Today, October 2, 2012 is the hardest it will ever be to copy things. It will never get harder. It only gets easier from here. Our grandchildren will marvel at how hard copying was in 2012. "Tell me again, Grandpa, about the years 2012, when hard-drives with the capacity to hold all the music, movies, words, photos and games ever weren't three for a buck in the check-out aisle at the grocery store! Tell me again about when not everyone knew the magic trick of typing 'movie name' and 'bittorrent' into a search engine!"

I can't stop you from copying this book (even if I wanted to). I can't force you to buy it in order to read it (even if I wanted to). All I can do is ask you to consider purchasing it if you enjoyed it. There's links below for buying the book in print or ebook form. All the ebooks are DRM-free because they come from Tor Books, who, as of summer 2012, publish all of their books without DRM (this is one of the reasons I love them!).

If you don't want a print edition, and if you're happy with this ebook, you can still send some money my way by donating a copy to a library or school . This will also make you a class-A dude.

You don't have to buy the book from an online seller, either. Here's a tool that will find you independent stores in your area that have copies on their shelves.

USA:

Amazon Kindle (DRM-free)

Barnes and Noble Nook (DRM-free)

Google Books (DRM-free)

Apple iBooks (DRM-free)

Kobo (DRM-free)

Amazon

Booksense (will locate a store near you!)

Barnes and Noble

Powells

Booksamillion

Canada:

Amazon Kindle (DRM-free)

Kobo (DRM-free)

Chapters/Indigo

Amazon.ca

Audiobook:

DRM-free download

This book is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 license. That means:

You are free:

to Share -- to copy, distribute and transmit the work

Under the following conditions:

Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).

Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.

No Derivative Works -- You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.

For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. The best way to do this is with a link ‹http://craphound.com/pc›

Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get our permission

More info here: ‹https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/›

See the end of this file for the complete legalese.

The Creative Commons license at the top of this file probably tipped you off to the fact that I've got some pretty unorthodox views about copyright. Here's what I think of it, in a nutshell: a little goes a long way, and more than that is too much.

I like the fact that copyright lets me sell rights to my publishers and film studios and so on. It's nice that they can't just take my stuff without permission and get rich on it without cutting me in for a piece of the action. I'm in a pretty good position when it comes to negotiating with these companies: I've got a great agent and a decade's experience with copyright law and licensing (including a stint as a delegate at WIPO, the UN agency that makes the world's copyright treaties). What's more, there's just not that many of these negotiations -- even if I sell fifty or a hundred different editions of this book (which would put it in top millionth of a percentile for bovels), that's still only fifty or a hundred negotiations, which I could just about manage.

I hate the fact that fans who want to do what readers have always done are expected to play in the same system as all these hotshot agents and lawyers. It's just stupid to say that an elementary school classroom should have to talk to a lawyer at a giant global publisher before they put on a play based on one of my books. It's ridiculous to say that people who want to "loan" their electronic copy of my book to a friend need to get a license to do so. Loaning books has been around longer than any publisher on Earth, and it's a fine thing.

Copyright laws are increasingly passed without democratic debate or scrutiny. In Great Britain, where I live, Parliament recently passed the Digital Economy Act, a complex copyright law that allows corporate giants to disconnect whole families from the Internet if anyone in the house is accused (without proof) of copyright infringement; it also creates a "Great Firewall of Britain" that is used to censor any site that record companies and movie studios don't like. This law was passed in 2010 without any serious public debate in Parliament, rushed through using a dirty process through which our elected representatives betrayed the public to give a huge, gift-wrapped present to their corporate pals.

It gets worse: around the world, rich countries like the US, the EU and Canada negotiated secret copyright treaties called "The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement" (ACTA) and "Trans-Pacific Partnership" (TPP) that have all the problems that the Digital Economy Act had and then some. The plan was to agree to them in secret, without public debate, and then force the world's poorest countries to sign up for it by refusing to allow them to sell goods to rich countries unless they do. In America, the plan was to pass it without Congressional debate, using the executive power of the President. ACTA began under Bush, but the Obama administration has pursued it with great enthusiasm, and presided over the creation of TPP. The secret part of the plan failed -- ACTA ran into heavy opposition in Congress and has been rejected by Mexico and the European Parliament -- but the treaty isn't dead yet, has supporters on both sides of the house who keep attempting to bring it back under a new name. This is a bipartisan lunacy.

So if you're not violating copyright law right now, you will be soon. And the penalties are about to get a lot worse. As someone who relies on copyright to earn my living, this makes me sick. If the big entertainment companies set out to destroy copyright's mission, they couldn't do any better than they're doing now.

So, basically, screw that. Or, as the singer and American folk hero Woody Guthrie so eloquently put it:

"This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin' it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do."

Most of my previous books have been released under a slightly different Creative Commons license, one that allowed for derivative works (that is, new creative works based on this one). Keen observers will have already noticed that this book is licensed "NoDerivs" -- that is, you can't make remixes without permission.

A word of explanation for this shift is in order. When I first started publishing under Creative Commons licenses, I had to carefully explain this to my editor and publisher at Tor Books. They were incredibly forward-looking and gave me permission to release the first-ever novel licensed under CC -- my debut novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (‹http://craphound.com/down/)›. This ground-breaking step was only possible because I was able to have intense, personal discussions with my publisher.

My foreign rights agents are the inestimable Danny and Heather Baror, and collectively they have sold my books into literally dozens of countries and languages, helping to bring my work to places I couldn't have dreamed of reaching on my own. They subcontract for my agent Russell Galen, another inestimable personage without whom I would not have attained anything like the dizzy heights that I enjoy today. They attend large book fairs in cities like Frankfurt and Bologna in order to sell the foreign rights to my books, often negotiating with one of a few English-speakers at a foreign press, who then goes back and justifies her or his decisions to the rest of the company.

The point is that this is nothing like my initial Creative Commons discussion with Tor. That was me sitting down and making the case to editors I've known for years (my editor at Tor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, has known me since I was 17). My foreign rights are sold by a subcontractor of my representative to a representative of a press I've often never heard of, who then has to explain my publishing philosophy to people I've never met, using a language I don't speak.

This is hard.

Danny and Heather have asked -- not demanded, asked! -- that I consider publishing books under a NoDerivs license, so that I can consult with them before I authorize translations of my books. They want to be able to talk to potential foreign publishers about how this stuff works, to give me time to talk with them, to ease them into the idea, and to have the kind of extended conversation that helped me lead Tor into their decision all those years ago.

And I agreed. Free/open culture is something publishers need to be led to, not forced into. It's a long conversation that often runs contrary to their intuition and received wisdom. But no one gets into publishing to get rich. Working in the publishing industry is virtually a vow of poverty. The only reason to get into publishing is because you flat-out love books and want to make them happen. People work in publishing for the same reason writers write: they can't help themselves.

So I want to be able to have this conversation, personally, unhurriedly, one-to-one. I want to keep all the people involved in my books -- agents, subagents, foreign editors and their bosses -- in the loop on these discussions. I will always passionately advocate for CC licensing in all of my work. I promise you that if you write to me with a request for a noncommercial derivative use, that I will do everything in my power to see that it is authorized.

And in the meantime, I draw your attention to article 2 of all Creative Commons licenses:

Nothing in this License is intended to reduce, limit, or restrict any uses free from copyright or rights arising from limitations or exceptions that are provided for in connection with the copyright protection under copyright law or other applicable laws.

Strip away the legalese and what that says is, "Copyright gives you, the public, rights. Fair use is real. De minimus exemptions to copyright are real. You have the right to make all sorts of uses of all copyrighted works, without permission, without Creative Commons licenses.

Rights are like muscles. When you don't exercise them, they get flabby. Stop asking for stuff you can take without permission. Please!

Every time I put a book online for free, I get emails from readers who want to send me donations for the book. I appreciate their generous spirit, but I'm not interested in cash donations, because my publishers are really important to me. They contribute immeasurably to the book, improving it, introducing it to audiences I could never reach, helping me do more with my work. I have no desire to cut them out of the loop.

But there has to be some good way to turn that generosity to good use, and I think I've found it.

Here's the deal: there are lots of teachers and librarians who'd love to get hard-copies of this book into their kids' hands, but don't have the budget for it (teachers in the US spend around $1,200 out of pocket each on classroom supplies that their budgets won't stretch to cover, which is why I sponsor a classroom at Ivanhoe Elementary in my old neighborhood in Los Angeles; you can adopt a class yourself at ‹http://www.adoptaclassroom.org/›.

There are generous people who want to send some cash my way to thank me for the free ebooks.

I'm proposing that we put them together.

If you're a teacher or librarian and you want a free copy of Pirate Cinema, email ‹freepiratecinema@gmail.com› with your name and the name and address of your school. It'll be posted to ‹http://craphound.com/pc/donate/› by my fantastic helper, Olga Nunes, so that potential donors can see it.

If you enjoyed the electronic edition of Pirate Cinema and you want to donate something to say thanks, go to ‹http://craphound.com/pc/donate/› and find a teacher or librarian you want to support. Then go to Amazon, BN.com, or your favorite electronic bookseller and order a copy to the classroom, then email a copy of the receipt (feel free to delete your address and other personal info first!) to ‹freepiratecinema@gmail.com› so that Olga can mark that copy as sent. If you don't want to be publicly acknowledged for your generosity, let us know and we'll keep you anonymous, otherwise we'll thank you on the donate page.

I've done this with a ton of books now, and gotten thousands of books into the hands of readers through your generosity. I am more grateful than words can express for this -- one of my readers called it "paying your debts forward with instant gratification." That's a heck of a thing, isn't it?

Me again. That's all the forematter. I admit that there's rather a lot of it. You're not obliged to read it all (though I think it's pretty cool, especially the part about buying copies to give to schools and libaries ).

And you're not obliged to read this interlude, nor the ones that follow. I've been giving away free ebooks for nearly a decade now, and my readers have rewarded my generosity with generosity of their own. I've had a pair of New York Times bestsellers, quit my day-job, and now I write full time. And I'm still giving away ebooks, and trusting that you, the reader, will reciprocate. You can either buy a book or ebook (always, always, always DRM-free) from one of the big online sellers, or buy a copy from a local bookseller .

