“Stop talking like Shakespeare and explain yourself, or I’m not taking another step.”
I blew a wet raspberry at her. “Oh, come on, Cora, play along. It’s a surprise, all right? Indulge me.”
“Fine,” she said. She handed me her rucksack, heavy as a corpse. “You carry this, though. I’m not going to lug it around while you play silly buggers.”
I shouldered it with a grunt. “Right you are. Now, nose, please.” I pinched mine. She followed suit. I opened the door that led into the room before the bridge. Even with my nose pinched, the smell was like a physical thing—I could taste it every time I breathed through my mouth. We would definitely need disposable face masks for the audience to wear. I had a brainstorm that we could decorate them with animal snouts, so that we’d be leading in a single-file army of tigers and zebras and dogs and donkeys. What fun!
I waited until she was right on my heels before opening the final door that led into the sewer itself. She recoiled from the sight, lit by lanterns spaced along the bridge and around the makeshift toilets at its far end. “Trent—” she began, then shut her mouth. It wasn’t pleasant even talking in the presence of all that filth.
“Come along,” I said, quickly, taking her hand and leading her to the door on the other side, then quickly through again and out to the screening room itself, releasing my nose and taking in big gulps of air.
My coconspirators were all busy in the cinema, having unloaded the night’s haul from Aziz’s van. They were setting up chairs, arranging the bar and the coolers and the cheap fizzy drinks and booze we’d bought in bulk from a dirt-cheap off-license near the Zeroday, setting up the speakers and stringing out the speaker wire along hooks set high into the brickwork, using handheld hammer-drills we’d borrowed from Aziz.
We stood in the doorway, contemplating the wonderful industry of the scene, and one by one my friends stopped work and looked back at us.
“Everyone,” I said, once they were all waiting expectantly, “this is my sister Cora. Cora, these are the Jammie Dodgers.”
“Like the biccies?” she said.
“Like the delicious biccies,” I said.
“Not exactly,” Jem said. “More like the criminal conspiracy.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well, that’s all right then.” So saying, she grabbed a chair from the pile of unsorted stock beside the door, plunked it down on the close-fit brickwork of the floor, and plopped into it. “Would someone care to elaborate?”
26 had poured out a shandy—half beer, half fizzy lemonade—in one of the little half-pint mugs we’d rescued from the Zeroday, and she pressed it into Cora’s hands. “Take your coat off, love, it’s going to take some telling.”
* * *
Twenty and Cora hit it off immediately, and they worked together patching up the chairs we’d harvested, which were in pretty poor nick. 26 had a mate who’d given her a whole mountain of this brightly colored polymer compound called Sugru; you took it out of the wrapper, kneaded it like plasticine, then pressed it into the cracks in the wood, or the holes in the seat, or the snapped corners, and worked it in there. In twenty-four hours, it dried to something like epoxy-hard. They chatted quietly to each other, and when I eavesdropped, I caught fragments of their conversation and discovered that they were talking heavy politics, dropping the names of MPs like they were the headmasters at their schools.
“What do you know about MPs?” I said to Cora.
She held up two fingers at me and made a sour face. “I’ve been down to our MP’s surgery every fortnight since you left, idiot boy. Practically lived there during the runup to the Theft of Intellectual Property Bill vote. Wanted him to know that his own constituents were losing their jobs and their education and their families to stupid laws like this, and if he didn’t vote against it, we’d end up in jail.”
I tried to keep the astonishment off my face. In my mind, my family had been frozen in time the moment I stepped on that bus, impossibly distant. I couldn’t believe that Cora and I had been working on the same campaign in two different cities. “That’s amazing,” I managed. I realized that I was busting with pride. I found a chair without too much wobble in it and sat down with them. “Can you believe my little sister?” I said to 26.
26 rolled her eyes. “Not so little, mate. She really knows her stuff. Getting good grades, apparently.”
“Really? I thought you said you were in trouble at school?”
