The Pirate

CHRISTOPHER WALLACE

The Pirate

For Ann, For Fiona

With thanks for the friendship

of the McLeish family

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

The Pirate

About the Author

Praise

Other Works

Copyright

About the Publisher

The Pirate

I asked for a price, Jesus Christ, I actually asked for a price.

There have been many low moments for sure but this one stands the test as one of the worst imaginable. Not that I thought this at the time; no, it all seemed reasonable, another transaction. The scary thing was that when I heard my voice making the enquiry it didn’t shock me, not at all, I listened to what I was saying and ploughed on regardless. Go down deeper. I was cool with it, cool with everything. Days later when I was a little less high and remembered what I had been asking for it made me feel sick enough to need to run to the bathroom. And when I got there I stared at myself in the mirror, wondering who was on the other side of the glass. I looked for a long long time. Half an hour, one hour? I tried and tried but didn’t have the time to find him.

Miguel and Torres ‘Tony’ Carcera didn’t look particularly shocked to hear it either, that’s when I realized they were the real thing. The only issue for them was how much, there was never going to be a set fee for this kind of deal, no; pitches like mine must have come along so rarely that every case had to be treated as a one-off.

Big Tony toyed with his drink, sticking a fat cigar-shaped finger into his glass to mop up the dregs of the froth left on its sides. The finger of a thug, filthy, oil-stained, the real thing, nail chewed to a stump that gave up less than halfway on its struggle to the tip. He stuck it into his mouth and sucked, blinking slowly at his brother, long eyelashes, dark and effeminate yet perfectly suited to the macho pout that rested so easily on his lips. The pout of a psychopath. I don’t know, it seemed to say, you work something out for me, brother, how much would it be for us to kill someone?

Miguel gave all the signs he was thinking it over. It was as simple a matter as just quoting a price and terms of payment; he was pondering the wider picture.

‘So this guy, it’s you or him, yeah?’

That was how he saw it, and I had to agree.

‘Well, we can help, but we need to know what happens when he’s gone, yeah?’

Miguel liked to know you were following him, that you were on the same level of understanding, that you were listening intently to the guttural drawl of his Catalan voice, following every word of wisdom that came out of him. He was a weedy-looking guy with thinning jet-black hair tied tight into a ponytail. You could tell that somewhere along the line Miguel had had it rough, maybe his childhood in the cockroach palace high-rises of the mainland, maybe prison in Barcelona, maybe a lifetime keeping the lid on his younger brother’s wilder enthusiasms. In years gone by he would have made a perfect extra in one of those spaghetti westerns, a pistol-toting desperado blown away by Clint Eastwood in the first reel. Miguel wanted a starring role though, one that meant he was around to stay.

‘What do you mean? Are you asking if anyone is going to come looking for you?’

A wave of his hand throws the question off. A different hand from his brother, more gold rings, cleaner, more delicate; a hand that found it easy to turn to brutal chores all the same.

‘No, I mean here, the bar, Puerto Puals marina, yeah? Who inherits?’

‘Who inherits? It’s my fucking bar, I get to have it back, I own it anyway.’

‘The other places?’

‘I guess they go to whoever Herman has left them to, the organization, whoever. What does it matter?’

‘It matters because we want to help you, Martin, not just with this problem but anything else to follow. You come to us for help, and we are looking for opportunities here in Mallorca. We know bars, me and Tony, we run them, in Barcelona. Nightclubs, discotheques … We got ideas, haven’t we Tony, yeah?’

Tony licked his finger by way of reply. Miguel moved his chair closer to mine, warming to his theme, speaking faster, forcefully. I could feel his breath on my eyes.

‘Us and you, Martin, yeah? You think about it. What a team, you, me and Tony. Nobody fucks with us.’

I didn’t like the way this was going, I only wanted them to murder someone, why couldn’t they just agree and name the price?

‘I’ll think about it. And you guys think about how much you want to charge me. Listen, I got to go, things to see to tonight. Can you excuse me?’

