Is that legal?/Cowardice/Shame
Of course, it couldn't last. Those whom the gods would destroy utterly, they first give a taste to heaven to (it's the epigram from Wasabi Heat, the deservedly least-known of Scot's rom-coms).
I really dressed up for Letitia's office this time. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's cos I spent so much time in weird-looking rags that were carefully calculated to half-offend people from the straight world, like Letitia Clarke-Gifford: middle-class, ultra-respectable, law- abiding. If I was going to be spending my life eating garbage, squatting in pubs, begging, and making illegal films, I wanted to be sure that the people I met knew what an ultra- alternative, cutting-edge type I was.
But now that Parliament was apparently on my side, I felt like I should at least turn up looking like I'd made an effort to meet them half-way. Lucky for me, slightly out-of-date formal clothes are common as muck in the charity shops, since fashions change so often. I was able to score a very smart blazer-and-slacks outfit with a canary-yellow banker's shirt made out of cotton with a thread-count so high you could use it to filter out flu viruses. The previous owner had scorched the back with an iron, so I reckoned I'd just keep the blazer on.
When I met 26 at the Maida Vale tube, she looked past me twice before recognizing me. Then she clapped both hands over her mouth, crinkled her eyes, and made a very large show out of not laughing at me.
“Come on, it's not that bad,” I said. “She's an MP, after all!”
26's shoulders shook. She took several deep breaths into her palms, then straightened up and put them down at her sides. She gave me a kiss and squeezed my bum.
“Do I look that stupid?” I said.
She shook her head. “That's what's got me horrified! It suits you! In another life, you could have been a junior banker!”
“Now you're just being cruel,” I said. I felt self-conscious all the way to the MP's surgery.
At first, Letitia didn't even want to talk about the bill. Mostly, she wanted to talk about the films.
“I can't stop watching them. They're like popcorn! I download one, then there's another one I want to see, and another, and another -- before I know, hours have gone by. Did you make the one where that Scot Colford is driving a black cab around London, describing all the landmarks with out-of-context lines from his actual films?”
I nodded. “The video was dead easy. I just took a matte of the back of Scot's head and some videos shot out of the windows of the Google Streetview cars, and stuck 'em into a taxi interior I'd cut out. The tricky part was finding dialog that worked with all the neighborhoods. 'Course, I was able to cherry-pick the streets and landmarks I had good dialog for, so it was a bit of a cheat.”
“God, I loved that bit about 'made of ale!'”
That had been inspired. The first time I'd ridden out to see 26 on the tube, I'd listen to the announcement as we pulled into Maida Vale, but heard it as “The next station is made of ale.” Which got me off on a whole tangent about some lost Victorian art of ale-based construction out of thick brown bricks and so forth. Well, one night, I'd been watching Scot in Barman's Holiday, mixing up exotic drinks for thick Americans in a seaside bar in the Honduras, and one of them says, “What's this one made of?” waving a mug in his direction. Scot deadpans back, “That is made of ale.” When the two clicked together, comedy was born. From there, it was just a matter of picking out some other Scot lines -- “That shop. That is made of ale. That bike. That is made of ale. That boy. That is made of ale.” I was worried the joke would get less funny with repetition, and I think it did, somewhere around the 0:30 mark. But by 0:45, it had gone through stupid and out the other side, which is an entirely funnier kind of funny, and the first time I showed it live at a Pirate Cinema, they'd laughed like drains, howling. Even now, people liked to point at random things and say, “That is made of ale.” It made me feel brilliant.
“It's a real favorite,” I said. I felt really weird in my suit now. The MP was wearing a flowy kind of dress with a big scarf -- it was cold in her drafty office -- and had taken off her shoes and crossed her legs, showing off her heavy wool socks with multi-color stripes. The only other person in formal clothes was the security guard out front, who hadn't even bothered to ask us for ID or to go through the metal-detector, having recognized 26 straight off.
“So,” Letitia said, leaning forward to get down to business. “26 has told you about the bill, yes?”
