Pirate Cinema (7 page)

"Yeah," he said. "I don't sleep in shelters if I can help it. I'm between squats at the moment, but not for long. Sleeping in shelters." He shrugged, the lighting bouncing around the room. "Well, it's not for me, like I said."

He had the lock off now, and he withdrew a heavy new lock from his bag, lined it up with the screw holes in the door to make sure it'd fit, then filled the holes with some kind of putty and set to screwing his lock in. "That should do it for now," he said. "Once that liquid wood sets, that lock won't budge. They'll have to angle-grind it off. Later, I'll put in a few deadbolts."

"Jem," I said. "What the hell are you doing?"

"I'm establishing a squat," he said. "Try to keep up, will you? I'm going to clean out this place, put that notice in the window, move in some beds and that, get the electricity and gas working, and I am going to live here for as long as I can. Remember what I was telling you about there being a better way to be homeless? This is it."

I swallowed. "And what am I doing here?"

"There's loads of room," he said. "And it's hard to do this alone. You've got to keep someone on the premises at all times, to tell them to bugger off if they turn up wanting to repossess the place. They can't enter the place so long as there's someone home, not without a warrant. Oh, sure, I could leave the radio on and hope that that fooled 'em but --"

He was going a mile a minute. I suddenly realized that he was even more nervous than I was. He'd had this place scouted out and all ready to move into, but he couldn't take it over until he found a confederate -- me. Someone had to stay home while he was out getting food and that.

"You want me to move in here? Jem --"

He held up both hands. "Look, the worst thing, the absolutely
worst
thing, right? The worst thing that could happen is that they get a court order and evict us and we're back at the shelter. Back where you started. It might take a day, it might take
years
. In the meantime, what else have you got to do? Do you really want to spend the rest of your life sleeping eight to a room? Look, son, this is the chance to become a gentleman of leisure instead of, you know, a
tramp
. Don't you want that? 'Course you do.
Of course you do!
"

I took a step back into the dark of the stinking, shuttered pub. "Look, mate," I said. "It all sounds nice, but this is really fast --"

He stood up and dusted his hands on his thighs. "Yeah, okay, fair enough. But you wouldn't have come along if I'd told you you were going to end up living in a squat, right? I wanted you to
see
the place before you made up your mind. Just look at this place, son, just look at it! Think of the potential! We'll get big comfy sofas, clean up the kitchen and get the water going, stick up a Freeview antenna, find some WiFi to nick, it'll be a bloody palace. A bloody
palace
! Just think about what it could be like! We'll get some wood polish and bring up the wainscoting and those old snugs, shine up the chrome in the kitchen. We could have
dinner parties
! Christ, you should
see
the fridge and walk-in deep-freeze they've got in there -- we could store a year's worth of food and still have room."

I teetered on the edge between my anxiety and his infectious excitement. "I don't understand," I said. "How is it possible that this won't get us banged up? Aren't we trespassing?"

He shook his head. "Not until there's a court order. Until then, we're brave homesteaders on the wooly outer edges of property law. It's a lovely place to be, mate. Places like this, it's in the public interest for us to occupy 'em. The cops might show up, but so long as you don't let 'em in and you know what to tell them, they won't do anything except make noises. Come on, what do you say? You want to be a streetkid or do you want to be an adventurer?"

I looked around the reeking and dark pub. Now my eyes were adjusting to the dim, I could see all the battered furnishings lurking in the shadows. It had once been a lovely place, I could see that. Nice tile work. Old wooden floors and snugs and benches. A long wooden bar with stumps where stools had been torn loose, and a broken back-mirror. I remembered how big the building had been from the outside, all the extra rooms and I wanted to explore them all, map them like a level in a game, find all their treasures and get them put to rights.

"All right," I said. "Deal. For now, anyway. But you got to promise me you won't get me arrested or cut me up and leave me in rubbish bins all over Bow."

He crossed his heart. "Promise. I told you I was a brick around the ankles man, didn't I?"

Once he had the locks on the door -- three of them, including two deadbolts that had to be slowly and painfully screwed into the jamb and door with long, sharp steel screws, a wrist-breaking task that took both of us an hour in turns -- he drew a letter out of his bag, in a sealed envelope with a first-class stamp.

"Right," he said. "This letter is addressed to me, at this address: The Three Crows pub, Bow. I'm going to nip out and find a post-box and post it. That'll get us started on proof that we live here, which'll be handy when and if the law shows up. I'll also get us some dinner. You all right with pizza?"

I was well impressed. "You've done this before."

"Never on my own, always as part of someone else's gang. But yeah, once or twice. I tell you, squatting is for kings, shelters are for tramps. Once you decide to be a king, there's no going back. So, pizza?"

My stomach leapt at the word
pizza
. "As the Buddha said in the kebab shop, 'make me one with everything.'"

He snorted and left, calling out, "Lock up and don't let anyone in until I get back, right?"

"Right!" I called into the closing door. He'd left me with his head-torch and I strapped it on. I'd expected it to be quiet in the pub once he'd gone, but it was alive with spooky old building sounds: creaks and mysterious skittering sounds of rats in the walls. Let's not mess about: the place was stitching me up. In my head, the clittering of mouse-claws over unseen boards was the scrabbling of the local drugs lookouts -- the ones we'd heard calling to one another as we made our way to the pub -- clawing their way in throughsecret loose boards. And those creaking boards -- that was some monstrous, leathery old tramp who made this place his den, holed up in some dank corner where he was now rousing himself, getting ready to cut up and eat the interlopers who'd intruded on his territory.

