The Pirates! in an Adventure with the Romantics (3 page)

‘And more’s the pity,’ snorted the Pirate Captain, with a rueful shake of his head. ‘If I had a crew of circus monkeys I wouldn’t be in these financial straits, would I? I’d be a leading theatrical impresario, happily knitting you waistcoats for our next sell-out show, “The Captain and His Mischievous Capuchin Crew”. It would be adorable, whilst at the same time containing a serious message about the peaceful coexistence of species.’

He banged his desk to show that his mind was made up and that any further discussion would be futile. The Captain often thought that if he hadn’t become a pirate, or an architect, his third choice of profession would have been a judge, because he really did enjoy banging things to make a point.

‘Jump to it, you swabs – new plan! I want you all looking as exotic and perilous as possible. That means scars at their most livid and stumps at their most unsightly. Hoist the jib, loosen the bowsprit, all that nautical palaver. For today . . .’ He paused and held his cutlass aloft. It felt like an important moment and that he needed to finish his sentence with something both stirring and memorable, yet at the same time pithy. ‘. . . we respond to a newspaper advertisement,’ said the Pirate Captain, who wasn’t great at thinking on his feet.

Two

The Boat That Bled Blood

‘Are you sure this is the right address?’ The Pirate Captain peered through the letterbox and tried pulling the bell-rope again.

‘Villa Diodati,’ the pirate with a scarf said with a shrug. ‘That’s what it says on the gate.’

‘You don’t think some other coves beat us to it, do you, number two? Neptune’s lips! I hope it wasn’t those confounded cowboys, peddling their idiotic Stetson- and cactus-based adventures.’

He gave the rope a final desultory yank, sighed, and turned to face the crew, who were neatly lined up in the driveway, dressed in all their most extravagant outfits, trying their best to look employable. ‘Well, lads, sorry to get your hopes up, but it seems like this is a bust. Probably time we drew lots to see which one of you I sell to the paste factory first.’

But before any lots could be drawn or any pirate bones could be melted down into a delicious paste, the door suddenly swung open, and a flustered young woman popped her head out.

‘Hello?’ she said, brushing a curl of brown hair from her face. ‘Can I help you?’

The Captain looked at the woman and narrowed his eyes. She had cheekbones and skin and nice teeth in all the right places and proportions, and if years at sea had taught him anything, it was to be suspicious of attractive girls, in case they turned out to be sirens trying to lure him to a watery grave.

‘Well?’ said the woman, cocking her head.

‘Excuse me just one moment,’ said the Pirate Captain, stepping back and taking his deputy to one side. ‘What do you think, number two?’

‘Think?’ repeated the pirate with a scarf, a bit confused. The Captain’s thought processes could be a little difficult to follow.

‘The girl! Do you suppose she’s . . .’ his voice dropped to a whisper. ‘You know: an oceanic seductress, here to feast on my briny soul?’

‘A siren?’

‘Well, it occurs to me that even sirens probably have to move with the times, so perhaps placing a newspaper advertisement is the nowadays equivalent of luring sailor-folk with their enchanting song.’
⁶

‘Hello,’ said the young woman, with a wave. ‘I
can
hear you. And no, I’m not a siren.’

‘Exactly what sirens tend to say of course,’ the Captain noted with an apologetic frown.

‘Yes. I imagine it would be. Look, I’m terribly sorry, but now isn’t really a great time—’

A tremendous crashing noise interrupted her. It was instantly followed by the sort of bellowing that, two hundred years later, would be most readily associated with Brian Blessed.

‘Not again,’ said the woman, rolling her eyes, which, the Captain noted, were exactly the right shade of hazel, and rolled about her eye sockets in a really pleasing way. She disappeared back inside the villa, leaving the door ajar. The pirates followed, because they were pirates and so not really attuned to social etiquette.

Inside the villa there was a lot of tasteful lubber furniture and a whole deal more banging and bellowing going on. At the top of a spiral staircase a pale and serious-looking young man hammered at a door, whilst from the other side muffled curses and the occasional roaring wail drifted out onto the landing.

‘What on earth is he
doing
in there?’ cried the woman, bounding up the stairs towards her companion.

‘I’m afraid,’ said the pale young man, ‘that he’s having one of his bleak tempestuous moods.’

‘Oh, good grief. What’s it about
this
time?’

‘I’m not sure. Everything was fine a moment ago: he was wagering that he could swallow an entire Toblerone in one gulp, which I contended to be impossible, because of that particular confectionery’s awkward shape. Then he said that triangles and nougat were no match for the tempests that rage in a man’s soul, and stomped up here. He bellowed something about ending it all, and now he’s locked himself in.’

The woman hammered at the door again. ‘Byron? Can you hear me? This is ludicrous! Please come out.’

The Pirate Captain had almost never encountered a situation where he didn’t fancy himself the best man for the job despite the lack of any evidence to suggest that he was.
⁷
This being no exception, he strode across the hallway and started up the staircase, hoping that any onlookers would notice how he took the steps three at a time.

‘Spot of trouble?’ he said, flashing the woman a grin that was a slightly different shape to his earlier ‘winning grin’ because this one was meant to convey ‘devil-may-care confidence’. ‘Not to worry, attractive brunette; and whoever you happen to be,’ he nodded vaguely at the pale man. ‘I think I might be of assistance.’

‘Who on earth are
you
?’ said the man, looking the Captain up and down in surprise.

