The Pirates! (3 page)

The Pirate Captain grinned, but the pirate with a scarf just gave him a reproachful look.

‘The boat's really not safe, Captain. What if there was a storm? She wouldn't hold together for a minute.'

‘I suppose a few of the lads might get washed out to sea,' agreed the Captain with a shrug. ‘But, like my wise old Aunt Joan always says, it's a harsh life out on the ocean.'

‘It's not just the pirates I'm thinking of,' said the scarf-wearing pirate. He paused meaningfully. ‘What about your Prize Ham?'

He pointed at the big glass-fronted display case in the corner of the room. Inside the case hung the Pirate Captain's pride and joy – a huge glistening honey-roast ham.
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It was about as close as you could get to the platonic ideal of a ham, if Plato had spent more time discussing hams and less time mucking about with triangles. It gleamed like a lumpy pink jewel where the sunlight from the porthole caught its honey glaze. There was even a little silk bow tied around the thin end.

‘Oh goodness,' said the Pirate Captain, looking
lovingly at the ham. ‘You're right. I don't think I could bear the thought of anything happening to her. And you know I can't say no when you do those big sad eyes at me.' He slumped back into his chair. ‘What were you thinking?'

‘We're not far from Nantucket, Captain,' said the pirate with a scarf, pointing at the nautical chart that the Captain had been using as a blotter.

‘I know a limerick about Nantucket,' said the Pirate Captain brightly.

‘It's where Cutlass Liz has her pirate boatyard,' said the pirate with a scarf, trying his best to keep the conversation on topic, which could be difficult with the Pirate Captain. ‘I thought we might stop off and get the boat fixed up properly. Then after that we could have an adventure, maybe with spies or something.'

‘Hell's bells,' exclaimed the Pirate Captain. ‘Cutlass Liz! The Butcher of Barbados. I don't think they hand out those sort of nicknames for no good reason.'

The pirate with a scarf nodded ruefully. ‘It's pretty hard to find reputable boatyards that are prepared to deal with us pirates,' he pointed out.

‘Yes, I suppose you're right. Sometimes I wonder if I should have taken up a more respectable line of work. Did I tell you how my mother was hoping I would be an architect?'

‘I'm sure you'd have made a brilliant architect, Pirate Captain.'

‘I'd have liked building those little models best. With the cut-out people.'

The Pirate Captain drifted off for a moment, thinking about his career choices.

In the boat's dining room the rest of the pirates were already tucking into their lunch. On board a pirate boat it wasn't considered rude to start before everybody was present, and you could even put your elbows on the table. Those were just two of the perks that attracted people to the piratical life. The Pirate Captain strode in followed by the pirate with a scarf to tell the crew the news. He picked up his ‘Number One Boss' mug that the pirates had given him for his last birthday and downed it in one gulp. Then he banged the mug on the table.

‘Listen up lads – and lady,' said the Pirate Captain with a nod to Jennifer, who had joined them on their last exciting adventure. ‘What's the single most important thing in the life of a pirate?'

The crew all looked deep in thought. There were a few whispered discussions. Then the pirate in green put his hand up.

‘Is it love?' he asked.

The Pirate Captain rubbed the back of his neck. ‘Yes, all right. That's probably true. But after that, what's the next most important thing?'

‘Respecting his or her mother?' suggested the pirate with gout.

‘Fair enough,' conceded the Pirate Captain. ‘You'd be nowhere without your mothers. But then what? What's the third most important thing?'

The crew looked stumped.

‘His pirate boat!' roared the Captain. ‘It's come to my attention that the old girl's a little past her best. And I can hardly maintain my reputation as a debonair terror of the High Seas
with bits falling off the boat all the time, can I? So you'll be pleased to know that we're paying a visit to Cutlass Liz's boatyard.'

The pirates didn't look very pleased at all. Most of them looked petrified.

‘Cutlass Liz!' exclaimed the sassy pirate.

‘They say she's as deadly as she is beautiful!' said the pirate in green.

‘I heard she ate twenty babies, just to show her crew how ruthless she was!' said the albino pirate.

‘Twenty whole babies all in one sitting!'

‘You tried that once, didn't you, Pirate Captain? To terrify that admiral?'

‘But there weren't any babies around at the time.'

‘I remember that. We drew faces on a load of hams instead. Ham babies!' A few of the pirates laughed as they remembered their adventure with the ham babies. Then they remembered about Cutlass Liz and looked worried again.

‘Oh, I'm sure her reputation has been exaggerated,' said the Pirate Captain, helping himself
to another mug of grog. ‘You know how us pirates get. She's probably just a bit stroppy now and again. And besides – who
hasn't
slit a man's belly open for looking at them cock-eyed?'

And so the pirate boat arrived at the island of Nantucket. Sailing past the harbour, it struck the pirates that the whole place seemed slightly one-note.
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The quayside inns all had names like ‘The Blue Whale's Rest' or ‘The Narwhal's Arms', and everywhere you looked there were big bronze statues of grimacing whales with harpoons sticking out of their sides and stalls that only seemed to sell ‘I Had A
Blubberly Time
In Nantucket' t-shirts and tatty-looking snowstorms with whales in them. They pulled up alongside Cutlass Liz's boatyard, and the Pirate Captain couldn't help but notice how shabby the pirate boat looked parked next to all the shiny new pirate boats that lined the side of the dock. He hoped that the holes in her hull
and bits of rigging held together by tape would say ‘rustic charm' rather than ‘barely afloat'. There was a sign hung on the boatyard gate:

The pirates looked around, but apart from some seagulls kicking about and a couple of unkempt old men shouting prophetic tales of doom at sea to nobody in particular, the place seemed deserted.

‘Looks like she's not about,' said the albino pirate. ‘Might as well be going.'

‘Yes, we did our best,' said the pirate in green.

‘No point dilly-dallying,' said the pirate with gout.

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 hat
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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.