by Gideon Defoe
‘Oh dear. Look at that,’ said the Captain, peering over the top of the barrel. ‘He’s all stabbed. Well, there’s always going to be a few teething troubles with these new games. Do you think Scrabble got where it is today without a few fatalities along the way? Anyhow, back to those demands. Does anybody else think they could do a better job of running the boat than me?’
The revolutionary pirates looked at their shoes.
‘Mm. I thought as much. If I hear another paean to the gnarly-handed worker I might not be responsible for my actions. Now, go and do that washing-up.’
The pirates started to leave.
‘Not you,’ said the Pirate Captain, glowering at the pirate in red. ‘I’ve got a job for you.’
The pirate in red managed to look guilty and surly at the same time.
‘I don’t want to play another round of Pop-up Pirate right now, but I’m pretty fickle and you never know when the mood will take me. So I want you to take these ship’s biscuits to Dr Marx and see if you can find out how he’s getting on with his major work of philosophy. Then back here, pronto.’
The pirate in red stood outside Marx’s cabin with a plate of pink wafers. He knocked on the door.
‘What is it?’ barked Marx. Inside, the cabin was a complete tip, with books strewn across the floor, cigar ash spilling out of ashtrays and half-drunk mugs of tea everywhere. The remains of Marx’s lunch were pushed under the hammock. In the centre of it all paced the philosopher, his brow furrowed and his hair sticking up from where he’d been yanking it in frustration.
‘I’ve brought you some ship’s biscuits, courtesy of the Captain.’
‘Oh, yes. Well, leave them there on the table,’ said Marx, going back to his brow-furrowing.
The pirate in red sidled over to the desk. ‘I’d just like to say that I’m a great admirer of your work, Dr Marx.’
‘Is that so?’ said Marx, breaking into a broad smile.
‘Yes, I like the bits with equations best.’
‘I’m very proud of them.’
‘How is the major work going?’
‘To be honest, I’ve barely started.’ Marx slumped into a chair. ‘I seem to keep distracting myself with games of solitaire and by trying on different hats.’ A pile of hats lay in the corner.
‘Do you think you’ll be done by the time we get to France?’
‘I’m afraid not,’ said Marx glumly. He picked up a wafer. ‘These biscuits, they’re not doctored, are they? You know, like with racehorses. The Pirate Captain wouldn’t try to nobble me with knock-out drops or something?’
‘Oh, no, nothing like that. The Pirate Captain is more of a . . . straightforward intellect. He’s asked us to sail around in circles for a bit so that he has more time to finish.’
‘Ah, thank you for that.’
‘Well, I’ll be off then. Cheerio,’ said the pirate in red.
‘Yes. Cheerio,’ said Marx.
‘So he’s nearly finished,’ said the pirate in red.
The Pirate Captain fiddled anxiously with one of his epaulettes. ‘Really?’
‘Oh, yes – he was just finishing Appendix Four when I walked in. It looked pretty impressive – a nice thick manuscript and everything.’
‘Hell’s barnacles!’ said the Pirate Captain. ‘Looks like an all-nighter for me then. I think five days to sail twenty miles is pushing it a bit.’ He stirred a few more spoonfuls of instant coffee into his mug.
Bleary-eyed, the Pirate Captain bundled together his manuscript and ran up on to the deck. He was met by the whole crew waiting for the unveiling of the two major works of philosophy. There was something of the spirit of carnival amongst the pirates, and several had made banners and bunting. It wasn’t every day that the pirate boat saw a pageant of intellectual endeavour. Some of the pirates were so excited that they’d been sent back to bed to calm themselves down.
None of it really helped the Pirate Captain’s mood. Yesterday’s attempted revolution hadn’t worked, but he didn’t want to look bad in front of the men when such feelings were aboard. Despite spending the whole night finishing his major work, he wasn’t sure that it would pass Marx’s rigorous intellectual standards. The grumpy philosopher was already on deck, in a huddle with a flustered-looking Engels.
