Pirate Cinema (18 page)

Which all makes it sound like that kiss was rubbish. It wasn't.

For all that I was distracted as anything and nervous and self-conscious, I still remember every second of it, the way her lips felt on mine, the way the blood roared in my ears, the way my feet and legs tingled, the way my chest felt too tight for my thundering heart. Which must mean that for all that I was thinking a thousand miles a second, I was also paying a lot of attention to the beautiful girl in my arms.

"Whew," she said, backing off a little, but keeping her arms locked around my neck. "That was a bit of all right, wasn't it?"

I swallowed a couple times, then tried to speak. It came out in a croak: "Wow."

"Come on, then," she said, and took my hand and led me across London Bridge.

It turned out that this wasn't Twenty's first experience digging through a skip, but it was her first time looking for food.

"I usually just go after electronics. There's always someone who can use them -- and now that I've met your mate Aziz, there's an even better reason to go after those skips. I figured food was more likely to be, you know, runny and stinky and awful."

It was the most mental feeling, having a conversation with Twenty after we'd snogged. I wanted to snog her again, but I also felt like I had an obligation not to just grab her and kiss her some more, like we had to go on pretending that we were still two friends on our way out for a strange dinner courtesy of the skips of Borough Market.

"It can be," I said. "But there's plenty that's really good, and it's such a pity to let it all go to waste." I took hold of a huge, smoked Italian salami. The label said it was smoked wild boar, and the paper wrapper around one end had been torn and scuffed. "You're not a vegetarian, are you?"

26 took it from me and studied it, sniffed it, and grinned. "Not tonight! Wild boar! How medieval!"

And the harvest began. There were mountains of food to choose from, and we set aside the choicest morsels for our enjoyment, making a pile that, in the end, was more than we could hope to eat. Still, we took it all up in a couple of cartons we found behind one of the skips and set off again.

"We'll give the extra to tramps," I said, and sure enough, before we'd reached London Bridge again, we'd already given away all of the surplus and tucked the rest into our rucksacks.

I chanced another look at Twenty as we climbed onto a bus and walked up the stairs to the upper deck. She was grinning ear to ear, and I remembered how I'd felt when Jem had taken me to Waitrose skip for the first time. Like there was a secret world I was being admitted to: like someone had just taken me through the back of a wardrobe into Narnia.

"I liked your idea," she said as the streets whizzed past us. "About doing all the MPs and record execs and that for piracy? I thought that would be lovely, a really cool bit of theater."

"Annika said it wouldn't work," I said, but inside I was glowing with pride.

"Oh," she said, waving her hands. "I don't think any of it is going to
work
. They've been at this for
years
. Every time the bastards from the film and record companies buy a new law, we all get out into the streets, make a lot of noise, call our MPs, go to their offices, write expert analysis of why this won't work, and then they pass it anyway. Parliament's not there to represent the people, or even the country. Parliament's there to represent the rich and powerful -- the bosses and the rulers. We're just the inconvenient little
voters
and you and I aren't even
that
for a couple years. What's more, once they put you in jail, you don't get a vote, so the more of us they lock away, the fewer of us there are to vote against them."

"That's depressing," I said. "What a load of B.S."

Then she kissed me again, not for very long, just a peck on the lips that still got my heart pounding again. "Don't be so down. This just means that we're going to have to, you know, dismantle Parliament to get any justice. Which, when you think about it, is a
lot
more fun than writing letters to your MP."

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One morning, I woke up and realized that I was
home
. The Zeroday was quiet -- it was only two in the afternoon and I was the first out of bed -- and as I padded downstairs in a dressing gown that I'd found in a charity shop for a pound, I saw the signs of my new family all around me. Jem was a pretty fair artist, and he'd taken to decorating our walls with gigantic, detailed charcoal murals, working late into the night, drawing whatever struck his fancy, blending scenes of London's streets into elaborate anatomical studies he copied out of books into caricatures of us and the people we brought home, me with my nose huge and my teeth crooked and snarled; Dog with his spots swollen and multiplied all over his face; Chester so horsey that he had pointy ears and a tail. Most of all, he caricatured himself: scrawny, rat-faced, knock-kneed, grinning an idiot's grin with a dribble of spit rolling off his chin, clutching a piece of charcoal, and drawing himself into existence.

We'd got tired of getting splinters from the floor and had gone on a painting binge, with Chester leading the work -- he'd helped out his dad, who was a builder, back home. We sanded and painted the floor a royal blue and it was as smooth as tile under my bare feet. The dishes were drying in the clean rack beside the sink, and I picked up my favorite coffee cup -- it was a miniature beer stein, studded with elaborate spikes and axes, an advertisement for some fantasy RPG, and we'd found eight hundred of them in a skip one night -- and made coffee in Jem's sock-dripper, just the way he'd shown me. The fridge was full, the sofa had a Cecil-shaped dent in it that I settled into with a sigh, and the room still smelled faintly of oregano and garlic from the epic spaghetti sauce we'd all made the night before.

