Flop!/A toolsmith/Family Reunion/Late reviews
We all had theories about what would happen next. I thought that the cinema people would go well mental and announce a fatwa on all of us, releasing weird, blurry CCTV footage of our costumed army with our fuzzed-out heads; cut to apoplectic industry spokesdroid who'd call us terrorists and declare us to be the greatest-ever threat to the film industry, while solemnly intoning the millions we'd cost them with our stunt.
All the rest of the night, and then the rest of the weekend, we reloaded as many news- sources as we could find, searched on every search term. All we found were a few be- mused tweets and that from people who'd been in the queue; almost everyone, it seemed, had discarded the booty we'd distributed or not bothered to plug it in.
In hindsight, I could see that this made perfect sense. No one cared about what a human spammer shoved into your hands, it was assumed that anything you got that way was junk. That's why they had to hand out so many brochures to get a single person to sign up for a gym membership or whatnot. Add to that the antique media -- you couldn't even do a rub-transfer, you had to fit it to a USB connector, and half the PCs I saw these days didn't even have one -- and the risks of sticking dodgy files on your computer and it was perfectly reasonable that nearly all of our little footballs went in the bin.
What a misery.
“I'm a flop,” I said, lying awake and rigid on Sunday night, while Twenty sat up and worked on her chem homework for the next morning. “I might as well go back to Bradford. What a child I was to think that I could beat them. They're sodding huge. They practically run the government. They're going to shut down every channel for showing around video except the ones they control, and no one will be able to be a filmmaker except through them. It's just like music -- the way they went after every music download site they couldn't control.”
26 gave no sign of even hearing me, just working through her problem-set, tapping on the screen and at the keyboard.
“The worst part is that I got all those people out there, used up all their time, put them all at risk, and it was for nothing. They must think I'm an absolute tosser. I want to stick my head in the ground for a million years. Maybe then, everyone will have forgot my stupidity and shame.”
Twenty set down her laptop and blew at the fringe of her mohican that fell across her forehead. She'd died it candy-apple red that week. “Cecil, you're wallowing. It is a deeply unattractive sight. What's more: it is a piece of enormous ego for you to decide that we all were led into this by you, like lambs led by a shepherd. We went into Leicester Square on Friday because we all thought it would work. You didn't make the plan, you got it started. We all made the plan. We all cocked up. But do you see RD or Chester or Jem moping?
Look at the freaking Germans! They're out in Hackney tonight, trying to sneak into all- hours clubs and planning on drinking their faces off no matter what! So leave it out, all right?”
She was right, of course. Not that I felt any better about it. “All right, you're right. It's not just about me. But it's still awful and rotten and miserable. What do we do? They buy the laws, attack our families, put us in prison --”
26 picked up her laptop again. “Cecil, I don't want to talk to you when you're like this. You know the answer as well as I do: you're doing something that they want you to stop. They fear what you do. They fear what we all do. So long as you keep doing it, you're winning. You don't need to go on a commando raid to beat them: you just need to keep on making your own films.”
I don't think anyone ever said anything more important to me than those ten words: “you just need to keep on making your own films.”
I threw myself into the project, stopping work only long enough to eat and snatch a few hours sleep, or to go out for a little fishing in the skips to find some food. I hardly left my room apart from that. My skin grew pale from the hours indoors, and I noticed that when I went up and down the stairs, I felt all sorts of awkward pulling and pinching sensations from deep in my muscles, especially around my bum and back and neck. 26 said I was sitting too much and made me download some yoga videos, which we did together in my room when she could force me off the box.
But she wasn't pissed at me. No one was, that was the amazing thing. I was editing fu- riously, putting together films in ways that just seemed to appear behind my eyes and in my fingers -- first a scene with Scot fighting vampires that pulled together all kinds of vam- pires from more than a century's worth of filmmaking, including the magnificently creepy Max Schreck, upsampled for some retrospective festival that the BFI had done. Rabid Dog spent an afternoon watching over my shoulder as I worked, and he was amazing -- I'd never dreamt that anyone could know that much about vampire films. By the time the scene was done, I had a new appreciation for vampire films, and I decided that I would expand my scene into an entire short film, in which Scot is a distressed older gentleman, alone in the world, who befriends a young boy (also Scot, which worked surprisingly well), and discovers that vampires are on the loose in his town. Unlike the other videos I'd done, I didn't really play this one for laughs: it was straight up action-horror, and it took the com- bined might of my encyclopedic knowledge of Scot's thousands of hours' of footage and Dog's insane horror obsession to pull it off.
