My first reaction was to shout at him for being such a hard-hearted bastard. But he had a point: I was running down the street like a headless chicken. He was taking steps to ensure that if he was raided, nothing in his place would put his friends in jeopardy. Which one of us was doing more to help? “Okay, Aziz, You’re right. I’ll call you later.”
“Better to use encrypted email, son. I’m afraid I’ll be ditching this SIM once we’re done.”
Durr. Aziz was much better at this than I was. Of course, he’d lived his whole life outsmarting people who tried to use technology to control their enemies. I put away my laptop, stood up and looked around. I’d worked up a sweat running down the road, but now I was freezing, my jacket unbuttoned, my feet jammed into my unlaced boots without socks. Right. I did up my boots and coat, wiped the icy sweat off my face. I thought about ditching my SIM, but it was the main way that 26 and the others would be able to reach me from jail, assuming they didn’t have access to a computer.
Now I made myself walk calmly toward the tube station. I had no idea where I’d go, but wherever I went, I’d probably need to take rapid transit to get there. Good. I was getting somewhere.
Who could I talk to? Well, Letitia would be good for starters. I didn’t have her number, but she’d be in the directory. Oh, and of course, there were 26’s parents. If she’d only been given one call, she’d call them, wouldn’t she, especially seeing as her stepfather was a lawyer, right? Of course. Now that I was thinking of this all calmly, it was starting to come together—even though it made me feel slightly guilty, as though I was betraying 26 by not running around in a panic while she was in trouble.
Now, did I have her parents’ numbers? Of course I did. There was that time 26 had gone away with her mum for a weekend in Devon and had dropped her phone in the sea, she’d sent me her mum’s number so I could call her and we could make goo-goo noises at each other (as her mum insisted on describing it, as in, “Darling, it’s for you, it’s your young man calling to make goo-goo noises again!”). It was in my phone’s memory. I stopped walking, moved under a newsagent’s awning, and dialed.
“Hullo?”
“Ms. Kahn?” I’d been calling her “Amrita” for months, but I felt the occasion demanded formality, like maybe she wouldn’t want me to be so familiar with her daughter now she’d been arrested.
“Who is it?”
“It’s me, Cecil.”
She made a kind of grunt. “They’ve let you out then?”
“I wasn’t in,” I said. “I wasn’t there when they raided the place. I’ve only just found out about it. Have you heard from 26?”
“My husband’s been down at the Magistrates’ Court for hours, now,” she said. “Trying to force them to bail 26 and her friends. The police say that with such a large number of people arrested, it could take some time.” There was a click. “Hold on a moment.” She put me on hold. After quite some time, she came back on. “That’s 26’s father,” she said. I suddenly remembered 26 telling me that her biological dad was a cop—and that her mum hadn’t spoken to him for years and years. I guess this was the kind of desperate situation that got people to overcome this sort of thing. “I have to go.”
“Wait!” I said. “What should I do?”
She made another grunt. “You may as well come over here, they’ll come here first when they get her out. I’ll be staying in for the duration.” Her voice was tight as a bowstring.
The tube ride took a dozen eternities, but eventually I heard the robot voice call out, “The next station is made of ale,” and I jumped up. I’d spent the whole ride staring at my phone’s faceplate, willing it to light up with an incoming call from 26 or anyone, debating whether I should pull the SIM out and stuff it between the cushions on the tube. In the end, I hung onto it, because they had all my mates, and that meant they knew where I lived and where I might be going, and if they wanted to snatch me, they could and would, and cutting myself off from everyone I cared about in the whole world seemed an impossible heartbreak.
So I pelted up the stairs three at a time, stuck my ticket into the turnstile, and went through it so quick I did myself an injury on the crossbar, doubling over and limping out of the station, then running like a three-legged dog all the way to 26’s place.
Standing on her doorstep, sweating buckets, half-dressed in whatever I grabbed on the way out the door, I forced myself to ring the bell. 26’s mum had seen me in yesterday’s T-shirt and a pair of gym trousers at breakfast before, she knew I wasn’t a fashion model. And this was more important than making a good impression on my girlfriend’s parents.
