I fetched them down, and she cut us both generous slices of pie and thick slices of Red Leicester cheese, and poured out two tall glasses of tea. I sat down and she plunked herself in my lap. At that moment, I heard footsteps on the stairs. “Get off,” I whispered, horrified at the thought of meeting her mum with her on my lap.
She waggled her eyebrows at me. “Why?”
“Come on,” I said. “Don’t do this.”
She winked at me, and said, “She’ll love you,” and leapt off my lap just as her mum came into the kitchen.
She was a tall Indian lady with bobbed hair shot with gray, smile lines bracketing a mouth that was just like 26’s. She wore a pretty sundress that left her muscular arms bare, and her bare feet showed long toes with nails painted electric blue.
26 pointed at her toes: “Love them!” she said, and gave her mum a full body hug that I knew well (it was her specialty). “Mum, this is Cecil, the boy who’s been kidnapping me to East London all summer. Cecil, this is my mum, Amrita.”
I stood up awkwardly and shook her hand. “Very pleased to meet you, Mrs. Kahn,” I said, aware that my hands were dripping with sudden, clammy sweat.
She gave me a quick up-and-down look and I was glad I’d dressed up a little for the MP meeting. “Nice to meet you, too, Cecil. I see that 26 has got you something to eat already.” I looked at Twenty—her mum had called her 26!—and saw that she was grinning smugly.
“It’s delicious,” I said. I was on good-manners autopilot.
“So, tell me how your big meeting went,” she said, settling in on another chair after moving its stack of books to the top of the pile on the next chair. She leaned across the table and used 26’s fork to nick a large bite of her pie, then made to get another one, but 26 slapped her wrist. Both were smiling, though.
“Letitia said it was all a waste of time,” 26 said. “The vote is fixed.”
“I can’t believe that’s what she really said,” her mum said. She looked at me.
“Well,” I said, “not exactly. But she did say that she thought it would be hard for other politicians to vote our way because their parties would punish them.”
Her mum winced. “Yes, I was worried about that, too.” She sighed. “I’m sorry, darling. You never can tell. Maybe getting people worked up about this will pay off later, with a bigger movement—”
“That’s what Letitia said,” 26 said snappishly. “Fine. I get it, it’s fine.”
Her mum nodded and pointedly looked at me. “Where do you go to school, Cecil?” she said.
Erm. I looked at my hands. “I don’t, really,” I said. “Well. It’s like—”
26 said, “Cecil left home because he got his family cut off from the Internet by downloading too much.”
Her eyes widened. “Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry to hear that. Where are you living now?”
“With friends,” I said. It was true, as far as it went, but I knew I was blushing. Technically, I was homeless. Well, technically I was a squatter, which was worse than homeless in some ways. 26’s house wasn’t posh, and it was obvious that her parents weren’t rich, but they weren’t the same kind of people as my family. The books, the funny toenails, how young her mum looked—it made me realize what people were talking about when they talked about “class.” I had to make a proper effort to stop myself squirming.
“Where’s Dad?” 26 said, changing the subject without much subtlety.
“He’s down the cellar, messing about in his lab.”
“Is he a scientist?” I said. I had a vision of a white-coated, German-accented superbrain, and felt even more inadequate.
They both laughed though. “No,” her mum said. “He brews beer. He’s mad about it. He hardly drinks the stuff, but he loves to make it. I think he just enjoys all the toys and gadgets.”
“Want to see?” 26 said.
“Erm, sure,” I said.
Once her mum was out of the room, 26 whispered, “He’s not my real dad, not biologically. But I think of him as my father.”
We descended the cellar stairs and came into a low room with a cement floor, the walls lined with tables and shelves containing enormous glass bottles, buckets, siphons, and charts hand-annotated with fat greasepencil. Her dad was bent over a huge glass bottle filled with murky liquid. He was wearing blue jeans and a green smock, and what I could see of his hair was wiry, short, and gray.
“Dad,” 26 said, “I’ve got someone I’d like you to meet.”
