Adrift/A new home/A screening in the graveyard/The anarchists!

Jem didn't answer my e-mails, didn't show up again at Old Street Station, didn't turn up at the skips we'd haunted. Dodger's phone was out of service -- he'd either been caught or had really and properly gone underground. The rest of my housemates had melted into the afternoon and vanished as though they'd never existed.

Back to the shelter I went, feeling a proper failure, and I slept in a room with seven other boys, and I got free clothes and a rucksack from the pile, ate the stodgy meals and remem- bered the taste of eels and caramelized leeks, and found myself, once again, alone in the streets of London. It had been nearly six months since I'd left Bradford, and I started to ache for home, for my parents and my sister and my old mates. I made a sign like Jem's, with kleenex and sanitizer and gum and little shoe-polish wipes, and made enough money for a bus-ticket home in less than a day.

But I didn't buy a bus-ticket home. I gave all the money to other tramps in the station, the really broken ones that Jem and I had always looked out for, and then I went back to the shelter.

It's not that life was easy in the shelter, but it was, you know, automatic. I hardly had to think at all. I'd get breakfast and dinner there, and in between, I just needed to avoid the boredom and the self-doubt that crept in around the edges, pretend that I wasn't the loneliest boy in London, that I was living the Trent McCauley story, the second act where it all got slow and sad, just before the hero found his way again.

But if there was a new way, I didn't know where it was. One day, as I sat in Bunhill Cemetery, watching the pigeons swoop around the ancient tombs -- their favorite was Mary Page: “In 67 Months, She Was Tapd 66 Times - Had Taken Away 240 Gallons of Water - Without Ever Repining At Her Case - Or Ever Fearing the Operation” (I wasn't sure what this meant, but it sounded painful) -- and I couldn't take it anymore. Call me a child, call me an infant, but I had to talk to me mam.

I watched my hands move as though they belonged to someone else. They withdrew my phone, unlocked it, dialed Mum's number from memory, and pressed the phone to my ear. It was ringing.

“Hello?” The last time I'd heard that voice, it had been cold and angry and fearful. Now it sounded beaten and sad. But even so, it made my heart thump so hard that my pulse was like a drumbeat in my ears.

“Mum?” I said, in a whisper so small it sounded like the voice of a toddler. First my hands, now my voice -- it was like my entire body was declaring independence from me.

“Trent?” She sucked in air. “Trent?”

“Hi, Mum,” I said, as casually as I could. “How're you?”

“Trent, God, Trent! Are you alive? Are you okay? Are you in trouble? Jesus, Trent, where the bloody hell are you? Where have you been? Trent, damn it --” She called out, Anthony! It's Trent!. I heard my father's startled noises, getting louder.

“Look, Mum,” I said. “Hang on, okay? I'm fine. I'm just fine. Missing you all like fire. But I'm fine. Healthy, doing well. Mum, I'll call again later.” Calling now seemed like such a stupid idea. I hadn't even been smart enough to block my number. Now I'd have to get a new prepaid card. What an idiot I was.

“Trent, don't you dare put the phone down. You come home immediately, do you hear me? No, wait. Stay where you are. We'll come and get you. Trent --”

I hung up. The phone rang. I switched it off, took the cover off, took out the SIM, and slipped it in my pocket. I missed Mum and Dad and Cora, but I wasn't ready to go home. I didn't know if I'd ever be. The few seconds I'd spent on the phone had made me feel about of six years old. It hadn't been pretty.

I left the graveyard, and poor Mary Page, who had never repined her case, whatever that meant.

Without realizing it, my subconscious had been scouting for a new squat. I kept catching myself staring at derelict buildings and abandoned construction sites, wondering if there was an open door around the back, wondering if the power was out. There were plenty of empty places. The economy had just fallen into the toilet again, something it had done every few years for my entire life. This one seemed worse than most, and they'd even put the old Chancellor of the Exchequer in jail, along with a couple of swanky bankers. I couldn't see that it had made any difference. There were more tramps everywhere I looked, and a lot of them had the wild look of mental patients who'd been turned out of closed hospitals, or the terrified look of pensioners who'd couldn't pay the rent.

It was strange to think that the city was filled with both homeless people and empty houses. You'd think that you could simply solve the problem by moving the homeless people into the houses. That was my plan, anyway. I wasn't part of the problem, you see, I was part of the bloody solution.

I was especially into old pubs. The Zeroday had been a golden find: proper spacious and with all the comforts of home, practically. I found one likely old pub in deepest Tower Hamlets, but when I checked the title registry -- where all sales of property were recorded -- I saw that it had been bought up the week before, and guessed (correctly, as it turned out) that they were about to start renovating the place.

After two weeks of this, more or less on a whim, I decided to ride the bus out to Bow and have a look in on the old Zeroday, see what happened to the homestead, check for clues about Jem's whereabouts. Plus, where there was one abandoned pub, there might be another. Bow was in even worse economic shape than most other places.

From a distance, the Zeroday looked abandoned, shutters back up on the upper stories. The drugs lookouts took up their birdsong when I got off the bus, but soon stopped as they recognized me. I sauntered over to the pub, filled with a mix of fear and nostalgia. My heart sank when I saw the fresh padlock and hasp on the outside of the front door. But then it rose again as I neared it and saw that the lock had been neatly sawn through and replaced. I slipped it off and nudged the door.

It was deja vu all over again. The smell of sugar and spliff and of piss and shite told me that the local drugs kids and sex trade had carried on using the place. I called out hello a few times, just in case someone was in the place, and left the door open half-way to let in some light. I found melted candles everywhere, even on “our” comfy parlor sofa, which was quite ruined, stuffing spilling out, cushions wet with something that made me want to find some hand-sanitizer.

In the kitchen, I nearly broke my neck falling into the open cellar. It was pitch dark down there, but I had an idea that maybe they'd just flipped the big cutout switch that Dodger'd installed and blacked the place out. Which meant that flipping it the other way...

I needed to come back with a torch. And some friends.

There were other kids in the shelter that I sort of got on with. A tall, lanky kid from Manch- ester who, it turned out, had also left home because he'd got his family kicked offline. He was another video nutter, obsessed with making dance mixes of Parliamentary debates, looping the footage so that the fat, bloated politicians in the video seemed to be lip-syncing. It was tedious and painstaking work, but I couldn't argue with the results: he'd done a mix of the Prime Minister, a smarmy, good looking twit named Bullingham who I'd been brought up to hate on sight (his dear old grandad, Bullingham the Elder, had been a senior cab- inet member in the old days when you had to look like a horrible toad to serve in a Tory government) singing a passionate rendition of a song called “Sympathy for the Devil.” It was a thing of beauty, especially when he cut out the PM's body from the original frames and supered it over all this gory evangelical Christian footage of Hell from a series called “The Left Behinds” that aired on the American satellite networks at all hours of day and night. He claimed he'd got eighteen million pageviews before it had been obliterated from YouTube and added to the nuke-from-orbit list that the copyright bots kept.

