The Pirates! in an Adventure with the Romantics (5 page)

‘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 flowing 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.