Ribblestrop Forever! (2 page)

‘Oooh! Hard!’ he mumbled, trying to get his tongue round it.

‘You can’t crunch them,’ said Miles. ‘Don’t even try. I’ve got a suitcaseful, for the orphans.’

It was at this point that Millie came forward. She put her hand on Miles’s shoulder, and then leant on his neck. The plane soared upwards, so she had to grab his shirt collar.

‘Are you flying the plane, Miles?’ she cried. ‘If you are, I want to know where the parachutes are kept.’

Timmy Fox laughed long and hard. ‘No parachutes today!’ he shouted. The sweet bounced against his tonsils and he tried to get his tongue behind it.

Miles squeezed to his right in an attempt to make room for Millie. The plane came out of the air pocket into a gust of hot air. Timmy hadn’t felt it coming, so the plane rose again, more
violently, as if caught on a wave. Then the wave was gone and the nose came down, hard and fast. Millie and Miles were jerked backwards, while Timmy Fox – who was safely belted into his seat
– received a violent jolt. The gobstopper spun against his uvula, where the digastric muscle strained at once to eject it. The plane bobbed yet again and the pilot panicked. He tried to
swallow and disaster struck. The gobstopper was sucked straight into his windpipe where it lodged like a cork in a bottle.

Timmy Fox’s eyes bulged. He did his best to cry out, but his airway was blocked – all that emerged was a choking groan.

Behind him, Miles was laughing. He’d fallen against Millie and caught her with his elbow, so she was clutching a bleeding nose. Sanchez looked mildly concerned, but had been reading a
magazine – so wasn’t sure what had happened. Their expressions changed, however, when the plane suddenly keeled over to the left and the engine started to scream. An alarm sounded at
once and then pulsed urgently.

‘Miles!’ shouted Millie.

They saw, with horror, that their pilot was clawing the air, completely helpless. He was spluttering too and changing colour before their eyes. He managed to get one hand back to the controls
and they were level again – but only for a few seconds. Timmy Fox grabbed his own throat, gagging, and a moment later, there was a sickening lurch to the right. His headset fell onto his
knees.

Sanchez was up now, but it was Millie who reacted fastest. The cockpit was tilting heavily, but she managed to dive forward and get her hands onto the joystick, her nosebleed forgotten. Miles
was beside her in a moment, grabbing at the gasping pilot. He was bright red and the red was turning to purple.

‘Heart attack!’ shouted Millie. ‘Do something!’

Miles guessed what had happened and tried to slap the man hard on the back. The blow bent him forward and he managed to disengage his seatbelt so he fell heavily onto the controls. Sanchez was
now right behind them, while Millie leant through the confusion of arms and knees to steady the all-important joystick. Miles tried to thump the pilot again, but the control area was too congested.
Timmy Fox levered himself up somehow and fell backward into Sanchez’s arms. With Miles’s help, he was lowered to the narrow strip of carpet behind, where he lay gasping. Millie jumped
straight into his empty seat and gazed through the cockpit window as fragments of cloud hurtled towards her. Seconds later, Miles was back with the headset clamped to his ear.

‘Do something!’ Millie was shrieking. ‘Get the pilot!’

‘Fly the plane, Millie!’

‘Oh my God! How can I? I don’t know how to fly a plane!’

She eased the joystick back and they rose slightly. The alarm stopped, but a red light kept flashing and a buzzer was buzzing. An oxygen mask had fallen from above and bounced uselessly,
knocking at their heads.

‘Hello?’ shouted Miles, into the mouthpiece of the headset. ‘Is anyone there, please? Hello?’

‘I don’t know what I’m doing, Miles!’ cried Millie. ‘Get help!’

‘Just do what you’re doing. Keep us up. Hello? Is anyone there? Mayday, mayday – come in, please. Ground control, this is . . . oh God . . . this is a very small plane up in
the sky. We’ve lost our pilot and we don’t know what to do.’ He turned to Millie in despair. ‘How do you work these things?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know anything. Ask Sanchez!’

Her eyes were dancing from dial to dial, from switch to switch. Some of the needles were moving up and she spotted two that were moving down. She pushed the joystick forward and felt the plane
respond and sink – but whether that was good or bad, she couldn’t say. There were pedals under her feet, but she didn’t dare press them. At least they were going straight and,
though everything was vibrating, it seemed like they weren’t about to fall out of the sky.