Now he hosted it, along with his other creations, on ZeroKTube, which wasn't even on the Web. It was on this complicated underground system that used something called “zero knowledge.” I couldn't follow it exactly, but from what Chester -- as the lad from Manch- ester insisted on calling himself, with a grin -- said, it worked something like this: you gave up some of your hard drive and network connection to ZeroKTube. Other 0KT members who had video to share encrypted their video and broke it into many pieces and stashed them on random 0KT nodes. When you wanted to watch the video, you fed a 0KT node the key for unscrambling the video, and it went around and found enough pieces to re- assemble the video and there you had it. The people running individual nodes had no way of knowing what they were hosting -- that was the “zero knowledge” part -- and they also randomly exchanged pieces with one another, so a copyright bot could never figure out where all the pieces were. Chester showed it to me, and even though it seemed a bit slow, it was also pretty cool -- the 0KT client had all the gubbins that YouTube had: comments, ratings, related videos, all done with by some fiendish magick that I couldn't hope to understand.

Chester had a street-buddy, Rabid Dog (or “Dog” or “RD”) which was a joke of a nickname, because RD was about five foot tall, podgy, with glasses and spots, and he was so shy that he couldn't really talk properly, just mumble down his shirt-front. Rabid Dog was an actual, born-and-bred Londoner, and he was only about fifteen, but had been living on the streets off and on since he was twelve and had never really gone to school. Even so, he was a complete monster for the horror films, and had an encyclopedic knowledge of them stretching back to Nosferatu and forward to Spilt Entrails XVII, which was the only subject that'd get him talking above a mutter.

Rabid Dog had got his family kicked off the net with his compulsion to rework horror films to turn them into wacky comedies, romantic comedies, torture comedies, and just plain comedies. He'd add hilarious voice-overs, manic music, and cut them just so, and you'd swear that Freddy Kruger was a great twentieth century comedian. He liked to use 0KT as well, but he wasn't happy just to make films: he made the whole package -- lobby cards, posters, trailers, even fictional reviews of his imaginary films. There was an entire parallel dimension in Rabid Dog's head, one in which all the great horror schlockmeisters of history had decided instead to make extremely bloody, extremely funny comedies.

I figured that Rabid Dog and Chester were ready to learn some of the stuff that I'd got from Jem. So one day, I showed them how my sign worked and introduced them round to the oldsters at Old Street Station. The next day, we rummaged for posh nosh in the skip behind the Waitrose (always Waitrose with Jem, he said they had the best, and who was I to change his rules?), and ate it in Bunhill Cemetery, near poor old Mary Page (Rabid Dog, a right scholar of human deformity, injury and disease said that she had had some kind of horrible internal cyst that had been drained of gallons of pus before she expired. What's more, he pointed this out as we were scoffing back jars of custard over slightly over-ripe strawberries. And he didn't mumble.)

The day after, I took the lads to the Zeroday. I'd scrounged a couple of battery-powered torches and some thick rubber gloves and safety shoes, a lucky find at a construction site that no one had been watching very closely. I put them on once we got inside, first putting on the gloves and then using my gloved hands to steady myself on the disgusting, spongy- soft sofa while I balanced on one foot and then the other, changing into the boots. I had no idea whether they'd be enough to keep me from getting turned into burnt toast by the electrical rubbish if I touched the wrong wire, but they made me feel slightly less terrified about what I was going to do.

“Hold these,” I said to the lads, handing them the torches and scampering down the ladder into the cellar. It smelled awful. Someone -- maybe several someones -- had used it as a toilet, and my safety shoes squelched in a foul mixture of piss and shite and God knew what else. “Shine 'em here,” I said, pointing down at the switchplate on the wall. Dodger had shown me his work after he got done with it: all the wires he'd put in neat bundles with plastic zip-straps, all running in and out of the ancient junction box with its rubber-grip handle. There were ridiculous old fuses, the kind that were a block of ceramic with two screws in the top, that you had to carefully stretch a thin piece of wire between and screw down. When the circuit overloaded, the wire literally burned up, leaving a charred stump at each screw. Dodger had kept threatening to put in a proper breaker panel, but he never got round to it, and we all got good at doing the wire thing, because the Zeroday's ancient electricals rebelled any time we tried to plug in, say, a hair dryer, a microwave, a fan, and a couple of laptops.

The lads played their lights over the switch and I saw that it was in the off position, handle up. Holding my breath, I took hold of the handle and, in one swift movement, slammed it down, jerking my hand away as soon as it was in place, as though my nervous system could outpace the leccy.

Let there be light.

The fluorescents above me flickered to life. The fridges started to hum. And above me,

Rabid Dog and Chester cheered. I smiled a proper massive grin. I was home.

Putting the Zeroday in order for the second time was easier. We hauled all the moldering furniture away, installed fresh locks, unblocked some of the upper windows, and scrounged some fans to get the scorching summer air out. We scrubbed everything with bleach, found new bedding, and made ourselves at home.

It was one of those long hot summers that just seemed to get hotter. Since I'd got to London, I'd spent most of my time being gently (or roughly) rained upon, and I'd lost count of the number of times I'd wished the rain would just piss off and the sun would come out. Now it seemed like London's collective prayer for sunlight had been answered and we were getting a year's worth of searing blue skies lit with a swollen, malevolent white sun that seemed to take up half the heavens. After months of griping about the rain, we were gasping for it.

It drove the Zeroday's residents into a nocturnal existence. But that wasn't so bad. It was summer. There were all-ages clubs where kids danced all night long, pretty girls and giggles and weed and music so loud it made your ears ring all day long the next day. We'd get up at three or four in the afternoon, have a huge breakfast, shower, smoke some weed -- someone always had some, and Chester swore he was going to find us some grow-lights and a mister and turn one of the upstairs bedrooms into a farm that would supply us with top-grade weed for the coming dark winter.

I wasn't sure about this. Having just three of us in the house, and coming and going mostly after dinner time, meant that we were keeping a much lower profile than we'd had in the days of the Jammie Dodgers. I thought that the serious electricity that grow-lights wanted might tip off the landlords or the law that we were back in residence.

After breakfast, we'd jump on our lappies and start looking for a party. For this, we used Confusing Peach Of The Forest Green Beethoven, which may just be the best name of a website ever. Confusing Peach was more like an onion, with layers in layers in layers. You started off on the main message boards where they talked about music and life and everything else. If you were cool enough -- interesting, bringing good links to the con- versation, making interesting vids and music -- you got to play in the inner circle, where they talked about where the best parties were, which offies would sell you beer and cider without asking for ID, where you could go to get your phone unlocked so that it would play pirated music.

But it turned out that there was an even more inner circle inside the inner circle, a place where they chatted about better parties, where they had better download links for music and films, where they spent a lot of time making fun of the lamers in the outer inner circle and the outer outer circle. We got to the inner-inner (for some reason, it was called “Armed Card and the Cynical April”) a couple weeks after finding Confusing Peach. We didn't have much to do except post on CP, and between Chester's crazy Bullingham videos, Rabid Dog's insane horror-comedies, and some Scot stuff I awkwardly put together (I hadn't worked on Scot since the day my laptop had been nicked in Hyde Park, the day I came to London), we were hits. The inner circle opened to us only two days after we got in, and the epic parties followed immediately after. All through the hot nights, in strange warehouses, terraced houses in central London, on abandoned building sites strung with speakers and lights, we went and we danced and we smoked and we swilled booze and tried so very hard to pull the amazing girls who showed up, without a lick of success.

