Pirate Cinema

by Cory Doctorow

  Annika was still talking and I squeezed my eyes shut to try to make the tears that had sprung up go back inside so that I wouldn’t humiliate myself in front of 26. And honestly, it was also so that I could squeeze away the enormous and terrible feeling I got when I thought about my family. I could hear my pulse in my ears and my hands were shaking.

  “Last time, every MP in the country got a visit from twenty constituents about the bill. They still voted for it. Of course they did, they were fully whipped.”

  26 leaned over and whispered, “That means their parties made them vote yes.” Like she was explaining things to an idiot, I suppose, but I was an idiot about this stuff. And when she whispered in my ear, her hot breath tickled the hairs there and gave me an instant stiffie that I had to cross my legs to hide.

  “This time, we want to get a hundred constituents to request meetings with their MPs. Ten a day, every day leading up to the vote. It’s a big number: 650 MPs, 6500 activists. But we’re talking about putting kids in jail here. I think that this will wake up even the complacent zombies who say, ‘It’s just the same as stealing, right?’”

  Lots of people had their hands up. Annika started to call on them. Everyone had ideas about how to get normal people to show up at their MPs’ surgeries with pitchforks and torches, demanding justice. I wished I had an idea, too, something that would make me seem like less of a total noob in front of 26. Then I had one, and I shot my arm straight up.

  Annika called on me. I suddenly felt shy and red-faced, but I made myself talk. “So, like, when I went to copyright class at school, they told us that everyone is a copyright owner, right? Like, as soon as you write it down or save it to your hard drive or whatever, it’s yours for your life and seventy years, right? So I figure, we’re all copyright owners, so we could go after everyone who takes our copyrights. Like, if a film company gets your graffiti in a shot, or if an MP puts your email on her website, or whatever. So what if we sue them all? What if we put them in jail?”

  Annika started shaking her head halfway through this. “I know that sounds like a good idea, but I’m afraid it won’t work. The way the law is written, you have to show ‘meaningful commercial potential’ before you can ask for criminal prosecution. And in order to sue for damages, you need to be able to spend more on solicitors than they are: the law is written so that rich and powerful people can use it, but poor people and artists can’t. A record company can use it to put you in jail for downloading too many songs, but if you’re a performer whose record company owes you money, you can’t use it to put some thieving exec in prison. They’re evil, but they’re not stupid: when they buy a law, they make damned sure it can’t be used against them.”

  I felt irrationally angry at Annika. I thought I’d had a genius idea, one that would really impress Twenty, and Annika had made me look like a noob. I was a noob. I should have just kept my mouth shut. But 26 gave my hand a little pat, as if to say, there, there, and I felt one nanometer better.

  I didn’t have anything else to say after that. Everyone else seemed to know more about this stuff than I did. It turned out that one of the guys in a suit was an MP, from the Green Party, and he got up on his feet to say how much he appreciated all this, and how he knew that there were LibDem and Labour and Tory MPs who would love to vote against the whip, but they were too afraid of being thrown out of the party if they didn’t cooperate. This was just too weird: I had thought that MPs got elected to represent the voters back home. How could they do that if someone else could tell them how to vote? It made me wish I’d paid more attention in school to all those civics classes.

  The meeting broke up with everyone giving out email addresses to Annika, which I thought was hilarious, since she was meant to be all punk and alternative, but here she was using email like some old crumblie. I’d have thought she’d use Facebook Reloaded like everyone else, but when I asked 26 about it, she shook her head in the way that told me I was being dumb again, and said, “Facebook’s all spied on. Everything you do—anyone who sets up an advertiser account can get everything, all your private info and all your friends’ public info. Why do you think we use Cynical April? Anyone tries to arrange an illegal party on Facebook Reloaded, the Bill know about it before their mates do.”

  There we were, standing in the flood of people pushing up and down Brick Lane, elbowing past touts offering free wine with a curry from one of the dozens of Balti houses, stepping around street musicians or peddlers with blankets, stopping at food wagons or to shout at a cyclist who got too close. The sun was a bloody blob just over the roofline, and the heat was seeping away to something tolerable, and I was standing so close to 26 that I could see the stubble on her scalp and the holes up and down her ears where she’d taken her earrings out.

  “Erm,” I said.

  “You’re a real charmer, you know that?” she said. My heart dropped into my stomach and my stomach dropped out my arse and I stood there like an idiot. “Oh, come on,” she said, tweaking my nose, “you don’t need to be such a nutcase about this. I like you all right so far. Let’s go somewhere, okay?”

  I almost invited her back to the Zeroday, but that would have been too much. So I said, “I’m skint, but I know where we can get some free food.”

  “No five-finger discounts,” she said. “I don’t believe in going to jail for stupid things like stealing.”

  “What do you believe in going to jail for?”

  She nodded. “Good question. I expect I’ll find out soon enough.”

