A shot across the bow/Friends from afar/Whatever floats your boat/Let's put on a show!

What's worse than making a great comic into a crap film? Making a great comic into eigh- teen crap films. Which is exactly what they did to Milady de Winter, which sold zillions of books in Japan before it was translated into English and forty-five other languages, sweep- ing the globe with its modern retelling of The Three Musketeers. So naturally, it became one of the most anticipated films of the century by kids all over the planet. They signed the best-grossing adult actors in Hollywood to play the villains, and imported two Bolly- wood actors, Prita Kapoor and Rajiv Kumar to play the beautiful visiting princess and the evil king of the thieves. The producer, who mostly made films where computer-generated space-ships fought deadly duels over poorly explained political differences, explained that these actors would “Open up the billion-strong Desi film-going market,” in an interview that made it clear that his $400,000,000 film was an investment vehicle, not a piece of art.

They got the cutest child actors. The finest special effects wizards. The best toy and video-game tie-ins, and advertisements that were slathered over every stationary surface and public vehicle in places as distant and unlikely as Bradford, and Milady de Winter was a success. Opening weekend box-office smashed all records with a $225,000,000 tally, and all told, the first one alone was reckoned as a billion dollar profit to Paramount studios and its investors.

Only one problem: it was an utter piece of shit. Seriously. I saw it when I was only twelve and even though I was barely a fan of the comics, even I was offended on behalf of every half-way intelligent kid in the world. Every actor in the film was brilliant, but the words they were asked to speak were not: it was like the film had been written with boxing gloves on. Whenever the dialog got too horrible to bear, the director threw in another high-speed and pointless action sequence, each wankier and stupider than the last, until by the end of the film, it was climaxing with a scene where swordfighters leapt hundreds of feet into the air, tossing their swords into enemy soldiers as they fell, skewering several at once like a kebab, then doing an acrobatic midair somersault, snatching the blades clean of the dead bad guys, and whirling them overhead like a helicopter rotor for a gentle landing. The critics hated it. The reviews were so uniformly negative that the quotes on the film posters were reduced to a single word, like:

• “Action” - The New York Times

• “Fast” - The Guardian

• “Adventure” - The Globe and Mail

Of course, the actual reviews said things like, “Too much action, not enough thought,” or “Scenes that move fast without managing to excite,” or “Turning one of history's best-loved adventure stories into yet another trite Hollywood blockbuster.”

So, what happened with this miserable, festering gush of cinematic puke? It was only the most profitable film in history. So profitable that they were already shooting the sequel before the opening weekend. Everybody I know saw them. Even me. And no one I knew liked them, but we all went anyway. And there was so much marketing tie-in, it was impossible to avoid: school gave out orange squash in Milady de Winter paper cups on fun- run days, sad men on the streets holding signs handed out Milady de Winter coupons for free chips at Yankee Fried Chicken and Fish (which didn't even let school kids eat there), the animated hoardings during the World Cup replayed the stupidest scenes in endless loops.

The standard joke was that Milady de Winter films were just barely tolerable if you down- loaded the Italian dubbed version and pretended you were looking at an opera. I tried it. It didn't make the experience any better. And still, we kept going to see the sequels, and still, they kept making more, two or sometimes three per year.

Part eighteen was scheduled for a grand London opening late in October. The openings rotated between Mumbai, New York, Los Angeles, and London, and lucky us, it was our turn. Everyone had a Milady de Winter joke, graffiti artists drew mustaches or boils or giant willies on the faces of the stars that went up on every billboard (the child actors had grown old and been replaced by new ones; the adult actors had found themselves forever unable to be cast in anything except a Milady de Winter film). But the polls in the freesheets reported that most Londoners were planning to go see Part Eighteen, which was called D'Artagnan's Blood-Oath.

And so were the Jammie Dodgers.

Little known fact about pirate film downloads: most of 'em come from people who work for the film studios. A picture as big and complicated as D'Artagnan's Blood-Oath has hundreds, if not thousands, of workers and actors and cutters and sound effects people who handle it before it gets released. And just like everyone else in the world, they take their work home with them (I once watched an interview with a SFX lady who said that when it came to the really big films, she often started working from the moment she got up, at 7:00 A.M., stopping only to shower and get on the bus to the studio). With that many copies floating around, it's inevitable that one or more will get sent to a mate for a sneaky peek, and from there, they slither out onto the net.

Hollywood acts like every film you download comes from some kid who sneaks a camera or a high-end phone into a cinema, and they've bought all kinds of laws allowing them to search you on your way into the screen, like you were boarding an airplane. But it's all rubbish: stop every kid with a camera and the number of early pirate films will drop by approximately zero percent. It's like the alcoholic dad in a gritty true-life film: he can't control his own life, so he tries to control everyone else's. The studios can't control their own people, so they come after us.

Which is how I got my hands on a copy of Part Eighteen a month before it opened in London (I can't bring myself to keep calling it D'Artagnan's Blood-Oath, which sounds more like an educational film about a teenaged girl struggling with her first monthly visitor). It was all the rage on Cynical April, where we were all competing to see who could do the most outrageous recuts. They were good for laughs, but I had bigger plans.

It started when I went with Jem to visit Aziz. Jem was after some new networking gear for a project he was all hush-hush about, while I was thinking it'd be nice to get a couple of very large flat-panel displays, better than the beamers I was using at the Zeroday when I edited, because they'd work with the lights on full-go, letting me edit even when 26 was over doing her homework.