I heard another person's footsteps on the stairs and turned to see Twenty picking her way down them, dressed in one of my long T-shirts and a pair of my boxers and looking so incredibly sexy I felt like my tongue was going to unroll from my mouth across the floor like a cartoon wolf.

"COFFEE," she said, and took my cup from me and started to slurp noisily at it.

"Good morning, beautiful," I said, sticking my face up the shirt's hem and kissing her little tummy. She squealed and pushed my head away and gave me a kiss that tasted of sleep and warm and everything good in my world. She sat down beside me and picked up her lappie and opened the lid, rubbed her finger over the fingerprint reader until it recognized her. "What's happening in the world?"

I shrugged. "Dunno -- only been up for five minutes myself." She snuggled into me and began to poke at the computer. And there and then, cuddling the woman I loved, in the pub I'd made over with my own hands and with the help of mates who were the best friends I'd ever had, I realized that this was the family I'd always dreamed of finding. This was the home I'd always dreamed of living in. This was the life I'd always wished I had. I was as lucky as a lucky thing.

And pretty much as soon as that feeling had filled me up like a balloon and sailed me up the ceiling, I remembered my parents and my sister and the life I'd left behind, and the balloon deflated, sending me crashing to the ground. I made a small noise in the back of my throat, like a kitten that's been separated from its mum, and 26 looked into my face.

"What is it?" she said. "Christ, you look like your best friend just died."

I shook my head and tried for a smile. "It's nothing, love, don't worry about it."

She tapped me lightly on the nose, hard enough to make me blink. "Don't give me that, Cec. Something's got you looking like you're ready to blow your brains out, and when you're that miserable, it's not just your business -- it's the business of everyone who cares about you. I.e., me. Talk."

I looked away, but she turned my head so that I was looking into her bottomless brown eyes. "It's nothing. It's just." I really wanted to look away, but she wouldn't let me. "Okay, I miss me mam. Happy?"

She tsked. "Boys are such idiots. Of course you miss your family -- how long has it been since you saw them?"

I did the maths in my head. "Ten months," I said. Then I thought again. "Hey, I'm turning seventeen next month!"

"We'll bake you a cake. Now, how long has it been since you called 'em?"

I shook my head. "I haven't, not really. Once, but only for a few minutes. Didn't work out so well." I'd told Twenty about how I came to leave Bradford, of course, but I hadn't told her much else about my family. I didn't like to talk about them, because talking about them led to thinking about them and thinking about them led to misery.

She glared. "That's terrible! How could you go that long without even
calling
? Your mum and dad must be beside themselves with worry! For all they know, you're lying dead in a ditch or being forced to peddle your pretty arse in a dungeon in Soho." She got up from the sofa and faced me, hands on her hips. "I know you, boyo. You're not a bastard. It can't feel good to be this rotten to your parents. You owe it to yourself to call them up."

I spread my hands with helplessness. "I know you're right, but how can I do it? It's been so long? What do I say?"

"You say
sorry
, idiot boy. Then you say
I love you
and
I'm alive and doing fine
. Do you think it's going to get any easier if you keep on procrastinating? Call them. Now."

"But," I said, and stopped. I was fishing for an excuse -- any excuse. "If I call them from my mobile, they'll have my number and they'll trace me. I'm only sixteen still; one call to the cops and I'll be dragged back home."

She rolled her eyes with the eloquent mastery of a teenaged girl. "Tell me you can't think of a way of making a call without having it traced back to you."

I grimaced. She had me there. There were only about twenty free Internet phone services. Most of them were blocked by the Great Firewall of Britain, but I'd been routing around the censorwall since before my testicles dropped. "Fine," I said. "I'll do it later."

"What, when all your mates are awake and around and embarrassing you? The hell you will. There's no time like the present, boyo."

So I found a headset and wiped it clean and screwed it into my ear and paired it up with my lappie and dialed Mum's number. It rang four times and bumped to voice mail, and I breathed a huge sigh of relief as I disconnected the phone. "No answer," I said. "I'll try again later."

"Don't tell me your whole family shares one phone? Are you from the past or something?"

"You're too damn clever for your own good, 26. Fine, fine." I called Dad's number. Four rings and... voice mail. "No answer," I said, cheerfully. "Let's get some breakfast --"

"What about your sister, what's her name, Nora?"

"Cora," I said. "You really paid attention when I told you about my family, didn't you?"

