Steve and the Singing Pirates

by Dan Anthony

  Contents

  Title Page

  About the Author and Illustrator

  1. Music

  2. The Boomerang

  3. Mrs Gestetner

  4. The New Mission

  5. Wolfie

  6. The Captain

  7. Wolfie, Liam and The Countess of Shropshire

  8. Explosions

  9. Duel in The Park

  10. Big Wigs

  11. The Killer Singers

  12. Rehearsals

  13. The Riverfront Song Contest

  14. Twoface

  Copyright

  Steve’s Dreams

  Steve and the Singing Pirates

  by

  Dan Anthony

  illustrated by Huw Aaron

  Dan Anthony

  Dan began writing for children as a scriptwriter for the BBC’s Tracy Beaker series. His books are funny, sometimes a bit scary, and always full of surprises. ‘The world isn’t boring,’ he says, ‘it’s completely crazy – but for some reason grown-ups keep going on about the dull bits.’

  Huw Aaron

  Huw is a cartoonist and illustrator whose scribbles have appeared in hundreds of magazines, comics and books. Monsters and aliens are his favourite things to draw ... but pirates are also pretty cool!

  1

  Music

  That morning I woke up suddenly, as if some kind of alert had sounded. I jumped up and checked the area through the skylight over my bunk. There was nothing to report, just blue sky all around. Below me, in his bunk, my little brother, Kyled, was on the wriggle, burying himself deeper and deeper under his Incredible Hulk duvet. He was the one who woke me up. I stuck my head over the side of my bunk and looked down. I could see a lump moving under the Hulk.

  ‘You can run, but you can’t hide, Kyled,’ I said. Kyled hated getting up.

  Kyled stopped moving. Now he was playing dead. The oldest trick in the book.

  When I reached the kitchen, Mum was already dressed. She checked her watch before pouring hot water on her instant coffee.

  ‘Where’s Kyled?’ she asked.

  ‘Hiding,’ I said, taking my blue bowl down from the plate cupboard.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In his duvet,’ I said, putting in the cereal.

  I poured some milk on.

  ‘I’m going to get him now,’ said Mum. ‘Don’t forget it’s Mrs Gestetner this afternoon.’

  I bowed my head. I’d been trying not to think about it. I knew I had Mrs Gestetner at 4pm, but so far I’d avoided the thought.

  ‘It’s the holidays,’ I said. ‘She’s probably not working.’

  ‘She is,’ said Mum, hurrying past. ‘She says that if she doesn’t keep teaching students in July and August they take four steps backwards. I want you to practise while I sort Kyled out. We have to go out this morning.’

  I pushed my cereal around in its blue bowl as Mum hurried upstairs. The thought of Mrs Gestetner worried me. I hadn’t practised and I hated her lessons. She made me feel like a boy with no talent.

  Just then I heard a huge cry coming from upstairs. Mum had found Kyled. There were crashes and bangs. The kitchen ceiling shook. The plates in the plate cupboard rattled as Kyled roared and ran from bedroom to bedroom. I could hear my sisters Jaydee and Miffany stomping after him, screaming at the tops of their voices.

  Then it stopped. That could mean only one thing. Mum had pinned Kyled to the floor. Now the screaming and shouting started. That could mean only another thing. They were getting Kyled dressed. He was only four, but he had the strength of a grizzly bear. I winced at the noise as Miffany pulled a T-shirt over Kyled’s head.

  I finished the last soggy bits of my cereal and went out into the hall.

  Mum came downstairs holding Kyled by the hand. His face was red. His hair was brushed. He was wearing an Incredible Hulk T-shirt and red shorts, he had his best Ben 10 socks on and his new orange trainers.

  Jaydee and Miffany stood at the top of the stairs in their dressing gowns, waving.

  ‘Don’t worry, Kyled, you won’t be too long in LoSave,’ said Jaydee.

  ‘Then you can come and watch us.’

  Kyled grinned. Miffany and Jaydee had entered themselves in the Pendown’s Got Talent competition at the Bastion Cleverly Leisure Centre. Jaydee and Miffany were going to sing and dance. They’d been practising their song for ages. They’d even created a name for themselves: The Piratellas.