As we wound our way through Aziz's shelves, he pointed out his most recent finds, and stubbed his toe on a carton the size of a shoe-box that rattled.

He cussed fluently at it, then gave it a shove toward an overflowing shelf. “What is that, anyway?” I said.

“Thumb drives,” he said. “A thousand of 'em, all told.” He gestured at more small car- tons.

I boggled. Sure, I had a dozen of them back at the Zeroday, ones we'd found at the charity shops and stuff. They were useful for carrying files you didn't want to keep on your mobile, or for loading onto older machines that didn't have working wireless links. Like most of the people I knew, I treated them as semi-disposable and never thought of them as very valuable. But a thousand of them -- that was getting into serious money.

“Bugger,” I said. “Are you going to sell 'em?”

He snorted. “These aren't the kind you sell. They're ancient. Only thirty-two gigabytes each. I only keep 'em here because I'm convinced someone will find something better to do with them than chucking them in a landfill.”

“I might just take you up on that,” I said, and my mind started to whirl.

I don't think I'd ever seen a thirty-two gig stick before then -- the ones we got in first year were 128s, and they were obsolete and nearly filled with crap adverts for junk food and Disneyland Paris from the start. These ones were shaped like little footballs and embla- zoned with the logo for something called Major League Soccer, which I looked up later (it was a sad, defunct American football league that had made an unsuccessful attempt to gain popularity in the UK before I was born, dating the sticks to nearly two decades before).

Thirty-two gigs was such a ludicrously tiny size, compared to the terabyte versions for sale in the little dry-cleaner/newsagent/phone unlocking place by Old Street Station -- it would take thirty of the little footballs to equal just one of those. What the hell could you put on one of those?

“You're joking,” Rabid Dog said, as I thought aloud about this in the pub room of the Ze- roday, one dark September night as the wind howled and the rain lashed at the shut- ters over the windows. He'd got a lot less shy lately, and I hadn't caught him wanking in weeks. “Thirty-two gigs is tons of space. You could stick fifty 640 by 480 videos on one of those.”

“Yeah, and I could get like a million films on there if I was willing to knock them down to ten by ten. You could pretend you were watching film on a screen ten miles away. Who cares about 640 by 480?”

“Fine,” he said. “But what about one or two films?”

Durr. There it was, staring me in the face. If you wanted to distribute just a couple of films, at very high resolution, with four or five audio-tracks and some additional material, thirty- two gigs was plenty. They'd rattle around with all the space left over. And that's when the plan came together.

Aziz not only had a thousand thumb-drives; he also had a shelf full of bulk-writers for them, ones that would take fifty at a time and let you write a disk-image to all of them at once. We packaged up the leaked copy of Part Eighteen along with a couple hundred of the best piss-takes from Cynical April, along with a little video that we all worked on together, piecing it together using the dialog from the actual film and its earlier parts, cutting in one word at a time to have a blur of actors explain:

“When you go to see terrible shows like this one, you just give money to the people who are destroying our country with corrupt, evil laws. Your children are being sent to jail by laws bought with the money from your purchase. Don't give them your gold. If you must see this stupid film, do it at home and keep your money for better things. Make your own art. Originality is just combining things that no one ever thought to combine before.” Some of the word-choices were a bit odd -- all eighteen parts combined had the vocabulary of a reader for a toddler -- but it worked brilliantly.

Some of 26's anarchist pals were deep pros at making T-shirts; they lent us their silkscreen- ing kit and showed us how to make a little grid of skull-crossbones logos with PLAYME written beneath. We lined the loaded thumbs up on the pub floor in a grid that matched the skulls on the screen and sprayed sloppy red and black identifiers on the footballs, straight over the naff old Major League Soccer marks.

Finally, we used one of Aziz's specialist printers to run off thousands of feet of scarlet nylon ribbon printed with the same manifesto that we'd loaded into the thumbs, and signed it THE JAMMIE DODGERS. I thought that Jem might mind -- it was his and Dodger's thing, after all -- but he just grinned and shrugged and said, “I'd have a lot of nerve to complain about you pirating from me, wouldn't I? I positively insist, mate.”

So we threaded lengths of ribbon through all of the footballs and tied them off. We filled urethane shopping bags with them, and admired our handiwork.

“Now,” said Chester, “how do you plan on getting them to people before they buy their tickets? Hand them out at some tube station or something?” If there was one thing that Jem's begging signs had taught us all, it was how to efficiently distribute small free items to commuters going into and coming out of the underground.

I shook my head and swilled some of the mulled wine that we'd made to warm up the night, spat a clove back into my cup. “Naw. Too inefficient. We want to get these to people who are actually planning on seeing the film, right before they stump up their money. Maximum impact.” That was the whole idea: maximum impact. A film makes most of its gross on the all-important opening weekend. Attack the box-office take from that weekend and you attacked the studio at its weakest, most vulnerable point.

“I'm going to give them out in Leicester Square,” I said. “On opening night.” They all gaped at me. 26 looked worried, then delighted, then worried again. Jem put a thumb up. “All right,” he said. “Why not? Go big or go home, right?”

Like any red-blooded English lad, I have seen approximately one million commando raids conducted with stopwatch precision, thanks to the all-popular military/terrorism thriller genre. I knew how to assemble the pieces: we needed cover, we needed countermea- sures, we needed escape routes.