USA:

Amazon Kindle (DRM-free)

Barnes and Noble Nook (DRM-free)

Google Books (DRM-free)

Apple iBooks (DRM-free)

Kobo (DRM-free)

Amazon

Booksense (will locate a store near you!)

Barnes and Noble

Powells

Booksamillion

Canada:

Amazon Kindle (DRM-free)

Kobo (DRM-free)

Chapters/Indigo

Amazon.ca

Audiobook:

DRM-free download

For Walt Disney: remix artist, driven weirdo, public domain enthusiast

I will never forget the day my family got cut off from the Internet. I was hiding in my room as I usually did after school let out, holed up with a laptop I'd bought third-hand and that I nursed to health with parts from here and there and a lot of cursing and sweat.

But that day, my little lappie was humming along, and I was humming with it, because I was about to take away Scot Colford's virginity.

You know Scot Colford, of course. They've been watching him on telly and at the cinema since my mum was a girl, and he'd been dead for a year at that point. But dead or not, I was still going to take poor little Scoty's virginity, and I was going to use Monalisa Fiore-Oglethorpe to do it.

You probably didn't know that Scot and Monalisa did a love-scene together, did you? It was over fifty years ago, when they were both teen heart-throbs, and they were co-stars in a genuinely terrible straight-to-net film called No Hope, about a pair of clean cut youngsters who fall in love despite their class differences. It was a real weeper, and the supporting appearances in roles as dad, mum, best mate, priest, teacher, etc, were so forgettable that they could probably be used as treatment for erasing traumatic memories.

But Scot and Monalisa, they had chemistry (and truth be told, Monalisa had geography, too -- hills and valleys and that). They smoldered at one another the way only teenagers can, juicy with hormones and gagging to get their newly hairy bits into play. Adults like to pretend that sex is something that begins at eighteen, but Romeo and Juliet were, like, thirteen.

Here's something else about Scot and Monalisa: they both used body-doubles for other roles around then (Scot didn't want to get his knob out in a 3D production of Equus, while Monalisa was paranoid about the spots on her back and demanded a double for her role in Bikini Trouble in Little Blackpool). Those body-doubles -- Dan Cohen and Alana Dinova -- were in another film, even stupider than Bikini Trouble, called Summer Heat. And in Summer Heat, they got their hairy bits into serious play.

I'd known about the No Hope/Equus/Bikini Trouble/Summer Heat situation for, like, a year, and had always thought it'd be fun to edit together a little creative virginity-losing scene between Scot and Monalisa, since they were both clearly yearning for it back then (and who knows, maybe they slipped away from their chaperones for a little hide-the-chipolata in an empty trailer!).

But what got me into motion was the accidental discovery that both Scot and Monalisa had done another job together, ten years earlier, when they were six -- an advert for a birthday-party service in which they chased one another around a suburban middle-class yard with squirt guns, faces covered in cake and ice cream. I found this lovely, lovely bit of video on a torrent tracker out of somewhere in Eastern Europe (Google Translate wouldn't touch it because it was on the piracy list, but RogueTrans said it was written in Ukrainian, but it also couldn't get about half the words, so who can say?).

It was this bit of commercial toss that moved me to cut the scene. You see, now I had the missing ingredient, the thing that took my mashup from something trite and obvious to something genuinely moving -- a flashback to happier, carefree times, before all the hairy bits got hairy, before the smoldering began in earnest. The fact that the commercial footage was way way down-rez from the other stuff actually made it better, because it would look like it came from an earlier era, a kind of home-film shakycam feel that I bumped up using a video-effects app I found on yet another dodgy site, this one from Tajikistan or Kyrgyzstan -- one of the stans, anyroad.

So there I was, in my broom-cupboard of a bedroom, headphones screwed in tight against the barking of the dogs next door in the Albertsons' flat, wrists aching from some truly epic mousing, homework alerts piling up around the edge of my screen, when the Knock came at the door.

It was definitely a capital-K Knock, the kind of knock they Foley in for police flicks, with a lot of ominous reverb that cuts off sharply, whang, whang, whang. The thunder of authority on two legs. It even penetrated my headphones, shook all the way down to my balls with the premonition of something awful about to come. I slipped the headphones around my neck, hit the panic-button key-combo that put my lappie into paranoid lockdown, unmounting the encrypted disks and rebooting into a sanitized OS that had a bunch of plausible homework assignments and some innocent messages to my mates (all randomly generated). I assumed that this would work. Hoped it would, anyway. I could edit video like a demon and follow instructions I found on the net as well as anyone, but I confess that I barely knew what all this crypto stuff was, hardly understood how computers themselves worked. Back then, anyway.

I crept out into the hallway and peeked around the corner as my mum answered the door.

"Can I help you?"

"Mrs. McCauley?"

"Yes?"

"I'm Lawrence Foxton, a Police Community Support Officer here on the estate. I don't think we've met before, have we?"

Police Community Support Officers: a fake copper. A volunteer policeman who gets to lord his tiny, ridiculous crumb of power over his neighbors, giving orders, enforcing curfews, dragging you off to the real cops for punishment if you refuse to obey him. I knew Larry Foxton because I'd escaped his clutches any number of times, scarpering from the deserted rec with my pals before he could catch up, puffing along under his anti-stab vest and laden belt filled with taser, pepper spray and plastic handcuff straps.

"I don't think so, Mr. Foxton." Mum had the hard tone in her voice she used when she thought me or Cora were winding her up, a no-nonsense voice that demanded that you get to the point.

"Well, I'm sorry to have to meet you under these circumstances. I'm afraid that I'm here to notify you that your Internet access is being terminated, effective --" He made a show of looking at the faceplate of his police-issue ruggedised mobile "-- now. Your address has been used to breach copyright through several acts of illegal downloading. You have been notified of these acts on two separate occasions. The penalty for a third offense is a one-year suspension of network access. You have the right to an appeal. If you choose to appeal, you must present yourself in person at the Bradford magistrates' court in the next fourty-eight hours." He hefted a little thermal printer clipped to his belt, tore off a strip of paper, and handed it to her. "Bring this." His tone grew even more official and phony: "Do you understand and consent to this?" He turned his chest to face Mum, ostentatiously putting her right in the path of the CCTV in his hat brim and over his breast-pocket.

Mum sagged in the door frame and reached her hand out to steady herself. Her knees buckled the way they did so often, ever since she'd started getting her pains and had to quit her job. "You're joking," she said. "You can't be serious --"

"Thank you," he said. "Have a nice day." He turned on his heel and walked away, little clicking steps like a toy dog, receding into the distance as Mum stood in the doorway, holding the curl of thermal paper, legs shaking.

And that was how we lost our Internet.

"Anthony!" she called. "Anthony!" she called again.

Dad, holed up in the bedroom, didn't say anything.

"Anthony!"

"Hold on, will you? The bloody phone's not working and I'm going to get docked --"

She wobbled down the hall and flung open the bedroom door. "Anthony, they've shut off the Internet!"

I ducked back into my room and cowered, contemplating the magnitude of the vat of shit I had just fallen into. My stupid, stupid obsession with a dead film star had just destroyed my family.

I could hear them shouting through the thin wall. No words, just tones. Mum nearly in tears, Dad going from incomprehension to disbelief to murderous rage.

"Trent!"

It was like the scene in Man in the Cellar, the bowel-looseningly frightening Scot slasher film. Scot's in the cupboard, and the murderer has just done in Scot's brother and escaped from the garage where they'd trapped him, and is howling in fury as he thunders down the hallway, and Scot is in that cupboard, rasping breath and eyes so wide they're nearly all whites, and the moment stretches like hot gum on a pavement --

"Trent!"

The door to my room banged open so hard that it sent a pile of books tumbling off my shelf. One of them bounced off my cheekbone, sending me reeling back, head cracking against the tiny, grimy window. I wrapped my head in my hands and pushed myself back into the corner.

Dad's big hands grabbed me. He'd been a scrapper when he was my age, a legendary fighter well known to the Bradford coppers. In the years since he'd taken accent training and got his job working the phone, he'd got a bit fat and lost half a step, but in my mind's eye, I still only came up to his knee. He pulled my hands away from my face and pinned them at my sides and looked into my eyes.

I'd thought he was angry, and he was, a bit, but when I looked into those eyes, I saw that what I had mistaken for anger was really terror. He was even more scared than I was. Scared that without the net, his job was gone. Scared that without the net, Mum couldn't sign on every week and get her disability. Without the net, my sister Cora wouldn't be able to do her schoolwork.

"Trent," he said, his chest heaving. "Trent, what have you done?" There were tears in his eyes.

I tried to find the words. We all do it, I wanted to say. You do it, I wanted to say. I had to do it, I wanted to say. But what came out, when I opened my mouth, was nothing. Dad's hands tightened on my arms and for a moment, I was sure he was going to beat the hell out of me, really beat me, like you saw some of the others dads do on the estate. But then he let go of me and turned round and stormed out the flat. Mum stood in the door to my room, sagging hard against the door-frame, eyes rimmed with red, mouth pulled down in sorrow and pain. I opened my mouth again, but again, no words came out.

I was sixteen. I didn't have the words to explain why I'd downloaded and kept downloading. Why making the film that was in my head was such an all-consuming obsession. I'd read stories of the great directors -- Hitchcock, Lucas, Smith -- and how they worked their arses off, ruined their health, ruined their family lives, just to get that film out of their head and onto the screen. In my mind, I was one of them, someone who had to get this sodding film out of my skull, like, I was filled with holy fire and it would burn me up if I didn't send it somewhere.

That had all seemed proper noble and exciting and heroic right up to the point that the fake copper turned up at the flat and took away my family's Internet and ruined our lives. After that, it seemed like a stupid, childish, selfish whim.

I didn't come home that night. I sulked around the estate, half-hoping that Mum and Dad would come find me, half-hoping they wouldn't. I couldn't stand the thought of facing them again. First I went and sat under the slide in the playground, where it was all stubs from spliffs and dried out, crumbly dog turds. Then it got cold, so I went to the community center and paid my pound to get in and hid out in the back of the room, watching kids play snooker and table-tennis with unseeing eyes. When they shut that down for the night, I tried to get into a couple of pubs, the kind of all-night places where they weren't so picky about checking ID, but they weren't keen on having obviously underage kids taking up valuable space and not ordering things, and so I ended up wandering the streets of Bradford, the ring-road where the wasted boys and girls howled at one other in a grim parody of merriment, swilling alco-pops and getting into pointless, sloppy fights.

