The Pirates! In an Adventure with Communists Read online

  The Pirate Captain turned a shade of purple that, if you’d seen it on a flower petal rather than a pirate, would have been considered very becoming.

  ‘I look nothing like him!’ he exclaimed to the pirate in green, apoplectic. ‘That beard! It looks like it’s been scribbled on to his face by a toddler! And his ears! Do I have that much hair growing out of my ears?’

  ‘No, Captain,’ said the pirate in green. ‘I’ve always admired how hairless your ears are.’

  Marx cleared his throat, smiled and waited for the applause to die down.

  ‘I love capitalism and think all the workers are lazy good-for-nothings who should be made to work until they die from exhaustion!’

  The audience gasped.

  ‘I don’t really,’ said Marx.

  The communists sighed in relief. The pirates approved – the headline-grabbing opening line was a tried and tested pirate trick, much used by the Pirate Captain to get their attention. It suggested that they were in for a rollercoaster ride of a speech that would have them on the edge of their seats.

  ‘I shall address you all tonight on the uprising of the Silesian weavers and how it can serve as an example for the urban proletariat in our struggle against the tyranny of the bourgeoisie.’

  You can’t exactly hear pirate expectations dropping, but if you could, everyone in Soho would have been deafened.

  The Pirate Captain knew that it was bad form to doze off during a lecture. He wasn’t sure how it had happened, but the next thing he knew he was waking up with his head on the pirate in green’s shoulder. A thin stream of saliva had drooled out of his mouth.

  ‘How long was I asleep?’ he asked.

  ‘About an hour,’ said the pirate in green, fighting back a yawn. ‘He’s just getting warmed up, I think. It’s quite . . . erm, dry. You missed a heated discussion about whether communist paintings should restrict themselves to bleak geometric shapes’ – he indicated a painting propped up on the podium that was mostly lines and triangles, but with the odd circle thrown in for light relief – ‘or whether they should concentrate on stirring pictures of workers doing heroic things instead.’ He indicated another painting that showed a rosy-cheeked peasant girl toiling in the wheat fields with the sun on her face who looked a bit tired, but in a sexy way that suggested she would still be a lot of fun to go out with. ‘He tends to go off on tangents a lot. He’s already spent half an hour denouncing the man who decorated the room.’

  ‘There will now be a short interval,’ announced Marx. ‘Comrade Engels will be serving ice cream by the doorway.’

  Pirates and communists alike ran for the toilets. ‘Ooh! Ice cream!’ squealed Jennifer. There was a great crush of pirates towards the doorway, where Engels stood with a tray of ice cream round his neck.

  ‘What flavours do you have?’ asked the pirate with a hook for a hand.

  ‘We have vanilla, strawberry and chocolate,’ said Engels.

  ‘Is that it? No raspberry ripple? That’s my favourite.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘When I saw Cats! they had cornettos. Why haven’t you got cornettos?’

  ‘I lost my little spoon out of the lid. Can I have another one?’

  Eventually, the Pirate Captain got to the front of the queue. ‘What flavours have you got then, comrade?’ he asked with a grin.

  ‘Pirate Captain! I’m so glad you came. We’ve got vanilla, strawberry and . . . an important business proposition.’ Engels whispered this last part.

  ‘What happened to the chocolate?’ asked the Pirate Captain with a frown.

  ‘Captain, this really is a matter of some urgency.’

  ‘Yes, sorry. So. A business proposal. In pirate language that translates as “an idea for adventure”, which I’m very keen on. Unless you meant a real business proposal, like a scam to buy and sell performing dogs to theatre impresarios – I don’t like the idea of that one bit.’

  ‘No, it’s not that.’

  ‘Good. Because it turns out that the market is sewn up,’ said the Pirate Captain bitterly.

  Engels ushered the Captain to one side. ‘I take it that, being a pirate, you have a boat?’

  ‘Best boat on the Seven Seas. Lord Nelson himself said it was the finest vessel he’d ever seen.’

  Engels looked a little disbelieving. ‘He didn’t say it with his mouth,’ the Captain added. ‘He said it with his eyes. Eye.’

  ‘I need to book passage to Paris for myself and Dr Marx. I fear we’re in great peril.’