We worked on it for three weeks straight, editing and editing, subjecting our housemates to rough cuts. The idea was to polish out all the seams, all the places where it became clear that these were footage from different films. I dropped them all into black and white to correct for the different color balances in the different sources, then I punched up the shadows on a frame-by-frame basis, giving it the dramatic contrast of some of the older, scarier horror films that Dog made me sit through. Some days I spent hours just shaving out individual pixels, rubbing out the edges, until one day, I watched all twenty-two minutes of it and realized it was perfect.
“This is as good as anything I've ever seen at the cinema,” 26 said from her perch on the sofa-arm. “Honestly.”
“But no one'd show this at any cinema,” Jem said. “Not in a million years. Too weird. Wrong length. Black and white. Sorry, mate, but I think the best you'll do is a couple bazillion hits on ZeroKTube or similar.”
I didn't say anything. Some old ideas I'd had were knocking together in a new way. I restarted the video and we all watched it through again. It was damn scary. The kind of thing that made the hairs on your neck stand up -- partly that was the way the organ music worked. That was another Dog find -- it had come from a fifth-rate monster film, but the director had scored it in a huge old cathedral with the original organ, and you could really hear the reverberations of the low notes in a way that was flat-out spooky.
“Imagine seeing this somewhere really spooky,” I said. “Someplace that actually feels haunted. Not on some tetchy laptop screen -- somewhere dangerous.”
“Like the graveyard,” Chester said. “That night we all met up. That was brilliant. But it's too cold and wet for that sort of nonsense right now, mate. It'd have to wait for next summer.”
“Someplace like the graveyard, but someplace indoors. Underground.” I snatched up my laptop and went back to my favorite infiltration site. There was a whole subculture of men- talists who spent their nights breaking into boarded up tube stations, forgotten sewers, abandoned buildings, and other places you just aren't meant to be. They lovingly docu- mented their infiltrations with video uploads and maps, carefully masking their faces and voices. It was fantastic watching, all this brilliant mountaineer's ropework, expert lockpick- ing, and the thrill of discovery as these modern explorers invaded modern ruins that human eyes hadn't seen for generations.
The video I called up was one I'd watched several times: it showed an infiltration gang making its way into an abandoned sewer under the Embankment, built as a spillover sewer when the river Thames was locked in the nineteenth century. They accessed it by means of an anonymous doorway that guarded a narrow stairway that led down into a maintenance room.
The door was locked, but not very well. The Greater London Authority standard for this kind of door was an old Yale lock, vulnerable to a “bump” attack, which even I could do: you just slid a filed-down key-blank into the lock, then rapped it smartly with a little hammer. The energy from the hammer-blow traveled along the key's shaft and was transmitted into the lock's pins, which flew up into the lock-mechanism for a brief moment, during which you could simply turn the doorknob and open the door. All told, bumping a Yale took less time than opening it with the actual key.
A series of locked (but bumpable) doors leading off the maintenance room took them deeper and deeper into the underground works, including a revolting stretch of catwalk that ran over an active sewer. The explorers wrapped cloth around their faces for this part, but even so, they made audible retching noises as they passed over the river of crap.
Two more locked doors and they were in: a huge, vaulted chamber, like the inside of a cathedral, all Victorian red brickwork with elaborate archways and close-fitted tiles on the floor and running up the walls. As the explorers' torches played over the magnificent room, we all breathed in together.
“There's my cinema,” I said.
“Oh yes, I think so,” Jem said. “That's the place all right.”
We went that night, straight down to the Embankment with reversible hi-viz vests that we'd hung with realistic-looking laminated badges and passes for various municipal enti- ties. They wouldn't hold up if we got hauled into a police station, but in the dark, they'd be convincing enough. We bumped the locks and retraced the spelunkers' route. We'd brought along some paper painter's facemasks and these did the trick well enough when we crossed the active sewer, and when we reached the big room, we strung up a load of white LED lanterns we used during the frequent breaker-overloads at the Zeroday. They lit it up with a spooky light that turned buttery with all the dust-motes floating in the air.
Twenty paced the chamber's length, thinking aloud: “We'd get, what, two hundred or three hundred chairs in here. Put a bar over there. We'll have to clear out the dust; that'll be a ten-person job at least. Need lanterns strung along the route, too. The screen'll go, erm, there, I think, and we'll need to do something about a toilet --”
“It's a sewer, love,” Jem said, prodding her in the ribs with a friendly finger as she paced past him.
