In Case of Excess Cabin Pressure

[tealin]

When under stress, I tend to find far more emotional depth in things than they might otherwise invite. This time, because I had to take breaks from drawing, and had a receptive audience, it got written down. And because Radio 4 just reran Xinzhou, and I have had just too little sleep to exercise the necessary judgment, I'm sharing it.

SPOILERS FOR SERIES 4 OF CABIN PRESSURE. Seriously, don't read it if you haven't listened to Series 4. If you plan to, it'll ruin things for you; if you don't, you won't understand.

Nessun Dorma
Rating: G
Warnings: loneliness, quiet, Puccini, existential crisis, rooibos
Synopsis: Douglas gets home from Xinzhou and makes a pot of tea.

When Douglas finally arrived home, after the ritual bustle of keys and locks and doffing bag, hat, coat, and shoes, he was ambushed by the quiet.

Granted, anything was going to be quiet after spending the better part of three days including surprise slumber party in a small metal tube with Arthur Shappey ... but it was really quiet. The house had been selected with quiet in mind, all those years ago, because you don't get all the way to airline captain just to live in a flat over a newsagent's, but even the distant comforting sounds of suburban civilization were absent tonight. The cold of the tile in the foyer soaked through his socks as he stood momentarily transfixed by the silence, staring blankly at the halfhearted oval of light thrown by the streetlamp through the front door.

He caught himself and hastily snapped the light on, but the warmth and colour it brought down the hallway only papered over the quiet that yawned at the edges of perception, like the infinite blackness of space hiding behind the blue sky – once you knew it was always there (and pilots, of all people, knew this well) you could feel it lurking, even on the sunniest day.

The answer, as it was for most things, was tea. Douglas could easily have prepared it in the dark – and had, on many late arrivals – but tonight he flicked every switch he passed, each snap a defiant shot at the vacuum. Here was the impeccably tidy kitchen, just as he left it, and the kettle, just as he left it, the rush of water from the tap giving blessed relief from the rush of empty air; the teapot came down from the cupboard, where he'd left it, and the Firenze mug cold and clean from the dishwasher which he'd set to go just before he'd left for China on Monday. If he concentrated really very hard, he could manage not to think of the significance of the untouched kitchen, but he knew the thought was waiting for him with the dark and the quiet.

You used to find it such a relief, he thought. Coming home to peace and order after the madcap tomfoolery of an MJN flight. So much more peace and order, now, too, since, since, getting the place to himself at last. Relax. Unwind. Count his winnings. The water in the kettle started to whisper, pushing the quiet a little further away. What had happened? Well, nothing happened. But that was kind of the point, wasn't it? Things happened but didn't happen, unpredictability that just kept rolling on and on with no structure, no progression, like the second movement of a modernist symphony.

Unlike a modernist symphony, however, Martin – Martin Crieff – Captain Wing Commander Martin Crieff Esquire – was dating a princess. A princess. Do they even make those things anymore? Well, obviously, but you get the point. MJN felt like a sitcom at the best of times, but not even the daftest sitcom writer, on the most dangerously impure of mysterious white powders, would have come up with something as preposterous as that. An actual princess. Of course it would never work out; a shared interest in the sundry charms of aviation could only go so far, even for Martin, and she was clearly going to eat him alive at some point which would be hard to watch but you have to let them learn the hard way sometimes ... but what the actual hell, an actual princess?

The water in the kettle was roaring now, fortifying the cocoon of light and sound, reminding Douglas that for all the kettle business he hadn't taken out any tea, so with more clatter than was strictly necessary he got the tin of Pekoe down and dug out the measuring spoon. Roar turned to bubble, a bit in the pot, back on the stand and switched on again to keep boiling, to the sink – quickly quickly, before the auto shutoff – swish, swish, splash – back again and – his phone dinged. It could wait; the water was boiling. The pop of the lid, a crunch of tea leaves, and the thought that had been banished to the dark sitting room sneaked back in and tapped his shoulder.

A whole pot, Douglas, really? All by yourself?

Aha, he thought in reply, you make a point. I'll be up all night. And he swapped the Pekoe for a bag of rooibos.