She swung open the door with her phone clamped to her head. She was dressed as oddly as I was, in old jeans and a loose cotton shirt with a misbuttoned cardigan over it and fuzzy slippers, her eyes red and hollow. She made a “come in,” gesture and then turned and walked back into the house, nodding her head at whomever was talking on the other end of the call.
“Yes, yes. Yes. No. Yes. Yes.”
She rolled her eyes at me. I mouthed, “Going to use the toilet,” and she nodded and seemed to immediately forget about me. So I went up to 26’s room and dug around in the mountains of junk on the floor until I found one of my T-shirts and a pair of my pants—she often borrowed them to slop around in when she was over at mine. I had a very quick shower and changed, and the smell of 26 on the shirt was like a punch in the chest, so I had to sit down on the floor with a thump and catch my breath. Then I padded back downstairs in my socks.
26’s mum was sat in the sitting room, an open book on her lap, not looking at it, staring into space. When I made a little throat-clearing noise, she looked up at me with a little startlement, then smiled sadly. “Sorry,” she said. “Miles away. My husband says he’s making some progress at the magistrates’, and 26’s father is apparently doing eighty miles per hour down the length of the M1 while calling every copper he knows in London. I suppose that means everything’s going to be okay, but I’m still worrying myself sick.” She closed her book and fisted her eyes. “How are you holding up, lad?”
I looked at my feet and mumbled something. I didn’t want to talk about how I felt, because it was complicated—relief that I wasn’t locked away, fear for what was happening to my friends, shame that I’d only escaped because I’d been such a coward at the meeting. “Can I make you some tea?” I said.
She nodded and wiped her palms on her thighs. “That’d be lovely.”
When I brought it to her—milk and no sugar, but strong as builder’s tea, the way 26 took it, too—she said, “I suppose I should have expected this. After all, you and 26 have been banging on for months about how crazy the law is getting. But I couldn’t get over the feeling that this was just harmless fun. After all, it’s not as if you were having gang fights and robbing buildings! You’re not planning to blow up Parliament! You were just—”
“—making films,” I said. “And breaching copyright.” I sighed. “I guess I didn’t think they’d come after us like this, either. I thought that since they mostly seemed to target random people to sue or arrest, they wouldn’t come after someone specific, you know what I mean? Guess that was pretty stupid.”
To my surprise, she stood up and gave me an enormous hug that seemed to go on and on, the kind of hug I remembered from when I was a little kid, the hug that made you feel like everything was going to be all right. Damned if it didn’t almost make me start crying. When I looked into her face afterward, I saw that she was nearly in tears, too.
Chapter 10
FACING THE PARENTS/LASERS IN LONDON/RABID DOG’S HORROR
26 got back to her house just as her father—her biological father—pulled up in a beat-up red Opel that was covered in mud-streaks. 26 and her stepfather met her father on the doorstep. He was a big man, Asian like 26’s stepdad, but with his balding head shaved to stubble, and dressed in clothes that made him look like a copper, even though they weren’t a uniform. Or maybe I was just seeing things because I knew tha
t he was the law, and that 26 and her family didn’t exactly get on with him.
Her dad and her stepdad shook hands warily on the doorstep, and 26 busied herself with the key and the lock and her handbag so she didn’t have to hug him. I watched it all from the sitting-room window, as 26’s mum rushed to open the door even as 26 fiddled with it. They all spilled into the front hall with a stamping of boots and a rush of cold, wet air, and I skulked in the sitting-room doorway, looking at 26 with a feeling like a doggy that’s just seen his mistress come home after giving up all hope of ever seeing her again. Our eyes met and for a second I thought she was going to smack me for having left the club so suddenly, damn me for a coward, and order me out of her life. But instead, she practically leapt into my arms, crossing the intervening distance with one long stride. She threw both arms around my neck and one leg around my waist and if I hadn’t had the doorjamb to catch me, we’d have gone over like a cricket bail. I was intensely aware that three of 26’s parents were watching us, including her copper bio-dad whom I’d never met. But I was even more intensely aware of the warm skin on mine, the lips pressing to my neck, the arms crushing my chest. I held her until I heard her mum pointedly clear her throat.
