Pirate Cinema

Chapter 13

Shopped!/On the Road/Family Reunion

26 was outraged on my behalf and was sure that Katarina had shopped me. I told her she didn't know what she was talking about, that the lady had been so supportive of me. 26 demanded Katarina's e-mail address so she could send an angry message to her, but I said that wouldn't be fair.

“How about if I write her a message on a piece of paper and you take a picture of it and e-mail it to her?” I said.

She shook her head at me (I was already getting sick of this). “You poor sod, you're really stuck, aren't you? Am I going to end up being your Seeing Internet Dog for the next two weeks, then?”

“Come on,” I said. “I need to know whether she betrayed me or whether it just got out.”

26 rolled her eyes at me. “Fine,” she said. She dug through the piles of junk in her room and came up with an old school notebook. She tore a page out of the back of it, handed me a biro, and passed them to me. I shut my laptop lid and used it for a desk.

I started to write, got as far as “Dear Katarina, I was in court today” and balled up the paper and chucked it aside. “Paper,” I said.

“Maybe you should do it in pencil, Cecil,” 26 said.

“Shaddit,” I said, and she swatted me and handed me more paper. It took three tries, but this is what I got:

Dear Katarina, I had my hearing today, about the court case where all the film studios are suing me for millions of pounds for remixing your grandad's films. They wanted the court to take my Internet access away and they got what they wanted. The reason that happened is that they had a copy of the video I gave to you, the one about the security checks at the cinema. You were the only person besides me who had a copy. I don't remember if I told you not to distribute it. I guess I just wanted to know if you passed it on to those lawyers to get me in trouble, or what?

I included my phone number and signed it, and 26 shot it with her phone and attached it to an e-mail and sent it off.

“How'd the exams go?” I said. She's been playing nonchalant about them all along, but I knew that her guts'd been in knots about it. 26 was smart, the kind of smart they love at school, and she'd always got fantastic marks, but that seemed to make her more anxious about succeeding, not less. Figure that one out.

“I can never tell. I think it all went well, except, well, maybe I'm wrong, right? Like the calculus -- it seemed too easy, like maybe I was just not understanding the questions right.” She shook her head hard and went Waaaaargh! and jumped up and down on the spot a while. “That's better. It's over in any event. And it's just going to start again at uni next year, of course.”

I didn't say anything. We both knew that she was going to go off to university eventually. She was such a brain-box, and her parents would flay her alive if she didn't. She kept talking about taking a gap year and working, but the parental authorities were very down on the idea, and besides, it was only delaying the inevitable.

26 caught it. She always caught it. “I've been reading up on the law program at University College London. There's an Intellectual Property specialist course that looks perfectly awful, raw propaganda for the entertainment industry. I was thinking it'd be a fun place to go and shout at people for the next four years.”

I smiled. “Really? UCL? As in, right here in London?”

She'd put in for Oxford and Cambridge, of course, and Sheffield and Nottingham. But this was the first she'd said about UCL.

“Right here,” she said.

“But I thought you wanted to do public policy, right? Oxford?”

She looked away. “Oh, Oxford's overrated. It's all rah-rah punting and snobbishness. Be- sides, law's just another side to public policy. And with a law degree, I could defend people like you! Public policy's just a fast-track to being a career bureaucrat or a politician.”