by Gideon Defoe
‘A hundred doubloons,’ said Mary, flicking through the brochure. ‘That does seem very reasonable.’
‘Plus sundries,’ said the Captain.
Three
The Spectral Brine
‘I can’t believe we’re having an actual feast with actual pirates!’ exclaimed Byron, happily thumping the boat’s dining table. ‘See here – this placemat is in the shape of a treasure map! Brilliant!’
The pirates had spent the afternoon giving their guests a tour of the boat, taking care to point out the important nautical bits, like the sails. The Captain, worried they might be disappointed with how small the place was, ended up walking Byron and his friends around it three times, but in a variety of directions, giving the masts and cannons different names on each circuit. After that he’d got the lads to sing a few of the more risqué shanties, and now they were in the midst of a pirate feast. In honour of their guests being poets, the pirates had laid on a menu of dishes made out of food that rhymed, because they wanted to look classy.
‘Of course – being a pirate is not quite as glamorous as people make out,’ said the Captain, thinking he could afford to dial it back it a little, having just finished an unlikely story about blowing up the kraken by a kicking a barrel of dynamite at its head. ‘There’s a surprising amount of paperwork these days. And it turns out there’s a lot of boring technical what-have-you that makes the boat go along. You can’t just strap a porpoise to the wheel and swan off to have cocktails. Learnt that the hard way.’
‘Pfft!’ roared Byron, taking a big bite out of his lamb and clam ciabatta. ‘I won’t hear it! What a life. Not knowing what the next day might bring! Adventuring! Derring-do! Boys wearing outsized jewellery! It’s exactly the kind of thing we’ve been looking for.’
‘But you say you’re writers? That must be interesting too,’ said the Pirate Captain, turning to Mary and waggling his eyebrows at her in as debonair a way as he could. ‘As a matter of fact, I’m something of a gentleman of letters myself.’
‘Really?’ said Mary, incredulous. ‘You write? What sort of things do you write about?’
‘Oh, you know,’ said the Captain, waving his fork in a vague circle and looking to whichever side it is that you look to when you’re not being entirely honest. ‘Emotions. Waves breaking on a rocky shore. The usual artistic bits and bobs.’
‘We’re not just “writers”,’ interjected Shelley, picking unenthusiastically at his spam and yam salad. ‘You can’t reduce a man to the label of his profession.’
‘Look!’ said Byron, ‘now I’m drinking pirate grog out of a mug made from a skull! It’s as atmospheric as it is impractical!’
‘So how would you describe yourselves?’ asked the pirate with a scarf.
‘We . . .’ said Shelley, flicking his hair with a flourish, ‘. . . are romantics.’
‘Ah,’ said the Captain, after a long pause, and with what he hoped would pass as a ‘wise’ nod. ‘Is that like a gang?’
Shelley visibly bristled. ‘No, Pirate Captain. It is not “like a gang”.’
‘Are you sure? You do seem a lot like a gang. You’ve obviously got a brave and headstrong leader,’ he waved at Byron, who was too busy laughing at a spoon with a mermaid drawn on it to notice, ‘a plucky girl,’ he indicated Mary, who just arched an eyebrow and went on thoughtfully licking her ham and jam popsicle, ‘and a slightly ratty one,’ he pointed back at Shelley, who frowned. ‘So you’re pretty much there. Though you should probably get a loyal dog with a sensitive nose as well. Always find it’s best for gangs to have a loyal dog with a sensitive nose. And matching jackets! The jackets could have some romantic emblem on the back. An albatross? They mate for life, you see, so it’s one of the most romantic creatures. Though it might look too much like a seagull unless you write the word albatross underneath it. Only then people could think your gang was called “the Albatrosses” rather than “the Romantics”. Doesn’t have to be an albatross. I’m just brainstorming here.’
‘It’s not a gang,’ Shelley persisted, sounding petulant. ‘In fact, we don’t approve of any sort of organisations. We believe in the individual! It’s a whole new way of looking at life.’
‘Oh, right, got you,’ lied the Captain.
Shelley leaned forward, and his eyes blazed a bit. ‘We have a dream, Captain. Imagine, if you will, a world run not by politicians . . . but by artists.’