It was the way they had talked as if he hadn't been there, he decided. Everyone knew MJN was going down – admittedly, it was a bit of a shock to hear the unspoken finally spoken, but Carolyn hadn't exactly been secretive about it – and Plans B were de rigeur this season. It had just ... stung, that Martin's future should be so much more of a concern than his. He felt a little guilty as soon as he acknowledged this thought; it carried too much of the older sibling's jealousy at the new arrival and was unbefitting anyone over the age of ten, but there it was nevertheless, and now the seed had found the earth it took root and sprouted. He'd been at MJN far longer. He had an established professional relationship with Carolyn. He'd saved their bacon more times than he could count –

That was it, though. That was the trouble with being so clever and superior, people assumed you were clever and superior, that you had everything figured out. Douglas will think of something clever and everything will be fine. It was one thing to save the gang from the jaws of fate by the skin of his wits and a snappy comeback, it was another to find any sort of reliable employment as a disgraced former captain hard on the heels of sixty. He needed MJN as much as they needed him, and boy did they ever need him. But now MJN wasn't going to need anything, and was leaving him on the kerb, while Martin's wide-eyed impression of a startled rabbit got all the coddling.

The other problem with being so superior was that it didn't count for anything if you didn't have anyone to be superior to.

This was a dangerous thought spiral to get into and Douglas tried to pull out of it by observing that the tea must be ready. As soon as he started pouring it he could tell it wasn't, really, but there was no point stopping now and it would warm him up at least. He wanted to stay at the kitchen table, safe in the hard-won palisade of light, but decided on principle to expand the frontier into the sitting room. The switch was easy enough to hit and the darkness whisked away, but the silence was still there, aggressively still there, its claws sunk deep in the soft furnishings. Well, we knew how to take care of that, didn't we? He strolled casually over to the stereo as if nothing was out of the ordinary and with an offhand poke of the power button unleashed a torrent of Radio 3.

Take that.

As he sunk into his chair – my chair now – he felt the trip begin to catch up with him. Maybe he'd be better off if he stopped doing this after all. Whisking around the world on short notice, packing in and out of cheap hotels, coping with GERTI's increasing senility, giving the finger to time zones and puffed-up airport officials, it all started to wear on you, and that was before adding the wind-up toy collectively known as MJN Air. How long could he keep doing this, realistically? Maybe it was time he got grounded at last, and used MJN's quiet folding as a valid excuse. 'It came at a good time,' he'd say. 'I was thinking of moving on and fate handed me the perfect opportunity.'

He couldn't pretend he'd fallen out of love with flying, though. That's what made the rest of it worthwhile. If he framed it correctly, maybe no one would ask.

He took a sip of tea. Urgh, no, rooibos! What was he thinking? He hated rooibos! And this was old and stale because, well, see above re: hating. Musty old weak non-tea ... Well, he'd made his bed, now he must lie in it; he swallowed a mouthful and took another out of spite.

As much as he resented Martin's pet treatment, Douglas was satisfied he'd done his bit. The boy needed toughening up, and there was no finer mentor in the ways of banter, leg-pulling, shit-taking, snidery, and sailing through life with an air of unruffled dignity than Douglas Richardson. He couldn't deny there were times he'd despaired of his pupil – that was most of the time, come to think of it – but some of it had caught by the end. Martin was still hopeless at anything approaching witty repartee despite the most rigorous immersion, but he was occasionally capable of taking a joke now, and some progress was better than no progress at all. A shame the course would have to wrap up before he could build on those baby steps.

Maybe radio was the future. There was a place for velvety authoritative tones. Douglas' reading of the Shipping Forecast would be the secret behind a sudden spike in the British birth rate. He'd turn around and wipe the floor with Just a Minute just to prove he could. Audiobooks, museum tours, rail travel announcements, all would come under his spell, and the more popular his work became the happier he'd be to provide more, because however much the public came to adore him, no one loved the sound of his voice more than Douglas Richardson.

An actual princess, though. Martin.

Oh, what was the use. He could daydream all night about finding late-life stardom, but the cold grey light of dawn would strip everything down to the truth. His life was behind him, and aside from the stories there wasn't much to show for it. Even when he had managed to get hold of something good, he hadn't been able to hold on to it. Over and over and over the pattern had played itself out, grinding the groove deeper each time, and he hadn't noticed it was happening until it was too deep to jump out. If lightning struck and he got married again – staggeringly unlikely, when you look at it; the uniform didn't have half the pull it used to even when it wasn't holding in someone falling apart at the seams, and three divorces was a pretty potent antidote to what power it had left – what possible reason could he have to think it wouldn't go exactly the same way again? The third time hadn't been the charm; the fourth would just be going through the motions. Their best hope would be that one of them would die so at least the end of that marriage wouldn't have been anyone's fault.

He wondered briefly how Carolyn and Herc were getting on but decided he didn't really want to know.

The piano concerto wound away with an anticlimactic little cadenza and then some familiar chords welled up from the speakers. Oh no, he thought. It's bad enough having to share my head with myself, now Puccini is joining in. I thought we were friends.

The last inch of tea – "tea" – was cold, so Douglas hurried himself back to the kitchen with an urgency that had nothing at all to do with getting further away from the song.

