The Pirates! in an Adventure with the Romantics Read online

  To Peter Lord,

  Who has his own film studio. You can’t

  compete with that, can you, Sophie?

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Unit One: Pronunciation – Meet Boris and Anna

  A trip to the bank – No joy for the Pirate Captain – Schemes – An opportunity!

  Unit Two: Basic Grammar – Boris and Anna take the Subway together

  The Villa Diodati – A pretty girl – Stormy moods – A deal is struck

  Unit Three: Making Small Talk – Boris asks Anna to come on a picnic

  An actual feast! – Not a competition – Waiting for adventure

  Unit Four: Expressing Possibilities – Boris and Anna look for jobs

  Discussing the guests – Aloof – Funny – Deep

  Unit Five: Socialising – Boris and Anna throw a party

  An unconvincing plan – Eskimo attack! – The Captain’s tattoo – Adventure at last

  Unit Six: In the Workplace – Anna tells Boris about her new colleague Sergei

  To London! – A grumpy sort of man – The code deciphered?

  Unit Seven: Asking for Directions – Sergei invites Anna to see his band

  The Captain is out of sorts – Advice from Jennifer – Arrival in Oxford

  Unit Eight: Dining Out – Boris eats dinner alone

  Visiting the library – A secret shared – An unexpected incident!

  Unit Nine: Advanced Grammar – Boris and Anna have a disagreement

  Success? – Surely it’s just a legend! – Percy’s plan

  Unit Ten: Booking Accommodation – Boris stays at the YMCA

  Shelley’s Account – A terrible warning

  Unit Eleven: Shopping Made Easy – Boris purchases a kitchen knife

  Collected Ephemera

  Unit Twelve: Out on the Town – Boris meets Sergei by a canal

  Advice is sought – Subtext in the tavern – A shocking leaflet

  Unit Thirteen: Handling Emergencies – Sergei has an unfortunate accident

  The castle – Looking for clues – The great switcheroo

  Unit Fourteen: Verb Tables – Boris spends a night in the woods

  An awful discovery – An uncomfortable breakfast – The Captain takes charge – Disappointment – A ghost!

  Unit Fifteen: All About Pronouns – The police find Anna

  Shelley has a plan – Contacting the dead – The villain unmasked!

  Unit Sixteen: Difficult Questions – Boris appears on television!

  A moral dilemma – Vanished! – Things hot up – To the crypt!

  Unit Seventeen: 10 Things to Avoid – Boris is cornered in the parking lot

  A very long explanation – Another code – The prize is found!

  Unit Eighteen: The Past Tense – Boris refuses to go quietly

  A tug of war – A difficult choice – A noble speech – Whoops

  Unit Nineteen: A Visit to the Hospital – Boris finds some peace at last

  Saying goodbye – New plans – A comforting thought

  Appendix – On Feelings

  About the Author

  List of Illustrations

  ‘Everybody gasped as Ruth squeezed the tenth ping pong ball into her mouth. The community centre was saved!’

  ‘Valerie narrowed her eyes. “That’s no turtle,” she whispered, giving the strange creature a prod with her toothbrush.’

  ‘Jim had never met a talking bookcase before. He sighed – it seemed like today was just going to be one annoying thing after another.’

  ‘The stocky man with the scar was back – and this time, Dave was relieved to see, he had the biscuits.’

  ‘All the children clapped and laughed with delight – it was the best pie-chart any of them had ever seen!’

  ‘Fig 1: The Bering Land Bridge at the last glacial maximum, as reconstructed from the latest research. Fig 2: Vin Diesel in “The Pacifier”.’

  ‘Sparklechops leapt over the fence. “Go Pony, go!” shouted Putin.’

  ‘Eliza burst into tears. The world’s biggest parsnip – and it was ruined!’

  ‘If the President’s button phobia ever got out, Brigid knew she could kiss goodbye to that promotion. She squeezed the trigger.’

  ‘Meringue!’ said Illiana.

