Don’t hate me for bringing it up, but I’ve been feeling very Christmassy lately. It’s the dark evenings and the chill in the air. And probably the box of Toffifee we were gifted yesterday evening.
Here’s a children’s story what I wrote on the subject, like.
Saint Anne’s lay at the end of small, tree-lined laneway. It was old and ivy covered and inside it smelled like eggs and feet. This was almost certainly because all of the old, doddery teachers who worked there ate eggs and toenail clippings for their lunch and the staff room walls couldn’t keep in the awful stench. At least, that was what Tess thought. It didn’t have to be true, just silly enough to make her giggle whenever she saw Miss Brennan, who taught third class, munching on an egg and onion sandwich.
She was considering the required growth rate of Miss Brennan’s toenails as she sat on the steps waiting for her Dad to pick her up. If Miss Brennan had egg sandwiches for lunch every day, she would need at least five nails for seasoning each day, and that would be twenty-five nails in a week. Far more than one crusty old teacher could be expected to grow, really. She had her suspicions that there might be a black market in toenails from teachers who didn’t like them. She was considering the possibility that Miss Brennan bought extra from Mr Sweeney who taught fifth class when Mr Sweeney himself appeared out from around the corner of the school building and walked towards her.
“Tess, is there no sign of your father?”
She wanted to say something smart in reply. Ah, he was here Mr Sweeney but I told him to go on and come back because I felt like waiting for another while. I enjoy a nice wait. No, of course there was no sign of him. She bit back the smart answer and gave the teacher one he would be happy with.
“No Mr Sweeney, he must be held up somewhere.”
“Did he say he’d be late today?”
“No Mr Sweeney. He had weight training yesterday, but he didn’t say anything about today.”
“Alright, well come inside and call him if you’re waiting much longer.”
Tess nodded to say that she would, and resumed thinking about egg and toenail sandwiches. Before long, she had caught sight of Sarah Fletcher and Clara Grouse from sixth class making their way across the yard towards her. She could see them out of the corner of her eye, stopping to have whispered discussions every other step, before advancing another little bit. Sarah reached her first.
“Here, Patch, did I hear your Dad is a weight lifter?” the older girl demanded.
With that, Tess did something she had never done before. She lied. She didn’t want to do it, but she was sick of being slagged for being different because of her eye patch and the funny way she talked. It wasn’t her fault that she’d come in on the first day and called the rest of her class ‘me hearties’, that was what pirates said and she was a pirate. She had only been trying to be nice to them.
She always tried to fit in, but she always stood out. The kids in her class slagged her all the time and said that she was missing an eye underneath the patch. Actually, her eye was just fine. In fact, if she took off the patch she might have looked the same as any other kid and been left alone, but it had been her mother’s patch and she liked to wear it to remember her by.
Her mother had been a pirate queen. Her name was Esther O’Malley but everyone had called her Star of the Sea because she could swim like a dolphin or a mermaid, cutting through the water like it wasn’t even there. Esther was an old school pirate. She had grown up on the seas, before the great migration to space when Tess had been a baby. Tess didn’t remember her very well, but the way everyone talked she knew that her mother had been a fantastic person. She really wished she could remember swimming with Star, and living aboard the Robbin’ Hood, which was her father’s ship. She’d only been 3 when her mother died in a fight against a clan of marauding space pirates who’d come to plunder their ship, and everything had changed after that. No more robbing the rich pirates to give to the poor ones. No shopping for bargains at the 2 euro ship. No helping her father raise the green feather sails of the Robbin’ Hood and hurtling to space, stopping for a quick bout of stealing at every planet on their way.
They lived on earth now, hiding out from all the pirates who were mad at her Dad for taking their riches to help the poor. Lorcan, her father, didn’t even wear his pirate clothes anymore, and she’d had to fight to keep her patch. He’d cut off his long pirate hair and hung up his peg leg for good, he said. And he’d taken the most awful job. She shuddered to think of it. He was a toll bridge man, a weigher. When the cars went down the motorway, he was the man who sat in the caves underneath the road with his hands cupped under the coin toss baskets, weighing to make sure the drivers had thrown in the correct change. It was awful, and even worse, that was after a promotion. He used to work as a weigher in a vending machine but that had been cramped and made his back ache from standing all day, so he’d done the extra weight training to get a job at the toll bridge. She grimaced as she thought of it. She didn’t want to be ashamed, but there were other kids whose Dads worked under the bridge and they got teased mercilessly. She couldn’t bear it, not when she never got a minute’s peace about her patch already.
“Yes,” she told Sarah and Clara. “Yeah, my Dad is a weight lifter.” As she spoke she got up quickly and pulled her bag onto her back. It clanked against her empty scabbard (she wasn’t allowed to carry her knife in school) and already she was groaning under the weight of the books but she started to walk away as fast as she could just the same. She didn’t want to hang around for more questions.
She started down the laneway, determined to make her own way home, when suddenly, from out of the laurel bushes at the path edge, there sprang a very familiar pirate.
