The Pirates! Read online

  The Pirate Captain was just about to ask if they were pirates or pignuts, when Cutlass Liz made her dramatic entrance. In his time the Pirate Captain had made a number of dramatic entrances of his own – not always intentional it had to be said, as quite often they were the result of him accidentally setting himself on fire – but even he had to admit that Cutlass Liz’s dramatic entrance set an extremely high dramatic-entrance standard. A terrified-looking man in a tattered coat came sprinting desperately across the cobblestones. He stopped for a moment, stared wildly about, looked up, and shrieked. The pirates all looked up too, just in time to see Cutlass Liz come sliding down the mainsail of one of the boats, swing across the dock on a piece of rigging, and land with an athletic somersault right in front of the terrified-looking man, whom she lifted off his feet by one ear. Cutlass Liz changed the colour of her hair as often as the Pirate Captain ate mixed grills, but at the moment it was a vivid red, which went well with the bloodstains on her blouse. She didn’t have a luxuriant beard, but otherwise she cut quite the piratical dash: a huge sapphire necklace that spelt ‘LIZ’ hung around her neck, and in her belly button she wore a gigantic diamond shaped like a skull, which was rumoured to have been a gift from Napoleon, whom she had dated briefly as a teenager. On any other pirate, the necklace and the diamond together might have looked a little bit much, but Cutlass Liz was famed for having the best face in the entire eastern seaboard, and so she somehow carried it off. If he had been meeting her a hundred and fifty years later, the Pirate Captain might have been struck by how much Cutlass Liz looked like the actress Julie Christie from around the time of Billy Liar or maybe Darling, but he wasn’t, so he just thought she looked fantastic. The pirate with a scarf sighed, because he knew how the Pirate Captain tended to get around attractive women.

  ‘I can pay, Cutlass! I can pay! One more day!’ pleaded the man with a tattered coat.

  ‘Too late, Jericho Leith,’ said Cutlass Liz, grinning from ear to ear. ‘Two minutes too late!’

  And with that, she took out her cutlass and did some unspeakable things to the unfortunate Jericho Leith. The Pirate Captain stood and watched politely, occasionally wiping a bit of blood from his eyes. Finally, just when he was starting to think that it might go on all day, Jericho Leith let out a horrifying gurgle and slumped down dead. Cutlass Liz deftly kicked his body into the harbour, and turned on her heel to face the pirates.

  ‘You must be Cutlass Liz,’ said the Pirate Captain, doffing his hat6 and doing a little bow. ‘I’m the Pirate Captain. You’ve probably heard of me. Possibly from one of those libellous accounts of my adventures that seem to be doing the rounds. I’m a successful pirate, you know.’

  ‘Is that a fact?’ Cutlass Liz arched a perfectly shaped eyebrow, and went on wiping customer innards off her hands with a flannel.

  ‘Oh yes. I lead an extremely glamorous lifestyle,’ said the Pirate Captain, hoping she had noticed how many of his best lace ribbons he had tied in his beard that morning. ‘And I’m really very well off. Because of all the treasure.’

  The pirate with a scarf bit his lip. This wasn’t the first time he had heard the Pirate Captain be a bit less than honest about his financial status when talking to a lady.

  ‘I’ve got more treasure chests than I know what to do with,’ continued the Captain. ‘All fit to bursting with silvery doubloons and pearls and sapphires and rubies, and those green ones too.’

  ‘Emeralds?’

  ‘Yes, that’s it, emeralds. Buckets of emeralds. It’s a wonder the boat can even move.’

  ‘Tell me,’ said Cutlass Liz, ‘what kind of pirate captain doesn’t have a crew?’

  The Pirate Captain looked about and realised that apart from the pirate with a scarf, his crew were nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Aarrrr. It’s just they’re all a little bit scared of you,’ said the Pirate Captain apologetically. ‘Come on, you coves!’

  The pirates reluctantly slunk out from behind various barrels and piles of old fish. Several of them held their hands over their faces in the mistaken belief that if they couldn’t see Cutlass Liz then she couldn’t see them.

  ‘You know I once ate twenty babies?’ said Cutlass Liz, looking them up and down. The crew all nodded fearfully.

  ‘I’m sure babies taste a lot better than pirates,’ said the albino pirate. ‘Because they’d be fresher. And not as salty.’