Cover: The enemy had given this one to us. Ever since the cinemas had introduced mandatory metal-detectors and coat-checks for phones and computers, every film opening looks more like an airport security queue, with a long snake of bored, angry people shuffling slowly toward a couple of shaved-head thugs who'll grope them, run them through a metal detector, and take their phone and laptop and that off them, just in case they're one of the mythological screen-cappers.

This is London. Where you have a queue of people with money, you have a small ecosys- tem of tramps, hawkers, and human spam delivery systems passing out brochures, cards, and loot-bags advertising cheap curry, dodgy minicabs, Chinese Tun-La massage (what- ever that is), American pizza, Minneapolis Fried Chicken, strip clubs, and discount fashion outlets.

This would be our cover. Chester had found us an enormous bag filled with lurid purple T-shirts in a skip, advertising a defunct Internet cafe (most of them had gone bust since the Theft of Intellectual Property Act raids began). They were gigantic, designed to hang to your knees, turning the wearer into a walking billboard. To these, we added baseball caps from a stall in Petticoat Lane Market that was happy to part with them as they were worn and a bit scuffed.

Countermeasures: These caps were our countermeasures. Between the baggy shirts and the hats, it would be hard for the CCTVs to pick us up or track us (Chester had read a thriller novel that said that a handful of gravel in one shoe each, would add enough randomness to make our gaits unrecognizable to the automated systems working the cameras).

But just to be sure, Aziz hooked us up with strings of miniature infrared LEDs, little pinhead things that we painstakingly stitched around the brims with electrical thread that ran into a fingernail-sized power-pack that took a watch battery. These would strobe ultra-bright infrared light that was invisible to the human eye, but was blinding to the CCTVs.

Or so Aziz said. He told us that the cameras were all sensitive into the infrared range so that they could take pictures in poor light, and that they automatically dialed up the sensitivity to max when the sun went down. As they strained to capture the glimmers of IR emitted by our faces, we would overwhelm them with the bright, invisible light. (Not that we told Aziz exactly what we were planning; as Jem said, the less he knew, the less he could be punished for not reporting. Aziz didn't seem to mind.)

Aziz had a pile of CCTVs (Aziz had a pile of everything), and he had me put on the hat and walk around in front of it for a time, walking close and far, even looking straight at it, with the hat on. Then he showed us the video: there I was, but where my head was supposed to be, there was just a white indistinct blob, like my noggin had been replaced by a poltergeist that manifested itself as ball lightning.

Escape routes: Piss easy. Leicester Square is a rat-run of alleyways, roads, and pass- throughs that run through the lobbies of clubs, restaurants, and cinemas, leading down to the heaving crowds of Trafalgar Square, up into the mazed alleys of Chinatown, toward the throngs of Piccadilly to the west and the street performers and hawkers of Covent Garden to the east. In other words, getting from Leicester Square to the anonymous depths of central London was only a matter of going a few steps, finding a doorway to shuck your purple shirt and baseball hat in, and then you'd be whistling on your way to safety.

It was a rush to get it all done in time for the big night. We worked around the clock silkscreening, wiring, writing disk-images, planning routes. I saw Aziz's thumbdrives ex- actly ten days before opening night. I had the idea the next morning, leaving us with nine days.

By day eight, it was clear we weren't going to make it. I reckoned that to give out one thousand thumb-drives, we'd need at least fifteen people on the distribution side, which meant wiring up fifteen hats, and the hats were turning out to be a right beast. Aziz had shown me how to do it ten times, but soldering the flexible wire was harder than it looked, and I ruined two hats completely before I did even one.

26 promised me that she would be able to dig up ten more helpers through Cynical April. They had to be absolutely trustworthy, with nerves of steel. She knew which helpers had been the best when we were getting the word out on TIP, and which of those people had been the nerviest when it came to planning and executing secret parties. We agreed that we'd bring them in at the last minute, to minimize the chance that one would blab our plan.

With forty-eight hours to go, I was a wreck. We only had three hats done, half the drives hadn't been flashed, and I hadn't slept for more than a few hours a day. I'd drunk so much coffee that my eyes wouldn't focus and my hands were shaking so hard I couldn't hold the soldering iron. Rabid Dog was trying to take over from me, but he didn't have a clue how to do it.

“No, shit, not like that!” I said, as he burned the hat with the hot iron, filling the table with the stink of burnt plastic. “Shit man, you've ruined it. You retard --”

26 crossed the room in three quick steps and grabbed my flailing arms and pinned them to my sides. “Enough. That is quite enough of that. You. Are. Going. To. Bed.” I started to object and she shook her head furiously, her mohican's ponytail flopping from side to side. “I don't want to hear it. You're going to make a complete balls-up of this adventure if you don't get some sleep -- get us all arrested, if I don't kill you first. Now, apologize to Dog.”

She was right. I hung my head. “Sorry, Dog. I was out of order.”

He muttered something. I felt miserable. Dog was better about talking these days, sure, but when you were cruel to him, he went right back into his own head and pulled the door shut behind him. Jem glared at me. It seemed they were all furious with me. I recognized the paranoid, angry feeling for what it was: massive sleep deprivation and caffeine overdose. Time to go to bed.

I woke fourteen hours later, feeling like weights had been tied to my arms and legs by a merry prankster who finished the job by gluing my eyes shut with wheatpaste and then taking a foul, runny shit in my mouth. Yes, I know that this is a gratuitously disgusting way of describing it. Take comfort, dear reader, in the knowledge that it is not one half so disgusting as the taste in my mouth.

