Pirate Cinema

  He toked heavily and let out a huge cloud of fragrant smoke. “Want some?” he said, holding out the joint and streaming more smoke out of his nostrils.

  Like one of those kids in an advert about the dangers of peer pressure, I took it and smoked it. As I inhaled, my mind was filled with paranoid fantasies about all the things the grass might be laced with: horse tranquilizers, rat poison, exotic hallucinogens, synthetic heroin. But it tasted and went down like the weed I’d smoked every now and again at school. I took one more sip of smoke, careful not to get the paper soggy, and passed it back.

  He took another gigantic toke, then one more. He passed it back to me. I didn’t seem to be feeling any effects, so I drew in a deep double-lungful, handed it back, then took it again once he’d done with it. We’d smoked it halfway down and he waved at me and croaked, “Keep it, mate, gotta do some work.” I still wasn’t feeling it, which was weird, because normally I was the first one to get all silly when there was a spliff going around. Shrugging, I toked some more and held the lamp while he went down the rickety ladder. I felt pretty cool, I must say, all edgy and “street,” smoking this geezer’s spliff in a pitch-dark squat. Just a few days before I’d been a lad from the provinces and now here I was in the great metropolis, doing crime, cutting capers, and hanging out with new mates who called themselves things like “Dodger.”

  It was epic.

  Dodger was down in the cellar, and he called to me to shift the light over to the panel he’d found. He scratched his chin meditatively as he contemplated it, and I noticed that the beam of light I was shining was flickering a little, and swirling a little around the edges. Maybe it was dust in the air. Dodger wasn’t complaining, so I didn’t say anything.

  Working with the same neat efficiency he’d applied to skinning up the spliff, Dodger started to take tools out of his bag. First, some kind of big meter with a pair of alligator leads he touched to different contacts on the board, working with precise, small movements. Then he nodded to himself and drew out a toolbelt that he slung around his waist, taking from it a bunch of screwdrivers and working on the plate with them in turn until the entire junction box came free of the sweating, rough brick wall. Now he brought out a spool of wire and snipped off a meter-long length, stripping the ends. He went back to work with the screwdrivers, and I squinted to see what he was working on.

  “Eugh,” he exclaimed, and reached a gloved hand into the space behind the junction box and withdrew a handful of dry, papery, furry things. “Mummified mice,” he called. “Little bastards had a chew of the wires and got a surprise. Lucky thing I spotted ’em before I got the juice back on—dry as they are, I wouldn’t have been surprised if they went up in flames like old leaves.”

  He dropped the mummified rodents to the dirt floor of the cellar and went back to work, grunting to himself and calling on me to shift the light this way or that. There was something funny about his voice, a weird quality imparted to it by the dead space of the cellar or something, and I snorted a small giggle.

  “Right,” he said, “one for the money, two for the show, three to get ready, aaand…” He snapped a huge switch and the lights all through the pub blazed to light. “Go cat go!” I fumbled the torch and squinted against the sudden light. Then there was a loud pop and the pub was plunged back into darkness. I smelled a bonfire smell of melted plastic.

  “Right,” Dodger said again. “Right. That’s how it’s going to be, hey? Get that light back on me, mate, this one’s going to need some major work.”

  I groped for the torch, which had stayed on when I dropped it, and discovered that I couldn’t maintain my balance. I toppled onto the filthy floor, narrowly missing a headfirst plummet down the trapdoor and ladder. I sat up gingerly, head swimming, and found the lamp. “I think,” I said, around a thick tongue. “I think maybe I smoked a little too much. Just a little…” I trailed off. My hands felt like they were encased in boxing gloves, and I could barely feel my face, and it was all brilliantly hilarious.

  Dodger made a rude noise. “Christ, you’re not half a little nancy, are you? Thought you northerners were supposed to be hard as bricks. Just sit there and hold the light, will you?”

  I did, and three more times, Dodger switched on the mains and three more times there was a loud crack, smoke, and sudden darkness. The third time, there was even a little fire in the wiring, which he snuffed out with a small chemical extinguisher. This fire seemed to indicate that the job was much bigger than he’d suspected and he went to work in earnest, using a wrecker’s bar to knock loose several bricks and dig deeper into the conduit that led into the cellar.