He straightened and turned around. I was surprised. Mentally, I’d figured that 26 was mixed-race, so when I saw that her mum was Indian, I assumed her dad was white, but he was Indian, too. And then I remembered that he was her stepfather. I decided that I was absolutely rubbish at predicting peoples’ racial backgrounds and resolved to do less of it from then on.
He was as kind as her mum, but he had ferocious concentration lines in his high forehead and a groove between his eyes you could lose a ten-p piece in. He blinked at us for a moment, then smiled.
“Dad, this is Cecil. Cecil, this is my dad, Roshan.”
He nodded appraisingly at me. I had a paranoid moment, thinking that he was about to ask me something like, “What makes you think that you’re allowed to have sex with my daughter?” But what he actually said was, “Could you give me a hand with something?”
26 tsked. “Dad, I didn’t bring Cecil over so that you could turn him into a human forklift.”
He shushed her. “It’s only that I need to get this”—he pointed at a waist-high glass bottle of brownish-black beer—“onto that table.”
I was glad to be useful. “Of course!” I said, and went over to the bottle and squatted in front of it, taking hold of the neck and the bottom. He took the other side.
“One, two, three!”
We lifted. It was like trying to budge a house. The bottle must have weighed thirty-five stone. I strained, and so did he, his face going purple and a vein standing out in his lined forehead. We groaned and the bottle rose. We got it up to waist-height and staggered two steps to the table and put it down with a clunk. I mashed my fingers a bit and I yanked them free and squeezed my hand between my thighs.
“You all right?” he gasped. He was rubbing his biceps.
“Yeah,” I said. “Didn’t think we were going to make it.”
26 clucked her tongue again. “Dad, that was very naughty. You could have given yourself a heart attack.”
“Small sacrifice for art,” he said, and thumped the bottle, his wedding ring making it ring like a bell. “This is licorice stout,” he said. “With some Valerian root. It’s a muscle relaxant. It’s an experiment.”
“Mum says you’re going to need to serve it over a dropcloth. She calls it incontinence in a glass.”
“She’s probably right, but it’s coming up a treat. Wait a tick.” He rummaged in a crate and pulled out a plastic pump. He fitted it over the bottle’s neck and worked it vigorously, holding a chipped teacup under its spout. It gurgled, then trickled a stream of the dark beer into his cup. He passed it to me.
“Try a sip,” he said. “It’s not quite ready, but I’m really liking where it’s headed.”
I sniffed at it, a bit suspicious. It smelled … earthy. Like fresh-turned soil—though I couldn’t tell you where I’d smelled fresh-turned soil!—or wet stone (I realized that this was where the wet-stone smell I’d noticed when we came into the house must have come from). It was so dark it looked like a black mirror. I tasted it. It was only slightly fizzy, and it was sour in that way that beer or rye bread are, and there were about twenty different flavors behind it, including a strong black licorice flavor that was improbably delicious and sharp inside that big, round earthy taste.
“Fwoar,” I said, and took another sip. Twenty’s dad grinned as though I’d just paid him the highest of compliments.
He pumped another cup and passed it to 26, then one for himself. He held out his cup and we all clinked glasses and sipped some more.
�
��Hardly any alcohol in it, yet,” he said. “I’m going to try to make it very weak, four percent or so. The Valerian will pack a righteous bloody kick.”
“What’s Valerian?” I asked.
Twenty said, “It’s a herb. A sedative. I take it when I get my cramps, knocks me flat on my arse.”
“You’re going to put it in beer?” I sniffed at the cup again. The dregs were swirling around the bottom, thick with gritty sediment.
He waggled his eyebrows and made his fingers dance. “Just a bit. A smidge. I’m thinking, ‘Dr Dutta’s All-Purpose Wintertime Licorice Sleepytime Brew.’ Going to make labels and everything. It will be brilliant on dark, awful winter nights, put your lights out like a switch.”