I'd spent my whole life in Bradford, and in broad daylight I felt like the whole city was my manor, no corner of it I didn't know, but in the yellow streetlight and sickly moonglow, I felt like an utter stranger. A scared and very small and defenseless stranger.

In the end, I curled up on a bench in Peel Park, hidden under a rattly newspaper, and slept for what felt like ten seconds before a PCSO woke me up with a rough shake and a bright light in my eyes and sent me back to wander the streets. It was coming on dawn then, and I had a deep chill in my bones, and a drip of snot that replaced itself on the tip of my nose every time I wiped it off on my sleeve. I felt like a proper ruin and misery-guts when I finally dragged my arse back home, stuck my key in the lock, and waited for the estate's ancient and cantankerous network to let me into our house.

I tiptoed through the sitting room, headed for my room and my soft and wondrous bed. I was nearly to my door when someone hissed at me from the sofa, making me jump so high I nearly fell over. I whirled and found my sister sitting there. Cora was two years younger than me, and, unlike me, she was brilliant at school, a right square. She brought home test papers covered in checkmarks and smiley-faces, and her teachers often asked her to work with thick students to help them get their grades up. I had shown her how to use my edit-suite when she was only ten, and she was nearly as good an editor as I was. Her homework videos were the stuff of legend.

At thirteen years old, Cora had been a slightly podgy and awkward girl who dressed like a little kid in shirts that advertised her favorite little bands. But now she was fourteen, and overnight, she'd turned into some kind of actual teenaged girl with round soft bits where you'd expect them, and new clothes that she and her mates made on the youth center's sewing machines from the stuff they had in their wardrobes. She always had some boy or another mooching around after her, spotty specimens who practically dripped hormones on her. It roused some kind of odd brotherly sentiment in me that I hadn't realized was there. By which I mean, I wanted to pound them and tell them that I'd break their legs if they didn't stay away from my baby sister.

In private Cora usually treated me with a kind of big-bro reverence that she'd had when we were little kids, when I was the older one who could do no wrong. In public, of course, I wasn't nearly cool enough to acknowledge, but that was all right, I could understand that. That morning, there was no reverence in her expression; rather, she seethed with loathing.

"Arsehole," she said, spitting the word out under her breath.

"Cora --" I said, holding my hands up, my arms feeling like they were hung with lead weights. "Listen --"

"Forget it," she said in the same savage, hissing whisper. "I don't care. You could have at least been smart, used a proxy, cracked someone else's wireless." She was right. The neighbors had changed their WiFi password and my favorite proxies had all been blocked by the Great Firewall, and I'd been too lazy to disguise my tracks. "Now what am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to do my homework? I've got GCSEs soon; what am I supposed to do, study at the library?" Cora revised every moment she had, odd hours of the morning before the house was awake, late at night after she'd come back from babysitting. Our nearest library closed at 5:30 P.M. and was only open four days a week thanks to the latest round of budget cuts.

"I know," I said. "I know. I'll just --" I waved my hands. I'd got that far a hundred times in the night, I'd just -- Just what? Just apologize to Universal Pictures and Warner Brothers? Call the main switchboard and ask to speak to the head copyright enforcer and grovel for my family's Internet connection? It was ridiculous. Some corporate mucker in California didn't give a rat's arse about my family or its Internet access.

"You won't do shit," she said. She stood up and marched to her room. Before she closed the door, she turned and skewered me on her glare: "Ever."

I left home two weeks later.

It wasn't the disappointed looks from my old man, the increasing desperation of the whispered conversations he had with Mum whenever finances came up, or the hateful filthies from my adoring little sister.

No, it was the film.

Specifically, it was the fact that I still wanted to make my film. There's only so much moping in your room that you can do, and eventually I found myself firing up my lappie and turning back to my intricate editing project that had been so rudely interrupted. Before long, I was absolutely engrossed in deflowering Scot Colford. And moments after that, I realized that I needed some more footage to finish the project -- a scene from later in Bikini Trouble when Monalisa was eating an ice cream cone with a sultry, smolder look that would have been perfect for the post-shag moment. Reflexively, I lit up my downloader and made ready to go a-hunting for Monalisa's icecream scene.

Of course, it didn't work. The network wasn't there any more. As the error message popped up on my screen, all my misery and guilt pressed back in on me. It was like some gigantic weight pressing on my chest and shoulders and face, smothering me, making me feel like the lowest, most awful person on the planet. It literally felt like I was strangling on my own awful emotions, and I sat there, wishing that I could die.

I scrunched my eyes up as tight as I could and whispered the words over and over in my mind: want to die, want to die. If wishing could make you pop your clogs, I would have dropped dead right there in my bedroom, and there they'd have found me, slumped over my keyboard, eyes closed, awful whirling brain finally silent. Then they'd have forgiven me, and they could go back to the council and ask to have the net reconnected and Dad could get his job back and Mum could get her benefits again and poor Cora would be able to graduate with top marks and go on to Oxford or Cambridge, where all the clever clogs and brain-boxes went to meet up with all the other future leaders of Britain.

I'd been low before, but never low like that. Never wishing with every cell in my body to die. I found that I'd been holding my breath, and I gasped in and finally realized that even if I didn't die, I couldn't go on living like that. I knew what I had to do.

I had almost a hundred quid saved up in a hollow book I'd made from a copy of Dracula that the local library had thrown away. I'd sliced out a rectangle from the center of each page by hand with our sharpest kitchen knife, then glued the edges together and left it under one of the legs of my bed for two days so that you couldn't tell from either side that there was anything tricky about it. I took it out and pulled my school bag from under the bed and carefully folded three pairs of clean pants, a spare pair of jeans, a warm hoodie, my toothbrush and the stuff I put on my spots, a spool of dental floss, and a little sewing kit Cora had given me one birthday along with a sweet little note about learning to sew my own arsing shirtbuttons. It was amazing how easy it was to pack all this. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I'd always known, I think, that I'd have to pack a small bag and just go. Some part of my subconscious was honest enough with itself to know that I had no place among polite society.

Or maybe I was just another teenaged dramatist, caught up in my own tragedy. Either way, it was clear that my guilty conscience was happy to shut its gob and quit its whining so long as I was in motion and headed for my destiny.

No one noticed me go. Dinner had come and gone, and, as usual, I'd stayed away from the family through it, sneaking out after all the dishes had been cleared away to poach something from the cupboard. Mum was gamely still cooking dinners, though increasingly they consisted of whatever was on deepest discount at Iceland or something from the local church soup kitchen. She'd brought home an entire case of lethally salted ramen noodles in bright Cambodian packaging and kept trying to dress them up with slices of boiled eggs or bits of cheapest mince formed into half-hearted, fatty meatballs.

If they missed me at dinner, they never let on. I'd boil a cup of water and make plain noodles in my room and wash the cup and put it on the draining board while they watched telly in the sitting room. Cora rarely made it to dinner, too, but she wasn't hiding in her room; she was over at some mate's place, scrounging free Internet through a dodgy network bridge (none of the family's devices had network cards registered to work on the estate network, so the only way to get online was to install illegal software on a friend's machine and cable it to ours and pray that the net-gods didn't figure out what we were up to).

And so no one heard me go as I snuck out the door and headed for the bus station. I stopped at a news-agent's by the station and bought a new pay-as-you-go SIM for cash, chucking the old one in thre different bins after slicing it up with the tough little scissors from the sewing kit. Then I bought a coach ticket to London Victoria Terminal. I knew Victoria a bit, from a school trip once, and a family visit the summer before. I remembered it as bustling and humming and huge and exciting, and that was the image I had in my head as I settled into my seat, next to an old woman with a sniffle and a prim copy of the Bible that she read with a finger that traced the lines as she moved her lips and whispered the words.

The coach had a slow wireless link and there were mains outlets under the seats. I plugged in my lappie and got on the wireless, using a prepaid Visa card I'd bought from the same news-agent's shop, having given my favorite nom-de-guerre, Cecil B. DeVil. It's a tribute to Cecil B DeMille, a great and awful director, the first superstar director, a man who's name was once synonymous with film itself. The trip to London flew by as I lost myself in deflowering poor old Scot, grabbing my missing footage through a proxy in Tehran that wasn't too fussed about copyright (though it was a lot pickier about porn sites and anything likely to cause offense to your average mullah).

By the time the coach pulled into Victoria, my scene was perfect. I mean perfect with blinking lights and a joyful tune P-E-R-F-E-C-T. All two minutes, twenty-five seconds' worth. I didn't have time to upload it to any of the youtubes before the coach stopped, but that was okay. It would keep. I had a warm glow throughout my body, like I'd just drunk some thick hot chocolate on a day when the air was so cold the bogeys froze in your nose.

I floated off the coach and into Victoria Station.

And came crashing back down to Earth.

The last time I'd been in the station, it had been filled with morning commuters rushing about, kids in school blazers and caps shouting and running, a few stern bobbies looking on with their ridiculous, enormous helmets that always made me think of a huge, looming cock, one that bristled with little lenses that stared around in all directions at once.

But as we pulled in, a little after 9:00 P.M. on a Wednesday, rain shitting down around us in fat, dirty drops, Victoria Station was a very different place. It was nearly empty, and the people that were there seemed a lot... grimmer. They had proper moody faces on, the ones that weren't openly hostile, like the beardie weirdie in an old raincoat who shot me a look of pure hatred and mouthed something angry at me. The coppers didn't look friendly and ridiculous -- they were flinty-eyed and suspicious, and as I passed two of them, they followed me with their gaze and the tilt of their bodies.

And I stood there in that high-ceilinged concourse, surrounded by the mutters and farts of the night people and the night trains, and realized that I hadn't the slightest pissing idea what to do next.

What to do next. I wandered around the station a bit, bought myself a hot chocolate (it didn't make the warm feeling come back), stared aimlessly at my phone. What I should have done, I knew, was buy a ticket back home and get back on a bus and forget this whole business. But that's not what I did.

Instead, I set off for London. Real London. Roaring, nighttime London, as I'd seen it in a thousand films and TV shows and Internet vids, the London where glittering people and glittering lights passed one another as black cabs snuffled through the streets chased by handsome boys and beautiful girls on bikes or scooters. That London.

