The Voyage

                
    
(An exercise in pisspotical prose)
 
I was yelling at idiot pedestrians in my path and lashing out with my granny’s walking stick as I propelled her wheelchair down the one-in-four incline of Luna Sea Lane hurtling towards Daft Ness Dock. I tumbled lame beggars and hobbledehoys left and right leaving them bruised battered and bleating in my wake. I had to get to my ship before the tide turned. 
 
At last I reached the quayside where the majestic two masted schooner the SV Fullavoles was loading a cargo of repatriated giraffes for the Congo.
 
As I skidded up the gang plank captain C Siknes was frantically circling the deck on his skateboard hurling coconuts up at the men setting the t’gallants high in the rigging. I think this was his way of encouraging them to work faster. He gave up however after knocking two of them into the harbour.
By the time we retrieved these hapless wazzacks the tide had dropped and the Fullavoles touched the bottom. It was then the captain had the bright idea of unloading some of the giraffes and harnessing them to the bow of the ship and getting them to tow us into deeper water.
 
These ungrateful creatures refused to do so until the captain’s wife Fanny stood on the figurehead and threatened to kiss them with her lavatory plunger lips. That did the trick; I didn’t know giraffes could scream. We reached deep water after about ten seconds. I never knew giraffes were such powerful swimmers either.
 
Three and a half weeks after leaving Liverport the captain pulled into the Isle of Man to ask for directions to Africa. His parrot was a brilliant navigator having been a sailor for two hundred sixty years but unfortunately she’d been at the captain’s grog. All she’d do now was squat in the rigging singing risqué sea shanties. We tried to coax her down with offers of raw meat but she bombarded us with marlin spikes so we gave up and went to bandage our heads.
 
Anyway once we’d taken on more food and fresh rum supplies the Captain’s transvestite daughter Quim came aboard as it was half term from her boarding school of St Hugh Janus. She had a GCSE in sex therapy and a photocopy of a world atlas from 1492 she’d found in a Cornflake packet. This time there’d be no mistakes.
 
As we headed out to sea again Quim, who’d also found the captain’s grog, climbed the rigging and sat the parrot on her head joining in with the sea shanties. Her lusty voice sounded like that of a baboon being slammed repeatedly against a tin shack. This was too much for two of the t’gallant men they plunged screaming from the masthead into the sea and struck out for shore some fifty miles astern.
 
When she got bored with the sea shanties Quim whipped off her panties and started an unnatural relationship with one of the giraffes she’d taken a fancy to. Her father was furious and sent his wife, who’d also had her share of grog, to intervene but she misheard and started to interview Quim and the giraffe.
 
This enraged the captain even further and he leapt up on the compass gimbal and started dancing a wild hornpipe swaying and reeling as he accompanied himself on a tin whistle. He fell off after an hour and lay sobbing on the deck; the compass was buggered.
 
Off the coast of Somalia we were boarded by pirates. Fanny and Quim grabbed a couple each and dragged them off to their cabins; they were screaming and begging god for mercy.
 
The Captain took an instant dislike to the Pirate leader so he whipped off his peg leg and beat the man into submission with it. Thereafter we held a conference where it was decided we’d hand back the pirate leader’s men for $30,000 each and bugger off out to sea. The pirates were overjoyed at this arrangement as they said we were giving the area a bad name and bringing piracy into disrepute.
 
Having no real clue where the Congo was we unloaded the giraffes down the coast a bit at a stretch of desert we found. We gave them the 1492 atlas and told them to sod off and walk the rest of the way. We kept the giraffe Quim and her mother had fallen for though.
 
The second mate said the giraffes would be ok ‘cos they were known as the ships of the desert and could go five days without food or water. He’d once spent half a day at a zoo on a school trip so he was our animal expert. 
 
And so we set a course for home. After two months the weather got really cold. I was sitting in the bow fending off icebergs with my granny’s walking stick when it occurred to me that something wasn't quite right. I called to the captain discreetly though a megaphone asking if we on the right course. He asked if I’d ever heard of a short cut and I said I had. He then told me that this was a long cut and to get off and swim if I didn't like it.
 
Whilst I was seriously considering this option the parrot wolf whistled at a passing albatross which swooped down and with a furious flapping of wings started raping the screaming bird sending parrot poop and feather flying in all directions. This really upset the captain, he emitted a long despairing cry and pirouetted rapidly on his peg leg with all the grace of a wounded whale. He flailed his arms wildly about his head whilst swearing fluently in Gaelic, Dutch and Swahili ‘cos the parrot was sitting on his shoulder at the time.
 
The unfortunate consequence of this union was that the parrot became pregnant and, as albatross eggs are much larger than those of the parrot, she began to stretch to unacceptable proportions. Our animal expert, the second mate, bound her tightly with gaffer tape but alas to no avail. The very next day the poor bird exploded backwards and departed this life through her own backside in a great gout of piss, poop and scrambled eggs all over the captain’s cabin.
 
After a week spent cleaning his cabin the captain ordered the parrot be buried at sea. It was a moving ceremony the highlight of which was Quim’s rendition of ‘The Turd Trapper’s Lament’ played soulfully on the Chinese classical one stringed banjo. Mercifully she didn't know all the words so she couldn't sing it as well.
 
Two years later we finally got home and I promptly returned my granny’s wheel chair and walking stick. She said she knew of another cargo in urgent need of delivery this time it was penguins that had to be returned to some pole or other.
 
Upon hearing this I seized her walking stick and laid about the old biddy thrashing her neck and crop with as much vigour as I could muster until her corsets burst. I had to do something to curb her insane enthusiasm for sending me on long sea voyages.
 
Whilst I was administering this corrective therapy I told her bollocks and that those lazy Polish bastards could deliver their own bloody penguins. 
 
Copyright © J A Milligan 2013