Pirate Cinema (33 page)

Then we all sat down and Annika sipped her tea and dipped her biccie and I watched the elaborate, tentacled tattoo writhe around her skinny throat and down her skinny arms. "Cecil," she said, "I'm really glad you came down tonight. You see, I've heard about the Sewer Cinema you and 26 and your friends put on, the films you showed, the things you said. I wanted to tell you what an absolutely
wonderful
job you did. I don't know what you could have done to make it any better, honestly -- it's got everyone talking about the right thing."

26 kissed me below the ear and squeezed my shoulders and I felt my ears turning red. I could see why 26 liked Annika so much; she was so calm, so assured, and she was very beautiful (though not as beautiful as 26, I hastily told myself). "Thank you," I said. "It wasn't just me, you know."

"Oh, I know. It's never just one person. But you're the one who's got his face in the papers and on the news. Which means that you're the one they'll be looking for when the time comes."

I gulped. "When the time comes?"

She shook her head. "You know what I mean. We're kicking the hornets' nest. That's good. I'm all for kicking hornets' nests! But when you do that, the hornets come out and swarm. I think it's a good bet that the coppers'll be looking for you before long."

I sighed. "Of course," I said. This had been in the back of my mind all along, ever since I'd seen the papers. "Do you think they'll try to put me in jail?"

She shrugged. "Depends on how chummy the coppers and the entertainment types are that day. They might charge you with criminal trespass on the sewer, or they might charge you with criminal copyright infringement. Or both. Impossible to say."

I nodded. "Yeah. But they tried to shut down Confusing Peach and they failed. We took the private Pirate Cinema and opened them to the public. So we lost the TIP vote -- maybe that means we'll just have to beat them outside of Parliament."

She smiled broadly and radiated approval. I basked in it. "That's the stuff," she said. "Why not -- we could get hit by a bus tomorrow, after all. But there's no sense in you going to jail if you don't have to, yeah? So here's what I was thinking: there's a lot of us around here who've been at this for a long time. Why don't you teach us how you do your cinema nights, and we'll help with the work. You can show up in disguise -- some of us are good at that -- and watch the proceedings, but we'll have it all done by people in masks and so on. No more faces. 26 told me you had some more locations you were scouting --"

I nodded, and told them about Rob, and his offer of more places to throw events.

Annika nodded sagely. "I've heard about this bloke -- he bought up a squat in Brixton where some friends of mine were living. They got to stay on for six months, then he moved them to another place in Streatham. Good for his word, I think. A rare bird, this: a landlord with a good heart. Most of them would rather see their places sitting empty than occupied by dirty squatters who don't pay for their lodgings."

I nodded enthusiastically. "He really seemed nice. And between his other empty buildings and the underground sites that we found in that book --"

She nodded back. "We could throw a new cinema every week. Do you think you could make enough films for that, though?"

26 set down her tea-cup. "Oh, there's plenty of people out there making films. I don't think we need to worry on
that
score. I'd be more worried about getting raided or whatnot."

Annika chuckled. "Oh, we've been through this before; I used to put on raves, back when I was just a little girl. It's an art and a science, a balance between technology and staying below the threshold for too much scrutiny. You'll learn it quick, you two. You're dead clever, aren't you?"

I couldn't argue with that. We clinked tea-cups.

I spend about four months a year on the road, all over the world, touring with my books (they're published in a
lot
of countries). Everywhere I go, I'm hosted by booksellers, whose customers fill their stores and then come up after the reading and Q&A for a signature and a chat. I'm always reminded of just how much I
love
bookstores. I'm a recovering bookseller, having worked at Bakka Books, Toronto's magnificent sf/f bookstore, as well as the late, lamented College Books. In honor of those stores, I've omitted the usual list of online booksellers in favor of a single link:

Booksense
(will locate a store near you!)

That's the Indiebound/Booksense directory of independent bookstores across America. Punch in your ZIP code, they'll find you a store in the neighborhood with my book on the shelf.

Tell them I sent you, OK?

Before Sewer Cinema, the Pirate Cinema nights had been easy -- just larks put on by friends at semi-secret/semi-public parties, organized on Confusing Peach by 26 and her mates, girls like Hester who lived to climb trees and string up the cameras. Sewer Cinema had been a deathmarch, a chaos of fixing chairs and dealing with out-of-town relatives and a million kinds of chaos.

But with Annika and her friends scouting locations and managing the logistics of getting people from rendezvous places to whatever civil defense bunker, sewer, graveyard, abandoned warehouse, or other romantic spot, it became a kind of assembly line.

Oh, 26, Chester, Dog, Jem, and I all helped with the setup still, sneaking in chairs, usually wearing the old standby disguise of a hi-viz vest and safety hat; Hester and her friends also threw their backs into the work with a great deal of enthusiasm. But for us at the Zeroday, the real work wasn't playing stevedore with bits of furniture; we were making films.