  I went out into the back lane to kick the ball at the spot. I hadn’t been doing it for long before Toby joined me. I’m not sure why he likes hanging around with me. I’m nine, he’s thirteen.

  ‘Hi, Steve,’ he said. ‘What you doing?’

  ‘Spot on,’ I said, kicking the ball.

  He watched the ball. It hit the spot, bounced back into the lane and rolled to the drain. You get double points for a direct hit from the drain, because it’s hard to get your foot under the ball. It generally means you can’t get the height to hit the spot.

  Toby lined up his shot. He was going for a flick, scooping the ball up with his toe so that it ballooned through the air and touched the spot on the way down – a tricky shot for a good footballer. For Toby it was almost impossible.

  I say ‘almost’ because we all know that nothing is actually impossible. Or to put it another way, anything is possible.

  Toby tried his flick. He mistimed it. The ball flipped out of the drain and rolled depressingly along the tarmac. It didn’t even reach the wall.

  ‘Are you going to watch The Piratellas?’ he asked.

  ‘Actually, Toby, I’m not,’ I said. ‘I live with The Piratellas. That’s quite enough.’

  Toby surprised me sometimes. He should have understood that the chances of getting me to go down to Bastion Cleverly Leisure Centre were non-existent. The place gives me the creeps. When I was small I got my toe stuck in a trampette at Sean Griffith’s sixth birthday party. The leisure centre reminds me of bad things that happened in the past.

  ‘I can’t go, anyway,’ I said.

  ‘Nerves?’ asked Toby.

  ‘It’s unmentionable, it’s an unmentionable thing,’ I said.

  ‘What is?’ asked Toby.

  I looked at him. He seemed to expect an answer.

  ‘How can I possibly say?’ I said. ‘It’s unmentionable, that means it cannot be mentioned.’

  ‘You can tell me,’ said Toby. ‘Is it something really bad? Is it another dream? You’re always going on about dreams?’

  ‘I’ve got a piano lesson,’ I said.

  I thought about piano lessons and shivered. I would have booked tickets for The Piratellas if it had meant missing my piano lesson. Even though she was little, there was something powerful about Mrs Gestetner. She gave me the creeps. For example, when I put my fingers on her piano keys I always thought she was going to smash the cover down on them, chopping them off. That’s the kind of lady she was: flowery dress and cakes in the morning – de-fingering in the afternoon. You could see it in her eyes – her glasses made them look huge, like an alien’s. If she caught your eye and looked at you, you felt as if she was staring through your eyes, down the string that ties them into your head. She was pulsing beams directly into your brain. The best thing to do was never to look into her eyes.

  ‘D’you want to come down the rec?’ I asked.

  Toby looked at me. Nobody ever asked him to come with them anywhere. He was one of those kids who spends a lot of time on his own. He was wearing jeans, a T-shirt with a photograph of a pelican on, which he’d had scanned on from a school trip to a bird sanctuary, and a LoSave baseball cap. Not one you can buy, one you get given if you work there. His uncle worked in LoSave. Toby loved LoSave, he said i
t had everything you could ever want in the whole of your life.

  ‘Err, yeah,’ he said. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Come on,’ I said, ‘so long as you don’t talk about music.’

  Of course he didn’t listen. He kept going on about how great my sisters were.

  ‘You see,’ he said, as if I didn’t get it, ‘pirates are usually boys. But “….ellas” makes you think they’re girls, right?’

  ‘I get it,’ I said. ‘Look, Toby, it’s just my sisters, Miffany and Jaydee, wearing lots of stripy pirate clobber, dancing around and singing their ridiculous song.’

  ‘I really dig their song,’ said Toby. ‘Man.’

  I sighed. There was no doubt about it – Toby was an actual fan of my sisters. I tried to get him to talk properly, but it didn’t work.

  We reached the rec. Two teams were getting ready for a baseball game. I could see the bases being set up. In the background kids were playing cricket and kicking footballs around. There was one guy, probably a student, throwing a boomerang.

