Or How I Learnt To Stop Worrying And Love An Owl

CAPTAIN OWL was well pissed off. He didn’t want to be a sailor. I mean, for fuck’s sake, he was a fucking owl. Still, that was his punishment and here he was, stuck aboard the SS Eponymous, riding the slow waves upon the Sea of Frøp. His crimes weren’t spectacularly criminal, more just small and shitey, but he’d upset the Duke, and that was not the stereotypically wise move you might have expected from a bird of that lineage.

The salty ocean was no place for a nocturnal bird of prey. He could only travel so far, albeit in a glamorous glide. Even if he had the energy for an epic voyage, there was little of excitement out there to see, and believe me when I tell you that he could see a long way. Just a handful of ponces on yachts, usually drunk or dead. No, he was stuck here, on a creaky old freighter, its rusting cargo containers packed with rotten meat.

Owls are the best birds going, when you think about it. Some of them look like kestrels, only bigger and well, more authoritative. Some of them look like ghostly visions, with their blank white bread faces and intangible charm. Some of them look like they just need a big hug, with their duffel coat appeal. Not so the Captain. He was weathered and bitter, bitter as the waves that ate away at the decaying metal of his charge. He hated this life, and it wasn’t being all that friendly towards him in return.

–

The whole maritime thing was of course the oft spoke of ‘cruel and unusual punishment’. Though a crude and pointless task, it was one which required constant attention, for even with a hold full of foul smelling pork, you can’t leave yourself at the mercy of the sea. You have to constantly toil, and it was this fact that made the journey - if you could call a trip with no end a journey - so unpleasant.

It was entirely possible that the chartered destination did exist. That was not the concern. The issue was precisely where one might find it at any one particular time. You would have expected a large container port to remain fairly stationary, at least for the most part. Sadly for the Captain, he found that many of the more conventional rules of geography, space and time eluded him, and it was only frequent faxes - their method of delivery a mystery - that would inform him of his being in quite the wrong place altogether.

On receiving the anticipated instruction, he would sigh, spit out his acidic grog - invariably into the wind - and turn his vessel back in the direction it had come from, as the currents below him smirked and altered their forces to match.

Inside the cabin, the ancient old fax machine beeped and prepared to churn out another missive. This was especially odd, since it had neither ink, paper nor any kind of connection.

The Captain glared at it most strongly, but such glaring was futile, since his messagey nemesis had proved a worthy adversary a great many times before. He inwardly cursed his lack of determination and tore the communication from the reel.

‘LOOK OUT, YOU STUPID OLD BIRDFUCK’, it read. He pondered this unusual development. The usual gist, awkward and perverse though it was, had been somewhat less blunt. Orders had changed, he’d failed to plot the correct course, or a fall in demand for fetid spam called for a return home. These were the usual excuses that kept him ploughing on through his watery purgatory. What did this warning mean?

–

What this meant became rather more obvious only a second later, when there came a horrendous crash! a SMASH, BASH, creeeaky CRASH! and a grinding, a grinding like a mincer full of bad gravel. Captain Owl really was a stupid old birdfuck. He’d crashed into a massive rock, the only one in all the Sea of Frøp! He cursed a long list of his least favourite things, such as wellingtons, mugs, and the Bible, and went to inspect the damage.

On the best of days, the SS Eponymous had still seen better. Today was likely the worst. All the important boaty parts that one would recognise, such as the funnel, and the sides, had been crunched up and scrunched in, like a little canoe made of foil when you try to carry it home from school in your bag. The containers leaked bright green pig products onto the rock, like hammy toxic waste.

Captain Owl was hurt. Not hurt as in Casualty’s “my head’s come off”, more hurt as in Holby City’s “my soul is bleeding”. He’d not liked his stupid maritime quest one bit, but the indignancy and shame of having completely fucked it up was still a little hard to swallow. Despite being an owl - an owl, for Christ’s sake! - he’d thought himself at least competent, a worthy traveller of the oceans. Apparently not.

He climbed - or flew, if this implicit personification deal’s not working out for you - up the rock to survey the horizon, when to his surprise, a little creature sprung out and startled him. It was a little ape, called Barabbas. No, of course it bloody wasn’t. You of all people should know by now that all my stories need to have an ape in, and I couldn’t see any other way to manage it. Still, Barabbas is a cool name, so we’ll have that bit.

Barabbas was a panda. I know it’s a bit of a weak concept now, but we’ll build on it. He was only two foot high, which made life even more difficult than it was already. Stuck in the middle of the sea, an aversion to shagging, and now some idiot writer’s turned him into some kind of monochrome gnome.

