Pirate Cinema (35 page)

She stopped clapping and made a pushing-down gesture, like she was patting an invisible table at chest height and like magic, the clapping stopped and all fell silent in the steaming-hot basement. The rasp of all those breaths was like the sound of distant rain. Like I said: magic.

"Right then," Annika said. "Let's get Cecil up here."

This was the part of the plan I wasn't exactly certain about. I'd introduced many of the Pirate Cinema screenings, but after the first night, I'd always worn a mask. But everyone knew what I looked like, thanks to Sewer Cinema, and all my mates figured I'd be able to explain it.

I jumped onto the table, helped up by Annika, and looked into the sea of faces. I had a scrap of paper on which I'd scribbled some notes, but I couldn't focus on it. Annika's hand had been slippery with sweat, and I could feel my own sweat running down my neck and back.

"Erm," I said. I felt physically sick, like I was going to throw up. All these people looking at me. What the hell did I know about it? A few days before, I hadn't even known what a Private Member's Bill
was
. I was just some kid who liked to cut up films. "Erm," I said again. My vision swam.

I shook my head. There were words on the sweaty bit of paper, but I literally couldn't make my mouth form any kind of coherent statement. And the faces! They were all
staring
and some of them were smirking and a few had started whispering to their neighbors, and all of a sudden it was all too much. I shook my head and muttered, "I'm sorry," and got off the table and pushed my way out of the crowd and up the stairs. Out on Brick Lane, it was shitting down drizzle, that wet stupid gray low-sky weather that London seemed to have from October to May.

I stalked away down the road, half expecting that at any second one of my mates or 26 would grab me and spin me around and tell me off for panicking and then give me a cuddle and tell me it was all okay, but no one did. I came out to Bethnal Green Road, among the Bangladeshi shops and the discount off-licenses and taxi touts and tramps selling picked-over rubbish off of blankets, and drunks reeling through the night with tins of lager held high. London had never seemed more miserable to me than at that moment. What had come over me? I'll tell you what: the sudden, terrible knowledge that I had no idea what I was doing, I was just a kid, and I was going to cock it all up. I wasn't a leader, I wasn't a spokesman. I was a school-leaver from Bradford who liked to make funny films.

In my imagination, my mates were all standing around the restaurant's basement, shaking their heads knowingly at one another, muttering things like, "Sodding Cecil, what a little drama queen, knew he never had it in him."

I went home, studying my shoes in excruciating detail on the long walk, bumping into people and poles and rubbish bins. I let myself in the front door, opened the fridge door, stared unseeingly at the interior. I wanted to obliterate my mind: get drunk, smoke spliff, take a little sugar. There was no booze in the house, no weed, but right outside the door, there was as much sugar as I could possibly want. The drugs lookouts knew us all, of course, and didn't bother to set up their birdcalls when we came in and out, and I knew plenty by sight. I didn't have a penny to my name, but I was willing to bet that someone would supply me with a sweet gasp on credit. They all knew where I lived.

I stood at the front door for a long time, hand on the knob, feet jammed into my unlaced boots. My calves and feet still ached from the long walk home, my mind was wrapped in a gauze of shame and self-pity. I seemed to be looking at myself from a long way away, outside of my body, watching as my hand began to turn the doorknob and I thought,
all right then, he's going to do it, he's going to go and score some sugar.
At that moment, the boy with his hand on the doorknob was someone else, not me.
I
was watching myself with bland interest, like it was all some video I'd shrunk down to a postage stamp and stuck on one corner of my screen.

Oh look, that silly lad's off to get stoned on something that might just be nail-varnish remover fumes.
I thought, and then the little voice in the back of my head that had been shouting in fear and anger came to the fore and I swam back to my body and let go of the doorknob. I gasped and stepped back and scrubbed at my eyes with my fists. I was crying.

I decided to go to bed. If I couldn't sleep, I could always go outside and score later. The sugar shacks weren't going anywhere.

I slept.

When I woke, I lay in bed and stared at the messy floor and the door for a long time. I checked my phone. It was only 11:00 A.M. Everyone would be asleep for hours, assuming they got in at their usual four or five in the morning. Just to be on the safe side, I slunk downstairs on cat's feet, not wanting to run into any of my housemates and face their anger -- or worse, their pity. I had plenty of pity for all of us.

I got dressed and picked up a sign bedecked with a hand-sterilizer pump, a packet of tissues, a packet of deodorant wipes, and a chewable toothbrush dispenser. I rolled it into a tube and headed for Old Street Station, found an exit that no one else was begging in, and began to rattle the sign hopefully at the passers-by.

I guess I must have been a dead sorry sight, because I raked in the dosh -- seventy pounds in two hours, an unheard-of sum. I was out of the sanitizer and the toothbrushes, and running low on everything else. I went round to the other exits and found Lucy and Fred and gave them half of it. Lucy gave me a long, slightly smelly hug, and I was glad for it -- someone in this world who was even worse off than me thought I was brilliant, that counted for something, didn't it?

It was 4:00 P.M. by the time I got back to the Zeroday. I went in by the old entrance up at the top of the fire-escape, the one we'd stopped using after we got legit with Rob, hoping to avoid everyone if possible. I snuck back into my room, noticing that all the lights were still off -- I supposed that everyone must have got up and gone out. Good.

I stared at my phone for a long time. 26 hadn't called me. Of course she hadn't. Why would she want to talk to a pathetic sack like me? I lay on my bed, wishing I could go to sleep and shut out the world. I thought of sugar again, and of the thirty-five quid in my pocket. That would buy more than enough sugar to see me off for the night. My personal camera began to dolly out, zooming away from my body again, and I knew that if I didn't do something now, that person on the bed with the red-rimmed eyes was going to go out and do something cocking stupid.

