Pirate Cinema

by Cory Doctorow

  * * *

  Getting the beamers just right up in the trees was hard. More than once, the climbers had to reposition themselves, and they dropped one beamer and it shattered into a million plasticky bits, and Hester stood beneath the tree it had fallen out of and told them off with such a sharp and stinging tongue that I practically fell in love that second. She was Indian, or maybe Bangla, and in the weird light of the glow-sticks, she was absolutely gorgeous. She had a whole little army of techie girls with matching vests and shorts and they seemed to be running the show. I was trying to figure out how to introduce myself to them when someone tackled me from behind.

  “Got you, you little miscreant! Off to prison for you—bread and water for the next ten years!” It was a voice I hadn’t heard in so long I’d given up on hearing it again.

  “Jem!” I said. “Christ, mate, get off me!”

  He let me up and gave me a monster hug that nearly knocked me off my feet again. “Trent, bloody hell, what are you doing here?”

  “Where have you been?” He was skinnier than he had been the last time I saw him, and he’d shaved the sides and back of his head, leaving behind a kind of pudding-bowl of hair. Now that I could see his face, I could also see a new scar under one eye.

  “Oh,” he said. He shrugged. “Wasn’t as quick as I thought I was. Ended up doing a little turn at His Majesty’s pleasure.” It took me a minute to realize he meant that he’d been in jail. I swallowed. “Not too much time, as it turned out. All they had on me was resisting arrest, and the magistrate was kindly disposed at sentencing. Been out for weeks. But where have you been? Haven’t seen you in any of the usual spots.”

  I rolled my eyes. “You could have just called me if you weren’t such a stubborn git about not carrying a phone.”

  He reached into his shirt and drew out a little phone on a lanyard, a ridiculous toy-looking thing like you’d give to a five-year-old on his first day of kindergarten. “I came around on that. But your number’s dead,” he said.

  I remembered chucking away my SIM after my disastrous phone call home. Durr. I was such an idiot. “Well,” I said, “you could have emailed.”

  “No laptop. Been playing it low-tech. But where have you been? I’ve checked the shelter, Old Street, everywhere—couldn’t find hide nor hair of you, son.”

  “Jem” I said. “I’m in the same place I’ve been since the day I met you: at the Zeroday.”

  He smacked himself in the forehead with his palm. “Like a dog returning to its vomit,” he said. “Of course. And the filth haven’t given you any trouble?”

  “We keep a low profile,” I said. “Too hot to go out during the day, anyway. Hardly anyone knows we’re there.”

  Without warning, he gave me another enormous, bearish hug. I could smell that he was a little drunk already. “Christ, it’s good to see you again!”

  “Where are you living?” I asked.

  “Oh,” he said. “Here and there. Staying on sofas. The shelter, when I can’t find a sofa. You know how it goes.”

  “Well,” I said. “My mate Chester’s been kipping in your room, but I’m sure he’d move. Or there are plenty of other rooms. It’s just three of us in there these days.”

  He looked down. “That’d be lovely,” he said. He put his hand out and I shook it. “It’s a deal.”

  So I introduced him round to Chester and Rabid Dog, who’d both heard all about him and seemed glad enough to meet him, though Chester was more interested in Hester and trying to be helpful to her, and Rabid Dog, well, it was impossible to say what Dog was thinking at any given moment, what with all the mumbling. But I didn’t give a toss: I had my best pal back, I had my new pals, it was a hot night, there were films, there was beer, there were girls, there was a moon in the sky and I wasn’t in bloody Bradford. What else could I ask for?

  * * *

  By the time they started the films, there must have been fifty kids in the trees and bushes. Some were already dancing, some were passing round cartons of fried chicken or enormous boxes of sweets. Loads were smoking interesting substances and more than one was willing to share with me. The night had taken all the sting out of the superheated day, leaving behind a not-warm/not-cool breeze that seemed to crackle with the excitement we were all feeling.

  One of the girls running the films climbed down out of a tree I was leaning against and nodded to me, then looked more closely. “You’re the Scot guy, yeah?”

  Feeling a massive surge of pride, I looked down at my toes, and said, quietly, “Yeah.”

