Pirate Cinema (15 page)

I glanced over to see if Twenty was, maybe, staring at me with girlish adulation. But she was scowling at her screen and mousing hard and getting everything set up for the next video, which was Chester's latest Bullingham creation, which he'd done in the style of the old Monty Python animations of Terry Gilliam, and all I remember about it was how rude it all was, in a very funny way, with Bullingham engaging in lots of improbable sex acts with barnyard animals, mostly on the receiving end. There was laughter and that, but it came from a long way off, from behind my glow of self-satisfaction. The same glow muffled the praise and laughter that accompanied Rabid Dog's horror-comedy mashup, the awesomely gory
Summer Camp IV
turned into a lighthearted comedy about mental teenagers, the legendary blood and guts and entrails played purely for yuks.

Then the first act was over, and the screens faded and the sweetest sound you ever heard swelled: fifty-some kids clapping as hard as they could without breaking their hands, cheering and whistling until Hester shushed them all, but she was grinning too, and I swear that was the best ten minutes of my life.

If I was editing
The Cecil B. DeVil Story
, this is where I'd insert one of those lazy montages, with me smoking a little of this, drinking a little of that, grinning confidently as I chatted up Twenty, dancing with her around the tree roots, watching the next round of films with my arm around her shoulder, getting onto a night bus with her and riding it all the way out to the Zeroday, showing her around my awesomely cool squat while she looked at me like I was the best thing she'd ever seen.

But actually, the night kind of went downhill after that. It would be hard for it not to, after such a high. I drank too much and ended up sitting propped against a tree, roots digging into my arse while my head swam and I tried not to puke. When I looked around to find Twenty between the second and third screenings, she was chatting with some other bloke who appeared, even in the dark, to be a hundred times cooler than me. This made me wish I was drinking yet another beer, but luckily there weren't any within an easy crawl of me and standing up was beyond to me at that moment.

Some time around three in the morning, my mates poured me onto a night bus and then I
did
puke, and got us thrown off the bus, so we walked and stumbled for an hour before I declared myself sober enough to ride again, and we caught another bus, making it home just as the sun came up. We slipped into the Zeroday and Jem stretched out on the floor of my room because we hadn't figured out where he'd sleep and his old room was occupied by Chester, who, it turned out, wasn't in a mad rush leave.

I woke up a million years later with a head like a cat-box and a mouth like the inside of a bus-station toilet. The room stank of beer-farts cooked by the long, hot day I'd slept through, turned into a kind of toxic miasma that clung to my clothes as I stumbled into the bathroom and drank water from the tap until I felt like I'd explode.

I was the last one up. Everyone else was downstairs, in the pub, and when I got there, they all looked at one another and snorted little laughs at my expense. Yes, I looked as bad as I felt. I raised two fingers and carefully jabbed them at each of my friends.

Jem pointed at the bar. "Food's up," he said. I followed his finger. Someone had laid out a tureen of fruit salad, a pot of yogurt, some toasted bagels (we froze the day-olds we scavenged, and toasted them to cover their slight staleness), a pot of cream cheese, and a bowl of hard-boiled eggs (eggs were good for days and days after their sell-by dates). My mouth filled with spit. I fell on the food, gorging myself until I'd sated a hunger I hadn't realized I'd felt. Rabid Dog made tea, and I had three cups with loads of sugar and then I blinked loads, stretched, and became a proper human again.

"Cor," I said. "Some night." I looked around at my three mates. Rabid Dog and Chester had taken the sagging sofa we'd dragged in from a skip, and Jem had seated himself as far as possible away from them, at the other end of the room. It occurred to me that while I knew Jem and I knew Dog and Chester, Dog and Chester didn't know Jem and vice-versa. Plus there was the fact that Jem had found the Zeroday, and now he was a newcomer to our happy home.

