Pirate Cinema

  “But they keep on beating us,” I said.

  26 pinched my leg under the table, hard. She’d finally swallowed her mouthful. “Stop with the defeat talk. Christ on a bike, you’re not going to get up in front of all those people in sack-cloth and say ‘doomed doomed we’re all doomed,’ are you?”

  “’Course not.” I swallowed. “It’s just so easy to lose heart sometimes—”

  “Be of stout heart and fear not, young sir, for you have right on your side,” her dad said, declaiming like a Shakespearean. 26 rolled her eyes again. He thumbed his nose at her. “It’s true, you know. For all that these are big and powerful interests, they are, at heart wrong. Take it from someone who’s spent a lot of time in front of a lot of juries: being right counts. It’s not an automatic win, but it’s not nothing, either.”

  They all nodded as though that settled it, and I thought of how nice it must be to be someone like that—someone who could simply make up his mind that he was right, the world was wrong, and fearlessly stride forth to fix things. That was the crazy thing about 26’s family: they believed that they could actually change things. They believed I could change things. I only wished that I believed it, too.

  Chapter 11

  SPEECHIFYING/£78 MILLION/A FRIEND IN THE LAW

  Writing a speech is stupid. You write it and speak the words aloud—I’d started off saying them into a webcam so that I could see what I looked like when I was talking, but I was so self-conscious about the horrible spectacle of all those stupid contrived words coming out of my spotty, awkward face—and they sounded as convincing as a cereal advert. The thing was, I’d heard plenty of speeches—Scot Colford had done more than a few brilliant ones in his films—and felt my heart soaring in response to the words entering my ears, so I knew it was possible to say things that moved people and maybe even changed their minds.

  But I didn’t know what words to say, or how to say them. I sat in my room, filling screen after screen with stupid, stupid words, discarding them, starting over, and finally, I called Cora.

  I’d been chatting to her all the time lately. She loved the idea of reforming TIP, and said that all her schoolmates were geared up to help. They’d descend on every MP’s surgery in Bradford with their parents in tow, and grab the lawmakers by the lapels and demand that they listen to reason and refuse to leave until they did. Cora was so much smarter than me. She was like 26 in that regard (and 26 probably called her even more than I did—she’d adopted her as big sister and coconspirator and the two were thick as thieves), just another one of the brilliant women in my life who were much, much cleverer than I’d ever be. Why weren’t they giving the speech? Well cos 26 had already filled in for my speech, and cos Sewer Cinema had been my idea, and because, weird as it was, millions of people actually cared what films Cecil B. DeVil gave his seal of approval to.

  Cora would understand what it was like to grow up in the kind of family where no one believed you could change anything, ever. She’d know exactly what to say to me. I dialed her and listened to it ring two, three times. I checked my watch. Bugger, she was in class. I was about to hang up when it was picked up.

  “Cora?” I said.

  “Cora’s at school,” my mum said. “She forgot her phone—I found it between the sofa cushions. Is that Trent?”

  I groaned inwardly. Mum and Dad and I had been on speaking terms since I’d gone back, and I rang them every fortnight or so to have a kind of ritualistic conversation about how many veggies I was eating and whether I was taking drugs or getting into trouble. The kind of conversation where everyone knows that the answers are lies, but pretends not to, in other words. I loved my parents and even missed them in a weird sort of way, but I hadn’t gone to them for advice since I was a little nipper. I certainly wasn’t planning on getting public speaking advice from my mum. The closest thing she’d ever come to giving a public speech was making the Christmas toast every year, and she was famously long-winded at that, too.

  “How are you, Mum?”

  “Can’t complain, actually. Been looking up the drugs and that they have me taking for my legs, and you know what I discovered? Turns out the pills one doctor had given me, way back when I had you, were very bad to take if you were on the other pills, the ones I’ve been on for about five years. So I stopped taking the old ones and I can’t tell you how much of an improvement it made!”