  ‘Oh, I do peril very well,’ said the Pirate Captain. ‘It’s practically my middle name. What kind of peril are you in? Haunted by ghosts? Caught impersonating a bishop? Chased by tigers?’

  ‘Nothing like that,’ said Engels, who was getting a bit impatient. His ice creams were melting and starting to make a little pink, yellow and brown pool on the floor.

  ‘You’re not being cooked in a pot by cannibals, are you?’

  ‘No, Captain. There has been a series of terrible incidents of late. And it always seems to be us who get the blame. I believe that sinister forces are at work, and that Dr Marx’s life may not be safe here in London. The atmosphere in this country . . . it’s become something of a witch hunt.’

  ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘Oh dear indeed, Captain,’ said Engels.

  ‘But you’re not witches? There’s some way of telling which I can’t really remember. I think it’s if you can dive to the bottom of a swimming pool and successfully retrieve a brick whilst wearing a dressing gown, then you’re a witch. But it might be the other way round.’

  ‘We’re not witches,’ said Engels firmly. ‘So, will you help?’

  ‘To be honest, I’ve been thinking of an adventure more along the lines of pearl-smuggling in the South Seas or discovering a lost continent. We’re being sponsored, you see, so it’s got to be full of glamorous locations and scantily clad women. Carting a couple of communists over the Channel is a bit pedestrian for us.’

  ‘Please, Captain! If we don’t get to the safety of the Paris Commune, who knows what might happen! We can pay you well.’

  ‘Oh, bad luck,’ said the Pirate Captain sympathetically. ‘If you’d said that in our last adventure, I’d have bitten your arm off.’

  Engels didn’t have a chance to try and persuade the Captain further, because the bell rang for the second half of the lecture and Dr Marx tramped back to his lectern with a heavy book.

  The second half of the lecture wasn’t much better than the first. The pirates were soon playing games of hangman and scratching their names into the benches. The pirate with a hook for a hand and the pirate with long legs entertained themselves by throwing little balls of rolled-up paper into a communist’s collar, whilst the pirate with an earring passed notes to the pirate in green about the other pirates.

  ‘. . . and that concludes why the latest Prussian censorship instruction is entirely symptomatic of the antiquated feudal-absolutist system. Now – any questions? I need to be certain that you’ve understood every single one of my arguments.’

  Dr Marx looked slightly disappointed that the majority of the questions concerned themselves with less highbrow issues, such as whether it was true that Dr Marx habitually ate bourgeois babies in their cradles (it wasn’t) and what hair products he used to create his magnificent mane of hair (Perkins’ Radical’s Pomade). One or two pirates chipped in and asked how he proposed to deal with the dashing Pirate Captain and his nefarious band of buccaneers, but Dr Marx claimed to have never heard of them, before launching into a boring answer that drew an analogy between piracy and slum landlords. Eventually, an especially serious-looking statuesque blonde stood up at the front of the audience.

  ‘I just wanted to congratulate Comrade Marx on his fine oratory,’ said the statuesque blonde. ‘And also to say that I’ve got your kittens.’ She held up a soaking-wet sack.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ said Marx, squinting down from his lectern.

  ‘Your kittens.’ The statuesque
blonde paused and raised her voice. ‘The ones that you asked me to drown in the canal.’

  The audience gasped.

  ‘I really don’t know what you’re talking about,’ protested Marx, looking flustered.

  ‘But, Comrade Marx, you must remember! Of course you do. Why, it was only this morning you were saying to me how reactionary their TINY BUTTON NOSES and BRIGHT SHINY EYES were. And when you saw them innocently playing about with a ball of yarn, batting it back and forth between their ADORABLE LITTLE PAWS, you said that the only thing for it was to bundle them into a scratchy sack, ignoring their HEART-RENDING MEWLING CRIES, and then go and drown them in the nearest canal.’

  By this point, even the loyal communist audience was in an uproar, but the statuesque blonde went on shouting above the din. ‘Anyhow, I just wanted you to know that I’d done it. And I stoved their heads in with a brick as well, just to make sure. You mentioned how you wanted the SAD, LIFELESS BODIES back for use as paperweights to keep your important philosophical notes together. So I’ll just leave the sack here, shall I?’