Miles, meanwhile, was experimenting with a small black knob on the headset. When he turned it, a green light came on.

‘Hello?’ he said, again. ‘Is anyone there, please? This is a real emergency – I’m not playing games here. Help!’

A man’s voice answered, utterly calm. ‘Come in,
Maisie 202
. State your position, over.’

‘What?’ said Miles.

The voice remained relaxed. ‘Come in,
Maisie 202
,’ it repeated, slowly. ‘This is Bristol control. State your position, over.’

Miles swore under his breath. ‘I think our pilot’s dead,’ he said. ‘That’s the position.’

‘OK,
Maisie
, can I ask you to identify yourself and repeat that, please? Over.’

‘Yes. My name is Miles Seyton-Shandy. I’m going to school, but I’m on a plane without a pilot because the pilot’s choking to death, and my friend is trying to fly the
plane. I have no idea where we are except up in the sky. Over.’

Miles’s eyes were full of tears. He had just realised the danger. They were racing along at more than a hundred miles per hour.

The voice on the radio seemed to become even calmer. ‘Okay, good . . . That’s good, Miles. I’m reading you – sounds like you’ve got a situation up there, so
I’m requesting priority airspace. Can you re-confirm, please? Your pilot is down? Over.’

‘He’s unconscious,’ said Miles, taking a quick look behind him. Sanchez had the man laid out in the recovery position. He had his knee in the pilot’s back and was jerking
his shoulders. ‘I don’t know if he’s breathing or not. He swallowed something and it got stuck.’

‘That’s good, that’s fine. You’re going to have to stay very calm, Miles, and relaxed. You’re going to have to answer all my questions, clear as you can. When you
finish what you say, try to remember to say “over”, because that makes communication simple. First question: who is at the controls of the plane? Over.’

‘Millie Roads. But she doesn’t know what she’s doing. Over.’

‘You’re doing fine at the moment. We’re getting a fix on you, and we’re going to pull all air traffic in the area well back. You’ve got a completely clear corridor,
okay, so there’s no emergency if you hold her steady. I want you to look at the controls and tell me when you have located a black dial with two white needles. They’re like the hands on
a clock. Over.’

Miles scanned the forest of dials. ‘Black with white needles,’ he said to Millie. ‘Can you see anything like that?’

Millie pointed and put her hand straight back on the joystick. She was rigid with concentration.

‘I’ve got it,’ said Miles. ‘Over.’

‘Good boy. What’s it reading at the moment? It’s going to tell us your altitude. Over.’

‘The big hand’s on six. The little one’s on two!’

‘Excellent. Ask Millie to ease the joystick back, very gently. Can you do that? Over.’

‘Millie,’ said Miles, ‘pull the lever back a bit. Slowly.’ He held the mouthpiece. ‘We’re doing it. We want to come down, okay? We want to be on the
ground!’

‘The numbers should be falling now—’

‘Over!’

‘What? No, listen: when the big hand’s at zero, that’s the altitude to hold. So we’re bringing you just a little lower, where you’ve got a good, safe space and
visibility’s best. Is that okay, Miles? Over.’

‘It’s okay. Yes, we’re going down a bit. Can you send us a new pilot or something?’

‘I’m handing you over to a colleague now, Miles. She’s senior to me and she’s going to keep you safe and get you on the ground. Is that okay?’

‘Don’t go!’ said Miles. ‘Don’t leave us!’

‘I’m right here, but Sandra’s taking over communication now. She’s more familiar with your craft than I am.’

‘I’m right here, Miles,’ said a woman’s voice. It was deep and wonderfully sensible. ‘I’m with you, okay? I’m with you all the way. We’re going to
get through this together. We’re clearing an emergency landing site for you in Bristol; the only problem at this stage is the airfields you’re passing are all short runways. Now, in
normal circumstances, a short runway would be fine for your craft, but—’

‘You think we can land this?’ said Miles.

‘We’ll talk you through it. We’re with you every step of the way.’

‘We’re going too fast!’

‘No, no. We’re going to find a nice, long airstrip for you. We’re going to practise your approach, give you a couple of dry runs. It’s much easier than you think.
’

‘What about petrol? The pilot said we were flying on reserve.’

‘Flying on reserve. Are you saying your first tank’s dry?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘How do you know you’re on reserve?’

‘The pilot told me. He didn’t fill up. He said he normally would, but he didn’t want to miss some wind or other.’