“Yes, all right, sure, but we can't ask people to crap right here by the bar, can we, now?”
“There's no bar,” Jem said.
“Not yet. But there will be. And three hundred people -- that's a lot of wee and poo and that. We need a ladies' and a gents'.”
Jem slipped his mask over his face and headed out into the active sewer. He came back a moment later, waving his torch.
“There's a little ledge to either side of the walkway there, just beside the door. Wide enough to build a couple of outhouses, they'd just to have a hole in the floor leading straight down into the sewer, right?”
We all made faces. “That's disgusting,” 26 said.
“What? It's where it all goes in the end. Not like we're going to be able to rig up proper plumbing down here, right? The smell'll stop people from lingering in the toilets, too. We'll put some hand sanitizer here, by the door.
“What about a band?” said Chester, finger on his chin.
“What about it?” I said.
“Well, something to get the crowd worked up, before the films, like?”
“Who ever heard of a band before a film?”
“Who ever heard of a film in a sewer?”
“Touché,” I said.
“This is going to be brilliant,” 26 said. She gave me an enormous hug, and it was all wonderful.
I'd learned a lot about construction and renovations from the work we'd done on the Zero- day, but that was nothing compared to the size of the job we faced in the Sewer Cinema, as we quickly took to calling it. First, of course, was the problem of how to move all the materials in without getting arrested.
Aziz looked at us like we were mad when we asked him about it, but after we talked about how wonderful it could be, and showed him the videos, he nodded. “Yeah,” he said, “that could work. But you're going to need some things.”
“Some things” turned out to be a portable chain-link fence with opaque plastic mesh, em- blazoned “TEMPORARY WORKS - J SMITH AND SONS - CONSIDERATE BUILDER SCHEME - RING 08003334343.”
“Just bung that up around your doorway after dark, turn up with a bunch of hi-viz vests and hard hats and keep the brims low --”
“We could put those infrared LEDs in 'em,” Jem said.
“Yeah,” Aziz said. “That too. And you'll need a vehicle.”
He took us out behind his warehouse where there were a half dozen cars in various states of disassembly. One of them was a typical white panel van, gray with city muck, hubcaps rusted, bonnet with the scars of an old, cack-handed conversion to hybrid. You saw one just like it every ten seconds or so on London's streets, night or day. The number-plate was artfully spattered with mud and filth, so you could only make out a few digits on it.
“That's my beauty,” Aziz said. “The White Whale. She's a workhorse, she is. Go anywhere, carry any load, never complain. And a motor like that commands respect on the streets of London, my boy. Practically screams, 'I have nothing to lose' -- any crash with an estate- banger like this is going to do more harm to the other geezer than you.”
Jem grinned and smacked his hands together. “She's perfect, Aziz.”
Twenty gave him a playful cuff on the back of the head. “It's a van, Jem, not a girl. Be- have.”
Jem pretended he hadn't heard. “How long can we have her for?”
Aziz shrugged. “I have far too much inventory these days. The skips have been too good to me. I was planning on having a week off from them, though it breaks my heart to think of all the lovely junk I'll miss. I'm just too full up now. So, a week? You can drive, can't you Jem?”
“I used to drive the tractor on the farm,” Jem said. “Can't be much different, can it?”
I tried to picture Jem living on a farm somewhere, mucking out the pigpen and scattering feed for the hens. I couldn't do it. Jem almost never talked about his background, and when he did, he often told ridiculous stories, all of which contradicted one another. I didn't push it. If he said he could drive, I expected he could.
“Fine, fine,” Aziz said. “But if you wreck her or get stopped by the law, I'm going to report it as stolen, you understand me?”
“I wouldn't have it any other way, my old,” Jem said. “Just so, just so.”
And that was how we got the car.
Aziz helped us fill the car with many of the bits and pieces we'd need from his enormous stock -- practically everything we'd need to kit out the cinema: beamers, sound system, lights, loads of power supplies and that. We'd have to get the chairs and bar from some- where -- there were several dozen chairs in the Zeroday, of course, and folding chairs were an easy scrounge, the kind of thing that often turned up on the curb on rubbish day. 26 reckoned that if we put the word out to the Confusing Peach lot to snag any they saw, we'd have more than enough come the day.
Chester, meanwhile, had quite an eye for building sites where there was extra lumber lying around unloved and unregarded, and he reckoned he'd have an easy time getting enough to build a few outhouses, especially as we planned on using wood for the floors and seats, and do the walls with tarpaulin, which we'd found miles of in the Zeroday's cellars.