I shrugged. “I guess so. I don't really know much about Parliamentary procedure or any- thing --”
Letitia nodded. “Okay, well, a private member's bill is usually just a kind of empty protest. The way it works is, an MP like me introduces it, rather than the governing party as a whole. If the government doesn't want it to pass, it's easy enough to knock down again, you just talk it out until the time for debate expires, and it dies. But sometimes a private member's bill is a way for the government to get a law passed without having to actually propose it themselves. They get someone like me, from the opposition, to propose the bill, then the Speaker gives it enough time for a full debate, a hearing in the Lords, and a vote and hey, presto, we've got a law! It's sneaky, but it's how we got some of our most, ahem, controversial laws passed.
“So here's the idea. I'm going to introduce a bill to amend the Theft of Intellectual Property Act. It will rescind all criminal penalties and end the practice of terminating Internet con- nections on accusation of piracy. In return, it will explicitly permit rights-holder groups to offer what are called blanket licenses to ISPs. These are already widely used -- for exam- ple, when the DJ at Radio 2 decides to play a song, she doesn't have to track down the record label's lawyer and negotiate the fee for the use. Instead, all the music ever recorded is available to her for one blanket fee, and the money the BBC pays gets divided up and paid to artists. Under this scheme, film studios, game companies, publishers, and music companies could offer ISPs a per-user/per-month fee in exchange for unlimited sharing of all music, books, music, and films.”
I tried to make sense of that. “You mean, I sign up with Virgin and give them, whatever, fifteen pounds a month for my Internet. They give five pounds to these groups, and I get to download everything?”
She nodded. “Yes, that's it exactly. It's no different, really to what already goes on in most places. For example, when you go to a shop and they're playing music, they pay a small fee every month to what's called a 'collecting society' that pays musicians for the usage. Collecting societies around the world have deals with one another, and some insanely complicated accounting for paying one anothers' members. They're big and often very corrupt, but it seems to me that making the collecting societies fairer is an easier job than convincing everyone to stop getting up to naughty Internet copying. We've put more than eight hundred people in jail now for copying. Just imagine! It costs the state more than £40,000 per year to keep them there -- that's £40,000 we're not spending on education, or health, or roads -- or arts funding for films and music! It's an absolute disgrace.”
She seemed to notice that she was practically frothing at the mouth and she calmed herself down with a visible effort. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I know I shouldn't get emotional about this, but it's just so dreadful. We keep passing worse and worse laws, and they're not solving the problem. It's a disease you get in government -- like passing a law against marijuana, then passing worse and worse laws against it, until the prisons are busting with people who really shouldn't be there, and by then, you're so committed to a ridiculous law that you can't back down without looking terminally foolish for having supported it in the first place.” She heaved a sigh.
“Anyway, the reason I asked you to come in today is because I've had a nice quiet chat in private with the Speaker of the House, who wanted me to know that if I was to introduce such a bill, he'd be inclined to allow for a full debate and put it to a vote. And he strongly hinted that his party's whips would see to it that all the MPs turned up for work that day and voted in favor of it. And I've been in touch with my party's leader, and she's inclined to let my lot vote our conscience, and I'm pretty certain that we'd all vote for it, barring one or two nutters who want to have practically everyone banged in prison for the next two hundred years or so, just to teach 'em a lesson.”
My eyes felt like they were bugging out of my head, and I realized I literally had my mouth open so far I was beginning to dribble. I was still reeling with the fact that this Member of pissing Parliament had just told me she thought spliff should be legal and part of my
brain was jumping up and down trying to get my attention, because that same MP was also proposing to repeal TIP, and even more, repeal the ancient Digital Economy Act that had got me and my family knocked off the Internet.
26 slugged me in the shoulder and then threw her arms around me and squeezed me so hard I felt like my lunch was going to make a second appearance. “Isn't it amazing?” she said.
I nodded vigorously. “Yes, but, erm --” Letitia looked at me. “Yes?”
“What are you telling us for?” I didn't say it, but I was thinking, we're just a couple of kids!
She clapped her hands to her mouth. “Oh! Didn't I say? No? Well, of course you two are absolutely crucial to making this happen. The fact is, as soon as any of the horrible grasping lobbyists from the other side get a whiff of this, they'll be all over us -- getting famous actors and pop stars to drop in on MPs, calling up Members and reminding them of all the money they donated to their election campaigns, that sort of thing. If this is to have a hope of passing, there's got to be enormous counterpressure on every MP in the country. Even more than with TIP -- you're going to have to get loads of voters to come out with real, passionate support for the bill. What's more, you're going to have to be prepared for everyone calling you thieves and worse. It seems to me, though, that you and your friends have a damn good rebuttal to that sort of thing: you're making films that people purely love, that are being watched all around the world, and you've not made a penny off them. It's plain to me that you lot aren't just cheapskates after a free film or two: you're filmmakers yourselves, exactly the sort of person our copyright's meant to be protecting, and here we are, putting you in jail.”