‘Before we do this, I’d like to point out that I’d written much more,’ the Captain started to explain, ‘but it vanished in the night. Probably eaten by weevils. Terrible problem on a boat, weevils are.’20
Marx didn’t seem to be listening. He held up his hand. ‘Pirate Captain, I’m afraid I am going to have to admit defeat. I’ve not managed much more than this . . .’
He opened his book and showed a single page. It was completely blank, apart from a short paragraph in German and a few geometric doodles in the margin. Marx’s hairy face almost looked humble.
‘Oh,’ said the Pirate Captain. ‘I’m sure it’s very good. What does it mean?’
‘It means nothing, sir. It’s little more than the lyrics to a song that I couldn’t get out of my head all night.’
‘Ah. Well, I’ve finished mine. But don’t feel bad – it’s probably not all that.’
The Pirate Captain handed over his hastily stapled-together wodge of papers. The front cover featured a picture of the Pirate Captain leaning on a gate and looking clever, beneath the title The Wit and Wisdom of the Pirate Captain. A ragged cheer erupted from the assembled pirates, and they waved their flags.
‘All right, lads, give it a rest,’ said the Pirate Captain. He’d rather they didn’t make things worse by raising everybody’s expectations.
Marx cracked open the book and started reading. ‘You can’t have a rainbow . . . without a little rain,’ read Marx slowly. He turned the page and read on. ‘By observing the natural world, we can deduce that the best way to impress girls is by being aloof, then funny, then deep – in that order.’ Marx licked a finger and turned the page again. ‘It is my opinion that there are several different kinds of face. There are “plate” faces, which are flat with upturned chins. There are “potatoes”, which are shapeless and may be lumpy. There are “lion” type faces, which tend to have flat, broad noses and—’ Marx stopped, and fixed the Pirate Captain with a serious stare. ‘Is this all your work, Pirate Captain?’
The Pirate Captain looked sheepish. ‘Yes. It’s just a first draft, you realise.’
‘But it’s brilliant!’ exclaimed Marx, slapping his forehead. ‘It’s . . .’ He leafed furiously through the book. ‘There’s all sorts here – recipes, jokes, puzzles, little observations . . . and what’s this? A list of what’s hot and what’s not!’
‘I do a new one every so often,’ said the Pirate Captain.
‘So do I! I tend to stick to philosophers and macroeconomic trends, but it’s the same principle! Oh, Pirate Captain, we have more in common than I realised!’
‘You really like it?’
‘It’s a triumph! I love the “pick it up and put it down” approach. I could keep this in my toilet and edify visitors to my house. This is astounding!’
‘I think I’ve misjudged you,’ said the Pirate Captain.
‘And I you,’ said Marx. ‘You see, Engels? This is where I’ve been going wrong – why, Das Kapital didn’t even have a single page to colour in!’
‘Oh, look,’ said the Pirate Captain, ‘there’s Paris.’ He beamed.
19 A tip for students of philosophy: writing philosophy is quite tricky. You need to make a cogent and logical argument based on accepted premises. You can’t just get away with reading a bit of someone else’s work and then vehemently disagreeing with it to hide the fact you don’t really know what you’re talking about.
20 Ship's biscuits would be baked three times, in order to make it as tough as possible for weevils to burrow into them. An unfortunate side effect of this is that when you’re seven years old and you go on a school visit to HMS Victory and they give you an authentic ship’s biscuit and you try to take a great big bite out of it, ch
ances are you’ll lose a tooth and end up crying for the rest of the trip.
Seven
Why Won’t These Mer-People Just Leave Me Alone?
Paris in those days also had its fair share of cholera-ridden hags and infant death and mud, but the cholera-ridden hags coughed with slightly more continental élan, and the infant death only seemed to strike the uglier babies. The mud was pretty much the same. Even though the pirates didn’t have any real reason to be disguised, several of them had cut their hair into chic bobs and bought themselves tiny dogs to carry about. The pirate in red pointed out how useful the Pirate Captain’s French language skills would prove to be now they were actually in France, but the Pirate Captain said that he spoke such a complex dialect the Parisians probably wouldn’t be able to understand him, so in fact he would be sticking to English for the duration of their visit, and anybody who was minded to bring the subject up again would be advised to keep quiet.