And Chester had found a band: The Honey Roasted Landlords were an odd bunch, play- ing a huge number of instruments -- big horns like the sousaphone, fiddles, and upright bass, a couple of squeezeboxes and a load of little drums -- and all of them were acoustic, an enormous plus as it saved us working out how to get them all equalized into the cin- ema's sound system. The singers even sang into paper megaphones, using strange, nasal voices, a style Chester told me was actually called “megaphone singing,” and it dated back to the time before electrical microphones. Their sound was dead weird: old fashioned, of course, can't help but sound old-fashioned with all that brass and the megaphones and that, but there was something in the melodies, and the speed in which they played, that sounded not just contemporary, but somehow futuristic, like something out of a sci-fi flick. They had a big following in London already, and their own mailing list, and they'd do it for the chance to ring up some donations, as was their way. Chester told me that they could bring in a thousand quid or more in a night from the generosity of their audiences.
What's more, their fans were fantastic visual artists -- collage types who'd whip up posters and handbills for their events that subtly reworked everything from commercial signage to iconic photos to fine art to film stills to make stuff that just *popped*. All illegal as hell, naturally, which was even better, far as I was concerned. Soon as I saw their stuff, I knew they were the right band and the right kind of people for our big night.
Chester was also working on his own film for the night, another short feature, this one a recut of all the MPs who'd said stupid, smarmy things in support of the Theft of IP Act, supered over infamous film courtroom scenes, and he replaced the prisoners in the dock with all the infamous kids who'd been bunged in jail since the law passed. It didn't have a spec of humor in it, but it wasn't really meant to, and watching it made my blood boil.
Rabid Dog had been secretly working on his own thing: an absolutely delightful remake of a popular zombie franchise, The Walking Dead, turned into a comedy, as was his thing, a series of six trailers, one after the other, for each part of the series. They got funnier and funnier, until you were roaring with laughter, practically wetting yourself. I figured it'd be a great warm-up for my feature.
There was no question that my feature would be the main event. It wasn't even mine, properly speaking. Everyone in the Zeroday had had a hand in it, arguing over the cuts and the pacing and the voice-over and that. It wouldn't have been nearly so good if it had merely been mine. We were all slavering to show it to the world -- once we'd screened it, we would salt ZeroKTube and all the other video sites to get it shown around. I'd never been as proud of anything in my life.
We began to spend our nights at the Sewer Cinema, unloading kit from the White Whale, setting things up by battery-powered lanterns. We had a load of spare batteries for these and at the end of every night, we brought them back to the Zeroday to charge them. It was half-term for 26, and she simply told her parents she was working on a big, secret project with me and they left her alone. It made me doubly envious: first, to have parents that understanding; and second, to have parents at all. Whenever I thought of my poor folks back in Bradford, it felt like sand had got in behind my eyes and a balloon was being inflated behind my heart, crushing it.
But I still couldn't bring myself to call them. At first, I'd been scared they'd order me home, make a scene. Then, as more time crept past without my ringing, I found that I was too ashamed to ring -- ashamed that I'd let it go so long. I couldn't explain myself to them, had no way to account for putting my parents through their torture. But then, hadn't I always been torture for them? Hadn't I cost them everything already with my reckless behavior? I was the family's chief embarrassment and useless layabout -- but here at the Zeroday, I was the mighty Cecil B. DeVil, with my glorious girlfriend, my brilliant videos, my excellent friends, and my grand plans to turn the sewers of London into cinemas.
I still checked in on the throwaway phone number I'd given Cora, ringing it every day or every second day if things were busy. She sometimes left me chatty little messages that barely masked the pain she was going through. Once or twice we arranged times for me to call her back and we had brittle little conversations that were lighthearted parodies of the real talkers we'd have back in the old days.
But on the third day of our preparations in Sewer Cinema, I got a different sort of message: “Hey, Trent. Well, hope you pick this one up soon. Very soon. Cos I'm on my way to London. Ha! Yes, I am. Gave myself French Leave, as they say. Things were just not working out with the crumblies and well, I shouldn't have to explain this to you, right? Of all people, right? So. Well. I'll be in about 9:00 P.M. It'd be just great if you'd leave me a real number I could reach you on. You can't call my old number. Right after I finish this call, I'm dropping the SIM in the bin and getting a new one. Your little sister's no dummy, right? Well. Okay. That's it. Erm. Love you? Okay. Love you. Call me.”
I was breathing so hard at this point that I was actually dizzy. I stood behind the J SMITH AND SONS hoarding in my hard-hat an hi-viz, clutching my phone to my head, trying not to fall over. 26 was going past with an armload of chairs, but she stopped when she saw me.