“Trevor!” she yelled, excited to see her father’s best friend. She rushed forward to hug him and a bundle of questions exploded on her tongue. Where was Sickbucket, his sarcastic parrot? How was he finding sailing through space on the Robbin’ Hood alone? There were so many things to ask, it took her a minute to realise that Trevor wasn’t acting like this was just a social call.
“Dad will be really happy to see you!” she told him. When she mentioned her father, Trevor frowned.
“About that. I’ll just come out with it me young hearty Tess. Your Dad’s been taken hostage and you’ve been called to a parlay.”
“Oh, Trevor!” This was very, very bad.
A parlay was a sort of meeting among pirates, an audience with the top seafarers to discuss any issues in pirate space. Also, very occasionally, it meant that you’d been scuppered by the marauders and they were calling you in to negotiate – which meant seeing how much they could get out of you. Tess shuddered as a feeling of dread travelled up through her stomach. What use was she to the marauders? She didn’t have anything to negotiate with.
“Now Tess, don’t be a thick-skulled wench,” advised Trevor, “I’d never let you up there alone. We’re not going to leave you in the hands of the marauders, we’ll try to steal him back before any of that.”
“As a matter of interest,” asked Tess, a little relieved, “why has he been taken hostage? What was he even doing in space? Today was supposed to be his first day at the toll bridge.” It didn’t make sense that Lorcan would go to Up Yonder without telling her, but he must have, because the marauders didn’t land on Earth. They said it tainted their ships with earth dregs.
“It’s a long tale, little wench,” said Trevor, “he got a call for help on the interstellar radio just before he left the house this morning and you know your Dad, he went to see what he could do to help.”
Tess groaned. She knew her father was a good man who tried his best to do right by people, but he’d promised that he’d given up on all the dangerous spacefaring and even though Tess missed Up Yonder, she didn’t want to go back to where her father was in danger.
“Who called for him, Trev?” she asked.
“It was the old man, Saint Nick,” Trevor explained, “he was up trying a new route before he does the Christmas Eve run next week and the marauders got him and all of the presents.”
“Santa!” Tess gasped. Lovely old Santa, caught by the marauders! For a moment, she found it hard to breathe. It was horrible to imagine the old man being trapped. He had always been so nice to her when she was small. Earth children got presents at Christmas, but Saint Nick was known to bring gifts to pirate kids whenever he happened to be passing by their ships. He said it was research to make sure he still knew what gadgets the kids were into, but Tess had a feeling he just liked the kids in Up Yonder better. And now he was trapped, and nobody would be getting any presents unless she and Trevor did something to help. In fact, it could be worse than no presents. If they didn’t act soon, her father and Saint Nick might be space dust.
“Where is the Robbin’ Hood anchored?” she asked, suddenly jittery with energy and desperate to get the rescue underway. Trevor lifted his peg leg and pointed it in the direction of the school football pitch.
“Trevor you didn’t!” she gasped.
“Aye, I did, and it’ll be just fine too. Nobody’ll believe any of those football players if they say a pirate ship landed on their field. Teenage boys are known to be liars.”
Tess couldn’t argue with that. She made for the pitch without another word, ignoring the drag on her shoulders as she ran with her heavy bag. Trevor pegged after her, his wooden leg knocking against the stones in the laneway as he followed and making an almost musical sound.
Once they were aboard the ship, Tess had to force herself not to run around and hug every inch of it. She had missed the Robbin’ Hood so much. She missed her berth. She missed the hammock on the deck. She missed the feather sails, stitched by Peter Pan himself on their voyage to Never Never Land so that the Hood would never grow old and fall apart.
When Trevor hauled up the anchor, she perched nervously on the starboard side, watching the skies as they ascended. They didn’t even have a plan.
“Trevor,” she asked, “what are we going to do exactly?”
Trevor grunted, and she suddenly remembered why he had been her father’s sidekick and not the lead adventurer. Trevor didn’t make plans or devise clever ruses, he waited until the plan was formed and waded in loyally with his knife and sword. That simply wouldn’t do now. Tess would have to come up with a plan herself.
“Alright,” she began, “here it is. We will anchor alongside the marauders ship and you will go aboard and say you couldn’t find me for parlay. Say that you will parlay in my stead. While you keep them busy, I’ll find father and Saint Nick and steal them away to the Robbin’ Hood and then father will come up with a plan to get the sleigh and the presents back.”
“That’s sounds dangerous, Tess.”
“I’m Tess Battle! Daughter of Star of the Sea and Lorcan the Brave, I live for danger.” She said it in a sort of glib, unserious voice just meant to buoy herself up, but Trevor seemed to buy it. He wrinkled his brow, cocked his head to the side for a moment and then nodded. A pirate who lived for danger – that matched exactly with his view of the world. He signalled his approval of the plan with a loud ‘arrrrrrrrrrrrr!’ as he pulled his sword from its scabbard and thrust it toward the air. His enthusiasm did nothing to calm Tess, who was looking around for a brown paper bag to take some terrified gasps into.
Before very long, they were approaching marauder space. Trevor got on the radio and relayed the carefully prepared lie about being unable to find Tess. The dadnappers didn’t seem pleased by the news, but they agreed to parlay with Trevor and soon they were anchoring beside the enemy ship and preparing to go aboard. Tess wished Trevor luck with his fake negotiation and waited for a few minutes after he had left before stealing up the gang plank herself and creeping nervously across the deck of the enemy ship.
