Pirate Cinema

by Cory Doctorow

  The Guardian mentioned that all the video was up for download on ZeroKTube and the comment sections on the download page filled up with hundreds of messages from all over the world, sometimes with links to other mixes of the same footage that other people had made, seemingly overnight. Just a few hours before, I’d felt all alone in the world, an idiot kid fighting a stupid war. Now I felt like I was part of a whole world of people who knew what I knew, felt what I felt. It was the best feeling in the world.

  Everyone at the Zeroday was in a fantastic mood. Jem made us coffee that was the strongest, most delicious thing to come out of his kitchen yet. Chester and Rabid Dog announced that they were making breakfast and disappeared into the kitchen. I trailed after them and they put me to work as sous-chef, chopping this, stirring that, googling recipes and scrubbing pots and rooting through our larder for ingredients.

  We brought out breakfast to a round of applause that intensified as Chester announced each dish: buckwheat porridge baked in milk with black currants and honey; grilled mushrooms with dill; buttered scones with raspberry jam; streaky bacon and wild boar sausage; and more. It was all the bounty of various skips around town. Chester turned out to have a real passion for them, and had just lucked into a load of half-frozen organic meat that a Waitrose chucked out when its freezer broke down. Knowing the food had all come for free and been prepared with our own hands made it all the more delicious.

  And so did Rabid Dog’s special homemade chili sauce, which he had made and put up in little jars the month before, filling the house with choking, pepper-spray clouds made from the lethal Scotch Bonnet seeds he’d minced and flash-cooked before pickling them with spice and tomato puree. We sat there, stuffing our gobs and marveling at our own cleverness. After a year in London, I had found a home, a community, and a purpose in life. I was only seventeen years old, but I’d already made more of a mark on the world than either of my parents, already found something extraordinary to be and do. I felt like a god, or at least a godling.

  So, of course, that’s just when it all went to shit.

  * * *

  After breakfast, we did the washing up and drifted away to our laptops. It was gone two in the afternoon, and we’d wrangled two more days’ use of the van out of Aziz to clear out the best junk from Sewer Cinema so that we could store it in the Zeroday for our next performance, whenever that was. But we couldn’t do that until after dark, and so we drifted off to our laptops and began to read the reviews and that.

  I lay down for a nap, my arms and legs leaden with food and hangover, Jem’s coffee having lifted me up and then dropped me like a sack of potatoes. But I’d hardly closed my eyes when someone knocked at my door. I swam up from sleep, trying to make sense of the knocking and my surroundings.

  “I’m sleeping,” I grunted at the shut door and whomever was behind it.

  “It’s Cora.” She sounded upset.

  I groaned. “Come in,” I said, and sat up, gathering my quilt around me.

  Cora flicked on the light when she came in and I shielded my eyes against the glare. When they adjusted, I saw that she was grim-faced and starey. Uh-oh.

  She moved a pile of dirty clothes and magazines and assorted junk off my edit-suite chair and perched on it. “I just spoke to Mum and Dad.” I facepalmed myself and groaned again. Mum and Dad didn’t read The Guardian—they didn’t read any newspapers, but The Guardian was a paper they especially didn’t read. But now that I’d given it two seconds’ thought, I realized that someone would have passed the paper onto them.

  “They’re upset?”

  She sighed. “No. Yes. Sort of. I think they finally believe me now about you not being some kind of junkie prostitute rent-boy.”

  “Well, that’s a relief.”

  She glared at me. “You should be relieved. They’ve been beside themselves since you left, convinced you’d be dead before they ever saw you again. They’ve been mourning you. Now they’re just pissed at you.”

  I sighed. “That’s an improvement, then?”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said. “They’ll forgive you. You’re the number one son, Trent. One night I came home late from the library and I heard Mum and Dad talking in the sitting room—they didn’t know I was still awake—and they were talking about how clever you were, how you’d always been so creative and how they’d always thought you’d go so far.”