I looked back and forth between them. "Come on, lads," I said. "What's this all about? This place is effing
huge
. You're all good people. Stop looking like a bunch of cats trying to work out which one's in charge."

They pretended they didn't know what I was talking about, but they also had the good grace to look a bit embarrassed, which I took to mean that I'd got through to them.

"Some night," Rabid Dog mumbled. He had his lappie out and he turned it round so that I could see the screen, a slideshow of photos from the graveyard. Some of them were shot with a flash and had that overexposed, animal-in-the-headlamps look; the rest were shot with night filters that made everyone into sharp-edged, black-and-white ghosts whose eyes glowed without pupils. Nevertheless, I could tell even at this distance that it had been every bit as epic as I remembered. The slideshow got to a photo of Twenty and my heart went lub-dub-lub-dub. Even in flashed-out blinding white, she was
magisterial
, that being the new replacement for
illustrious
that had gone round at the party.

Jem snorted. "That one's trouble, boy-o," he said. "Too smart for her own good."

"What's that supposed to mean?" I felt an overprotective sear of anger at him, the kind of thing I used to get when boys came sniffing round after Cora.

He shrugged. "It was a mate of hers that brought me last night. One of those girls up in the trees. She said that your little bit of fluff there runs with a bunch of politicals, the sort who'd rather smash in a bank than go to a party. And Aziz says she's just
nuts
, full of gigantic plans."

I swallowed my anger. "None of that sounds like a problem to me," I said. "That all sounds pissing fantastic, actually." I said it as quietly and evenly as I could.

He shrugged again. "Your life," he said. "Just letting you know. And now you know. I'll say no more about it. So, it's Cecil now?"

I refused to be embarrassed about it. "Like Jem was your real name. You just picked it so you and Dodger could be the Jammie Dodgers, yeah? And Rabid Dog's mum didn't hold him up, crying and covered in afterbirth, and say, 'Oo's Mummy's lickle Rabid Dog then, hey?' And Chester from Manchester? Please. Why should I be the only one without a funny name?"

The boys were all looking at me as if I'd grown another head. I realized I'd got to my feet and started shouting somewhere in there. It must have been the hangover. Or Jem talking rubbish about Twenty.

In silence, I got some more fruit salad. Outside the locked-down, blacked-out windows of the pub, someone was shouting at someone else. Loud motorbikes roared down the street. Dogs barked. Drugs kids hooted.

"Sorry," I mumbled.

Jem bounced an empty juicebox (we'd found two pallets of them, the boxes dirty from a spill into a puddle) off my head. "You're forgiven. Go get your crapping computer and e-mail the mad cow and ask her out. Then take a shower. No, take a shower
first
."

That broke up the tension. Dog and Chester giggled, and I realized that Jem was right: I wanted nothing more badly than to get my lappie and see if I could find Twenty on Cynical April and try to come up with something not totally stupid to say to her.

And I did need a shower.

It took me a ridiculous amount of time to realize that I should be looking for "26" and not "twentysix" or "twenty six" in the Cynical April user directory, but once I had that down, I found myself in a deep and enduring clicktrance as I went through all of Twenty's old message-board posts, videos, and all the photos she'd appeared in. She liked to do interesting things with her hair. She had a properly fat cat. Her bedroom -- in which she had photographed herself trying out many hair colors and cuts -- was messy and tiny, and it had a window that looked out onto a yellow-black brick wall, the kind of thing you got all over London. Her room was full of books, mountains and teetering piles of them, and she reviewed them like crazy, mostly political books that I went crosseyed with boredom just thinking about.

Aha! There it was: she had a part-time job at an anarchist bookstore off Brick Lane, in the middle of Banglatown, a neighborhood that was posh and run down at the same time. It was riddled with markets, half of them tinsy and weird, selling handmade art and clothes or even rubbish that semi-homeless people had rescued and set out on blankets. The other half of the markets were swank as anything, filled with expensive designer clothes and clever T-shirts for babies and that.