I started in Leicester Square. My phone's map thought it knew a pretty good way of getting there in twenty minutes' walk, but it wanted me to walk on all the main roads where the passing cars on the rainy tarmac made so much noise I couldn't even hear myself think. So I took myself on my own route, on the cobbeldy-wobbeldy side-streets and alleys that looked like they had in the time of King Edward and Queen Victoria, except for the strange growths of satellite dishes rudely bolted to their sides, all facing the same direction, like a crowd of round idiot faces all baffled by the same distant phenomenon in the night sky.

Just then, in the narrow, wet streets with my springy-soled boots bounding me down the pavement, the London-beat shushing through the nearby main roads, everything I owned on my back -- it felt like the opening credits of a film. The film of Trent McCauley's life, starring Trent McCauley as Trent McCauley, with special guest stars Trent McCauley and Trent McCauley and maybe a surprise cameo from Scot Colford as the worshipful sidekick. And then the big opening shot, wending my way up a dingy road between Trafalgar Square and into Leicester Square in full tilt.

Every light was lit. Every square meter of ground had at least four people stood on it, and nearly everyone was either laughing, smoking a gigantic spliff, shouting drunkenly, or holding a signboard advertising something dubious, cheap, and urgent. Some were doing all these things. The men were dressed like gangsters out of a film. The women looked like soft-core porn stars or runway models, with lots of wet fabric clinging to curves that would have put Monalisa to shame.

I stood at the edge of it for a moment, like a swimmer about to jump into a pool. Then, I jumped.

I just pushed my way in, bouncing back and forth like a rubber ball in a room that was all corners and trampolines. Someone handed me a spliff -- an older guy with eyes like a baboon's arse, horny fingernails yellow and thick -- and I sucked up a double lungful of fragrant skunk, the crackle of the paper somehow loud over the sound of a million conversations and raindrops. The end was soggy with the slobber of any number of strangers and I passed it on to a pair of girls in glittering pink bowler hats and angel wings, wearing huge "Hen Night" badges to one side of their deep cleavage. One kissed me on the cheek, drunken fumes and a bit of tongue, and I reeled away, drunk on glorious! London!

A film kicked out and spilled eight hundred more people into the night, holding huge cups of fizzy drink, wafting the smells of aftershave and perfume into the evenings. The tramps descended on them like flies, and they scattered coins like royalty before peasants. They were all talking films, films, films. The marquee said they'd been to see That Time We All Got Stupid and How Much Fun It Was, Wasn't It? (the latest and most extreme example of the ridiculous trend to extra-long film titles). I'd heard good things about it, downloaded the first twenty minutes after it played the festival circuit last year, and would have given anything to fall in alongside of those chattering people and join the chatter.

But it was a wet night, and they were hurrying for the road, hurrying to get in cabs and get out of the wet, and the next show let in, and soon the square was nearly empty -- just tramps, coppers, men with signboards...and me.

The opening credits had run, the big first scene had concluded, the camera was zooming in on our hero, and he was about to do something heroic and decisive, something that would take him on his first step to destiny.

Only I had no bloody clue what that step might be.

I didn't sleep at all that night. I made my way to Soho, where the clubs were still heaving and disgorging happy people, and I hung about on their periphery until 3:00 A.M. I ducked into a few all-night cafes to use the toilet and get warm, pretending to be part of larger groups so that no one asked me to buy anything. Then the Soho crowds fell away. I knew that somewhere in London there were all-night parties going on, but I had no idea how to find them. Without the crowds for camouflage, I felt like I was wearing a neon sign that read "I am new in town, underage, carrying cash, physically defenseless, and easily tricked. Please take advantage of me."

As I walked the streets, faces leered out of the dark at me, hissing offers of drugs or sex, or just hissing, "Come here, come here, see what I've got." I didn't want to see what they had. To be totally honest, I wanted my mum.

Finally, the sun came up, and morning joggers and dog-walkers began to appear on the pavements. Bleary-eyed dads pushed past me with prams that let out the cries of sleepless babies. I had a legless, drunken feeling as I walked down Oxford Street, heading west with the sun rising behind me and my shadow stretching before me as long as a pipe-cleaner man.

I found myself in Hyde Park at the Marble Arch end, and now there were more joggers, and cyclists, and little kids kicking around a football wearing trackies and shorts and puffing out clouds of condensation in the frigid morning. I sat down on the sidelines in the damp grass next to a little group of wary parents and watched the ball roll from kid to kid, listened to the happy sounds as they knackered themselves out. The sun got higher and warmed my face, and I made a pillow of my jacket and my pack and leaned back and let my eyes close and the warmth dry out the long night. My mind was whirling a thousand miles per hour, trying to figure out where I'd go and what I'd do now that I'd come to the big city. But sleep wouldn't be put off by panic, and my tired, tired body insisted on rest, and before I knew it, I'd gone to sleep.

It was a wonderful, sweet-scented sleep, broken up with the sounds of happy people passing by and playing, dogs barking and chasing balls, kids messing around in the grass, buses and taxis belching in the distance. And when I woke, I just lay there basking in the wonder and beauty of it all. I was in London, I was young, I was no longer a danger to my family. I was on the adventure of my life. It was all going to be all right.

And that's when I noticed that someone had stolen my rucksack out from under my head while I slept, taking my laptop, my spare clothes, my toothbrush -- everything.

Poor Trent! What's he going to do? What would you do?

You know what I'd do? I'd buy a book. March right down to my local indie bookseller and warm myself by the shelves, browsing, until I found just the perfect book to soothe my panic. Or get online -- relying on my resourcefulness to manage the trick without a laptop -- and have a copy shipped to a handy safe-house. And once I was back on my feet, I'd donate a copy to a school or library.

USA:

Amazon Kindle (DRM-free)

Barnes and Noble Nook (DRM-free)

Google Books (DRM-free)

Apple iBooks (DRM-free)

Kobo (DRM-free)

Amazon

Booksense (will locate a store near you!)

Barnes and Noble

Powells

Booksamillion

Canada:

Amazon Kindle (DRM-free)

Kobo (DRM-free)

Chapters/Indigo

Amazon.ca

Audiobook:

DRM-free download

My "adventure" wasn't much fun after that. I was smart enough to find a shelter for runaways run by a church in Shoreditch, and I checked myself in that night, lying and saying I was eighteen. I was worried that they'd send me home if I said I was sixteen. I'm pretty sure the old dear behind the counter knew that I was lying, but she didn't seem to mind. She had a strong Yorkshire accent that managed to be stern and affectionate at the same time.

My bedfellows in the shelter -- all boys, girls were kept in a separate place -- ranged from terrifying to terrified. Some were proper hard men, all gangster talk about knives and beatings and that. Some were even younger looking than me, with haunted eyes and quick flinches whenever anyone spoke too loud. We slept eight to a room, in bunk beds that were barely wide enough to contain my skinny shoulders, and the next day, another old dear let me pick out some clothes and a backpack from mountains of donated stuff. The clothes were actually pretty good. Better, in fact, than the clothes I'd arrived in London wearing; Bradford was a good five years behind the bleeding edge of fashion you saw on the streets of Shoreditch, so these last-year's castoffs were smarter than anything I'd ever owned.

They fed me a tasteless but filling breakfast of porridge and greasy bacon that sat in my stomach like a rock after they kicked me out into the streets. It was 8:00 A.M. and everyone was marching for the tube to go to work, or queuing up for the buses, and it seemed like I was the only one with nowhere to go. I still had about forty pounds in my pocket, but that wouldn't go very far in the posh coffee bars of Shoreditch, where even a black coffee cost three quid. And I didn't have a laptop anymore (every time I thought of my lost video, never to be uploaded to a youtube, gone forever, my heart cramped up in my chest).

I watched the people streaming down into Old Street Station, clattering down the stairs, dodging the men trying to hand them free newspapers (I got one of each to read later), and stepping around the tramps who rattled their cups at them, striving to puncture the goggled, headphoned solitude and impinge upon their consciousness. They were largely unsuccessful.

I thought dismally that I would probably have to join them soon. I had never had a real job and I didn't think the nice people with the posh film companies in Soho were looking to hire a plucky, underage video editor with a thick northern accent and someone else's clothes on his back. How the crapping hell did all those tramps earn a living? Hundreds of people had gone by and not a one of them had given a penny, as far as I could tell.

Then, without warning, they scattered, melting into the crowds and vanishing into the streets. A moment later, a flock of Community Support Police Officers in bright yellow high-visibility vests swaggered out of each of the station's exits, each swiveling slowly so that the cameras around their bodies got a good look at the street.

I sighed and slumped. Begging was hard enough to contemplate. But begging and being on the run from the cops all the time? It was too miserable to even think about.

The PCSOs disappeared into the distance, ducking into the Starbucks or getting on buses, and the tramps trickled back from their hidey holes. A new lad stationed himself at the bottom of the stairwell where I was standing, a huge grin plastered on his face, framed by a three-day beard that was somehow rakish instead of sad. He had a sign drawn on a large sheet of white cardboard, with several things glued or duct-taped to it: a box of kleenex, a pump-handled hand-sanitizer, a tray of breath-mints with a little single-serving lever that dropped one into your hand. Above them was written, in big, friendly graffiti letters, FREE TISSUE/SANITIZER/MINTS -- HELP THE HOMELESS -- FANKS, GUV!, and next to that, a cup that rattled from all the pound coins in it.

As commuters pelted out of the station and headed for the stairs, they'd stop and read his sign, laugh, drop a pound in his cup, take a squirt of sanitizer or a kleenex or a mint (he'd urge them to do if it seemed they were in danger of passing by without helping themselves), laugh again, and head upstairs.

I thought I was being subtle and nearly invisible, skulking at the top of the stairwell and watching, but at the next break in the commuter traffic, he looked square at me and gave me a "Come here" gesture. Caught, I made my way to him. He stuck his hand out.

"Jem," he said. "Gentleman of leisure and lover of fine food and laughter. Pleased to make your acquaintance, guv." He said it in a broad, comic cockney accent and even tugged at an invisible cap brim as he said it. I laughed.