I shook my head. Could it be possible? “So, you're saying we'll basically be the poster- children for a complete overhaul of British copyright law?”
She laughed. “If you want to put it that way. The fact is that there's almost certainly going to be an election called in the next three months; the government can't wait more than four months in any event. They've been in office for nearly five years now, that's the maximum, and odds are good they'll hold the election in May in order to tie it in with regional and council elections, which saves loads of money and always looks good when you're running for re- election. The party in power knows that they're vulnerable on this issue, and all the other parties are eyeing up the possibility of going into the election having championed such a popular cause. So everyone's got a reason to want to see this pass, provided the other side doesn't outflank us. But I like our odds. You lot are adorable, talented, and clearly harmless. They'll have a hard time painting you to look like villains.”
She sipped at her mug of tea. “Not that they won't try, of course.”
Annika called another meeting in the basement of the Turkish restaurant in Brick Lane the next week. There were the same carob brownies, but there was lots more besides: Jem and Dodger had spent two days in the kitchen, turning out all kinds of little delicacies, like miniature eel pies, plum puddings, tiny plates of stewed rabbit, and fluffy scones. I thought they'd overdone it when we'd loaded it all into six huge boxes to take down to Brick Lane on the buses, but there were so many people in the restaurant's basement that the food was gone in seconds. I was used to the Pirate Cinema nights being crowded -- there'd been one in an old civil defense tunnel that had been so claustrophobic I'd had to leg it up the endless stairs to the surface before I had a panic attack, and it was a good job nothing caught fire because no one could have got out. But this was nearly as bad as that worst- ever night. The restaurant's owner kept bringing down pitchers of beer and stacks of cups and platters of mezzes and whomever was closest to the bottom of the stairs would have a whip-round for the money to pay for it, then the grub and booze would disappear into the heaving mass.
Annika called the meeting to order by the simple expedient of climbing up onto a table, extending her hands before her, and clapping a simple, slow rhythm: Clap. Clap. Clap. The people around her joined in, then the people around them, and in a few minutes, no one could possibly carry on a conversation. It was quite the little magic trick: clearly, Annika had run a meeting or two in her day.
She stopped clapping and made a pushing-down gesture, like she was patting an invisible table at chest height and like magic, the clapping stopped and all fell silent in the steaming- hot basement. The rasp of all those breaths was like the sound of distant rain. Like I said: magic.
“Right then,” Annika said. “Let's get Cecil up here.”
This was the part of the plan I wasn't exactly certain about. I'd introduced many of the Pirate Cinema screenings, but after the first night, I'd always worn a mask. But everyone knew what I looked like, thanks to Sewer Cinema, and all my mates figured I'd be able to explain it.
I jumped onto the table, helped up by Annika, and looked into the sea of faces. I had a scrap of paper on which I'd scribbled some notes, but I couldn't focus on it. Annika's hand had been slippery with sweat, and I could feel my own sweat running down my neck and back.
“Erm,” I said. I felt physically sick, like I was going to throw up. All these people looking at me. What the hell did I know about it? A few days before, I hadn't even known what a Private Member's Bill was. I was just some kid who liked to cut up films. “Erm,” I said again. My vision swam.
I shook my head. There were words on the sweaty bit of paper, but I literally couldn't make my mouth form any kind of coherent statement. And the faces! They were all staring and some of them were smirking and a few had started whispering to their neighbors, and all of a sudden it was all too much. I shook my head and muttered, “I'm sorry,” and got off the table and pushed my way out of the crowd and up the stairs. Out on Brick Lane, it was shitting down drizzle, that wet stupid gray low-sky weather that London seemed to have from October to May.