I have an overactive imagination. At least I'm man enough to know it. I mean, part of me knew that there was no one else in this rotten tooth of a building. And I'd spent the morning meeting and feeding a whole gang of tramps and even they had been polite, friendly, and more scared of me (and their own shadows) than I was of them.

So I resettled the headlamp on my forehead and slowly began to explore the pub, making a conscious effort to keep my breathing even and my shoulders from tightening up around my ears.

Tell you what, though: there are better ways to explore a spooky abandoned building than with a headlamp. The narrow beam of light jiggles like crazy every time you move your head the slightest, teensiest bit. The beam of light that passes right in front of your face means that you have
zero
peripheral vision. Every time you bounce the beam off something reflective and blind yourself, it creates a swarm of squirming green after-burns that look
exactly
like the hands of phantoms rising out of the walls, bent on strangling you. It is the perfect re-creation of every zombie film you've ever seen where the hero's breath rasps in and out as he walks carefully through the halls of some blood-spattered military base, waiting for a pack of growling undead biters to boil out of a doorway and tear him to gobbets and ooze.

There's only one thing worse: turning off the lamp.

I started off slow and careful, bent on convincing myself that I wasn't half-mad with fear. There was a large kitchen which did have huge walk-in deep-freezer, which smelt a bit off, but not totally rancid. The pipes rattled and groaned when I turned on the taps, but then the water began to flow, first in irregular bursts of brown, rusty stuff and then in a good, steady gush of clear London tap-water, the river Thames as filtered through twenty million people's kidneys, processed, dumped back into the Thames, filtered, and sent back to those thirsty kidneys. It's the crapping circle of life. Reassuring.

By now, I had a genuine case of the heebie-jeebies, and I had an idea that maybe some of the upstairs windows hadn't been quite boarded up so there might be some rooms with the light of day shining through them and chasing away the bogey-men. So I found the staircase -- which creaked like one of the Foley stages they use for horror film sound effects -- and made my noisy way up to the first floor. I didn't hang around long. Not only was it pitch black, it also smelled even worse than the ground floor. Someone had lived here and left behind a room filled with dried-out turds and the ammonia reek of old, soaked-in piss.

You want to hear something funny? Once I'd got past my total disgust, I felt a landlord's resentment at this abuse of "my" home. Some interloper had installed himself here and done this awful thing to
my
beloved home. Never mind that he'd been there first, that I hadn't known this place existed before that afternoon, and that I had pretty much broken in and claimed it as my own. I
deserved
this place, I was going to take care of it in a way that the animal that had crapped all over the floor could never understand.

Yeah, it's odd how quickly I went from squatter to owner in my head. But on the other hand, I remember the first time I mixed down my own edit of a Scot Colford clip and watched it spread all over the net, and how much I'd felt like that clip was
mine
, even though I'd taken it from someone else without asking. It's a funny old world, as the grannie in
Home, Home on the Strange
(Scot's first and best rom-com) used to say.

Up on the second floor, things were just as dark, but less awful. There was wax on the floor where someone had burned candles, and I kicked over a few stubs. There was a pretty horrible mattress and a litter of lager-tins in what looked like an old office -- the local estate kids' romantic getaway, I supposed -- and another room stacked high with chairs and tables, all chipped and wobbly looking. I filed that away for future reference.

On the third and top story, I found some rooms whose windows were not boarded-up. These let in a weak, grayish twilight, but it was a massive relief after the pitchy dark of the rooms below. I thought I'd wait there for Jem to return. How long could it take to post a letter and get a pizza? Though, from what I'd seen of Jem, I wouldn't have been surprised if his way of posting a letter involved breaking into the central sorting office, stealing a stamp, then reverse-pickpocketing it into a letter-carrier's bag.

The third floor was a huge, open space: dusty and grimy, but mostly free from sign of human habitation. It was ringed with windows on all its walls, and I could imagine that it'd be a lovely penthouse someday when we'd finished doing up the place. But for now, I was more interested in the fact that the western windows were unboarded. I switched off the headlamp and examined them. They were filthy, but they looked like they might open up, admitting even more light. I yanked the painted iron handles, and pushed and tugged and grunted and rattled them until they squealed to life in a shower of dried paint and fossilized mouse turds and rust-colored dust. Slowly, painfully, I cranked the windows wide open, flooding the room with London's own dirty gray light. The fresh air was incredible, cooling and reassuring, as was the light in the room. With its help, I noted a box of candles and a stack of chairs in one corner.

I looked out the window at the bleak housing estate. It looked like a bomb site: blasted flat and partially ruined, with rotting brickwork and railings hanging free. Loads of the flats looked completely deserted, with their windows boarded up. We'd had some like that back on my estate in Bradford: places where the roof had caved in or the pipes had burst and the council had decided just to leave them empty instead of finding the money to fix them up. I didn't know much about how things were run, but I knew that the council didn't have any money and was always cutting something or other to make ends meet.

If you made a biopic of my life to that point, you could call it
Not Enough Money
and hire someone to write a jaunty theme song called
He's Skint (Yes, 'e is)
. It'd be a box-office smash.

So this bomb site was pretty familiar to me. And it looked like Jem might be the first person I'd ever met who didn't have any problems with being broke. He seemed to have figured out how to live without money, which was a pretty neat trick.

I peered out the window again, looking for Jem. I didn't see him (did he go to Italy for the damn pizza?), but I did spot the drugs lookouts he was talking about before. Just kids, they were, eight or nine years old, playing idle games or chatting on the balconies of the estate, sitting in doorways eating crisps, doing things that were pretty kid-like. But whenever someone new came onto the estate, they started up with their bird-calls, sending them echoing off the high towers.