But we must have made a good impression, even if it wasn't good enough to convince any of the young lassies to initiate us into the mysteries of romance (I may have taken Scot's virginity in my edit suite, but sad to say that no one had returned the favor). Before long, we were in the Cynical April message boards, where the videos were funnier, the music was better, and the parties were stellar.

“Dog,” I shouted, pounding on the bathroom door. “Dog, come on, mate, there's just not that much of you to get clean, you fat bastard!” He'd been in the bathroom showering for so long that I was starting to think he might be having a sneaky wank in there. He was the horniest little wanker I'd ever met, and I'd learned never to go into his bedroom without knocking unless I wanted to be scarred by the spectacle of his bulging eyes and straining arm and the mountain of crusty kleenexes all over his floor.

The shower stopped. Rabid Dog muttered something filthy that I pretended I hadn't heard, and a second later he came out, with a towel around his waist. He'd shaved his long hair off at the start of the heat wave, and it had grown in like a duck's fuzz, making him look even younger. Now it was toffee-apple red, and the hair dye had got on his forehead and ears, making him look like he was bleeding from a scalp wound.

“Whatcha think?” he muttered, pleading silently with his eyes for me to say something nice.

“It's pretty illustrious,” I said, “illustrious” being the word-du-jour on Cynical April. He smiled shyly and nodded and ran off to his room.

I quickly showered and dressed, pulling on cut-off pinstripe suit trousers and a canary- yellow banker's shirt whose collar and sleeves I'd torn off. It was a weird fashion, but I'd seen a geezer sporting nearly the same thing at a party the week before and he'd been beating off the girls with both hands. By the time I made it down to the front room, Chester was dressed and ready, too, a T-shirt that shimmered a bit like fish-scales and a kilt with a ragged hem, finished out with a pair of stompy boots so old and torn that they were practically open-toed sandals. I squinted at this, trying to understand how it could look cool, but didn't manage it. “Huh,” I said.

He held up two fingers at me and jabbed them suggestively. Then he indicated my own clothes and pointedly rolled his eyes. Okay, fine, we all thought that we looked ridiculous. Why not. We were teenagers. We were supposed to look ridiculous.

“What's the party, then?” I said. Chester had been in charge of picking it out, and he'd been snickering to himself in anticipation all day, barring us from looking at the party listings in Cynical April.

“We're going to the cinema,” he said. “And we're bringing the films.”

By that time, Bunhill Cemetery was like a second home to me. I knew its tombstones, knew its pigeons and its benches and the tramps who ate dinner there and the man who mowed the huge, brown sward of turf to one side of the tombstones. When I thought about graveyards, I thought of picnic lunches, pretty secretaries eating together, mums and nannies pushing babies around in pushchairs. Not scary at all.

But then, I'd never been to West Highgate.

We snuck into the graveyard around 10:00 P.M. Chester led us around the back of its high metal fence to a place where the shrubs were thick. We pushed through the shrubs and we discovered a place where the bars had rusted through, just as the map he'd downloaded to his phone had promised.

He whispered as we picked our way through the moonlit night, moving in the shadows around crazy-kilter tombs and headstones and creepy trees gone brown and dead in the relentless heat wave. “This place got bombed all to hell in World War Two and never got put right. There's still bomb craters round here you could break a leg in. And best of all, the charity that looks after it has gone bust, so there's no security guards at night -- just some cameras round the front gate.”

Five minutes' worth of walking took us so deep into the graveyard that all we could see in every direction were silhouetted stones and mausoleums and broken angels and statues. The stones glowed mossy gray in the moonlight, their inscriptions worn smooth and indis- tinct by the years. Strange distant sounds -- rustles, sighs, the tramp of feet -- crawled past us on the lazy breeze.

It was as scary as hell.

Chester got lost almost immediately and began to lead us in circles through the night. Our navigation wasn't helped by our unwillingness to tread on the graves, though whether this was out of respect for the dead or fear that hands would shoot out of the old soil and grab us by the ankles, I couldn't say.

It was getting dire when a shadow detached itself from one of the crypts and ambled over to us. As it got closer, it turned into into a girl, about my age, shoulder-length hair clacking softly from the beads strung in it. She was wearing knee-length shorts covered in pockets and a tactical vest with even more pockets over a white T-shirt that glowed in the moon- light.

She hooted at us like an owl and then planted her fists on her hips. “Well, lads,” she said. “You certainly seem to be lost. Graveyard's shut, or didn't you see the padlock on the gate?”

I had a moment's confusion. She looked like the kind of person that showed up at Cynical April parties, but she was acting like she was the graveyard's minder or something. If I told her we were coming to a party and she represented the authorities --

“We're here for the party,” Chester said, settling the question. “Where is it?” “What party?” Her voice was stern.

“The Cynical April party,” Chester said, stepping forward, showing her the map on his phone. “You know where this is?”

She snorted. “You would make a rubbish secret agent. What if I wasn't in on it, hey?”

Chester shrugged. “I saw you at the last one, down in Battersea. You were doing some- thing interesting in the corner with a laptop that I couldn't get close enough to see. Also, you've got two tins of lager in that pocket.” He tapped one bulge in her tactical vest. I hadn't noticed them, but Chester had a finely tuned booze detector.

She laughed. “Okay, got me. Yes, I can get you there. I'm Hester.”

Chester stuck out his hand. “Chester. We rhyme!” As chat-up lines went, it wasn't the best I'd heard, but she laughed again and shook his hand. Me and Rabid Dogsaid hello and she mentioned that she'd seen some of our Cynical April videos and said nice things about me and I was glad that you couldn't tell if someone was blushing in the moonlight. Up close, she smelled amazing, like hot summer nights and fresh-crushed leaves and beer and ganja. My heart began to skip in my chest at the thought of the party we were about to find.

Hester seemed to know her way around the graveyard, even in the dark, and pretty soon we could hear the distant sounds of laughter and low music and excited conversation.

Finally, we came to a little grove of ancient, thick-trunked trees, wide-spaced, with elabo- rate hillocky roots. They led up to a crumbling brick wall, the back of a much larger building, some kind of gigantic mausoleum or crypt or vault, a massive depository for ex-humans and their remains.

Someone had set glow-sticks down in the roots of the trees and in some of the lower branches, filling the grove with a rainbow of chemical light. I heard cursing over my head and looked up and saw more people in the trees' upper branches, working with headlamps and muttering to themselves. Chester pointed them out and laughed and I grabbed his arm and said I wanted to know what the deal was. He'd been chortling evilly to himself the whole trip out to the graveyard, and refusing to answer any questions about the party he'd picked for us.

“Oh, mate, it's going to be illustrious. They've got little beamers up there, projectors, right? And they're going to show films up against that wall all night long.”