  One

  Fate Wore A Tentacle

  ‘The most exciting way to start an adventure,’ said the albino pirate, ‘would be to open in the sinister lair of the International Crime League, eavesdropping as they plotted their most audacious crime yet – the theft of the Queen’s brain!’

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ said the pirate with gout. ‘The most exciting way to start an adventure would be to wake up inside a room, next to a dead body, two pieces of coal, and an unexplained carrot – but there’s apparently no way in or out of the room!’

  ‘How about finding yourself in a regular-looking café . . . but then, when you open the door – it turns out you’re in space!’

  ‘What if, overnight, plants started walking backwards.’

  Soon all the pirate crew joined in the argument about what the most exciting way to start an adventure might be. Usually this would escalate from polite to heated to vociferous before you could say ‘guts everywhere’, ‘arterial spray’ or ‘horrific splatter pattern’, but today, because the pirates were sitting in the vestibule of a fusty Swiss bank and one of the bank clerks was giving them a stern look, they decided it was probably best to keep the noise down. The albino pirate stopped waggling his cutlass at the pirate with bedroom eyes and stared at a pot plant instead. The pirate with gout picked up a magazine and went back to reading an article about dividends. The pirate with a scarf gazed out of the window to where the pirate boat lay parked on the rain-drenched, achingly dull shore of Lake Geneva, thought a bit about the nature of irony, and yawned.

  Inside the bank manager’s office the Pirate Captain tipped back in his chair, swung his boots onto the big mahogany desk and did his most winning smile, which involved showing off all of his teeth, even the molars.1 His years at sea had left him tanned and weathered – but weathered in a good way, like an antique globe or a vintage fireplace, not in a bad way, like Val Kilmer or a mouldy coffee cup – and if you were to compare him to a type of gastropod, which was the latest thing his crew tended to compare him to, he’d probably be a luxuriantly bearded conch, or maybe a whelk with a pleasant, open face. The Captain wasn’t keen on being compared to types of gastropod, so he’d been trying to persuade them to compare him to other things instead:

  He hadn’t had much luck so far. The crew were adamant that he had a lot more in common with whelks. The Captain pointed out that unlike whelks – which use a large muscular foot to pin down their lobster prey – he had two large muscular feet, didn’t care for shellfish as much as people made out, and lacked any kind of extendable proboscis tipped with a sharp radula at all, but once the pirates had something in their heads it was hard to shake it.

  ‘So, I was thinking that a thousand doubloons should do the trick,’ said the Captain, pointedly not scratching his shell, because he wasn’t much like a whelk. ‘I realise that sounds like quite a lot, but you know how day-to-day expenses can mount up. As it happens, I made a list, in case you don’t.’ He pulled a napkin from his coat pocket. ‘Let’s see: Spare bits of rope – thirty-five doubloons. Press-ganging – that’s fifty. New hats – that’s another fifty.’ The Captain tapped his tricorn. ‘Might seem frivolous to you, but it’s important to keep up with the latest season’s fashions in order to maintain the lads’ respect. You can’t put a value on respect. Where was I? Ah, yes: Christmas presents for Scurvy J
ake, twenty-five . . . new barbecue . . . forty . . . and the rest is “sundries”.’

  The bank manager, who like most people in his income bracket was made mostly of jowls, peered over his half-moon spectacles. ‘Eight hundred doubloons for “sundries”?’

  ‘Can’t get by without the sundries. Say the word a few times, it’s very satisfying. “Sundries”.’

  ‘Pirate Captain. In today’s wintry financial climate, credit is not so readily available as it once was.’

  ‘Ah, no, of course. The markets,’ said the Pirate Captain, with a conspiratorial nod. He had recently taken to dropping phrases like ‘the markets’ into conversation to give the impression he understood economic matters. The bank manager pulled a face as sober as his suit.

  ‘And your account is now nine thousand doubloons in the red.’

  ‘Is red the good colour? I can never remember.’

