by Rhys Hughes
“So he made me walk the longest plank in the world. That’s what he did!
“Where he got such a plank from, if indeed he got it from anywhere, or where he kept it stored when not in use, were questions I asked not. I was too shaky to utter a word. I just recall being dragged from my tiny cell in the hold and pushed out on deck. The longest plank in the world jutted over the side and its far end was lost in a fine mist — or so I thought at first. Then Captain reckless muttered ruefully ‘It’s a shame I don’t have the longest cutlass in the world to jab our prisoner down this plank’ and his crew of ruffians all chortled and bared mirthfully rotten teeth.
“I took my first step along that plank and I heard the scrape of a blade being drawn from a scabbard and I assumed that Captain Reckless intended to execute me himself. A rare honour! I felt a sharp prod at the base of my spine and I increased my pace. But the further I walked, the harder and sharper became the sensation in my back. I now realised the true reason why the far end of the plank was invisible: it was obscured by the curvature of the Earth. Yes, the longest plank in the world really was that long!
“The further I walked, the lower the plank dipped, and still harder jabbed the point of that infernal sword into my flesh. As the plank bent under my weight, my journey became a descent, a mild incline at first but growing steadily steeper. I longed to reach the end and plunge into the cold sea, anything to end the pain in my spine, but still the plank went on, from one horizon to the next, and I began to fear it might circle the globe and take me back to the ship, where I would surely be forced to repeat the journey.
“Finally I could bear no more. I glanced back over my shoulder to beg Captain Reckless, or whoever it was that held the cutlass, to finish me off quickly. Imagine my dismay when I beheld no man at all but a wooden trolley mounted on wheels at the front of which the sword was fixed. There could be no pleading for mercy with this device!
“The mechanics of my doom were simple enough — as I walked along, the plank bent, and as it bent the trolley rolled faster down the increasing gradient. There was no room to stand aside and let it pass and it was too heavy to overturn into the sea. Only one course of action lay open to me: I ran as fast as I could!
“I was able to outdistance it and soon its abominable trundling became like the murmur of an empty glass rolled across a table in another room, but its progress was implacable and it was fated to always increase its speed, while I was only human and too easily fatigued. There was no doubt as to the eventual outcome of this situation...
“On the verge of giving up all hope, I was heartened by a smudge in the distance. My running legs soon resolved this vagueness into a definite shape. Land! A coastline, a port city in fact, and the plank terminated not more than a yard from the edge of a stone quay. What luck! By using a plank this long, Captain Reckless had inadvertently given me an opportunity to escape. I had only to keep running and take that final leap.
“But my legs were tiring fast and the trolley was catching up!
“It is obvious to you all what happened... After all, I am here among you, one of the oldest members of our club. I reached the end of the plank before the trolley reached me, I jumped and landed on the quay, and the plank — abruptly deprived of my weight — sprang back like a catapult, hurling the trolley in the direction of the pirate ship. I like to think it crashed onto the deck and impaled Captain Reckless through the ribs, but I know it probably didn’t. Still a man is allowed his dreams!
“In the port city I climbed onto a bus when nobody was looking and hid at the back. That bus took me to another city where I found work as a dogsbody in a cat hospital and earned enough to pay my fare to yet another city, where I sold my nose — luckily I found a cheap replacement later — for a sum sufficient to keep me travelling... And thus I lived for many months, moving from one city to the next, until I finally reached my hometown. My house was waiting for me like a wife, but with a roof instead of a hat, plus my house wasn’t alive, but all the same...
“I took the key from the chain around my neck, inserted it into the lock, turned once, pulled the handle and the door swung open.
“And there, waiting for me in the shadows, was — you know who!”
* * * *
We all nodded and I even clapped my hands but there was sadness in our appreciation of his story. I wondered if I ought to continue with my own tale at this point, but I was pre-empted by another member, a sweating fat man with an astoundingly unhealthy complexion. He was about fifty years of age but looked as if he had existed twice as long on a diet of nothing but beer and chips. Yet his voice was resonant and rich and I could tell he was used to relating stories. Afterwards I learned that his accent and diet were both Welsh, but at the time I assumed merely that he was overly sentimental, melancholic, verbose, impractical, unambitious and a curious blend of pompous and humble.
“At the North Star, all other directions are south! I mention this fact simply to grab your attention, but the light of that cold distant sun did shine on the lips and tongue of my lover on the night of our rescue, while we kissed.
“I shouldn’t get ahead of myself like that — but it’s better for me to do so than anyone else. That’s my humble, and pompous, opinion!
“A few minutes ago I winced at the words through the ribs. I winced because they reminded me of my own incarceration aboard a pirate ship under the command of Captain Ribs. Yes, that really was his true name, and let me tell you that he was the second worst pirate on the first set of Seven Seas. Your own pirates were like water lilies in comparison, or like coconuts adrift on ocean currents — hairy and full of milk.
“Captain Ribs was a bony freak and a vile philosopher. He had a horrid motto, ‘Life is too short for it to be long for anyone else.’
“He said that to me a dozen times. My knees knocked together!