  The weed pressed on my arms and legs like lead weights and I found my head drooping to my chest, my eyelids closing of their own accord. I dozed off and on in a slow, giddy, stoned stupor. The lights blazed on and popped out in an irregular rhythm as Dodger made his erratic progress, each event rousing me momentarily. I was woken up properly by Dodger thumping on the sole of my shoe with the handle of his screwdriver, reaching up from the cellar, shouting, “Oi! Oi! Get the door, son!”

  I blinked my eyes and listened. Someone was clattering at the door in a jaunty rat-a-tat-a-tat, using something metallic like a key ring to beat out an uptempo ditty.

  I walked to the door on feet that felt like they’d grown three sizes, trying to shake the weed off my mind and limbs.

  “Who is it?” I shouted.

  “Prince Charles,” Jem said. “I’ve come to give you a royal medal for service to England. Open the damned door, son!”

  I worked the locks with stupid fingers and swung open the door. It was full dark outside, which made the interior fluorescent tube lights seem as bright as the sun. Jem stepped back, nearly dropping the pizza boxes he was holding before him. “Sorry,” he said. “Had some business to attend to. Took a little longer than I thought. Looks like Dodger found the place okay, though?” He jerked his head at the lights and handed me the pizza boxes. They wafted out a smell as intoxicating as any perfume, cheesy and greasy and salty and hot and my mouth flooded with so much saliva I nearly dribbled it down my front.

  “You didn’t tell me anyone was coming over,” I said, hearing a note of accusation in my voice. I wanted to say, He scared me to death. Thought he was here to murder me! But I also wanted to be, you know, hard and street and that.

  Jem snorted and shut and bolted the door, shucked out of his oversize parka and draped it over a chair. Without it, he was as skinny as a broomstick, arms like toothpicks and legs like pipe-stems. “Said I was sorry, didn’t I? I thought I’d be back before Dodger showed. You don’t need to be scared of him, old bean, he’s a pussycat, Dodger is.”

  “I heard that,” Dodger shouted from the kitchen. “Don’t make me beat you like the dog you are, Jem.” He stepped into the pub and looked around, wrinkling his nose again. “Christ, the pong in this place just keeps coming at you in waves, like. That’s a textured stench.”

  Jem waved his hand. “We’ll take care of that soon enough. Meantime, I got some coffee.”

  Dodger nodded. “Yeah, that’ll do for a start, give it here.”

  Jem unzipped his backpack and handed over a paper sack of coffee grounds. Dodger popped it open, breaking the vacuum seal with a hiss and the smell of coffee was dark and warm at once, cutting through the piss and must smell. Dodger poured some out in his hand and sprinkled it around the pub, paying special attention to the corners and the baseboards. While he did this, Jem opened up his pizza boxes, wiped down his fingers with some sani-towels, and started to tease the slices apart, dripping gooey cheese.

  He offered me a wipe and I realized how grimy my hands were, like I’d been arm-deep up a cow’s arse or worse, and I fastidiously scrubbed all around, up to my elbows and under my fingernails. Jem eventually plucked the wipe out of my fingers—it was in tatters. “You’ve been smoking Dodger’s weed,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “Does funny things to you, that stuff. Smoke enough of it, you come out li
ke Dodger. No one wants that.” Dodger, finished with the coffee-sprinkling, balled up the empty sack and tossed it at Jem’s head, beaning him right on the bonce.

  Jem pointed at the cooling pizzas. One was covered in mushrooms, peppers, and sweet corn. The other had pepperoni, mince beef, shrimp, and anchovies. Normally I hated both sweet corn and anchovies, but between the weed and the odd events of the day, I felt like I could try anything that night.

  I tried the veggie slice first and found the sweet-corn made it just perfect, an almost-crunchy texture in the niblets that made the pizza especially great to chew. It was bursting with tangy tomato and garlic and spices—I could taste oregano and basil, and lots more I couldn’t place. It was the best-tasting thing I’d ever eaten, because I was eating it as part of an adventure. Then I tried a meat slice and that was even better, the salty anchovy and its fishy flavor rich as a good soup and perfect in a million ways. I was a normal English teenager and I’d grown up eating pizza all my life, but I’d never eaten pizza like that.