‘Sure, yeah.’ Miguel smiled. Neither brother moved an inch though, they were already sizing the place up, already acting like the new fucking owners, did they expect me to leave them here?

‘You got a girl coming round?’

To my surprise it was Tony doing the asking now; maybe he was trying to reach out to his prospective business partner.

‘You bet. A shy girl, should be a good lay. I don’t want you two handsome guys distracting her, so I’m afraid I’ve got to ask you …’

The two boys smiled, perhaps not fully appreciating the irony I had intended.

‘Hey Miguel, maybe we should hang around to see Martin’s new girl, maybe she’d like a threesome?’

‘Hey, me first, yeah?’

‘No, fuck you, you guys can wait, me first this time.’

‘Hey, what do you mean, if she likes me, she has me, she won’t need use of either of you when I’ve finished, yeah?’

‘Hey, fuck you.’

The general tone of the debate now established, it proceeded, the two of them arguing about the order in which they would take their pleasure from a girl who did not exist. The strange thing was, I suspect that somehow they knew there wasn’t any girl about to call, but that they enjoyed sparring with each other anyway, as if it was a rehearsal for the kind of argument they would have if they became partners in the Arena Bar. All they had to do to make that happen was to do what I had asked them, kill someone. The real thing. The shit I find myself in.

I was born in Greenock. Just like Captain Kidd. I could tell you about Greenock but you wouldn’t thank me for it. Not that it would take too long – in fact, the opposite; it’s more that it has no particular relevance to what I am about to tell you about the rest of my life and the shit I find myself in. And you will probably need all your strength and powers of concentration and whatever compassion you might have at the outset to deal with that. So the only thing you really need to know about Greenock is that it is what I left behind, like Captain Kidd three hundred years earlier, and that anyway the decision to leave wasn’t taken there but in another place, on the shore of a foreign land many hundreds of miles away, and that when I decided to leave I left everything behind, there would never really be any road back. Not that I knew this at the time, it’s just the way these things go. When you choose to become a pirate it is a strictly one-way ticket, you are on a ship that can never turn round.

The shit I find myself in. I will amaze and appal you with it, none of which you can ever have imagined. The shit in my head. Too much goes on inside my head, things I never share. For all I have achieved, for all I’ve been able to do and say, and for all the tenacity and spirit I have surprised even myself with, there has been a price to pay. And part of that price has been the way I have had to dig so deep to make my way along the bastard path I have chosen; the way I’ve had to dig so deep inside, the way I’ve had to do these things alone. I didn’t know it at the time but all this came at personal cost, not just isolation, detachment or separation. It’s the way I have lived as a stranger, removed from everyone and everything, a stranger to myself. There will be men right now serving time in solitary confinement who have more companionship than me. At least they would know for what they stand, who they stand for and how that relates to anyone else.

I will try to explain but perhaps you will never understand. Maybe you can be a dispassionate bystander to these events in the same way that I was, even when I was at the heart of them. Something changed in me along the way so that I forgot how to judge, or how to empathize … how to feel angry about things, the right things other than just when losing money or graft. So you can watch and let me try to explain how it is and even how it might have been in a different life and in a different time, like three hundred years ago. I will show you another life, one that has grown with me from childhood, one that I chose to ignore until almost too late, one I never shared. You see, I was a normal boy, in a normal town going to a normal school. And I would read normal books full of exciting tales and adventures of piracy and duels on the high seas. But even then, when the villainous Blackbeard or his dastardly men fought their enemies, I knew whose side I was on. The shit I find myself in goes all the way back to then because I grew up with all these battles in my mind and eventually tried to live as a pirate, just like Captain Kidd. Like him I became a hunted man; somewhere along the way the whole world turned against me without explanation. Understand, if you can, that in this life there’s only so much they will let you get away with, and it’s not always the criminal stuff they object to. No, if you really want to confront the system you’ll have to attempt something much more subversive than that.

I will tell you what it is of course, and how I found that I had been declared an enemy without anyone ever telling me why, just like my heroes before me. Let us study the past, to see if we can find where it was I crossed the line of acceptability, and let us study the old maps, the antiques of a bygone age; perhaps X still marks the spot. Let us find where the stinking treasure is buried.