“To stay alive I had to work for him as an official member of his crew. I was his lookout and I spent most of my time balanced precariously in the crow’s nest watching out for other ships. We sailed around the island of Kurtsy so many times that it went giddy and sank very politely into the sea — which is how it earned its name — and I’m sure we visited every country in the world.
“Apart from the landlocked ones, that is. Like Hungary.
“But one day we entered a region of thick fog, so thick it could be spooned into coffee quite realistically, and I didn’t do my job properly and we collided with a ship sailing the other way, another pirate vessel as it happens, and all hands were lost, and feet too, apart from those belonging to myself and a woman from the other ship, the woman who became my lover when we were finally washed up together on a deserted island. North Star, kisses with tongues.
“Our love eventually produced a baby, our son, and so we became a proper family. When I say ‘eventually’ I mean nine months, obviously. When I say ‘obviously’ I mean that it’s needless to say. Needless.
“Our baby was needful, as are they all, not needless.
“I had escaped Captain Ribs but only in part... The desert island held me to its bosom in the same way a mad monkey holds a small coat. Weird simile, blame the rum, and the beer, and the chips. Anyway, years passed before we were picked up. An oil tanker did the deed, bless its commercial crudity, and its captain was a very slick fellow.
“I made a new life with my woman and child on the mainland and we lived in a cosy house and everything was fine and whenever our child cried one of us would go to its cot to see what the trouble was. One morning just after the sun had risen I heard a strange noise coming from the cot. I turned to my woman and said ‘our son is saying his first words, in fact he is singing them and playing the accordion at the same time.’ And what did my woman say to this? She said ‘It’s your turn to sort him out.’
“So I got out of bed and wrapped a dressing gown around myself and I left the bedroom and I approached the cot and I saw that it was sagging on its legs, as if it held a weight greater than any normal child, and I saw how it
bulged at the sides, and I scratched my head in confusion and I approached it cautiously.
“Then I looked inside and saw — you know who!”
* * * *
Once again the entire company nodded. I felt closer to them than before and I had the feeling they finally accepted me now, regarded me as one of them, despite the fact I still hadn’t finished my tale. The man with the extended finger, the evident leader of the group, grimaced as if he had swallowed an unpleasant substance, angled his head as if waiting for syrup to pour out of his left ear, and began speaking. There was regret in his eyes as he did so, but his tone was steady and elegantly sardonic.
“I can also say something striking to commence my tale. For instance: total war can elicit half-hearted cries in certain quarters... But I don’t need to pepper my life with lyrical phrases, whether appropriate or not. My experience will speak for itself, even though it has no mouth. For itself, but through me.
“Knees knock together — yes, they often do. Knock hard!
“Captain Knock was the pirate who captured me and he was the second worst pirate on the first set of Seven Seas. Believe me! He wanted to be different from other pirates, more extravagant and colourful, and so he decided to own the shoulder with the biggest ever parrot sitting on it. Other pirates had ordinary parrots but Captain Knock found a parrot bigger than he was. No wonder he walked with a stoop!
“He found the parrot just off the coast of Persia — modern day Iran.
“It was a beautiful bird with orange feathers and a silver beak, but there was something not quite parroty about it, if you take my meaning, and I began to wonder if Captain Knock had made a mistake. At night it perched on the taffrail of our ship, enjoying the moonbeams. I sometimes went to visit it stealthily, but it never spoke to me, and gradually I realised that this was no parrot — it was a simurgh.
“The simurgh is a creature similar to the phoenix but completely different!
“I had heard long ago about how the simurgh is an inherently benevolent bird, and so one midnight I mounted its back and urged it to flight. Up we went, the flapping of the great wings alerting the pirates to my escape. Sleepy and bleary eyed they loaded muskets and fired, but all the bullets missed. The simurgh wanted me to survive because it had a good soul. It carried me safely away.
“It landed in a garden encircled by lofty mountains and here I lived in peace. One day, to my astonishment, it laid an egg, and we took turns sitting on it. I came closer to knowing simple happiness than ever before or since, and Captain Knock, the second worst pirate on the first set of Seven Seas, was long forgotten, but then the egg hatched while I was sitting on it. Yes, it hatched directly beneath me.
“And what came out was — you know who!”
* * * *
I made no attempt to resume my own story because I assumed everyone else would want to tell theirs first, leaving mine to be the last. But I was wrong about this and slowly all eyes around the table swivelled to focus on me. There was an air of expectation, a tainted air but an air all the same, in the same way that the air that hisses out of a punctured sausage is tainted. Well not quite like that. I also realised that apart from the three who had already spoken, the tales of the other members followed directly from my own, and then I felt guilty, although there was no reason why I should be blamed for anything. Captain Salve was the man who had caused the chaos, not me.
“You want to know what the reckless thing was?” I asked. “The reckless thing he did after that risotto at the East Pole?”
The heads all nodded and so I poured myself more rum.
“Well he was a compulsive thief, as I said before...” I began.
“And?” they whispered urgently.
I shifted uncomfortably in my chair. “And then he stole it.”
“Stole what?” came the chorus.