‘I’m the Pirate Captain,’ the Pirate Captain replied, with a quick flourish of his hat. ‘Think Zeus, a bottle of Château Lafite or a mudslide. And these are my pirate crew,’ he pointed at the crew who were dutifully following up the stairs behind him. ‘This is my loyal, though somewhat dull, deputy, the pirate with a scarf. That’s the albino pirate, who’s probably best described as the boat’s happy idiot. That’s the pirate in green, he’s sort of an everyman type. The pirate in red is the surly one. The rest are pretty interchangeable. I wouldn’t bother trying to keep track of them if I were you. Oh, and this is Jennifer, a genuine lady who we met on an earlier adventure in London.’ The Captain suddenly pulled a knowledgeable face and nodded at the door. ‘So. Delicate business. But as luck would have it, I’m something of an expert at emotionally charged situations such as these. Brace yourselves.’

He took off his coat and started to roll up his sleeves. The pirate with a scarf tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Are you
sure
you’re an expert at emotionally charged situations, Pirate Captain?’ he asked quietly. ‘You’re not just thinking about the time you tried to talk Little Jim out of killing himself? When he jumped to his gruesome death, even though he’d only gone up the mast to clean the crow’s nest in the first place?’

‘That’s not how I remember it at all, number two,’ said the Captain, one of whose many skills was remembering things differently to how they had happened, which is a useful trick to pick up once you get past the age of thirty. He turned back to the young woman and adopted an authoritative tone of voice. ‘Now: when dealing with a potentially unbalanced person contemplating suicide, the important thing is to make sure you have the
element of surprise
on your side. Catch them unawares.’

And with that, before anybody could challenge this piece of psychological reasoning, the Captain charged at the door with a great piratical roar, sending it splintering off its hinges. He careened right through and straight into a bookcase. Manuscripts fluttered about like a lot of papery rectangular seagulls.

Across the room a strapping man with a cascade of wavy black hair so shiny it looked like it had been conditioned in something really expensive, like lobster sweat or dolphin’s eggs, balanced on the balustrade of an ornate balcony. The sudden appearance of a pirate didn’t appear to bother him at all. He furrowed his brow, and held up two billowy shirts. ‘Which one do you think would look best on my shattered, yet still unfeasibly dashing corpse?’

‘I like the one with the ruffles,’ said the Pirate Captain, picking himself up off the floor. ‘You can’t go wrong with a lot of ruffles.’

‘Yes! Quite right!’

The man quickly stripped off his shirt and changed into the one with more ruffles. Then he pulled a pistol out from his belt. ‘Be a stand-up fellow and pass me that bottle, would you?’ He pointed rakishly to the mantelpiece, upon which sat a small green bottle that had the same logo on the side as the pirates had on their flag.
⁸
The
Captain
obliged
.
He
was
impressed
,
because
pointing rakishly
isn’t an easy thing to pull off. The man attempted to get the top off the bottle, but it was difficult because he already had the pistol in his other hand. Then he tried holding the pistol in his teeth, but the stopper was obviously jammed tight. Eventually he got it out with a pop, but spilt half the poison down his freshly laundered shirt. He cursed a bit.

‘I don’t want to be rude, but do you maybe think this is
overkill
?’ said the Captain, gesturing to the balcony and the gun and the poison.

‘No, sir!’ said the man. ‘It is to be the most spectacular suicide ever witnessed! A truly tortured and poetical end, destined to echo down the ages. I was going to involve a gas stove as well, but there were logistical complications.’

He raised the gun to his head and the bottle to his lips. A fountain burbled in the garden below. ‘Right, here goes,’ he said, striking a pose so heroic it made several watching pirates, who had piled into the room after their Captain, faint clean away. ‘My glorious final act! Goodbye, cruel world!’

‘Byron! Stop!’ cried the young woman, hurrying towards him.

The Captain remembered why he had gone in there in the first place. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, putting his hand up.

‘Yes?’ said the man, pausing on the very edge of the balustrade.

‘We all have those bleak sort of days when everything seems hopeless. A monkey’s eaten your sextant, some native witchdoctor has sold you a cursed eye-patch, your crew won’t shut up about gastropods. But before you go ahead with this, I’d like you to take a moment to think about all the
other
more life-affirming things knocking about the universe.’

‘That does sound like it would be fun, but I don’t want to miss the light,’ the man waved at the sunset. ‘It’s going to really add to the poignancy of the moment.’

‘It won’t take long,’ said the Captain, pulling another napkin from his pocket. ‘I happen to have made a list. I like lists.’

‘Oh fine,’ said the man. ‘Go on then.’

‘Right,’ said the Captain. He ran through his quicker vocal warm-up exercises and then began to read. ‘A list of items I consider to be so miraculous and unexplainable that they make life worth living: Giraffes’ necks. Magnets. Lava. Shooting stars. Rainbows. Pelican beaks . . .’

‘Goodness,’ said the woman, half an hour later. ‘It’s quite a long list, isn’t it?’

‘The Captain’s very thorough,’ agreed the pirate with a scarf.

‘. . . that odd neat handwriting psychopaths have. Venn diagrams. Snow globes. Tiny cheeses. And, last but not least, girls in thigh-length boots.’ The Pirate Captain stopped, wiped his forehead and gave a bow. ‘That’s it.’

‘You forgot dressing up a sausage dog in a coat shaped like a bun,’ said the man.

‘It
is
good when people do that,’ agreed the albino pirate.