  “Nice stuff,” she said. She stuck her hand out. I shook it. It was sticky with sap from the tree branch she’d been clinging to, and strong, but her hand was slender and girly in a way that made me go all melty inside. Look, it was summer, I was sixteen, and anytime I let my mind wander, it wandered over to thoughts of girls, food, and parties. Every girl I met, I fell a bit in love with. Every time one of them talked to me, I felt like I’d scored a point in some enormous and incredibly important game that I didn’t quite understand but madly wanted to win.

  “Thanks,” I said, and managed not to stammer, quaver, or squeak. Another point. “I’m—” I was about to say “Trent,” but instead I said, “Cecil.” Everyone else had a funny street name—why the hell did I have to be boring old Trent forever? “Cecil B. DeVil.”

  She laughed. She had a little bow-shaped mouth and a little dimple in her chin and a mohican that she’d pulled back into a ponytail. Her skinny arms were ropy with fine muscle. “I’m 26,” she said.

  She didn’t look any older than I was. I must have looked skeptical. “No, I mean my name’s 26. As in, the number of letters in the alphabet. You can call me Twenty.”

  I had to admit that this was the coolest nickname I had ever heard.

  “Hester pointed you out, you and your mates. She said that you made those Scot Colford films, right?”

  “That was me,” I said. “My mates did the others, the horror films and that Bullingham thing.” I gestured vaguely into the writhing, singing, dancing, shouting mass of people.

  “Yeah, those were good, but the Scot thing was genius. I love that old dead bastard. Love how he could do the most shite bit of fluff one week, then serious drama the next. He was a complete hack, absolutely in it for the money, but he was an artist.”

  I had written practically the very same words in a Media Studies report, the only paper in my entire academic career to score an A. “I couldn’t agree more,” I said. “So.” I couldn’t find more words. I was losing the game. “So. So, you’re doing all this stuff with the projectors then?”

  She beamed. “Innit wonderful? My idea, of course. We got the beamers from some geezer out in Okendon, guy lives in a gigantic building full of electronic rubbish—”

  “Aziz!” I said.

  “Yeah, that’s the one. Bastard seems to know everyone. Hester met him through some squatters she knew, brought us along to get the gear. He certainly has whatever you need. From there, it was just a matter of rigging up some power supplies and a little wireless network so we wouldn’t be throwing cables from tree to tree, and voilà, instant film festival. Not bad, huh?”

  “It’s absolutely brilliant!” I said. “Christ, what an idea! What else have you got to screen?”

  “Oh, just bits and pieces, really. Mostly we went for stuff without much audio. Didn’t want to rig up a full-on PA system here, might attract attention. The light’ll be shielded by that hill”—she gestured—“but there’s houses down the other side of the rise, and we don’t want them calling in the law. So it’s just wincy little speakers and video you can watch with the sound down. Your stuff was perfect for that, by the way, Scot’s just so iconic. All in all, there’s like an hour’s worth of video, which we’ll start showing pretty soon, before this lot’s got too drunk to appreciate the art.”

  I shook my head. I realized that I had fallen in love in the space of five minutes. I really desperately wanted to say something cool or interesting or suave,
or at least to give her my mobile number or ask her if I could take her out to an all-night place after the party. But my mouth was as dry as a talcum-powder factory in the middle of the desert.

  “That’s so cool,” I managed. What I wanted to say was something like, I think that this is the thing I left home to find. I think that this is the thing I was meant to do with my life. And I think you are the person I was meant to do it with.

  She looked up into the tree branches, saw something, and shouted, “No, no, not like that! Stop! Stop!” She shook her head vigorously and pointed a pencil torch into the branches, skewering another girl in the tactical shorts uniform who was in the middle of attaching a pocket-sized beamer to a branch with a web of elasticated tie-downs. She swore. “Girl’s going to break her neck. Or my projector. In which case I will break her neck. ’Scuse me.” She scrambled up the tree like a lumberjack, cursing all the way. I found myself standing like a cow that’d been stunned at the slaughterhouse, wobbling slightly on my feet.