I stalked away down the road, half expecting that at any second one of my mates or 26 would grab me and spin me around and tell me off for panicking and then give me a cuddle and tell me it was all okay, but no one did. I came out to Bethnal Green Road, among the Bangladeshi shops and the discount off-licenses and taxi touts and tramps selling picked- over rubbish off of blankets, and drunks reeling through the night with tins of lager held high. London had never seemed more miserable to me than at that moment. What had come over me? I'll tell you what: the sudden, terrible knowledge that I had no idea what I was doing, I was just a kid, and I was going to cock it all up. I wasn't a leader, I wasn't a spokesman. I was a school-leaver from Bradford who liked to make funny films.
In my imagination, my mates were all standing around the restaurant's basement, shaking their heads knowingly at one another, muttering things like, “Sodding Cecil, what a little drama queen, knew he never had it in him.”
I went home, studying my shoes in excruciating detail on the long walk, bumping into people and poles and rubbish bins. I let myself in the front door, opened the fridge door, stared unseeingly at the interior. I wanted to obliterate my mind: get drunk, smoke spliff, take a little sugar. There was no booze in the house, no weed, but right outside the door, there was as much sugar as I could possibly want. The drugs lookouts knew us all, of course, and didn't bother to set up their birdcalls when we came in and out, and I knew plenty by sight. I didn't have a penny to my name, but I was willing to bet that someone would supply me with a sweet gasp on credit. They all knew where I lived.
I stood at the front door for a long time, hand on the knob, feet jammed into my unlaced boots. My calves and feet still ached from the long walk home, my mind was wrapped in a gauze of shame and self-pity. I seemed to be looking at myself from a long way away, outside of my body, watching as my hand began to turn the doorknob and I thought, all right then, he's going to do it, he's going to go and score some sugar. At that moment, the boy with his hand on the doorknob was someone else, not me. I was watching myself with bland interest, like it was all some video I'd shrunk down to a postage stamp and stuck on one corner of my screen.
Oh look, that silly lad's off to get stoned on something that might just be nail-varnish re- mover fumes. I thought, and then the little voice in the back of my head that had been shouting in fear and anger came to the fore and I swam back to my body and let go of the doorknob. I gasped and stepped back and scrubbed at my eyes with my fists. I was crying.
I decided to go to bed. If I couldn't sleep, I could always go outside and score later. The sugar shacks weren't going anywhere.
I slept.
When I woke, I lay in bed and stared at the messy floor and the door for a long time. I checked my phone. It was only 11:00 A.M. Everyone would be asleep for hours, assuming they got in at their usual four or five in the morning. Just to be on the safe side, I slunk downstairs on cat's feet, not wanting to run into any of my housemates and face their anger -- or worse, their pity. I had plenty of pity for all of us.
I got dressed and picked up a sign bedecked with a hand-sterilizer pump, a packet of tissues, a packet of deodorant wipes, and a chewable toothbrush dispenser. I rolled it into a tube and headed for Old Street Station, found an exit that no one else was begging in, and began to rattle the sign hopefully at the passers-by.
I guess I must have been a dead sorry sight, because I raked in the dosh -- seventy pounds in two hours, an unheard-of sum. I was out of the sanitizer and the toothbrushes, and running low on everything else. I went round to the other exits and found Lucy and Fred and gave them half of it. Lucy gave me a long, slightly smelly hug, and I was glad for it -- someone in this world who was even worse off than me thought I was brilliant, that counted for something, didn't it?
It was 4:00 P.M. by the time I got back to the Zeroday. I went in by the old entrance up at the top of the fire-escape, the one we'd stopped using after we got legit with Rob, hoping to avoid everyone if possible. I snuck back into my room, noticing that all the lights were still off -- I supposed that everyone must have got up and gone out. Good.
I stared at my phone for a long time. 26 hadn't called me. Of course she hadn't. Why would she want to talk to a pathetic sack like me? I lay on my bed, wishing I could go to sleep and shut out the world. I thought of sugar again, and of the thirty-five quid in my pocket. That would buy more than enough sugar to see me off for the night. My personal camera began to dolly out, zooming away from my body again, and I knew that if I didn't do something now, that person on the bed with the red-rimmed eyes was going to go out and do something cocking stupid.
So I grabbed my lappie and logged into Confusing Peach. Of course, it was all chatter about last night. I looked away, but I couldn't not read it. I read it.
