Pirate Cinema

Chapter 6

The Guardian mentioned that all the video was up for download on ZeroKTube and the comment sections on the download page filled up with hundreds of messages from all over the world, sometimes with links to other mixes of the same footage that other people had made, seemingly overnight. Just a few hours before, I'd felt all alone in the world, an idiot kid fighting a stupid war. Now I felt like I was part of a whole world of people who knew what I knew, felt what I felt. It was the best feeling in the world.

Everyone at the Zeroday was in a fantastic mood. Jem made us coffee that was the strongest, most delicious thing to come out of his kitchen yet. Chester and Rabid Dog announced that they were making breakfast and disappeared into the kitchen. I trailed after them and they put me to work as sous-chef, chopping this, stirring that, googling recipes and scrubbing pots and rooting through our larder for ingredients.

We brought out breakfast to a round of applause that intensified as Chester announced each dish: buckwheat porridge baked in milk with black currants and honey; grilled mush- rooms with dill; buttered scones with raspberry jam; streaky bacon and wild boar sausage; and more. It was all the bounty of various skips around town. Chester turned out to have a real passion for them, and had just lucked into a load of half-frozen organic meat that a Waitrose chucked out when its freezer broke down. Knowing the food had all come for free and been prepared with our own hands made it all the more delicious.

And so did Rabid Dog's special home-made chili sauce, which he had made and put up in little jars the month before, filling the house with choking, pepper-spray clouds made from the lethal Scotch Bonnet seeds he'd minced and flash-cooked before pickling them with spice and tomato puree. We sat there, stuffing our gobs and marveling at our own cleverness. After a year in London, I had found a home, a community, and a purpose in life. I was only seventeen years old, but I'd already made more of a mark on the world than either of my parents, already found something extraordinary to be and do. I felt like a god, or at least a godling.

So, of course, that's just when it all went to shit.

After breakfast, we did the washing up and drifted away to our laptops. It was gone two in the afternoon, and we'd wrangled two more days' use of the van out of Aziz to clear out the best junk from Sewer Cinema so that we could store it in the Zeroday for our next performance, whenever that was. But we couldn't do that until after dark, and so we drifted off to our laptops and began to read the reviews and that.

I lay down for a nap, my arms and legs leaden with food and hangover, Jem's coffee having lifted me up and then dropped me like a sack of potatoes. But I'd hardly closed my eyes when someone knocked at my door. I swam up from sleep, trying to make sense of the knocking and my surroundings.

“I'm sleeping,” I grunted at the shut door and whomever was behind it.

“It's Cora.” She sounded upset.

I groaned. “Come in,” I said, and sat up, gathering my quilt around me.

Cora flicked on the light when she came in and I shielded my eyes against the glare. When they adjusted, I saw that she was grim-faced and starey. Uh-oh.

She moved a pile of dirty clothes and magazines and assorted junk off my edit-suite chair and perched on it. “I just spoke to Mum and Dad.” I facepalmed myself and groaned again. Mum and Dad didn't read The Guardian -- they didn't read any newspapers, but The Guardian was a paper they especially didn't read. But now that I'd given it two seconds' thought, I realized that someone would have passed the paper onto them.

“They're upset?”

She sighed. “No. Yes. Sort of. I think they finally believe me now about you not being some kind of junkie prostitute rent-boy.”