“Cec? What is it?”
I unlocked my phone with shaking hands, checked the time: 11:00 P.M. Cora'd been wan- dering the streets of London for two hours. “Cora,” I said, punching the redial button to call back into the voice mail drop, talking as calmly as I could, “Cora, it's Trent,” I said, and I caught sight of 26's face as I said my real name in front of her for the first time. It was all so much to be thinking about, I could barely keep track of it all. “Cora, it's me. Here's my number. Erm.” I had an impulse to tick her off, tell her she was an idiot and irresponsible and did she know how much trouble she could get into here in London, a girl like her on her own? But even in my state, I knew what a hypocrite I'd be to say that sort of thing. I knew that I wouldn't tolerate it if our positions were reversed. “Call me, all right? Call me quick.”
It wasn't until after I put the phone down that I realized I'd just given her my real number and that meant if she was still at home, helping my parents track me down, I was done for.
“What is it, Cecil?” 26 said again.
“My sister,” I said. “She's in London on her own.” I slid down the hoarding until I was sat on the pavement, my back propped against it. “On her own,” I said again, my voice lost in the traffic noises from the other side of the hoarding. “Oh, God, Twenty, what will I do?”
The next hour was agony. I made 26 go back to work. I couldn't risk being down in the tunnel when Cora rang, and I waited and waited for the call, remembering all the creepy types in Victoria when I'd come off the bus that first night. It made me realize just how cruel and awful I'd been to my parents. That set me to crying. My friends trooped past me, carrying gear, silently, pretending that they couldn't see me standing in the dark, snuffling back my sobs, tears dripping off my face onto the pavement.
And then my mobile rang. “Cora?” I said, hitting the button.
“Hey, Trent,” she said. Her voice sounded tiny, terrified, a one-molecule-thick layer of guts and bravery pasted over it.
“Where are you?”
“I'm in a call box,” she said. “Near the station. Most of the phones were out of service, or were being used.” I heard traffic behind her, heard some idiot boys hooting filthy things at her from out a car window. She gave a small, suppressed whimper.
“Is it safe to go back to the station? Tell me honestly. I need to know.”
“Yes,” she said. “I think so. It's a big road -- I don't reckon anyone'd give me trouble with this much traffic about.”
I'd been fully prepared to call the law if she'd said no, even if it meant turning myself in. But I knew my sister. If she said it was safe, it was safe. “Go back to the taxi rank,” I said. Victoria Station served the Gatwick Express -- the train to Gatwick airport -- and there was a big rank with hundreds of black cabs all night, and several porters directing the travelers. She'd be as safe there as anywhere. “I'll meet you there in fifteen minutes.” I'd already got thirty pounds off my mates to supplement the fifteen I had in my pocket. That'd be plenty for a cab there and back, with plenty left over for contingencies and unforeseen circumstances.
“Yeah, all right. Thanks, Trent.”
I swallowed. “That's what big brothers are for, innit?” I put the phone down.
I kissed 26 hard, and said, “I'll be back quick.” I stepped out into the road, leaving behind my hi-viz and hat, stood off a few yards from the White Whale, and stuck my hand out at the next black cab that went past. The driver pulled up to the curb and eyed me with suspicion.
“Can you take me to Victoria Station?”
The driver squinted at me. He was about a million years old, a proper ancient London black-cab driver, the sort that looks like he's some kind of wizened gnarled tree that's grown out of the seat of his taxi. “It's third tariff after ten,” he said. “You know that, right, sir?”
I felt a sear of anger at this old bastard, giving me a hard time when I was trying to rescue my sister. Six months ago, I would have cursed him out and kicked the wheel of his cab, and sent him off, but now I knew I couldn't afford to indulge my anger.
“Sir,” I said, drawing the money out of my pocket and fanning it out, “I have the money. I've just had a call to tell me that my little sister has run away from home and turned up at Victoria. She's fifteen, she's alone, and I'm trying to get to her as quickly as I can. Can you take me there?”
He grunted and squinted at me, then jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Get in, mate, we'll go get this wayward sister of yours, all right?”
I jumped in, settling myself on the big back-seat, belting myself in as the driver pulled away into the road, putting his foot down and turning London into a black blur dashed with streaks of white light that we tore past. The red intercom light was on, and the driver said, “She a clever girl, your sister? Good head on her shoulders?”