  “Wow,” I said. “That’s fantastic news!” My mum’s legs have given her trouble all my life, and on the bad days, she could barely stand. It had all been getting much worse lately, too. This really was brilliant news.

  “It’s better than fantastic, you know. Now that I can get about a little more, I’ve been doing the physiotherapy and getting some more walks in, and I’ve found a ladies’ walking group that goes out three evenings a week. It came up as an automatic suggestion when I was looking up the physio things, you understand. It’s made such a difference, I can hardly believe it.”

  “Aw, Mum, I’m so happy for you! Honestly, that’s just brilliant.”

  “Shall I tell Cora you called?”

  I was about to thank her and ring off, but I stopped. She didn’t sound like my mum somehow—didn’t have that note of deep, grinding misery from years and years of chronic pain. Didn’t sound like she just wanted to make the world all go away. It was the sound of my mum on her rare good days, the few I remembered growing up, when we’d go to the park or even to a fun fair or a bonfire and she’d smile and we’d all smile back at her. When Mum was happy, the whole family shone.

  “Mum? Can I ask you something?”

  “Of course, sweetie, any time.”

  “Well, you know. I’m giving a speech soon, and—” I told her about the meeting and the talk I was supposed to give. “It’s only meant to be fifteen minutes or so, but everything I write sounds so stupid. I’m going bonkers here.”

  She was quiet for a long time. “Trent,” she said, “we haven’t really talked much about this, I know. All this business with copyright and that. I think you probably think I disapprove of it all. But the truth is, you convinced me.” My heart sped up. “I don’t know how else to put it. When you started it all, the downloading and making your films, I thought it was a kind of hobby, and I guess it was, though if you say it’s art, I’ll say it’s art. It’s not like I’m any kind of authority on art, you know. Never had much use for it, to tell the truth. But the thing that convinced me isn’t art or anything like it, it’s the idea that protecting copyright is more important than our network connection. I mean, look at me. I was a complete disaster until I was able to use the Internet to look up my troubles. It helped me find people around the world who had the same problems as I did, and even helped me find ladies from right here on my own manor who could help me get out and about. It seems to me that everyone must have a story like this—look at your sister’s education, or your father’s job, or the new people next door, the Kofis. They just had a baby, a darling little girl, and their poor old parents in Ghana can’t come for a visit. So they have a visit over the video, every night. Take away their Internet, you take away that little girl’s chance to know her granny and grandad. Seems to me that’s just not right. If the only way the films and music and that can get made is by giving them the power to just cut off all our connections to each other and work and school and health, I think we should just let ’em die.”

  My mouth literally hung open. My mum hadn’t said anything that profound to me since … well, forever. Or maybe she’d never said anything that profound at a time I was ready to hear it. I know that I’m often ready to ignore anything my parents say. But this came straight from Mum’s heart, and she had clearly thought very, very hard about it. Had I ever wondered how I’d make any of this matter to my parents? What an idiot I was.

  “Mum,” I said, “that was genius. Really.”

  “Don’t pull my leg, Sunshine. It was just what I feel. I thought that knowing you could convince a silly old woman might help you do your talk.”


  “Ma, seriously—” I felt for the words. “What you just said, it put it all into perspective for me. It’s like—” And then I had it. “Never mind. Thanks, Mum! Love you!”

  “Love you, too, Trent.” She sounded bemused now. I rang off and put my fingers back on the keyboard.

  * * *

  “It’s easy to think nothing we do matters. After all, didn’t we mob our MPs when they were debating—or rather, not debating the Theft of Intellectual Property Bill? And they passed it anyway. Most of ’em didn’t even turn up for work that day, couldn’t be arsed to show up and defend the voters. And now they’re throwing kids in jail at speed for downloading, cutting off families from the Internet as though losing your net access was like being sent to bed without supper.”