“Which films?” I said. I hadn't been to the cinema all summer -- between the high cost and the mandatory searches and having your phone taken off you for the whole show in case you tried to record with it, I just hadn't bothered. But there were a bunch of big, stupid blockbustery films I'd had a yen for, some of which I'd downloaded, but it just wasn't the same. When some gigantic American studio spends hundreds of millions of dollars on computer-animated robots that throw buildings at one other while telling smart-alecky macho jokes, you want to see it on a gigantic screen with hundreds of people all laughing and that. A little lappie screen won't cut it.

“Our films!” he said, and punched the air. “I submitted clips from all of us and the girl who's running it all chose them to headline the night. Yes!” He punched the air again. “It is going to be illustrious, illustrious, ill-bloody-us-tri-bloody-ous! We're going to be heroes, mate.” He hung a sweaty arm around my neck and put me in an affectionate headlock.

I wrestled free and found myself grinning and chortling, too. What an amazing night this was going to be!

Getting the beamers just right up in the trees was hard. More than once, the climbers had to reposition themselves, and they dropped one beamer and it shattered into a million plasticky bits, and Hester stood beneath the tree it had fallen out of and told them off with such a sharp and stinging tongue that I practically fell in love that second. She was Indian, or maybe Bangla, and in the weird light of the glowsticks, she was absolutely gorgeous.

She had a whole little army of techie girls with matching vests and shorts and they seemed to be running the show. I was trying to figure out how to introduce myself to them when someone tackled me from behind.

“Got you, you little miscreant! Off to prison for you -- bread and water for the next ten years!” It was a voice I hadn't heard in so long I'd given up on hearing it again.

“Jem!” I said. “Christ, mate, get off me!”

He let me up and gave me a monster hug that nearly knocked me off my feet again. “Trent, sodding hell, what are you doing here?”

“Where have you been?” He was skinnier than he had been the last time I saw him, and he'd shaved the sides and back of his head, leaving behind a kind of pudding-bowl of hair. Now that I could see his face, I could also see a new scar under one eye.

“Oh,” he said. He shrugged. “Wasn't as quick as I thought I was. Ended up doing a little turn at His Majesty's pleasure.” It took me a minute to realize he meant that he'd been in jail. I swallowed. “Not too much time, as it turned out. All they had on me was resisting arrest, and the magistrate was kindly disposed at sentencing. Been out for weeks. But where have you been? Haven't seen you in any of the usual spots.”

I rolled my eyes. “You could have just called me if you weren't such a stubborn git about not carrying a phone.”

He reached into his shirt and drew out a little phone on a lanyard, a ridiculous toy-looking thing like you'd give to a five-year-old on his first day of kindergarten. “I came around on that. But your number's dead,” he said.

I remembered chucking away my SIM after my disastrous phone call home. Durr. I was such an idiot. “Well,” I said, “you could have e-mailed.”

“No laptop. Been playing it low-tech. But where have you been? I've checked the shelter, Old Street, everywhere -- couldn't find hide nor hair of you, son.”

“Jem” I said. “I'm in the same place I've been since the day I met you: at the Zeroday.”

He smacked himself in the forehead with his palm. “Like a dog returning to its vomit,” he said. “Of course. And the filth haven't given you any trouble?”

“We keep a low profile,” I said. “Too hot to go out during the day, anyway. Hardly anyone knows we're there.”

Without warning, he gave me another enormous, bearish hug. I could smell that he was a little drunk already. “Christ, it's good to see you again!”

“Where are you living?” I asked.

“Oh,” he said. “Here and there. Staying on sofas. The shelter, when I can't find a sofa.

You know how it goes.”

“Well,” I said. “My mate Chester's been kipping in your room, but I'm sure he'd move. Or there are plenty of other rooms. It's just three of us in there these days.”

He looked down. “That'd be lovely,” he said. He put his hand out and I shook it. “It's a deal.”

So I introduced him round to Chester and Rabid Dog, who'd both heard all about him and seemed glad enough to meet him, though Chester was more interested in Hester and trying to be helpful to her, and Rabid Dog, well, it was impossible to say what Dog was thinking at any given moment, what with all the mumbling. But I didn't give a toss: I had my best pal back, I had my new pals, it was a hot night, there were films, there was beer, there were girls, there was a moon in the sky and I wasn't in sodding Bradford. What else could I ask for?

By the time they started the films, there must have been fifty kids in the trees and bushes. Some were already dancing, some were passing round cartons of fried chicken or enor- mous boxes of sweets. Loads were smoking interesting substances and more than one was willing to share with me. The night had taken all the sting out of the superheated day, leaving behind a not-warm/not-cool breeze that seemed to crackle with the excitement we were all feeling.

One of the girls running the films climbed down out of a tree I was leaning against and nodded to me, then looked more closely. “You're the Scot guy, yeah?”

Feeling a massive surge of pride, I looked down at my toes, and said, quietly, “Yeah.”

“Nice stuff,” she said. She stuck her hand out. I shook it. It was sticky with sap from the tree branch she'd been clinging to, and strong, but her hand was slender and girly in a way that made me go all melty inside. Look, it was summer, I was sixteen, and anytime I let my mind wander, it wandered over to thoughts of girls, food and parties. Every girl I met, I fell a bit in love with. Every time one of them talked to me, I felt like I'd scored a point in some enormous and incredibly important game that I didn't quite understand but madly wanted to win.

“Thanks,” I said, and managed not to stammer, quaver or squeak. Another point. “I'm --” I was about to say “Trent,” but instead I said, “Cecil.” Everyone else had a funny street name -- why the hell did I have to be boring old Trent forever? “Cecil B. DeVil.”

She laughed. She had a little bow-shaped mouth and a little dimple in her chin and a mo- hican that she'd pulled back into a pony-tail. Her skinny arms were ropy with fine muscle. “I'm 26,” she said.

She didn't look any older than I was. I must have looked skeptical. “No, I mean my name's 26. As in, the number of letters in the alphabet. You can call me Twenty.”

I had to admit that this was the coolest nickname I had ever heard.

“Hester pointed you out, you and your mates. She said that you made those Scot Colford films, right?”

“That was me,” I said. “My mates did the others, the horror films and that Bullingham thing.” I gestured vaguely into the writhing, singing, dancing, shouting mass of people.

“Yeah, those were good, but the Scot thing was genius. I love that old dead bastard. Love how he could do the most shite bit of fluff one week, then serious drama the next. He was a complete hack, absolutely in it for the money, but he was an artist.”

I had written practically the very same words in a Media Studies report, the only paper in my entire academic career to score an A. “I couldn't agree more,” I said. “So.” I couldn't find more words. I was losing the game. “So. So, you're doing all this stuff with the projectors then?”

She beamed. “Innit wonderful? My idea, of course. We got the beamers from some geezer out in Okendon, guy lives in a gigantic building full of electronic rubbish --”

“Aziz!” I said.

“Yeah, that's the one. Bastard seems to know everyone. Hester met him through some squatters she knew, brought us along to get the gear. He certainly has whatever you need. From there, it was just a matter of rigging up some power supplies and a little wireless network so we wouldn't be throwing cables from tree to tree, and voila, instant film festival. Not bad, huh?”

“It's absolutely brilliant!” I said. “Christ, what an idea! What else have you got to screen?”