Twenty slurped the rest of hers back. “Dad’s bonkers, but it’s mostly a harmless kind of crazy. And when he’s not making beer, he’s a pretty fair barrister.”
He held his hands at his breastbone and made a funny little bow. I found myself really liking him. And his beer.
“What are you two up to?”
“I was going to take him round the neighborhood, show him some of my favorite places.”
He nodded. “Will you stay for dinner? I was going to grill some steak. And tofu wieners for Little Miss Veggiepants over there.”
“Dad,” she said. “I haven’t been a vegetarian for months.”
He rolled his eyes. “Who can keep track? Meat for everyone, then. Okay with you, Cecil?”
“Sure,” I said, again, not wanting to seem rude, but wondering if 26 would mind. How long did she want me hanging around her parents? How long until I said or did something that embarrassed her and made them hate me and forbid her to see me?
“You’re not a veggiepants, are you?”
“No sir,” I said seriously. “I’ll eat anything that doesn’t eat me first.” I had to stop myself explaining that I normally lived on a diet of rubbish harvested from skips.
“Good man,” he said. He kissed 26 on the top of her head. “Bring him back by seven o’clock and I’ll have supper on the table.”
She grabbed my hand and dragged me upstairs. “Come on,” she said, squeezing my hand. “I’ll show you my room.”
She slammed the door behind us as soon as we got into her room—a bit bigger than my room back in Bradford, but every bit as crowded with papers, posters, a litter of memory sticks and keys and semifunctional beamers, along with a load of climbing gear and ropes hanging from hooks rudely screwed into the plaster.
She swept a pile of clothes off the single bed and pushed me down on it, then climbed on top and began to kiss me. “Still fancy me now that you’ve met my insane parental units?” she whispered in my ear.
I squeezed her bum. “’Course!” I said. “They’re brilliant, you know. Really nice. I thought they’d hate me on sight.”
“Naw,” she said. “Compared to my last boyfriend, you’re the catch of the century.”
I pulled my face away from hers. “You’ve never talked about him. Who was he?”
She shrugged. “A major tosser, as it turns out. Not one of the highlights of my life and times. Caught him fondling my so-called best mate behind the school one day. I forgave him, but then I caught him snooping around my computer, reading my private stuff. That was unforgivable. So I put him out with the rubbish.”
Of course, I had a thousand daft questions, like “Did he shag better than me?” and “Was he white, too?” and “Was he smarter than me?” and “Was his thing bigger than mine?” and “Was he posh?” and so on. But as stupid as my undermind was, the stuff up front had the good sense to only say, “Well, there you go. Sounds like an idiot. But I’m glad to have someone to make me look good.”
She kissed me again. “Let’s go see my stomping grounds.”
* * *
The Kensal Green Cemetery was even bigger than Highgate—like a city for the dead, surrounded by a crumbling wall that had been patchily repaired, the outside road lined with shops selling headstones and statues of angels and that.
26 took me in through a gap in the wall hidden by tall shrubs that smelled of dog piss, which led into a field of knee-high wild grasses growing around crazy-tilted headstones whose names had been worn away by wind and rain and the passing of years.
“Isn’t it magic?” she said as we meandered through the stones, warm earth smells in our noses, preceded by the scampering sounds of small animals haring off through the grass to get out of our way. “It’s where I got the idea for the screening in Highgate. I’d really love to do one here, next. We could get a pretty big crowd into the more remote bits of the place. I’d love to do the screenings every week, or maybe every fortnight. Get a big audience. That one in Highgate was like, the high point of my life.”
I wished yet again that I hadn’t spent most of it getting so rat arsed. From what Rabid Dog and the others said, it had been absolutely, epically magisterial. “Yeah,” I said. “It was pretty stupendous.”
“But if we did it that often, we’d be sure to get rumbled.”