‘And he said you’re flying on reserve?’

‘That’s what he said. What can we do?’

There was a pause.

‘Miles,’ said the voice. It was just a little firmer. ‘We’re going to try something a little bit different in the light of what you’ve just told me. Can you take a
look at the reserve gauge? That’s three dials to the right of your altimeter. It’s a needle over a white strip about three centimetres long – have you got that?’

‘The needle’s at half,’ said Miles. ‘Is that good?’

‘The needle’s at half of the white area. So you’re how far from red?’

‘About one point five centimetres.’

‘Okay.’

‘It’s bad, isn’t it?’

‘No, it’s—’

‘We’re running out of fuel! Oh God!’

‘No, no, no. There’s enough fuel, just not enough to give us too much leeway. We’re going to have to make some more emergency arrangements. I’m going to leave you for a
moment. I’m going to brief my colleagues and scramble a helicopter.’

‘Don’t go!’ cried Miles again.

There was no answer. He glanced at Millie and saw that her face, like his own, was a mask of terror.

‘Are we going to die?’ she said.

‘I think so,’ said Miles. ‘We’d better tell Sanchez.’

Sam saw the little plane through the window of his father’s car.

He didn’t mention it to Ruskin, who was sitting next to him, because he seemed to be dozing. Oli was in front, deep in an instruction manual and definitely not to be disturbed, and his
father had his nose close to the windscreen. He pulled the new phone out of his pocket and polished the display panel with his tie. His parents had told him that he was to hand it straight in to
the headmaster when he got to school, and he was wondering if he was going to obey them. He had promised he would – it had been a condition of his keeping it. But what was the point of having
such a thing if you couldn’t actually use it? Anyway, he was still getting used to the device, which seemed to have so many different functions. It was quite a large phone, and a sticker on
the box had said,
Special offer, line discontinued
. He needed two hands to operate it, because it was as heavy as a brick. It had a stopwatch and a countdown facility. It had a calculator
too, but that was quite tricky to operate and seemed to get even the simplest sums wrong. It had an alarm clock, and you could also check which year you were in.

As he held it, it vibrated and emitted a piercing bleep.

‘Oh!’ he said. ‘I’ve had a text.’

Ruskin opened his eyes. ‘Another one? That’s number seven.’

‘How do you get at it?’ said Sam. ‘Do you have the instruction book?’

‘You just press the . . . you press that little digit there, under the screen.’

Sam pressed it and the words
Address book
appeared.

‘You’ve pressed the wrong one,’ said Ruskin. ‘Give it to me.’

‘I think that plane’s in some kind of trouble,’ said Sam, glancing out of the window again. ‘Unless it’s just practising stunts or something. It was low and now
it’s high.’

Ruskin pressed another button and found
Games
. ‘Did you know you had games on this thing?’ he said.

‘The man in the shop said there were games, but he showed me so quickly that I could never find them.’

‘Texts. I’ve got it. Inbox.’

‘So who was it from?’

‘I’m in your inbox. This is such a crafty gadget: it actually stores all the texts you receive, so you can go through them. Oh, it’s from Millie again.’

‘She’s probably at school by now. What does it say?’

Ruskin blinked and held the phone higher. ‘I can’t see. There’s a reflection. Looks like,
Why R U so crap?
’

‘That was the last one,’ said Sam.

‘Oh. Right. Scrolling down . . . hang on a moment. Here we are.’ He tilted the screen again.
Goodbye all. We R going . . .
’

‘Going where?’

‘It doesn’t say. What a strange message. Maybe she was interrupted.’

‘Go down a bit, Jake. If you press the down arrow, you can see the rest of the words.’

Ruskin pressed the arrow and the sentence continued.

‘Ah!’ he said. ‘There is more.
Goodbye all. We R going to crash. We R all going to die. Millie.
’

‘Crash where? How can you be about to crash and have the time to text someone?’

‘Maybe she’s joking. I’m not sure it’s something to joke about, though, Sam – you remember that crash we were in last term?’

‘Shall I phone her?’

‘It’s quite expensive, isn’t it? Making calls?’

‘Can I have it back a second? I’ve got five pounds credit, so I might as well use it.’

‘Don’t waste it, Sam. What if there’s an emergency?’

‘I’ll give her a very quick call – just check she’s okay. Oli? Look, sorry to disturb you, but you’re better at this than me. Can you give us a hand calling
Millie?’