Barabbas didn’t have a lot to do out here, but he did have the latest Nokia, and he enjoyed nothing more than faxing ships that were about to crash into his rock, which I reckon you can probably do. Captain Owl was nonplussed about this exciting technology. ‘Why in blue fuck’, he demanded, ‘did you ONLY tell me about the BIG fucking ROCK’, he asked, ‘ONE and a half SECONDS before I CRASHED into it?’, he inquired.

‘Dodgy signal’, said Barabbas, and it was true, for he had only one bar.

–

Owl was still well pissed off, just like at the beginning. He’d not encountered any pandas before, but now that he had, he’d drawn the conclusion that they were cunts. He cursed some more items he’d got stored up in his head, such as cupboards, saucers and tape. And that twat the Duke. That made him feel a little better, and his thoughts turned to how he might ever get off this sorry lump of sedimentary stone.

Barabbas was pissing around on WAP. He didn’t think much of it, but mainly because it hadn’t lived up to the hype. Still, neither had plenty of other things when you looked at it from the panda perspective. Fridges, fast food, motels, traffic calming measures, bacon. None of these things had really become popular amongst his community.

He looked over to Captain Owl, and saw a little irony in the fact that without his despised boat, he looked somewhat broken. Possibly the prospect of an infinite stay on a rocky outcrop with no food, water, comfort or avian pornography was the real reason, but either way, he didn’t look pleased. Barabbas wondered how he could ever help him, with only his tiny little panda paws, and had a tiny little panda idea.

Barabbas searched through his phonebook. Pappy P… The Queen… Ronald McDonald home… Ronald McDonald mobile… Ronald McDonald work… Susan… aaaaahhh Susan… lovely Susan. He didn’t have anyone beginning with T or U because he didn’t get on with that type. VOICEMAIL. William Tell, Xenu, Yoko Ono - he deleted Yoko Ono - and there, he had found him. The mysterious Zob!

Zob’s phone number was seven. That might seem an odd phone number, due to its lack of digits, but it pays to keep things simple. He didn’t get any sales calls that way, cos hardly anyone could dial it. You can try calling Zob yourself and I bet it won’t work.

–

Zob was an odd sort of fellow. He was a bit like a lizard, a big lizard like one of those dragon people in zoos, but with really smooth skin. He had a big brown beard, made of plankton, which some said gave him the look of an oracle. He was known for his cheery grin, perhaps in part due to the big yellow crown he sported, which in turn was perhaps in part due to him being King.

Most recent Kings are Kings of something fairly modest, like Luxembourg, or Spades. Kings had been on the decline since revolutions had become fashionable and the populace had decided they preferred 24 hour garages and celebrity magazines instead of awesome tyrant leaders. Such cutbacks had largely passed Zob by, for he knew nothing of modern moderation. This was, experts agree, because he lived under the sea, and it was precisely this of which he was King.

The sea’s pretty good. You can never quite view it all, even from space. There’s always a little bit of it hidden away. There’s so much stuff in the sea too, like crabs and plaice, abandoned shopping trolleys and Robert Maxwell. Zob was quite proud that he was King of all that. He looked after it fairly well, and made it go up and down twice daily to satisfy the whim of the landpersons. Other than this, his calendar was fairly empty, but he found enough to do down there to keep himself occupied.

Zob’s phone rang, deep below the sea. Zob stopped filling in the Guardian crossword - but only the one in G2, cos it’s easier - and went to answer it. ‘Pisschops’, he said, his big grin undiminished. ‘That fucking panda again’.

Zob didn’t mind Barabbas, but he hoped he’d eventually find something else to do instead of ringing him up all the time. Usually he just wanted a chat, often about mollusks, or to complain about the email server being down. ‘I don’t deal with technical queries’, Zob would tell him, but it was no use.

This time though, Barabbas wanted a favour. This was nothing unusual - plenty of people would write in to beg for mercy or to try and get work experience controlling the sea, like King Canute kept begging for - but what he was after certainly was.

‘You want me to do what?’, asked Zob. ‘I can’t do that!’, he exclaimed. ‘Where will it go?’

‘Moses managed it’, said Barabbas, on the rock. ‘Moses did it just fine, and he was rubbish’.

‘He was a bit shit’, Zob reluctantly agreed, ‘but it was probably just an illusion’.

‘It can’t have been an illusion’, said Barabbas. ‘David Blaine does illusions, and no bastard will remember him in two thousand years’.