‘That sounds terrible,’ blurted out Jennifer, because she was the crew member who tended to say out loud what the rest of the crew was thinking.
The poet didn’t appear to have noticed. ‘The world has become so drab of late,’ he went on. ‘Everything’s about logic and industry and science and things being “rational”. Well, we reject all of that!’
‘But surely,’ said Jennifer, ‘science and “being rational” are quite good? You know. Advances in medicine. Technological innovation. Not being in thrall to mumbo-jumbo superstitions?’
‘I’m afraid you have a terribly Western view of culture, young lady. Can science write you a poem? Can medicine paint you a landscape? Can engineering make your spirits soar?’ Shelley sat back and looked pleased with himself.
‘It can build you a sewer,’ pointed out Jennifer. ‘I quite like working sewers.’ She turned to Byron and Mary. ‘You all go along with this romantic stuff, do you?’
Byron shrugged. ‘Percy’s the theoretical one. I tend to be a bit more . . .’ he fished for a description. ‘Hands on. Do you know, I once punched a donkey? For no reason at all! Just the simple thrill of living in the moment. If you ask me, the key to a really artistic way of life is total impulsiveness. No thinking things through if you can possibly help it.’10
‘Yes, I’m like that,’ said the Captain, offering Mary some zucchini blinis. ‘The other week I refused to eat anything that wasn’t a suckling pig and/or drizzled in honey. Pure impulse.’
‘Exactly! I can see we’re cut from the same cloth, you and I. Men who must constantly breathe in all the sensual delights the world has to offer, lest we suffocate without them.’ Byron threw out his arms expansively. ‘Tell me, Captain, do you ever just find you’ve spent the entire day marvelling at how nice your own hair is?’
‘All the time!’
‘Me too!’
‘Oh good grief,’ muttered the pirate in red, burying his face in a napkin. ‘There are two of them.’
After the feast, the pirates served coffee and chocolates in the Captain’s cabin and refused the Romantics’ offers to help wash up, on the grounds that they were paying guests. Because it was the nineteenth century people had to make their own after-dinner entertainments – they couldn’t just slump in front of old Friends episodes and say, ‘Oh, this is the season when Chandler was on crack, look how thin he is,’ like they do nowadays – so Shelley suggested they play a game.
‘It’s a little thing we invented whilst stuck in that villa,’ he explained. ‘We challenge ourselves to come up with the most moving work of literature possible on the spot. You’ve got to think fast, but it’s just fun. Not a competition.’
‘Not a competition, right, got you,’ said the Pirate Captain. He didn’t fancy Shelley’s chances much.
‘Each person throws out three completely random objects and the other has to improvise something literary about them. The winner is the one who moves the audience to tears.’
‘See, that’s interesting, because us pirates tend to play a similar sort of game. After dinner, we close our eyes and throw cutlasses around. The winner is the one with as many eyes at the end of the game as he had at the start.’ The Captain shrugged. ‘But hey! You’re paying – so let’s give your version a shot.’
‘Pirate Captain, as our host, I’d like you to give me my three objects,’ boomed Byron.
The Pirate Captain didn’t like to be put on the spot. Three objects was a lot of objects and it seemed a bit much to get a question like this out of the blue. But nonetheless he rubbed his temples to get the brain juice flo
wing and did his best to think. ‘A ruined lighthouse!’ he said, after a while.
‘Don’t make it too easy for him,’ said Percy.
‘An owl’s egg.’
The Pirate Captain thought hard about the last one. He’d never played baseball, because baseball didn’t really get popular until the 1850s, but if he had, he’d have realised that what he was looking for was a curveball.
‘A loss adjuster in a medium-sized insurance concern.’
Byron cracked his knuckles, fluffed his blousy shirt and climbed up to stand on the remains of his pudding.
‘O Egg! Who comes from such wise arse,
That borne thee spinning to scrivener’s jaws . . .’