  As Toby talked, we watched it fly high into the blue sky, then zoom around in a circle, looping back behind the guy who threw it, before hovering a few yards away from where he stood.

  I’d seen boomerangs before – I remembered my last dream. I thought about telling Toby about it, but when I added it all up – stepping out onto the roof of my house in the middle of the night, jumping off the tiles into the floating ‘Library of Dreams’ that looked like the church where Mum takes her Spanish lessons, meeting Big Mo and the other librarians and then discovering that this was the place where all the dreams ever created were kept – I decided to leave Toby out of it. He was thirteen. They say that’s a difficult age. The dream stuff could have completely freaked his mind.

  ‘You know what?’ said Toby.

  ‘What?’ I asked. Although I wasn’t really listening. I was checking out the park. I looked back towards the library. Everything seemed normal. But something told me we were being watched. The next time I scanned the park the boomerang, and the guy throwing it, had disappeared. I had a strange tingling in my spine, the hairs on the back of my neck spiked up. Big Mo was about. I knew it. Another dream was coming.

  ‘I can play the piano,’ said Toby, ‘I can help you practise if you want.’

  I shook my head.

  ‘You can’t play the piano,’ I said.

  ‘I started on the piano,’ said Toby. ‘I wasn’t very good, so they put me on the trombone.’

  ‘Great,’ I said, ‘so really what you’re saying is that you can play the trombone. It doesn’t even look like a piano.’

  ‘I’m saying I started on the piano. I can do some stuff. I can help you.’

  2

  The Boomerang

  Toby and I arrived back at my house just as Mum pulled in. Kyled was sitting in the back on his booster seat. He had a punnet of strawberries in one hand. When he saw me and Toby he stuck his tongue out.

  ‘I’m a bit concerned about Kyled,’ I said as Mum opened the door for him. ‘I don’t think we should be giving him too many treats.’

  ‘Hi, Steve,’ said Mum, as Kyled clambered out. ‘Glad to see you’ve found a friend.’

  Kyled rushed towards the house.

  ‘Kyled was so good,’ said Mum.

  ‘What did he do, Mrs James?’ asked Toby.

  ‘Errr, there’s no need to call my mum Mrs James,’ I said. ‘You can call her Tiffany.’

  ‘Actually,’ said Mum, ‘Mrs James will do fine. And, since you ask, Kyled was very good in the supermarket. He didn’t even ask for sweets, so I bought him strawberries for a change.’

  I’ve got a keyboard. Mum borrowed it from school for me to practise on. In the beginning everybody was satisfied with the arrangement. The school was pleased because they always say in my reports that I should join in more; Mum was happy because she thought playing the piano would let me prove to people that I was good at something and Mrs Gestetner was chuffed because she got the money for teaching me.

  In fact the whole deal didn’t suit anyone. All the other kids at school who might have been good at piano were deprived of a turn on the keyboard; I was terrible at playing and I hated going to Mrs Gestetner’s. Far from making me feel confident and gifted, a half hour with Mrs Gestetner made me a cucumber-fingered dork boy. It wasn’t doing anything for my self-esteem.

  I decided that this time the lesson was going to be different. By transforming Toby’s special trombone skills, I’d prove to them all that I was a great musician. I took Toby and Kyled up to the room at the top. I plugged the keyboard in and told Kyled to sit on his bunk.

  He nodded. He seemed docile. Perhaps his behaviour was improving. Soon Kyled had nodded off on the bottom bunk, leaving Toby and me time to learn the piano properly.

  ‘Play something,’ said Toby.

  ‘Play something?’ I asked. ‘Are you crazy? I’m still on learning the notes.’

  I showed Toby my book: The Piano For Beginners by Wolfgang Amadeus Lofthouse. He may as well have called it: ‘I can do it – you can’t – byeee.’

  Toby opened the book. To my surprise, he folded the pages back and began to play a tune on the keyboard. He could understand the dots on the long lines. He could read keyboard music.

  ‘I thought you played the trombone,’ I said.

  ‘I started on the piano,’ he said.

