Pirate Cinema (27 page)

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 revealed 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."