He was looking at me in the rear-view mirror. “A lot smarter than me,” I said. “But she's too young to be on her own, and I'm nowhere near responsible enough to look after her.”
He laughed, a sound like a series of coughs, and winked at me in the mirror. “You sound like you're sensible enough to know that you're not sensible, which is a pretty good trick. Let's get this young lady with all due haste, then, shall we? Victoria's no place for a child to be out on her own after dark.” So saying, he revved the engine and yanked at the gearshift, overtaking a night bus and pressing me back into the squeaking seat.
London had been a blur before -- now it was a screech of lights and movement that I went past so fast I couldn't make out any details, just jumbled impressions of lights and motion.
Abruptly he geared down and braked hard at a red light and I saw that we were about to turn into the Victoria Station taxi rank. I put my thumb over the seat-belt release and dug for my money. He saw the notes in my hand in his rear-view and said, “Naw, naw, hold onto it. I'll wait for ya and take you back. We'll call it a tenner, even, and that'll be my good deed for the night, and don't say I never done nuffing for you.”
I stopped with the money in my hand, trying to think of something to say that would express my gratitude, but no words rose to my lips. “Thanks” was the best I could manage, but the cabbie looked like he understood, and he swung into the turnabout and set the brake, unlocking my door. In a flash, I was out and searching, a fresh rain making everything go swimmy and glittery. I hunted the length of the long queue in the taxi rank twice before I spotted her, huddled, face down, hunched behind the luggage trolleys, her hair hanging over her face.
“Cora?” I said.
She looked up and for a moment, I was staring at my little sister again -- not the young woman she'd become, but the little girl who used to follow me around, copy everything I did, look up to me, and look to me for approval. I nearly bawled there and then.
Her expression changed a bit and now I was looking at the Cora I knew, the teenager who was indeed much smarter than I ever was or would be, beautiful and sharp-tongued, who didn't really need her cock-up of a big brother anymore. Except that now she did, and she opened her arms and gave me a cuddle that was so hard the breath whooshed out of me. She smelled of home, of Bradford and our flat and the family I'd left behind, and that smell was a new shock as big as the earlier ones, and I was glad she was holding me so hard or I might have fallen to my knees.
“I've got a cab waiting,” I managed. “Come on.” I picked up her rucksack -- it weighed a ton -- and lugged it to the taxi, Cora clinging tight to my hand. We climbed inside, her eyes wide and staring in the buttery light from the tiny bulb in the cab's ceiling. I sat her down on the bench and folded down one of the jump-seats, so that we could face each other.
The cabbie looked over his shoulder, his face inches from mine, separated by the clear perspex, and he cocked a crooked grin at Cora. “You'd be the young lady, then,” he said. “Your brother here's been having kittens over you being out there all on your own, you know?”
My stomach sank. Saying something like this to Cora was bound to get her back up, make her feel like she was being patronized, which would only make my self-appointed task of sending her home again even harder.
But she didn't snap at the driver. Instead, she actually looked sheepish, ducking her face behind her fringe, and said, “I expect he was.”
The driver grunted with satisfaction. “Back to where I picked you up in the Embankment, yeah?”
“That's right,” I said. “Thanks.”
“Hold on, guv,” he said, and hit the intercom switch, leaving us in privacy as the cab lurched into traffic, and I was glad I'd put on my seat-belt or I would have ended up sitting in Cora's lap.
She grinned at me and I grinned back at her. “Welcome to London, I suppose,” I said.
She made a point of looking out the windows. “I like what you've done with the place,” she said.
Somehow, we managed not to talk about the fact that she had run away as we sped back to my friends. It seemed she knew the city better than I did, and she excitedly called out the name of each bridge as we passed it (I knew Tower Bridge and Millennium Bridge, because the former had a couple of dead great towers in the middle of it and the latter looked like it had been built out of futuristic ice-lolly sticks and steel cabling), and I found myself sharing in her excitement. Something about all that steel and fairy archways, lit up in the night, over the lapping black water, everything prismed by the rain spattering the windows.
We got out by the hoarding and I gave the driver a tenner and then passed him another fiver through the window. He grabbed my hand as I gave him the fiver and gave it a single hard, dry shake. “You take care of that sister of yours, and of yourself, you hear me, young man?”
“I will,” I said, and it came out like a promise.
He drove away, leaving us standing by the hoarding with the rain drizzling around us. “Trent?”
“Yes?”
“Why are we in the middle of this pavement?”
I had thought this one through, a bit of showmanship. I laid my finger alongside my nose and led her behind the hoarding, opening the door and ushering her into it, closing it behind us, leaving us in the warm gloom of the lantern we'd left in the corner of the vestibule.