  I shook my head. “Cora, what the hell are you talking about? I was the family cock-up artist! Oh, sure, I know they loved me, but they weren’t stupid enough to think I’d ever amount to anything. I know that much.”

  “You are pretty stupid for such a clever person, Trent.” She sighed again. “I don’t want to argue about it. The only person who thought you were a cock-up artist was you. The rest of us thought you were pretty good. And Mum and Dad thought the sun shone out your arse. Believe it or not, but it’s true.

  “I even think they’re a little proud.” She looked at the floor for a while. “I think I need to go back to them.” I didn’t say anything. She was chewing on the words, trying to get them out. “Mum and Dad need me there. They just don’t understand how the world works. They’re about to get their Internet back, you know?” That startled me. But of course—it had been a year. “But Dad’s got to find new work, and he’s been offline for a year and you know what he was like—he could barely make the computer work when he was using it every day. He’s hopeless.” She heaved a huge sigh. “Trent, all this stuff you’re doing here, I mean to say, it’s really fantastic, honestly. Makes me proud to bust, just to be related to you. I thought that I’d come to London and discover a life of mystery and excitement, and I did, but I also discovered that I’m just not cut out for it. You and your mates, you’re magic, but you’re also insane. The truth is—” She looked me straight in the eyes. “The truth is, I am a good girl, the kind of girl who gets top marks and loves to study and so on. I’m not nearly cool enough to hang around with you and your friends.”

  “Cora,” I said. “You’re the coolest girl I know.” And it was true. Cora didn’t have illustrious clothes or a shaved head or a bunch of piercings or whatever, but she’d seen through what I was doing with Sewer Cinema instantly, and challenged me to be a better version of myself. “I know you think you’re not cool enough for us, but the truth is that you’re so cool you don’t need to live in a squat or break the law to be cool. You’re cool just by being you—you’re cool enough to go to the bloody library. If anyone should be proud, it should be me.”

  She chuckled a bit and kicked her feet. “Who knew my brother was so soppy? Whatever, Trent. Listen, I’ve spent the past year worrying myself stupid about you, and Mum and Dad are twice as worried as I am. So I’ve got a proposal for you: come home and see them with me. Show them what you’ve done with yourself. Talk with them. You can come straight back to London afterward. I’m not trying to convince you to go live in Bradford or anything, but, Trent, you don’t know what it’s doing to them. They may not be the brightest people in the world, but they love us both like fire, and it’s just not right—”

  I held up my hands. “You’re right.” I was surprised to hear myself saying it, but as soon as I did, some band of tightness and sorrow that had cinched up my chest for so long I’d forgot it was there released itself, and I found myself breathing into corners of my lungs that hadn’t felt air in a year. “You’re right, Cora. I didn’t call because I hadn’t called, and every day that went by made it harder to call. It’s been nearly a year now, and I can’t stay away any longer. You’re right, you’re right, you’re right.”

  She got up and kissed me on the cheek. “I love you, Trent,” she said, and gave me a ferocious hug that made my ribs creak. I guess carrying all those library books had given her strong arms.

  * * *

  No one was surprised to hear that I was going home to see my family. Chester had been to Manchester twice in the time I’d known him, returning in a weird happy-sad mood, with a big bag of food and a little stash of money f
rom his parents. Even Rabid Dog called his parents once a month, and endured their shouting and abuse, and then went out and danced his ass off all night, returning exhausted and red-eyed and crawling into bed for a day. Only Jem was like me, a man without a past, never contacting his family or anyone else from his old days, whatever they might have been. I asked him about Dodger from time to time, but he just shrugged and changed the subject.

  26 took Cora out before we left and they went clothes shopping at the vintage places Twenty liked, and they did Cora’s hair in her bathtub, dying it a weird reddy-brown like a fox and cutting it so that it stood out in clumps that looked random but did flattering things for her round face. They returned from their day happy and giggly as ever, and swore they’d stay in touch. I sat on my laptop and lazily worked on my timeline of the life-and-times of Scot Colford, a huge file I kept that documented every appearance Scot had ever made and all the people who’d costarred with him. It was a big project that I’d been working on for years, though I’d had to start over when my lappie was stolen.