Then I stood bolt upright, grabbed my jacket, and ran for the door, barely stopping to lock it behind me. I was dialing 26's number as I tore down Bow High Street, hitting the wrong speed-dial icon three times before I got through, only to reach her voice mail without a ring. I called Jem next, then Dog and Chester and even Dodger -- all the numbers I had for the people who'd been in the cellar the night before. No one was answering. I thought I must have Aziz's number somewhere, so I stopped running, grabbed my laptop from my bag and crouched down against the window of a shop while I went through old messages looking for it. I found it and dialed the number with shaking fingers.
It rang six times and then Aziz answered, with a distracted, “'Lo?”
“Aziz, mate, it's me, Cecil.”
“Yeah, hullo, Cecil. Listen, son, I'm kinda busy --”
“They've all been arrested, Aziz, all of them -- Jem and Chester and Dodger and Dog and my girlfriend all, well, all of them! It was on Confusing Peach this morning -- the coppers raided a meeting last night about this copyright bill, said they were after the pirates who'd been running the cinemas.”
There was a long silence. “Aziz?”
“One sec,” he said. I heard his fingers clattering over a keyboard, then the grinding hum of a shredder. “Do go on,” he said, calmly.
I opened and shut my mouth a couple times. “I don't know what to say, Aziz! I'm going spare, mate. What do I do?”
He sighed. “Look, Cecil, you're a good young fellow, but you're young. And when you're young, you still haven't learned that getting all in a lather doesn't help anything. I can hear you panting from here. Take several deep breaths, clear your head, and have a good think. People go to jail all the time. They haven't been convicted of anything yet, and if they are, it, erm, won't be due to any evidence on my premises.” I heard the shredder whir again. “Meantime, calm the hell down and see what kinds of solutions present themselves.”
My first reaction was to shout at him for being such a hard-hearted bastard. But he had a point: I was running down the street like a headless chicken. He was taking steps to ensure that if he was raided, nothing in his place would put his friends in jeopardy. Which one of us was doing more to help? “Okay, Aziz, You're right. I'll call you later.”
“Better to use encrypted e-mail, son. I'm afraid I'll be ditching this SIM once we're done.”
Durr. Aziz was much better at this than I was. Of course, he'd lived his whole life outsmart- ing people who tried to use technology to control their enemies. I put away my laptop, stood up and looked around. I'd worked up a sweat running down the road, but now I was freezing, my jacket unbuttoned, my feet jammed into my unlaced boots without socks. Right. I did up my boots and coat, wiped the icy sweat off my face. I thought about ditching my SIM, but it was the main way that 26 and the others would be able to reach me from jail, assuming they didn't have access to a computer.
Now I made myself walk calmly toward the tube station. I had no idea where I'd go, but wherever I went, I'd probably need to take rapid transit to get there. Good. I was getting somewhere.
Who could I talk to? Well, Letitia would be good for starters. I didn't have her number, but she'd be in the directory. Oh, and of course, there were 26's parents. If she'd only been given one call, she'd call them, wouldn't she, especially seeing as her stepfather was a lawyer, right? Of course. Now that I was thinking of this all calmly, it was starting to come together -- even though it made me feel slightly guilty, as though I was betraying 26 by not running around in a panic while she was in trouble.
Now, did I have her parents' numbers? Of course I did. There was that time 26 had gone away with her mum for a weekend in Devon and had dropped her phone in the sea, she'd sent me her Mum's number so I could call her and we could make goo-goo noises at one another (as her mum insisted on describing it, as in, “Darling, it's for you, it's your young man calling to make goo-goo noises again!”). It was in my phone's memory. I stopped walking, moved under a newsagent's awning, and dialed.
“Hullo?”
“Ms. Khan?” I'd been calling her “Amrita” for months, but I felt the occasion demanded formality, like maybe she wouldn't want me to be so familiar with her daughter now she'd been arrested.
“Who is it?”
“It's me, Cecil.”
She made a kind of grunt. “They've let you out then?”
“I wasn't in,” I said. “I wasn't there when they raided the place. I've only just found out about it. Have you heard from 26?”
“My husband's been down at the Magistrates' Court for hours, now,” she said. “Trying to force them to bail 26 and her friends. The police say that with such a large number of people arrested, it could take some time.” There was a click. “Hold on a moment.” She put me on hold. After quite some time, she came back on. “That's 26's father,” she said. I suddenly remembered 26 telling me that her biological dad was a cop -- and that her mum hadn't spoken to him for years and years. I guess this was the kind of desperate situation that got people to overcome this sort of thing. “I have to go.”