  Cutlass Liz stared incredulously at the albino pirate. The albino pirate was so frightened that he somehow managed to go even whiter than usual. For a moment nobody said a thing. Then Cutlass Liz threw back her head and let out a laugh that sounded like a delicate foghorn. She pinched one of the albino pirate’s cheeks and slapped him hard on the back. ‘I like you. I don’t know what you are, but I like you. What are you? Some kind of a milk bottle?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said the albino pirate, trembling.

  ‘Well you’re all right. I suppose you swabs are here to get your boat fixed up?’ said Cutlass Liz, putting her hands on her hips.

  ‘Yes, please. I mean to say, if that would be all right. Not if you’re too busy or anything,’ said the scarf-wearing pirate.

  Cutlass Liz looked at the ramshackle old pirate boat and frowned. ‘Is that a piece of gammon you’ve patched up the side with?’

  ‘You’d be surprised how effective a properly cooked bit of gammon can be at keeping out the weather,’ explained the Pirate Captain, making sure to touch his hair, because he remembered hearing that touching your own hair was a good way to be flirtatious with someone.

  ‘And she seems to be listing rather badly.’

  ‘Oh, that’s just because I like to keep my boats at a jaunty angle. It’s to demonstrate that I don’t take life too seriously.’

  ‘Not having a mast? Does that demonstrate anything in particular?’

  ‘Ah, no. Not as such.’

  ‘Sorry, boys,’ said Cutlass Liz with a shrug. ‘I don’t think there’s much I can do for her. But have you thought about trading her in? I do part exchange, you know.’

  ‘How much do you think the old girl’s worth?’ asked the pirate in green.

  ‘She’s sturdier than she looks,’ lied the scarf-wearing pirate.

  ‘Yes. And you’re not just getting a boat,’ said the sassy pirate. ‘I reckon there must be about five hundred pounds of barnacles stuck to her hull. That’s got to be worth a bit.’7

  ‘And it’s full of rats,’ added the albino pirate helpfully. He was going to say about the mushrooms that were growing out of the carpet in the galley as well, but the Pirate Captain cut in before he had a chance.

  ‘She’s not on fire. That’s got to count for something.’

  ‘Well …,’ Cutlass Liz tapped the pirate boat’s hull with her boot, and it made a sort of squelching noise. ‘You’re robbing me, but I could probably stretch to fifty doubloons. Might get some useful kindling out of her. What are you looking to replace it with?’ She waved at the various types of boat that were sat about her boatyard. ‘I’ve got pirate sloops, pirate galleons, pirate yachts, pirate schooners, pirate pedalos … anything take your fancy?’

  ‘I was thinking something to match my fearsome and larger-than-life personality,’ said the Pirate Captain. ‘I like the look of that big one over there.’

  Cutlass Liz nodded approvingly. ‘The Lovely Emma? She can outrun anything in the Royal Navy, and short of being attacked by a sea monster, that double-layered hull makes her virtually unsinkable. And there’s plenty of room for all that treasure of yours.’

  The pirates all looked up at the Lovely Emma. The pirate with a scarf counted a full thirty gleaming cannons. Some of the less practically minded pirates noticed she had the most striking figurehead they had ever seen – a smiling lady carved out of oak. From the waist up the smiling lady left almost nothing to the imagination, and several of the younger pirates’ eyes grew as wide as saucers.

  ‘Yes, that’s the kind of thing we’re after. How much does she cost? After you’ve
knocked off the fifty doubloons, that is?’

  ‘Six thousand doubloons.’

  The Pirate Captain almost dropped his cutlass. He took a moment to compose himself and pretended to be thinking it over.

  ‘It’s a bit flash, is the thing. I don’t want people thinking I’m vulgar. How about that one over there?’

  ‘That’s the Perch. She’s only five hundred doubloons,’ said Cutlass Liz. ‘And she comes with a free ham.’

  ‘Aaarrr. Still a bit on the showy side. What about that one?’ said the Pirate Captain, pointing disappointedly to the smallest boat in the lot.

  ‘The Sea Slug? Two hundred doubloons.’

  Before the Pirate Captain had time to say that maybe he wasn’t that bothered about buying a new boat at all, mainly because of unspecified environmental concerns he had about them, he was interrupted by a shout from the other end of the docks.

  ‘If it isn’t my old friend the Pirate Captain!’ bellowed a familiar voice. The Pirate Captain froze. All the blood drained from his face, though you wouldn’t really notice this because of his luxuriant beard. But if beards had blood in them, it would have drained from that as well.

