The Pirates! In an Adventure with Communists Read online

  ‘I counted the portholes like you asked me to, Captain,’ said the pirate with a scarf. ‘There are still thirty-six of them; no change from last week.’

  ‘Do you know what my bath was like this morning after he’d left?’ said the Captain, with a scowl. ‘Full of thick black hairs. Enough to knit a cardigan. A scratchy Marx-hair cardigan.’

  ‘I don’t much fancy that, sir,’ said the pirate with a scarf.

  ‘And you’ll notice I’m not drinking from my favourite mug,’ the Pirate Captain went on, indicating his mug. The Pirate Captain’s favourite mug was one he’d got from a garden centre. It had a picture of a flea on the side that only appeared when it had a hot drink in it. This one just had ‘Monkey World’ emblazoned across the handle and was about his fifth favourite. ‘Because somebody was using it. Then, when he was lounging about on a deckchair a bit later, he asked if I could sail the boat at a slightly different angle, because he was getting the sun in his eyes.’

  ‘I much preferred that nice Mr Darwin,’ said the pirate with a scarf.

  ‘Me too. At least he didn’t look like a cat crossed with a monkey.’ The Captain let out an indignant snort. ‘But he’s a paying guest. And I suppose it’s not really the done thing to run through paying guests.’

  ‘No, Captain.’

  ‘And stuffing him into a cannon and firing him into the sun would probably be out of the question as well?’

  ‘I don’t think the Pirate King would approve,’ said the pirate with a scarf ruefully. ‘You know how seriously he takes the issue of good manners.’

  ‘Damn our piratical code of hospitality.’

  ‘It can be a burden, sir.’

  ‘Worse still, there’s no wind! And that’s important, isn’t it? Because . . .’ The Pirate Captain scratched his cheek as he tried to remember something.

  ‘Because it makes the boat go along, sir?’ said the pirate with a scarf.

  ‘That’s the one. A little test for you there, number two.’ He patted the pirate with a scarf on the head. ‘So no wind means we won’t go along for some time. Which means I have to put up with that ungrateful lubber for even longer. I’m really starting to feel the strain. Look at my eyes.’ The Pirate Captain opened his eyes wide and offered them to the pirate with a scarf.

  ‘They’re very slightly bloodshot, sir.’

  ‘Exactly. I’m a wreck. I wouldn’t be surprised if I died from the mental pressure.’16 He sighed. And then, seeing Marx bounding across the deck towards them, did his best to try and return his face to its customary pleasant openness. Engels followed alongside, sniffing into a handkerchief.

  ‘I’m sorry to say it, Captain,’ said Marx. ‘But our situation is unacceptable. Do you think we are animals?’

  Yes, I do, thought the Pirate Captain. Very much. You’ve hit the nail on the head there. And not even a good type of animal. But he managed to force a winning smile. ‘Something wrong?’ he enquired politely.

  ‘Engels and I,’ said Marx. ‘We simply cannot be expected to share quarters. I’m a thinker, Pirate Captain. And for thinking I need plenty of personal space. Do you realise that I had to make Engels sleep up here on the deck last night? On the deck! Of a ship! I couldn’t even give him a pillow, because I need a minimum of three pillows.’

  ‘Oh well, sleeping on the deck, that can be quite fun,’ said the pirate with a scarf. ‘You get to watch the stars, and listen to the ocean. It’s like camping. Sometimes we sit out and cook marshmallows on a little fire. Though we’ve stopped that now, because it turns out “lighting fires” and “wooden boats” aren’t an ideal mix.’

  ‘Honestly, it’s really not a problem,’ said Engels, looking embarrassed by the whole thing.

  ‘Nonsense!’ said Marx. ‘He’s caught a cold. And he’s not much use to me sneezing all over my papers.’

  ‘Dear me. Well, I suppose we do have a room he can use,’ said the Pirate Captain. He shot the pirate with a scarf a pained look and led them below deck.

  Beneath the creaking boards, the Pirate Captain unlocked a door and threw it back to reveal a tiny cabin. There was a bed with a duvet covered in sporting scenes, posters on the walls of animals and baseball players, and a great pile of children’s toys, none of which had been taken out of their wrapping.