  ‘No, Captain. Red is not the good colour. We’ve been trying to contact you for several months regarding this matter, but you don’t appear to have replied to any of our letters.’

  ‘Ah. If you think I was avoiding them, then you’re wrong. I actually didn’t even open those letters because I assumed they were birthday cards. And, thanks to a clerical error, you thought I had a birthday twice a month.’ The Captain helped himself to a complimentary mint from the little tray on the manager’s desk, and did his winning grin again. ‘I’m doing my winning grin again,’ he explained. ‘I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but if you look closely you’ll see I’ve had tiny grinning faces carved into some of my gold teeth to make it an even more winning grin than it would otherwise be.2 So. How about this loan, then?’

  ‘Sorry, Pirate Captain,’ said the bank manager. ‘I’m afraid that this time, we really won’t be able to oblige.’

  The Captain puffed out his hairy cheeks and tried another tack.

  ‘Look, you have to understand – piracy isn’t like other jobs. One minute you’re swimming in pearls and eating diamonds instead of cereal, the next you’re clinging to a raft made from dead pygmies without a penny to your name. The thing we’re dealing with here is what I believe your sort refer to as “a temporary liquidity issue”.’

  ‘I’m well aware of the piracy business model,’ said the bank manager, wobbling his jowls sympathetically. ‘After all, we pride ourselves on being the bank of choice for . . . the more unsavoury professions.’ He gestured at the wall, which was covered in pictures of famous pirates, gangsters, deposed dictators and other bank managers.

  ‘It just doesn’t seem like piracy is a very lucrative career for you, Pirate Captain. Have you considered doing something else? I hear plumbing is surprisingly well paid. People will always need plumbers.’

  The Pirate Captain leapt to his feet as if he’d found a jellyfish in his boot. ‘You insult me, sir! I am a pirate to the core! If you cut me in half – this is a metaphor by the way, so don’t actually do it – if you cut me in half you wouldn’t find intestines and bits of spine and blood. No! It would be more like a stick of seaside rock and running through that rock would be the words “ONE HUNDRED PER CENT PIRATE” in big bold letters.3 I’d never give up the pirating life! Never!’

  ‘I heard you were a beekeeper for a while.’

  The Captain sat back down. ‘That was different. And, anyway, it turns out there’s no money in bees either. People aren’t ready for my avant-garde take on honey.’

  The bank manager tapped a pencil on his desk and adopted the conciliatory tone that works well with toddlers when they’ve been told they can’t eat glue.

  ‘Shall we talk about repayment terms?’

  ‘Sorry. I’m afraid you’ve got my blood up now, and I find it impossible to think about money when I’m having an emotion. I demand to see my lawyer!’

  ‘This really isn’t a legal matter, Pirate Captain.’

  The Pirate Captain tossed his beard about and waved his arms. ‘Oh, it’s all becoming clear to me! Shall I tell you what the problem is? It’s that you don’t know what it is to live and laugh and love and run a man through! You’ve never tasted the salty air on your tongue or waved heartily at a mermaid! It would be impolite to call you a shrivelled little bean counter who wouldn’t know drama if it kissed you on the mouth, but nonetheless – I’m afraid that’s exactly what you are. You people have no flair, no romance, no sense of adventure! Everything’s just numbers for you! Well, you can’t reduce passion and flair and eating ham to numbers, sir! Good day to you!’

  And with that he swept out of the room, slamming the door behind him. The bank manager shook his head and made a weary note in his ledger. A few moments later the door creaked open and the Pirate Captain crept back in, picked up a handful of the complimentary mints and crept back out again.

  ‘Right lads,’ said the Pirate Captain, tapping his cutlass against his boot buckle to get everyone’s attention. ‘There’s no way to sugar-coat this – we’re going to have to tighten our belts.’

  The pirate crew, now sprawled on the deck of the pirate boat, made a few unhappy noises, and some of the more literal-minded ones sucked in their bellies and wondered out loud if the bits of seaweed that held up their stripy trousers counted as belts.