  I looked out over the crowd. They’d said it would be huge, but I hadn’t really anticipated what huge really meant until I’d got up on the little podium at the end of the hall. The people looked like some kind of impossible “Where’s Wally” drawing, like a kid’s drawing of a football stadium where all the faces are represented by a kind of frogspawn cluster of little circles all touching one another. Many of the heads were crowned with odd, mirror-brimmed hats—mossie-zappers, with green lasers ready to fight back the West Nile scourge. Even though no one was talking, there was an enormous wall of sound rising off the crowd—whispers, shifting feet on floorboards, rasping of fabric from arms and legs. Part of me noted this in the abstract, wished I had a really good multichannel recording setup pointed out at the crowd to use for Foley sound the next time I wanted to edit a crowd into a film project.

  I took a breath, the sound enormously magnified by the PA speakers beside the podium and set up around the room.

  “Here’s why I think we’re going to win. Because we all need the net. Every day that goes by, more and more of us realize it.” I looked again into the crowd, found Cora, who’d come down for the day to see me talk. She was in a little knot of her school chums, all come down together on the bus after much wheedling of parents who thought London would swallow them whole. “My mum just explained to me that when we lost our net connection, she wasn’t able to get the health information she needed to help with her legs. She was sentenced to a year of agony, trapped in her flat, because I’d been accused of downloading. It cost my dad his job: up in Bradford, practically all the work there is comes over the net. He worked as a temp phone-banker, answering calls for a washing machine warranty program one day and taking orders for pizza the next day. It didn’t pay much, but it was the best job he could get. And my sister—” I looked at Cora again. She was blushing, but she was grinning like a maniac, too. “She was in school, and you just imagine what it was like for her, trying to do her GCSEs without the net, when every other kid in her class had Google, all the books ever published, all those films and sound files and so on.

  “My mum and dad aren’t geeky kids who want to remix films. They’re just plain northerners. I love them to bits, but they’d be the first to tell you they don’t know anything about technology and all that business. But last week, my mum explained to me, better than I ever could, why the net matters to them, and why laws like TIP, which make the net’s existence contingent on it not messing up the big entertainment companies’ ancient business models, are bad for normal people like them.

  “That’s when I realized why we were going to win in the long run: every day, someone else in this country wakes up and discovers that his life depends on the net. It may be how he gets his wages, or how he stays healthy, or how he gets support from his family, or how he looks in on his old parents. Which means that, every day, someone in this country joins our side. All we need to do is make sure that they know we exist when that happens, and lucky for us, we’ve only got the entire bloody Internet to use to make that happen. It’s why there are so many people joining up with pressure groups like Open Rights Group and all that lot.

  “So we’re going to win someday. It’s just a matter of how many innocent people’s lives get destroyed before that happens. I’d like that number to be as small as possible, and I’m sure you would, too. So that’s why I think it’s worth trying to win this, today, now, here. Last year, our MPs didn’t believe that enough voters cared about the net to make voting against TIP worth it. This year, they know different. Let’s remind them of that, now that there’s an election coming up. All of you who went out last time, it’s time to pay a little ‘I told you so’ visit on your MP. And those of you who didn’t care or didn’t believe it was worth it last time: this time you need to care. This time it’s worth it.”

  I drank some water. Something weird was happening: despite my dry throat and my thundering pulse, I was enjoying this! I could feel the talk’s rhythm like I could feel the rhythm of a film when I was cutting it, and I knew that I was doing a good job. Not just because people were smiling and that, but because I could feel the rightness.

  “They tell us that without these insane laws, our creativity will dry up and blow away. But I make films. You’ve seen them, I think—” A few people cheered in a friendly way, and I waved at them. “And I think they’re plenty creative. But according to laws like TIP, they’re not art, they’re a crime.” People booed. I grinned and waved them quiet again. “Now, maybe there used to be only one way to make a film, and maybe that way of making films meant that you needed certain kinds of laws. But there are plenty of ways to make films today, and yesterday’s laws are getting in the way of today’s filmmaking. Maybe from now on, creativity means combining two things in a way that no one has ever thought of combining them before.” I shrugged. “Maybe that’s all it ever was. But I think my films should be allowed to exist, and that you should be allowed to watch them. I think that a law that protects creativity should protect all creativity, not just the kind of creativity that was successful fifty years ago.”