  * * *

  Taking a girl to a skip for dinner makes for an odd first date, but I admit that I thought it might make me seem all dangerous and street, and besides, I really was broke. We weren’t all that far from the Barbican and the Waitrose skip, but I had my sights on bigger spoils (so to speak). Over the river, Borough Market had just finished for the day. Hawkers have been selling food there since the 1200s, and it’s one of the biggest food markets in the world. Most of the week, it’s just wholesale, but on Saturday it opens up to the public, with endless stalls selling fine meats and cheeses, braces of exotic game like pheasant and rabbit, handmade chocolates, farmers’ produce, thick sandwiches, fizzy drinks, fresh breads, and some of the finest coffee I’ve ever drunk. Just thinking about it made my mouth water.

  But as good as it was during the day, it was even better at nighttime. That was when the stall-holders set out all the stuff that didn’t sell during the day, but wouldn’t last until the next Saturday market. On a Saturday night, Borough’s skips were like an elephant’s graveyard for slightly unlovely vegetables, mildly squashed boxes of handmade truffles, slightly stale loaves studded with walnuts or dried fruits, and wheels of cheese gone a little green around the gills. Like Jem says, cheese is just milk that’s spoiled in a very specific way, and mold is part of the package. Just scrape it off and eat the rest.

  We walked to Borough through a magic and sparkling night, and 26 told me all about her mates who ran the anarchist bookstore—it was called Dancing Emma’s—and how much fun she had reading all the strange books they stocked. “I mean, when I started working there, I had no idea. I’d literally never thought about how the system worked and that. It never occurred to me to wonder why some people had stuff and other people had nothing. Why there were bosses and people who got bossed. My mum isn’t very political.”

  “My parents don’t do politics, either. Do you see your old man?”

  She shook her head. “Naw,” she said. “Left my mum when I was little. He’s a cop, believe it or not. In Glasgow. Mum’s been remarried for ages, though. Stepdad’s a good bloke.”

  We walked a bit. I got up the courage to say, “So, why are there bosses? What else would we do, just let everyone do what they want?”

  “That’s about right. What’s wrong with that?”

  I started to say something, stopped. “What if someone wanted to go and do murders or commit rape?”

  We walked for a while, and I snuck a peek at her. She seemed to be th
inking it over. “This is hard to explain. Whenever you ask an anarchist about it, she’ll usually go on and on about how most of those crimes are committed because people are poor and powerless and so on. Like, when we get rid of bosses and masters and everyone has enough, it won’t matter. But I think some people are just, like, total bastards and I don’t know exactly what you do about them. Maybe after we get rid of the state and everyone can do what they want, we’ll agree on some rules, you know, some crimes that involve hurting people, and we’ll all agree to enforce them.” She shrugged. “You go right to the hard question, you know? I don’t really have the answer. But look around London, all the crime and violence and that—it’s not like having all kinds of laws and rules and jails and power is making us safe.”

  “Maybe we’d be a lot less safe without them,” I said. I liked this kind of discussion and I didn’t get much of it with Rabid Dog and Chester. My mind raced.

  “Maybe. But I don’t know, doesn’t it seem, you know, obvious that at least some crime is down to the fact that there are rich bastards and poor sods? Maybe there’s some nutter who’d steal even if he had plenty, but isn’t most crime down to not having enough?”

  I shook my head. “Maybe. But that makes it sound like poor people are bigger crims than rich ones. But we were poor, my family, and we weren’t criminals. If we could get by without breaking the law—”

  She laughed. “Mate, are you serious? You’re the biggest crim I know! Or did you get a license for all those tasty clips you cut together for those videos last night?”

  I laughed, too. “Right, right, okay. But I didn’t make that video cos I’m poor.”

  “Not exactly, okay. But you know that 90 percent of the film copyrights in the whole history of the planet belong to five studios? And that eight companies control 85 percent of the world’s radio, TV, films, newspaper, book publishing, and Internet publishing? So if you worked for one of those companies, chances are that you’d be able to use all those clips you cut up. I see stuff like that all the time, stupid adverts to pimp Coke or Nike or whatever. Those companies own all our culture and they get to make anything they want with it. The rest of us have to break the law to do what they do all the time. But it’s everyone’s culture—that’s the whole point, right? Once you put it out into the world, it’s the world’s—it’s part of the stories we tell each other to make sense of life.”

  I’d been about one-quarter in love with 26 until this point. Now I felt like I was 75 percent of the way, and climbing. It was like she was saying something I’d always known but never been able to put into words—like she was revealing a truth that had been inside of me, waiting for her to let it out. I felt like dancing. I felt like singing. I also felt like kissing her, but that thought also made me want to throw up with nervousness, so I pushed it down.

  “You’re a very clever lass,” I said. “Christ, that was brilliant.”

  She stopped in the middle of the pavement, and people behind us had to swerve around us, making that tsk-huff sound that Londoners make when you violate the Unwritten Code of Walking. I didn’t care. She was smiling so much she almost lit up the whole street. “Thank you, Cecil. That means a lot, coming from you. I thought your videos were just genius. When I saw them, I thought to myself, ‘Whoever made these is someone really special.’ I’m glad to see that I was right.”

  I thought I should kiss her then. Was she waiting for me to kiss her? Her face was tilted toward mine—she was nearly as tall as me. I could smell her breath, a hint of the peppermint tea we’d drunk. I’d never kissed a girl before. What if I messed it up? What if she slapped me and never wanted to see me again? What if—

  She kissed me.

