Pirate Cinema

Chapter 14

Good friends and lifted spirits/Magnum opus (“It's Not Fair!”)/Parliament Cinema

I thought about calling Annika or one of the organizers or politicos I'd met along the way, but in my head, the conversation got as far as “We've lost, there's no point, we might as well chuck it in,” and then trailed off.

So I went home, sulking the whole way, the now-familiar long journey across London to the Zeroday. It was Friday, and the TIP-Ex vote was due on Monday. On Tuesday, I was scheduled to go on trial for £78 million worth of copyright infringement.

For all that, London seemed unaware that it had only days to go before all hope would be lost. The streets were full of people who clearly didn't give a toss about copyright, about TIP, or about anything apart from getting rat-arsed and howling through the night, vomming up their fried chicken into the gutter or having sloppy knee-tremblers with interesting strangers in the doorways of shuttered shops.

26 was right. These people would wake up on Tuesday morning and see some hard-to- understand headline about the defeat of some bill they'd never heard of and they'd ignore it and go back to talking about who had the West Nile virus, who had been rubbish and who had been brilliant on Celebrity Gymnastics, and which clubs they'd get blotto at next weekend. And if some of their mates went to jail, if their parents lost their livelihoods, if their kids couldn't make art or get an education, well, what could you really do about it? Just a fact of life, innit, like earthquakes or tsunamis.

Rabid Dog and Chester had scored some truly amazing food down at Borough Market and Jem had decided it was time for a feast. He'd been in the kitchen all day with Dodger, who had invited Rob over. Chester had brought along Hester, 26's old mate from Confusing Peach, and Aziz had come by with three kids about our age who'd been staying at his and helping him with a massive haul he'd brought in, turning it into saleable merchandise and moving it out through a small network of car-boot sale retailers he'd put together. They were your basic gutterpunks, but clever and moderately sober.

I'd invited 26 and she'd agreed to come and naturally we'd both forgot about this, so I came home just as Dodger was serving up a massive humble pie, stuffed with livers and heart and tripes in a simmering, rich brown gravy that was as thick as custard. The crust was yellow-gold and crackled like parchment when he sliced into it, releasing first a waft of butter smell, and then the meaty smells from within.

“Sit down, Cecil,” he said. “And shut your gob, you're letting the flies in and the dribble out.”

Something about coming through my familiar door and into a candle-lit room dominated by a huge table (okay, it was a bunch of little wobbly pub tables pushed together) ringed by friends and friends-of-friends, drinking wine, laughing, and this big, beautiful, ridiculous pie in the middle of it all -- it made me think that maybe, just maybe, my problems might be solved. Why not? We were the Jammie Dodgers, and we could do anything!

I took off my jacket, went into the kitchen and maneuvered around Jem -- resplendent in an apron, working madly at five bubbling pots on the massive cooker -- and washed my hands in the sink. Back at the table, someone had poured me a glass of wine, and Dodger had dished me up an enormous slice of pie. Jem burst out of the kitchen carrying platters of roast parsnips, duck-fat potatoes, tureens of white sauce, and a massive loaf of thick- crusted brown bread studded with olives and capers. It steamed when he tore off hunks and chucked them at us, and the air was filled with baked-bread perfume. There were saucers of coarse salt and saucers of dark green olive oil, and we dipped the bread in the oil and then the salt and chewed it like gum, hot and fatty and salty and so fresh it almost burned your mouth.

Then we attacked the pie and the veg and there was wine-guzzling and arms reaching across the table to top up everyone's glasses whenever they ventured even a little below the full line. We didn't talk about copyright or film remixing or finding £78 million with which to pay off the nutters at the film studios. Instead, we gossiped about friends; Dodger told near-death electrocution stories; Hester regaled us with stories of drug-fueled excess from a party we'd all missed; Rabid Dog had a new joke he'd made up about three children who go wandering in a woods filled with serial killers (it went on and on, getting funnier and funnier, until it came to the punchline: “I thought you were going to chop the firewood!” and we fell about laughing); Aziz and his minions explained a gnarly driver problem they were having with a load of de-authorized sound-cards and solved it for themselves as they described it and cheered and slapped one another on the back; Chester had just read a mountain of downloaded ancient comics called Transmetropolitan that he couldn't shut up about... In other words, it was a brilliant table full of amazing, uproarious conversation, piled high with delicious food.