She giggled. “I started checking out library books and bringing ’em down to the MP’s surgery, and did all my studying in his waiting room. At first I just did it to prove a point, but now the library’s only open four days a week, it worked out to be a brilliant place to get work done. Hardly anyone ever goes down there. His receptionist kind of adopted me and ticked him off any time he tried to get me to leave.”
I remembered the heft of her rucksack. “You didn’t bring a load of library books to London with you?”
She looked horrified. “Of course not. That’d be stealing. My bag’s full of discards—it’s shocking what they’re getting rid of. No funding, you see. Taking ’em off the shelves is cheaper than reshelving them, so the collections keep on shrinking. There’s always some gobshite at the council meetings saying, ‘what do we need libraries for if everyone’s got the Internet?’ I keep wanting to shake them by the hair and shout something like, ‘Everyone except me! And what about all the stuff librarians have to teach us about using the net?’”
“You go to council meetings?”
She rolled her eyes. “26 has been telling me all about this film night you’re planning. Sounds like it’ll be fun. But what do you hope to accomplish with it?”
I felt a flush in my cheeks. “What do you mean? We’re going to put on a show!”
“Yeah, I get that. But why?”
The flush crept higher. “Cos I made a film, all right? And I want to show it. And there’s no way I could show it in the real world, cos I broke every law in the world making the picture. That means I’ve got to find some other way around things.”
She nodded. “Okay, that’s fine. But wouldn’t it be better to change things so that you didn’t have to show your films in the sewer?”
I felt myself shaking my head, felt my ears burning. Of course, she was just saying the things I’d been thinking to myself all along, trying to shove down into the bottom of my conscience so I could get on with making Sewer Cinema ready for the opening show. Hearing Cora speak the forbidden words aloud made me want to stuff my fingers in my ears.
“Don’t worry about me,” I said, waving my hands. “I’ve got plans. Big plans. What about you, Cora? What did you tell Mum and Dad? Have you called them?”
Now it was her turn to squirm, as I’d known it would be. It felt good to have the heat on someone else for a change. “I didn’t tell them anything. Why should I? You didn’t. You just vanished.”
One thing about Cora, she was smart. Smart enough to make me squirm some more, anyway. “We’re not talking about me, Cora, we’re talking about you.”
Twenty chose this moment to weigh in: “Cecil, your sister has a good point. You did a runner without talking things over with your parents at all—you’ve got no call to tick off your sister for doing the same thing.”
Cora nodded with satisfaction. “Thank you,” she said. “So shut it, Cecil.” I’d once told Cora over the phone that I was going by Cecil B. DeVil so that she’d know how to search for my videos. She’d told me it was a hilarious name and that I was pathetic to be using it.
Twenty wheeled on her. “However,” she said, not missing a beat, “I have call to tick you off for doing it. Which I am about to do.”
Cora’s smile vanished. “Who are you to—”
Twenty just kept talking. “I’ve heard loads about your parents and from everything I’ve heard, they’re basically good sorts. Not much money, maybe a bit short-tempered, but they love you to bits, don’t they?”
“So?” Cora folded her arms.
“So you owe them more than this.” She held up a hand. “And so does he. But you’re meant to be the smart one. They’ve got to be worrying their guts out by now. So the first thing I want you to do is call them and tell them you’ve found your brother, that you’ve got a roof over your head tonight, and that you’ll be in touch with them while you work out what to do next. Get a phone number like the one Cecil’s been using with you and let them leave you messages there. Okay?”
Cora unfolded and refolded her arms. “Listen, I just met you. You have no right to tell me what to do—”
26 nodded vigorously. “You’re right. Please consider all the previous material to be a strongly worded suggestion, not a demand. Better?”
That cracked us both up. “Fine,” Cora said. “Fine, you’re right. I’ll call them as soon as I can get online, leave them a voice mail with a number they can reach me at.” She rubbed her eyes. “Cripes, what are they going to say to me? They’ll be furious.”
“It only gets worse the longer you wait,” I said. “Believe me.”