She cocked her head at me. “Trent, what's going on?”
I laid my finger alongside my nose again, changing sides this time. “Oh, all shall be re- vealed in good time, my dear. Come along, now.”
I led her down the stairs, then said, “You'll want to hold your nose for this next bit.”
“Trent, what the hell is this about?” She was looking rather put out, which was good. At least she'd lost all her fright and timidity.
“Trust me, little sister,” I said. “All shall be revealed anon.”
“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 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 co-conspirators 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 one 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 re-shelving 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 hand-written “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 freaking 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 noth- ing 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 that 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 film.”
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.”
“You don't know their names,” Jem said, grinning. I could tell I was getting through to him.
Cora laughed like a drain. “Trent doesn't know anything unless he can google it. But I do. The novel was invented by Cervantes five hundred years ago: Don Quixote. And the detective story was invented in 1844 by Poe: The Purloined Letter. A fella named Hugo Gernsback came up with science fiction, except he called it scientifiction.”
I nodded at her, said, “Thanks --”
But she cut me off. “There's only one problem, Trent: The novel was also invented by Murasaki Shikibu, half-way around the world, hundreds of years earlier. Mary Shelley wrote science fiction long before Hugo Gernsback: Frankenstein was written in 1817. And so on. The film camera had about five different inventors, all working on their own. The problem with your theory is that these creators are creating something that comes out of their heads and doesn't exist anywhere else, but again and again, all through history, lots of things are invented by lots of people, over and over again. It's more like there are ideas out there in the universe, waiting for us to discover them, and if one person doesn't manage to make an idea popular, someone else will. So when you say that if you don't create something, no one will, well, you're probably not right.”
“Wait, what? That's rubbish. When I make a film, it comes out of my imagination. No one else is going to think up the same stuff as me.”
“Now you sound like me,” Jem said, and rubbed his hands together.
Cora patted my hand. “It's okay, it's just like you said. Everyone wants a definition of creativity that makes what they do into something special and what everyone else does into nothing special. But the fact is, we're all creative. We come up with weird and interesting ideas all the time. The biggest difference between 'creators' isn't their imagination -- it's how hard they work. Ideas are easy. Doing stuff is hard. There's probably a million geezers out there who love Scot Colford films, but none of them can be arsed to make something fantastic out of them, the way you do. The fact is, creativity is cheap, hard work is hard, and everyone wants to think his ideas are precious unique snowflakes, but ideas are like assholes, we've all got 'em.”
I sat down. 26 gave me a cuddle. “She's right, you know.”
I made a rude noise. “Of course she's right. She's the brains in the family, isn't she?”
Cora curtsied, and Jem clapped once or twice. “Well, that was invigorating. Who wants coffee?”
Cora called Mum and Dad later that afternoon, shutting herself in my bedroom for what seemed an eternity. 26 and I amused ourselves by googling the locations mentioned in Beneath the City Streets, checking out satellite and streetview images, as well as infiltration reports from intrepid urban spelunkers. A surprising number of the abandoned deep tube stations had virtually no information on them, which was exciting news -- if no one had been going down there, perhaps we could. Rabid Dog and Chester wandered in at some point and demanded to know what we were doing with our stacks of library books, then they, too, caught the excitement and began to google along with us. We were booked to take the White Whale down to the Sewer Cinema at nine that night, once the foot traffic had basically vanished, and they suggested that we visit some of the more promising sites beforehand, just to scout them in person.
We were all so engrossed that we didn't even notice when Cora came down the stairs and sat down on the sofa. And then I looked up and saw her sitting there, her eyes sunken and red-rimmed. I nudged 26 -- she had been e-mailing her day's lessons to her teachers so that she wouldn't be reported as truant. She looked at Cora for a moment, then elbowed me in the ribs. “Go talk with her,” she hissed.
I got up and held my hand out to Cora. Her hand was clammy and cold. I helped her to her feet. “Let's go for a walk, okay?”
She let me lead her up to the top floor, out the fire-door, and down the back stairs. We circled around the Zeroday and crossed the empty lot, striking out for the Bow high street.
“How'd that go, then?” I said, finally.
I saw her shake her head in my peripheral vision. “They're furious,” she said. “They think you lured me away. They think you're a drug addict or a prostitute or something.”
I felt like I'd been punched in the chest. I found that I was bunching my shirt in my fist. When I didn't say anything, Cora went on.