I staggered to the second floor toilet and turned the tap on all the way. As always, there was a groaning and a sputtering and a coughing, and then it began to trickle cold water. The pressure up here was almost nil, and there were fittings for an old pump that was long gone that might have corrected it. As it was, it took forty-five minutes for the toilet cistern to fill up between flushes. Every now and then we'd joke about complaining to the landlord.

I slurped up as much of the water as I could get out of the tap, then changed into a brown corduroy bath-robe that 26 had surprised me with when the weather turned. I added a pair of rubber shower-sandals and made my way back down into the pub room, moving like I was underwater as the residual sleep and fatigue tugged at my flesh.

It was a hive of brightly lit, bustling activity, filled with happy chatter and speedy, efficient motion. Memory sticks were loaded, silkscreened and tied up with ribbon. Hats were stitched, soldered, powered and tested. It looked like a proper assembly line. Only one problem: I didn't recognize any of the people doing the work.

They all stopped and looked at me when I walked into the room. Someone's phone was playing jangly dance music, DJ mixes that I'd heard on Cynical April. There were four of them, two boys and two girls, about my age or a bit older, with strange, pudding-bowl haircuts and multicolored dye-jobs that matched their multicolored, chipped nail-varnish (even the blokes). They had ragged tennis shoes that were held together with tape and safety pins, black cargo trousers with loads of little pockets, and cut-down business shirts with all the collars, sleeves, and pockets torn away.

“You'd be Cecil, then,” said one of the girls. She had a funny accent. Not English or Scottish. Foreign.

“Y-e-s,” I said slowly.

“Right,” she said, and beamed at me, showing me the little skulls laser-etched into the enamel of her front teeth. “I'm Kooka, and these are Gertie, Tomas, and Hans the Viking.” Hans didn't look anything like a viking. He looked like a stiff breeze might knock him down. What was it about wimpy blokes and big, macho nicknames? But he was smiling in a friendly way, as were the others, and waving, and I waved back, still not sure what to make of these strangers.

“Are you friends of --”

“We're friends of the Jammie Dodgers!” Tomas declared. He pronounced it “ze Chammie Dodtchers!”

“We're your reinforcements,” Kooka said. “We've come from Berlin to help!”

“Berlin?”

“We'd have been here sooner, but the hitchhiking was awful,” she said. “Not least coming up from shitting Dover after we got off the ferry. It's like English drivers have never seen someone hitching a ride before!”

I shook my head and sat down. “I see. Erm. Who the hell are you?”

“We're from Cynical April!” Kooka said. “It's not so complicated. We've been on the boards forever, from way back. We're the German wing.” Hans cleared his throat. “German and Swedish,” Kooka said. “We've been fighting off the same bastards at home for years and it seemed like a holiday was in order.”

I felt my mouth open and shut of its own accord. Part of me was made up that we had this help, and so exotic and energetic, with their hitchhiking and that. Part of me was furious that 26 had brought in outsiders without asking me. But the enraged part couldn't work up much fury -- I seemed to have burned out all my capacity to be furious, spending it on the week-long binge of coffee and work.

26 appeared from the kitchen, teetering under a tray carrying our teapot, a stack of our chipped, mismatched cups, the sugar bowl, the cream jug, and a small mountain of posh little health-food seed-cakes that had turned up in the skip of a fancy delicatessen in Mayfair.

“The creature lives!” she said, handing me the tray and giving me a hard kiss on the neck. I handed the tray off to two of the Germans -- or Swedes, or whatever -- and gave her a cuddle.

“This is a surprise,” I said.

“Surprise!” she said, and tickled my ribs. I danced back, squirming. She was grinning with pride. What was left of my anger evaporated. “I didn't want to say anything because I half believed they wouldn't make it. I mean, hitchhiking!”

“You must try it!” Kooka said. “It's the only way to travel. All the best people do it.”

“But now they're here, we're in great shape! Kooka's done all sorts of stunts and raids, isn't that right?”

Kooka curtsied and the other nodded. “We're superheroes. Legends in our own minds. The scourge of Berlin!” She gestured at the works all around her. “And we're nearly done with all this rubbish.”

It was true. What we'd struggled with for a week, they'd made short work of in a few hours. Of course, we'd spent a week getting all the kinks out of the production, making expensive mistakes and learning from them. The Germans had the benefit of all those lessons and, what's more, weren't crippled by sleep deprivation, squabbling, and caffeine shakes. So they had kicked quantities of ass and torn through the remaining work in no time.

“Ya,” Hans said. “Then, the party begins!”

Which, indeed, it did. The next several hours were a blur. We started off heading down to Leicester Square, ostensibly to familiarize the Germans with the escape routes (the local volunteers wouldn't need any orientation). It was sparkling, of course, even though it was only a Wednesday, alive with the chatter of thousands of people going into and out of the cinemas. I loved Leicester Square at night: the lights, the glamour, the grifters and tramps, the tourists and hen nights, the spliff and the brochureware spammers. It was like some other world where entertainment and fantasy ruled.