It wouldn’t make sense to hold prisoners on deck, she reasoned. If she knew pirates, and she did, the prisoners would be kept somewhere deep in the bowels of the ship, under guard so that they couldn’t escape. Still not sure about how she planned to get around any guards there might be, she climbed below deck and began moving carefully through the storage rooms, the berths and the galley, searching for her Dad and Saint Nick. Just when she had sighted a promising-looking locked room up ahead, she was seized by the shoulders and lifted off her feet.
“Arrr, what have we here mateys?” Within seconds, she was surrounded by marauders, all vying to be the one to take her to the captain. Her heart sank, this was very, very bad.
“That’s a little Battle that is, I’d recognise the crest on that patch anywhere. She’s Lorcan the Brave’s daughter!” came a shout. Suddenly, the insistent wearing of her mother’s eye patch didn’t seem like such a genius idea, it had given her away in seconds and now she was being carried above deck by the band of marauders, who were singing “Yo, ho ho and a bottle o’rum we’ve caught ourselves Earth pirate scum!”
“This is her, Cap’n.” They pulled off her eye patch and presented it to him.
She was dumped unceremoniously at the feet of the largest, smelliest marauder of the bunch who held court on a makeshift throne of old fishing nets draped across rum barrels up on the deck. He was a typical marauder, first seeing what he could steal from her person before bothering at all about what he was going to do with her. He pulled her school bag from her shoulders and began rifling through it, tossing aside most of the items with disappointed like ‘arrrs’ which said this is not treasure! Why do you carry it around in your strange cloth chest? Oh, you disappoint me!
“I want to see my Dad!” Tess demanded, her bravery popping up out of nowhere.
“And you will little Brave, just as soon as we’ve had parlay.”
“I don’t have anything to give you,” Tess reasoned.
“Arrr, you do!” insisted the Captain, drawing her aside for a muffled conversation that the other marauders wouldn’t be able to hear. Tess’s heart even softened a little as the marauder captain explained that he heard about her Earth schooling, and he wanted her to teach him how to read. Of course she would do that, if he would give back her Dad and Saint Nick and all the presents. She had taught her Dad, and her uncle Albert, pirate and 7th Earl of the Sea Floor. That wasn’t such a bad request at all.
“Alright,” she agreed, “I’ll do it.”
“Then we have arrrr….arrrrr….a deal,” confirmed the marauder captain, “but we must make it look like I have given you a greater challenge, I must not look weak in front of my men! I have devised a great ruse!” he told her. Tess listened intently while the Captain told her of his plan and tried very hard not to giggle at his ridiculous idea. His men would almost certainly see through it, but nonetheless she went along with it to keep him happy.
Before long, her father and Saint Nick had been hauled above deck and the marauder captain was standing before them all, holding aloft a copy of The Merchant of Venice from Tess’s schoolbag.
“This arrr, arrr, arrr, book has an excellent idea what they use in it!” announced the captain, “I know, because I have read it because I am very smart.” He winked at Tess.
“These gentlemen,” he continued, “wager a bet for a pound of flesh no more no less and they are defeated because they cannot measure an exact pound. The young pirate wench here wagers that her father can lift exactly a pound of Saint Nick’s presents – and if he can, I shall give all of the presents back. Of course, I don’t think he can do it, which is why I have made such a bet. I am no fool, do not thinking I am risking our great new supply of games for under tens!”
Tess looked on while her father, an excellent weigher to be proud of, stepped forward and began to measure out a pound of toys in his hands. Eventually, he presented a ball, two Nintendo DS’s and a miniature cricket bat to the captain and announced that together they weighed exactly one pound. The marauder captain put on a fake show of fierce anger as the weighing machine showed Lorcan to be exactly right, and Tess beamed at her Dad. He wasn’t just a weigher, he had saved Christmas by doing something nobody else could.
“Thank you Lorcan,” said Saint Nick in a voice that tried very hard to be serious but always burbled with mirth.
“All in a day’s work,” Lorcan insisted. He stepped forward, removed Tess’s eye patch from where the marauder captain had left it to hang across one of the buttons on his jacket, and set it firmly back where it belonged over Tess’s perfectly good left eye.
“We’re pirates and we’ll always be pirates,” he announced to nobody in particular. That would be something to tell Sarah Fletcher and Clara Grouse, Tess thought smugly. Her Dad was a pirate, and she was a pirate, and when they were doing their homework every night all the way up to the summer holidays, she would be up in space teaching a marauder how to read.
). Thanks to Mark, Susan, Sarah, the Eoins and countless others for never saying “You can’t blog that about me!” Thanks to the lads at home for not thinking they have a weird internet daughter/granddaughter/niece. Thanks to the gang I live with for good naturedly keeping track of tales about a bunch of people they’ve never met (“Is that Dave who plays lego or Darragh who knows everyone or Darren whose party you went to?”) Thanks to those I’m forgetting, who will be remembered in countless edits of this post for the next week.