  ‘Here you go,’ said the Pirate Captain.

  ‘Ah . . . this seems to be occupied,’ said Engels, backing away.

  ‘Sadly, no,’ sighed the Pirate Captain. ‘This cabin is for the son I never had. See? There’s his baseball bat. He’d have been quite the athlete, but he’d love animals too, and just look at the books he’d read. I’d have called him Champ. “Come here, Champ,” I’d say and we’d probably do a bit of rough-housing.’ He demonstrated some rough-housing on the pirate with a scarf.

  ‘Anyhow,’ the Captain added, ‘I hope you’ll both be joining us for dinner?’

  Marx prodded unenthusiastically at his boiled cabbage.

  ‘I’d heard,’ he said, sounding a little put out, ‘that you pirate types tended to enjoy gargantuan and debauched feasts. I suppose I’ve been misinformed.’

  ‘No, you’re quite right,’ said the Pirate Captain, looking pretty unenthused by his bit of cabbage as well. ‘Sometimes they go on for days, and we actually end up having smaller feasts in between the courses of the main feast. It can get quite complicated. Normally they’re such a high point of an adventure that whoever we’re helping out gets a laminated certificate saying “I had a feast with the pirates on one of their adventures”. We just thought, what with you going on about how you didn’t have any truck with all that material-wealth business, and how much you admired the common street-sweeper sort, that you’d prefer something like this.’

  Marx shook his bushy head and pushed his plate away. ‘On the contrary. That is my curse, Pirate Captain. Oh! What I wouldn’t give to be a noble member of the proletariat! How I’d love to enjoy their simple pleasures and plain, uninspired meals. But I am for ever tainted by my breeding, doomed by my sensitive palate to enjoy only the best food and the finest cigars.’

  ‘Oh well, that’s a bit of a relief,’ said the Captain, brightening up. ‘See, I was actually eating this steak off my lap. And I had this gravy hidden in my sleeve.’ He shook his sleeve and a few dollops of gravy fell out. The rest of the pirates took out the plates of food that they had been hiding under the table.

  The pirate in green coughed. ‘So,’ he said to Marx, ‘how did you get into philosophising? Did you run away and join a band of travelling thinkers? Or were you raised in the woods by wild philosophers?’

  ‘No, sir. I started out as a journalist,’ said Marx, happily helping himself to some grilled puffin and humming-bird skewers.

  ‘Really? Well, that’s a coincidence,’ said the Pirate Captain. ‘I’m a journalist of sorts myself. I write a newsletter for my fans. They’re lubbers, but they call themselves the Cutlass Club – they get a three-colour badge on joining. Do you give your communists badges?’

  ‘It’s not just a club, Pirate Captain,’ said Marx stiffly. ‘It’s an international uprising of the proletariat.’

  ‘People love badges,’ said the Pirate Captain.

  At the other end of the table, Engels turned to the pirate with a scarf. ‘What’s it like being a working pirate?’ he asked quietly. ‘I must say that your captain isn’t quite what I was expecting.’

  ‘Oh, well. He’s a very busy man,’ said the pirate with a scarf. ‘He doesn’t really have time to worry about the details.’

  ‘I see. And how does that affect the rest of you?’

  ‘It . . . can be . . . a little demanding on my time,’ said the pirate with a scarf. ‘But I wouldn’t want it any other way. The Captain is a brilliant man. Though he can be a bit crabby in the mornings.’17

  ‘Why does he keep laughing whenever I say anything?’

  ‘He seems to think that you’re the funny one out of you and Marx. He’s convinced you’re some sort of double act and that you�
��re only there for comic relief.’

  Engels looked sadly at his chicken-stuffed-with-a-smaller-chicken. ‘He’s not the first, but . . . Well, Dr Marx is a brilliant man too. I . . .’ He went a bit quiet.

  ‘Of course, in addition to being a pirate and a bit of a journalist, I’m also something of a philosopher,’ said the Pirate Captain.

  ‘Really?’ said Marx.

  ‘In fact,’ said the Pirate Captain, warming to his theme, ‘I’d go so far as to say that my adventures are as much an intellectual journey as an actual journey. Take the one where we went to Poland – we had to disguise ourselves as chess pieces. They’re quite intellectual, aren’t they?’