* * *
When I finally woke the next day, 26 had already left, and so had Cora. Jem was in the kitchen making coffee, and he said something vague about them stepping out for some sort of errand. I gave up on getting more info out of him: when Jem was making coffee, you could set a bomb off next to him without distracting him. He had three notebooks’ worth of handwritten “field histories” from his experiments in extracting the perfect shot of espresso, and he’d been playing with stovetop pots for months now, voraciously consuming message-board debates about “oxidization,” “crema,” “bitter oils,” and ideal temperatures.
He’d hit on the idea that he needed to heat the bottom chamber until just enough coffee had perked up into the top pot, and then he had to cool it off instantly. His first experiments had involved plunging the pot into a bowl of ice water, but he’d cracked the pot in two with a sound like a cannon shot. Lucky for him, the charity shops were full of these things. He had a shelf of them, along with a whole mountain of rusted cast-iron pots and pans that he was slowly rehabilitating, buffing them up with a disc-sander attachment on his drill, then oiling them and curing them in high-heat ovens.
I paced the pub room and helped taste-test Jem’s coffee until the girls came back, breezing in through the back door in a gust of raucous laughter. They set down heavy bags on a table and plunked themselves on the sofa, looking indecently pleased with themselves.
“And you’ve been…?” I said, peering down my nose at them. I had caffeine jitters from all the experimental assistance I’d been lending, and it had put me in an intense mood.
“We’ve been at the bloody library, haven’t we?” Cora said. She seemed giddy with glee.
“Well, it’s certainly put you in a lovely mood, hasn’t it? Been looking at the dirty books?”
Cora waggled a finger at me. “Oh ye of little faith,” she said. “We’ve been thinking about your great project, and how to make it rise to true, epic greatness. And we have got part of the solution. Show him,” she said, waving 26 on.
26 dug through the bags—which were bulging with books—and drew out a small, battered paperback. “Beneath the City Streets,” she said, and sniffed. “The fourth edition. Published in 1983. Written by one Peter Laurie, an investigative journalist of the last century with a special interest in nuclear bunkers, bomb shelters, underground tunnels, and whatnot. He dug up all these elderly maps and purchase orders and that, and walked the streets of London looking for suspicious buildings and big green spaces bordered by mysterious battened-down steel security doors and the like. Then his readers sent him all kinds of corrections and clues that he chased up for new editions, until you get to the fourth edition. Plenty of Internet debate about it, of course—but it’s got these lovely maps, see, places where they built tube stations that never got used, or shut down stations and abandoned them. Basically, there’s an entire bloody city down below London, not just some old sewers.”
I could feel their excitement, and I paged through the book, feeling the old yellowing paper and the corners of the cover gone soft as mouse-fur from decades of handling. “Well,” I said. “Well. That’s certainly very interesting, but what about it? Just last night you were telling me that it didn’t matter because it wasn’t going to make a difference, right?”
“One film won’t make a difference,” Cora said. “But what about a hundred films? What about films all over the country, all over the world? You know you’re not the only one making illegal films—there’s enough out there on the net to show new ones every night forever. But out there in message boards and on ZeroKTube, nobody seems to get much worked up about the fact that the stuff they love is illegal, that their friends are going to jail for making art. I reckon that from a keyboard, it all seems like something imaginary and very far away.”
26 leapt to her feet and nodded furiously. “It’s like they’re ashamed of it, they’ve seen all those adverts telling them that downloading is stealing, that remixing isn’t creation. They think they’re getting away with something, and when a bunch of billionaire corporations buy the government off and start locking up their mates, they just shrug their shoulders and try to make themselves as small as possible to avoid being noticed.”
Cora took Beneath the City Streets out of my hand and waved it like a preacher with a Bible. “You get people coming out by the hundreds and thousands, you tell them that they’ve got to work together to make a difference, you get them to refuse to be ashamed to make and love art. Show them that they should be proud of this stuff. They can’t arrest us all.”
My heart was thudding in my chest. It was an amazing vision—films being shown openly all over the land, bringing the glories of the net to the real world.