Byron’s poem was quite long. The loss adjuster, Philetaerus, was an arrogant, moody chap, doomed to inspect maritime property damage as penance for the death of his sister. He stalked the coast, haunted by a supernatural owl that may or may not have been the spirit of his monstrous father. The owl mostly taunted him by laying ghostly eggs into his open mouth when he was asleep. The end came when Philetaerus was swept from a ruined lighthouse into the sea by a wave that represented conventional society.
Everybody agreed it was a fantastic work of literature, and if gasps were the measure of success, Byron would have carried the night. But nobody cried. Shelley’s lip wobbled, Mary seemed to have drifted off about halfway through, and the crew got bogged down debating whether ghost owls would eat ghost mice or regular mice.
Next up was Shelley. Inspired by the bric-a-brac that littered the Captain’s cabin, Byron suggested a happy wolf’s head, a plaster mermaid and a pair of scissors.
After each one, Shelley did a small, serious nod.
‘A tricky triumvirate, my friend!’ he said, ‘but not so tricky that it can overcome the Muse. I give you . . . The Waning Lament!’
The Pirate Captain was pretty sure Shelley had some sort of system worked out for his improvised poetry, because there was a clever bit where he rhymed ‘lupine grin’ with ‘marine chin’ that definitely sounded rehearsed. Unfortunately, Shelley’s verse went over the heads of most of his audience, because despite their many years sailing with the Pirate Captain, none of the crew were able to decipher the clever allegory of a water spirit’s desire to cut loose the ties of normal family life and journey to a Fairy Queen’s tomb, so once again nobody cried. Shelley looked fed up.
‘That was a very good attempt, Percy,’ said the Pirate Captain, magnanimously.
‘Who’s next? Mary?’
Mary seemed about to speak, but Shelley cut in. ‘No, Pirate Captain. Mary and I are very forward thinking, and, as such, we feel that it’s wrong, politically, for a woman to perform purely for the entertainment of men. Isn’t that right, Mary?’
‘Oh,’ said Mary, wincing a little. ‘I suppose we do think that, yes.’
‘So it’s your turn,’ said Shelley, turning back to the Captain. ‘What, I wonder, might you make from a dartboard, a burning flame and the concept of free will.’
‘Well, that’s easy,’ said the Pirate Captain, not missing a beat. ‘A dartboard and a burning flame were in love, but then the concept of free will came along and the dartboard fancied it, so there was a love triangle. It all came to a head and in a moment of passion the burning flame accidentally set a tiny puppy on fire.’
The pirates looked distraught.
‘Sadly, the puppy’s injuries were too grave and he passed away. The dartboard and the other things were pretty cut up about it and stopped arguing. The end.’
Everybody apart from Percy clapped. Tears streamed down Byron’s big cheeks, and he raised his mug of grog aloft. ‘Bravo, Pirate Captain! Bravo! A tragic tale! Such humanity!’
Shelley shifted in his seat. ‘I’m not saying it wasn’t a nice story. It was very moving. But can I ask one thing?’
‘Fire away.’
‘How did the dartboard talk?’
‘Good question,’ said the Pirate Captain, pondering for a moment. ‘I’d say he probably had a little mouth in the bullseye. Do you want me to do the voice?’
‘No, I think that’s all right,’ said Shelley, pulling a face and looking rather irritably at his pocket watch. ‘So, this evening has been a lot of fun, but if it’s not too rude a question, when exactly does our exciting adventure begin?’
‘Aarrr,’ said the Pirate Captain, at something of a loss. ‘I’m sure one will be along any moment now.’
The cabin fell quiet. A few rats messed about in the rafters. The boring sound of cowbells wafted across the lake. After a moment, Mary coughed. ‘How do they tend to get going? The adventures, I mean?’
‘It can be all sorts,’ explained the Captain. ‘Unexpected octopus attack.11 Some sort of nefarious trick played by my aforementioned nemesis, Black Bellamy. Or, I don’t know, a flaming seagull might crash through that porthole at any moment, carrying a curious summons in its beak.’12
Everybody stared at the porthole for a while. Flaming seagulls pointedly failed to crash through it.
The Pirate Captain grinned awkwardly. ‘Oh well, you know what they say – a watched adventure never boils. But, um, feel free to have the run of the boat until whatever exciting thing is going to happen kicks off. There are some very romantic barrels of weevils knocking about, you might want to check those out.’