  ‘Black Bellamy!’ said the Pirate Captain, thinking that his day couldn’t get much worse. Black Bellamy was the roguish rival pirate who the pirates had most recently encountered in their adventure with scientists. He was famous for having a beard that went up to his eyeballs and a matching rakish charm. There were several reasons why the Pirate Captain and Black Bellamy didn’t get on, but the main one was that Black Bellamy was the Pirate Captain’s evil nemesis, which obviously put quite a strain on the relationship.

  ‘Buying yourself a new boat?’ said Black Bellamy, beaming. ‘Not before time!’

  The Pirate Captain scowled. ‘What are you doing here, you cove?’

  ‘You know, whenever we meet you’re always calling me a cove or a fiend or something terrible like that. A pirate’s feelings could be quite hurt. I’m just picking up a few piratical supplies from Lizzie here. That the one you’re getting?’ Black Bellamy looked over at the Sea Slug and pulled a face. ‘She’s very nice. Compact. I think the French call it bijou. Sometimes I find all the space on the Barbary Hen such a burden. So much easier to keep something as small as that tidy.’

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ the Pirate Captain said with a sniff, ‘I’m buying this one.’ And he pointed straight at the Lovely Emma. The pirate with a scarf buried his face in his hands.

  ‘Goodness,’ said Black Bellamy, obviously impressed. ‘The pirating business must be treating you well. I’m surprised there’s so much money in, what was it …? Zoological specimens?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve been meaning to have a word with you about that.’

  ‘An honest mistake,’ said Black Bellamy holding his hands up with a cheeky shrug.

  ‘You won’t be disappointed with her, Pirate Captain,’ said Cutlass Liz, giving him a playful tug on his beard. ‘How do you plan to pay? Doubloons or treasure?’

  The Pirate Captain paused. ‘Aaarrrr. Thing is, all my treasure is a little tied up at the moment. It might take me a couple of weeks to get my hands on it.’

  ‘Didn’t you say it was all in treasure chests? On board your boat?’

  ‘I did. That’s to say, it is. But, uh, I have about a hundred treasure chests,’ said the Pirate Captain, thinking on his feet, ‘and that means about a hundred different keys. Obviously, for security purposes, I don’t label either of them. So there’s no knowing which key fits which chest.’

  The Pirate Captain was quite pleased with this explanation, but Cutlass Liz just frowned.

  ‘It shouldn’t take too long to open one chest?’

  ‘You’d think that, wouldn’t you?’ said the Pirate Captain. ‘But – ah – you’re working on the assumption that I try the chests in some sort of systematic order. Whereas what I’ll actually do is try random keys in random chests, making no real note of which chest or which key I have already tried. It could take days.’

  Cutlass Liz gave the Pirate Captain a look. It was the same sort of look as Jennifer sometimes gave him when he said he hadn’t realised the boat’s shower was occupied.

  ‘You’re not a time-waster, are you, Pirate Captain?’ said Cutlass Liz, turning a pretty shade of pink round her décolletage. ‘Because I save my most terrible cutlass work for time-wasters. Time-wasters and actors.’

  ‘Can I just say,’ said the Captain, deciding to change tack, ‘that I’ve always approved of women at sea. A lot of pirates will tell you that the closest girls should get to nautical matters is making seaweed albums, or those boxes covered in shells. But I don’t think that at all.’

  Cutlass Liz tapped the blade of her cutlass.

  ‘All right,’ said the Pirate Captain with a sigh. ‘I wasn’t being entirely honest with you. My boat isn’t actually full of bulging treasure chests.’

  The Pirate Captain was dimly aware that this was the point in the adventure where he had the opportunity to come clean, and at the risk of a slightly wounded pride he and the crew could spend the next couple of weeks just sitting about Nantucket, chewing opium and taking naps. But he looked at the smirk playing across Black Bellamy’s face and he looked at Cutlass Liz’s fantastic cheekbones, and somehow the confession stuck in his craw.

  ‘The truth of the matter,’ the Pirate Captain found himself saying, ‘is that the treasure chests aren’t on my boat. Because they’re buried on one of the Cayman Islands. For tax purposes.’8

  Black Bellamy stifled a laugh, and Cutlass Liz puffed out her cheeks and weighed up the Captain and his rag-tag crew with a steely stare.

  ‘I wouldn’t normally do this, Pirate Captain,’ she finally said, ‘but you have a pleasant, open face. And I like your little milk-bottle man.’

  Cutlass Liz disappeared into her office for a moment.