‘I suppose,’ said the Pirate Captain to Marx, as they strolled down a leafy boulevard, with Engels and the pirate with a scarf hefting their luggage a little way behind, ‘that there’s some clever way we get in touch with these Paris communists? Something to do with code words inserted into the Le Monde crossword? “Three across – the swallow flies east tonight”. “Shadowy meetings in the park”. That kind of thing?’
‘No, Pirate Captain,’ replied Marx. ‘We’re on the more enlightened continent now, where we communists are not vilified like in London. In fact, a group of my followers have set up the Paris Commune, as a sort of utopian model of how society should be, lived according to my philosophical principles.’21
‘A utopian society!’ said the albino pirate excitedly.
‘With lady models! And as much meat as you can eat!’
‘And furniture made from that Spanish ham that tastes of fruit!’
‘And intelligent, talking dogs that brush your teeth for you!’
The pirates all got so carried away with imagining what a perfect utopian society would be like that they didn’t even notice that they’d already arrived at the Commune. It was a bit of a let-down. But the pirates tried their best to hide their disappointment.22
‘Funny sort of utopia,’ muttered the Pirate Captain, pulling away some of the peeling paint from the door. A hand-written sign said ‘No door-to-door salesmen, no circulars and no bourgeois oppression’. Marx rang the bell, and before long a baleful-looking eye appeared at the peephole and peered out at them. Then there was the sound of several bolts being drawn back, and the door creaked open to reveal a French communist in a beret.
‘Comrades!’ boomed Marx, ushering the pirates into the hallway. ‘These are my new friends. This is the Pirate Captain, and these are his aquatic crew. I know they look like questionable types, but the Pirate Captain here is a fellow philosopher.’
‘Hello, pirates,’ said the communists.
‘Hello, communists,’ said the pirates.
After that, the conversation lapsed a bit. Normally, the Pirate Captain would put this down to how bad his crew were at mingling with non-work people, but in this instance he had to partly blame the communists. They seemed glum, especially for a group of people living in a utopia. Nobody was singing, or laughing, or even reading out stirring political poetry. Mostly the French communists looked like somebody had just that second told them the truth about Santa.
‘Things haven’t been going well in London,’ said Marx. ‘We’ve had to flee because someone is trying to ruin our reputation.’
‘Oh, dear me. It’s the same here,’ said one of the communists miserably. ‘All sorts of terrible things have been happening, and we seem to get the blame for everything.’
By way of explanation the communist indicated a stack of old newspapers piled up on the coffee table. Marx’s eyes flicked across the headlines.
‘It goes on in the same vein. Just last week we were accused of stealing nine bears from the Paris zoo. What would we do with nine bears?’ said the communist, sounding a little exasperated.
‘You could get them to form one of those human pyramid things, except with bears, instead of humans,’ suggested the Pirate Captain. ‘Actually, you’d only need six bears to make a pyramid, but the other three could be spares.’
‘We didn’t steal any bears.’
‘That’s a pity. I’d have liked to have seen a bear pyramid.’
‘This is bleak,’ said Marx, shaking his bushy beard. ‘My reputation back in England is in tatters, and now I find out that our troubles seem to have followed us here to France.’
‘Would you like to hear my considered philosophical opinion, Marx?’ said the Pirate Captain, trying to lighten the mood.
‘By all means, Captain.’
‘I think of it like this – there are only two certainties in life. One is the inevitability of death, and the other is uncertainty itself. So when everything seems to be going badly, it’s probably meant to be. Or perhaps it’s fate. Either way, it’s something we’ll never really know, and it doesn’t pay to waste too much time thinking about it. Eat a chop instead.’
‘Dr Marx,’ said Jennifer. ‘it’s obvious you and your communists have a lot to discuss, and we were thinking that it might be nice for us pirates to see a few sights.’
