The Pirates! In an Adventure with Communists

by Gideon Defoe

  ‘This Leonardo da Vinci,’ said the pirate with a scarf. ‘He was supposed to be a genius, was he?’

  ‘Someone’s stolen the Mona Lisa!’ shouted an adorable French child.

  ‘Another outrage by those filthy communists,’ said a gigantic statuesque blonde. ‘They won’t stop until they have brought civilisation crashing to the ground.’

  ‘When is someone going to come along and sort them out once and for all?’ said another statuesque woman with blonde pigtails, a bit stiltedly, almost like she was reading from something. ‘How much longer must we live in fear?’

  The Parisians around the painting grumbled in agreement.

  ‘This is bad,’ said the pirate with a scarf.

  The second group of pirates were having a much better time in Madame Tussauds. Over the course of their adventures they had met a great many famous people in the flesh, but they all agreed that meeting famous people in the flesh wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, as they tended to be much more boring than you’d hoped, and also shorter. Whereas meeting them in wax form was brilliant, because you could stare at their faces as much as you liked but they couldn’t let you down and you could pretend to have a conversation with them in your head where they were witty and erudite.

  The pirates stopped in front of a High Seas display. There was Napoleon and Lord Nelson having an arm wrestle, and Jason and the Argonauts waving from the deck of the Argo, and next to that an exciting diorama of Black Bellamy riding atop a big wax squid.

  ‘They’ve done Black Bellamy very well, haven’t they? They’ve really captured that mischievous gleam in his eye,’ said Jennifer.24

  ‘But why is it that Black Bellamy has a waxwork when the Pirate Captain doesn’t? Is Black Bellamy a more famous pirate?’ asked the albino pirate.

  ‘Of course not,’ said the pirate in green defensively. ‘I’m sure the Captain has been asked to pose, but he probably didn’t think wax technology is at a sufficiently high standard to do justice to his air of resolute authority.’

  ‘Do you suppose they have nipples?’ the pirate with a peg-leg wondered out loud, trying to peer down Nell Gwyn’s top.

  ‘I wonder if they’re wax all the way through?’

  ‘Oh, no. They build a frame out of wire, or newspaper, or whatever they have to hand, and then they spray it with a special bee pheromone. That makes all the bees for miles around turn up and cover the frame with wax,’ said the pirate who had once been a mailman.

  ‘Really? I didn’t know that,’ said the albino pirate.

  ‘You see, wax is basically bee sick.’

  ‘What if there aren’t any bees about? Bees get all sleepy in winter,’ said the pirate who knew a bit about nature.

  ‘Yes, well, in winter they probably use earwax from street urchins instead.’

  ‘Look at me! I’m kissing Charles Babbage!’

  ‘And I’m getting a piggyback from Oliver Cromwell!’

  ‘Ha ha! Marie Antoinette is doing something unspeakable with the Pope!’

  They wandered through to the Hall of Crowned Heads, which was supposed to be full of waxworks from all the royal families in Europe, although most of them seemed to be temporarily removed for repairs. The sassy pirate got a match and set about melting the nose of a crowned head who had once tried to trap the pirates down a well.

  ‘Look, here’s a waxwork of a dead waxwork-museum curator with a spear coming out of his back,’ said the pirate in green. ‘They’ve even done a little pool of wax blood! That’s very clever, isn’t it?’

  The pirates looked at the dead waxwork-museum curator waxwork sprawled across the floor. Jennifer bent down and prodded it.

  ‘I think,’ she said, wrinkling her nose, ‘that this is an actual dead body.’ Even though she was a Victorian lady, she had seen a number of dead bodies since becoming a pirate, and was getting to be quite an expert on the subject, though she had not let this affect her breezy outlook.

  ‘Was it old age?’ said the albino pirate hopefully.

  ‘I don’t think spears in the back are often a symptom of old age, no.’

  ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘Moider!’ said the pirate from the Bronx.

  All the pirates jumped with a start as the sound of heavy footsteps echoed down the hallway.

  ‘Somebody’s coming!’ said the pirate in green.

  ‘Oh! It’s bound to be the murderer. They always return to the scene of the crime. And what if they’re not done murdering?’

  ‘Quick, we’ll pretend to be a piratical diorama.’

