Pirate Cinema (9 page)

"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, 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 like 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 a while 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 floor-boards 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 run-down 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 if with book cases 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 got 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 major 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 ones 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 the lethally strong coffee in it, using beans he bought without complaint from his espresso wizard, Fyodor, paying four times what the local Co-Op asked for beans.

I took 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 brilliant 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 around, 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 guard rail 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 pot-bellied Asian guy in his twenties, unshaven and rumpled in a dirty T-shirt and a pair of cut-off 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. "Hop it 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.

I know a fair bit about tech, if I do say so myself. Taught myself to edit, taught myself to set up dual-boots and secure proxies to dodge the snoops. But I'd never really got down into the guts of the machine, the electronics and other gubbins. They were a complete mystery to me. Being around so many dismembered and eviscerated computers made me feel like I was getting out of my depth. I liked the feeling.

"What is this place?" I said.

"Aziz's place," Jem said. Aziz looked back over his shoulder at us and grinned like a pirate. "Aziz is the best scrounger in all of freaking London. He's got the good stuff, mate."

We came to our destination, a cleared-away space with some long trestle-tables that served as workbenches, cluttered with semi-assembled (or disassembled?) computers. In one corner was a big four-poster bed, as unlikely as a sofa in the middle of the motorway. It was piled high with grimy pillows and bedding and even more computers. Beside it was a rolling clothes rack, the kind I'd seen in big department stores, crowded with clothes on hangers and even more clothes draped over the top.