No one else seemed to have the same reaction. The Germans laughed at the slow, wad- dling coppers, climbed up on the wrought iron fence around the garden to get a view and then backtucked off it, landing on springheels like gymnasts. Rabid Dog cheered them in an uncharacteristic display of public enthusiasm. Jem joined in, and then the rest of us. Jem climbed up on the fence and gave it a try, though the rest of us told him he was insane and would split his skull. He surprised us all by doing a very credible backflip, though he landed heavily and staggered into a posh couple who shoved him off. He brushed himself off coolly and accepted our applause, then whistled the little two-note warning the drugs kids used that meant coppers and we saw the PCSOs heading our way and scarpered, up through Chinatown, up to Soho, threading through the crowds and legging it down alleys so skinny we had to turn sideways to pass.

26 said, “There's a big Confusing Peach get together near here tonight.” She pulled out her phone and made her most adorably cute face at it, poking at the screen until it gave up the address.

The parties that got listed on Confusing Peach of the Forest Green Beethoven were less exclusive and weird than the inner-circle events on Cynical April, but this one was held in an interlocking set of coal-cellars we reached through an unmarked staircase between two skips behind a posh Chinese restaurant. The cellars were narrow and low-ceilinged and they throbbed with music from cheap speakers that had been glue-gunned to the walls at regular intervals. There were so many people in that claustrophobic space that you were always touching someone, usually two or three people, and the music was so loud you could only be heard by pressing your face into someone's ear and shouting.

It was brilliant.

Twenty and I danced these weird, horny dances that were half-snogging, and I could feel people on all sides of me doing the same. Someone passed me a propelled inhaler full of sugar and I stared at it stupidly. I had never tried it, even though there was plenty for sale around the Zeroday. I guess I'd just heard all those scare stories at school and in brochures and on the sides of buses and so on, and I was half-way convinced that one hit would turn me into a raving addict who'd kill his own mother for another gasp of the sweet stuff.

Of course, I'd heard all the same stuff about spliff -- the evil, evil skunk that would melt my mind and make me the perverted love-slave of some dealer who'd peddle my doped-up arse to twisted vicars and City boys until I was spoilt meat. I'd smoked spliff for years and the worst thing it did to me was make me lazy and slow the next day. And for all that they said that weed led to the hard stuff, I'd never found myself led anywhere.

They were wrong about spliff, so maybe they were wrong about sugar. I laughed: it wasn't grass that led me to the harder stuff, it was all the BS about grass. And then I realized that this meant I was about to take a puff off the inhaler, and my heart started hammering and the room seemed to zoom away from me as I brought it to my nose and touched the button on the bottom.

Blam! The gas-charge fired the sweet gas deep down my lungs, down to those little grape- clusters on the ends of the branches where the oxygen crossed over and entered my bloodstream. Only this wasn't oxygen: this was sugar, and my tongue felt like it had been drenched with honey even before I felt any other effects. Then I felt the other effects, just like you read about in the Sunday paper confessionals: “I was a gasper and it cost me everything.” A feeling of supreme confidence. A feeling like time was stretching out, like I could reach out and catch a bullet. A feeling like I could see the connections between everyone and everything, all the little invisible strands that tied it all together, and like I could reach out and tug at the strands and make the universe dance like a marionette.

The feeling ebbed away as fast as it came, leaving me back in my boots, knees a bit weak, practically being held up by the sweaty bodies on every side of me. 26 was giving me a look that was half-worried, half-angry, and she plucked the inhaler out of my hand and passed it off to someone else. She put her lips up to my ear and shouted over the noise: “What was that about? Since when do you take sugar?”

I shrugged. I didn't know why I'd done it. And I wasn't feeling entirely back in my own skin just yet. Twenty's face screwed up lemon-sour and she walked off. I started to go after her, then gave up, feeling deliciously angry at her: who was she to tell me what to do with my life?

So I went back to dancing, dancing with the press of bodies and the thunder of music, and someone passed me another inhaler, but this time, I passed on it -- the dancing was obliterating my worries and my insecurities perfectly, and I didn't want to take the risk that I might lose that peace and have to start thinking about what it meant that Twenty had gone off on her own in a right fury.

I moved from corridor to corridor, room to room, seeing people I vaguely recognized from different parties and events I'd been to since we all got on Confusing Peach. I stuck my head in one room and found that it was full of writhing, snogging couples. Embarrassed, I withdrew my head quickly, then I looked back in again. Had I just seen what I thought I'd seen?

I had.

There, back in the corner, two blokes kissing furiously. That wasn't unheard of at Confusing Peach events, plenty of the people on the boards were openly gay. But the two specific blokes who were kissing were Rabid Dog and Jem.

Rabid Dog seemed to feel my eyes on him and he looked up and met my gaze, then squirmed away from Jem, a look that was a cross between humiliation and terror in his eyes. Jem looked around, surprised, and saw me. He shrugged and turned back to Dog. I left the party.

As I made my way through Soho toward Trafalgar Square and the night buses, I wondered why I was so weirded out. I hadn't known many openly gay people in Bradford, though I'd once seen the gay pride parade and after an initial shock, I'd found it to be quite a lot of fun: clearly the people involved were having the time of their lives and they weren't hurting anyone, so why shouldn't I support them?

And after I came down to London, I saw loads of openly gay people, and not just on Con- fusing Peach. Loads of Twenty's anarchist friends called themselves “queer,” though that seemed to mean different things. Soho was a proper gay district, filled with bars and restaurants that flew rainbow flags and had loads of same-sex couples hanging around. Like the people at the pride parade, they all seemed to be having a good time with one another and there were precious few good times around, so why should I begrudge them theirs?