“Oh, just bits and pieces, really. Mostly we went for stuff without much audio. Didn't want to rig up a full-on PA system here, might attract attention. The light'll be shielded by that hill --” she gestured -- “but there's houses down the other side of the rise, and we don't want them calling in the law. So it's just wincy little speakers and video you can watch with the sound down. Your stuff was perfect for that, by the way, Scot's just so iconic. All in all, there's like an hour's worth of video, which we'll start showing pretty soon, before this lot's got too drunk to appreciate the art.”

I shook my head. I realized that I had fallen in love in the space of five minutes. I really desperately wanted to say something cool or interesting or suave, or at least to give her my mobile number or ask her if I could take her out to an all-night place after the party. But my mouth was as dry as a talcum-powder factory in the middle of the desert.

“That's so cool,” I managed. What I wanted to say was something like, I think that this is the thing I left home to find. I think that this is the thing I was meant to do with my life. And I think you are the person I was meant to do it with.

She looked up into the tree branches, saw something, and shouted, “No, no, not like that! Stop! Stop!” She shook her head vigorously and pointed a pencil torch into the branches, skewering another girl in the tactical shorts uniform who was in the middle of attaching a pocket-sized beamer to a branch with a web of elasticated tie-downs. She swore. “Girl's going to break her neck. Or my projector. In which case I will break her neck. 'Scuse me.” She scrambled up the tree like a lumberjack, cursing all the way. I found myself standing like a cow that'd been stunned at the slaughterhouse, wobbling slightly on my feet.

Jem threw an arm around my neck, slapped the side of my face with his free hand, and said, “Come on, mate, the film's about to start. Got to get a good seat!”

I don't think I'd ever been as proud or happy as I was in the next ten minutes. The beamers all flickered to life, projecting a three-by-three grid of light squares, projected from the trees, lined up to make one huge image. That was freaking clever: the little beamers didn't have the stuff to paint a crisp, big picture. Try to get a pic as big as a film-screen and it would be washed out and blurry, even in the watery moonlight. But at close distances and small sizes, they could really shine, and that's what the girls had set up, nine synchronized projectors, each doing one little square of screen, using clever software to correct their rectangles so that everything lined up. I couldn't figure out how that worked, but then I meandered over to Twenty's control rig and saw that she had a webcam set up to watch the picture in real-time and correct the beamers as the branches blew in the wind. Now that was smart.

Also: I swear that I was only shoulder-surfing Twenty because I wanted to see how the trick with all the beamers was done and not, for example, because I wanted to smell her hair or watch her hands play over her keyboard or stare enraptured at the fine muscles in the backs of her arms jump as she directed the action like the conductor of an orchestra. No, those are all creepy reasons to be hanging around a lass. I only had the most honest of intentions, guv, I swear darn.

Once the screen was up and running, the buzz died off and everyone gradually turned to face the screen. Twenty had a headset on and she swung the little mic down so that she was practically kissing it. “Illustrious denizens of Armed Card and the Cynical April, I thank you for attending on behalf of the Pirate Cinema Collective, Sewing Circle and Ladies' Shooting Society. First up in the program tonight is this delightful piece of Scot Colford fannon, as directed by our own celebrated Cecil B. DeVil.” My mates cheered loudly and shouted rude things, and Twenty looked up and winked at me. I practically collapsed on the spot.

She hit a button and the video started to roll. This was my first major Scot piece since coming to London, made in the hot, anticipatory hours before we hit the parties and in the exhausted, sweaty time after we came back, as the sun was rising and I waited for the excitement to drain out of my limbs and let me sleep the day away like a vampire.

It was another piece I'd been planning in my head for years: Scot as the world's worst driver. Scot crashed eighty-three cars on-screen, at least. I mean, those are just the ones I know about. Sometimes it was part of an action sequence. Sometimes, it was a comedy moment. Sometimes, it was just plain weird, like the experimental tank he'd driven into a shopping mall in Locus of Intent. But my idea was that I could, with a little bit of creative editing, make every single one of those car-crashes into a single, giant crash, with Scot behind the wheels of all the cars. All I'd need was exterior footage of the same cars -- medium- and long-shots, where you couldn't really make out who was driving -- intercut with the jumbled shakycam shots of the cars' interiors as Scot crashed and rattled inside, fighting the airbags, screaming in terror, fighting off a bad guy, whatever. Time it right, add some SFX, trim out some backgrounds, and voila, the world's biggest all-Scot automotive disaster. Pure comedy.

I had done the test-edits at tiny resolution, little 640 by 480 vids, but once I had it all sorted, I re-rendered at full 1080p, checking it through frame-by-frame at the higher rez for little imperfections that the smaller video had hidden. I'd found plenty and patiently fixed every one, even going so far as dropping individual frames into an image editor and shaving them, pixel by pixel, into total perfection. At the time, it had seemed like a stupid exercise: you'd have to watch the video on a huge screen to spot the imperfections I was painstakingly editing. But now that it was screening on a huge piece of wall, I felt like an absolute genius.

I wasn't the only one. At first, the audience merely chuckled. But as the car-crash continued and continued and continued, car after car, they began to hoot with laughter, and cheer. When it came to the closing sequence -- a series of quick cuts of shaken Scot Colfords pulling themselves free of their cars and staring in horror, seemingly at one another -- they shouted their delight and Rabid Dog and Chester pounded me on the back and Jem toasted me with his tin of lager and I felt one hundred feet tall, made of solid gold, and on fire. No embarrassment, just total, unalloyed delight. It's not a sensation English people are supposed to feel, especially northerners: you're supposed to be slightly ashamed of feeling good about your own stuff, but screw that, I was a God!

I glanced over to see if Twenty was, maybe, staring at me with girlish adulation. But she was scowling at her screen and mousing hard and getting everything set up for the next video, which was Chester's latest Bullingham creation, which he'd done in the style of the old Monty Python animations of Terry Gilliam, and all I remember about it was how rude it all was, in a very funny way, with Bullingham engaging in lots of improbable sex acts with barnyard animals, mostly on the receiving end. There was laughter and that, but it came from a long way off, from behind my glow of self-satisfaction. The same glow muffled the praise and laughter that accompanied Rabid Dog's horror-comedy mashup, the awesomely gory Summer Camp IV turned into a lighthearted comedy about mental teenagers, the legendary blood and guts and entrails played purely for yuks.

Then the first act was over, and the screens faded and the sweetest sound you ever heard swelled: fifty-some kids clapping as hard as they could without breaking their hands, cheer- ing and whistling until Hester shushed them all, but she was grinning too, and I swear that was the best ten minutes of my life.

If I was editing The Cecil B. DeVil Story, this is where I'd insert one of those lazy montages, with me smoking a little of this, drinking a little of that, grinning confidently as I chatted up Twenty, dancing with her around the tree roots, watching the next round of films with my arm around her shoulder, getting onto a night bus with her and riding it all the way out to the Zeroday, showing her around my awesomely cool squat while she looked at me like I was the best thing she'd ever seen.

But actually, the night kind of went downhill after that. It would be hard for it not to, after such a high. I drank too much and ended up sitting propped against a tree, roots digging into my arse while my head swam and I tried not to puke. When I looked around to find Twenty between the second and third screenings, she was chatting with some other bloke who appeared, even in the dark, to be a hundred times cooler than me. This made me wish I was drinking yet another beer, but luckily there weren't any within an easy crawl of me and standing up was beyond to me at that moment.