Every spare minute that occurred, every hour that could be stolen from sleep, we were buried in our edit suites, cutting and mixing. Confusing Peach had got bigger than ever, and there were more secret sub-boards that we were being invited to all the time. There were loads of people making and posting videos, and there were loads of kids who loved their 3D animation software, and by working with them, we realized new possibilities. Rabid Dog found a crew of Italian kids from Turin who loved the monster films nearly as much as him, and working with them, he was able to realize some of the funniest disembowelment and dismemberment scenes in the history of illegal horror.

And now I came to appreciate just how enormous the whole remix world was. A little venturesome wandering online and I was smack in the middle of music mixers, visual mixers, text slicers and dicers. They were just as obsessed as I was, just as driven to make new out of old, to combine things that no one had ever thought of combining. Of course, they were just as threatened by TIP as we were, though they were much lower-profile targets than those who raided the entertainment industry's multimillion pound crown jewels.

I discovered that I was far from the only Scot-obsessive in the world. A pack of kids in Rio were dead keen on him, and they were incredibly skilled with a bunch of free 3D animation packages; what's more, they'd been perfecting their own Scot 3D models for years, trading polygons with other 3D kids all over the world. They had hardly any English and I couldn't speak a word of Portuguese when we started but we had loads of automatic translation engines, and a shared love of Scot. Apparently, he'd been
huge
in Brazil. Working with Sergio, Gilberto, Sylvia, and them, I was able to make Scot do things he'd never done in the films, and now we were
really
cooking.

We had Pirate Cinema nights every Friday and sometimes also on Sunday afternoons, changing locations every time. Sometimes we'd be in a big, derelict Victorian down by Notting Hill, with different screens in every room showing films to rapt crowds. Sometimes it'd be long, sooty, abandoned tube tunnels with films splashed on the ceiling, and loungers wedged between the steel rails so you could recline and watch. Sometimes it was warehouses, and once we even took over an actual cinema, one that had been closed down for fifteen years but still had working popcorn machines. For that night, we made ourselves proper usher's uniforms, sewing gold brocade onto our shoulders and down the sides of our trousers, and we packed the house -- six hundred masked faces watching as the films we'd made and found unspooled on the huge screen.

Masked? Oh yes. After Sewer Cinema and my unexpected personal fame, Annika hatched a plan to keep all our identities secret -- we'd turn Pirate Cinema nights into a masked ball. Some people came in simple domino masks or surgical face-masks, while others went in for Black Block balaclavas, but the best were the elaborate carnival masks that people made for themselves. You'd get people tottering in with enormous confections on their heads -- fantastic animals, monsters, cruel papier mache caricatures of politicians. There was a pack of zombies that came regularly, much to RD's delight: they competed each week to see who could do the most gruesome makeup; they'd fake dangling eyeballs, gaping slit throats, latex holes in their cheeks exposing "teeth" and gums. It was magesterially stomach-churning.

It all went by in a blur. No sooner would we tear down a show than we'd be setting up for the next one. And now that the press knew who I was, I was getting all kinds of requests for interviews -- as Cecil B. DeVil, of course. Annika encouraged me to do these -- "just don't take them too seriously."

The first three or four made me very nervous, but then I realized that the press always asked the same questions, so I'd just flop down on the sofa with my laptop and my headset and take the call while Jem fed me so much jet-fuel it was a race to see whether I could finish the interview before I attained lift-off and sailed into gabbling, babbling coffee-orbit.

I don't think I ever worked harder in my life, before or since. I'd roll into bed at 2:00 or 3:00 A.M., having come off a night's binge-editing; it'd be even later if I'd been out at a Cinema night. I'd wake up five hours later, merciless alarm beating me into wakefulness. I'd attempt coffee in the kitchen, and the sound of my fumbling inevitably roused Jem, who
hated
to be woken, but hated the sound of someone murdering his precious beans even worse. He'd make me a pot of French press and I'd go back to work, devouring the night's e-mails, status updates, tweets and IMs, many from other people running their own Pirate Cinemas in other cities around the world, others from film-makers who were hoping to get screened at one of our nights. Plenty of messages from fans, too, people who'd been to one of the nights or had seen the videos on ZeroKTube or some other site and wanted to sing my praises, which felt insanely great.

It was so much stuff that I actually created two separate identities, one for press queries -- I'd get half a dozen of these every day, many for e-mail interviews, others for video or audio linkups. Some even wanted to come and meet me, but I never said yes to these, because I was paranoid that they might bring the police -- or
be
the police. But I did all the others. The e-mail interviews were easiest, since they always asked the same five or six stupid questions, and I just kept a huge file of pre-written answers in the form of a FAQ on the Pirate Cinema site. I'd just cut-and-paste the answers straight into the e-mail and be done with it.

Then there were all the organizational e-mails. Annika and her people were amazing location scouts, always finding new places for us to try. But then there was the problem of smuggling in the attendees -- and getting them there without tipping off the cops about our location in advance. For this, they employed tactics from the golden age of rave parties: they'd announce a rallying point and then someone would meet them with instructions for another location, and then another. On the way, hidden scouts would check them out, looking for anyone suspicious. Finally, they'd put them in white builders' vans with no windows and ferry them to the actual spot. I could think of fifty ways for the cops to defeat this, but it lent the whole thing an air of mystery and excitement, and it seemed the cops were not trying that hard to intercept us just then, because we didn't get busted once.