  ‘What should we do?’ said the albino pirate in a panic. ‘What goes on in a piratical diorama?’

  ‘Pirate stuff. You two, pretend to be having a duel,’ said Jennifer.

  ‘What about me?’ said the pirate in green.

  ‘Pretend to be in the middle of ravishing me.’

  ‘I don’t really know what that means,’ said the pirate in green, turning crimson. ‘We tend to stick to the pillage and plundering part of piracy.’

  ‘Here, grab my dress like this.’

  The pirates had just frozen into an exciting diorama when two gigantic statuesque blonde ladies with long blonde pigtails marched into the room.

  ‘Jennifer,’ whispered the pirate in green.

  ‘Sssh,’ hissed Jennifer.

  ‘What if one of the bees comes and lands on my nose?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘The bees that make the wax.’

  ‘Please be quiet.’

  ‘It’s just I’m allergic to bees.’

  ‘Shut. Up.’

  ‘Did those pirates in that piratical diorama say something?’ said one of the statuesque blonde ladies, peering at Jennifer suspiciously.

  The other statuesque blonde lady came across and looked the albino pirate up and down.

  ‘Don’t be stupid, Helga,’ she said. ‘They are wax. Look, this one isn’t even particularly realistic.’

  The first statuesque blonde lady shrugged, and grabbed a couple of the remaining crowned heads under each arm.

  ‘Oh, this one’s heavy.’

  ‘I think that’s Poland. It’s all the meat in their diet.’

  ‘Is this the last of them?’

  ‘Yes. Let’s get them loaded up and be on our way.’

  The third group of pirates were sat in the audience of the Folies Bergère. Whilst they weren’t having as good a time as the pirates at Madame Tussauds, they were having a better time than the pirates at the Louvre, although they were having to sit through a lot of boring acts that the programme assured them contained biting satire whilst they waited for the dancing girls.

  ‘I heard that when they dance they blow kisses at the men in the audience,’ said the pirate with a hook for a hand.

  ‘I heard that they don’t wear any knickers when they do the cancan!’ said the pirate with rickets.

  ‘I heard that you can see their bare tummies.’

  ‘I heard that they don’t wear any knickers when they do the cancan!’ said the pirate with rickets.

  In the row in front of them sat a small group of Parisian gents, knocking back absinthe and smoking cigars. They were talking about how the Folies Bergère wasn’t as popular as it usually was.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said the pirate in red, leaning forward, ‘I hope you don’t mind me asking, but why do you think that is?’

  ‘Peuh!’ said one of the Parisians with a Gallic shrug. ‘Who can say? Perhaps it is the Ring Cycle opera of Monsieur Wagner? It’s the talk of the town.’

  ‘But that’s on in London,’ said the pirate with a hook for a hand.

  ‘Oh, no,’ said the Parisian, ‘it’s on a tour of Europe. It doesn’t stay in one place for very long.’

  ‘Like a tramp!’ said the pirate with long legs.

  ‘Do tramps sing?’

  ‘Do you remember that adventure when the Pirate Captain decided that he should do something about the homeless and he adopted that tramp? He sang quite a lot
if I recall.’

  ‘Especially when he drank all the Captain’s grog.’

  ‘Yes. Poor Trampy. I wonder how he’s getting on in Antarctica. He looked quite cold when we left him.’

  ‘I heard that they don’t wear any knickers when they do the cancan!’ said the pirate with rickets.

  The pirates waited while yet another comedian went through a routine about relationships. While they had always wondered about what was up with women stealing the duvet, they were getting very impatient. Fortunately, the comedian was followed by the cancan dancers, who high-kicked their way on to the stage. The music speeded up. The dancers kicked higher and higher. The pirates craned forward for a better look, in the anticipation of having absolutely nothing left to their imagination.25

  ‘Oh,’ said the pirate with rickets.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said the pirate with long legs.

  ‘That’s not what I was expecting at all.’

  21 The Soviet space flight Voskhod 1 took a fragment of a banner from the Paris Commune into space. A fragment of the Jolly Roger has yet to go into space, presumably because the pirate space programme is not very advanced.