Some time around three in the morning, my mates poured me onto a night bus and then I did puke, and got us thrown off the bus, so we walked and stumbled for an hour before I declared myself sober enough to ride again, and we caught another bus, making it home just as the sun came up. We slipped into the Zeroday and Jem stretched out on the floor of my room because we hadn't figured out where he'd sleep and his old room was occupied by Chester, who, it turned out, wasn't in a mad rush leave.

I woke up a million years later with a head like a cat-box and a mouth like the inside of a bus-station toilet. The room stank of beer-farts cooked by the long, hot day I'd slept through, turned into a kind of toxic miasma that clung to my clothes as I stumbled into the bathroom and drank water from the tap until I felt like I'd explode.

I was the last one up. Everyone else was downstairs, in the pub, and when I got there, they all looked at one another and snorted little laughs at my expense. Yes, I looked as bad as I felt. I raised two fingers and carefully jabbed them at each of my friends.

Jem pointed at the bar. “Food's up,” he said. I followed his finger. Someone had laid out a tureen of fruit salad, a pot of yogurt, some toasted bagels (we froze the day-olds we scavenged, and toasted them to cover their slight staleness), a pot of cream cheese, and a bowl of hard-boiled eggs (eggs were good for days and days after their sell-by dates). My mouth filled with spit. I fell on the food, gorging myself until I'd sated a hunger I hadn't realized I'd felt. Rabid Dog made tea, and I had three cups with loads of sugar and then I blinked loads, stretched, and became a proper human again.

“Cor,” I said. “Some night.” I looked around at my three mates. Rabid Dog and Chester had taken the sagging sofa we'd dragged in from a skip, and Jem had seated himself as far as possible away from them, at the other end of the room. It occurred to me that while I knew Jem and I knew Dog and Chester, Dog and Chester didn't know Jem and vice-versa. Plus there was the fact that Jem had found the Zeroday, and now he was a newcomer to our happy home.

I looked back and forth between them. “Come on, lads,” I said. “What's this all about? This place is effing huge. You're all good people. Stop looking like a bunch of cats trying to work out which one's in charge.”

They pretended they didn't know what I was talking about, but they also had the good grace to look a bit embarrassed, which I took to mean that I'd got through to them.

“Some night,” Rabid Dog mumbled. He had his lappie out and he turned it round so that I could see the screen, a slideshow of photos from the graveyard. Some of them were shot with a flash and had that overexposed, animal-in-the-headlamps look; the rest were shot with night filters that made everyone into sharp-edged, black-and-white ghosts whose eyes glowed without pupils. Nevertheless, I could tell even at this distance that it had been every bit as epic as I remembered. The slideshow got to a photo of Twenty and my heart went lub-dub-lub-dub. Even in flashed-out blinding white, she was magisterial, that being the new replacement for illustrious that had gone round at the party.

Jem snorted. “That one's trouble, boy-o,” he said. “Too smart for her own good.”

“What's that supposed to mean?” I felt an overprotective sear of anger at him, the kind of thing I used to get when boys came sniffing round after Cora.

He shrugged. “It was a mate of hers that brought me last night. One of those girls up in the trees. She said that your little bit of fluff there runs with a bunch of politicals, the sort who'd rather smash in a bank than go to a party. And Aziz says she's just nuts, full of gigantic plans.”

I swallowed my anger. “None of that sounds like a problem to me,” I said. “That all sounds pissing fantastic, actually.” I said it as quietly and evenly as I could.

He shrugged again. “Your life,” he said. “Just letting you know. And now you know. I'll say no more about it. So, it's Cecil now?”

I refused to be embarrassed about it. “Like Jem was your real name. You just picked it so you and Dodger could be the Jammie Dodgers, yeah? And Rabid Dog's mum didn't hold him up, crying and covered in afterbirth, and say, 'Oo's Mummy's lickle Rabid Dog then, hey?' And Chester from Manchester? Please. Why should I be the only one without a funny name?”

The boys were all looking at me as if I'd grown another head. I realized I'd got to my feet and started shouting somewhere in there. It must have been the hangover. Or Jem talking rubbish about Twenty.

In silence, I got some more fruit salad. Outside the locked-down, blacked-out windows of the pub, someone was shouting at someone else. Loud motorbikes roared down the street. Dogs barked. Drugs kids hooted.

“Sorry,” I mumbled.

Jem bounced an empty juicebox (we'd found two pallets of them, the boxes dirty from a spill into a puddle) off my head. “You're forgiven. Go get your crapping computer and e-mail the mad cow and ask her out. Then take a shower. No, take a shower first.”

That broke up the tension. Dog and Chester giggled, and I realized that Jem was right: I wanted nothing more badly than to get my lappie and see if I could find Twenty on Cynical April and try to come up with something not totally stupid to say to her.

And I did need a shower.

It took me a ridiculous amount of time to realize that I should be looking for “26” and not “twentysix” or “twenty six” in the Cynical April user directory, but once I had that down, I found myself in a deep and enduring clicktrance as I went through all of Twenty's old message-board posts, videos, and all the photos she'd appeared in. She liked to do inter- esting things with her hair. She had a properly fat cat. Her bedroom -- in which she had photographed herself trying out many hair colors and cuts -- was messy and tiny, and it had a window that looked out onto a yellow-black brick wall, the kind of thing you got all over London. Her room was full of books, mountains and teetering piles of them, and she reviewed them like crazy, mostly political books that I went crosseyed with boredom just thinking about.

Aha! There it was: she had a part-time job at an anarchist bookstore off Brick Lane, in the middle of Banglatown, a neighborhood that was posh and run down at the same time. It was riddled with markets, half of them tinsy and weird, selling handmade art and clothes or even rubbish that semi-homeless people had rescued and set out on blankets. The other half of the markets were swank as anything, filled with expensive designer clothes and clever T-shirts for babies and that.

I'd wandered into the shop she worked at: it had wicked stickers, but it smelled a bit, and the books all had a slightly hand-made feel, like they had come off a printer in someone's basement. It felt a bit like visiting the tinsy school library at my primary school, a sad cupboard full of tattered books that someone was always trying to get you to read instead of looking at the net. But my school library didn't have a beautiful, clever, incredibly cool girl working in it. If it had, I probably would have gone in more often.

It took me a minute to figure out what day of the week it was -- I'd gone to bed at sunrise, and slept, and the room was shuttered in, but after looking at the clock and then making it expand to show the calendar, I worked out that this was Saturday, just before four in the afternoon. And hey, what do you know, Twenty worked afternoon shifts on Saturday at the shop: said so right there in a message board for party-planners who were trying to schedule a meeting. Another quick search and I found out that the shop closed at 5:30 P.M. on Saturdays. Which meant that I could just make it, if I managed to get out of the house in less than fifteen minutes, and the bus came quick. I thought about calling the shop to see if she was working and if she'd wait for me to get there, but somehow that seemed creepier than just “accidentally” wandering in a few moments before closing to “discover” that she happened to be working.