"Trent McCauley," I said. I tried to think of something as cool as "gentleman of leisure" to add, but all I came up with was "Cinema aficionado and inveterate pirate," which sounded a lot better in my head than it did in the London air, but he smiled back at me.

"Trent," he said. "Saw you at the shelter last night. Let me guess. First night, yeah?"

"In the shelter? Yeah."

"In the world, son. Forgive me for saying so, but you have the look of someone who's just got off a bus from the arse end of East Shitshire with a hat full of dreams, a pocketful of hope, and a head full of strawberry jam. Have I got that right?"

I felt a little jet of resentment, but I had to concede the point. "Technically I've been here for two days," I said. "Last night was my first night in the shelter."

He winked. "Spent the first night wandering the glittering streets of London, didn't ya?"

I shook my head. "You certainly seem to know a lot about me."

"Mate," he said, and he lost the cockney accent and came across pure north, like he'd been raised on the next estate. "I am you. I was you, anyway. A few years ago. Now I'm the Jammie Dodger, Prince of the London Byways, Count of the Canalsides, Squire of the Squat, and so on and so on."

Another train had come in, and more people were coming out of the station. He shooed me off to one side and began his smiling come-ons to the new arrivals. A minute later, he'd collected another twelve quid and he waved me back over.

"Now, Master McCauley, you may be wondering why I called you over here."

I found his chirpy mode of speech impossible to resist, so I went with it. "Indeed I am, Mr. Dodger. Wondering that very thing, I was."

He nodded encouragement, pleased that I was going along with the wheeze. "Right. Well, you saw all the other sorry sods holding up signs in this station, I take it?"

I nodded.

"None of 'em is making a penny. None of 'em know how to make a penny. That's cos most of the people who end up here get here because something awful's gone wrong with them and they don't have the cunning and fortitude to roll with it. Mostly, people end up holding a sign and shaking a cup because someone's done them over terribly -- raped them, beat them up, given them awful head-drugs -- and they don't have the education, skills or sanity to work out how to do any better.

"Now, me, I'm here because I am a gentleman of leisure, as I believe I have informed you already. Whatever happened in my past, I was clever and quick and tricksy enough to deal with it. So when I landed up holding a sign in a tube station hoping for the average Londoner to open his wallet and his heart to buy my supper, I didn't just find any old sheet of brown cardboard box, scrawl a pathetic message on it, and hope for the best.

"No. I went out and bought all different kinds of card -- bright yellow, pink, blue, plain white -- and tested each one. See?" He reached into the back pocket of his jeans and drew out a small, worn notebook. He opened it to the first page and stuck it under my nose. It was headed "Colors: (HELP THE HOMELESS)" and there were two columns running its length, one listing different colored cardboards, the other showing different amounts.

"Look at that, would you? See how poorly brown performs? It's the bottom of the barrel. People just don't want to open their wallets to a man holding a sign that looks like it was made out of an old cardboard box. You'd think they would, right? Appearance of deserving thrift an' all? But they don't. They like practically any color except brown. And the best one, well, it's good old white." He rattled his sign. "Lots of contrast, looks clean. I buy a new one every day down at the art supply shop in Shoreditch High Street. The punters like a man what takes pride in his sign."

Another tubeload of passengers came up, and he shooed me off again, making another twenty-some pounds in just a few minutes. "Now, as to wording, just have a look." He showed me the subsequent pages of his book. Each had a different header: HOMELESS - HELP. HUNGRY - HELP. HELP THE HUNGRY. HELP THE HOMELESS. DESPERATE. DESPERATE - HELP. "What I noticed was, people really respond to a call for action. It's not enough to say, 'homeless, miserable, starving' and so on. You need to cap it off with a request of some kind, so they know what you're after. HELP THE HOMELESS outperforms everything else I've tried. Simple, to the point."

He flipped more pages, and now I was looking at charts showing all the different things he'd given away with his signboard, and the combinations he'd tried. "You gave away liverwurst?" I stared at the page.

"Well, no," he said. "But I tried. Turns out no one wants to accept a cracker and liver-paste from a tramp in a tube station." He shrugged. "It wasn't a great idea. I ended up eating liverwurst for three days. But it didn't cost me much to try and fail. If you want to double your success rate, triple your failure rate. That's what I always say. And sometimes, you've just got to be crazy about it. Every time I go into a shop, I'm on the lookout for something else I can do. See this?" He held up a tiny screwdriver. "Eyeglass tightener. You wait until sunglasses season, I'm going to be minted. FREE DIY SPECTACLE REPAIR. HELP THE HOMELESS."

"Why are you telling me all this?"

He shrugged again. "I tell anyone who'll listen, to be honest. Breaks my heart to see those poor sods going hungry. And you seemed like you were fresh off the boat, like you probably needed a little help."

"So you think I should go make a sign like yours?"

He nodded. "Why not? But this is just a way to get a little ready cash when I need it." He carefully rolled up the signboard, emptying his cup into his front pocket, which bulged from the serious weight of an unthinkable quantity of pound and two-pound coins. "Hop it, I'll buy you a coffee."

He walked us past the Starbucks and up Old Street to Shoreditch High Street, then down a small alley, to a tiny espresso stand set in the doorway of an office building. The man who ran it was ancient, with arthritic, knobby fingers and knuckles like walnuts. He accepted two pound coins from Jem and set about making us two lattes, pulling the espresso shots from a tarnished machine that looked even older than he did. The espresso ran out of the basket and into the paper cup in a golden stream and he frothed the milk with a kind of even, unconscious swirling gesture, then combined the two with a steady hand. He handed them to us, wordlessly, then shooed us off.

"Fyodor makes the best espresso in east London," Jem said, as he brought his cup to his lips and sipped. He closed his eyes for a second, then swallowed and opened them, wiping at the foam on his lip with the back of his hand. "Had his own shop years ago, went into retirement, got bored, set up that stand. Likes to keep his hand in. Practically no one knows about him. He's kind of a secret. So don't go telling all your mates, all right? Once Vice gets wind of that place, it'll be mobbed with awful Shoreditch fashion-victims. I've seen it happen. Fyodor wouldn't be able to take it. It'd kill him. Promise me."

"I promise." I was really starting to enjoy his overblown, dramatic way of speaking. "On my life I doth swear it," I said. I didn't mention that the only coffee I'd ever drunk was Nescafé.

"You're overdoing it," he said. "You were doing okay until you got to 'doth.'"

"Noted," I said. Personally, I liked 'doth.'

"Here's the thing," he said. "Most of the poor bastards who end up on the street never really think it through. It's not a surprise, really. Like I said, people usually get here as the result of some awful trauma, and once they're on the road, it's hard to catch your breath and get some perspective. So nothing against them, but there's a smart way to be homeless and a stupid way. Do you want to learn about the smart way?"

I had a pang of suspicion just then. I didn't know this person. I hadn't even noticed him in the shelter (but then, I'd spent my time there trying not to inadvertently provoke any of the boys with eye contact, especially the ones talking about their knives and fights). Everything I knew about being homeless I'd learned from lurid Daily Mail cover stories about poor tramps and runaway kids who'd been cut up, fouled, and left in pieces in rubbish bins all over England.

One word kept going round my head: "Groomer." Supposedly, there was an army of groomers out there, men and women and even kids who tried to get vulnerable teens (like me, I suppose) to involve themselves with some dirty, ghastly pedophile scheme. These, too, featured prominently in the screaming headlines of the Daily Mail and the Sun, and we had an annual mandatory lecture on "network safety" that was all about these characters. I didn't really believe in them, of course. Trying to find random kids to abuse on the net made about as much sense as calling random phone numbers until you got a child of your preferred age and sex and asking if she or he wanted to come over and touch your monkey.

I'd pointed this out once at school, right after the teacher finished showing us a slide that showed that practically every kid that was abused was abused by a family member, a teacher or some other trusted adult. "Doesn't that slide mean that we should be spending all our time worrying about you, not some stranger on the net?" I'd got a week's detention.

But it's one thing to be brave and sensible at school; another thing to be ever-so-smart and brave as you're standing on a London street with less than thirty quid to your name, a runaway in a strange city with some smart-arse offering to show you the ropes.

"You're not going to cut me up and leave me in a lot of rubbish bins all over England are you?" I said.

He shook his head. "No, too messy. I'm more the cement-block-around-the-ankles-heave-ho-into-the-Thames sort. The eels'll skeltonize you inside of a month. I'll take your teeth so they can't do the dental records thing."

"I confess that I don't know what to say to that."

He slapped me on the shoulder. "Don't be daft, son. Look, I promise I won't take you inside any secluded potential murder sites. This is the Jammie Dodger's tour of London, admission free. It's better than the Ripper tour, better than one of them blue disk walking tours, better than a pub crawl. When you're done with the Jammie Dodger tour, you've got knowledge you can use. What say you, stout fellow?"

"You're overdoing it," I said. "You were doing okay until you got to 'stout fellow.'"

"It's a fair cop," he said. "Come on."

Our first stop was a Waitrose supermarket in the Barbican. It was a huge place, oozing poshness out into the street. Mums with high-tech push-chairs and well-preserved oldies cruised in and out, along with the occasional sharp-dressed man in a suit. Jem led me through the front door and told me to get a trolley. I did, noting that it had a working checkout screen on it -- all the ones back home were perpetually broken.

As I pushed it over to him in the produce section, one of the security guards -- cheap suit, bad hair, conspicuous earphone -- detached himself from the wall and drifted over to us. He hung back short of actually approaching us, but made no secret of the fact that he was watching us. Jem didn't seem to mind. He walked us straight into the fruit section, where there were ranks of carefully groomed berries and succulent delights from around the world, the packages cleverly displaying each to its best effect. I'd never seen fruit like this: it was like hyper-fruit, like the fruit from films. The carton of blackberries didn't have a single squashed or otherwise odd-shaped one. The strawberries were so perfect they looked like they'd been cast from PVC.

Jem picked up one of each and waved it at the cart so that one of its thousands of optical sensors could identify it and add the total to a screen set into the handle. I boggled. The strawberries alone cost twelve pounds! The handle suggested some clotted cream and buns to go with them. It offered to e-mail me a recipe for strawberry shortcake. I merely goggled at the price. Jem didn't mind. He gaily capered through the store, getting some rare pig-gall-bladder pate ("An English Heritage Offal Classic") for fifteen pounds; a Meltingly Lovely Chocolate Fondant (twelve pounds for a bare mouthful); hunnerwurst-style tofu wieners (six pounds); Swiss Luxury Bircher Muesli (twenty-two pounds! For a tiny bag of breakfast cereal!). The screen between my hands on the handle stood at over two hundred pounds before he drew up short, a dramatic and pensive finger on his chin.

