Pirates

'There's more!'

My hand, entirely of its own volition, reaches out and grasps her tiny wrist. Her bones are bird-like under my skin. She turns, casts her eyes down on my white-knuckled hand, then raises them, slow and deliberate (which frankly makes me wonder if she practices such melodrama in her cabin mirror) and fixes me a gaze of such astonishing green-eyed severity, I am struck dumb.

'Let ... go ... my ... wrist.' The enunciation of each single syllable word is precise and particular and each word lands like an artillery explosion on my eardrum. My hand falls away as though it were butter and her wrist was hot lead.

'Miss Burroughs, I ...' I want to say something apologetic and seemly about the impropriety of this clandestine meeting, something to immediately win back a modicum of favour, and yet I am also encouraged to say something mysterious and bold, something which will excite her emotions and, yes, perhaps even illicit more such reactions. I'm in a quandary. I want her to see me as her equal and, at the same time, I want her to ... I want her to ...

'You what? What is it? What is it you want to say?' Her hair clasp has come undone and a fiery tendril of hair flames about her face.

'Pirates!' the word explodes out of me, with a wild emphasis on the plosive 'P'.

She narrows her eyes, but I have her. She pauses in her haste to reach the staircase. 'Pirates?'

Ah, the desired response. Intrigue.

Sea legs and sea dogs

Sea legs. I'm not entirely sure what they are, nor how to attain them, but I'm certain of one thing: I don't have them.

The Captain has sea legs. And then some. Apparently, he was born at sea, carried to his mother's arms by a long-winged albatross, swooping right out of the sky. That's what the shipmates say. I, of course, don't believe a word of it. He was born like anyone else. On dry land. He came to sea, probably in his teens, and worked up the rope ladder, rotting rung by rotting rung, until he stood at the helm of the Frontier with his weathered sea dog face and his faraway eyes that could pierce a London fog right through.

He stands above me and his gargantuan shadow looms over the deck. He adorns the bridge with his long beard and fixes his glittering grey-green eye on the undulating grey-green sea. He's nothing but a pirate to me. 'Yar, me hearties, ye scurvy dogs, to work with ye.' Of course, he doesn't really speak this way, but he might as well. His face might as well be made of sand it's so weathered and moulded by the wind. The truth is, he scares me. I have never met anyone like him. Someone made by the sea. Captain Henry J. Burroughs by name, sea dog by appearance, stone-silent Narwhal by nature.

We are two days at sea and, so far, the trip has been nothing short of disastrous. We set sail under inauspicious circumstances. No fanfare, no ticker tape parade, no waving army of fair maidens. Nothing but the shrill cry of gulls and the ripe stench of fish guts and the sting of salt on the air. Two days at the rail, lurching under the rise and tilt of this tin can boat leaves me white-knuckled and bilious.

Everything shifts on the schooner. The mast, the ship's furniture, even the windows. Plates on the table scuttle from one side to the other as I attempt to stab my gristle-ribbed slice of beef (at least I assume it's beef) with a blunt fork. And the thing is ... it doesn't seem to bother anyone but me. Even the Right Honourable Ibrahim Seedat seems at ease in these seas.

I know this because he turns to me today and says: 'I feel indeed at ease in these seas. Jolly good and all. What ho.'

'Jolly good,' I repeat, hurling, green-faced, over the pitching side.

'This is no storm, young rascal, save your sickness and incredulity for the whipping Atlantic wind and the walls of water. She is not upon us yet.'