But seeing Rabid Dog and Jem had done my head it, I admit it. Partly it was the feeling that I hadn't really known them. How many times had we sat around before a night out, talking about girls and whether we'd meet any and what we'd do when we did? Had all that been lies? Had I pissed them off with what I'd said?

It wasn't just that. Partly, it was the picture of the two of them as a couple, maybe rolling around in bed the way that 26 and I did. The mental image made me squirm and feel all weird and discombobulated.

I found myself wishing that I had more sugar, and I found that I was also freaked at this. When I'd taken the sugar, the world had had a kind of clarity that I was already missing -- I knew where everything belonged and how it fit, and knew that I was exactly where I needed to be, doing exactly what I needed to do. Of course, in my head, I knew that no one was ever exactly perfectly in the right place, and if you were, why would you do anything else, anyway? But I missed that feeling, even though it had been an illusion.

After all, my bird wasn't talking to me, my two best mates were trying to dissolve one anothers' faces with saliva, and I was about to commit an act of artistic terrorism in the middle of one of the most policed, surveilled, and controlled cities in the world. A little comfort would have gone a long way.

I woke up the next morning alone and miserable. My head felt like it was two sizes too small for my brain, a feeling which I reckoned was the sugar, though it might have been all the cheap lager or the skunk or just the two hours I'd spent crying and wallowing in self-pity before dropping off to sleep finally.

The Germans were spark out and snoring in the pub room, two sleeping end-to-end on the sofa, two more on bedrolls on the floor. They didn't even notice when I switched on the light (and then quickly switched it off when I saw them), and I tiptoed into the kitchen to make myself a brew and get my lappie. I was sure that 26 had sent me e-mail by now and if she hadn't, I was going to send her some, and though part of me yearned to tick her off for being such a pissy prude about my taking sugar, a bigger part of me wanted to grovel for her forgiveness.

When I got back upstairs to my room, there was Jem sitting at my edit-desk, feet up on the table, reading an old film magazine from the pile by my bed. He looked up when I came in the room, then nodded his head toward the bed.

“Have a seat,” he said.

I sat, putting my brew and lappie down on the floor.

“Time we had a talk,” he said.

I held up a hand. “No need,” I said. “None of my business.”

“You're right about that. No one's business but mine and his. But if you're his mate, you should know some things. So sharpen your ears, my old chum, and hearken to what Jem has to say.

“I never had no trouble with who I am or what I am. To me, it's always been natural that I'd spend some time with girls and some time with blokes.” He winked. “Not ugly sods like you, of course, don't get no ideas. But as far back as I can remember, I've felt like either could be right for me.”

I nodded, hoping that I was seeming cool about, though again, it made me feel squirmy in a way I couldn't get my head around.

He blew out a sigh. “Look, I know it's not the usual, normal thing. Everyone expects you to grow up to be a big strapping lad and spend your whole life trying to get your end away with some girl, not some other big strapping lad. But everyone also expects you to live in a flat you're paying rent for, to buy your food at the grocer's, and to call yourself by your given name instead of some daft handle like 'Rabid Dog' or 'Cecil B. DeVil.' I say, bugger everyone, bugger their expectations, and bugger anyone who thinks less of me for who I fancy.”

“Can't argue with that,” I said with as much conviction as I could manage.

“Except you want to, old son, I can see that from here. You don't like it. It makes you go all skin-crawly, don't it? It's okay, you can admit it.”

I shook my head. “Jem, I don't -- I mean, look, you're still my mate and you're right, who you fancy, that's up to you. But yeah, I don't like to picture it.”

He punched me in the shoulder. “You're afraid if you think about it too much you'll end up turning queer, yeah? That's what all this business is, blokes all being hyper-manly and calling one another faggot and so on. It's that fear that it might just be too nice to resist -- getting together with another lad who wants it as much as you do, the way you do, who understands the way no bird can --”

“Enough,” I said.

He laughed. “Look, don't worry about it. Take it from someone who's tried it both ways, it's not better, it's not worse, it's just different. And you'll know if you go that way, and when you do know, it won't be difficult to detect. It'll be as obvious to you as two plus two is four. You remember how you carried on about 26 when you first met her? That feeling? You'll not be mistaken about that feeling if you feel it again.”

“Fine,” I said. “I get it. And you're right, it's naught to do with me, what you and Dog do. Anything to keep him from locking himself in the loo for a wank, anyway.”

“I'll do my part for the squad, cap'n. About Dog, though --” He looked uncomfortable. “Look, I should leave this for him to tell you, but he won't, and that's why I've got to say it. Dog ain't like me. He's exclusive to boys. Always has been, ever since he could remember.

And one day he made the mistake of telling his older brother about it. His brother, who he looked up to like a hero.

“His brother beat six kinds of shit out of him, and then told their parents. His dad wasn't an understanding sort -- which explains his brother's treachery -- and he had all kinds of nicknames for Dog, 'the little fairy,' and so on. He wasn't shy about using these endear- ments in front of the other kids around the estate, and became clear to them that no one -- not his dad, not his brother -- would come to his defense, which was like bloody mince in shark-infested water. He was every bully's favorite punching bag, the punchline to every cruel joke. You've told me some of what you went through in Bradford. I went through my own this and that before I lighted out for sodding London. But neither of us ever went through what Dog went through. Neither of us have half the guts that podgy little bastard has. He's quiet and he's broken in lots of ways, sure, but he's not anyone's victim anymore. Never will be.