I had a sinking feeling. He was going to steal something. I knew that he was going to steal something. Of course he was going to steal something -- everyone knew it. The other shoppers knew it. The security guard certainly knew it. There were hundreds of cameras on the trolley to make it easier to scan your groceries, each one no larger than a match-head. I didn't care how experienced and sophisticated this guy was, he was about to get us both arrested.

But then he patted down his pockets, then said, in a showy voice, "Dearie me, forgot my wallet." He took the cart out of my hands and wheeled it to the security guard. "Take this, would you, mate?"

And then he left so quickly I almost didn't catch up with him. He was giggling maniacally. I grabbed his shoulder. "What the hell was that all about?" I said.

He shook my hand off. "Easy there, old son. Watch and learn." He led me around the back of the shop, where two big skips -- what they called "Dumpsters" in American films -- sat, covered in safety warnings and looking slightly scary. Without pausing, Jem flipped up the lid of the first one. He peered inside. A funky, slightly off smell wafted to me, like the crisper drawer of a fridge where a cucumber's been forgot for too long.

"Here we go," he said. "Go get us some of those boxes, yeah?" There were stacks of flattened cardboard boxes beside the skips. I brought a bale over to him and he wrestled them free of the steel strap that tied them tight. "Assemble a couple of them," he said.

I did as bade, and he began to hand me out neatly wrapped food packages, a near item-for-item repeat of the stuff we'd found in the store. Some of it had a little moisture on it or something slimy, but that was all on the wrapping, not on the food.

"Why is all this in the bin?" I asked as I packed it into the box.

"All past the sell-by date," he said.

"You mean it's spoiled?" I'd filled an entire box and was working on another one. I gagged a little at the thought of eating rotting food from the garbage, and I was pretty sure that was what Jem had in mind.

"Naw," he said, his voice echoing weirdly off the steel walls of the skip. "The manufacturers print sell-by dates on the packages because they don't want to get sued if someone eats bad food, so they're very conservative. And of course no one will buy anything at a store that's past its sell-by date. But if you think about it logically, there's no magic event that happens at midnight on sell-by day that makes the cheese go off." He handed me a neatly wrapped package of presliced Jarlsberg cheese. "I mean, cheese is basically spoiled milk already. Yogurt, too!"

He moved on to the next skip, carefully closing the lid. "Ooh!" he said, and handed me a case of gourmet chocolate bars, still sealed. One side of it had been squashed. "Probably fell off the stock-shelf or got squished in shipping. Those are freaking good, too -- I like the ones with chili in."

"Ooh," he said again. "Bring me boxes, will you? More boxes." I went and wrestled another set of cardboard flats off the pile and slipped them out of their band. Jem vaulted the skip's edge and held a hand out. I gave him a box, listened to the sound of things being moved about inside. Then his hand came out again, and I passed him another box. Then another. "Come see," he said, and I stood on tiptoe to peer over the edge.

Jem had used the boxes to make a sort of corridor through the food and other rubbish, like a miner's tunnel, and he was turning over the skip's contents, and he was building a tower of tins in one corner of it. "I was hoping for this," he said. "Oh, yes." He stacked more tins. I peered at the labels. GOURMET COCONUT MILK, the nearest one read. REINDEER MEAT, another read. FILIPINO SARDINES. REFRIED BEANS.

"What's all that?"

"That," he said, "is the remains of Global Tradewinds, Ltd. They used to tin the best gourmet delicacies from around the world and sell 'em here. But they went bust last month and all the Waitroses have been taking them off the shelves. I knew I'd find a skip full of their stuff if I waited long enough!" He rubbed his hands together.

"We're not going to carry all that stuff out of here?" I said. There were dozens of tins.

"We certainly are," he said. "Christ, mate, you can't seriously think that I'd let this haul go to waste? It'd be a sin. Hop it, more boxes." He snapped his fingers.

Shaking my head, I went and got more boxes. He tossed me a roll of packing tape. "Tape up the bottoms -- they're not going to hold together just from folding, not with all this weight."

"Where the hell are you going to keep all this junk?" I said. When I'd started boxing up food, I had a vision of feasting on it, maybe putting the rest in my backpack for a day or two. But this was a month's worth of food, easy.

"Oh, we're not going to keep it, no fear."

In the end, there were eight big boxes full of food, which was about six more than we could easily carry.

"No worries," he said. "Just form a bucket brigade." Which is exactly what we did. I piled up seven boxes and Jem took one down to the end of the block. I picked up another box and walked toward him while he walked back to me. When we met, I gave him the box and he turned on his heel and walked back to the far end, stacking the box on top of the one he'd just put down. Meanwhile, I'd turned round and gone back to my pile, scooping another box. It was a very efficient way of doing things, since neither of us were ever sitting around idle, waiting for the other.

I worried briefly about someone stealing one of the boxes off the piles while they were unattended, but then I realized how stupid that was. These were boxes of rubbish, after all. We'd got them for free out of a skip. We could always find another skip if we needed to.

We moved the boxes one entire block in just a few minutes and regrouped. I was a bit winded and sweaty. Jem grinned and windmilled his arms. "Better than joining a gym," he said. "Only ten more roads that way!"

I groaned. "Where are were taking these sodding things?"

He was already moving, hauling another box down the pavement. "Back to the station," he called over his shoulder.

When we got to Old Street Station, he straight away went up to two of the tramps, an elderly couple wearing heavy coats (too heavy for the weather) and guarding bundle-buggies full of junk and clothes. They didn't smell very good, but then again, neither did I at that point, 'cos I'd forgot to pack deodorant in my runaway go-bag.

"Morning Lucy; morning, Fred," Jem said, dropping a box at their feet. "You all right?"

"Can't complain," the old lady said. When I looked closer, I saw that she wasn't as old as all that, but she was prematurely aged, made leathery by the streets. She was missing teeth, but she still had a sunny smile. "Who's the new boy, Jem?"

"Training up an apprentice," he said. "This is Trent. Trent, these are my friends Lucy and Fred." I shook their rough, old hands. Lucy's grip was so frail it was like holding a butterfly. Fred grunted and didn't look me in the eye. He had something wrong with him, I could see that now, that weird, inexplicable wrongness that you could sense when you were around someone who was sick in the head somehow. He didn't seem dangerous -- just a bit simple. Or shy. "Brought you some grub," Jem said, and kicked his box.

Lucy clapped and said, "You are such a good boy, Jem." She got down on her creaky knees and opened the box, began to carefully paw through the contents, pulling out a few tins, some of the fruit and veg. She exclaimed over a wheel of cheddar and looked up at Jem with a question in her eyes.

"Go on, go on," he said. "Much as you like. There's more where that came from."

In the end, the two of them relieved us of an entire boxful of food. As they squirreled it away in their bundle-buggies, I felt something enormous and good and warm swell up in my chest. It was the feeling of having done something...good. Something really, really good -- helping people who needed it.

They thanked us loads and we moved on through the station.

"Do they know that the food comes from a skip?" I asked, quietly.

Jem shrugged. "Probably. They never asked."

"Haven't you taken them to see all the stuff in the skips?"

He snorted. "Fred and Lucy are two of the broken people I was telling you about. Tried to help 'em with their signs, tried to help 'em learn how to get better food, a decent squat. But it's like talking to a wall. Lucy spent a year in hospital before she ended up out here. Her old man really beat her badly. And Fred... Well, you could see that Fred's not all there." He shrugged again. "Not everyone's able to help themselves." He socked me in the shoulder. "Lucky thing there's us, hey?"

We came to another tramp, this one much younger and skinny, like the drug addicts I'd seen around the bus station in Bradford. His hands shook as he picked out his tins, and he muttered to himself, but he couldn't thank us enough and shook my hand with both of his.

One by one, we covered the station exits and the tramps at each one. Jem never tried to keep anyone from taking too much, nor did he keep back the best stuff for himself. By the time we were done, we were down to a single box of food, mostly the odd tinned foreign delicacies. These were the heaviest items in the haul, of course.

"Come on, then," he said. "Let's have a picnic." We walked out of the station and down the road a little way and turned into the gates of a beautiful old cemetery.

"Bunhill," he said. "Originally 'Bone Hill.' It was a plague pit, you see." The graveyard was a good meter higher than the pavement in front of it. "Masses of people killed in the plagues, all shoveled under the dirt. Brings up the grass a treat, as you can see." He gestured at the rolling lawns to one side of the ancient, mossy, fenced-in headstones. "Nonconformist cemetery," he went on, leading me deeper. "Unconsecrated ground. Lots of interesting folks buried here. You got your writers: like John Bunyon who wrote Pilgrims Progress. You got your philosophers, like Thomas Hardy. And some real maths geniuses, like old Thomas Bayes --" He pointed to a low, mossy tomb. "He invented a branch of statistics that got built into every spam filter, a couple hundred years after they buried him."

He sat down on a bench. It was after mid-day now, and only a few people were eating lunch around us, none close enough to overhear us. "It's a grand life as a gentleman adventurer," he said. "Nothing to do all day but pluck choice morsels out of the bin and read the signboards the local historical society puts up in the graveyard."

He produced a tin-opener from his coat pocket and dug through the box. "Here," he said. "You like Mexican refried beans?"

"You mean like from Taco Bell?"

He shook his head. "Nothing at all like Taco Bell. Much better than that rubbish." Rummaging further in his pockets, he found a small glass bottle of Tabasco sauce. He opened the beans, sprinkled the hot sauce on them, and mashed it in with a bamboo fork he extracted from a neat nylon pouch. He took out another and handed it to me. "Eat," he said. "We're on a culinary tour of the world!"

It wasn't the best meal I've ever eaten, but it was the oddest and the most entertaining. Jem narrated the contents of each tin like the announcer on a cooking show. The stodgy breakfast gruel had finally dissolved in my stomach, leaving me starving hungry, and the unfamiliar flavors went a long way toward filling the gaps. When we were done, there were only two or three tins left, which Jem offered to me. I took a tin of bamboo shoots in fresh water and left the other two for him.