  They were deep in conversation about the intricacies of copyright, talking about something called “plurilateral trade negotiations,” “TRIPS,” and “the Berne Convention.” It made me feel a bit dumb, but also proud—the women in my life were so bloody brilliant, and they let me hang around with them.

  Cora and I rode the tube to Victoria, and I helped her carry her big bag of library books and another bag of clothes 26 had helped her pick out. I had a cloth carrier-bag with my lappie and mains adapter, a couple clean pairs of underpants and socks, a toothbrush, and a spare T-shirt. I was going back to Bradford, but I wasn’t staying more than one night.

  As the bus pulled out of Victoria Station, my anxiety began to mount. What would I say to Mum and Dad? What would they say to me? Cora could tell that I was starting to work myself into a state, so she started to explain what she and 26 had been talking about. It was the history of copyright treaties, starting with something called the Berne Convention that a French writer named Victor Hugo had dreamed up in 1886, the first in a long line of international agreements on copyright that all built on one another. I didn’t quite understand what Cora meant by this, but she explained: Every copyright treaty ever passed, for hundreds of years, has had in it something like, “By signing this treaty, you agree to all the other copyright treaties ever.” The way Cora described it, it was a net that got tighter and tighter, every time a country signed on and promised to make its laws comply with all the copyright laws anyone ever managed to come up with.

  Cora told me that lately, copyright treaties weren’t even being made at the United Nations, not since the big film and record companies figured out that you could get a lot more done by holding the treaty discussions in secret, then announcing the results to the world’s nations and demanding that they sign on, and refusing to trade with them if they didn’t.

  At first I didn’t understand her, and then I didn’t believe her, and then she made me get out my laptop and jump on the bus’s WiFi network—I had a whole fistful of prepaid credit cards now that I used for this sort of thing, topping them up with cash only at newsagents that didn’t have CCTV cameras—and look it up. It was sickening, really, thinking that our laws weren’t really being passed by our MPs, but instead being made up in secret meetings run by executives from giant corporations. How the hell could we fight that?

  All this business made the time fly past, so that I didn’t even have time to worry about seeing Mum and Dad again, which was what Cora had intended all along. When we got off the bus in Bradford, my mind was still whirling with thoughts about secret treaties, so that I hardly noticed where we were until we were out on the road, smelling the smells and seeing the sights of my hometown.

  It was so familiar—it seemed like I knew every crack in the pavement, every spiderweb in a shop doorway. The faces of the tramps asking for spare change outside of the station were like old friends: I must have seen them a million times in my life. Watching them begging for money, I wanted to run over and explain about Jem’s sign-theory, but mostly that was about avoiding Mum and Dad for as long as possible.

  I wanted it to drizzle while we walked home, for the sky to be iron-gray and low and glowering, but it remained stubbournly cheerful and blue, with clouds that looked like fluffy sheep. Stupid sky. We were home far too soon, and if the bus station had seemed familiar, the chipped cement steps leading up into the estate were like seeing my own face in the mirror. They still had the same graffiti, even the same withered crisp packets and sneaky dried-out fossil dog shits that I remembered, like the place had been pickled the day I left.

  Cora had her keys out before we got to the door, and she wanded them over the panel, punched in her PIN, and the door clicked open, and the smell of my parents’ house slithered out the crack and up my nostrils and I was home.

  Mum and Dad stood in the hallway, and Cora gave them each a kiss and a long hug, then slid past them into the sitting room, leaving me alone and facing them. They seemed to have aged ten years since I’d last seen them, skin sagging loose on their bones. Mum was leaning heavily on Dad, and when she took a step toward me, she wobbled so violently that both Dad and I leapt out to steady her. So there we were, all holding onto one another, and it seemed like we’d start blubbing any minute. So I said, “I’m sorry I didn’t call. You must have been worried sick.”

  Mom said, “We were,” and her voice cracked a bit.