  ‘But they took you off,’ I said.

  ‘It doesn’t matter, once you can read trombone music you can read any music.’

  ‘No way,’ I said.

  ‘Way,’ he said.

  ‘I thought it was different for every instrument – are you saying that trombone music looks the same as other stuff?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Toby.

  ‘Wow,’ I said.

  ‘Now,’ said Toby, ‘put your hands on the keyboard and look at these notes. Everything starts with the middle C.’

  ‘Surely it should start with A?’ I said. ‘That’s the first letter. Music should go from A to Z.’

  ‘There’s no Z sharp,’ said Toby. ‘At least I’ve never heard one. It’s A to G beginning with C.’

  I was getting confused. Why start music with a C when you’ve already got an A?

  Just then Kyled woke up. He was sick all over the keyboard. Then he fainted. I ran downstairs as fast as I could. I found Mum, Jaydee and Miffany in the kitchen straightening their hair.

  ‘Mum,’ I yelled.

  This time I went with Mum. Toby was sent home.

  We sped out of our estate, past LoSave, onto the Western Distributor Road and then off at the medical centre roundabout. Mum kept looking behind us at Kyled. He sat in his seat, his face was white, and he could hardly keep his eyes open.

  I didn’t know what to say to Mum. I couldn’t say, ‘Don’t worry, it’ll be alright,’ because I thought that it wouldn’t be alright. Perhaps Kyled had been poisoned. I shook my head as I watched him.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said to Mum. ‘We can get some kind of monument put up.’

  Mum looked at me out of the corner of her eye.

  ‘Try to pay attention to the road ahead,’ I said. ‘I appreciate how stressful this is.’

  She swung the car into the health centre. While she parked and grabbed Kyled, I ran on ahead. I sprang into the waiting room and shouted out at the top of my voice.

  ‘Emergency! Poisoning coming through.’

  Then Mum rushed in carrying Kyled in her arms. The nurses were waiting for her. They took Mum and Kyled straight into one of the doctor’s rooms. The waiting room was quite full. Everybody looked at me. I didn’t quite know what to do. So I sat down, picked up one of their magazines and started reading.

  I expected to find myself waiting in there for ages. But within a few minutes Mum appeared holding Kyled’s hand. He was walking. His skin had gone less pale and blotchy. The dark rings under his eyes had disappeared.

  Mum and Kyled walked through surgery out into the car park. Then they came back.


  ‘Sorry, Steve,’ said Mum, ‘we forgot you. Kyled’s going to be fine.’

  ‘It was an allergic reaction,’ she said. ‘Kyled’s allergic to strawberries. They make him drowsy, nauseous and blotchy. They gave him an antihistamine and now he’s getting back to normal.’

  ‘Good,’ I said, following them to the car. ‘So Kyled will survive after all.’

  Mum gave me another one of those looks.

  Kyled snored in his booster seat behind me.

  When we arrived back home, Jaydee and Miffany needed Mum to help them in the kitchen with their nails, their hair, their make-up, their shoes and their clothes. I went upstairs to clean Kyled’s sick out of my keyboard. Guess what? After I’d rinsed it out thoroughly it didn’t work.

  3

  Mrs Gestetner

  It was three o’clock. Showtime.

  Jaydee sat in my seat at the front. Mum drove. I sat behind her next to Kyled and Miffany sat next to him. Jaydee and Miffany were wild with excitement. They kept singing their song and going through their moves. Jaydee and Miffany had given themselves a kind of pirate look. Jaydee had a stripy shirt and long false eyelashes. Miffany had piled her ginger hair up on her head into a huge beehive, and she wore long boots and a pirate’s jacket. I lent forward as Mum pulled out of our street.

  ‘Mum,’ I said, ‘if you’d like me to show some support for Jaydee and Miffany, I don’t mind coming to the Bastion Cleverly Leisure Centre to watch them sing.’

  She sighed. ‘I’m dropping you at Mrs Gestetner’s, then we’re going to the concert.’

  ‘I’m just saying,’ I said, ‘I think I’d actually quite like to see the performance.’