Pirate Cinema (20 page)

She nodded. "It may not sound like much to you, but you don't get to be an MP unless you've spent your whole life working in and for your party. All your friends will be in the party, your whole identity. It's a miniature death penalty. Now, if
all
of the MPs in caucus defied the whip, I don't think the party would cut them loose. But no MP can be really
sure
that her colleagues will vote for conscience, and no one wants to be the only one to stand up for a principle. They're all thinking to themselves, 'Hum, well, I'll hold my nose and vote for this today, and that means that I'll get to stay in parliament and have the chance to do good for my constituents the next time.' They call that 'realpolitik' -- which is a fancy way of saying, 'I've got no choice, so I'll pretend that it doesn't bother me.'"

I looked at 26. It seemed like the MP was just saying what I'd been saying all week long: there was no point in playing along with the politics game, because the other side got to make the rules. Twenty's rosebud mouth was pinched and angry.

"Why wouldn't the party let them vote the way the people want them to? It just doesn't make any sense."

Clarke-Gifford shrugged. "Lots of reasons. The entertainment industry's always been big here. Exporting our culture is part of the old imperial tradition: we used to own half the world, some MPs think we might end up owning half the world's screens.

"Plus there's the fact that the members and the party bigwigs get courted heavily by all these famous people. They get to go to the best parties in the country. Their kids go on holidays with popstars' kids in exotic places. They go to premieres and get to go on the red carpet alongside of people who are literally legends, get their pictures in the papers next to film stars that every one of their voters idolize.

"When their good friends from the industry tell them that downloading is exactly like theft, they're inclined to believe them. After all, don't you believe the things that your mates tell you?"

"So we shouldn't have even bothered?" 26 looked like she might cry. I quietly slipped my hand into hers.

"No, no. No! It's not a wasted effort. If you lose this round, you can go back to your supporters and say, 'see, see how big the stitch-up is?' And they can go to
their
mates and say, 'Look, hundreds and thousands of people asked their MPs to do the right thing, but big business forced them into voting against the public interest. Don't you think you'd better get involved?' Little by little, your numbers will grow, until they can't afford to ignore you any longer. And in the meantime, there are
some
parties that let members vote their conscience, sometimes -- our party, and the Greens; the LibDems, too."

I tried to imagine explaining to my parents why they should rise up and shout in the streets about this. After all, this was the issue that had cost them their jobs, their benefits, their daughter's education -- their son! But I couldn't imagine it. Mum could barely walk, let alone march down the road. And Dad? He'd be too busy trying to find a way to pay for dinner to join the revolution.

I looked at 26 again. She seemed to have got a little cheer and hope out of the MP, so I kept my gob shut.

Clarke-Gifford was also looking at 26, maybe thinking that she'd given her a little too much reality. "Besides, maybe I'm wrong," she said, unconvincingly. "Maybe with all the support you lot have got today, the party won't dare whip the vote in case they have a rebellion in Parliament. After all, Labour doesn't want to be the party that votes for it if the Conservatives vote against it -- or vice-versa."

26 smiled bravely (and beautifully, I might add) and said, "That's a really good point. If one party goes with us, it'll make the other one look really bad. That's something we could talk to Annika about. I still want you to meet her, Letitia -- you'd get on so well."

The MP smiled. "Well, I'm having my annual constituency garden party next month. Why don't you bring her around then? There'll be little sandwiches with the crusts cut off and everything. Bring your young man, too. Now, if you'll excuse me, it sounds like there's a new group of constituents in the front room waiting to tell me how terribly important it is that I vote against a tremendously important piece of legislation."

We passed them on the way out, a group of ten people, clutching paper notes for their meeting with their MP. 26 quizzed them on how they came to be there and whether they'd ever done something like this before. It turned out that they were a church reading circle, and four of the members had had their Internet cut off so they'd come out. And no, they'd never come out for something like this before, but enough was enough.

As we walked away down the street, 26's arm around my waist, my arm around her shoulders, I thought,
What if they give up hope because the vote goes the wrong way? What had Annika said? "Eventually so many of us will be offline or in jail that there won't be anyone left to organize."
But 26 was warm under my arm, and she'd promised to introduce me to her mum and dad, which meant that I was going to learn her real name at last -- the visit to the MP's office had given me a surname,
Khan
, but her real first name remained a tantalizing mystery. I'd asked her what it was on that first night together, and she'd confessed to
Sally
, but she later swore it was
Deborah
,
Sita
, and
Craniosacral
. She'd answer to anything I called her, and all her friends called her Twenty or 26, and I enjoyed the mystery, but I was looking forward to puncturing it. And thinking about finding out her real name distracted me from feeling nervous about meeting her family. I had met lots of my friends' parents before, but never my
girlfriend's
parents. I had recurring panics when I thought about shaking the hand of the mother of the girl that I'd had sex with the night before.

Oh, didn't I mention? Yes. We were having sex.
Lots of it
. And it was wicked. It didn't happen until the third time she stayed over -- we snogged and stuff, but I kept stopping short. Eventually, she asked me why I wasn't trying to shag her and I hemmed and hawed and confessed that I'd never done it before. She gave me a big, sloppy kiss, said, "I'll be gentle," and stripped off. Since then, we'd been at it like rabbits. Disgusting. Drove my flatmates around the bend with our carrying on and grunting and that.