He stood and stretched his arms over his head then bent down to touch his toes, straightened and twisted from side to side. "Right then," he said. "Basic lessons are over. What have you learned, pupil mine?"

I stood and stretched too. My muscles, already sore from carrying all the food, had cooled and stiffened while we ate, and I groaned as they reluctantly stretched out. "Erm," I said. "Okay, no brown signs." He nodded. "Don't trust sell-by dates." He nodded again. "Skips are good eating." He nodded. "Well," I said. "That's pretty cool."

"You're forgetting the most important lesson," he said. He shook his head. "And you were doing so well."

I racked my brains. "I don't know," I said. "What is it?"

"You have to come up with it on your own," he said. "Now, what are you going to do next?"

I shrugged. "I guess I'll make a sign. I'll find a pitch that's not too close to you, of course. Don't want to cut into your business."

"I'm not bothered. But beyond that, what are you going to do? Where will you sleep tonight?"

"Back at the shelter, I suppose. Beats sleeping in a doorway."

He nodded. "It's better than a doorway, true. But there's better places. Me, I've had my eye on a lovely pub out in Bow. All boarded up, no one's been in for months. Looks cozy, too. Want to come have a look at it with me?"

"You're going to break in?"

"No," he said. "That's illegal. Going to walk in. Front door's off its hinges." He tsked. "Vandals. What is this world coming to?"

"It's not illegal to walk in?"

"Squatter's rights, mate," he said. "I'm going to occupy that derelict structure and beautify it, thus elevating the general timbre of the neighborhood. I'm a force for social good."

"But will you get arrested?'

"It's not illegal," he said. "Don't worry, mate. You don't have to come, if you don't want to. I just don't like that shelter. It's all right for people who can't do any better, but I always worry that there's someone more desperate than me who can't get a bed 'cos I'm there.

"Plus those old pubs are just lovely. Hardwood floors, brass fittings, old wainscoting. Estate agent's dream. Just the tile on the outside is enough to break your heart."

He stuck out his hand. "Nice to have met you, son. I expect we'll run into one another again soon enough."

"Wait!" I said. "I didn't say I wouldn't come!"

"So come, then!"

We caught a 55 bus from Old Street. He paid my fare, handing over a clatter of pound coins from his jingling pocket. We went upstairs to the upper deck and found a seat, right up front, by the huge picture window.

"The London channel," he said, gesturing at the window and the streets of London whizzing past us. "In high def. Nothing like it. Love this place."

We passed through the streets of Shoreditch and into Bow, which was a lot wilder and less rich. Mixed in among the posh shops were old family shops, bookies, seedy discount shops, and plenty of boarded-up storefronts. The people were a mix of young trendies like you'd see in Shoreditch, old people tottering down the road carrying their shopping, women in Muslim veils with kids in tow, Africans in bright colors chatting away as they walked the streets. It felt a lot more like Bradford, with all the Indians and Pakistanis, than it did like London.

We went deeper into Bow, through a few housing estates, past some tower-blocks that were taller than any apartment building I'd ever seen, some of them boarded up all the way to the sky. This was a lot less nice than the high-street we'd just passed down, proper rough. Like home. But it didn't make me homesick.

"This is us," Jem said, pressing the Stop Request button on the pole by the seat. There was almost no one else left on the bus, and we wobbled down the steps as it braked at a bus stop where all the glass had been broken out, and recently, judging by the glittering cubes of safety glass carpeting the pavement as we got off.

We crunched over the glass and I heard a hoot -- like an owl, but I was pretty sure it had come from a human throat -- from off in the distance. There was an answering whistle.

"Drugs lookouts," Jem said. "They think we might be customers. Don't worry, they won't bother us once they see we're not here for sugar. Just keep walking."

He set off across an empty lot that was littered with an old mattress, pieces of cars, trolleys, and blowing, decomposing plastic bags. Across the lot stood a solitary brick building, three stories tall. The side facing us had a ghost-staircase -- the brick supports for a stairwell that once ran up that wall when it was part of the building next door. Looking around, I could see more ghosts: rectangular stone shapes set into the earth, the old foundations for a row of buildings that had once stood here. The pub -- for that's what it was -- was the last building standing, the sole survivor of an entire road that had succumbed to the wrecker's ball.

As we drew nearer, Jem stopped and put his hands on his hips. "Beautiful, innit? Wait'll you see inside. An absolute tip, but it'll scrub up lovely."

We crossed to the building, and Jem entered without stopping. I followed, and my nose was assaulted with the reek of old piss and booze and smoke and shite. It was not a good smell. I gagged a bit, then switched to breathing through my mouth.

Jem, meanwhile, had shucked his backpack and dug out some paper painter's masks. He slipped one over his head and handed the other to me. "Here," he said, a bit muffled. "We'll take care of the smell soon enough, no worries. But first we have to do something about this door."

He produced a hiker's headlamp from his bag and fitted it to his head, switching it on and sending a white beam slicing through the dusty, funky air. He shut the door with a bang, and his torch became the only source of light in the shuttered pub, save for a few chinks around the boards on the windows. I felt a moment's fear. This is where he cuts me up and chucks me in a bin. But he didn't show any interest in cutting me up. Instead, he was peering at the lock. He fitted a screwdriver to it and began to remove the mechanism. I could see that it was bent and broken by some ancient vandal.

"Pissing screws have rusted into place," he muttered, dipping into his bag for a small plastic bottle with a long, thin nozzle. He dripped liquid onto the screws. "Penetrating oil," he said. "That'll loosen 'em up."

"Jem," I said, "what the hell are you doing?"

"Changing the locks. Got to establish my residency if I'm going to claim this place for my own." He reapplied the screwdriver to the door.

"You what?" I said. "You're going to claim this place? How do you think you'll do that?"

"With one of these," he said, and he handed me a folded sheet of paper. I unfolded it in the dark, then held it in the light of his torch so that I could read it.

LEGAL WARNING

Section 6 Criminal Law Act 1977

As amended by Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994

TAKE NOTICE

THAT we live in this property, it is our home and we intend to stay here.

THAT at all times there is at least one person in this property.

THAT any entry or attempt to enter into this property without our permission is a criminal offense as any one of us who is in physical possession is opposed to entry without our permission.

THAT if you attempt to enter by violence or by threatening violence we will prosecute you. You may receive a sentence of up to six months imprisonment and/or a fine of up to £5,000.

THAT if you want to get us out you will have to issue a claim in the County Court or in the High Court, or produce to us a written statement or certificate in terms of S.12A Criminal Law Act, 1977 (as inserted by Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, 1994).

THAT it is an offense under S.12A (8) Criminal Law Act 1977 (as amended) to knowingly make a false statement to obtain a written statement for the purposes of S. 12A. A person guilty of such an offense may receive a sentence of up to six months imprisonment and/or a fine of up to £5,000.

Signed

The Occupiers

I tried to get my head around the note. "What the hell is this?" I said.

He grunted as he twisted the screwdriver and I heard the screw he was working on rasp and begin to turn. "What's it look like?"

"It looks," I said, carefully, "like you're claiming that you now own this pub."

He finished the screw he was working on and went to work on the next one. "That's about right," he said. "Squatter's rights."

"You said that before. What's a squatter's right?"

"Well, you know. When buildings are left derelict, like this one, the landlord gone and no one taking care of it, it's a, you know, a blight on the neighborhood. Attracts drug users, prostitutes, gangs. Becomes an eyesore. After World War Two there were loads of these buildings, just sitting there vacant, dragging everything around them down. So families that couldn't afford housing just moved into them. It's not a crime, it's a civil violation. You can't get arrested for it, so don't worry about that. The worst they can do is force you to move out, and to do that, they need a court order. That can take months, if not years."

"Sounds like you've done this before." It seemed too good to be true. I had no idea what a multistory pub was worth, but it had to be many hundreds of thousands of pounds. Could we really just move in and take it over?

"Yeah," he said. "I don't sleep in shelters if I can help it. I'm between squats at the moment, but not for long. Sleeping in shelters." He shrugged, the lighting bouncing around the room. "Well, it's not for me, like I said."

He had the lock off now, and he withdrew a heavy new lock from his bag, lined it up with the screw holes in the door to make sure it'd fit, then filled the holes with some kind of putty and set to screwing his lock in. "That should do it for now," he said. "Once that liquid wood sets, that lock won't budge. They'll have to angle-grind it off. Later, I'll put in a few deadbolts."

"Jem," I said. "What the hell are you doing?"

"I'm establishing a squat," he said. "Try to keep up, will you? I'm going to clean out this place, put that notice in the window, move in some beds and that, get the electricity and gas working, and I am going to live here for as long as I can. Remember what I was telling you about there being a better way to be homeless? This is it."

I swallowed. "And what am I doing here?"

"There's loads of room," he said. "And it's hard to do this alone. You've got to keep someone on the premises at all times, to tell them to bugger off if they turn up wanting to repossess the place. They can't enter the place so long as there's someone home, not without a warrant. Oh, sure, I could leave the radio on and hope that that fooled 'em but --"

He was going a mile a minute. I suddenly realized that he was even more nervous than I was. He'd had this place scouted out and all ready to move into, but he couldn't take it over until he found a confederate -- me. Someone had to stay home while he was out getting food and that.

"You want me to move in here? Jem --"

He held up both hands. "Look, the worst thing, the absolutely worst thing, right? The worst thing that could happen is that they get a court order and evict us and we're back at the shelter. Back where you started. It might take a day, it might take years. In the meantime, what else have you got to do? Do you really want to spend the rest of your life sleeping eight to a room? Look, son, this is the chance to become a gentleman of leisure instead of, you know, a tramp. Don't you want that? 'Course you do. Of course you do!"

I took a step back into the dark of the stinking, shuttered pub. "Look, mate," I said. "It all sounds nice, but this is really fast --"

He stood up and dusted his hands on his thighs. "Yeah, okay, fair enough. But you wouldn't have come along if I'd told you you were going to end up living in a squat, right? I wanted you to see the place before you made up your mind. Just look at this place, son, just look at it! Think of the potential! We'll get big comfy sofas, clean up the kitchen and get the water going, stick up a Freeview antenna, find some WiFi to nick, it'll be a bloody palace. A bloody palace! Just think about what it could be like! We'll get some wood polish and bring up the wainscoting and those old snugs, shine up the chrome in the kitchen. We could have dinner parties! Christ, you should see the fridge and walk-in deep-freeze they've got in there -- we could store a year's worth of food and still have room."

