Pirate Cinema (36 page)

Standing on her doorstep, sweating buckets, half-dressed in whatever I grabbed on the way out the door, I forced myself to ring the bell. 26's mum had seen me in yesterday's T-shirt and a pair of gym trousers at breakfast before, she knew I wasn't a fashion-model. And this was more important than making a good impression on my girlfriend's parents.

She swung open the door with her phone clamped to her head. She was dressed as oddly as I was, in old jeans and a loose cotton shirt with a mis-buttoned cardigan over it and fuzzy slippers, her eyes red and hollow. She made a "come in," gesture and then turned and walked back into the house, nodding her head at whomever was talking on the other end of the call.

"Yes, yes. Yes. No. Yes. Yes."

She rolled her eyes at me. I mouthed, "Going to use the toilet," and she nodded and seemed to immediately forget about me. So I went up to 26's room and dug around in the mountains of junk on the floor until I found one of my T-shirts and a pair of my pants -- she often borrowed them to slop around in when she was over at mine. I had a very quick shower and changed, and the smell of 26 on the shirt was like a punch in the chest, so I had to sit down on the floor with a thump and catch my breath. Then I padded back downstairs in my socks.

26's mum was sat in the sitting room, an open book on her lap, not looking at it, staring into space. When I made a little throat-clearing noise, she looked up at me with a little startlement, then smiled sadly. "Sorry," she said. "Miles away. My husband says he's making some progress at the magistrates', and 26's father is apparently doing eighty miles per hour down the length of the M1 while calling every copper he knows in London. I suppose that means everything's going to be okay, but I'm still worrying myself sick." She closed her book and fisted her eyes. "How are you holding up, lad?"

I looked at my feet and mumbled something. I didn't want to talk about how I felt, because it was complicated -- relief that I wasn't locked away, fear for what was happening to my friends, shame that I'd only escaped because I'd been such a coward at the meeting. "Can I make you some tea?" I said.

She nodded and wiped her palms on her thighs. "That'd be lovely."

When I brought it to her -- milk and no sugar, but strong as builder's tea, the way 26 took it, too -- she said, "I suppose I should have expected this. After all, you and 26 have been banging on for months about how crazy the law is getting. But I couldn't get over the feeling that this was just harmless fun. After all, it's not as if you were having gang fights and robbing buildings! You're not planning to blow up Parliament! You were just --"

"-- making films," I said. "And breaching copyright." I sighed. "I guess I didn't think they'd come after us like this, either. I thought that since they mostly seemed to target random people to sue or arrest, they wouldn't come after someone
specific
, you know what I mean? Guess that was pretty stupid."

To my surprise, she stood up and gave me an enormous hug that seemed to go on and on, the kind of hug I remembered from when I was a little kid, the hug that made you feel like everything was going to be all right. Damn if it didn't almost make me start crying. When I looked into her face afterward, I saw that she was nearly in tears, too.

It's all going wrong, isn't it? Poor kids. Don't worry, things will pick up (no, that's not a spoiler -- this isn't the end of the book, after all!). Speaking of "picking up," why don't you (ahem)
pick up
a copy of
Pirate Cinema
. It makes a dandy gift for all occasions, and the electronic version is made from pure, free, 100% non-DRMed bits. You can also pick up a spare for a
library or school.

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26 got back to her house just as her father -- her biological father -- pulled up in a beat-up red Opel that was covered in mud-streaks. 26 and her step-father met her father on the doorstep. He was a big man, Asian like 26's step-dad, but with his balding head shaved to stubble, and dressed in clothes that made him look like a copper, even though they weren't a uniform. Or maybe I was just seeing things because I knew that he was the law, and that 26 and her family didn't exactly get on with him.

Her dad and her stepdad shook hands warily on the doorstep, and 26 busied herself with the key and the lock and her handbag so she didn't have to hug him. I watched it all from the sitting-room window, as 26's mum rushed to open the door even as 26 fiddled with it. They all spilled into the front hall with a stamping of boots and a rush of cold, wet air, and I skulked in the sitting-room doorway, looking at 26 with a feeling like a doggy that's just seen his mistress come home after giving up all hope of ever seeing her again. Our eyes met and for a second I thought she was going to smack me for having left the club so suddenly, damn me for a coward, and order me out of her life. But instead, she practically leapt into my arms, crossing the intervening distance with one long stride. She threw both arms around my neck and one leg around my waist and if I hadn't had the door-jamb to catch me, we'd have gone over like a cricket bail. I was intensely aware that three of 26's parents were watching us, including her copper bio-dad whom I'd never met. But I was even more intensely aware of the warm skin on mine, the lips pressing to my neck, the arms crushing my chest. I held her until I heard her mum pointedly clear her throat.