  “Where the hell did you get this?” I said. “It’s-It’s-It’s insane.”

  Jem grinned around his own slice. “Good, innit? Place I know, they use a wood-fired oven, make their own dough. I’d sooner starve than eat Domino’s. Save up for this stuff. It ain’t cheap, but this is a special occasion.”

  Dodger rolled a slice into a tube and popped it into his mouth like a spring roll. He chewed it voraciously and swallowed hugely. “My nipples explode with delight!” he shouted, making us all dissolve in stupid giggles.

  From there, it became a contest to see who could say the most ridiculous thing about the pizza. I tried, “I will marry this pizza and make it my queen!” and Jem topped it with “You are the pizza that launched a thousand sheeps!”

  Before long, the food was gone and we’d picked the last strings of cheese off the greasy cardboard. I was feeling more myself now, and when Jem pulled out three tins of lager from his bag, I passed on it and washed out an unbroken pint glass and filled it with tap water, which tasted amazing, even though there was a metallic flavor from the old pipes behind it. I hadn’t realized how thirsty I was.

  Jem and Dodger drank the beer slowly, talking about people I didn’t know in other squats. From what I could work out, they had lived together somewhere else, but Jem had left—maybe after a fight with the other squatters—and ended up in the shelter, and that’s how I’d met him. It sounded like this had all happened quite awhile ago, and the sting had gone out of the old arguments.

  Neither of them seemed to mind that I wasn’t joining in with the conversation, so I got myself another glass of water and explored the pub again, this time with the lights on. Most of the lights had burned out or were missing their bulbs, but it was still bright enough to see, and without the crazy horror-show headlamp, it was all a lot less sinister. It was also a lot less promising: there were missing floorboards in some of the rooms (how narrowly had I missed breaking my leg?) and the stairs were sagging and splintering.

  Still, I could see what the place would look like after a lot of paint and sanding, after cleaning and polishing and stuff. The pub had seen a lot of wear over the years, but it had been built with love, out of solid brick and wood, and it had been well maintained before it got all rundown and knackered.

  I sat down in one of the little second-story rooms, propped up against one of the walls, and tried to imagine what it would be like with bookcases and a desk and a big edit suite with some giant screens here. And then, for the second time that day, I dropped off sitting up, with my chin on my chest.

  * * *

  That was my first day in the Zeroday, as we called our pub home. Over the next two weeks, Jem and I foraged for food, scrounged furniture, did some tube-station begging, and applied ourselves vigorously to painting, sanding, and refurbishing the Zeroday from roof to cellar.

  Jem had a lot of friends who’d drop in, and it became clear that some of them were planning on staying. I didn’t mind at first—they were mostly older than us, and they knew a lot about sanding and painting and getting the plumbing unstuck. It’s hard to say no to someone who’s willing to help you scoop up ancient tramp turds and carry them off to a distant skip for disposal. Besides, having all these people around meant that Jem and I could venture out together without leaving the pub unguarded, and this was a massive plus.

  But some of them were a bit dodgy. There was Ryan, an older guy who always wanted the first pick of the food we brought home from flash grocery skips, and took the best stuff and put it in his own bag, but never helped get the food or bring it home. He liked to stay up late drinking and smoking endless fags that filled the pub room with thick smoke, and then he’d complain about the noise when we got up in the morning.

  Some of the little ’uns were just as bad: Sally had run away from Glasgow and hated everything about London. She claimed to be seventeen, but I thought she was probably more like fifteen. She moaned about the air, the weather, the food, the accents, the boys, the girls, the mobile reception, all of it. When she first showed up—she came to our housewarming party, a week after we moved in, along with a whole crew of people who knew people who knew Jem—I was a bit excited. She was very pretty, pale and round-faced, with big brown eyes, and I liked her accent. But by the time we finished dinner, I was ready to throttle her. And of course, she was one of the ones who kept showing up to stay at ours, hogging the sofas or even taking over one or another of our beds without asking. Then she’d get up in the morning and complain about the water pressure and the grime in the shower. Jem got fed up with this and he met her on her way into the bathroom one day with an old toothbrush and a bottle of tile-cleaner and told her it was her turn to clean the shower. She didn’t speak to either of us for a week, which was just fine with me.

