Bell at Sea

JAN SWAYED ACROSS the deck and rang the dinner bell, just outside the galley door. Those off-duty dribbled in gradually and took their seats around the dinner table, discussing the day’s chores and journey progression. They were just two days from Port Royale now, which meant two days from looting, drinking, fornicating and fighting. The excitement on the ship increased the closer they were to a port, and tonight, aided by extra rum rations, spirits were high and raucous.

Getting over-excited, and forgetting the new regime, one hulking pirate gulped down his beer and belched long and loudly, finishing with a tuneful flourish. His shipmates began to erupt in cheers, until Jan raised a questioning eyebrow. The cheering stopped abruptly. ‘Sorry’, muttered the offender, eyeing the wooden spoon in her hand.

Jan and her galley boy heaved the enormous vegetarian lasagnes from the ship’s ovens to the centre of the wooden table. The pirates, politely, one after another, helped themselves. ‘And whoever doesn’t finish doesn’t get pudding’, she warned to nodded grunts, as the salad bowl was passed around.

Thinking about it, Jan still wasn’t completely sure how she ended up as part of the crew of a 18th Century pirate ship.

Just six weeks earlier, almost to the day, she had been sitting desolate on the Bristol quayside, watching absent-mindedly through her one good eye the ferry boats sail past towards the city with cargoes of tourists. She had fingered the black patch covering her right eye, drained the last of the bottle, and sighed heavily.

Seven days before she had quite unexpectedly woken up with the complete right side of her face just, well, out of order. Her right eye had drooped, and had become frighteningly hard to blink. The right corner of her mouth similarly drooped, as if in formation with the eye, and Jan found it actually beyond use. Talking became a matter of forcing conversation through the left side of her mouth, making it raise slightly whenever she spoke, and giving her speech a curious growl.

Bell’s Palsy, apparently, is when the nerve that controls the muscles in your face become compressed due to some kind of viral infection. Basically, she thought, staring at her reflection, she looked like a stroke victim, but thankfully without having had the stroke.

The hospital had given Jan an eye-patch to wear, and a set of muscle exercises for her mouth. Eventually, they said, her face would recover.

She adapted well, at first. WIthin a few hours she was getting used to talking out the corner of her mouth, but she couldn’t do much about that rolling growl, no matter what she tried. In fact, it was getting more pronounced, if anything.

Mortified at her appearance to her colleagues, in desperation she had taken up her idiot son’s advice about ‘rocking the pirate look’ until she could bear to remove the eye-patch and her face exercises cured the worst of the droop.

Seemed like a good idea.

To head off any suspicions and questions from bewildered colleagues and friends she began a sponsored ‘Act Like a Pirate’ month to disguise her condition. She even started taking donations so as  not blow her cover.

Over the next few days, though, things deteriorated.

Her growl became more and more pronounced, and she unthinkingly began prefixing all her replies to colleagues with the guttural, rolling drawl.

On a midweek evening out with department colleagues, she was wrongly ordered a straight rum from the bar. Not wanting to cause a fuss, and despite never having liked rum, being more of a wine girl, she sat quietly and sipped at the dark liquid. Four hours later she staggered in through her front door, swigging straight from a half-empty bottle of Lambs Navy, shouting at imaginary mermaids and singing shanties she had no idea she knew.

She started referring to women she didn’t know as ‘wenches’, a word that definitely wasn’t in her pro-feminist vocabulary before.

She became claustrophobic in the city, hankering for the ocean, to get off dry land and into the open sea, which was weird given that she became sea-sick just by pedalling a swan pedalo on the shallow pond in the local park.

She had also recently started looking into buying a parrot. It just somehow seemed like a good idea.

After a few days of this, while she was sitting desolate on the quayside, wondering what on earth was going on, feeling the black patch covering her right eye, and with an empty rum bottle at her feet, the pirate ship unexpectedly sailed into Bristol harbour. As the crew laid waste to the city, the Captain, seeing one of his own, had her kidnapped and shanghaied aboard. They sailed away that same evening.

And now, six weeks later, under the Jolly Roger flapping in the wind, Jan gazed out across the beautiful blue, swirling ocean. The brilliant low sun cast dark shadows of the ship onto the water as it ploughed through the great seas. In truth, she was quite looking forward to arriving at Port Royale; the Captain had promised her gold and fine jewellery, fit for a queen. Gold and fine jewellery had never before excited her. But now it made perfect sense, and it excited her far beyond most things. Fit for a queen!

Yes, Jan couldn’t wait to get to Port Royale.

She still wore the eye-patch, and she was still talking out of the side of her mouth and growling at people. But the worst of the Bell’s Palsy had long worn off, so this was mostly for effect.