“Which is why you need to make a point of telling him, as quickly and sincerely as you can, that everything you said about me goes triple for him. You're still his mate, you don't think any less of him, that sort of thing. He needs to hear that soonest so that he knows whether you and he are on the same side still, or whether he needs to figure out how to find some new people to hang about with. Understand me?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Course. No problem.”

“And when you're done with him, you'd better find 26 and make up to her for whatever had her so furious last night. I saw her leaving the party -- looked like a bulldog chewing a wasp. We've got a major operation tomorrow night, sonny, and we can't afford to have any dissent in the ranks.”

I left Twenty messages in all the usual places asking her to call me, hinting that I wanted to apologize for being such a dick. Then it was a matter of waiting for her to get back to me and for Rabid Dog to wake up and make an appearance and for the Germans in our parlor to rouse themselves -- wait, wait, wait.

26 called me first.

“Hi,” I said.

She didn't say anything. The silence on the line was proper intense.

“I'm sorry, all right? I'd never done that before, and I don't plan on doing it again. I guess I just -- you know, got overexcited. It was stupid of me. I'm sorry.”

Still nothing.

“Look,” I said. “Look, it was just one mistake. It wasn't even that good --” Except it was, it had been fantastic in a way that was kind of scary and not altogether unpleasant. “Okay, tell a lie. It was good. It made me feel like I could rule the world.” I swallowed. My mouth was off on its own now, talking without any intervention on my part. “But I've felt that good before. When I'm with you.” It was easily the soppiest thing I'd ever said and until I said it, IhadnoideathatIwasabouttosayit. AndthenIsaiditandIknewitwastrue.

“You're an idiot,” she said. I could tell that she wasn't angry anymore. “I am,” I said. “Can I be your idiot?”

“Come over to my flat tonight. I've got to revise for a maths quiz tomorrow. Calculus. Ugh.”

“I'll help you revise,” I said.

“By doing your usual impression of Cecil the Human Boob-Juggling Octopus? You will come and sit in the corner and contemplate your sins, young man. If you're very good, you might get a crust of bread and a tiny snog before I send you home. I expect you to be very grateful for this.”

“I will be,” I said around the grin that was threatening to split my head in two. What a lass.

I felt like a huge weight had been lifted from my chest, like I'd been holding my breath overnight and could finally exhale properly. I could hear the Germans stirring downstairs and muttering in their language. I skipped down the stairs and said good morning and played host, making tea, bringing out some of the nicest treats in my larder. They were remarkably easy to chat with, and fun besides, and had had plenty of adventures in Berlin. Berlin was apparently the land of a thousand squats and they were well up for me going out and visiting them there.

I was daydreaming about how I could swing it -- I'd have to wait until I could apply for a passport on my own in a few months at least -- when Rabid Dog poked his head in the pub room. He scanned the room, blushed to the tips of his ears, and retreated up the stairs.

“'Scuse me,” I said, and set off after him.

I ran him to ground on the top-floor landing, headed into the big loft room where we stashed the spare bits of furnishing that we scrounged off London's curbs and in its skips.

“Dog,” I said, “got a sec?”

He wouldn't meet my eye, but he didn't say no (nor yes, of course), and I took this for assent. I perched on a wobbly tabletop and thought hard about what to say next.

“Look,” I said. “Jem was in to chat with me this morning. About your situation, like. Your dad and brother and that. I guess I just wanted to say that I think it's shit what they done to you, and it was, like, uncalled for.” The opposite of what had happened earlier with Twenty was unfolding now, my mouth running away with dire stupidity while my brain looked on in horror. “I mean, Christ, I don't care who you shag. Shag anything. It's none of my business, is it? Whatever makes you happy. Course, not if it's like a kid or an animal or whatever, that's wrong. Not that being gay is like wanting to stick it in a dog!” I closed my mouth and stared at him.

He was staring back at me with a look of such unbelieving horror on his face that he'd forgot to be shy. I understood where he was coming from. I couldn't believe the miserable, bizarre stuff I was spouting. I clamped my mouth shut tighter and did the only thing I could think of.

I punched myself, as hard as I could, across the jaw. It turns out that despite the awkward angle, you can really hit yourself very hard in the face. I hit myself so hard that I knocked myself off the table and onto the floor.

Hitting yourself in the face as hard as you can is an experience I actually recommend, having done it. Not because it feels good, but because it feels bad in a bad way that nothing else you'll ever experience feels bad. I've actually been punched very hard in the face by someone else, when I wasn't expecting it, and that was terrible, but not nearly as terrible as this (though I think he actually hit me harder than I did). I think it was the knowledge that I had inflicted this pain on myself, deliberately. The stupid, it burns. Or throbs, really.

I rolled around on the floor for a moment, waiting for the stars to stop detonating behind my scrunched-tight eyelids.

“Holy God, that hurt,” I said, and got to my feet. Dog was watching me with his jaw literally resting on his chest. “Oh, excuse me, Mr. Horror Film Gorefest. You've never seen some- one break free of an intense attack of the stupids by beating the piss out of himself?”

He laughed aloud. “That was literally the stupidest thing I've ever seen,” he said. “Well done, mate.”

