The Pirates! (8 page)

‘Hello Las Vegas!' said the Pirate Captain, waving to the audience with both hands. ‘It's lovely to be here!'

The show got off to an energetic start, with all the pirates doing a shanty about swimming really fast. Next up was the tallest pirate on the Seven Seas, who came on and did a little dance to the sound of an accordion. The tallest pirate on the Seven Seas was wearing a very long coat and had a normal-sized head that looked a lot like the pirate in green's head. When the tallest pirate on the Seven Seas left the stage to a polite round of applause he nearly fell over as his top half turned to bow to the audience and his bottom half continued into the wings.
¹⁷
Then there was some tumbling from some of the more lively pirates and after that the Pirate Captain invited a few children up onto the stage. He magicked some eggs from behind their ears, sat them all on a bench and got them to sing a jolly shanty about the harsh life of a pirate. The
Pirate Captain warned them that the theatre was haunted and that they had to keep singing – even if a scary ghost came and touched their shoulder. As the children sang, the albino pirate sneaked on and chased them off one by one, until only the littlest kid was left, absolutely terrified out of his wits, whilst the Pirate Captain chuckled away. Then the Pirate Captain told him that it was all okay and that the ghost was actually just an albino. He let the littlest kid feed the albino a couple of pieces of meringue to see how harmless he was. Then the Pirate Captain sang a shanty to the kid about how we have to look after the children, because they are our future. The show finished with the Pirate Captain's moving environmental monologue, which he had entitled ‘The Last Dolphin In The Sea'. It was a bit downbeat, because he had written it when he was in a mood and it had been raining, but the pirates all agreed that the environment was a serious matter and needed to be treated as such. Halfway through the monologue the accordion broke, but fortunately the pirate with asthma was on hand to step up and do ‘human accordion',
which was a bit like human beatbox, but with more emphasis on wheezing.

‘… where are my friends,
Oh where can they be?
Life is so lonely when you're
The last dolphin in the sea!'

‘Remember. There's magic inside each and every one of you. Never forget that,' said the Pirate Captain, wiping a tear from his cheek and bowing to the audience as the curtain came down. All the pirates were buzzing.

‘That went brilliantly, Captain!' said the pirate with a scarf, clutching a big bag of the evening's takings. He'd drawn a big thermometer to show how close they were getting to the six thousand doubloons and he set about colouring in the current total.

‘It did go well, didn't it?' said the Captain, dabbing at his forehead with a handkerchief. ‘I think I was born to the stage, lads. This is my calling. If you cut me, do I not bleed greasepaint?'

‘I'm sure that during our adventure with a
circus you said you had sawdust in your veins, Captain.'

‘Aaarrr. Yes. Also greasepaint. Sawdust and greasepaint.'

‘That must make a sort of gooey paste, Captain.'

‘…So I said to him, “Larry – you can't go on like that, you just
can't
!”'

The Pirate Captain was regaling the pirates with a theatrical anecdote.

‘And do you know what? He bloody did! He went on and
bloody stormed it
. Great times, lads. Great times.'

The pirates all sighed and shook their heads at Larry. Since the night before, the Pirate Captain had become an even better raconteur than ever, with a ready supply of funny and moving tales from the wonderful world of showbusiness.

‘Five-minute call, Mr Captain!' shouted the pirate with a strawberry birthmark, and the pirates started scurrying about for the second night's performance. The Pirate Captain took a moment to tease his eyebrows into points. He stopped to look approvingly at himself in a mirror.

‘ME ME ME. MO MO MO. MA MA MA,' he said to his reflection. The pirate in green straightened his hat for him. ‘They're pretty quiet out there, Captain,' said the pirate in green.

‘I expect they're trembling in anticipation. They'll have been looking forward to it all day.'

The Pirate Captain closed his eyes, took a deep breath and bounded onto the stage.

‘Laaaadies and Gentlemen! Live on stage, fresh from the Seven Seas, it is
I
, the Pirate Captain! Raarggh!'