“Wait!” I said. “What should I do?”
She made another grunt. “You may as well come over here, they'll come here first when they get her out. I'll be staying in for the duration.” Her voice was tight as a bowstring.
The tube-ride took a dozen eternities, but eventually I heard the robot voice call out, “The next station is made of ale,” and I jumped up. I'd spent the whole ride staring at my phone's faceplate, willing it to light up with an incoming call from 26 or anyone, debating whether I should pull the SIM out and stuff it between the cushions on the tube. In the end, I hung onto it, because they had all my mates, and that meant they knew where I lived and where I might be going, and if they wanted to snatch me, they could and would, and cutting myself off from everyone I cared about in the whole world seemed an impossible heartbreak.
So I pelted up the stairs three at a time, stuck my ticket into the turnstile, and went through it so quick I did myself an injury on the crossbar, doubling over and limping out of the station, then running like a three-legged dog all the way to 26's place.
Standing on her doorstep, sweating buckets, half-dressed in whatever I grabbed on the way out the door, I forced myself to ring the bell. 26's mum had seen me in yesterday's T- shirt and a pair of gym trousers at breakfast before, she knew I wasn't a fashion-model. And this was more important than making a good impression on my girlfriend's parents.
She swung open the door with her phone clamped to her head. She was dressed as oddly as I was, in old jeans and a loose cotton shirt with a mis-buttoned cardigan over it and fuzzy slippers, her eyes red and hollow. She made a “come in,” gesture and then turned and walked back into the house, nodding her head at whomever was talking on the other end of the call.
“Yes, yes. Yes. No. Yes. Yes.”
She rolled her eyes at me. I mouthed, “Going to use the toilet,” and she nodded and seemed to immediately forget about me. So I went up to 26's room and dug around in the mountains of junk on the floor until I found one of my T-shirts and a pair of my pants -- she often borrowed them to slop around in when she was over at mine. I had a very quick shower and changed, and the smell of 26 on the shirt was like a punch in the chest, so I had to sit down on the floor with a thump and catch my breath. Then I padded back downstairs in my socks.
26's mum was sat in the sitting room, an open book on her lap, not looking at it, staring into space. When I made a little throat-clearing noise, she looked up at me with a little startlement, then smiled sadly. “Sorry,” she said. “Miles away. My husband says he's making some progress at the magistrates', and 26's father is apparently doing eighty miles per hour down the length of the M1 while calling every copper he knows in London. I suppose that means everything's going to be okay, but I'm still worrying myself sick.” She closed her book and fisted her eyes. “How are you holding up, lad?”
I looked at my feet and mumbled something. I didn't want to talk about how I felt, because it was complicated -- relief that I wasn't locked away, fear for what was happening to my friends, shame that I'd only escaped because I'd been such a coward at the meeting. “Can I make you some tea?” I said.
She nodded and wiped her palms on her thighs. “That'd be lovely.”
When I brought it to her -- milk and no sugar, but strong as builder's tea, the way 26 took it, too -- she said, “I suppose I should have expected this. After all, you and 26 have been banging on for months about how crazy the law is getting. But I couldn't get over the feeling that this was just harmless fun. After all, it's not as if you were having gang fights and robbing buildings! You're not planning to blow up Parliament! You were just --”
“-- making films,” I said. “And breaching copyright.” I sighed. “I guess I didn't think they'd come after us like this, either. I thought that since they mostly seemed to target random people to sue or arrest, they wouldn't come after someone specific, you know what I mean? Guess that was pretty stupid.”
To my surprise, she stood up and gave me an enormous hug that seemed to go on and on, the kind of hug I remembered from when I was a little kid, the hug that made you feel like everything was going to be all right. Damn if it didn't almost make me start crying. When I looked into her face afterward, I saw that she was nearly in tears, too.
Cmrcl ntrld
It's all going wrong, isn't it? Poor kids. Don't worry, things will pick up (no, that's not a spoiler -- this isn't the end of the book, after all!). Speaking of “picking up,” why don't you (ahem) pick up a copy of Pirate Cinema. It makes a dandy gift for all occasions, and the electronic version is made from pure, free, 100% non-DRMed bits. You can also pick up a spare for a library or school.