  * * *

  In the films, they always say that you’ll never forget your first kiss. In the films, your first kiss is always perfect. In the films, everyone participating in the kiss knows what to do,

  In real life, my first kiss was wildly imperfect. First, there was the business of noses. Hers was small and round and adorable, like a Bollywood star on a poster. Mine was a large, no-shape English nose. Both of them tried to occupy the same space at the same time and it didn’t really work out.

  Then teeth. The sound your teeth make when they knock against someone else’s teeth is minging, and you hear it right in your head, like the sound you get when you crunch an unexpected chicken bone. And it seemed that no matter where I wanted to put my teeth, she wanted to put her teeth.

  And tongues! Christ, tongues! I mean, when you see them going at it in the videos, they’re doing insane things with their tongues, making them writhe like an eelmonger’s barrow. But when I tried to use a bit of tongue, I ended up licking her teeth, and then I had the realization that my tongue was in another person’s mouth, which was nearly as weird as, say, having your hand in someone’s stomach or your foot in someone’s lung.

  That was only the first realization that entered my head. After that, it was a nonstop monologue, something like, Holy crap, I’m kissing her, I’m really kissing her! What should I be doing with my hands? Should I put my hands on her bum? I’d love to put my hands on her bum. I probably shouldn’t put my hands on her bum. Oh, yes I should. No. Wait, why am I thinking this, should the kiss be, like, all-obliterating and occupying 300 percent of my total consciousness, transporting me to the Galaxy of the First Kiss? I wonder if this means she’s my girlfriend now? I wonder if she’s kissed other blokes. I bet she has. I wonder if I’m better at it than they are. I bet I’m rubbish at it. Of course I’m rubbish at it. I’m spending all my time thinking instead of kissing her. For God’s sake, Trent, stop thinking and KISS. Oh, there’s that tongue again. It’s not exactly nice, but it’s not exactly horrible, either. We’re standing right here on the public pavement kissing! Everyone can see. I’m so embarrassed. Wait, no I’m not. I’m the bloody king of the world! See that, London, I’m KISSING! Oh shitshitshit, I just got a stiffie.

  The other thing about kissing: when do you stop? I mean, if it’s just your mum kissing you good night, it’s easy to tell where it ends. But a kiss like this, a proper snog, where does it end? In the vids, I’d carry her into a bedroom or a closet or something. But we were in the middle of the street, on the north side of London Bridge. I didn’t have any handy bedrooms or closets. Besides, my mind was still racing, going off in demented directions: Does it matter that I’m white? Has she kissed more Asian guys or more white guys? Is she Asian? Maybe her dad is white? She doesn’t look that Asian. Maybe her mum is white? Maybe she’s all Asian. Maybe she’s just kind of dark-skinned. Does she think I’m weird because I’m white? I mean, this was just mad. I hadn’t given two thoughts to 26’s background until she kissed me—half the people I knew in Bradford had families from India or Bangladesh or Pakistan. And half of them were more English than I was, more into footie and the Royals and all that stuff.

  And there I was, standing on the street, snogging the crap out of a girl I was falling in love with, thinking of how my neighbors in Bradford had hung out their England flags every World Cup and how no one in my English family could be arsed to watch the game. Get that? I wasn’t just thinking about football—I was thinking of how little I cared about football. Stupid brain.

  But at least that distracted me from the throbber in my pants, which was about to become a major embarrassment once 26 let go and I turned to face the crowd. I was going to look like someone had pitched a tent in there. Stupid cock.

  Which all makes it sound like that kiss was rubbish. It wasn’t.

  For all that I was distracted as anything and nervous and self-conscious, I still remember every second of it, the way her lips felt on mine, the way the blood roared in my ears, the way my feet and legs tingled, the way my chest felt too tight for my thundering heart. Which must mean that for all that I was thinking a thousand miles a second, I was also paying a lot of attention to the beautiful girl in my arms.

  “Whew,” she said, backing off a little, but keeping her arms locked around my neck. �
��That was a bit of all right, wasn’t it?”

  I swallowed a couple times, then tried to speak. It came out in a croak: “Wow.”

  “Come on, then,” she said, and took my hand and led me across London Bridge.

  * * *

  It turned out that this wasn’t Twenty’s first experience digging through a skip, but it was her first time looking for food.

  “I usually just go after electronics. There’s always someone who can use them—and now that I’ve met your mate Aziz, there’s an even better reason to go after those skips. I figured food was more likely to be, you know, runny and stinky and awful.”

  It was the most mental feeling, having a conversation with Twenty after we’d snogged. I wanted to snog her again, but I also felt like I had an obligation not to just grab her and kiss her some more, like we had to go on pretending that we were still two friends on our way out for a strange dinner courtesy of the skips of Borough Market.

  “It can be,” I said. “But there’s plenty that’s really good, and it’s such a pity to let it all go to waste.” I took hold of a huge, smoked Italian salami. The label said it was smoked wild boar, and the paper wrapper around one end had been torn and scuffed. “You’re not a vegetarian, are you?”