Yes, I will freely admit that this was not objectively any less creepy. That I was getting into deep stalker territory with this. That I'd only met her for a few minutes, and that for all I knew she was seeing someone else, or was a lesbian, or just didn't fancy me.

But it was summer. I was sixteen. Girls, food and parties. And films. That was all I cared about. And most of the time, it was either girls or food. Okay, films and food. But girls: girls most of all. It was weird. Intellectually, I knew that it wasn't such a big deal. Girls were girls, boys were boys, and I would probably start seeing a girl eventually. Everyone seemed to manage it, even the absolute losers and weirdos. But the fact was that I was desperate, filled with a longing for something my bones and skin seemed absolutely certain would be the best thing that ever happened to me, even if I couldn't say so for sure. I'd seen loads of sex-scenes on my screen -- even edited one or two -- and objectively, I could see that they weren't a big deal. But there was a little man sat in the back of my skull with his fingers buried deep in my brains, and every time my thoughts strayed too far from girls, he grabbed hold of the neurons and yanked them back to the main subject.

So: fastest shower ever, brush teeth quickly, then again as I realized all the terrible things that might be festering in my gob. Dress, and then dress again as I realized how stupid I looked the first time. Speaking of first times, for the first time I wished I had some cologne, though I had no idea what good cologne smelled like. I had an idea that something like a pine tree would be good, but maybe I was thinking of the little trees you could hang up in your car to hide the stink of body odor and old McDonald's bags.

I didn't have any cologne.

“Anyone got any cologne?” I shouted down the stairs as I struggled into my shoes. The howls of laughter that rose from the pub were chased by catcalls, abuse, and filthy, lewd remarks, which I ignored. I pelted down the stairs and stood in the pub, looking at my mates.

“Where are you going?” Jem said.

“I'm going to go try and meet Twenty,” I said.

“Twenty whats?” Rabid Dog said, puzzled enough that he forgot to mumble.

“The girl's name is 26,” I said. “But it's 'Twenty' to her friends.”

Jem started to say something sarcastic and I jabbed my finger at him. “Don't start, 'Jem'!”

“Is that what you were talking about last night?” Chester said. “Arsing 26! You wouldn't shut up about it. I thought you were having visions of a winning lottery number or some'at. Shoulda known.”

I didn't remember any of that. Wait. No, I did. It was after the driver threw us off his bus. Which was after I threw up in it. And we were walking through somewhere -- Camden? King's Cross? And I was counting to 26, counting backwards from twenty-six. Twenty-six, twenty-six, twenty-six. Stupid beer. If I hadn't got so drunk, I could have been talking to 26 all night, instead of making an ass out of myself in the streets of London. Stupid beer. Stupid me.

“Do I look okay?” I said.

Jem cocked his head. I thought he was going to say something else sarcastic, but he came over to me and smoothed down my collar, untucked my shirt from my trousers, did something with his fingers to my hair. “You'll do,” he said. Rabid Dog and Chester were both nodding. “Proper gentleman of leisure now,” Jem went on. “Don't forget that. They can smell fear. Go in there, be confident, be unafraid, be of good cheer. Listen to her, that's very important. Don't try to kiss her until you're sure she wants you to. Remember that you are both a gentleman and a gentleman of leisure. Got your whole life ahead of you, no commitments and not a worry in the world. Once she knows that, fwoar, you'll be sorted. Deffo.” Jem always turned on the chirpy cheerful cockney sparrow talk when he was on a roll.

This sounded like good advice and possibly a little insulting, but I'd already had a turn at defending 26's honor and reckoned that she could probably stick up for herself anyway. And besides, I was frankly hoping to get “sorted,” whatever that meant in Jem's twisted imagination. I was grateful for the advice.

It took me three tries to go into the shop, and in between the tries, I stopped and breathed deeply and told myself, “Gentleman of leisure, gentleman of leisure, gentleman of leisure.” Then I squared my shoulders, re-scruffed my hair the way Jem had done, and wandered casually into the little shop.

She was bent over the desk, mohican floppy and in her eyes, staring at some kind of printed invoice or packing list, a pile of books before her on the counter. Even her profile was beautiful: dark liquid brown eyes, skin the color of light coffee, round nose, rosebud lips.

She looked up when I came in, started to say, “We're about to close --” and then raised her eyebrows, and said, “Oh!” She was clearly surprised, and I held my breath while I waited to discover if she was pleasantly surprised.

“You!” I said, trying hard to seem sincerely shocked, as though I'd just coincidentally wan- dered in. “Wow!”

“I'm surprised you're able to walk,” she said.

God, I was such an idiot. She hated me. She'd seen me stupidly drunk and had decided I was a complete cock and now I'd followed her to work and she was going to think I was a stalker too, oh God, oh God, oh God, say something Trent. Gentleman of leisure. “Erm.” I had had over an hour on the bus and that was all I'd come up with. Erm. “Well. Yeah. Felt rank when I got up. Better now, though. Good party, huh?”

“You looked up where I worked, didn't you?”

Ulp. Idiot, idiot, idiot. “Rumbled,” I said. “I, well.” Gentleman of leisure. Unafraid. Full of cheer. I pasted on a smile. “I did. Cos, you know, I drank too much last night and got stupid and that, and I wanted to come here and see you again and give it another try.”

She looked at her paper. “All right, that's a little bit creepy, but also somewhat charming and flattering. But I'm afraid your timing is awful. Got a meeting to go to right after work, which is in --” She looked at the screen on the counter. “Ten minutes.”

I felt like a balloon that's had the air let out of it. She didn't hate me, but she also didn't have time for me just then. Course she didn't. I tried not to let the crushing disappointment show, but I must have failed.

“Unless,” she said, “you want to come along? It's just round the corner.”

“Yes!” I said, far too quickly for a cool man of leisure, but who gave a toss? “What kind of meeting is it?”

“I think you'll enjoy it,” she said. She made another mark on her paper, shoved it into the stack of books, and hopped off the stool. “Come on.”

The meeting was being held just down the road, in the basement room of a Turkish restau- rant, the kind of place where they had hookah pipes and apple tobacco and low cushions. 26 said, “They're a good bunch -- some of 'em are from the bookstore, others are from protest groups and free software groups and that. The sort of people who're worried that they'll get done over by the Theft of Intellectual Property Bill.” She said this as though I should know what it was, and I was too cool to admit that I had no idea, so I nodded my head sagely and made enthusiastic noises.

Almost everyone there was older than us by at least ten years, and some were really old, fifty or sixty. Lots of the blokes were older and kind of fat with beards and black T-shirts with slogans about Linux and stuff. These beardie-weirdies were the free software lot; you could spot 'em a mile off. Then there were ancient punks with old piercings and tattoos and creaky leather jackets. And there were serious, clean-cut straights in suits and that, and then a bunch of the sort you'd expect to find round Brick Lane -- in their twenties, dressed in strange and fashionable stuff. Mostly white and Asian, and a couple of black people. It looked a little like someone had emptied out a couple night buses full of random people into the low-ceilinged basement.

Especially with all the DJ/dance party types, showing off their dance moves and tap- transferring their latest illegal remixes to one anothers' headphones. I'd always thought of music as something nice to have in a film, so I'd not paid much attention to their scene since landing up in London, but I had to admit that the things these kids could do with pop songs and computers made for some brilliant parties.

