The Pirates! (9 page)

‘Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen,' said Black Bellamy, waving for them to calm down. ‘I'm now going to sing you a shanty that is very close to my heart. As you know, I care a great deal about the environment … This one is called “The Last Dolphin In The Sea”.'

‘Oh, honestly!' cried the Pirate Captain. ‘That really is the final straw! Excuse me, Ahab.' And with that the Pirate Captain charged up through the audience and onto the stage.

‘Hello Pirate Captain,' said Black Bellamy in a laconic voice. ‘Fancy seeing you here.'

‘Don't you “hello” me,' said the Pirate Captain, waggling his cutlass. ‘You're stealing my material, you cove!'

‘Pirate Captain! I don't even know how to begin to respond to such a baseless accusation.'

The Pirate Captain drew himself up to his full
height of five feet and nine inches. ‘I've had enough, you swab. We're going to settle this in the time-honoured pirate fashion!'

‘Cutlasses?' shouted a helpful audience member.

‘Pistols maybe?' shouted another excitedly.

‘Wrestling naked in front of a roaring log fire?'

‘Is it something to do with eating?'

‘No,' said the Pirate Captain, turning to the audience. ‘We're going to have a shanty battle.
Mano-a-mano
, with only our voices and ready wit as weapons! What do you say, Black Bellamy?'

‘Why not?' roared Black Bellamy.

The audience cheered as the pirate with the accordion began to play a simple hornpipe. The Pirate Captain tapped his foot a few times.

‘Walking with my big pirate boots on the deck,

Here comes the Pirate Captain with my broad neck,

I sing with confidence, finesse and flair,

My clothes are the best and so is my hair!'

The crew and audience joined in on a chorus of ‘Yo ho hos' and the Pirate Captain fixed Black Bellamy with a challenging eye. Black Bellamy swaggered confidently to the front of the stage.

‘When admirals cry into their pillows at night,

It's Black Bellamy who caused their terrible plight!

I've plundered all of the Seven Seas and more,

Get out of my way when you hear me roar!'

As the crowd sang the chorus, Black Bellamy did a special backwards walk that looked as if his feet were walking forwards. The Pirate Captain stepped up.

‘I move across the stage with sinuous grace,

Singing all the while from my pleasant, open face,

This Black Bellamy's show is a useless waste,

And if you think otherwise then you have no taste!'

On the last line, the Pirate Captain pointed an accusing finger at the audience and was met with a chorus of markedly less enthusiastic yo ho hos.

‘The only thing more famous than my piratical crimes,

Is the super quality of my amazing rhymes

You try your hardest, but your shanties are jokes,

And then you insult these stand-up folks!'

Black Bellamy gestured to the crowd, who nodded and glared at the Pirate Captain. The Pirate Captain puffed out his chest.

‘Only idiots couldn't see that you're a fraud.

I should have expected this from people abroad!

They're vulgar and crass and …'

‘I don't think they appreciated you saying that about their mothers, Captain,' said the pirate with a scarf as they sprinted down the street a few minutes later.

‘You may be right, Number Two,' said the Pirate Captain, using his cutlass to knock aside a bottle that was aimed at his head.

‘It's been a while since we've had an angry mob after us, hasn't it, Captain?' said the pirate in green.

‘Not since the adventure with the Catholic girls' school!' said the pirate with long legs.

‘I feel a bit bad about Ahab.'

‘You mean his leg snapping off? I'm sure he's got lots of spares.'

‘Yes, I suppose being trampled by furious cowboys would be nothing compared to having your leg bitten off by a whale.'

‘I've decided that showbusiness isn't really for me,' said the Pirate Captain, trying to remember where they had left the boat.

‘It's a bit shallow, Captain,' agreed the pirate with a hook for a hand.

‘Exactly,' said the Pirate Captain. ‘The public
aren't really ready for my material. It may be that I'm one of those innovative types who are doomed to only be appreciated by future generations.'

Next morning, after a terrible dream involving Cutlass Liz and his beard and a big pair of rusty scissors, the Pirate Captain woke to the sound of bits of pirate bones trickling through the egg-timer. He tramped bleary-eyed into the boat's breakfast room. Usually he would have expected to find it full of the merry sounds of pirates staging little naval battles, with their cornflakes as tiny galleons and the milk as the sea, and the sizzle of bacon as distant cannon fire, but today he was greeted only by a restrained munching.

‘Ka-boom!' said the Pirate Captain, as he sat down and spooned some cereal into his mouth, pretending it was Royal Navy boats and that his mouth was a big whirlpool.

‘Hooray! Take that Royal Navy!' a couple of the crew replied, but more than a little half-heartedly.