  22 Thomas More coined the term ‘Utopia’ in his book Libellus vere aureus, nec minus salutaris quam festivas, de optimo reipublicae statu deque nova insula Utopia of 1516. Though of course his version is flawed, because it was written over four hundred years before the young Julie Christie and tubs of Haagen-Dazs even existed.

  23 A recent analysis of the Mona Lisa using emotionalrecognition software showed her to be eighty-three per cent happy, six per cent fearful, two per cent angry and nine per cent disgusted.

  24 There is a waxwork museum in Prague that has possibly the least convincing Michael Jackson you could ever hope to see. But it makes up for this with several quite scary golems. Recently, Madame Tussauds in London had to cover up Kylie with a longer skirt because so many visitors were patting her bum it was starting to wear away.

  25 The ‘cancan’ literally translates as ‘scandal’ or ‘tittle-tattle’ and fi rst appeared in Paris in 1830.

  Eight

  Ambushed By Kill-Crazy Lobsters

  The three sets of pirates all arrived back at the salon at the same time to find the Pirate Captain stretched out on a chaise longue in the middle of the room holding forth to Marx, Engels and an appreciative-looking audience of Parisian intellectuals. The pirates waited politely for him to finish, because he was clearly in the middle of some important philosophising.

  ‘. . . and that’s why, in a straight fight, I think a shark would most likely defeat Dracula,’ said the Pirate Captain thoughtfully.

  All the Parisian intellectuals clapped their hands. The men nodded and stroked their pointy beards, whilst the ladies fanned themselves and jostled for the Captain’s attention.

  The Pirate Captain noticed his crew and waved them over. ‘Hello, number two,’ he said. ‘I seem to have become a cause célèbre.’

  ‘Could we have a word, Captain?’ asked the pirate with a scarf.

  ‘Of course. Excuse me, gentlemen, ladies. I’ll just be a moment.’

  ‘Don’t leave us for too long,’ said a lady intellectual. ‘We are all so keen to hear your views on the nature of consciousness.’

  ‘Oh, that’s easy,’ said the Captain, with a wink. ‘It’s little people inside your brain. They’re the size of earwigs.’

  He strolled over to his pirates, grinning.

  ‘I’m really enjoying this, number two. I’ve often felt it’s a shame my wit and wisdom have been confined to the likes of you lot, when they could be benefiting a much broader audience. Amazing that it took someone like Marx to realise it. So then, what have the rest of you been up to? Anything that might help lead to a proper adventure?’

  The pirates all started talking at once.

  ‘We saw the most amazing thing at the Folies Bergère!’

  ‘Not as amazing as what happened at the waxworks!’

  ‘Wait till you hear about what happened at the Louvre!’

  The Captain waved for them all to be quiet. Because the pirates often got up to pretty exciting stuff, they frequently had a problem with who wanted to tell their anecdote first. To avoid the situation escalating to bloodshed, a while back the Pirate Captain had drawn up a list of topics for potential anecdotes and, through a complex bit of maths, assigned them various scores. Thus it could quickly be decided which anecdote was best and so deserved to be told first.

  The topics were:

  • an anecdote featuring a ham. (10 points)

  • an anecdote featuring nudity. (7 points)

  • an anecdote featuring murder. (5 points)

  • an anecdote featuring somebody being eaten by a creature. (4 points)

  • an anecdote featuring problems with public transport. (1 point)

  ‘Right,’ said the Pirate Captain. ‘My anecdote features ham. Do any of your anecdotes feature ham?’

  The pirates shook their heads sadly.

  ‘Well then. In addition to spending most of the day impressing high society with my intriguing philosophical debates, I also tried some of that French ham today. It was OK, nothing special. Bit salty.’

  ‘That is a good anecdote, Captain,’ said the pirate in green.

  All the pirates were glad they’d heard the Captain’s story first.

  ‘Our anecdote features murder,’ said Jennifer. ‘We went to the waxworks, and they were really good, especially the mechanical ones that jiggle about like they’re dancing. Anyhow, then we found a murdered body. And some mysterious statuesque blonde ladies with pigtails turned up and started stealing the crowned heads of Europe. We had to pretend to be waxworks ourselves, or who knows what they might have done to us.’

  ‘Jennifer was really brave,’ added the pirate in green. He wanted to get a bit of ‘will-they-won’t-they?’ speculation going amongst the rest of the crew.