“Not if we changed locations. It wouldn’t always have to be cemeteries. They’re not going to be any good once autumn rolls in and it starts pissing down with rain practically every night. But there’s loads of indoor places you could do it, too—Jem’s always scouting spots for squats, he can’t help himself. Lots of boarded-up warehouses type of thing. And then there’s underground; saw a little urban infiltration video from these absolute nutters who go running around in the old Victorian sewers. Some of them, they’re like castle dining halls. The Victorians were mad for grandeur. Can you imagine how fantastically cool it would be to lead a load of people in wellies down some damp tunnel and into a huge brick vault with popcorn and seats and a big screen?”
“Magisterial,” she said.
One thing led to another—specifically, 26 led me deeper into the graveyard’s secluded secret places—and before long we sat in the lee of a stone mausoleum, soft moss beneath us, snogging like a pair of crazed ferrets. Eventually, 26 checked her phone and announced that we were about to be late for dinner and we ran through the now-closed graveyard, ducking back through the same crumbled section of wall.
Dinner was delicious and, after a few minutes, very friendly. Her dad was really funny, and had loads of stories about mad judges and dodgy clients. Her mum was more reserved—and clearly a bit put off by the idea of her daughter having a boyfriend—but she warmed and even let me help with the washing up, which turned into something of a party as 26 turned on some music from her phone and pitched in to help, too, and soon we were dancing and singing around the kitchen.
When I kissed her good night at the door—a brief one, as her parents were in the front room, reading in sight of the picture windows that overlooked the doorway—she whispered, “You done good,” in my ear. The words stayed with me on the long tube journey home, and they had me smiling all the way.
* * *
If you care about any of this stuff, you already know what happened with the Theft of Intellectual Property Bill: in the end, only thirty-nine MPs bothered to turn up for the vote. That left 611 absent without leave. I guess they were all having a lovely lie-in with the newspapers and a cup of tea. At first, I thought that only thirty-nine attendees meant that we’d won—I’d googled up the rules for Parliament and it said that you needed at least forty for a vote.
I was cheering about this on a Cynical April board when some clever bastard pointed out that the Speaker of the House—the bloke who kept order and handed out the biscuits at teatime—also counted, bringing the total up to forty. The independent and Green candidates all voted against it, and so did many of the LibDems, but twenty-one Labour, Conservative, and Liberal Democrat MPs voted in favor of it, and it passed, with only fifty-five minutes’ debate.
The office of every MP who took the day off work was flooded with calls from angry voters, but as Annika pointed out, they didn’t really have to worry, most of them, since there wasn’t anyone to vote for in their district who w
ould have come out against the bill, not with their party’s whips out and enforcing order.
Within a week of the law coming into effect, they had their first arrest. Jimmy Preston, the kid they took away, had some kind of mental problems—autistic spectrum, they said on the BBC—and he didn’t go out much. But he’d collected 450,000 songs on his hard drive through endless, tedious, tireless hours of downloading. From what anyone could tell, he didn’t even listen to them: he just liked cataloging them, correcting their metadata, organizing them. I recognized the motivation, having spent many comforting evenings tidying up and sorting out my multi-terabyte collection of interesting video clips (many of which I’d never even watched, but wanted to have handy in case they were needed for one of my projects). He had collected most of them before the law came into effect, but TIP also made it a crime to possess the files.
Six months later, the sentencing judge gave him five years in prison, the last year adult prison after he turned twenty-one—because the Crown showed that his collection was valued at over twenty million pounds!—and the media was filled with pictures of this scared-eyed seventeen-year-old kid in a bad-fitting suit, his teary parents hovering over his shoulder, faces pulled into anguished masks.
But he didn’t serve five years. They found him hanging from the light fixture in his cell two weeks later. His cellmates claimed they hadn’t noticed him climbing up on the steel toilet with a rope made from a twisted shirt around his neck, hadn’t noticed as he kicked and choked and gurgled out his last breath. The rumor was that his body was covered in bruises from the beatings he’d received from the other prisoners. Jimmy didn’t deal well with prison. We all got to know his name then—until then, they’d kept it a secret because he was a minor—and he went from being Mr. X to Dead Jimmy.
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