Great moments in my life. Gatwick Airport 1989, the unwelcoming, strange and tiny country lying between freedom and tyranny that is the Goods to Declare zone. I walk in, struggling manfully with rucksack, holdall, oxygen tanks, mask, mouthpiece and flippers. I would need at least another three pairs of hands to keep this lot together, and then maybe I could appear more serene, like a scuba-diving Vishnu. The sound is of a thump and things spilling as I make it to the only occupied desk. I have to snatch to keep the pile together and stop the rogue elements crashing to the floor, swearing under my breath in frustration.

‘What have we got here, sir?’

The officer on duty is a little startled and taken aback by my obvious ill-humour though he tries not to show it. He looks a kindly type, even under his prison guard garb of white nylon shirt and black tie. His skin strikes me as being very pink, the freckled bald scalp to layers of double chin one big ball of its different shades with only a grey moustache to break the colour code. He’s maybe four or five years from retirement and ten minutes from lunch. The sort of guy my father would play bowls with.

‘Diving gear … bought it in Spain. Some of it brand-new, most of it about a year old. The breathing apparatus is the expensive stuff, it’s specialist equipment so that you can go down deeper, not your normal scuba bits. The belt in the lining of the suit is the BCD … sorry, buoyancy control … see? Yeah, special. Anyway I’ve kept the receipts because I knew I would be bringing it back sometime, but I didn’t know what kind of import duty I would be liable for, or whether I’d have to pay on all of it or just the new stuff. Must be worth about eight hundred pounds all told. What do you reckon the score on tax is?’

Go down deeper. I’ve thrown myself at his mercy and he’s not going to thank me for it. I hand him the receipts and he’s almost reluctant to take them. The gentle wind-down towards lunch that he must have promised himself is looking in distinct jeopardy. I watch him peer at the crumpled pieces of paper in his hand, they are all in Spanish and won’t mean a thing to him. Not that he’s about to admit that to the much younger man opposite him, the ridiculously tanned and footloose hombre with his tousled hair, faded jeans and hippyish air who has obviously spent the last couple of years in his carefree life having a whale of a time diving, sunbathing and fornicating with all kinds of exotic types you sometimes see in Nothing To Declare. No sir, the dedicated customs man will not admit to any kind of inadequacy to someone like that.

‘Hold on sir, if you would.’

And now the test, the biggest test of nerve I’d ever had up to then, as I’m left to stare at the gear whilst he vanishes behind a panel door to consult with his colleagues and superiors. There are security cameras above me capturing all this for posterity, and I begin to concentrate on my performance. It would be better if I could look frustrated rather than aggrieved, agitated rather than nervous. The trick is to look normal, whatever that is, I guess the trick is not to appear extreme. I’m Martin Law and I’m normal, I tell myself. I used to live in Spain and now I’m coming home. I take in a breath and let out a little sigh. The air in here is stale, there’s no ventilation, no windows, just the cameras and fluorescent lights above, white Formica tabletops, plastic chairs and lino floor below, these being the only props for one of the key scenes in my life. These and the gear in front of me of course, and maybe the dust that has settled on every available horizontal surface in sight. I stare at the door behind which my fellow performer has disappeared and catch a dull reflection of myself staring in. Is there a problem? My hair, is it too extreme? It had been bleached in Spain, streaks of blonde to join the other strands that had turned yellow under the sun. Hair to go with the times. Maybe not. Anyway, I’d been concerned that I might look too much the beach-bum and dyed it dark just before this trip. Very dark, jet-black in fact. I hadn’t meant to at the time, but that’s the way it goes with hair dye, and now I was left like an impersonation of Elvis during the Vegas years. I studied the impossible mop on the top of my head; it definitely had a sixties showbiz look, a third-rate nightclub crooner or a sleight-of-hand magician … A magician, yes, let me tell you about magic, that would be relevant.

