. You can show up in disguise—some of us are good at that—and watch the proceedings, but we’ll have it all done by people in masks and so on. No more faces. 26 told me you had some more locations you were scouting—”

  I nodded, and told them about Rob, and his offer of more places to throw events.

  Annika nodded sagely. “I’ve heard about this bloke—he bought up a squat in Brixton where some friends of mine were living. They got to stay on for six months, then he moved them to another place in Streatham. Good for his word, I think. A rare bird, this: a landlord with a good heart. Most of them would rather see their places sitting empty than occupied by dirty squatters who don’t pay for their lodgings.”

  I nodded enthusiastically. “He really seemed nice. And between his other empty buildings and the underground sites that we found in that book—”

  She nodded back. “We could throw a new cinema every week. Do you think you could make enough films for that, though?”

  26 set down her teacup. “Oh, there’s plenty of people out there making films. I don’t think we need to worry on that score. I’d be more worried about getting raided or whatnot.”

  Annika chuckled. “Oh, we’ve been through this before; I used to put on raves, back when I was just a little girl. It’s an art and a science, a balance between technology and staying below the threshold for too much scrutiny. You’ll learn it quick, you two. You’re dead clever, aren’t you?”

  I couldn’t argue with that. We clinked teacups.

  Chapter 8

  OPENING NIGHT/THEY LOVE US!/A FRIEND IN PARLIAMENT

  Before Sewer Cinema, the Pirate Cinema nights had been easy—just larks put on by friends at semisecret/semipublic parties, organized on Confusing Peach by 26 and her mates, girls like Hester who lived to climb trees and string up the cameras. Sewer Cinema had been a deathmarch, a chaos of fixing chairs and dealing with out-of-town relatives and a million kinds of chaos.