The Pirate Captain scratched glumly at his
bushy eyebrows. ‘Number Two,' he said to the pirate with a scarf. ‘As soon as these breakfast things have been cleared away, I want us to make sail for Nantucket.'

‘What about the six thousand doubloons?' asked the albino pirate, not able to look the Captain in the eye.
¹⁹

‘Aaarrr,' said the Pirate Captain. ‘We just have to face it, lads – I'm not going to be able to raise the cash in time. I've given it my best shot. We're going to have to hand back the boat.' The men stared at their plates. ‘Besides, there's always a chance Cutlass Liz will decide that a stern telling-off would be a lot less bother than all that messy murdering,' the Captain added unconvincingly.

‘Can't give up now, sir,' said the pirate with rickets. A few of the pirates whispered to each other and then the albino pirate held up a little bag.

‘We've had a bit of a whip-round, Captain,' he said, passing it rather shyly across the table. The
Pirate Captain tipped the bag out next to his plate. It contained:

•
3 pieces of eight

•
Some foreign coins

•
A chocolate groat with fluff on it

•
A ‘one child gets in free' voucher to see the lunatics at Bedlam

•
An apple core

‘Oh …' The Captain pushed the contents about with his fork. ‘Is that it?'

‘Those foreign coins could be valuable,' said the pirate in green hopefully.

‘This one's from Water-flumeland,' said the Pirate Captain, holding it up to the light, ‘which I don't think is even a real country.'

‘We tried our best!' said the pirate with rickets, distraught.

‘I know you did,' said the Pirate Captain. ‘And I'm touched, really I am. But we're in a pickle. We've tried treasure maps and showbusiness, and you've already said you don't much care for me pulling the gold teeth from every man here.
So if you know any other way a pirate can come by a bit of loot, I'd certainly like to hear it.'

‘Why don't you become the spokesperson for treasure?' said the sassy pirate. ‘My uncle was the spokesperson for Beecham's Pills, and he got a lifetime's supply of them for free. You should do that, but for gold and jewels and that kind of thing – I'm sure they'd like to be associated with you.'

‘Or we could start making shell animals, to sell as souvenirs. Everybody likes shell animals, and we have ready access to plenty of shells.'

‘Or we could,' said the pirate in red, rolling his eyes, ‘try some pirating.'

‘Eh?'

‘You know – attacking boats and making off with their treasure. What with us being pirates and all.'

Even though the Pirate Captain didn't care much for the pirate in red's tone, he had to admit that the idea had a certain logic. Now the pirate in red had pointed it out, the Pirate Captain wasn't really sure why it hadn't occurred to them earlier. So after they had finished their
breakfast and drunk some coffee, the noisy pirate climbed up to the crow's nest
²⁰
to look out for passing boats to plunder, whilst the rest of the crew got busy, polishing the cannons and swabbing the decks. They hoisted the Jolly Roger, to show they were back in business, but some of the younger pirates felt the skeleton face was a little too frightening, so they took it back down and used a flag that showed the Pirate Captain waving instead. The Pirate Captain himself took up his position at the ship's wheel and rested his hat on a barrel in order to let his glossy hair and beard billow in the wind. He was just thinking how he might get a portrait commissioned in exactly this pose when they spotted their first boat.

Pirating being a lot like riding a bicycle or making out with a pretty girl, the basics soon
came back to them. They braced the mainsail and fired the cannons and fixed their faces into terrible grimaces, did all the usual roaring and generally made for a fairly horrific sight.
²¹
The pirates were slightly disappointed that the boat turned out to be a leper ship. The lepers were really very understanding, and the pirates came away with some nice bells and a hefty stack of old leper parts, which they thought they might be able to sell to hospitals later on.
²²
The second boat they attacked was full of children out on a school trip. The pirates made a few doubloons by selling the children some opium, and they all had a great time together building Frankensteins out of the bits of leper they had just
collected. When it was time to go home several of the children asked if they could maybe stay and be pirates too, but the Pirate Captain was adamant that they should get back to their mothers, who would be worrying about where they were.

The pirate with a scarf picked up a telescope – making sure to check the eyepiece first, because on board the pirate boat the general consensus seemed to be that ‘the old gags were the best' – and scanned the horizon.

‘Ship ahoy, Captain.'

‘Well, third time lucky,' said the Pirate Captain, a little wearily. ‘It's definitely not penniless refugees or a ghost ship or something like that?'

‘Can't quite tell, Captain. Bit small. Well weathered, but somehow … I don't know … almost
noble
. And she's covered with ivory, by the looks of it.'

‘That sounds more like it. Ivory. White gold! Remember our adventure with elephants?'

‘Does it have a name?' said Jennifer, biting excitedly on a cutlass blade.