  Jem threw an arm around my neck, slapped the side of my face with his free hand, and said, “Come on, mate, the film’s about to start. Got to get a good seat!”

  * * *

  I don’t think I’d ever been as proud or happy as I was in the next ten minutes. The beamers all flickered to life, projecting a three-by-three grid of light squares, projected from the trees, lined up to make one huge image. That was bloody clever: the little beamers didn’t have the stuff to paint a crisp, big picture. Try to get a pic as big as a film-screen and it would be washed out and blurry, even in the watery moonlight. But at close distances and small sizes, they could really shine, and that’s what the girls had set up, nine synchronized projectors, each doing one little square of screen, using clever software to correct their rectangles so that everything lined up. I couldn’t figure out how that worked, but then I meandered over to Twenty’s control rig and saw that she had a webcam set up to watch the picture in real-time and correct the beamers as the branches blew in the wind. Now that was smart.

  Also: I swear that I was only shoulder-surfing Twenty because I wanted to see how the trick with all the beamers was done and not, for example, because I wanted to smell her hair or watch her hands play over her keyboard or stare enraptured at the fine muscles in the backs of her arms jump as she directed the action like the conductor of an orchestra. No, those are all creepy reasons to be hanging around a lass. I only had the most honest of intentions, guv, I swear darn.

  Once the screen was up and running, the buzz died off and everyone gradually turned to face the screen. Twenty had a headset on and she swung the little mic down so that she was practically kissing it. “Illustrious denizens of Armed Card and the Cynical April, I thank you for attending on behalf of the Pirate Cinema Collective, Sewing Circle and Ladies’ Shooting Society. First up in the program tonight is this delightful piece of Scot Colford fannon, as directed by our own celebrated Cecil B. DeVil.” My mates cheered loudly and shouted rude things, and Twenty looked up and winked at me. I practically collapsed on the spot.

  She hit a button and the video started to roll. This was my first major Scot piece since coming to London, made in the hot, anticipatory hours before we hit the parties and in the exhausted, sweaty time after we came back, as the sun was rising and I waited for the excitement to drain out of my limbs and let me sleep the day away like a vampire.

  It was another piece I’d been planning in my head for years: Scot as the world’s worst driver. Scot crashed eighty-three cars on-screen, at least. I mean, those are just the ones I know about. Sometimes it was part of an action sequence. Sometimes, it was a comedy moment. Sometimes, it was just plain weird, like the experimental tank he’d driven into a shopping mall in Locus of Intent. But my idea was that I could, with a little bit of creative editing, make every single one of those car crashes into a single, giant crash, with Scot behind the wheels of all the cars. All I’d need was exterior footage of the same cars—medium- and long-shots, where you couldn’t really make out who was driving—intercut with the jumbled shaky-cam shots of the cars’ interiors as Scot crashed and rattled inside, fighting the airbags, screaming in terror, fighting off a bad guy, whatever. Time it right, add some SFX, trim out some backgrounds, and voilà, the world’s biggest all-Scot automotive disaster. Pure comedy.

  I had done the test-edits at tiny resolution, little 640x480 vids, but once I had it all sorted, I re-rendered at full 1080p, checking it through frame-by-frame at the higher rez for little imperfections that the smaller video had hidden. I’d found plenty and patiently fixed every one, even going so far as dropping individual frames into an image editor and shaving them, pixel by pixel, into total perfection. At the time, it had seemed like a stupid exercise: you’d have to watch the video on a huge screen to spot the imperfections I was painstakingly editing. But now that it was screening on a huge piece of wall, I felt like an absolute genius.

  I wasn’t the only one. At first, the audience merely chuckled. But as the car-crash continued and continued and continued, car after car, they began to hoot with laughter, and cheer. When it came to the closing sequence—a series of quick cuts of shaken Scot Colfords pulling themselves free of their cars and staring in horror, seemingly at one another—they shouted their delight and Rabid Dog and Chester pounded me on the back and Jem toasted me with his tin of lager and I felt one hundred feet tall, made of solid gold, and on fire. No embarrassment, just total, unalloyed delight. It’s not a sensation English people are supposed to feel, especially northerners: you’re supposed to be slightly ashamed of feeling good about your own stuff, but screw that, I was a God!