So -- organizational e-mails, then I'd shove some food in my gob without tasting it, and hit the editing suite again. I was turning out thirty to forty-five minutes of video a
week
, and it took me more than an hour to edit together every minute. And on top of that, I still had to do my runs to the skips to harvest food, and on top of that I was always on the lookout for scraps for the mask-making projects, which had sprawled all over the Zeroday, taking over every horizontal surface with sloppy papier mache remnants -- torn strips of newspaper, wheatpaste -- paints, beads, glitter, fur, scraps of fabric and bone, even a load of false teeth that Aziz had dug up from somewhere.

Someone was always making masks, and it had turned into a competition and a game. 26 had upped the ante by making a mask for me one week and demanding that I give her the mask I'd been planning on wearing -- a giant muppet head made out of fake electric blue fur with hundreds of eyes sewn all around it (the real eye-holes were hidden behind a scrim of window-screening). Thereafter, we inaugurated a ritual of trading masks just before heading out on show nights, and we'd surprise one another with our bizarre and hilarious creations.

By the time the editing and the grocery shopping and the eating and the interviews were done, if I was lucky I'd get an hour or two with 26 -- who was doing almost everything I was doing, plus keeping up with her final year's worth of schoolwork -- before heading out for the night -- either to one of our cinema nights or to some meeting that Annika's people had put together to talk about how to make things better next time.

I'd get home exhausted but unable to sleep from all the coffee and adrenaline and excitement, and often as not I'd spin up a little pin-sized spliff and then smoke it while I did a few more edits and waited for it to kick in and tie weights to my eyelids and my arms and legs and drag me off the chair and onto the mattress on the floor, until the alarm woke me to start it all over again.

Week after week this continued, punctuated by increasingly common phone-calls home to Cora and my parents. It looked like Cora would finish out her year okay, not the best grades she'd ever got, but not the worst, either. She was using the newly restored network connection to do a series of independent study projects on how corrupt the Theft of Intellectual Property Act's passage had been, and was making a arsing pest of herself calling up the offices of MPs who'd voted for it, asking them to talk to her for the projects.

It turned out that her teachers
adored
this sort of thing and had put her up for some kind of district-wide student-work competition, with the winning essay to be published on the BBC's website and presented nationally, Which would be quite a laugh, what with it making Parliament look like a bunch of corporate lickspittles. Well, I'd laugh, anyway. Mum and Dad were doing a bit better now that the network was back, and most times when I rang, we could get through ten or fifteen minutes without them recriminating against me and telling me that I should come home and asking me what I was doing with my life.

I didn't answer this last one. My face hadn't been in the papers for quite some time now, and to be honest, that's how I liked it. It had been ages since anyone on the street had recognized me, since anyone on a bus had squinted at me from across the aisle, as if trying to remember where they knew me from. All in all, that was for the best.

But without my picture on the front of the paper, Mum and Dad quickly forgot how proud they were of me and once again began to worry that a wee lad like myself might get led astray by bad company in dirty old London. Nothing I said could dissuade them from this, and to be honest, if they knew, actually knew what I was up to, they'd say that they were perfectly correct about what had happened to their beloved son in the terrible city.

But those calls didn't get me down for long. Nothing did. That sense of overwhelming, all-consuming busy-ness kept anything from making so much as a scratch on me. I had
too much to do
to mope or grump or moan. I was living life, not complaining about it, and Christ, didn't it feel wonderful?

Yeah, so that was my life there for quite some time. It was all our lives, thrown headlong into it, and every week there were more e-mails, more films, more press queries, more people who seemed to care about what we were up to. And there were more people coming to the cinema nights, and there were more cinemas -- not just ours. They popped up all over town and I tried to go to as many as I could make it to -- even if it meant skipping out for part of ours. I wanted to see what they were showing, and if it was any good, I wanted to poach it for one of our nights. Plenty of it was good and some of it was so freaking fantastic, I wanted to find the makers and prostrate myself at their feet and beg to be taught by one so skilled.

Of course, it couldn't last.

26 let herself into the Zeroday one Wednesday afternoon, just like any other Wednesday afternoon. She had her own key, and she came over plenty of days after school -- her parents didn't mind so long as she spent at least three nights per week at home and kept her grades up. I was on the sofa in the sitting room, using a hot-glue gun to attach feathers from a feather-duster to a mad birdy crow mask with evil button eyes and a cruel beak made from a bit of curved umbrella-ribbing draped with black vinyl, every bit of it rescued from the rubbish.

She plonked herself down on the sofa next to me and gave me a giant, flying cuddle that nearly crushed the mask, biting hard on my earlobe and my neck so that I squirmed and pushed and screeched "Gerorff!" and tickled at her with one hand while holding the mask away from the melee with the other.

"Oh, oh, oh," she said, chortling and holding her belly and kicking her legs in the air while leaning back against me. "It's so fantastic, wait'll you hear!"