  I looked down at the face of my phone, resting on the podium. My countdown timer had nearly run out. I’d timed this talk to exactly ten minutes, and here I was, right at the end, after ten minutes exactly. I smiled and raised my voice.

  “They’ve been passing laws to make people like you and me more and more guilty for years. All it’s done is crushed creativity and ruined lives. We’ve had the Web for decades now, isn’t it about time we made peace with it? You can do that—tell your MP, and remind him that it’s election season. We’re going to win someday—let’s make it today.”

  I swallowed, smiled, said, “Thank you,” and grabbed my phone and my papers and stepped away from the podium. The applause and cheers rang in my ears and people were saying things to me, leaning in to shout congratulations and good job and that, and it was all more than I could take in, so it blended into a kind of hand-clasping, shoulder-shaking hurrah. My head was light and my hands were shaking and I felt unaccountably hot. I knew I’d done well, and I’d managed to keep all my nervousness at bay while I was speaking, but now I felt like I might actually faint—keel right over on the spot.

  I pushed my way clear of the well-wishers and through the crowd (more people shaking my hands, whispering that I’d done a good job, while the next speaker—a Green MP I’d met once before at one of Annika’s meetings—began her talk) and out into the cool of the entry hall. I leaned against the wall and put my head back and closed my eyes and concentrated on breathing heavily. Then I heard the door to the hall open again (the MP’s voice growing louder for a moment) and two sets of footsteps approaching. They came closer and I smelled 26’s hair stuff. She kissed me softly on the lips, pressing her body to mine, and I kept my eyes closed while my world shrank down to the lips gently pressing against mine.

  “You okay?” she said, whispering into my mouth.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Just wrung out.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Got to get back to it, I’m next.”

  “I’ll be right in,” I said.

  She moved away and I opened my eyes to see who else had come out with her. It was Cora, of course, her eyes shinin
g, and she flung her arms around my neck and hugged me so hard I thought I’d fall over. “You were brilliant! I’m so proud! My friends all think you’re a god!”

  I laughed. This was exactly what I needed. My sister and my girlfriend, both telling me I’d done it all right, hadn’t cocked up, and an island of isolation from the crowd and the speeches and the rushing around and the pressure.

  A man crossed the lobby. He was dressed like a hoodie from the estate I grew up on, but he was older, and really, too old to be dressed like a teenager. Thirty or forty, maybe.

  “You Cecil B. DeVil, yeah?” he said. He was smiling, sticking his hand out.

  I took it, embarrassed and proud to be cornered by a fan in front of my sister. She’d probably assume that I got this kind of thing all the time, and that made me proud, too.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Nice to meet you.” I took his hand, and he brought out his other hand so quick that I flinched back, sure he had a cosh or a knife in there, and he squeezed my hand even harder, pulling me in. I saw that he was holding an envelope, not a weapon, and he shoved it into my hand.

  “Lawsuit for yer,” he said, and laughed nastily, and let go of my hand, pushing me a little in the direction I’d been tugging, nearly sending me back onto my ass. I clutched the envelope and windmilled my arms, and Cora turned and shouted, “Sod off, you prick! Get a proper job!”

  He just laughed harder and more nastily, and held up two fingers as he banged out the hall’s front doors and into Old Street.

  I held Cora back and shoved the envelope in my pocket. “Come on,” I said, “26 is about to start.”

  * * *

  It turned out that four film studios had filed a lawsuit with 15,232 separate charges against me.

  Seriously.

  One for every single clip I’d ever used in every video with Cecil B. DeVil in the credits. 26’s stepdad seemed to think that this was some kind of marvel.