Nessun dorma! Nessun dorma. Tu pure, o Principessa, nella tua fredda stanza, guardi le stelle che tremano d'amore, e di speranza ...

While pouring his second mug of tea – which he was going to finish, and he was going to like it, because he was damned if he let himself be bested by bloody rooibos – he remembered his phone had dinged. He dug it out of his pocket and touched the button that woke it up.

Ma il mio mistero è chiuso in me; il nome mio nessun saprà!

An email from Carolyn. Well, she could wait. It was probably the next booking. How people got to be millionaires without being able to plan things more than three days in advance was an irritating mystery to him, and because MJN lived by their whim, and he by Carolyn's whim, he was subject to their madness. The email would have the same information in the morning, and he'd have the satisfaction of not having jumped at her command – turnabout being fair play, she was due a little neglect. If she was throwing him to the dogs he certainly wasn't going to read whatever she sent at – he checked – 2:18 a.m. If it was an emergency, then let her sweat a little, and see how she liked it.

Il nome suo nessun saprà, e noi dovrem, ahimè, morir, morir!

Rooibos was no better when allowed to steep properly, but Douglas had to concede it did warm him up a little, though the indignation might have helped. It had started to rain since he'd been in the kitchen last, and the patter on the window, barely audible over that turncoat Radio 3, turned his thoughts bed-ward. Maybe it was time to call it a night.

How like life.

He downed the last of the tea and wandered back to the sitting room in time for the end of the aria. Regardless of his feelings, it really would be a crime to shut it off partway through, so he let Calaf sing himself out.

Dilegua, o notte! Tramontate, stelle! Tramontate, stelle! All'alba vincerò! Vincerò! Vincerò!

Yeah, bully for you, mate. Douglas gave the last chord its due respect and hit the power button just as the continuity announcer started to speak, which he regretted when the abrupt cutoff collapsed the protective force field and the quiet crashed in with a vengeance. Ten seconds ago he could have climbed the stairs into the dark without a second thought, but ...

Oh all right fine, what was it that Carolyn had to send him at two in the bloody morning?

He pulled the phone out of his pocket and turned it on again, properly this time with the passcode and everything, and opened his email.

From: MJN Air, Carolyn Knapp-Shappey CEO <ceo@mjnair.co.uk>
Subject: For when you need it

​Dear Sir or Madam,

It has been my pleasure to work and fly with Douglas Richardson for his eight years as a pilot with MJN Air, during which he has proven consistently to be skilful, responsible, committed, and competent, and his resourcefulness is unparalleled. Neither rain, nor snow, nor obstreperous clients, nor technical malfunctions, nor acts of God can faze him; his cool head and quick wits have pulled us through every imaginable difficulty. Mr Richardson has been the backbone of the flight crew, and had I not made the decision to dissolve the company I would continue to rely on his capable service and good humour for years to come. As it is, I can only heartily recommend him for your airline in the expectation he will be as valuable an asset to you as he has been to me, which I am certain he will be wherever he goes.

With all respect and sincerity,

Carolyn Knapp-Shappey

CEO, MJN Air

 

Douglas -

Let me know if this works for you & I'll print some copies on MJN letterhead & sign them.

 There followed a list of other charter firms, with contacts and phone numbers, and a small selection of the same for some of MJN's more exceptionally wealthy customers, the sort who might want a personal pilot on staff. Douglas was amused to find Unbeaten Track Travel on the list – he looked back up at 'responsible' in the letter of reference and decided that must have been Carolyn's little joke.

Then he read the letter again.

And one more time, just to make sure.

He felt he had to send a reply, if only so a copy would be preserved in his 'sent' folder in case, like leprechaun's gold, this email evaporated from his inbox in the morning. His usual eloquence had turned its back for the moment so he tapped out a hasty 'Yes, this is excellent, thanks' and hit Send. 

Well, that would do, for now. 

He took the stairs two at a time, daring the darkness to say anything about it. Tomorrow was the first day of the rest of his life, and he was damn well going to sleep through most of it. All'alba vincerò indeed!

 

As he was brushing his teeth, a muffled ding came from the pile of jacket on the bed. Holding the toothbrush in his mouth he retrieved the phone and opened Carolyn's reply.

Good, you can collect it at the office Saturday. Pickup 6am, flying to Odessa, look sharp.

Of course.

 

 

That was surprisingly theraputic. I can see why writing fanfic is such a popular pasttime. Don't expect too much more from this end, though, I am not an ideas person ... we'll be back to visualisations of other people's ideas in a month or so.

In the meantime, I shall be driving up the play count in iTunes ...