26 let go of me and I saw through the tears in my eyes that she had tears in her eyes, too. I had an overpowering urge to drag her out of the house and just go, run away and never come back. But there was the small matter of the giant copper looming over us, giving me a look so filthy, it should have come in a plain brown wrapper. I gently pushed 26 a little farther away and smiled at everyone with my best and most harmless grin. Her stepfather nodded back at me and managed a tired smile, but her bio-dad continued to look at me as though he was deciding which charges would send me to prison for the longest sentence.
26’s mum stepped between us and gave 26 a hug, which let me escape to the kitchen to put the kettle on and load up a tray with biccies and cups and that. By the time I loaded it with the teapot and carried it into the sitting room, everyone was arranged in a kind of civilized tableau, with 26 equidistant from everyone on the floor, arms around her knees. I set the tea tray down and began to sneak away. I reckoned I’d go hide upstairs in 26’s room until things calmed down, but 26 called to me and patted the carpet next to her. I maneuvered around the stacks of books and sat down next to her, looking down.
“I just can’t believe what you’re letting her get up to, Amrita,” her bio-dad said. “Hanging out with crazy radicals, risking arrest over this nonsense?”
Her mum kept her composure. “Deepak, it’s nice to see you taking an interest in her life again, but you’ve forgot her past three birthdays, so I don’t really think you’ve got much business criticizing how we’re raising her. But this young woman is smart as anything, gets top grades, is probably going to go to University College London next year only because she can’t be bothered with Oxford, and she cares about injustice in the world around her and is doing something meaningful to change it. I, for one, am proud as anything of my daughter. I think you might start by telling her the same thing.”
I really, really wanted to go, but 26 had made a manacle out of her fingers and had cinched it tight around one of my forearms. I’d have to gnaw it off if I was to escape. So I breathed deeply.
“Proud? Fine, you be proud. Here’s what I know: my daughter’s been charged with Criminal Trespass, Criminal Infringement, Criminal Computer Intrusion, and those are just the major charges. She could wind up in prison for the rest of her life, and they don’t let you go to Oxford or UCL when you’re banged up in Askham Grange. So forgive me if I am a little skeptical of your pride here.”
26’s stepdad cleared his throat. “I happen to think that, in my professional judgment, none of these charges will make it past a preliminary hearing. They’re without merit, the evidence is poor, and many of the laws themselves are pending High Court review.” He folded his hands on his tummy, as though he was resting a case in front of a jury. Her bio-dad’s jaws jumped under his skin. 26 cleared her throat.
“Can I say something?”
All the adults in the room turned to look at her. She took a deep breath and got to her feet. “First, I want to thank you both for getting me free. Deepak, Dad tells me that I would still be there if it wasn’t for you. Thank you, really and honestly for that. Jail is awful. Bugger that: jail is bloody awful. I don’t want to go back there and I’m grateful not to be there and I’m worried sick about all my mates who are still there, because I never dreamt that it could be so terrible—” She took another deep breath and composed herself. It was like watching someone catch hold of a hummingbird with her bare hands without crushing it. I loved her more than ever at that moment. “So thank you both. Next, I want to say, Deepak, this is my boyfriend, Cecil. Cecil, this is my biological father, Detective Inspector Deepak Kahn.” I scrambled to my feet and held out my hand and he shook it with a funny kind of pressure, like he was testing my balance, sizing me up for a judo-throw over the sofa and through the front window. Or maybe I was just being paranoid, still. “Next item of business: I need a shower and a change of clothes. No one is going to come and arrest me in the next fifteen minutes. There is nothing that can’t wait that long, right? So I’m going to go upstairs now. I’d prefer it if you all remembered that you are adults and kept things civil, all right?”
And without another word, she was gone and I was alone with the three adults. I was still standing and wished I could sit down or possibly go crouch behind a pile of books and disappear. 26’s bio-dad skewered me on his eyeball lasers and said, “I suppose you’re part of this business as well, Cecil?”