  ‘I don’t mean to be rude,’ said Marx, because that’s what people say when they mean to be rude, ‘but do you really think a pirate can have much to add to the canon of Western thought?’

  ‘It might surprise you to learn that I have a deep and considered philosophy,’ said the Pirate Captain, in his best measured tones. ‘It’s mainly a meat-based theory. I feel that everybody should strive to eat as much red meat as possible. That’s one tenet. Another would be that I tend to know best. And my third tenet – I always think it’s best to have three – is probably something to do with the ocean. Generally I would say that I’m in favour of it.’

  As a gesture of goodwill, upon coming aboard the boat Engels had given the whole crew a copy of Marx’s latest book. A few of them had flicked through it that morning, though it was soon glaringly obvious that it didn’t contain any swordfights or racy descriptions of fiery Latin princesses. But it was quite a thick book, and the pirates approved of the thwacking sound it made when you crept up on another pirate and smacked him round the head with it.

  The Pirate Captain now put down his fork and opened Marx’s book at a random page. ‘You see, you’ve done well to write all this,18 and some of it’s pretty good. This “each according to his abilities to each according to his needs” thing makes a lot of sense. For instance, I often need a clean plate, but my ability to do the washing-up is rather limited. I’m just not very thorough. So it makes a lot more sense to get one of the lads to do it. But I can’t say I agree with all your arguments. Here’s your first problem,’ he said, pointing at a sentence. ‘“Religion is the opium of the people.” Well, I don’t know about people, but I think you’ll find the opium of pirates is actual opium.’

  ‘I’m not sure you’ve really grasped my philosophical points,’ said Marx.

  ‘And this next part is patently absurd. “You have nothing to lose except your chains.” It’s true, I am always losing my chains, but that’s just the start of it. I also lose the anchors that tend to be attached to my chains. I can never find my reading glasses. And I doubt a day goes by when I don’t forget where I’ve put my astrolabe.’

  ‘When Black Bellamy tricked you into wearing that gigantic nappy,’ added the albino pirate, ‘you lost your dignity then.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said the Captain. ‘The list of things we have to lose is virtually endless.’

  Marx grimaced. ‘I’m afraid philosophy is not something lesser minds would really understand.’

  ‘All that “if I drop a cannonball and a bag of feathers off a tree in the middle of a forest but nobody is about to see it then who’s to say if I’m actually eating this ham?” business – how hard can it be?’

  ‘I think,’ said Marx, ‘you probably underestimate the effort involved in the writing of a major philosophical work.’

  ‘Aarrrr,’ said the Pirate Captain, raising one eyebrow and tapping his gold tooth with his thumb. Unbeknownst to Marx and Engels, this seemingly innocuous gesture was actually a sign that the Pirate Captain had come up with something. The pirate crew’s faces were variously:

  1. Thrilled. The pirates who liked surprises couldn’t wait to hear what it was. Many of them still remembered the time the Pirate Captain had decided they should turn the pirate boat into a giant sledge and ‘go down mountains and stuff’.

  2. Wary. The more experienced pirates knew that this could signal absolutely anything. Like the time they had used the converted pirate boat to sledge down Mont Blanc and ended up in a lake full of man-eating alligators.

  3. Covered in meat juice.

  ‘What are pirates famous for?’ asked the Pirate Captain, with a grin.

  Marx chewed on his food for a moment. ‘Plunder? Shanties? Your pronounced sense of fair play?’ he suggested.

  ‘No – we’re mainly famous for our wagers,’ said the Pirate Captain. ‘So then, a friendly challenge – by the end of this voyage I will have written a work of philosophy that changes Western thought once and for all! You do the same, and the one that’s most world-changing wins.’

  Marx banged his puffin leg on the table. ‘You, sir, have yourself a wager!’ he cried. ‘If you win, I shall have Engels here shine your shoes.’

  ‘Best get philosophising then. But not before pudding, obviously. Did you say you liked cigars?’ The Pirate Captain handed him a box of cigars. Marx sniffed at one.

  ‘Rolled on the dusky inner thighs of a native Cuban girl?’