Four
A Fantasmagoria Ate My Face
Early next morning the pirate with a scarf found the Pirate Captain pacing back and forth across his cabin, like a hairy metronome, or a sad polar bear. So far as anybody could tell, they still weren’t on an adventure, and the Captain was worried that if a grisly murder or a woman with flashing eyes didn’t turn up soon then the Romantics might start to have second thoughts about the entire business. After a little while he stopped pacing, picked up a tin of biscuits and perched on the edge of his desk, looking thoughtful.
‘So what do you think of our guests, number two?’ he asked his deputy, as he fished around for a custard cream, which were still his favourites.
‘They seem nice enough,’ the pirate with a scarf replied, sitting down on the Captain’s chaise longue. ‘Mister Byron is certainly very enthusiastic.’
‘Yes – good nautical sort, Byron. Brine in his veins. You can just tell. Not so sure about that Shelley fellow. You know how brilliant I am at working out people’s entire personalities solely based upon their physiognomy? As soon as I clapped eyes on him I thought – “Hello! Here’s a chap with a suspicious upper lip!” Too fleshy. Or not fleshy enough. One of those.’ The Captain paused, then rubbed his beard and ostentatiously stifled what the pirate with a scarf recognised as a ‘nonchalant yawn’. ‘How about the other one?’
‘Mary?’
‘Is that her name? I forget.’
‘I like her. She seems both clever and curious,’ said the pirate with a scarf, after a moment’s consideration. He knew that the Captain liked him to keep character descriptions to no more than two easily identifiable traits, because anything more gave him a headache.
‘Clever and curious. Hmmm.’ The same distracted expression that the Pirate Captain normally got walking past a butcher’s crept across his face. ‘Did you notice her eyes?’
‘I noticed she had eyes.’
‘Yes, they’re sort of like . . . limpid pools. But brown. Can limpid pools be brown?’
‘I suppose so. If the limpid pools have mud or gravy or something like that in them,’ said the pirate with a scarf.
‘And then there’s her skin. Her skin’s like . . . like . . .’
The Captain floundered for a bit, and the pirate with a scarf thought about suggesting ‘satin’ or ‘fine alabaster’, but the Pirate Captain was never going to get any better at doing similes if he helped him out every time, so he held his tongue.
‘. . . like bacon!’ said the Captain, triumphant. ‘Well, shiny like bacon can sometimes be.’
‘She’s certainly quite striking,’ agreed the pirate with a scarf.
‘If
you say so. Can’t say she made much of an impression on me. To be honest, I barely remember anything about her at all.’ The Captain trailed off, because, at that moment, through a porthole, he caught sight of Mary emerging from her cabin. She strolled across the deck, draped a delicate hand over the boat’s railing, and shook her hair loose in the breeze. For some weird reason the Captain was pretty sure that she managed to do all that in slow motion. He hopped off his desk and patted down his beard.
‘Anyhow, number two, can’t stay and chinwag all day. I’ve just realised that I should probably go and carry out my regular boat inspection.’
And, before the pirate with a scarf could point out it was Thursday, and that boat inspections were on Tuesdays, and also that they only took place every six years or so anyway, because the health and safety regime onboard was notoriously lax, the Pirate Captain had already barrelled out the door.
The Captain’s boat inspections were always pretty slapdash, because they mainly just involved him looking at the ropes and planks and barnacles and then nodding to show that he approved of whatever they happened to be doing. But today’s inspection was even less thorough than usual, because as soon as he was done approving of a blocky wood thing with a hole in it, the Captain forgot all about inspecting things and turned his attention to Mary instead. She didn’t seem to have noticed him, as she stood gazing out across the lake with a faraway look on her face. The Pirate Captain cricked his neck, narrowed his eyes, and decided that now seemed a good time to employ his patented conversational gambit, which was also known as ‘the standard protocol’ – first of all he would establish himself as aloof, then he’d be funny, and finally he’d be deep. It never failed to impress a lady and when it did, that was the exception that proved the rule, because it was foolproof.