“The pole! The East Pole! What else? He stole the pole, the actual pole, the striped length of wood at latitude 0°, longitude 90°E. He tied one end of a rope to it and connected the other end to his capstan. How we grunted as we pushed the levers. With a dreadful sucking sound out came the pole, like a healthy tooth from a tricked gum! And what then? Do you really want to know?”
“We already know, we knew all along.”
I nodded and laughed. “Of course you did! The pole acted like a giant plug in an immense hole in the seabed and suddenly all the water started spiralling down into the centre of the Earth and all the pirate ships gathered at that spot began to spin round too... Well some of them were anchored with plenty of slack, some with none, others with thin ropes that snapped easily, a few weren’t anchored at all, and the result was a terrible series of collisions that smashed every last vessel to splinters. What a mess!
“Fortunately for the world, some of the wreckage plugged the hole again, otherwise the oceans might have drained entirely away and the first set of Seven Seas would be nothing more than seven smelly deserts littered with pale fishbones.
“My own ship was broken and Captain Salve was probably drowned.
“His first name was Lipsy, if anyone is interested to know that. Lipsy Salve. I see that nobody here cares one way or another. That’s fair enough!
“I never saw Captain Salve again, but I survived and I wasn’t alone, for several other people aboard some of the other destroyed ships also survived. We clung to the East Pole as it floated across the Indian Ocean. Looking around this room I note that many of the members of the club were the men and women who shared my experience. I apologise for not recognising you earlier. During a storm the pole struck a reef and broke into many small pieces and we all went drifting off in different directions. I went south.”
The man with the extended finger winked horribly. “Oh yes? And what happened next?”
Before I could answer, he withdrew his finger and I saw that it had been plugging a hole in the table. Now the puddle of spilled rum poured through it onto the floor with a grotesque slurping noise and I was brought face to face, on a more domestic scale, with what had happened on that fateful day when Captain Salve tried to steal the East Pole. But the man whose finger was no longer extended had demonstrated bad timing, because I was already past that point in my tale, and unsure of how seriously to take his gesture I almost floundered, which possibly was his intention.
“I continued south,” I said, “until I stopped going that way.”
“Why did you stop?” he demanded.
“I was swallowed by a whale. At least I thought it was a whale, in fact I thought it was Moby K Dick, the Paranoia Whale, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t anything alive. It was a false whale, a submarine disguised as a whale, with an airlock designed to work like jaws. Down I went, into the stomach, and holding aloft a lamp there stood — you know who!”
“Yes we know who! Captain Worst!”
“That’s right. Captain Worst — the worst pirate on the first set of Seven Seas!”
“He waited for all of us in a similar way. He waited on the thresholds of our own homes, in the cots of our children, in the eggs of fabulous birds. There is much disagreement about who is the second worst pirate on the first set of Seven Seas, but nobody disputes who is the very worst. Captain Worst. Who else could it be?”
“What a supreme rascal he is! What an ineffable blackguard!”
“He crews his ship only with men and women who have escaped from other pirates. It’s his trademark and the reason we are all together...”
Our meeting was suddenly interrupted by the tolling of an iron bell near the ceiling. I hadn’t noticed it until now. At the same time, a furious stamping on the boards high above alerted the company to the fact it was time to return to work. We stood and climbed the ladder to the deck. I spied a ship on the horizon and realised we were preparing to attack it. Captain Worst is a terrible fellow but even he has his good side, allowing members of his crew to form a private club in one of the larger cabins. As I made my way to the nearest cannon I wondered aloud:
“Will any of us ever escap
e from Captain Worst?”
“Not worth the attempt,” came the reply from behind me, and I shuddered at the sound of that voice. “Who knows who might pick you up next? I may be the worst pirate on the first set of Seven Seas but that says nothing about the second set of Seven Seas — Seas Eight to Fourteen. Count yourself fortunate, my friend, and remember that the worst is sometimes the best!”
I nodded briskly and loaded the cannon as quickly as I could.
3: Castor on the Seven Plus Seas
Many centuries have passed since the total number of seas on the planet was seven. Thanks to geography and inflation, the total is now closer to seventy. Some of the new seas are watery enough to satisfy the pickiest of ancient helmsmen, but others are wholly metaphoric in character, less damp than their material counterparts but equally deep or even deeper. If you care to follow Castor on those seas, and over the edge of the world, be sure to learn how to swim in ink and float on fables.
Chuckleberry Grin
“Shall I tell a new story?” asked Castor Jenkins.
Paddy Deluxe shrugged. “I don’t mind; provided it’s not about the time you entered yourself in Bankcrufts, the bankrupt dogs’ show, and won the first prize just by tagging your wail.”
“Or about the time you hunted fossils for a living, blasting them to bits with bazookas,” said Frothing Harris.
“Or about the time you ate a storm cloud and it tasted like blackcurrant jam but then it rained in your stomach for forty nights and forty days and the other foodstuffs in your gut had to construct an ark to survive but got stuck on the edge of your appetite and were forced to turn to cannibalism and be devoured for a second time.”
Castor considered this. “Well, I’m willing to do negative requests. Tell me what you don’t want to hear and I promise not to mention it. I have no issue with pandering to my public!”