26 let go of me and I saw through the tears in my eyes that she had tears in her eyes, too. I had an overpowering urge to drag her out of the house and just
go
, run away and never come back. But there was the small matter of the giant copper looming over us, giving me a look so filthy, it should have come in a plain brown wrapper. I gently pushed 26 a little farther away and smiled at everyone with my best and most harmless grin. Her stepfather nodded back at me and managed a tired smile, but her bio-dad continued to look at me as though he was deciding which charges would send me to prison for the longest sentence.

26's mum stepped between us and gave 26 a hug, which let me escape to the kitchen to put the kettle on and load up a tray with biccies and cups and that. By the time I loaded it with the teapot and carried it into the sitting room, everyone was arranged in a kind of civilized tableau, with 26 equidistant from everyone on the floor, arms around her knees. I set the tea-tray down and began to sneak away. I reckoned I'd go hide upstairs in 26's room until things calmed down, but 26 called to me and patted the carpet next to her. I maneuvered around the stacks of books and sat down next to her, looking down.

"I just can't believe what you're letting her get up to, Amrita," her bio-dad said. "Hanging out with crazy radicals, risking arrest over this
nonsense
?"

Her mum kept her composure. "Deepak, it's nice to see you taking an interest in her life again, but you've forgot her past three birthdays, so I don't really think you've got much business criticizing how we're raising her. But this young woman is smart as anything, gets top grades, is probably going to go to University College London next year only because she can't be bothered with Oxford, and she cares about injustice in the world around her and is doing something meaningful to change it. I, for one, am proud as anything of my daughter. I think you might start by telling her the same thing."

I really, really wanted to go, but 26 had made a manacle out of her fingers and had cinched it tight around one of my forearms. I'd have to gnaw it off if I was to escape. So I breathed deeply.

"Proud? Fine, you be proud. Here's what I know: my daughter's been charged with Criminal Trespass, Criminal Infringement, Criminal Computer Intrusion, and those are just the major charges. She could wind up in prison for the rest of her life, and they don't let you go to Oxford
or
UCL when you're banged up in Askham Grange. So forgive me if I am a little skeptical of your pride here."

26's stepdad cleared his throat. "I happen to think that, in my professional judgment, none of these charges will make it past a preliminary hearing. They're without merit, the evidence is poor, and many of the laws themselves are pending High Court review." He folded his hands on his tummy, as though he was resting a case in front of a jury. Her bio-dad's jaws jumped under his skin. 26 cleared her throat.

"Can I say something?"

All the adults in the room turned to look at her. She took a deep breath and got to her feet. "First, I want to thank you both for getting me free. Deepak, Dad tells me that I would still be there if it wasn't for you. Thank you, really and honestly for that. Jail is awful. Bugger that: jail is
pissing awful
. I don't want to go back there and I'm grateful not to be there and I'm worried sick about all my mates who are still there, because I never dreamt that it could be so terrible --" She took another deep breath and composed herself. It was like watching someone catch hold of a hummingbird with her bare hands without crushing it. I loved her more than ever at that moment. "So thank you both. Next, I want to say, 'Deepak, this is my boyfriend, Cecil. Cecil, this is my biological father, Detective Inspector Deepak Khan." I scrambled to my feet and held out my hand and he shook it with a funny kind of pressure, like he was testing my balance, sizing me up for a judo-throw over the sofa and through the front window. Or maybe I was just being paranoid, still. "Next item of business: I need a shower and a change of clothes. No one is going to come and arrest me in the next fifteen minutes. There is nothing that can't wait that long, right? So I'm going to go upstairs now. I'd prefer it if you all remembered that you are adults and kept things civil, all right?"

And without another word, she was gone and I was alone with the three adults. I was still standing and wished I could sit down or possibly go crouch behind a pile of books and disappear. 26's bio-dad skewered me on his eyeball lasers and said, "I suppose you're part of this business as well, Cecil?"

"I guess you could say so."

"So why weren't you arrested with that lot? More sense than them? Or are you a grass? Working for the coppers?"

I shook my head. "No sir," I said. "I just --" I didn't really fancy telling him how I'd come to be somewhere else when the law came for my friends. "I'd just stepped away when it happened. Pure chance."

He snorted. "And what do you do, with all these people?"

I licked my lips, then made myself stop. "I make films," I said.

He grunted. "The kind of films involving nudity?"

I held my hands up. "No! God, no! No, I make films about Scot Colford, mostly. I cut up footage, add my own, remix it, like. Mostly piss-takes, but also some serious stuff."

He raised one eyebrow so high I thought his eye would fall out of the socket. "Scot
Colford
? The actor?"

"He's very good," 26's mum said. "They've shown his stuff on telly. Cecil, why don't you go downstairs and get the clean towels out of the machine and bring them up to the bathroom? I don't think there are any in there."

I nearly ran.