“I guess you could say so.”
“So why weren’t you arrested with that lot? More sense than them? Or are you a grass? Working for the coppers?”
I shook my head. “No, sir,” I said. “I just—” I didn’t really fancy telling him how I’d come to be somewhere else when the law came for my friends. “I’d just stepped away when it happened. Pure chance.”
He snorted. “And what do you do, with all these people?”
I licked my lips, then made myself stop. “I make films,” I said.
He grunted. “The kind of films involving nudity?”
I held my hands up. “No! God, no! No, I make films about Scot Colford, mostly. I cut up footage, add my own, remix it, like. Mostly piss-takes, but also some serious stuff.”
He raised one eyebrow so high I thought his eye would fall out of the socket. “Scot Colford? The actor?”
“He’s very good,” 26’s mum said. “They’ve shown his stuff on telly. Cecil, why don’t you go downstairs and get the clean towels out of the machine and bring them up to the bathroom? I don’t think there are any in there.”
I nearly ran.
* * *
26 got out of the shower, toweled off, and went straight to bed. I didn’t blame her—after all the adrenaline (and lack of sleep the night before) I was ready to collapse myself. But being as her cop father was downstairs, I wasn’t going to stay there with her. Besides, she would probably want to know why I happened to leave right before the coppers raided them, and even if she didn’t believe that I was a supergrass, she would probably be just as disappointed to know that I was a coward.
So I slunk back home, more time on public transit to recriminate with myself. Except that I was hugely distracted by a bizarre sight: there was a group of German tourists on the overland with me to Euston, wearing funny fedoras with wide brims crusted with some kind of funny electronics and a weird, silvery hat-band that glittered like a disco ball. They were gabbling in German to one another, and I couldn’t understand a single word, but those were, hands down, the weirdest hats I’d ever seen. They didn’t seem to be a fashion thing, either—the crumblie oldsters and the little kids were all wearing them, and I never heard of any weird fashion that people of all ages got into.
So what the hell were they? They got out at Euston with me. It was unseasonably hot now—it had been running hot
and cold for days now, so that you never knew when you left the house whether you’d be sweating buckets or shivering by the end of the day, and the hats certainly looked like they’d be plenty warm. I trailed along behind them toward the buses upstairs and then one of those hats did the strangest bloody thing: it shot out a laser beam!
It was a bolt of green laser light, only flickering into existence for a brief instant, sizzling in the humid air, the width of a pencil-lead and bright in the gloom of the platform. The Germans all pointed at the one whose hat had gone off and made excited noises and looked around on the ground, and one of them pointed at something and they all made more noises and got out their mobiles and snapped piccies of whatever it was. The others on the platform watched with that weird British noninterest thing where you pretend you’re not staring and stare anyway.
Once they’d moved on, I looked at the spot on the floor they’d been pointing at and saw that there was a dead mosquito there, slightly crispy. That bloke’s hat had apparently shot it out of the sky with a freaking laser!
On the bus to Bow, I googled “laser hat mosquito” and learned more. Apparently all the news had been full of stories about something called West Nile Fever, which is a terrible disease spread by mosquitoes in tropical parts. But now that the whole world was getting warmer and that, diseases were moving around, and there’d been six confirmed cases of it in London. All the red-top tabloid papers were going bonkers over this, predicting a planet-killing pandemic and the end of life as we knew it, and tourists were being advised to avoid London.
I felt like a proper idiot for not knowing this, and when I thought about it, it seemed to me that there had been newsagents’ signs with screaming headlines about mosquitoes and tropical diseases, but I’d been too wrapped up in this bill and my films and that to pay them any heed. Ninety-nine percent of the time, the newsagents’ signs were about subjects that were completely irrelevant to me: celebrities getting caught shagging each others’ spouses, Royals getting caught snorting coke, footballers winning or losing big matches I couldn’t give a toss about. Every now and again, I’d snag a free-sheet while I was running around town, but after reading about the miraculous lives saved by brave doggies and the horrible parents who’d absentmindedly put their kids down the kitchen sink garbage disposal, I’d stick them in a bin and move on.