  I glanced over to see if Twenty was, maybe, staring at me with girlish adulation. But she was scowling at her screen and mousing hard and getting everything set up for the next video, which was Chester’s latest Bullingham creation, which he’d done in the style of the old Monty Python animations of Terry Gilliam, and all I remember about it was how rude it all was, in a very funny way, with Bullingham engaging in lots of improbable sex acts with barnyard animals, mostly on the receiving end. There was laughter and that, but it came from a long way off, from behind my glow of self-satisfaction. The same glow muffled the praise and laughter that accompanied Rabid Dog’s horror-comedy mashup, the awesomely gory Summer Camp IV turned into a lighthearted comedy about wacky teenagers, the legendary blood and guts and entrails played purely for yuks.

  Then the first act was over, and the screens faded and the sweetest sound you ever heard swelled: fiftysome kids clapping as hard as they could without breaking their hands, cheering and whistling until Hester shushed them all, but she was grinning, too, and I swear that was the best ten minutes of my life.

  * * *

  If I was editing The Cecil B. DeVil Story, this is where I’d insert one of those lazy montages, with me smoking a little of this, drinking a little of that, grinning confidently as I chatted up Twenty, dancing with her around the tree roots, watching the next round of films with my arm around her shoulder, getting onto a night bus with her and riding it all the way out to the Zeroday, showing her around my awesomely cool squat while she looked at me like I was the best thing she’d ever seen.

  But actually, the night kind of went downhill after that. It would be hard for it not to, having attained such heights. I drank too much and ended up sitting propped against a tree, roots digging into my arse while my head swam and I tried not to puke. When I looked around to find Twenty between the second and third screenings, she was chatting with some other bloke who appeared, even in the dark, to be a hundred times cooler than me. This made me wish I was drinking yet another beer, but luckily there weren’t any within an easy crawl of me and standing up was beyond me at that moment.

  Some time around three in the morning, my mates poured me onto a night bus and then I did puke, and got us thrown off the bus, so we walked and stumbled for an hour before I declared myself sober enough to ride again, and we caught another bus, making it home just as the sun came up. We sl
ipped into the Zeroday and Jem stretched out on the floor of my room because we hadn’t figured out where he’d sleep and his old room was occupied by Chester, who, it turned out, wasn’t in a mad rush to leave.

  I woke up a million years later with a head like a cat-box and a mouth like the inside of a bus-station toilet. The room stank of beer-farts cooked by the long, hot day I’d slept through, turned into a kind of toxic miasma that clung to my clothes as I stumbled into the bathroom and drank water from the tap until I felt like I’d explode.

  I was the last one up. Everyone else was downstairs, in the pub, and when I got there, they all looked at one another and snorted little laughs at my expense. Yes, I looked as bad as I felt. I raised two fingers and carefully jabbed them at each of my friends.

  Jem pointed at the bar. “Food’s up,” he said. I followed his finger. Someone had laid out a tureen of fruit salad, a pot of yogurt, some toasted bagels (we froze the day-olds we scavenged, and toasted them to cover their slight staleness), a pot of cream cheese, and a bowl of hard-boiled eggs (eggs were good for days and days after their sell-by dates). My mouth filled with spit. I fell on the food, gorging myself until I’d sated a hunger I hadn’t realized I’d felt. Rabid Dog made tea, and I had three cups with loads of sugar and then I blinked loads, stretched, and became a proper human again.

  “Cor,” I said. “Some night.” I looked around at my three mates. Rabid Dog and Chester had taken the sagging sofa we’d dragged in from a skip, and Jem had seated himself as far as possible away from them, at the other end of the room. It occurred to me that while I knew Jem and I knew Dog and Chester, Dog and Chester didn’t know Jem and vice-versa. Plus there was the fact that Jem had found the Zeroday, and now he was a newcomer to our happy home.

  I looked back and forth between them. “Come on, lads,” I said. “What’s this all about? This place is effing huge. You’re all good people. Stop looking like a bunch of cats trying to work out which one’s in charge.”