  “I’m sorry,” I said again. “I’m so, so sorry. But I couldn’t stay here, not after what I’d done to you all. And once I was gone … Well, I just couldn’t bring myself to ring, I didn’t know how I’d explain myself to you. And the longer I waited—”

  “We thought you were dead!” Dad said, so loud that we both jumped. “We thought you were a prostitute, or taking drugs—”

  Mum squeezed his arm hard. “Enough,” she said. “We promised Cora.” She put her arms around my neck and squeezed me so hard I thought my stuffing would come out. “It’s so good to see you again, Trent. We love you.”

  “I love you too, Ma,” I said, and I didn’t want to cry in front of them, so I squirmed away and ran to my little room and threw myself down on my old bed and stuffed my face into my pillow and sobbed like a baby.

  My room looked like I’d just stepped out. I could have sworn that the sheets on the bed were the ones that had been on it when I left for London, though they smelled of fresh detergent, so I guessed that Mum had come in and cleaned up, which also explained the lack of dust. There were my schoolbooks, and my old clothes, and the parts of laptops I’d taken apart to keep mine running. There were the scuffs on the wall from where I kicked off my trainers every day, and even spare trainers under the bed. Though it had been a year since I’d last been there, it felt like I’d only just left—but at the same time, it had been so long I couldn’t even remember what or who I had been then.

  Worst of all was the feeling that I was somehow going backward, or sinking down, into the life I’d had before London. I’d always had a sad, worshipful insecurity about being from the North, always wanted to trade the northern habit of saying little, of being wry and low-key, for the gabby, exuberant blathering of Londoners in the TV and films I’d grown up with. In my time at the Zeroday, I’d reinvented myself, made myself into a fast-talking and wordy sort. Back home in Bradford, all that felt like a cheap trick, a flimsy mask I’d made for myself, and now it was slipping off as I found myself speaking—even thinking—in the northern patterns I’d been reared on.

  I dried my eyes and went into the sitting room. Cora had changed into more of her new clothes and to my surprise, both Mum and Dad were making approving noises about them. When did they get so cool? In my mind, Bradford had been a remote village with the cosmopolitan sophistication of a pigsty. Mum and Dad made space between them on the sofa, and I smelled Dad’s cologne, Mum’s perfume, like they’d made themselves up for a big night out, the way they did when we were little kids.

 
“We saw your film,” Dad said. “On the telly. They showed it on the news. Sky only had bits of it, but ITV showed the lot.”

  Mum said, “They say that the film company’s going to sue ITV for breaching copyright by showing it.”

  I snorted. “Brilliant: it’s illegal to report the news now.”

  “It was a damned good film,” Dad said. “All that Scot stuff. I didn’t know you were as clever as that, son.” He smiled, a proud and soppy kind of smile that sliced right through my guts. Making my dad smile like that was better than a hundred Christmases.

  “You liked it?” I said, blatantly fishing now.

  “Made us proud,” Mum said. “Laughed ourselves silly. It was so much better than the real film.”

  We sat there in awkward silence for a while.

  “Is this what you’ve been doing since you got to London, then?” Dad said. The temperature in the room seemed to drop ten degrees.

  “Erm,” I said. I thought of all the adventures—the food from the skips, the squats, the giant bags of skunk, the hours spent begging in tube stations. “Mostly.”

  “How do you live?” Mum asked.

  “I—” I swallowed. Then I told them all about Jem, and about the squat and the skips and the begging, though I danced quickly over it. I wasn’t proud of that, even though I had made some major advances on Jem’s science-of-panhandling project. I didn’t tell them about the weed or the drink or the parties, either. Some things my parents didn’t need to know. “So you see,” I said, looking back and forth at their pop-eyed expressions, “You don’t need to worry about me. I’m taking care of myself.”

  I was worried that they’d explode again, but now they were completely silent. I guess it was a lot to digest.

  Finally, Mum said, “Trent, what on earth are you going to do with yourself? What sort of future is there in doing this … stuff? Are you going to spend the rest of your life squatting in abandoned buildings, eating garbage?”