  “Come on, Sunshine,” Jem said to me one morning as I wandered into the big pub room in search of coffee. Jem had set up a coffee filter in a kind of sock that hung from a wooden stand. He brewed lethally strong coffee, using beans he bought without complaint from his espresso wizard Fyodor, paying four times what the local Co-Op asked for beans.

  I accepted a cup with a nod of silent thanks and sipped it, closing my eyes while the caffeine found its way into my bloodstream and began to kick some arse.

  “What’s on your agenda today, then?” he said.

  I shrugged. “Not much to do round here,” I said. “What I really want to do is get back to work with the net, but…” I spread my hands. “No lappie, right?”

  Truth be told, I’d deliberately avoided getting a new computer or borrowing someone else’s. Whenever I thought about getting online, two awful feelings crashed in on the thought: first, that my mum and dad would have found a computer at the community center and filled my inboxes with pissed-off messages about me running away, and second, that I had lost my wonderful virginity-stealing Scot clip. Course, the longer I waited, the angrier the messages would be, and the harder it would be for me to remember what choices I had made in the edit. I’d neatly solved both these problems by just ignoring them, and it had been working.

  “Well, let’s fix that, then, shall we?”

  “What, do you know a skip where they chuck out old laptops?”

  He pooched his lips. “Trent, you’d be amazed at what you can find in skips.”

  But it wasn’t a skip—it was a wonderland.

  We got on an eastbound bus and rode it as far as it would go, for a whole hour, out and out past where the houses started to peter out in favor of bleak, crumbly industrial estates with sagging gates and chipped brickwork. They reminded me of the old workshops and factories dotted around Bradford, long-shuttered relics with sagging and missing roofs.

  We were the last ones on the bus when we finally got off. The bus stop was on a small island of pavement on the shoulder of a dual carriageway. Cars rattled and honked past. There were no people about, no shops. Jem stuck his hands on his hips. “Ready to go shopping?” he said.

  “I suppose so.
Where the hell are we?”

  “Paradise,” he said. “Come on.”

  He dodged across the road, vaulting the guardrail on the median. I followed, dancing around the oncoming cars. Down a winding and cracked road, we came to a low-slung warehouse with small, high windows. Jem thundered at the door with two fists.

  “Hope he’s home,” he said.

  I rolled my eyes. “You mean we came all the way out here and you don’t even know if the person we’re here to see is even in?” The most frustrating quirk of Jem’s character was his refusal to carry a mobile phone. He might have been the last Londoner to use the red call boxes for their proper purpose (mostly, London’s pay phones seemed to exist to support a thick mat of lurid cards advertising the services of prostitutes). Whenever I asked him about this, he just shrugged.

  “He’ll be in,” Jem said. “He’s almost always in.” He thumped at the door again. “Aziz!” he shouted, pressing his mouth up to the crack between the double doors. “Aziz! It’s Jem!” He pressed his eye to the crack. “Lights are on. He’s home. No fear.”

  A moment later, the door rattled and swung open, revealing a potbellied Asian guy in his twenties, unshaven and rumpled in a dirty T-shirt and a pair of cutoff shorts. “Jem?” he said. “Christ, boy, when are you going to get a phone?” He turned to me. “Who’s this?”

  “New chum,” he said. “Trent, meet Aziz the Fixer. This man knows more about computers than any ten ultranerds you’ll find on Tottenham Court Road, combined. He’s an artist. Aziz, this is Trent, who is in need of some new kit.”

  Aziz shook my hand. His fingers were long and flexible, with calloused tips that rasped on my palm. “Come in, then,” he said. He turned without waiting for an answer and set off into the warehouse, leaving us to hurry after him.

  The building was enormous, the size of two football pitches stitched together, with metal shelving in ranks stretching off into infinity, piled high with electronics, like the warehouse at the end of the remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark. It smelled of ozone, burnt plastic electrical insulation, and mouse piss (this last one being a smell I’d grown very familiar with while getting the Zeroday into shape). He led us through a maze of shelves, deeper and deeper, not saying anything, but occasionally grunting and jabbing a long finger in the direction of the shelves we passed, evidently pointing out something interesting. Jem nodded and made enthusiastic noises when he did this, so apparently he was seeing something I wasn’t.