26 got out of the shower, toweled off, and went straight to bed. I didn't blame her -- after all the adrenaline (and lack of sleep the night before) I was ready to collapse myself. But being as her cop father was downstairs, I wasn't going to stay there with her. Besides, she would probably want to know why I happened to leave right before the coppers raided them, and even if she didn't believe that I was a supergrass, she would probably be just as disappointed to know that I was a coward.

So I slunk back home, more time on public transit to recriminate with myself. Except that I was hugely distracted by a bizarre sight: there was a group of German tourists on the overland with me to Euston, wearing funny fedoras with wide brims crusted with some kind of funny electronics and a weird, silvery hat-band that glittered like a disco-ball. They were gabbling in German to one another, and I couldn't understand a single word, but those were, hands down, the weirdest hats I'd ever seen. They didn't seem to be a fashion thing, either -- the crumblie oldsters and the little kids were all wearing them, and I never heard of any weird fashion that people of all ages got into.

So what the hell were they? They got out at Euston with me. It was unseasonably hot now -- it had been running hot and cold for days now, so that you never knew when you left the house whether you'd be sweating buckets or shivering by the end of the day, and the hats certainly looked like they'd be plenty warm. I trailed along behind them toward the buses upstairs and then one of those hats did the strangest freaking thing: it shot out a laser beam!

It was a bolt of green laser-light, only flickering into existence for a brief instant, sizzling in the humid air, the width of a pencil-lead and bright in the gloom of the platform. The Germans all pointed at the one whose hat had gone off and made excited noises and looked around on the ground, and one of them pointed at something and they all made more noises and got out their mobiles and snapped piccies of whatever it was. The others on the platform watched with that weird British non-interest thing where you pretend you're not staring and stare anyway.

Once they'd moved on, I looked at the spot on the floor they'd been pointing at and saw that there was a dead mosquito there, slightly crispy. That bloke's hat had apparently shot it out of the sky with a freaking
laser
!

On the bus to Bow, I googled "laser hat mosquito" and learned more. Apparently all the news had been full of stories about something called West Nile Fever, which is a terrible disease spread by mosquitoes in tropical parts. But now that the whole world was getting warmer and that, diseases were moving around, and there'd been six confirmed cases of it in London. All the red-top tabloid papers were going bonkers over this, predicting a planet-killing pandemic and the end of life as we knew it, and tourists were being advised to avoid London.

I felt like a proper idiot for not knowing this, and when I thought about it, it seemed to me that there had been newsagents' signs with screaming headlines about mosquitoes and tropical diseases, but I'd been too wrapped up in this bill and my films and that to pay them any heed. Ninety-nine percent of the time, the newsagents' signs were about subjects that were completely irrelevant to me: celebrities getting caught shagging one anothers' spouses, Royals getting caught snorting coke, footballers winning or losing big matches I couldn't give a toss about. Every now and again, I'd snag a free-sheet while I was running around town, but after reading about the miraculous lives saved by brave doggies and the horrible parents who'd absent-mindedly put their kids down the kitchen sink garbage disposal, I'd stick them in a bin and move on.

Anyway, the Chinese had been fighting West Nile mosquitoes for years apparently, and they did it all with these powerful green lasers that were as cheap as chips. They'd hook 'em up to a couple of microphones that used sonar to locate the little bastards, then they targeted the lasers by bouncing them off curved mirrors, and zip-zap, no more little flying vampires. They worked a treat in houses, where you could mount 'em with brackets in the corners of the rooms, but when you were out in the world, you needed another layer of protection. Bug-spray was nice, but laser hats were scorchingly bad-arse because
they put lasers on your head
and you went pew-pew-pew when you walked down the street. I couldn't argue with that reasoning, even if I hadn't had a single mosquito bite that I'd noticed since coming to London. Though, naturally, by the time I'd finished googling, I was imagining mosquito whines in the barely audible edge of the bus-motors, and feeling phantom itches from non-existent bites. I resisted the temptation to google "West Nile Disease" for as long as I could, but after the fifth nonexistent mosquito bite, I gave in.

Oh, lovely, comas. Twitching, horrible, usually terminal comas. That was just
fantastic
. I'd have to get a hat.

I got home and no one was there. I was about to ring Jem when he rang
me
. "Hullo, chicken," he said in his bravest voice, but I could hear the edge in it. Jem was tired, and hurting.

"Jem! Where are you? Do you need me to come and get you?"

"They just sprung us. Sounds like your girlfriend's old man impressed the magistrate. After her hearing, the old darling started to ask the law some tough questions about just why we were being held. There was a fixer from the film industry there, some smart city boy lawyer, kept trying to say something, but the magistrate told him to sit down or he'd have him chucked out of the court. So we're sprung. Only one problem, son, Rabid Dog --" He breathed a deep breath, and I heard a ragged edge in it. "He's not in such good shape. I don't have money for a taxi, and I don't reckon Chester and me can get him home on our own on the bus."