But Jem was in the doorway kitchen, shaking with caffeine, looking grumpy. He waited until we were all staring at him, then said, “Come on, would you? You’re not striking a revolutionary blow, children—you’re just showing a couple of pictures in a sewer. It’s a lovely bit of fun and all, but let’s not go mad here, all right?”
We all stared at him. “Jem—” I said. I didn’t know where to start. “Jem, mate, how can you say that? What they’re doing, it’s so wrong—”
He snorted. “’Course it’s wrong. So what? Lots of wrong things out there. What you’re doing could get you tossed in jail. That’s pretty wrong, believe me.” He pointed to the scar under his eye. “Pray you never have to find out how wrong it all is. What we’re doing is a lark. I love larks, I’m all for ’em. But don’t mistake a lark for a cause. All this high and mighty talk about ‘creativity,’ what’s it get you? You’re nicking stuff off other people and calling it your own. I don’t have any problem with that, but at least call it what it is: good, honest thieving.”
Something burst in me. I got to my feet and pointed at him. “Jem, chum, you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, mate. You might know more about jail than I do, but you haven’t a clue when it comes to creativity.” This was something I’d thought about a lot. It was something I cared about. I couldn’t believe that my old pal and mentor didn’t understand it, but I was going to explain it to him, wipe that smirk right off his mug. “Look, let’s think about what creativity is, all right?”
He snorted. “This could take a couple of months.”
“No,” I said. “No, it only takes a long time because there are so many people who would like to come up with a definition of creativity that includes everything they do and nothing anyone else does. But if we’re being honest, it’s easy to define creativity: it’s doing something that isn’t obvious.”
Everyone was looking at me. I stuck my chin out.
“That’s it?” Jem said. “That’s creativity? ‘Doing something that isn’t obvious?’ You’ve had too much coffee, chum. That’s the daftest thing I ever heard.”
I shook my head. “Only because you haven’t thought about it at all. Take the film I just made with Rabid Dog. All th
at footage of Scot Colford, from dozens of films, and all that footage of monsters, from dozens more. If I handed you any of those films, there’s nothing obvious about them that says, ‘You could combine this in some exact way with all those other films and make a new one.’ That idea came from me. I created it. It wasn’t lying around, waiting to be picked up like a bunch of pebbles on the beach. It was something that didn’t exist until I made it, and probably wouldn’t have existed unless I did. That’s what ‘to create’ means: to make something new.”
Jem opened his mouth, then shut it. He got a thoughtful look. 26 was grinning at me. Cora was looking at me with some of the old big-brother adoration I hadn’t seen for years and years. I felt a hundred feet tall.
At last, Jem nodded. “Okay, fine. But all that means is that there’s lots of different kinds of creativity. Look, I like your film just fine, but you’ve got to admit there’s something different about making a film out of other peoples’ films and getting a camera out and making your own movie.”
I could feel my head wanting to shake as soon as Jem started to talk, but I restrained myself and made myself wait for him to finish. “Sure, it’s different—but when you say, ‘making your own film,’ you really mean that the way I make films is less creative, that they’re not my own, right?”
He looked down. “I didn’t say that, but yeah, okay, that’s what I think.”
“I understand,” I said, making myself be calm, even though he was only saying the thing I feared myself. “But look at it this way. Once there weren’t any films, right? Then someone invented the film. He was creative, right? In some way, every film that’s been made since isn’t really creative because the people who made them didn’t invent films at the same time.”
He shook his head. “You’re playing word games. Inventing films isn’t the same as making films.”
“But someone made the first film. And then someone made the first film with two cameras. The first film that was edited. The first film that had sound. The first color film. The first comedy. The first monster film. The first porno film. The first film with a surprise ending. Jem, films are only about a hundred years old. There are people alive today who are older than any of those ideas. It’s not like they’re ancient inventions—they’re not fire or the wheel or anything. They were created by people whose names we know.”
Pirate Cinema Page 21