I'd wandered into the shop she worked at: it had
wicked
stickers, but it smelled a bit, and the books all had a slightly hand-made feel, like they had come off a printer in someone's basement. It felt a bit like visiting the tinsy school library at my primary school, a sad cupboard full of tattered books that someone was always trying to get you to read instead of looking at the net. But my school library didn't have a beautiful, clever, incredibly cool girl working in it. If it had, I probably would have gone in more often.

It took me a minute to figure out what day of the week it was -- I'd gone to bed at sunrise, and slept, and the room was shuttered in, but after looking at the clock and then making it expand to show the calendar, I worked out that this was Saturday, just before four in the afternoon. And hey, what do you know, Twenty worked afternoon shifts on Saturday at the shop: said so right there in a message board for party-planners who were trying to schedule a meeting. Another quick search and I found out that the shop closed at 5:30 P.M. on Saturdays. Which meant that I could
just
make it, if I managed to get out of the house in less than fifteen minutes, and the bus came quick. I thought about calling the shop to see if she was working and if she'd wait for me to get there, but somehow that seemed creepier than just "accidentally" wandering in a few moments before closing to "discover" that she happened to be working.

Yes, I will freely admit that this was not objectively any less creepy. That I was getting into deep stalker territory with this. That I'd only met her for a few minutes, and that for all I knew she was seeing someone else, or was a lesbian, or just didn't fancy me.

But it was summer. I was sixteen. Girls, food and parties. And films. That was all I cared about. And most of the time, it was either girls or food. Okay, films and food. But girls: girls most of all. It was weird. Intellectually, I knew that it wasn't such a big deal. Girls were girls, boys were boys, and I would probably start seeing a girl eventually. Everyone seemed to manage it, even the absolute losers and weirdos. But the fact was that I was
desperate
, filled with a longing for something my bones and skin seemed
absolutely certain
would be the best thing that ever happened to me, even if I couldn't say so for sure. I'd seen loads of sex-scenes on my screen -- even edited one or two -- and objectively, I could see that they weren't a big deal. But there was a little man sat in the back of my skull with his fingers buried deep in my brains, and every time my thoughts strayed too far from girls, he grabbed hold of the neurons and
yanked
them back to the main subject.

So: fastest shower ever, brush teeth quickly, then again as I realized all the terrible things that might be festering in my gob. Dress, and then dress again as I realized how stupid I looked the first time. Speaking of first times, for the first time I wished I had some cologne, though I had no idea what good cologne smelled like. I had an idea that something like a pine tree would be good, but maybe I was thinking of the little trees you could hang up in your car to hide the stink of body odor and old McDonald's bags.

I didn't have any cologne.

"Anyone got any cologne?" I shouted down the stairs as I struggled into my shoes. The howls of laughter that rose from the pub were chased by catcalls, abuse, and filthy, lewd remarks, which I ignored. I pelted down the stairs and stood in the pub, looking at my mates.

"Where are you going?" Jem said.

"I'm going to go try and meet Twenty," I said.

"Twenty whats?" Rabid Dog said, puzzled enough that he forgot to mumble.

"The girl's name is 26," I said. "But it's 'Twenty' to her friends."

Jem started to say something sarcastic and I jabbed my finger at him. "Don't start, 'Jem'!"

"Is
that
what you were talking about last night?" Chester said. "Arsing 26! You wouldn't shut up about it. I thought you were having visions of a winning lottery number or some'at. Shoulda known."

I didn't remember any of that. Wait. No, I did. It was after the driver threw us off his bus. Which was after I threw up in it. And we were walking through somewhere -- Camden? King's Cross? And I was counting to 26, counting backwards from twenty-six. Twenty-six, twenty-six, twenty-six. Stupid beer. If I hadn't got so drunk, I could have been talking to 26 all night, instead of making an ass out of myself in the streets of London. Stupid beer. Stupid me.