‘Thank fuck for that’, said Zob, who preferred to tread a more refined - and it had to be said, successful - path when it came to displays of incredible power. ‘Alright then’, he said, after a moment’s pause, ‘but if millions of people are horribly killed, then you can’t blame me’.

‘Wouldn’t dream of it’, said Barabbas, and placed another wager at www.betontragedy.biz.

–

Zob pulled some levers, and Japan shot up in the air. ‘Oopsie’, said Zob, and lowered it back down gently. A soft little wobble passed through Tokyo, but it was late, and most of the people were sleeping. Those awake looked around, slightly bemused, and continued with their mysterious pursuits of the night.

In the Sea Control Centre, Zob tapped away at the keys on his ancient sea computer. It was an unusual computer, with all the keys marked Z. What letter they actually produced was determined by the angle and force at which one tapped them, which had made his marine biology dissertation tricky.

Out on Barabbas’ rock, not a lot was going on. Captain Owl was cursing objects of an industrial nature, such as bolts, ladders and hammers. Slowly though, a rumbling began from deep below the rock. The waters grew choppy, and the wreck of the SS Eponymous grimaced at the thought of another, rather more vertical, journey.

The ocean seethed around them, like a madman in a greenhouse with a cardigan full of bees. This was getting serious. Owl and Barabbas grew afraid. Would they be consumed by the growing storm?

BOOM! There was a terrifying cascade of mist and moisture, like someone had dropped a fat man from a plane and he’d fallen right into a big bowl of soup! BEHOLD! The waves were parted, rolling away like a fugitive carpet, as the SS Eponymous tumbled sideways and fell onto the sea bed, splitting in two.

Captain Owl was bemused to say the least. Barabbas was surprised that such a thing would have actually worked, but then Zob was normally pretty conscientious with what he did. It was a bit of a concern where all that water would actually go, and really some forward planning wouldn’t have gone amiss, but at least all the important places like Austria were safe.

It was probably going to be a long stroll home, so the pair climbed down from the rock, and walked across the rapidly drying desert wastes, now populated only by troubled fish, the odd annoyed crab and the occasional bit of sea junk like a Manilow gold disc or a discarded branch of Maplins.

They walked for miles, across strange and mysterious new territories, stumbling across forgotten civilisations, literally a land rediscovered. Eventually they got tired of walking and phoned for a taxi.

–

On reaching what used to be the shore, it became apparent that Barabbas was rather a busy panda. How this came to be was unclear, but I expect if you were stranded on a rock in the middle of the sea for, oooh ninety years I reckon, you’d have a fair bit of junk mail to sift through. He’d missed eighty thousand and three hundred appointments, and his tiny panda boss was bound to have some rather unwelcome questions on the matter.

Barabbas bade Captain Owl farewell, and ventured away in the direction of his tiny panda office. An opportunity for further character development had been missed, for now, but the Captain still had his own business to attend to.

The locals whispered in hushed tones as he wandered through the market. Word was out that the Duke was after him, and was somewhat aggrieved at the loss of both his fine vessel and its delicious cargo. The Captain wasn’t bothered by this supposed danger; his owly feathers were in quite a state after his adventure, and being rather annoyed by his ragged appearance, he was already in the mood for a scrap.

The Duke lived in a grand hall on the hill; a bit like Toad Hall, if plagiarism was acceptable, but if not, then a bit more like that memorial in Lancaster which was once used in the Wind in the Willows anyway. Never mind that.

Owl was getting more angry at the thought, and so am I, just trying to dream up what might happen next. He threw his few water damaged possessions to the ground and stormed up the road to the house.

–

At the crest of the hill, there were a couple of guards. They were dressed up like Beefeaters, but in bright green suits. They didn’t look best pleased about that. In fact, it was at this very moment that they decided that enough was enough, and that this kind of guarding in this kind of attire was a largely thankless task, and so they let the Captain pass without a word.

He quickly preened his feathers to make himself look a little more imposing, strolled around to the side of the house, and catapulted himself right through the french windows. Inside, a weekly tea party was taking place, and the guests all leapt up at once to avoid the shower of glass and wood damaging their prized outfits.

‘WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THIS’, cried an elderly gent, who stumbled up from his chair. ‘YES, WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THIS?’ spat Owl, bitter as a rusty bucket full of stale sheep piss.

‘WHAT’, he demanded to know as he strode around the giant room, ‘ARE YOU ALL DOING? WHO’, and he paused for effect, ‘ARE YOU, YOU TWERPS?’.