How does a magician make something disappear? Easy. He doesn’t, he just hides it. He will invite you to look for it in all the obvious places – up his sleeves, under the hat, inside the box. He challenges you to search in all the usual kinds of places, but when you do it is on his terms. So he turns his palms one way and then another, he waves the sleeve under your eyes, he lifts the lid on the box; and when you look you assume, because of the confidence he shows whilst doing all of this, that there really is nothing there, the answer must be elsewhere, somewhere else he is not showing you. This is not magic at all then, merely a trick, a confidence trick based on his confidence your thoughts will be elsewhere when he is actually showing you the only places where the item could be concealed.

The relevance of this? Well, it’s like someone having the confidence to walk up to a customs inspector in Goods to Declare and have the nerve to explain to him how a BCD works – or would work if it didn’t have three kilos of cocaine stuffed inside – and giving that man the headache of having to work out the import tax that is liable on the rest of the mess that’s been brought in when all he really wants to do is have a good rummage through everything and then piss off for lunch.

Go down deeper. My reflection is shunted out of view as the door re-opens and my fellow performer returns. He is perplexed, like an audience stooge who has to admit defeat to the delight of the rest of the crowd. Well I just don’t know, his shaking head seems to say, go on then, show me, where have you put it? But of course I’ll do nothing of the kind. A grim sort of smile emerges under his moustache. He’s fumbling for some sort of way out that doesn’t leave him open to ridicule.

‘Sir … You said most of this stuff was over a year old?’

I sense there must be a mountain of forms that he doesn’t want to fill in. Lunch is calling him.

‘About eighteen months … the purchase receipts are dated –’

He puts up a hand to stop me talking, he has no desire to hear the detail, he’s already made up his mind.

‘I guess we can let you through on this occasion, given the relative age of the goods in question. Is there anything else you wish to declare, sir?’

I’m beginning to like this guy but there is nothing else I feel inclined to tell him. He nods and with a wave of his hand I’m gathering up the gear again and walking out of customs. Abracadabra. I’m twenty-three years old and I’ve just earned more than he will ever make in his lifetime. I went deep down inside and was able to hold my composure. I’ve passed the test.

Originally I had studied to be an engineer, like James Watt. Engineering has a fleeting relevance to the events I’m about to describe so perhaps it is worth lingering on this subject and my studenthood in general for a moment.

So what can I say about it? I suppose engineering in itself was never something I had a particular fondness or aptitude for, aside from a bit of tinkering with bikes and boats – of which more later – but it was what I found myself immersed in during my very last teenage months and most of my twentieth year. Quite why is still difficult to fathom. In those days you finished school and you went to college or university in Glasgow and studied. The only way out was by being too thick for the process or such a genius that you by-passed any Scottish stop and went straight to Oxbridge. I fell into neither category. I fell into engineering after a two-minute interview with my careers teacher at the end of sixth year. An interview, I might add, with all the depth and interaction that you have with your average dentist whilst he’s giving you root canal treatment, and only slightly less pleasure. So it came to be agreed that I would enrol at The University of Strathclyde and in the autumn of 1984 I was to be found living in a tiny room, six feet by twelve feet, on the thirteenth floor of the art-deco splendour at the Baird hall of residence, downtown Sauchiehall Street. Glasgow might not have an awful lot going for it as a hedonistic metropolis but after nineteen years in Greenock it was like New York, believe me. Even my little cell with its white walls, single bed, wash-basin and desk seemed like a Manhattan penthouse suite looking down on the throbbing alleyways of decadence below when compared to the dormitory set-up back home. Far away now, though the memories of having to share everything – walls, air and light – with my older brother are still close enough, and all with the glorious sound of my father next-door snoring loud enough to warn the ships to keep from the shore of the Clyde. Yes, my student days were carefree days by comparison, even if they only amounted to barely three hundred. I didn’t know it at the time, it was just the way things were going to work out. A few hundred days of getting drunk as cheaply as you could, trying to get stoned as frequently as possible, and toiling to get laid. Just a hundred-odd shots at this bohemian debauchery before it was over. Sometimes myself and other like-minded souls even stayed up all night.

