Pirate Cinema (28 page)

She nodded. "Okay, that's fine. But wouldn't it be better to change things so that you didn't have to show your films in the sewer?"

I felt myself shaking my head, felt my ears burning. Of course, she was just saying the things I'd been thinking to myself all along, trying to shove down into the bottom of my conscience so I could get on with making Sewer Cinema ready for the opening show. Hearing Cora speak the forbidden words aloud made me want to stuff my fingers in my ears.

"Don't worry about me," I said, waving my hands. "I've got plans. Big plans. What about
you
, Cora? What did you tell Mum and Dad? Have you called them?"

Now it was her turn to squirm, as I'd known it would be. It felt good to have the heat on someone else for a change. "I didn't tell them anything. Why should I? You didn't. You just vanished."

One thing about Cora, she was smart. Smart enough to make me squirm some more, anyway. "We're not talking about me, Cora, we're talking about you."

Twenty chose this moment to weigh in: "Cecil, your sister has a good point. You did a runner without talking things over with your parents at all -- you've got no call to tick off your sister for doing the same thing."

Cora nodded with satisfaction. "Thank you," she said. "So shut it,
Cecil
." I'd once told Cora over the phone that I was going by Cecil B. DeVil so that she'd know how to search for my videos. She'd told me it was a hilarious name and that I was pathetic to be using it.

Twenty wheeled on her. "However," she said, not missing a beat, "
I
have call to tick you off for doing it. Which I am about to do."

Cora's smile vanished. "Who are you to --"

Twenty just kept talking. "I've heard loads about your parents and from everything I've heard, they're basically good sorts. Not much money, maybe a bit short-tempered, but they love you to bits, don't they?"

"So?" Cora folded her arms.

"So you owe them more than this." She held up a hand. "And so does
he
. But you're meant to be the smart one. They've got to be worrying their guts out by now. So the first thing I want you to do is call them and tell them you've found your brother, that you've got a roof over your head tonight, and that you'll be in touch with them while you work out what to do next. Get a phone number like the one Cecil's been using with you and let them leave you messages there. Okay?"

Cora unfolded and refolded her arms. "Listen, I just met you. You have no right to tell me what to do --"

26 nodded vigorously. "You're right. Please consider all the previous material to be a strongly worded suggestion, not a demand. Better?"

That cracked us both up. "Fine," Cora said. "Fine, you're right. I'll call them as soon as I can get online, leave them a voice mail with a number they can reach me at." She rubbed her eyes. "Cripes, what are they going to say to me? They'll be furious."

"It only gets worse the longer you wait," I said. "Believe me."

When I finally woke the next day, 26 had already left, and so had Cora. Jem was in the kitchen making coffee, and he said something vague about them stepping out for some sort of errand. I gave up on getting more info out of him: when Jem was making coffee, you could set a bomb off next to him without distracting him. He had three notebooks' worth of hand-written "field histories" from his experiments in extracting the perfect shot of espresso, and he'd been playing with stovetop pots for months now, voraciously consuming message-board debates about "oxidization," "crema," "bitter oils," and ideal temperatures.

He'd hit on the idea that he needed to heat the bottom chamber until just enough coffee had perked up into the top pot, and then he had to cool it off instantly. His first experiments had involved plunging the pot into a bowl of ice-water, but he'd cracked the pot in two with a sound like a cannon-shot. Lucky for him, the charity shops were
full
of these things. He had a shelf of them, along with a whole mountain of rusted cast-iron pots and pans that he was slowly rehabilitating, buffing them up with a disc-sander attachment on his drill, then oiling them and curing them in high-heat ovens.

I paced the pub room and helped taste-test Jem's coffee until the girls came back, breezing in through the back door in a gust of raucous laughter. They set down heavy bags on a table and plunked themselves on the sofa, looking indecently pleased with themselves.

"And you've been...?" I said, peering down my nose at them. I had caffeine jitters from all the experimental assistance I'd been lending, and it had put me in an intense mood.

"We've been at the bloody library, haven't we?" Cora said. She seemed giddy with glee.

"Well, it's certainly put you in a lovely mood, hasn't it? Been looking at the dirty books?"

Cora waggled a finger at me. "Oh ye of little faith," she said. "We've been thinking about your great project, and how to make it rise to true, epic greatness. And we have got part of the solution. Show him," she said, waving 26 on.

26 dug through the bags -- which were bulging with books -- and drew out a small, battered paperback. "
Beneath the City Streets
," she said and sniffed. "The fourth edition. Published in 1983. Written by one Peter Laurie, an investigative journalist of the last century with a special interest in nuclear bunkers, bomb shelters, underground tunnels, and whatnot. He dug up all these elderly maps and purchase orders and that, and walked the streets of London looking for suspicious buildings and big green spaces bordered by mysterious battened-down steel security doors and the like. Then his readers sent him all kinds of corrections and clues that he chased up for new editions, until you get to the fourth edition. Plenty of Internet debate about it, of course -- but it's got these lovely maps, see, places where they built tube stations that never got used, or shut down stations and abandoned them. Basically, there's an entire freaking city down below London, not just some old sewers."

I could feel their excitement, and I paged through the book, feeling the old yellowing paper and the corners of the cover gone soft as mouse-fur from decades of handling. "Well," I said. "Well. That's certainly very interesting, but what about it? Just last night you were telling me that it didn't matter because it wasn't going to make a difference, right?"