I teetered on the edge between my anxiety and his infectious excitement. "I don't understand," I said. "How is it possible that this won't get us banged up? Aren't we trespassing?"

He shook his head. "Not until there's a court order. Until then, we're brave homesteaders on the wooly outer edges of property law. It's a lovely place to be, mate. Places like this, it's in the public interest for us to occupy 'em. The cops might show up, but so long as you don't let 'em in and you know what to tell them, they won't do anything except make noises. Come on, what do you say? You want to be a streetkid or do you want to be an adventurer?"

I looked around the reeking and dark pub. Now my eyes were adjusting to the dim, I could see all the battered furnishings lurking in the shadows. It had once been a lovely place, I could see that. Nice tile work. Old wooden floors and snugs and benches. A long wooden bar with stumps where stools had been torn loose, and a broken back-mirror. I remembered how big the building had been from the outside, all the extra rooms and I wanted to explore them all, map them like a level in a game, find all their treasures and get them put to rights.

"All right," I said. "Deal. For now, anyway. But you got to promise me you won't get me arrested or cut me up and leave me in rubbish bins all over Bow."

He crossed his heart. "Promise. I told you I was a brick around the ankles man, didn't I?"

Once he had the locks on the door -- three of them, including two deadbolts that had to be slowly and painfully screwed into the jamb and door with long, sharp steel screws, a wrist-breaking task that took both of us an hour in turns -- he drew a letter out of his bag, in a sealed envelope with a first-class stamp.

"Right," he said. "This letter is addressed to me, at this address: The Three Crows pub, Bow. I'm going to nip out and find a post-box and post it. That'll get us started on proof that we live here, which'll be handy when and if the law shows up. I'll also get us some dinner. You all right with pizza?"

I was well impressed. "You've done this before."

"Never on my own, always as part of someone else's gang. But yeah, once or twice. I tell you, squatting is for kings, shelters are for tramps. Once you decide to be a king, there's no going back. So, pizza?"

My stomach leapt at the word pizza. "As the Buddha said in the kebab shop, 'make me one with everything.'"

He snorted and left, calling out, "Lock up and don't let anyone in until I get back, right?"

"Right!" I called into the closing door. He'd left me with his head-torch and I strapped it on. I'd expected it to be quiet in the pub once he'd gone, but it was alive with spooky old building sounds: creaks and mysterious skittering sounds of rats in the walls. Let's not mess about: the place was stitching me up. In my head, the clittering of mouse-claws over unseen boards was the scrabbling of the local drugs lookouts -- the ones we'd heard calling to one another as we made our way to the pub -- clawing their way in throughsecret loose boards. And those creaking boards -- that was some monstrous, leathery old tramp who made this place his den, holed up in some dank corner where he was now rousing himself, getting ready to cut up and eat the interlopers who'd intruded on his territory.

I have an overactive imagination. At least I'm man enough to know it. I mean, part of me knew that there was no one else in this rotten tooth of a building. And I'd spent the morning meeting and feeding a whole gang of tramps and even they had been polite, friendly, and more scared of me (and their own shadows) than I was of them.

So I resettled the headlamp on my forehead and slowly began to explore the pub, making a conscious effort to keep my breathing even and my shoulders from tightening up around my ears.

Tell you what, though: there are better ways to explore a spooky abandoned building than with a headlamp. The narrow beam of light jiggles like crazy every time you move your head the slightest, teensiest bit. The beam of light that passes right in front of your face means that you have zero peripheral vision. Every time you bounce the beam off something reflective and blind yourself, it creates a swarm of squirming green after-burns that look exactly like the hands of phantoms rising out of the walls, bent on strangling you. It is the perfect re-creation of every zombie film you've ever seen where the hero's breath rasps in and out as he walks carefully through the halls of some blood-spattered military base, waiting for a pack of growling undead biters to boil out of a doorway and tear him to gobbets and ooze.

There's only one thing worse: turning off the lamp.

I started off slow and careful, bent on convincing myself that I wasn't half-mad with fear. There was a large kitchen which did have huge walk-in deep-freezer, which smelt a bit off, but not totally rancid. The pipes rattled and groaned when I turned on the taps, but then the water began to flow, first in irregular bursts of brown, rusty stuff and then in a good, steady gush of clear London tap-water, the river Thames as filtered through twenty million people's kidneys, processed, dumped back into the Thames, filtered, and sent back to those thirsty kidneys. It's the crapping circle of life. Reassuring.

By now, I had a genuine case of the heebie-jeebies, and I had an idea that maybe some of the upstairs windows hadn't been quite boarded up so there might be some rooms with the light of day shining through them and chasing away the bogey-men. So I found the staircase -- which creaked like one of the Foley stages they use for horror film sound effects -- and made my noisy way up to the first floor. I didn't hang around long. Not only was it pitch black, it also smelled even worse than the ground floor. Someone had lived here and left behind a room filled with dried-out turds and the ammonia reek of old, soaked-in piss.

You want to hear something funny? Once I'd got past my total disgust, I felt a landlord's resentment at this abuse of "my" home. Some interloper had installed himself here and done this awful thing to my beloved home. Never mind that he'd been there first, that I hadn't known this place existed before that afternoon, and that I had pretty much broken in and claimed it as my own. I deserved this place, I was going to take care of it in a way that the animal that had crapped all over the floor could never understand.

Yeah, it's odd how quickly I went from squatter to owner in my head. But on the other hand, I remember the first time I mixed down my own edit of a Scot Colford clip and watched it spread all over the net, and how much I'd felt like that clip was mine, even though I'd taken it from someone else without asking. It's a funny old world, as the grannie in Home, Home on the Strange (Scot's first and best rom-com) used to say.

Up on the second floor, things were just as dark, but less awful. There was wax on the floor where someone had burned candles, and I kicked over a few stubs. There was a pretty horrible mattress and a litter of lager-tins in what looked like an old office -- the local estate kids' romantic getaway, I supposed -- and another room stacked high with chairs and tables, all chipped and wobbly looking. I filed that away for future reference.

On the third and top story, I found some rooms whose windows were not boarded-up. These let in a weak, grayish twilight, but it was a massive relief after the pitchy dark of the rooms below. I thought I'd wait there for Jem to return. How long could it take to post a letter and get a pizza? Though, from what I'd seen of Jem, I wouldn't have been surprised if his way of posting a letter involved breaking into the central sorting office, stealing a stamp, then reverse-pickpocketing it into a letter-carrier's bag.

The third floor was a huge, open space: dusty and grimy, but mostly free from sign of human habitation. It was ringed with windows on all its walls, and I could imagine that it'd be a lovely penthouse someday when we'd finished doing up the place. But for now, I was more interested in the fact that the western windows were unboarded. I switched off the headlamp and examined them. They were filthy, but they looked like they might open up, admitting even more light. I yanked the painted iron handles, and pushed and tugged and grunted and rattled them until they squealed to life in a shower of dried paint and fossilized mouse turds and rust-colored dust. Slowly, painfully, I cranked the windows wide open, flooding the room with London's own dirty gray light. The fresh air was incredible, cooling and reassuring, as was the light in the room. With its help, I noted a box of candles and a stack of chairs in one corner.

I looked out the window at the bleak housing estate. It looked like a bomb site: blasted flat and partially ruined, with rotting brickwork and railings hanging free. Loads of the flats looked completely deserted, with their windows boarded up. We'd had some like that back on my estate in Bradford: places where the roof had caved in or the pipes had burst and the council had decided just to leave them empty instead of finding the money to fix them up. I didn't know much about how things were run, but I knew that the council didn't have any money and was always cutting something or other to make ends meet.

If you made a biopic of my life to that point, you could call it Not Enough Money and hire someone to write a jaunty theme song called He's Skint (Yes, 'e is). It'd be a box-office smash.

So this bomb site was pretty familiar to me. And it looked like Jem might be the first person I'd ever met who didn't have any problems with being broke. He seemed to have figured out how to live without money, which was a pretty neat trick.

I peered out the window again, looking for Jem. I didn't see him (did he go to Italy for the damn pizza?), but I did spot the drugs lookouts he was talking about before. Just kids, they were, eight or nine years old, playing idle games or chatting on the balconies of the estate, sitting in doorways eating crisps, doing things that were pretty kid-like. But whenever someone new came onto the estate, they started up with their bird-calls, sending them echoing off the high towers.

They began to coo and call and I thought That must be Jem. About cacking time. But when I looked out, it wasn't Jem: it was a huge, shambling man with long dreads and a black duffel-bag that he hauled as if it weighed a ton. He was wearing scuffed boots, greasy blue-jeans, a beaten wind-cheater -- he looked like a tramp. Or maybe a killer who hunted tramps and dismembered them and carried them around in a duffel bag.

And he was headed straight for the pub.

I mean, it wasn't like there was anywhere else he could be headed for. The pub stood alone in the wasted field, like the lone tooth in a bleached skull. The man bounced when he walked, dreads shaking, arm penduluming back and forth with that weighty bag.

My first thought was that this was some kind of goon sent by the owner to beat the hell out of me and toss me out. But there was no way that the landlord could know what we were up to. Jem hadn't even put up the sign yet.

Then I thought he must be a dealer, alerted by the lookout. Maybe one of these loose floorboards disguised a secret stash with millions in sugar or smack or something even more exotic -- a cache of guns?

Then I thought he might just be someone who had got here before us, someone who lived here and did such a good job of covering up for himself when he was out that I couldn't find his nest.

Then I stopped thinking because he was standing at the door, thudding rhythmically with a meaty fist, making the whole building shake. My guts squirmed with terror. I thought I'd been afraid before, but that was the nameless, almost delicious fear of something in the dark. Now I had the very pointed, very specific terror of a giant, rough-looking bloke hammering at my door. I didn't know what to do.

Seemingly of their own accord, my feet propelled me back downstairs into the pub's main room, where my headlamp was the only light. It made sense, right? After all, when someone knocks at the door, you answer it.

He was still thudding at it, but then he stopped.