‘Yes, good idea,’ said the Pirate Captain. ‘A lot of people follow our adventures with a view to getting travel tips and ideas, because we go to so many exotic climes. So I think it’s only right that whilst we’re here in Paris we check out the local attractions.’
‘While your pirates do that, perhaps you would accompany me to the salon?’ said Marx to the Pirate Captain.
The Pirate Captain looked a bit dubious at this suggestion. ‘Is that a salon like we have in England, where you go to get a fancy new haircut? It’s just that I never let anybody but the pirate with a scarf cut my hair. Between you, me and the gatepost, I have a slightly funny-shaped head, and if I’m not careful I end up looking like that Nefertiti bust. He does these clever feathery bits, hides it very well.’
‘Yes, I see. But you needn’t worry. It’s not like one of those salons, but rather a place where the Parisian élite go to discuss intellectual matters of the day. It will be a fantastic introduction of your philosophies to the wider world.’ Marx clapped the Captain on the back. ‘And I must confess to a selfish interest, because I have a feeling that by bringing you along, I may be able to restore my popularity.’
‘Oh, well, that’s different. It sounds right up my street,’ said the Pirate Captain. ‘I love intellectual matters of the day.’
The pirate with a scarf held up his hand, looking a little anxious. ‘Pirate Captain, do you think sitting about in a Paris salon talking about stuff counts as an adventure any more than sitting about in London did?’
The Captain clicked his tongue thoughtfully. ‘Hmmm . . . I suppose not. What does the small print on the Perkins contract say?’
The pirate with a scarf pulled the contract from his pocket. ‘It says that the . . . ah . . . blah, blah . . . “aforementioned adventure of which the full part is to be sponsored by the party of the first part must involve running through, deathly peril, a racy encounter, at least one chase, numerous incidents of bloodthirstiness, a few shanties and a comic bit with some creatures”.’
‘Nothing about pontificating on the meaning of life?’
‘No, sir.’
‘And I don’t suppose that a metaphorical running through of a poorly constructed argument is going to do the trick, is it?’
‘It explicitly says in Clause 45b that metaphorical running through will not suffice.’
‘Well, not to worry,’ said the Captain, with a grin. ‘You know what we’re like. We’re bound to run into trouble.’
The pirates couldn’t agree which was the best thing to see in Paris, so they split into groups. One group decided to go to Madame Tussauds to see the waxworks. Another group decided to go to the Louvre to see the paintings. And the third group decided to go to the Foli
es Bergère to see the ladies who left nothing to the imagination. The Pirate Captain took the precaution of making sure each group took a packed lunch with them and learnt from the communists how to ask a policeman for help in case they got into any trouble.
The pirates who went to the Louvre were a bit disappointed to find that the gallery didn’t seem to have a single one of those pictures of the girl with green skin, or of unicorns standing on a giant chessboard in space.
‘Why do you suppose they painted so many bowls of fruit in the olden days?’ said the pirate who liked kittens and sunsets, stifling a yawn. ‘Why not bowls of ham?’
‘Yes. It doesn’t exactly encourage healthy eating habits,’ agreed the pirate with gout.
‘These Pre-Raphaelite girls certainly look like they could do with a bit more red meat in their diet. Look how pasty they are,’ said the pirate with a nut allergy.
‘Oooh! This next room contains the Mona Lisa,’ said the pirate with a scarf, looking at his guide. ‘Who, according to this, is “one of the most enigmatic ladies ever painted”.’23
‘Does enigmatic mean not wearing a thing?’
‘No. You know when the Pirate Captain says something like, “I may lead a secret double life as a spy? Or maybe I don’t. Who’s to say?” and then he arches an eyebrow? That’s enigmatic.’
‘Ah. I always thought that was just annoying.’
There was quite a crowd in front of the Mona Lisa, and it took the pirates a little while to fight their way through. They all looked up excitedly, and this is what they saw:
‘Well, I suppose it’s OK. Though I’m not sure I can really see what all the fuss is about,’ said the pirate with long legs.
‘It lacks a certain something,’ said the pirate with gout.