  This seemed to be the final straw for most of the audience, and they barged out of the room muttering that if Dr Marx proposed to bring about a world where decent folk feared for their kittens, then he could take his Communism and do something unmentionable with it.

  ‘I’ve no idea who that statuesque young lady is!’ Marx went on protesting from the podium. ‘I’ve never seen her before in my life.’

  A half-finished carton of ice cream sailed through the air, and he had to duck to avoid it. Soon it was followed by brass stuff from the ceiling, bits of seat and various pieces of taxidermy.

  ‘Poor baby kittens!’ said the albino pirate. ‘I don’t like these communists at all.’

  ‘I’m more of a dog man, myself,’ said the Pirate Captain. ‘But even so. It’s a bit much.’

  Marx picked up the dripping sack and emptied it out on to the floor. Several of the pirates jumped back and covered their eyes, because they were worried that the skeleton kittens would give them nightmares, no matter what vestiges of adorableness remained. But all that spilled out was a pile of old fruit.

  ‘You’ve turned the kittens into old fruit!’ exclaimed the pirate in green. ‘That’s an amazing trick! Can you get the fruit to turn into doves?’

  ‘No, you seem to be missing the point,’ said Engels. ‘That young lady was just trying to make Dr Marx look bad. Somebody stop her!’

  Chasing sinister characters was all in a day’s work for the pirates, and a group of them set off in hot pursuit of the mysterious blonde, but before long they traipsed back into the pub looking despondent.

  ‘We did our best,’ said the pirate with a hook for a hand, a little out of breath. ‘Only she leapt into a waiting hansom cab, which clattered off atmospherically into the fog. But we caught a glimpse of the driver. He was a giant! Swathed in a billowing cape, and with demonic glowing eyes!’

  ‘He was bigger than Scurvy Jake!’ exclaimed the albino pirate. Scurvy Jake was the biggest pirate any of the pirates had ever met. ‘Or even two Scurvy Jakes, with one Scurvy Jake standing on top of the other Scurvy Jake’s shoulders!’

  ‘If he was a font,’ said the pirate in green, ‘he would be about a hundred point! If font size goes up that far. And if he was a type of cheese, he’d be one of those big wheels of Cheddar that they roll down hills.’

  The Captain grimaced, and gave Marx an apologetic shrug. ‘I’m sorry about this. The lads have an unfortunate tendency to exaggerate. I think it’s because there’s too much sugar in their diet.’ He turned back to his crew. ‘I’ve warned you about this before; exaggerating things might seem like fun, but it can be very dangerous. Remember the time I asked if we had enough milk onboard, and you all said, “Oh, yes, there’s loads of milk left, Captain,” but there wasn’t, and I had to spend half the voyage eating my Weetabix with butter?’

  ‘Honestly, Captain, we’re not exaggerating this time,’ said the albino pirate, his lip trembling.

  ‘It hardly matters now,’ said Marx, dusting himself down. ‘It’s clear that we cannot stay in London a moment longer. What with this and the claims that I put up the entry price at the zoo, I fear we need to get out tonight.’ He pulled a stuffed sparrow out of his mane.

  ‘So, Pirate Captain, you see our predicament. Will you help?’ asked Engels.

  The Pirate Captain thought for a moment. Engels and Marx looked at him pleadingly. He sighed, and despite himself felt his craggy heart melt a bit. ‘Aaarrrr,’ he said. ‘Maybe it’s not quite as exotic an adventure as I was hoping for. But I can’t say I approve of these sinister characters’ methods. And besides, what are us pirates famous for?’

  ‘Scurvy?’ suggested Engels.

  ‘Roaring?’ suggested Marx.

  ‘Being good at tying knots?’ suggested the pirate in green.

  ‘No, we’re famous for our pronounced sense of fair play,’ said the Captain cheerily. ‘But don’t worry. That was what they call a rhetorical question, so I’m not surprised you didn’t get it.’

  13 Catholics used to argue that the barnacle goose, Branta leucopsis, came from barnacles rather than eggs,because this meant they would be classified as fish instead of birds and so could be eaten during Lent.

  14 While at university, Engels held a ‘moustache evening’ in which he invited all ‘moustache-capable’young men to outrage philistines by growing moustaches and toasting their facial hair.