What would I have been like then, I wonder? Well, young I suppose, youthful and youthful-looking, no doubt in a wholesome and earnest way. The look I craved was that of an amphetamine-washed Iggy Pop, or a Satisfaction-era Keith Richards. Sadly, the face that confronted me in my bed-sit mirror would have had more in common with a tubby farmer’s lad reared on generous portions of Aberdeen Angus, rhubarb crumble and custard. A shy lad at that, boyishly shy, guiltily holding a tenuous notion of what it was he wanted – libidinous sex, a life of excess, high times – and an even more tenuous notion of how he might actually get it. A normal boy brought up in a normal west of Scotland household wanting the normal things. There were many others like me of course, and we sought each other out at the normal places; the student bars, alternative clubs and Cure concerts. We could tell each other by our spiky hair with long fringes, our grey raincoats, and our curious way of dancing, twitching our shoulders whilst gazing vacantly at our shoes like heavily sedated battery hens let loose on an electrified floor. Laughable now but normal then, ordinary boys expressing their individuality by dressing and acting the same. Where I differed I suppose was that I was more willing to push it a little further than the rest, always hungering for anything a little more intense on the basis of the timeless equation that more insane plus less legal equals more fun, a formula which must have marked me down at those times as mad, bad and interesting to know. For a while I wasted energy trying to take people with me before realizing that the most interesting journeys are those where you travel alone. Back then these were the first signs of the way my life was to go, back then this would have been one of the first opportunities to draw the line, to settle for what those around me wanted – the four years of harmless frolics as a Glasgow undergraduate, a decent degree, future wife and job at the end of it. I didn’t know I was rejecting it at the time, I only wanted to experiment for a while before taking it all up again at some point in the future. A naive assumption to go with the times. I would later come to learn that there is no such return option. Once a pirate always a pirate. Like Captain Kidd.

Then there is the other story, the one I read. The story I rewrite so many times in my head so that in the end I star in this one too. An adventure story. I will be thirty-five soon. You would have thought that I would have grown out of these things rather than into them but I suppose that’s the way it is with me, everything over and over if I’m ever going to learn any lessons. Anyway, I’ll share this tale as well, why not, I enjoy playing it through, rehearsing the cast. It’s meant to be over three hundred years old, and truth be told it is authentic to the period. I have read all there is to read so that you can be sure of that. So it is spring 1698, although what will happen is just as resonant to the here and now, just as relevant. It is how things maybe could have been.

It begins with a man walking on to a ship, one he knows will never reach its stated destination. He boards anyway. Why? It’s impossible to tell at first, maybe he doesn’t even know, except that he’s some kind of fugitive, a man on the run, a misfit born outwith his time.

The ship lies at harbour and is being prepared for a long voyage when he arrives. He travelled far to be here, from the north, another port – Greenock, in Scotland – although he has journeyed across land to this part of the southern Devon coast. A trip that has taken him from one country to another, across mountains, plains and rivers, a multitude of dialects passing like languages as he progressed by coach, horse and on foot. Yet this distance is as nothing compared to that he is assigned to undertake once he steps on to the Anne’s deck.

As he approaches the vessel for the first time he pauses briefly to study the activity all around him at the quayside; the loading of cargo into the timber holds – bales of linen, cases of carbines, brass pans and carpets, barrels of spirit, firkins of gunpowder, spare sails and rope, lots of rope. Nothing moves without the application of strenuous labour by men on and off the ship. Nothing seems to move without being noted by the men with pens and notebooks. There is a strange sourness in his mouth for a moment as he realizes that those who do not sweat are undoubtedly the ones who are making the money here. Who were they? The officiators, the clerks, all the king’s men; the supercargoes – agents of the merchants who had funded the voyage – the tax inspectors, the captain’s mate. He noticed that they managed somehow to maintain composure and concentration amidst the distractions all around; the screeching and bawling of the traders pitching their goods to the departing ship’s crew, the barking of stray dogs sniffing excitedly at the tubs of lard and tallow about to be loaded. All ignored, eyes fixed instead on the glimmer of silver that the boat represents.