So I grabbed my lappie and logged into Confusing Peach. Of course, it was all chatter about last night. I looked away, but I couldn't not read it. I read it.

Then I stood bolt upright, grabbed my jacket, and
ran
for the door, barely stopping to lock it behind me. I was dialing 26's number as I tore down Bow High Street, hitting the wrong speed-dial icon three times before I got through, only to reach her voice mail without a ring. I called Jem next, then Dog and Chester and even Dodger -- all the numbers I had for the people who'd been in the cellar the night before. No one was answering. I thought I must have Aziz's number somewhere, so I stopped running, grabbed my laptop from my bag and crouched down against the window of a shop while I went through old messages looking for it. I found it and dialed the number with shaking fingers.

It rang six times and then Aziz answered, with a distracted, "'Lo?"

"Aziz, mate, it's me, Cecil."

"Yeah, hullo, Cecil. Listen, son, I'm kinda busy --"

"They've all been arrested, Aziz, all of them -- Jem and Chester and Dodger and Dog and my girlfriend all, well, all of them! It was on Confusing Peach this morning -- the coppers raided a meeting last night about this copyright bill, said they were after the pirates who'd been running the cinemas."

There was a long silence.

"Aziz?"

"One sec," he said. I heard his fingers clattering over a keyboard, then the grinding hum of a shredder. "Do go on," he said, calmly.

I opened and shut my mouth a couple times. "I don't know what to say, Aziz! I'm going spare, mate. What do I do?"

He sighed. "Look, Cecil, you're a good young fellow, but you're young. And when you're young, you still haven't learned that getting all in a lather doesn't help anything. I can hear you panting from here. Take several deep breaths, clear your head, and have a good think. People go to jail all the time. They haven't been convicted of anything yet, and if they are, it, erm, won't be due to any evidence on my premises." I heard the shredder whir again. "Meantime, calm the hell down and see what kinds of solutions present themselves."

My first reaction was to shout at him for being such a hard-hearted bastard. But he had a point:
I
was running down the street like a headless chicken.
He
was taking steps to ensure that if he was raided, nothing in his place would put his friends in jeopardy. Which one of us was doing more to help? "Okay, Aziz, You're right. I'll call you later."

"Better to use encrypted e-mail, son. I'm afraid I'll be ditching this SIM once we're done."

Durr. Aziz was much better at this than I was. Of course, he'd lived his whole life outsmarting people who tried to use technology to control their enemies. I put away my laptop, stood up and looked around. I'd worked up a sweat running down the road, but now I was freezing, my jacket unbuttoned, my feet jammed into my unlaced boots without socks. Right. I did up my boots and coat, wiped the icy sweat off my face. I thought about ditching my SIM, but it was the main way that 26 and the others would be able to reach me from jail, assuming they didn't have access to a computer.

Now I made myself walk calmly toward the tube station. I had no idea where I'd go, but wherever I went, I'd probably need to take rapid transit to get there. Good. I was getting somewhere.

Who could I talk to? Well, Letitia would be good for starters. I didn't have her number, but she'd be in the directory. Oh, and of course, there were 26's parents. If she'd only been given one call, she'd call them, wouldn't she, especially seeing as her stepfather was a lawyer, right? Of course. Now that I was thinking of this all calmly, it was starting to come together -- even though it made me feel slightly guilty, as though I was betraying 26 by not running around in a panic while she was in trouble.

Now, did I have her parents' numbers? Of course I did. There was that time 26 had gone away with her mum for a weekend in Devon and had dropped her phone in the sea, she'd sent me her Mum's number so I could call her and we could make goo-goo noises at one another (as her mum insisted on describing it, as in, "Darling, it's for you, it's your young man calling to make goo-goo noises again!"). It was in my phone's memory. I stopped walking, moved under a newsagent's awning, and dialed.

"Hullo?"

"Ms. Khan?" I'd been calling her "Amrita" for months, but I felt the occasion demanded formality, like maybe she wouldn't want me to be so familiar with her daughter now she'd been arrested.

"Who is it?"

"It's me, Cecil."

She made a kind of grunt. "They've let you out then?"

"I wasn't in," I said. "I wasn't there when they raided the place. I've only just found out about it. Have you heard from 26?"

"My husband's been down at the Magistrates' Court for hours, now," she said. "Trying to force them to bail 26 and her friends. The police say that with such a large number of people arrested, it could take some time." There was a click. "Hold on a moment." She put me on hold. After quite some time, she came back on. "That's 26's father," she said. I suddenly remembered 26 telling me that her biological dad was a cop -- and that her mum hadn't spoken to him for years and years. I guess this was the kind of desperate situation that got people to overcome this sort of thing. "I have to go."

"Wait!" I said. "What should I do?"

She made another grunt. "You may as well come over here, they'll come here first when they get her out. I'll be staying in for the duration." Her voice was tight as a bowstring.

The tube-ride took a dozen eternities, but eventually I heard the robot voice call out, "The next station is made of ale," and I jumped up. I'd spent the whole ride staring at my phone's faceplate, willing it to light up with an incoming call from 26 or anyone, debating whether I should pull the SIM out and stuff it between the cushions on the tube. In the end, I hung onto it, because they had all my mates, and that meant they knew where I lived and where I might be going, and if they wanted to snatch me, they could and would, and cutting myself off from everyone I cared about in the whole world seemed an impossible heartbreak.

So I pelted up the stairs three at a time, stuck my ticket into the turnstile, and went through it so quick I did myself an injury on the crossbar, doubling over and limping out of the station, then running like a three-legged dog all the way to 26's place.