A rather Poirotesque old man rose to his feet and replied, ‘We are merely having some tea, good fellow. It is all paid for by the rather generous Duke’.

‘RAAAA’, shouted Owl, incandescent with rage, like an angry red lightbulb. He pulled an ornate sword from the wall, and with a swish, cut the man’s twirly moustache clean off. ‘AND WHERE IS THE COCKING DUKE, YOU NOB?’ he yelled.

An ancient old lady smiled sweetly, perhaps amused by this impromptu show of barbershop bravado. In a frail voice, she answered, ‘Why, he’s out in his helicopter, hunting pigs’. Owl didn’t like this one bit. He jumped up onto the table, and sliced off her wobbling tower of grey hair.

‘ANGRY OWL!’ said the angry owl. They looked at him, some with visible disdain, and some merely with inquisitive stares. ‘AN-GRY OWL!’ he said again, this time in a singsong bellow. He swept his sword in a gleaming arc and smashed through one of the tall pillars that adorned the dining room.

It fell directly onto the long table, completely crushing the ornate china and spilling the tea. The guests panicked and scattered away. Owl felt sad that he’d ruined their party, because he didn’t like to waste other people’s efforts, but he was quite angry, so he didn’t think about this for long.

–

From the upwards came a fluttering and a chuppa chuppa chuppering, like a load of mad snakes that had each eaten a bag of tiny flapping birds, and then were spun around like in some giant abstract reptilian game of swingball. The Duke was back in his helicopter from his sick pighunt.

The Duke liked war, and violence, but he didn’t like actually getting shot, not that he ever had been, so these days he just flew around the fields shooting at defenceless animals. There wasn’t really any purpose to it, and it wasn’t even that exciting, but it felt like the sort of thing that would be thought of as interesting, and that was enough for him.

He was back now, and he was fully pigged up, the greedy aristocrat blob. He was looking forward to his big feast, and he’d be furious when he saw his crackers and cheese and stately pillars all crunched to bits in the melee. Owl didn’t give a fuck; he was ready for a duel.

The Duke looked around. Someone had trashed his house! His valuable paintings of err, whatever it was he’d had painted! His golden statues of things and stuff! His beautiful French windows he’d got in a sale at B&Q! The Duke was angry, really angry. He looked around a tiny bit more, and there was Owl! ‘OWL BASTARD‘, he bellowed, in a not particularly imaginative fashion.

Owl brandished his sword. The Duke brandished a giant ham. Owl nimbly leapt upon onto the table. The Duke climbed onto it, and it broke underneath him, the fat old wanker. They drew closer, and clashed weapons.

Despite their differences, they were evenly matched. The Duke was ungainly but reliable, like a bear in a Volkswagen, and Owl was fast but erratic, like a ket addict in a kayak. With sparks and bits of bacon flying about the room, they darted back and forth in a crazy battle ballet. They bounded up the stairs, and soon they were on the rooftop, in a typically rubbish movie endgame style.

–

Every few minutes, Owl would force The Duke to the very edge of the roof, and just when all seemed lost for the obese old menace, he would deliver a hefty blow with his club, and force Owl back to the defensive.

It was becoming clear that Owl was growing tired. His agility was undiminished, but the effort was proving a lot for him, and it was starting to show. Before too long, disaster struck; one of his clever little moves was a fraction too slow, and The Duke saw it coming. He blocked it, and despite a huge section of meat being sliced right off his hammy hammer, he was still able to strike back, knocking Owl flat to the floor!

The Duke was an ugly sort in many ways, and his victory wasn’t going to be too pretty either. He wanted to say something clever and elaborate, like in all those Shakespeare plays he’d never read - something witty about his stupid sea quest. He couldn’t do it though, as he wasn’t very good with words. ‘SEA TWAT FUCKING BIRD’, he burbled loudly, in his horrible, arrogant laugh. ‘SHOULD HAVE STUCK TO TRANSPORK! TRANSPORK! HUR HUR HUR!’.

I suppose that could have been funny, but it was delivered with the subtlety of a planeload of bricks, so it didn’t work at all.

–

Owl was disappointed, mainly in his own performance. Avenging himself hadn’t worked out too well at all, and given the strife he’d gone through in trying, it was pretty upsetting. It was a bit like spending ages building a fireplace from matchsticks.

The Duke interrupted his thinking. ‘ANY LAST REQUESTS?’, he grinned, in spitting disgusting bile all over his feathers. Owl had a think. He quite fancied a pie. No, that was stupid. He was hardly going to get The Duke to go to Somerfield to fetch a quick snack. Hmmm. Owl decided he’d like a final song. Something like ‘Death or Glory’, by The Clash. He asked The Duke what he could manage.

