Monday, December the 20th, 2004

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Petrochemical Shiver-me-timbers Conclave

Rookie pirates aboard container ships need to watch their backs. As a seaside doctor, I cannot count the number of cases I've had of youngsters fresh from their first sea voyage coming to me with cutlass wounds or, worse, lead pellets from a blunderbuss embedded in their crania, dangerously close to the brain.

One such lad was Rufus Farjeon, who ran away to sea when he was just seven. He ran from his parents' gingerbread cottage all the way to the beach, panting, panting, and he swam out to a container ship moored on the horizon and clambered aboard, and in his tiny squeak of a voice he said to the captain “Rufus Farjeon, aged nine, reporting for duty, cap'n!”

Captain Cack was not taken in by the boy's lying about his age, but he placed an avuncular hand on Farjeon's shoulder and quizzed him on his knowledge of obscure marine imponderabilities. The captain's right hand was the avuncular one. His left hand was withered.

Over the next few weeks, young Farjeon scrubbed the decks, sloshed out nautical buckets, polished the railings to a gleam, and learned all there was to know about bells at sea. He also sat at Captain Cack's breakfast table, reading aloud to the old sea dog from Yoko Ono's book Grapefruit, while the captain ate plentiful toast, hard tack biscuits and, by coincidence, halves of grapefruit.

Then, one Thursday some weeks into the voyage, the blond and brilliantined bo'sun took the boy aside as he trundled a clattering barrel through a narrow passage between containers.

“A word of warning,” muttered the bo'sun, in tones of menace, “At eight bells the captain is holding a petrochemical shiver-me-timbers conclave in his cabin. There may be trouble. Watch your back.”

But Rufus Farjeon, who had celebrated his eighth birthday a week ago, was by now puffed up, preening and reckless, and he ignored the bo'sun's words. Reeking of grog and blinded by the pitiless tropical sun, he behaved at the conclave in a foolhardy manner, so angering a bloodthirsty corsair that he was taken to the poop deck and shot in the head.

And thus he turned up in my seaside surgery a few days later. I bandaged his wounds and prescribed a course of Doctor Wainwright's Brain Pills. I well knew that just one pill was enough to stun an ostrich, and I had the lad on twenty of them a day, for his metabolism was inhuman. I needed to find out if he was a changeling. He was. And now he sits like a little potentate on a throne on the jetty, facing out to sea, his bandages discarded and his eyes aglow, and mermaids come to gawp at him, and minnows swim in ribbons at his feet, for he is Triton now, and will always be, throned, festooned with seaweed, and staring out to sea.