Pirate Cinema

Chapter 8

By the time the editing and the grocery shopping and the eating and the interviews were done, if I was lucky I'd get an hour or two with 26 -- who was doing almost everything I was doing, plus keeping up with her final year's worth of schoolwork -- before heading out for the night -- either to one of our cinema nights or to some meeting that Annika's people had put together to talk about how to make things better next time.

I'd get home exhausted but unable to sleep from all the coffee and adrenaline and excite- ment, and often as not I'd spin up a little pin-sized spliff and then smoke it while I did a few more edits and waited for it to kick in and tie weights to my eyelids and my arms and legs and drag me off the chair and onto the mattress on the floor, until the alarm woke me to start it all over again.

Week after week this continued, punctuated by increasingly common phone-calls home to Cora and my parents. It looked like Cora would finish out her year okay, not the best grades she'd ever got, but not the worst, either. She was using the newly restored network connection to do a series of independent study projects on how corrupt the Theft of Intel- lectual Property Act's passage had been, and was making a arsing pest of herself calling up the offices of MPs who'd voted for it, asking them to talk to her for the projects.

It turned out that her teachers adored this sort of thing and had put her up for some kind of district-wide student-work competition, with the winning essay to be published on the BBC's website and presented nationally, Which would be quite a laugh, what with it making Parliament look like a bunch of corporate lickspittles. Well, I'd laugh, anyway. Mum and Dad were doing a bit better now that the network was back, and most times when I rang, we could get through ten or fifteen minutes without them recriminating against me and telling me that I should come home and asking me what I was doing with my life.

I didn't answer this last one. My face hadn't been in the papers for quite some time now, and to be honest, that's how I liked it. It had been ages since anyone on the street had recognized me, since anyone on a bus had squinted at me from across the aisle, as if trying to remember where they knew me from. All in all, that was for the best.

But without my picture on the front of the paper, Mum and Dad quickly forgot how proud they were of me and once again began to worry that a wee lad like myself might get led astray by bad company in dirty old London. Nothing I said could dissuade them from this, and to be honest, if they knew, actually knew what I was up to, they'd say that they were perfectly correct about what had happened to their beloved son in the terrible city.

But those calls didn't get me down for long. Nothing did. That sense of overwhelming, all-consuming busy-ness kept anything from making so much as a scratch on me. I had too much to do to mope or grump or moan. I was living life, not complaining about it, and Christ, didn't it feel wonderful?

Yeah, so that was my life there for quite some time. It was all our lives, thrown headlong into it, and every week there were more e-mails, more films, more press queries, more people who seemed to care about what we were up to. And there were more people coming to the cinema nights, and there were more cinemas -- not just ours. They popped up all over town and I tried to go to as many as I could make it to -- even if it meant skipping out for part of ours. I wanted to see what they were showing, and if it was any good, I wanted to poach it for one of our nights. Plenty of it was good and some of it was so freaking fantastic, I wanted to find the makers and prostrate myself at their feet and beg to be taught by one so skilled.

Of course, it couldn't last.

26 let herself into the Zeroday one Wednesday afternoon, just like any other Wednesday afternoon. She had her own key, and she came over plenty of days after school -- her parents didn't mind so long as she spent at least three nights per week at home and kept her grades up. I was on the sofa in the sitting room, using a hot-glue gun to attach feathers from a feather-duster to a mad birdy crow mask with evil button eyes and a cruel beak made from a bit of curved umbrella-ribbing draped with black vinyl, every bit of it rescued from the rubbish.

She plonked herself down on the sofa next to me and gave me a giant, flying cuddle that nearly crushed the mask, biting hard on my earlobe and my neck so that I squirmed and pushed and screeched “Gerorff!” and tickled at her with one hand while holding the mask away from the melee with the other.

“Oh, oh, oh,” she said, chortling and holding her belly and kicking her legs in the air while leaning back against me. “It's so fantastic, wait'll you hear!”

“What?” I said. I couldn't think of what it was -- a great video she'd found, a daring location for the next cinema, top grades in some subject at school?

“I've had a call from Letitia. She says that she's going to introduce a private member's bill to repeal TIP. It's been such a disaster -- there's over two thousand people gone to prison now, and most of them are minors. She reckons that between that and all the civil disobedience in the pirate cinemas, there's never been a better time to get the MPs whipped up about the issue. Everyone says there'll be an election before the summer, and no one wants to be on the ballot after voting for a bill that put kids in jail for listening to music and watching telly.”

I cocked my head. “I don't know much about this stuff, but isn't this kind of a, you know, a gesture? Is there any chance they'll pick it up in Parliament? Why would they vote for this when they wouldn't vote against TIP in the first place?”

She waved her hands airily. “When they were debating TIP, the entertainment lobbyists were saying that we were all overreacting, that it would only be used selectively against organized crime kingpins and the like. Now we can show that we were right all along. I rang Annika on the way over and she thinks it might be a goer, too. She says that the cinema nights have kept all the attention on what real creativity is, and on the injustice of TIP; what's more, they're a perfect place to beat the drum for people to get out and support it.”

I allowed myself to feel a small glimmer of hope. This was better than I'd ever dreamed: the Pirate Cinema nights weren't just empty protest or a way of having a great party and showing off, they were going to make a difference. We would change the law, we'd beat back those corporate arseholes, take power back for the people.

I set down the mask and gave 26 a huge, wet kiss that went on and on for quite some time. I couldn't stop grinning -- not that evening, and not that night, behind the elaborately painted surgical mask I'd swapped with Rabid Dog for. The films had never been better, the crowd never more fascinating, the night never more magic.

Land of the commercial interludes

A lot of these commercial interludes are meant to be silly or jokey, but I'm going to be serious for this one. I've been giving away free ebooks since February 4, 2003. When I plunged into it, I wasn't entirely sure it would work. I held my breath for about two days. Then my publisher told me the hardcover was selling briskly, and they were delighted with the book's performance, and I let it all out in a whoosh.

Three years later, I quit my day-job to write full time. Two years after that, I had a daughter. Two years after that, my wife quit her job to launch a startup. Now I'm basically the sole supplier of income to my little family in central London. We have modest needs, and we do very well, to be perfectly frank. My books sell well, all over the world, and get licensed for audio, for dramatic adaptation, and film, as well as tons of translations. We've got money in the bank, we're putting away some for our retirement, and we're crossing our fingers for Alice's cool startup.

There's a good chance that you can't afford to buy this book. There's a chance that you -- like so many people today -- have no work, or not enough. You might have a family like mine, but you might be finishing up your month with nothing extra to put away. You might be finishing up the month with not enough, and trying to stretch a few bucks further than a few bucks can possibly be stretched.

Or you might be a student or recent grad struggling with loans -- and don't I know what a scam that is! Or you might just be down on your luck.

If that's the case, don't worry about it. This one's on me. Get me when you can. And if you can't, that's OK, too. Hang in there.