"
One
film won't make a difference," Cora said. "But what about a hundred films? What about films all over the country, all over the world? You know you're not the only one making illegal films -- there's enough out there on the net to show new ones every night forever. But out there in message boards and on ZeroKTube, nobody seems to get much worked up about the fact that the stuff they love is illegal, that their friends are going to jail for making art. I reckon that from a keyboard, it all seems like something imaginary and very far away."

26 leapt to her feet and nodded furiously. "It's like they're ashamed of it, they've seen all those adverts telling them that downloading is stealing, that remixing isn't creation. They think they're getting away with something, and when a bunch of billionaire corporations buy the government off and start locking up their mates, they just shrug their shoulders and try to make themselves as small as possible to avoid being noticed."

Cora took
Beneath the City Streets
out of my hand and waved it like a preacher with a Bible. "You get people coming out by the hundreds and thousands, you tell them that they've got to work together to make a difference, you get them to refuse to be ashamed to make and love art. Show them that they should be
proud
of this stuff. They can't arrest us all."

My heart was thudding in my chest. It was an amazing vision -- films being shown openly all over the land, bringing the glories of the net to the real world.

But Jem was in the doorway kitchen, shaking with caffeine, looking grumpy. He waited until we were all staring at him, then said, "Come on, would you? You're not striking a revolutionary blow, children -- you're just showing a couple of pictures in a sewer. It's a lovely bit of fun and all, but let's not go mad here, all right?"

We all stared at him. "Jem --" I said. I didn't know where to start. "Jem, mate, how can you say that? What they're doing, it's so
wrong
--"

He snorted. "'Course it's wrong. So what? Lots of wrong things out there. What you're doing could get you tossed in jail. That's pretty wrong, believe me." He pointed to the scar under his eye. "Pray you never have to find out how wrong it all is. What we're doing is a lark. I love larks, I'm all for 'em. But don't mistake a lark for a cause. All this high and mighty talk about 'creativity,' what's it get you? You're nicking stuff off other people and calling it your own. I don't have any problem with that, but at least call it what it is: good, honest thieving."

Something burst in me. I got to my feet and pointed at him. "Jem, chum, you don't know what the hell you're talking about, mate. You might know more about jail than I do, but you haven't a clue when it comes to creativity." This was something I'd thought about a lot. It was something I cared about. I couldn't believe that my old pal and mentor didn't understand it, but I was going to explain it to him, wipe that smirk right off his mug. "Look, let's think about what creativity is, all right?"

He snorted. "This could take a couple of months."

"No," I said. "No, it only takes a long time because there are so many people who would like to come up with a definition of creativity that includes everything they do and nothing anyone else does. But if we're being honest, it's easy to define creativity: it's doing something that isn't obvious."

Everyone was looking at me. I stuck my chin out.

"That's it?" Jem said. "That's creativity? 'Doing something that isn't obvious?' You've had too much coffee, chum. That's the daftest thing I ever heard."

I shook my head. "Only because you haven't thought about it at all. Take the film I just made with Rabid Dog. All that footage of Scot Colford, from dozens of films, and all that footage of monsters, from dozens more. If I handed you any of those films, there's nothing obvious about them that says, 'You could combine this in some exact way with all those other films and make a new one.' That idea came from me. I created it. It wasn't lying around, waiting to be picked up like a bunch of pebbles on the beach. It was something that didn't exist until I made it, and probably wouldn't have existed unless I did. That's what 'to create' means: to make something new."

Jem opened his mouth, then shut it. He got a thoughtful look. 26 was grinning at me. Cora was looking at me with some of the old big-brother adoration I hadn't seen for years and years. I felt a hundred feet tall.

At last, Jem nodded. "Okay, fine. But all that means is that there's lots of different
kinds
of creativity. Look, I like your film just fine, but you've got to admit there's something different about making a film out of other peoples' films and getting a camera out and making your own film."

I could feel my head wanting to shake as soon as Jem started to talk, but I restrained myself and made myself wait for him to finish. "Sure, it's different -- but when you say, 'making your own film,' you really mean that the way I make films is less creative, that they're not my own, right?"

He looked down. "I didn't say that, but yeah, okay, that's what I think."

"I understand," I said, making myself be calm, even though he was only saying the thing I feared myself. "But look at it this way. Once there weren't any films, right? Then someone invented the film.
He
was creative, right? In some way, every film that's been made since isn't really
creative
because the people who made them didn't invent films at the same time."

He shook his head. "You're playing word games. Inventing films isn't the same as making films."

"But someone made the first film. And then someone made the first film with two cameras. The first film that was edited. The first film that had sound. The first color film. The first comedy. The first monster film. The first porno film. The first film with a surprise ending. Jem, films are only about a hundred years old. There are people alive today who are older than any of those ideas. It's not like they're ancient inventions -- they're not fire or the wheel or anything. They were created by people whose names we know."

"You don't know their names," Jem said, grinning. I could tell I was getting through to him.

Cora laughed like a drain. "Trent doesn't know anything unless he can google it. But
I
do. The novel was invented by Cervantes five hundred years ago:
Don Quixote
. And the detective story was invented in 1844 by Poe:
The Purloined Letter
. A fella named Hugo Gernsback came up with science fiction, except he called it scientifiction."