“Yeah,” I said, and rubbed at my jaw. I could already feel the swelling there. “Well, someone had to do it and you're clearly too much of a pussy to punch me when I deserve it.”

He laughed and as I was laughing, he managed to flick a finger, hard, square into the bruise that I was developing on my chin. “Pussy, huh?”

“Right,” I said. “Let me try this again. First, let me say this: who you fancy or shag or whatever? That is none of my business. Next: also, I have nothing but the utmost re- spect and admiration for your sexual proclivities and congratulate you on them without reservation.”

He gave me a golf-clap, but it was a friendly one, and he was smiling. “You're an idiot, Cecil,” he said.

“So I've been told. But at least my heart's in the right place, right?”

“You are forgiven,” he said. “Look, just so you know, I don't fancy you, okay? So you don't have to worry.”

“Are you saying I'm not fancyable?”

He rolled his eyes. “No, Cecil. I'm sure that there are many boys who weep for the fact that you go for the ladies. But I'm not one of them. Ego satisfied?”

“Yes,” I said. “That will do nicely.”

He came over shy again, looking at his toes. “Cec,” he said so quietly I could barely hear him.

“Yeah?”

“Just, well, it was nice of you to say that. Means something, okay?” “Okay,” I said and found that I had a lump in my throat.

True to her word, 26 showed up with six of her friends in tow at exactly 7:15 P.M. We met in the shadow of Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square, the one hundred and sixty- nine-foot-tall pillar topped with a bird-spattered statue of Lord Admiral Nelson, a bloke who apparently did something important involving boats at some point in the past several hundred years.

It was a good place to gather. By day, Trafalgar Square was a favorite with the tourists, and there were always people coming and going. Human spammers were common, and you often saw them taking their lunch breaks on the steps or benches or in the shadow of the National Portrait Gallery at the top of the square.

We huddled up tight and went over the plan together, 26 leading the lesson, making each person recite his or her part of the plan, along with three escape routes. It was simple enough: “I pull down my shirt and put on the hat and turn on the lights and make my way to Leicester Square. I pick a spot in the Odeon queue and work my way down it, saying 'Free films, free films,' handing out the thumbdrives as fast as I can. Don't argue with anyone. Don't stop to talk. Keep my face down. After seven minutes or when I run out -- whichever comes first -- I walk quickly away. My first escape route is down through Trafalgar Square. My second is up to Chinatown. My third is east to Covent Garden. I step into the second doorway I pass and take off the hat and shirt and put them in my bag, then head back the way I came, toward Leicester Square, and go around it to my next escape route. We regroup in Soho on Greek Street at 7:25. Any trouble, call 0587534525 and enter my serial number, which is 4.”

The phone number was one of those free voice-boxes. It came with a touch-tone or voice- menu, and I could access it using my prepaid mobile if someone didn't turn up within ten minutes of the appointed time.

“If I think I'm being followed, I go to the nearest tube station and board the first train, ride five stops, get out, and check to see if I can still see my tails. If they're there, I sit down on a bench and read a book for half an hour and see what they do. If not, I get back on the tube and go home, after leaving my serial number, which is 4, at 0587534526.” We'd got another voice mail drop for this eventuality.

Once we'd each said it, quickly and perfectly, we put on our shirts and hats, openly, just as we would if we were any other gang of human spammers who'd just been given the night's briefing by our manager. Then we trooped in a loose line up to Leicester Square, the purple shirts hanging down to our knees, the hatbrims obscuring our faces. Other peoples' attention slid away from us as they avoided eye-contact with a potential handbill-shover. I wished I'd thought to get some handbills from some real human spammer for us to carry into battle. Nothing made Londoners get out of the way faster than the sight of someone trying to give them an advertisement for some takeaway curry house or discount fitness club.

The mission went perfectly. We hit the queue in an orderly mass, half of us on its left, half on its right. It was drizzling out, which was normal for autumn in London, and the early September twilight mixed with the water made the whole square dark and gloomy. The forest of unfurled umbrellas provided excellent cover from the CCTVs and PCSOs and coppers with their hat-brim cameras. We efficiently went up and down the line, barking “Free films!” and handing out our little footballs. I could hear little surprised noises rippling through the queue as some people read the ribbon's message and worked out what they'd just been given, but by then I'd given out my lot of sixty-seven footballs. I checked my phone: less than seven minutes had elapsed.

I wadded up the nylon carrier bag I'd brought the boodle in and shoved it into my pocket, then turned on my heel and struck out back to Trafalgar Square. Again, I wished I had some fliers I could hold to make the crowd part -- it was getting thick. I kept checking my reflection in the drizzle-fogged windows of the restaurants and office buildings on the way out of the square, looking for a tail, but I didn't see any. I concluded, tentatively, that I'd made it out of the square without being followed.

Back to the rendezvous, Greek Street, with its pre-theater Soho throng and the office peo- ple who'd gone home and changed into their woo-party! outfits trickling back in, and we were just a bunch of teenagers, giggly and bouncy. Everyone made it. We got on the tube and headed back to the Zeroday, absolutely drunk on delight.

Down and out in the commercial interlude

What breathtaking precision! In and out, no messing about, everyone gets away clean. Makes you want to take a victory lap, huh? Why not celebrate with a little (ahem) retail therapy, by patronizing one of the fine independent bookstores across the land, or get- ting a book sent straight to you, or downloaded to your ebook reader (without any DRM encumbrance).

Or you could share the joy by donating a copy to a school or library.