  ‘Let’s be honest,’ the Captain continued. ‘It was pretty much 100 per cent me and my carefree attitude to finances that got us into this mess, so arguably I’ve already done my bit. Therefore it seems only right that these unfortunate economies should fall squarely on the rest of you. Probably sensible to start with the elderly and disabled pirates,’ he waved cheerily at the pirate with a hook for a hand and the pirate with skin the texture of old accordions, ‘seeing as they’re less able to stand up for themselves.’

  The pirates all nodded at this logic, because it seemed pretty watertight.

  ‘With that in mind, I’ve decided to ring-fence the budget for my beard-care products, and it goes without saying that I’m not going to be eating any less ham than I usually do. But everything else is on the table. So: who’s got any ideas?’

  This wasn’t the first time the pirates had found themselves in a tricky financial position, so they ran through a few of their usual moneymaking schemes. The pirate in green thought they should start a mania for tulip bulbs; the pirate with long legs thought they should try their hands at counterfeiting pigs; and Jennifer, the former Victorian lady who had joined the crew on a previous adventure, suggested that they could ask children for their pocket money in return for running through any siblings they didn’t get along with, because children were quite immoral. Several pirates had heard that ‘white collar’ crime was a pretty easy option, but they didn’t really know what it involved. Also very few of them wore collars of any description, and those that did certainly didn’t have white collars, partly because nothing was very clean onboard the pirate boat, and partly because they knew not to wear white after Labour Day. They were pirates, not animals.

  The Captain listened to everyone’s pitches and clicked his tongue thoughtfully.

  ‘They’re interesting suggestions,’ he said, ‘and I’m glad to see that some of you are finally learning to think outside of the box. But you know me: the only thing I prefer to following the path of least resistance is failing to consider the long-term repercussions of my actions. So I thought we might start by selling off some assets, because selling off assets doesn’t really require much planning or intellectual effort at all. It so happens that I’ve already taken the liberty of getting the pirate with a scarf to draw up a list.’

  The Captain signalled his trustworthy number two, who stepped forward, cleared his throat and began to read.

  ‘Assets: two cabin boys, condition poor; one barrel of weevils,4 six months past their best-before date; an old seal carcass; a particularly large barnacle that looks a bit like a face; some moss.’

  The Pirate Captain clapped his hands together. ‘Well, that’s a promising start. Very promising indeed. Pirate in green, run down to the newsagent’s and pick up a copy of
the Geneva Gazette. Somebody is bound to want fantastic assets like those.’

  It wasn’t as ridiculous a plan as it sounded, because back in those days people still bought newspapers, and soon all the crew were sat round the desk in the Captain’s cabin poring through the ‘Items Wanted’ section. Not having a girlfriend meant that the Captain never did much tidying up, so the cabin was the familiar jumble of nautical paraphernalia, olden-days bric-a-brac, and mementoes from past adventures. There was a fake nose from their adventure with spies, a wax Viking from their adventure at the Jorvik centre, and a genuine letter signed by Abraham Lincoln from their adventure at an autograph fair.

  ‘Anybody found anything yet?’ he asked, turning over another fruitless page of newsprint.

  ‘Sorry, Pirate Captain,’ said Jennifer. ‘People seem to want prams, second-hand cuckoo clocks, open-minded partners for fun times in the countryside, but very few are looking for a large barnacle or a barrel of weevils.’

  The Captain scanned through a couple more pages of adverts himself, his heart sinking fast, like a lazy shark. He was just about to set fire to the newspaper and throw it at a cabin boy, when he spotted the very last advert, in florid type near the bottom of the page.5

  ‘Those are all exactly the kind of elements our adventures tend to include!’ exclaimed the Pirate Captain, drawing a ring around the advert and holding it up for everybody to see. Those pirates who could read murmured excitedly. The pirate in red frowned.