  ‘Well, our anecdote should have featured nudity, because we decided to go to the Folies Bergère,’ said the pirate with a hook for a hand. ‘It was quite exciting, but also melancholy, because the dancing ladies all had that kind of particularly lovely face that just makes you want to cry into your pillow all night. Anyhow, when it came to the finale, which as you know is meant to leave nothing to the imagination, well, they were all wearing big serious-looking bucket pants! Made out of sacks! The crowd all starting booing, but the statuesque Nordic lady with pigtails stood up and told everybody that it was by order of the communists, because communists felt that not wearing any underwear was a bit much.’

  ‘Are we against a lack of pants now? I do lose track a bit,’ said Marx.

  ‘No,’ said Engels. ‘We said that it’s all about context. If it’s “artistic”, then that’s OK.’

  ‘The Folies Bergère are French, so they must be artistic,’ said the pirate in green.

  ‘Precisely. We’d have no problem with that,’ said Engels.

  ‘We went to the Louvre,’ said the pirate with a scarf, going next. ‘I think we probably drew the short straw, because although we feel culturally enriched, we didn’t get to see any murders or high-kicking legs. We got a bit of art theft, which isn’t bad, I suppose. Someone had tried to make it look like the communists had stolen the Mona Lisa! A hefty blonde was telling all the crowd how terrible it was and how if we had a strong government who weren’t afraid to act then we’d soon see the end of the “red reign of terror”.’

  ‘It’s just like in London!’ cried Marx. ‘Obviously, somebody is intent on blackening our name. But who could be carrying out such a thing? And for what possible motive?’

  ‘Aaarrrr,’ said the Pirate Captain, narrowing his eyes and tapping his chin.

  ‘Oh, good God. He’s going to start going on about his “detective skills” again,’ muttered the pirate in red, holding his head in his hands.

  ‘In the course of my many adventures,’ said the Pirate Captain, taking on an air of authority, ‘I’ve noticed that when sinister dealin
gs are afoot, one is usually looking for a culprit. “Culprit” is a technical term for somebody who is up to no good. It’s usually the last person you suspect. Like a pillar of the community. Or a kindly spinster. Have you noticed any pillars of the community or kindly spinsters skulking about?’

  ‘Afraid not, Captain.’

  ‘Well, not to worry. As I may have mentioned before, I’m a bit of an expert when it comes to solving mysteries and criminal matters. For instance, did you know that nine times out of ten you can discover who the guilty party is simply by comparing the butt of a cigarette left at the crime scene with the brand he smokes?’

  ‘Except we didn’t find any cigarette butts, Captain.’

  ‘Really? That’s unusual.’ The Pirate Captain clicked his tongue thoughtfully. ‘We’re clearly dealing with a professional. In which case, the identity of the criminal is usually given away by a dog failing to bark, thereby revealing the fact that the intruder was familiar to the victim. Case closed.’

  ‘Not sure that really helps either, Captain,’ said the pirate in green. ‘Because we didn’t see any dogs.’

  ‘Then it seems,’ said the Captain, holding up a finger dramatically, ‘that the villain was a jellyfish all along!’

  ‘Actually, Captain,’ said the pirate in red, with a world-weary sigh, ‘the keen observer will notice a common thread. Something all these stories have in common.’

  ‘All the stories are about pirates!’ shouted the albino pirate excitedly.

  ‘Besides that. All the stories feature these mysterious statuesque blonde women.’

  The Pirate Captain frowned, and tried to remember something important. Unfortunately, the years of drinking grog mixed with gunpowder had left the ‘remembering things’ part of the Captain’s brain a bit shot, though the ‘knowing a lot about meat’ part of his brain had done its best to compensate for this. He screwed up his eyes in concentration. He did his best not to think about hams. He thought about the mysterious blonde ladies. Then he thought about how sad it was that ladies weren’t very good at growing luxuriant beards. He wondered if perhaps that could be a motive, because maybe they were jealous of Marx’s facial hair. Then he thought about how much better his own beard was compared to Marx’s, which led him on to thinking about how oak-like his broad neck was. That made him think about how fantastic he looked in his nice new coat. And then he sat bolt upright.