There was iced mint tea, which was brilliant, and someone had brought a big basket of tofu- carob biscuits, which were revolting, but I was hungry enough to eat three of them.

“People, people,” said one of the old punks. She was very tall and thin as a skeleton, and had some kind of elaborate tentacle tattoo that wrapped around her throat and coiled round her arms and her bare legs sticking out of a loose cotton sun-dress, disappearing into her high, scuffed Docs. “Time to start, okay?” She had a Polish accent and the air of a kindly school teacher, which was funny, because she looked like a warrior queen out of a post-apocalyptic action film.

We all sat down and looked over at her. 26 looked at her with something like worship and I wondered what it would take to get her to look at me that way.

“I'm Annika,” she said. “Thank you all for coming. We hear that TIP is going to be intro- duced some time in the next month, and they're going to try to get it through with practically no debate. Which means we're going to have to be fast if we want to get people pissed off about it.”

She took out her phone and turned on its beamer and painted a page on the back of the door to the basement room. It was dense type, but parts of it had been highlighted and blown up to be readable. It was headed THEFT OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY BILL and it was clear that it was some kind of boring law, written in crazy lawyer gobbledygook. I looked at the highlighted sentences: “Criminal sanctions,” “commercial-scale infringe- ment,” “sentencing recommendations to be left to Business Secretary's discretion...” I tried to make sense of it, but I just couldn't. I felt stupid, especially as 26 seemed to get it right away, shaking her head and clenching her fists.

Annika gave us a minute to look at it. “This is a leaked draft, so we don't know how much of it will be in the bill when they introduce it, but it even a tiny amount of this is in the final, it's very bad. Look at this: Article 1(3) makes it a criminal offense to engage in 'commercial scale' infringement, even if you're not charging or making money. That means that anyone caught with more than five pirated films or twenty pirate songs can be sent to prison. And here, article 2(4), leaves the sentencing guidelines up to the discretion of the Business Secretary: she's not even elected, and she used to work for Warner Music, and she's been on record as saying that she wished we still had the death penalty so it could be used on pirates.

“And here, this is the best part, here down at the bottom in article 10(4)? This says that unless this results in a seventy percent reduction in copyright infringement in eighteen months, there's a whole new set of police powers that go into effect, including the right to 'remotely search' your computer, with 'limitation of liability for incidental loss of data or access'.” The people around me hissed and looked at one another. I didn't know what the hell it meant.

26 noticed my puzzlement. She pinched my cheek. “Thicko,” she said. “It means that they have the right to hack your computer over the net, search your drive, and there's no penalty if they get it wrong, mess up your data, invade your privacy, whatever.”

I shook my head. “That's the daftest thing --”

Everyone was talking at once. Annika held up her hands for silence. “Please, please. Yes, this is terrible. This stupid clause, this eighteen months business, it's been in every new copyright bill for a decade, right? Every time, they say, 'If these new penalties don't work, we're going to bring in even worse ones. We don't want to, of course, heavens no, who would want to be able to put people who hurt your business in jail? What corporate lobby would ever want to be able to act as police, judge and executioner? Oh no. But if this plan doesn't work, we'll just have to do it. Le sigh.' It's so much rubbish. But Parliament has been giving EMI and Warner and Sony and Universal so much power for so long, they've got so used to going to parties with pop-stars and getting their kiddies into the VIP screenings and behind the rope at big concerts that they don't even think about it. They just get out the rubber-stamp and vote for it.

“This time, we want to stop it. I think the time is right. People are sick to death of the piracy wars. Everyone knows someone who's been disconnected because someone in their house was accused of file-sharing. Some families are ruined by this -- lose their jobs, kids fail at school --” I jolted like I'd been stuck with a tazer. 26 looked quizzically at me, but I was a million miles away, thinking of my mum and dad and poor Cora, and all the time that'd gone by without my contacting them. I knew that they were still trying to get in touch, I couldn't help but see and flinch away from the e-mails they sent me from the library or a neighbor's house. But every day that went past without my replying made it harder for me to consthink aboutider replying the next day. She'd said “ruined families” and I realized that yes, that's what I'd done: I'd ruined my family.

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 one hundred constituents to request meetings with their MPs. Ten a day, every day leading up to the vote. It's a big number: six hundred and fifty 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 e-mail on her website, or whatever. So what if we sue them all? What if we put them in jail?”

Annika started shaking her head half-way 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 damn 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 e-mail addresses to Annika, which I thought was hilarious, since she was meant to be all punk and alternative, but here she was using e- mail 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 stupid 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 night time. 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 hand-made 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 mum?”

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

We walked a while. 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 thinking 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 ninety 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 one another 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 pep- permint 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 freaking 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 cupboard 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 cupboards. 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 British 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?”

26 took it from me and studied it, sniffed it, and grinned. “Not tonight! Wild boar! How medieval!”

And the harvest began. There were mountains of food to choose from, and we set aside the choicest morsels for our enjoyment, making a pile that, in the end, was more than we could hope to eat. Still, we took it all up in a couple of cartons we found behind one of the skips and set off again.

“We'll give the extra to tramps,” I said, and sure enough, before we'd reached London Bridge again, we'd already given away all of the surplus and tucked the rest into our ruck- sacks.

I chanced another look at Twenty as we climbed onto a bus and walked up the stairs to the upper deck. She was grinning ear to ear, and I remembered how I'd felt when Jem had taken me to Waitrose skip for the first time. Like there was a secret world I was being admitted to: like someone had just taken me through the back of a wardrobe into Narnia.

“I liked your idea,” she said as the streets whizzed past us. “About doing all the MPs and record execs and that for piracy? I thought that would be lovely, a really cool bit of theater.”

“Annika said it wouldn't work,” I said, but inside I was glowing with pride.

“Oh,” she said, waving her hands. “I don't think any of it is going to work. They've been at this for years. Every time the bastards from the film and record companies buy a new law, we all get out into the streets, make a lot of noise, call our MPs, go to their offices, write expert analysis of why this won't work, and then they pass it anyway. Parliament's not there to represent the people, or even the country. Parliament's there to represent the rich and powerful -- the bosses and the rulers. We're just the inconvenient little voters and you and I aren't even that for a couple years. What's more, once they put you in jail, you don't get a vote, so the more of us they lock away, the fewer of us there are to vote against them.”

“That's depressing,” I said. “What a load of B.S.”

Then she kissed me again, not for very long, just a peck on the lips that still got my heart pounding again. “Don't be so down. This just means that we're going to have to, you know, dismantle Parliament to get any justice. Which, when you think about it, is a lot more fun than writing letters to your MP.”

Commercial interlude: a new generation

Sex sells, right? Time to do some selling! You know the drill (heh, “drill”): below are links to buy the book in DRM-free ebook form, to have a hardcopy made from genuine dead tree delivered right to your door by a team of skilled professionals, or to locate one of the few, proud surviving local booksellers and grace them with your presence.

If none of those appeal -- and if you're still all hot and bothered from that kiss -- you can donate a copy to a school or library.