He waited for the applause. And he waited. After a bit more waiting he opened his eyes. There was nobody there. Just row upon row of empty deckchairs.
¹⁸

‘You can come out,' said the Pirate Captain. ‘I'm not really that terrifying!'

* * *

‘I don't understand it, Captain,' said the pirate with a hook for a hand, as they wandered disconsolately down one of Las Vegas's brightly lit streets.

‘The reviews felt you were a “powerhouse of performance”,' said the pirate in green.

‘Fame is fickle,' said the scarf-wearing pirate wisely.

The Pirate Captain shook his head. ‘It doesn't make any sense, lads. Yesterday we were all the rage, and now we can't shift a single ticket. It's a mystery.'

He took out the pirate with a scarf's useful table from a pocket and grumpily doodled an extra couple of columns:

He was just about to add a third column about how much better his removable shiny pirate boots were compared to the dirty old cowboy boots that cowboys couldn't take off when, with
a
tap tap tapping
sound, who should they spot but Ahab hurrying down the dusty street.

‘Hello Ahab,' the Pirate Captain called out. ‘Any joy? Whale-wise, I mean?'

Ahab hobbled sternly towards them. ‘Ill-fortune besets me as ever, Captain. The leviathan has eluded me once again – the men tell me he must have slipped out the back of the casino just as we arrived.'

‘He's a tricky so-and-so, isn't he?' said the Pirate Captain. ‘You wouldn't expect something that big to be so stealthy, would you? Considering he's got no legs.'

Ahab glowered. ‘I could spend an afternoon telling you tales of the beast's monstrous cunning, Pirate Captain. But I have an appointment to keep, so I cannot stop and chit-chat.'

‘Oh, off anywhere interesting?'

‘I am visiting a theatre show.'

The pirates were a little put out by this. ‘I thought you said you were too busy to go to see shows?' said the pirate with a scarf.

‘Ahab is a solemn fellow,' said Ahab. ‘I take no pleasure from playacting. But the men
insisted that after the white whale left the casino, they spotted him buying tickets for a show. This, apparently, was his choice.'

Ahab handed the Pirate Captain a theatrical flyer. The Pirate Captain's beetling brows almost leapt off his face.

‘Hell's teeth! The
rogue
!'

For there, printed in a gothic pirate script above a picture of a boat, they read:

‘So that's why nobody came to our show!' exclaimed the pirate in green.

‘It's almost as if he does this sort of thing just to cause us mischief!' said the pirate in red.

‘Whilst I have no time for such fripperies, one must admit that it's very clever how they've done all those Ks, do you not think, Pirate Captain?' said Ahab.

The Pirate Captain was so angry that he didn't even stop to buy popcorn before he, Ahab and the pirates burst into Black Bellamy's show. Black Bellamy was already up on stage, halfway through taking questions about cuisine from a girl from the audience who was sat on his knee.

‘What's the bounciest meat in the world?' asked the girl.

‘Good question,' said Black Bellamy. ‘There isn't actually a bounciest meat in the world, but the chewiest meat is beef jerky, which comes from dry cows.'

‘I see no sign of the accursed sea-beast,' said
Ahab, scanning the auditorium, ‘but my godforsaken crew are obviously enjoying themselves,' he added bitterly, looking at his whalers sat in the front row. Ahab paused, and turned to the pirates. ‘You might say that they are having a whale of a time.'

The pirates looked at Ahab. There was an embarrassed silence.

‘That was a joke,' said Ahab. ‘Whale of a time. You see?'

The pirates went on looking at Ahab.

‘I rarely make jokes,' said Ahab, a little sadly. ‘I don't really have the delivery.'

Black Bellamy had finished with his question-and-answer session, and now he had begun to recount a story about the time he had disguised himself as Admiral Nelson and sunk Napoleon's flagship.

‘It's funny, it's moving and it's educational,' whispered one of the audience to their neighbour.

‘Much better than that other pirate last night. Much classier.'

‘And I like the way his beard goes right up to his eyes.'

The Pirate Captain was just about to tap the fellow on the shoulder and point out that Black Bellamy was just an old ham, by which he certainly did not mean the good kind of mouth-watering old ham, when there was another wild round of applause.