Yeah, I was pretty made up about all of it. But I had this nightmarish daydream in which I shook her mother's hand and blurted, "Very pleased to meet you, ma'am. It's really lovely, having it off with your precious daughter."

"Nervous about meeting my parents?" Twenty said.

"Naw," I lied.

They lived in one of the terraced Victorian row-houses with a little garden out front. Twenty pointed out the stumps of an iron fence that had once surrounded the garden: "During World War Two, everyone pulled up their steel fencing and that to make into battleships. But there wasn't any good way to recycle the metal so the government just dumped it all into the English Channel."

"I did not know that," I said. "Um. Look, are we going to go meet your mum and dad?"

She laughed and gave my arse a swat. "Calm down, boyo. You'll do fine. It's not fashionable to say it, but my parents are actually quite cool."

You know how houses have smells that their owners never seem to notice? 26's house smelled
great
. Like the cedar chips they'd spread on the paths in the public parks every spring, mixed with something like lemon peel and wet stone.

The place had wooden floors and wooden steps leading up to an upper story, coathooks and framed antique maps, and books.

Thousands of books.

They teetered in stacks on the stairs and in the hallway. Shelves ran the length of the corridor, just about head-height, packed with a double row of books, some turned sideways to fit in the cramped space. They were in a state of perfect (and rather glorious) higgledy-piggledy, leather bound antiques next to cheap paperbacks, horizontal stacks of oversized art books and a boxed encyclopedia serving as a little side-table, its top littered with keys, packets of kleenex, rolled pairs of gloves, umbrellas, and, of course, more books.

26 waved a hand at them: "My parents are readers," she said.

"I can see that."

She turned and called up the stairs, "Oh, parents! I'm home! I've brought a boy!"

A woman's voice called down, "The prodigal daughter! I was on the verge of turning your bedroom into a shrine for my dear, departed offspring!"

26 rolled her eyes, but she was smiling. "I'll just be in the kitchen, eating all your food, all right?"

I followed her down the short hallway, past a sitting room -- more books, a comfy sofa and chair, a small telly covered in dust -- and into an airy kitchen that led into a glass conservatory that showed a small back garden planted with rows of vegetables and wildflowers.

She went straight to the fridge and began pulling out stuff -- a tall glass pitcher of what looked like iced tea or apple juice (it turned out to be iced mint tea, and delicious, too), half a rhubarb-strawberry pie, a small cheeseboard under a glass bell. She handed it to me and I balanced it on the parts of the kitchen table that weren't buried in reading material. 26 jerked a thumb over her shoulder: "Glasses in that cupboard and cutlery in the drawer underneath it."

I fetched them down, and she cut us both generous slices of pie and thick slices of Red Leicester cheese, and poured out two tall glasses of tea. I sat down and she plunked herself in my lap. At that moment, I heard footsteps on the stairs. "Get off," I whispered, horrified at the thought of meeting her mum with her on my lap.

She waggled her eyebrows at me. "Why?"

"Come on," I said. "Don't do this."

She winked at me, and said, "She'll love you," and leapt off my lap just as her mum came into the kitchen.

She was a tall Indian lady with bobbed hair shot with gray, smile lines bracketing a mouth that was just like 26's. She wore a pretty sundress that left her muscular arms bare, and her bare feet showed long toes with nails painted electric blue.

26 pointed at her toes: "Love them!" she said, and gave her mum a full body hug that I knew well (it was her specialty). "Mum, this is Cecil, the boy who's been kidnapping me to East London all summer. Cecil, this is my mum, Amrita."

I stood up awkwardly and shook her hand. "Very pleased to meet you, Mrs. Khan," I said, aware that my hands were dripping with sudden, clammy sweat.

She gave me a quick up-and-down look and I was glad I'd dressed up a little for the MP meeting. "Nice to meet you too, Cecil. I see that 26 has got you something to eat already." I looked at Twenty -- her
mum
had called her
26
! -- and saw that she was grinning smugly.

"It's delicious," I said. I was on good-manners autopilot.

"So, tell me how your big meeting went," she said, settling in on another chair after moving its stack of books to the top of the pile on the next chair. She leaned across the table and used 26's fork to nick a large bite of her pie, then made to get another one, but 26 slapped her wrist. Both were smiling, though.

"Letitia said it was all a waste of time," 26 said. "The vote is fixed."

"I can't believe that's what she really said," her mum said. She looked at me.

"Well," I said, "not exactly. But she did say that she thought it would be hard for other politicians to vote our way because their parties would punish them."

Her mum winced. "Yes, I was worried about that, too." She sighed. "I'm sorry, darling. You never can tell. Maybe getting people worked up about this will pay off later, with a bigger movement --"

"That's what Letitia said," 26 said snappishly. "Fine. I get it, it's fine."

Her mum nodded and pointedly looked at me. "Where do you go to school, Cecil?" she said.

Erm. I looked at my hands. "I don't, really," I said. "Well. It's like --"

26 said, "Cecil left home because he got his family cut off from the Internet by downloading too much."

Her eyes widened. "Oh," she said. "I'm sorry to hear that. Where are you living now?"

"With friends," I said. It was true, as far as it went, but I knew I was blushing. Technically, I was homeless. Well,
technically
I was a squatter, which was worse than homeless in some ways. 26's house wasn't posh, and it was obvious that her parents weren't rich, but they weren't the same kind of people as my family. The books, the funny toenails, how
young
her mum looked -- it made me realize what people were talking about when they talked about "class." I had to make a proper effort to stop myself squirming.