The Duke didn’t like music. It was all noise to him, like jazz is to normal people. The Duke thought music was for weasels, and the French, and he didn’t have any good tunes at all. ‘I’ve got Celine Dion, and that’s it’, said The Duke.

‘Bollocks to it’, said Owl, but The Duke inserted the tape and played it anyway. Owl was ruined. Not only had he failed, but he’d failed to the worst soundtrack in all the land. He was going to die to the horrific warbling sounds of the most awful music the otherwise amicable nation of Canada could have ever conceivably produced.

“Ne-arrrr, farrr, where-eee-ever yo-oou are! I belie-eee-eve that the heart does go o-ee-oh-ee-oooon”, she screeched. ‘AAAAARRRGGHHHH’, cried Owl. ‘AHAAAAAAAA’, cried the Duke. Just as their respective pain and delight reached a peak, the tape stopped, with a clunk. ‘Eh?’, mumbled the Duke. He jabbed at the play button. Nothing happened. He poked and prodded. It was resuscitated for a brief moment, then stopped again. He smashed it with his fat fist, and it began hissing.

Hisssssss’, hissed the tape player. ‘FUCK IT’, barked the Duke. ‘Hissssss’, hissed the tape player, for effect. The Duke picked it up, and threw it off the rooftop. Silence.

–

He turned back to finish Owl off. Owl was just annoyed by now. This wasn’t the stylish martyrdom he’d been hoping for. Head stoved in with a massive salami? This would be a permanent stain on his karmic CV.

The Duke raised his club for one final tremendous blow. ‘Get on with it then’, said Owl. ‘HAHAAAAA’, said The Duke. ‘Hissssssss’, hissed the tape player. ‘Uh?’ said the Duke, who stopped, and looked around. But there was no tape player. ‘Hissssssssssss!’ The noise still came.

The Duke looked around. He looked around the roof. No mystery sissers over yonder. He peered over the edge. No phantom hissers down below. He looked up above. Oh.

1,347,000,000 cubic kilometres of brine fell from the sky, and as clever marine scientists will tell you, ‘that is a lot’. The sea was back, and it was back with as much of a watery vengeance as you can imagine.

–

The impossibly powerful tide swept up everything in its path. The Duke, Owl, the hall, everything in sight and beyond was collected up as if flicked by a massive broom, and propelled at immense speed. The two enemies rode the incredible wave as it carried them for hundreds of miles, but they were both in grave danger!

Owl wasn’t faring too well, his wings soaked and near useless, but it was the Duke who was in the most trouble. He was a bulbous, overweight old fool - all that gorging had done him no good. He was struggling to stay afloat and his thorough lack of exercise meant he was entirely unable to fight. He went under, dragged himself back up for a final time, and promptly disappeared under the waves.

Owl was carried far away from him, and when the force of the water subsided, he was all but lost. He had survived only by his limited maritime knowledge - in something of a twist of fate, the Duke’s evil scheming had saved his life.

He bobbed along the ocean for what may well have been days - at least a quarter of an hour - with nothing but the odd piece of urban debris or crate of pork floating by. It didn’t seem like he would ever be saved, but Owl had experienced this quite often enough by now, and he didn’t give up hope.

–

It was just as well really, because just as miles of empty sea began to lose any little interest they might have once had, there came a buzzing. Owl thought he recognised it as a nautical buzz, trained as he was in such techniques, and indeed he was right. It was a boat, and not only that, but a familiar face!

Hurray! It was Barabbas, in a shiny red speedboat. ‘Hullo’, said Barabbas, as he lifted him aboard. ‘Bit damp out’, he chortled. Owl agreed wholeheartedly, and they set off back towards the sodden shore together.

Most of the planet was flooded, but that was OK, in a horrible Waterworld way. ‘The plants needed it’, most people agreed, even though the salt had killed most of them off. At least some wealth had been redistributed, if only in the form of gruesome piggy products.

Owl had achieved what he was after, and finally found peace. Barabbas had lost his technology, but discovered that no-frills travel had a lot to offer. Zob was sent on a training course, and might one day achieve his NVQ in Ethical Sea Management.

And The Duke? Drowned, most thought. Perhaps he really was, but still some say that if you climb up to the Hall on a clear day, and stare really hard out to sea, you can make out a thin, trembling figure, clinging to a certain familiar rock...

FIN.