  ‘I don’t think so. But we could roll them on the pirate with a scarf’s inner thighs if you wanted,’ suggested the Pirate Captain. ‘He keeps them quite smooth. He won’t mind at all.’

  15 The animal with the longest period of REM sleep, the state commonly associated with dreams, is the armadillo. Nobody knows what armadillos dream about, probably ants, of which they can eat up to 40,000 for a single meal.

  16 Philosopher John Stuart Mill had a nervous breakdown (caused by too much thinking at an early age), but he was cured by hanging around with Harriet Taylor, a girl whom he fancied and later married. Despite this, he still thought intellectual and cultural pleasures were superior to physical ones

  17 Don’t listen to people telling you that getting up early is best. Rene Descartes is one of history’s most important philosophers, but he rarely got out of bed before noon – and when he started getting up early for a new job as a private tutor, it caused him to catch pneumonia and die.

  18 Probably the most prolific philosopher was St Thomas Aquinas, who wrote approximately 8 million words, which is equivalent to about 260 pirate books.

  Six

  I Was A Slave Of The Sea Lions

  By the next morning the Pirate Captain had hit a bit of a wall. He’d spend half the night on his major work, but it wasn’t really coming together.19 It didn’t help that every time he got to a tricky bit, he’d play a couple of hands of solitaire or waste half an hour trying on hats. He’d had the boat sailing in circles for a while now, to give himself more time to finish, and he really didn’t know how much longer he could keep it up before Marx suspected something.

  There was a knock at the door, and then the pirate with a monobrow came in, followed by a small group of other pirates. They looked a bit shifty.

  ‘Hello, lads,’ said the Captain, grateful for the distraction. ‘Something I can help you with?’

  ‘Yes, Captain,’ said the pirate with the monobrow, trying his best to look resolute. ‘A few of us pirates have been listening to Dr Marx, and we have come to the conclusion that we, the workers, are being unfairly oppressed.’

  There was a pause. If the pirates had been around 150 years later they would probably have recognised it as a ‘Pinteresque’ pause, as menacing as any zombie. Not quite as menacing maybe, because The Pirates In An Adventure With a Menacing Pause wouldn’t be much cop. But, still, menacing nonetheless.

  ‘Is that so?’ said the Pirate Captain eventually, almost imperceptibly arching an eyebrow. ‘Is that what they’re calling pirates who spend all afternoon lazing about the deck trying to see how many starfish they can balance on top of each other, these days? “Workers”?’

  ‘We don’t think it’s right that we should have to tie knots in bits of rope and swab the decks, whilst you lie idle, growing fat on the profits of our labours.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ll grow fat on bits
of rope, do you? No matter how nicely you’ve tied knots in them.’

  ‘Tell him the list of demands,’ whispered the pirate in red before ducking out of view.

  ‘Demands, eh? That sounds serious. Well, I suppose we’d better hear them.’

  The pirate with a monobrow began to recite his list. ‘One: an end to the use of derogatory phrases such as “you scurvy landlubbers” when ordering us about. Because when you think about it, it doesn’t even make much sense, seeing as how landlubbers don’t tend to get scurvy. Two: more of a say on what we eat at feasts. Perhaps we could be a little more adventurous with our choice of meats? Three: when you read us a bedtime story, we were hoping it could be something other than your unpublished novel? Oh, yes, and four: a more equal distribution of cereal from mini variety packs.’

  The Pirate Captain steepled his fingers in front of his face. ‘I think your manifesto contains some very salient points,’ he said after another long pause. ‘And to show that I’m not an unreasonable man, I’m going to let you all off doing the washing-up today, and instead we’re going to play a new game I’ve just invented a moment ago.’

  Some of the stupider pirates who weren’t too good at reading between the lines or picking up on disagreeable undertones cheered at this news. The pirate with a monobrow looked a bit uncomfortable.

  ‘I think I’m going to call it Pop-up Pirate,’ said the Captain, leading them out on to the deck. ‘How it works is like this: you go and hide in that barrel. The rest of us take turns to poke our cutlasses through the sides of the aforementioned barrel, and the first one to make you jump up in the air gets a prize.’

  A few minutes later, the game was over. The pirate with a monobrow hadn’t jumped up at all.