“I told them they were being stupid, that you had a place to live and that you were doing good stuff, but they weren't hearing any of it. As far as they're concerned, there was only one reason you could possibly have cut them off, and that's because you're ashamed of what you're doing here. And now they think I'm going to end up selling my body or something daft.”
I chewed on air, trying to find words. I choked them out. “All right, the fact is, I am ashamed to call them. I'm living in a squat, eating garbage, begging to make cash. But it's not like they think it is. I'm doing something I care about. I don't know, maybe we should charge ad- mission to our films, or I should ask for donations for my online videos or something.”
Cora shrugged. “You know what? I think that whatever you're doing here, it's not one millionth as scary as Mum and Dad assume it is. The silence is worse than anything else. You were right about that -- now that I've called them, they're not nearly so freaked out about me.”
“It wasn't me that told you to call them, it was 26.”
“Yeah, well, she's a lot smarter than you,” Cora said. “I like her.” “Me too,” I said.
We walked some more, passing boarded-up storefronts, kebab shops, cafes advertising cheap meals. One of them had a telly in the window, and something on it caught my eye. It was a scene from D'Artagnan's Blood-Oath, a film I knew down to the last frame. But it wasn't the film as it was being shown in cinemas.
It was a scene from my remix: D'Artagnan's big, stupid swordfight remade as a big Bolly- wood dance number through the judicious use of loops and cuts to Sun-King!, a Bollywood film set in old-time France I'd found. And it was showing behind a Sky newsreader who then cut away to a serious-looking old bastard in a suit who was talking very quickly and angrily. A moment later, a caption appeared beneath him: “Sam Brass, Motion Picture Association (UK).”
We'd finally made the news.
As we hurried back to the Zeroday, Cora kept talking about her conversation with our parents. “I just couldn't stand it anymore. They were always in a panic -- no money, on me about my grades, worried about my GCSE scores, demanding to know where I was all the time. Since you'd gone, they've gone all paranoid, convinced that I was up to something horrible. And the fact that I had to spend all this time out of the house to do my homework only made it worse. I just couldn't take it anymore, you know?”
As miserable as this made me feel, I was also feeling elation, excitement. That snatch of SkyTV had lofted me to the clouds. After nothing had come of our raid on Leicester Square, I'd been shattered. Working on Sewer Cinema had been a welcome distraction, but it hadn't really offset the awful feeling that nothing I did really mattered. Now I found myself daring to hope that I could make a difference.
We pelted up the fire-stairs and then back down into the pub room. I grabbed my lappie and began to google.
“What is it?” 26 demanded.
I shook my head and kept searching, then showed her my screen. It was the same news- reader, announcing that our little films had gone viral. Our remixes were being downloaded at speed from all corners of the globe, along with our message:
BUYING FILM TICKETS ONLY ENCOURAGES THEM. EVERY PENNY YOU SPEND GOES TO BUYING MORE CRAP COPYRIGHT LAWS. YOUR CHILDREN ARE BEING SENT TO PRISON TO PROTECT RUBBISH LIKE THIS.
This seemed to have tipped the scales for Mr. Motion Picture Association, an American who seemed to be based in London, or maybe Brussels. He called us every name in the book: terrorists, thieves, pirates, then compared what we'd done to murder, rape and pedophilia. By the time he was done, we were all grinning like loonies.
“Well, better late than never,” Jem said. “Did you see the vein in his forehead throbbing? Poor bastard's going to have an aneurysm if he's not careful. Needs to take up Tai Chi or something. You should send him a letter, Cecil.”
We cackled like a coop full of stoned hens -- and then Jem started to spin up some of his monster spliffs and the cackling got even more hen-like. Getting high with my baby sister felt weird and awkward at first -- I veered from being embarrassed to smoke in front of her to wanting to tell her off for taking a turn when the joint came around to her. But after a few puffs, we were all too blotted to care, and very little happened for a couple of hours while we moved in a slow-motion daze. As I started to sober up, I thought to myself (for the millionth time) that smoking weed always turned out to be a lot more time-consuming than I'd anticipated.
As it was, we were too late to reconnoiter the ghost tube-stations we'd planned on visiting, and rushed into town in the White Whale to finish up the Sewer Cinema. Our grand opening was only two days away, and we all reckoned that with the publicity from the enraged film industry fatcats, we'd have a full house and then some.
Commercial interlude for the win
Faked you out, right? Thought they'd lost, but victory was snatched from the jaws of defeat. Hurrah! Now I bet you feel like celebrating, huh? Allow me to direct your attention to the merchandise aisle...