"I always pay attention," she said. "That way, I can tell when you're lying to me, or yourself. I pay attention to
everything
. It's my super-power."

I dialed Cora's number with a heavy heart, then held my breath as the phone rang: once, twice, three times --

"Hello?"

"Cora?"

"Who is this?" Her voice sounded thick, like she'd been sleeping. But it was the middle of the afternoon. I'd figured on her being at school. It was a Wednesday, after all. The school jammed all pupils' phones (though teachers and heads got special handsets that worked through the jammers).

"Cora, it's me." I didn't want to say my real name. It's silly, but I hadn't introduced myself to 26 as Trent yet. It's not like it was a big secret -- I'm sure my roommates had grassed on me -- but I felt weird being anyone apart from Cecil in front of her.

"
Trent
?"

"Yeah." There was silence. "So, how are you?"

"Holy shit, I can't
believe
it! Trent, where the hell have you
been
? Mum and Dad think you're dead or something!"

"No," I said. "I'm alive. I'm doing fine. You can tell them that." There was stunned silence from the phone. "So," I said. "So. How are you, then?"

She snorted. "Oh, we're all arsing wonderful here in old Bradford. Dad's still out of work, Mum's still fighting to get her benefits without queuing up at the Jobcenter, and I've just failed three of my subjects."

It was like an icicle through the heart. I wanted to throw the laptop across the room. Instead, I took a deep breath and squeezed my hand into fists and then let them go. "How could you be failing in school, Cor? You're a supergenius."

"It's just hard, okay? How many days could I skip breakfast to study at the library? How was I supposed to do my assignments late at night when the library was shut? Besides, who the hell cares? It's not as though I'm going to go to my deathbed whispering, 'If I'd only got better marks in GCSE Geography.'"

The icicle twisted. I used to say that line about deathbeds every time I brought home a failing grade. My little sister had learned well from my example.

"Say something," she said.

"I --" I closed my eyes. "Cora, you need to do better in school. You've got too much brains to be failing. I know it's hard but --"

She interrupted me. "Oh, shut up your stupid hypocritical noise. You've got no
idea
how hard it is. As soon as things got bad, you buggered off to wherever you're hiding out. Don't you be lecturing me about my life. You're swanning around the world having adventures and I'm stuck --"

She broke up and I could hear that she was crying. I didn't know what to say. I looked with helpless anger at 26, who'd made me make this call. Her expression was full of sympathy and that softened me, made my anger turn to misery so that I thought I might start crying, too.

"I'm really sorry, Cora," I said. "You're right, one hundred percent right. It's all my fault. I've got no call to lecture you on your behavior, not when I'm so far away."

"Where
are
you, Trent? We're all so worried about you. It's all Mum and Dad talk about, when they're not getting at me about my schoolwork or shouting at one another about money."

"I'm --" I shut my mouth. "I'm not ready to tell you that, yet. I'm sorry, Cora. I just can't take the risk. But how about if I give you a phone number where you can leave me a message?" As I talked, I went to a free voice mail service and signed up for an account, using a dodgy browser plugin that automatically generated a fake name and address in France, along with a one-time fake e-mail that it signed up for using the same details. A few seconds later, I had a phone number in Ghana.

"You're a suspicious sod," she said. "Fine, give me the number."

I read it to her. "Get a calling card from a newsagent to call it, otherwise it'll be a fortune. I'll check it once a day and get back to you, all right?"

She sighed. "It's good to hear your voice again, Trent."

I smiled. "It's good to hear yours, too, Cora. I've missed you. All of you. Where are Mum and Dad, anyway?"

"Oh, they're at school. The head wanted to 'have a word with them' about me. I'm apparently on the slippery slope straight to hell."

I groaned. This was clearly all my fault.

"Oh, stop it," she said. "You messed us over when you got the net cut off, but
they
cut the net. It's not as though you committed a murder. Hell, Tisha's brother's in jail for murder and
he
gets to use the Internet! He's doing a degree in social work through the Open University. They're the bullies and the bastards. You're just an idiot." She paused. "And we miss you."

Tears were leaking out of my eyes and running down my cheeks. I was embarrassed to be crying in front of 26, but I couldn't stop. I swallowed snot and tears, snuffled up a breath. "I miss you too, Cora. All of you. But especially you. Call me, okay?"

She made a small, crying noise of her own that I took for assent and I disconnected.

I glared at 26, furious at her for making me go through that ordeal. But she put her arms around me and pushed my head against her neck and shoulder and made a "shh, shh," sound that went straight to the back of my brain and I felt like I was five years old again, with a skinned knee, being comforted by a teacher as I bawled my eyes out. I couldn't stop. I didn't
want
to stop. It was like my brain had been filled with poison and pus, and it was finally all running out. I let it go.