  Five

  The Crustacean Carnival Of Fear

  ‘It’s taken me years to realise it, Pirate Captain, but you are actually the best at pirating.’ Black Bellamy looked at his drink and frowned.

  ‘And?’ said the Pirate Captain.

  ‘And the best dancer, the most debonair and the best at knowing about cuisine. I’m just a big loser with a beard that goes all the way up to my eyes.’

  ‘Don’t be so hard on yourself,’ said the Pirate Captain. ‘You’ve done well, in your own small way. But being my nemesis was never going to work out, was it? For all your cunning and mischief, you’ve simply come up against a better man. With a better hat. In Hawaii.’

  The Pirate Captain stretched out on his sun lounger and sipped grog from a coconut. Black Bellamy slunk off.

  ‘Crestfallen,’ said the Pirate Captain, savouring the word. With a click of his elegant fingers, a lanky woman in a bikini strolled over and started massaging the Pirate Captain’s shoulders. He passed a languid gaze over the swimming pool, where some of the pirates were splashing about and having fun.

  Oh look, some dancing hams, he thought. A line of hams and steaks shimmied past the Pirate Captain, dancing little waltzes and tangos. He grabbed one as it went past and sunk his teeth into its glistening flesh. But instead of the warm meaty flavour of well-roasted ham, he got a mouthful of feathers.

  ‘Mmpphhh,’ said the Pirate Captain, waking with a start. The pirate with a scarf stood at his bedside with a glass of water.

  ‘Dancing hams again, sir?’

  ‘Mff-mffruff-ffooh,’ said the Pirate Captain.

  ‘You might want to take the pillow out of your mouth.’15

  Tramping out of his cabin and opening the bathroom door to billowing clouds of steam, the Pirate Captain was pleased to see that his trusty number two had already run him a bath. He stripped off his pyjamas and was just about to put a toe in the water, when he saw that a terrible hairy sea creature was already sat in it. The Pirate Captain leapt backwards in horror, grabbing for something to hit the sea creature with. He found himself waving a bar of soap as menacingly as possible.

  ‘Do you have any more shower gel?’ asked the sea creature, waggling an empty bottle of shower gel at the Captain. ‘I seem to have used this all up.’

  The Pirate Captain goggled, and then decided that he really wasn’t in any state for this sort of thing. He backed out of the door and bumped into the pirate with a scarf carrying some towels.

  ‘I don’t know if this is one of those tim
es when my dream hasn’t ended even though I supposed it had,’ said the Captain to the pirate with a scarf. ‘But there appears to be some kind of sea creature in there. Probably crawled in through a porthole. And now it’s washing itself in my bath.’

  ‘Yes, sir. I meant to warn you. Except it’s not a sea creature. It’s Dr Marx.’

  ‘Are you sure? It really is very, very hairy.’

  ‘Yes, Captain. It seems to grow out of all of him. I’ve not seen anything like it before.’

  ‘He’s used up all my shower gel,’ said the Captain indignantly. ‘The good stuff that keeps my skin soft and comes in a bottle shaped like a dolphin.’

  ‘I tried to explain that it was your private bathroom, Captain. But he didn’t seem to be listening.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ bellowed Marx.

  The Pirate Captain opened the bathroom door again. ‘Hello, yes?’

  ‘What sort of time do you do breakfast around here?’

  The Captain shrugged. ‘Oh well, you know, whenever. We’re fairly relaxed about that sort of thing.’

  ‘I’ll be wanting orange juice, but not with bits in.’ Marx rubbed himself vigorously with the Captain’s best loofah. ‘I don’t like bits.’

  ‘Right, I’ll, uh, see what we’ve got to hand,’ said the Captain, feeling slightly at a loss. ‘Um. So. You’re all right for towels?’

  ‘Yes, thanks,’ said the hairy communist.

  The Pirate Captain backed out of the bathroom, whilst Marx struck up a rousing chorus of the Internationale.

  The Captain paced up and down the deck, looking dour and drinking his morning tea. The pirate with a scarf hurried along beside him, struggling to keep up with his gigantic strides. Normally, they took this time to tackle the tricky business of running the boat, but the Pirate Captain’s mind was elsewhere.