  ‘Lovely girl, that Cutlass,’ said Black Bellamy with a wink to the Pirate Captain. ‘There’s something really irresistible about a woman who can kill a man with just a pork loin, don’t you think?’

  ‘Haven’t you got to go and be diabolical somewhere?’ replied the Captain with a grimace.

  Black Bellamy grinned again and looked at his pocket watch. ‘I won’t take that to heart, because I know you don’t mean it. And I’m sure we’ll be seeing each other again soon. So, till next time then.’ With a bow and a wave to all the pirates Black Bellamy sauntered back down the dock, humming a cheery little shanty to himself as he went.

  When Cutlass Liz reappeared from her office she was carrying a stack of papers the size of a ship’s log. She handed them to the Pirate Captain.

  ‘You’ll just need to sign this.’

  The Pirate Captain leafed through the contract as his crew crowded around. ‘This bit about cutting off my luxuriant beard if I default on the first payment. Is that really necessary?’ said the Pirate Captain, wincing.

  ‘And the paragraph describing how you’ll hunt us down across the Seven Seas, and gut us like fishes. That seems needlessly graphic,’ said the pirate with a scarf.

  Cutlass Liz smiled sweetly, and waved at the array of skulls she had scattered about the boatyard. Most of them looked about the size and shape of the average pirate head.

  ‘It’s all standard terms and conditions,’ she said, handing the Captain a quill which, if he didn’t know better, looked as if it had been dipped in blood.

  Three

  I Knifed My Way to a Diamond Pit!

  The Pirate Captain and the scarf-wearing pirate stood on the dock staring at a gigantic glass egg-timer. Cutlass Liz had been very helpful in supplying it to the pirates and making clear exactly what it was for. ‘Before this runs out, you boys bring me the full balance owing,’ she had said, ‘otherwise I’ll enact section six, paragraph four. But I will be using a harpoon instead of an axe, to add a bit of local colour.’ She had also taken great pride in letting them know that the grains in the egg-timer weren’t grains of sand, but pieces of ground-up pirate
bones. On their way back to clear out the old boat the pirate with a scarf tried to make some small-talk about how you didn’t seem to find the same quality of cannonball about nowadays, but the Pirate Captain could tell he was just trying to take his mind off their predicament.

  ‘Feisty lass, that Cutlass Liz, isn’t she, Number Two?’ said the Pirate Captain, packing away his portraits in an old wooden trunk.

  ‘You could put it like that,’ said the pirate with a scarf dubiously.

  ‘I suppose you noticed the frisson between us?’ added the Pirate Captain. ‘That was sexual tension. I think she was quite impressed by me.’

  The pirate with a scarf nodded. The Pirate Captain was a master of understanding body language, and he often detected things that nobody else would have picked up on.

  The Pirate Captain clicked the trunk shut and beckoned for a couple of the crew to take it across to the Lovely Emma. Then he began to flick through the boat’s inventory, to make sure that nothing got left behind. It didn’t make for jaunty reading:

  24 limes

  1 Prize Ham

  18 dry-cured hams

  2 boxes of ship’s biscuits (one set

  custard cream/one bourbon)

  4 barrels of tar

  5 emergency doubloons taped to the underside of the teapot

  1 pirate with an accordion (deceased and subsequently electroplated)

  ‘It is just possible I got a little carried away, Number Two,’ he said. ‘We don’t actually have any loot whatsoever, do we?’

  ‘Not really, sir. We have several limes.’

  The Pirate Captain ran a concerned hand through his luxuriant beard. ‘I knew I was exaggerating our finances, but I had no idea things were in quite such a sorry state.’

  ‘We do have that big stone coin, Captain. I think that’s worth something on one of the more remote Pacific island economies.’9

  Whilst the crew busied themselves moving everything into the new boat, the Pirate Captain went and sat on the edge of the dock, next to the strips of gelatinous jellyfish bladders left out for salting. He whistled a little tune to himself and wondered where on earth he was going to find six thousand doubloons. A swarthy cove came and sat down next to him, and for one horrible moment the Pirate Captain thought he was going to be propositioned, because a surprising amount of that sort of thing went on amongst these sailor types. But rather than a saucy wink or a pinch on his seafaring behind, the man just offered him a swig of drink. He was a fearsome-looking fellow, with an ugly scar running the length of one cheek, and a stump of whale ivory poking out of his trousers instead of the more regular leg. But he was offering grog, so it seemed only right to be friendly.