Pirate Cinema

Chapter 3

Family/Feeling useless/A scandal in Parliament/A scandal at home/War!

One morning, I woke up and realized that I was home. The Zeroday was quiet -- it was only two in the afternoon and I was the first out of bed -- and as I padded downstairs in a dressing gown that I'd found in a charity shop for a pound, I saw the signs of my new family all around me. Jem was a pretty fair artist, and he'd taken to decorating our walls with gigantic, detailed charcoal murals, working late into the night, drawing whatever struck his fancy, blending scenes of London's streets into elaborate anatomical studies he copied out of books into caricatures of us and the people we brought home, me with my nose huge and my teeth crooked and snarled; Dog with his spots swollen and multiplied all over his face; Chester so horsey that he had pointy ears and a tail. Most of all, he caricatured himself: scrawny, rat-faced, knock-kneed, grinning an idiot's grin with a dribble of spit rolling off his chin, clutching a piece of charcoal, and drawing himself into existence.

We'd got tired of getting splinters from the floor and had gone on a painting binge, with Chester leading the work -- he'd helped out his dad, who was a builder, back home. We sanded and painted the floor a royal blue and it was as smooth as tile under my bare feet. The dishes were drying in the clean rack beside the sink, and I picked up my favorite coffee cup -- it was a miniature beer stein, studded with elaborate spikes and axes, an advertisement for some fantasy RPG, and we'd found eight hundred of them in a skip one night -- and made coffee in Jem's sock-dripper, just the way he'd shown me. The fridge was full, the sofa had a Cecil-shaped dent in it that I settled into with a sigh, and the room still smelled faintly of oregano and garlic from the epic spaghetti sauce we'd all made the night before.

I heard another person's footsteps on the stairs and turned to see Twenty picking her way down them, dressed in one of my long T-shirts and a pair of my boxers and looking so incredibly sexy I felt like my tongue was going to unroll from my mouth across the floor like a cartoon wolf.

“COFFEE,” she said, and took my cup from me and started to slurp noisily at it.

“Good morning, beautiful,” I said, sticking my face up the shirt's hem and kissing her little tummy. She squealed and pushed my head away and gave me a kiss that tasted of sleep and warm and everything good in my world. She sat down beside me and picked up her lappie and opened the lid, rubbed her finger over the fingerprint reader until it recognized her. “What's happening in the world?”

I shrugged. “Dunno -- only been up for five minutes myself.” She snuggled into me and began to poke at the computer. And there and then, cuddling the woman I loved, in the pub I'd made over with my own hands and with the help of mates who were the best friends I'd ever had, I realized that this was the family I'd always dreamed of finding. This was the home I'd always dreamed of living in. This was the life I'd always wished I had. I was as lucky as a lucky thing.

And pretty much as soon as that feeling had filled me up like a balloon and sailed me up the ceiling, I remembered my parents and my sister and the life I'd left behind, and the balloon deflated, sending me crashing to the ground. I made a small noise in the back of my throat, like a kitten that's been separated from its mum, and 26 looked into my face.

“What is it?” she said. “Christ, you look like your best friend just died.”

I shook my head and tried for a smile. “It's nothing, love, don't worry about it.”

She tapped me lightly on the nose, hard enough to make me blink. “Don't give me that, Cec. Something's got you looking like you're ready to blow your brains out, and when you're that miserable, it's not just your business -- it's the business of everyone who cares about you. I.e., me. Talk.”