The Quality of Silence

by Rosamund Lupton

  Adeeb turned away from Silesian Stennet and checked the satellite receiver mounted above the cab. The man who sold him the truck had installed it and claimed it was designed for ships and could get reception any place on the planet. He’d given Adeeb his sat-phone. Adeeb hadn’t wanted to keep the expensive contract going but Visha had made him. There was no cell reception or Wi-Fi in northern Alaska, not for hundreds of miles. She said she had to know he was all right. Said she wasn’t fussing. She’d stood there, long-fingered hands on her hips, daring him to disagree with her. He’d put an arm around her, awkward with those pretty hands still on her hips.

  ‘I feel fit as a fiddle, no problems at all,’ he’d said. (His mother, who’d taught him English, enjoyed colloquialisms.)

  ‘Then I want to know you feel fit as a fiddle no problems at all every day,’ Visha had said.

  He phoned home on the sat-phone every night, just long enough to reassure Visha and say good night to the boys. In the far north it helped him mark out night from day, reassured him that the diurnal rhythm still existed somewhere.

  Before getting back into his cab he checked everything one more time – snow chains, spare tyres, tyre jack, tools to repair hoses and lines and filters. Today he was Amundsen triple-checking his airship before setting off over the North Pole, not a middle-aged refugee from Afghanistan with incipient OCD. He suspected that the special repair tools and the flares, the emergency medical kit, all of it, was totally inadequate against the enormity of what northern Alaska could throw at them. But he would be taking Yasmin and Ruby only as far as the Arctic Circle – whatever their real reason was for that – and no further.

  Mum is a bit turned away from me, like when she’s playing Twenty-one and is trying to hide her expression so Dad and I think she might have an ace and a king. I can’t see her eyes, which are usually Mum’s giveaway. I gently pat her arm to get her attention. Her eyes are all filmy.

  ‘Dad told me a story about an Inupiaq hunter on sea ice,’ I say because I think the story will cheer her up.

  She says with her mouth-voice, ‘Can you tell me using your words?’

  Normally, I’d turn away from her, so I can’t read her lips any more. Then she’d come in front of me again and we’d do a little maypole dance around each other. But we can’t do that in Mr Azizi’s truck.

  ‘I am using my words,’ I say to her, in my hand-voice. She just shakes her head, like I’ve made her sad.

  The funny thing is that Mum understands everything else. She’s kind and funny and wonderful; super-coolio-wonderful. Sometimes at school when I’m upset, I think of her and I feel hugged, just by the thought of her. But there’s a hard bit, like a bit of gravel in a snowball. And it’s awful because the only thing that’s hard in her is something that I really really mind about.

  It’s a shame about the story because I think she might’ve really liked it.

  I’m looking for Dad out of the windscreen, like suddenly there he’ll be! I know it’s stupid, we haven’t even left Fairbanks yet, haven’t even left the yard, so it’s too early to be looking for him. And anyway, he’s in Anaktue, waiting for us. I just really want to see him.

  Mr Azizi is trying to turn out of the yard onto the road, but there’s loads of trucks coming in and we can’t fit past them. Most of them have ‘AM-FUELS’ or ‘F.B.F.’ on them, which the man at the airport said stands for ‘Frack Baby Frack’, but Mum said he was only joking. Some of the trucks have houses on them, like the one we’ve got. Mum’s asking Mr Azizi questions, like how he stops fuel freezing. I’m not even trying to lip-read his answers because I’m pretty sure we won’t have done that in science. Last week we put baby teeth in Coca-Cola to see-what-happens, (borrowed from the Year Twos after the tooth fairy’s visited as most of us Year Sixes have lost our baby teeth). So instead of trying to lip-read their conversation I look out for Dad again.

  The slimeball man is next to me; BANG next to my window. He must be standing on something because his face is close to mine. I can see the top of his head; there’s a horrible grey line either side of his parting, like a rat. I try to get further away from him, but I can’t get very far away because I’ve got a seat belt on and Mum is next to me.

  Mum hasn’t seen him because she’s turned away again, probably hiding her filmy eyes from me.

  The slimeball man is taking off his big mittens, but it’s so cold, why’s he doing that? He opens his bare hand and puts two fingers against his palm, which means ‘Mummy’ – MY sign for her.

  Mr Azizi hasn’t seen him, because he’s looking straight ahead, waiting to turn onto the road.

  The slimeball man is moving his fingers slowly around his face, the sign for ‘beautiful’.

  His pudgy hands must be getting really cold because they’re turning all mottled, like ugly blue and mauve jellyfish. He signs, ‘Get your mummy for me.’

  He’s pointing one of his horrible fingers at Mum.

  There’s a gap for us to go and Mr Azizi drives out of the yard and onto the road and slimeball man is running after us, but he’ll never catch us.

  I don’t know if I should tell Mum about him. I pat her arm and she turns to me and her eyes are filmy, just like I thought they’d be. I don’t want to make her more upset. And we’ll never have to see him again. He’s miles away from us already.

  @Words_No_Sounds

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  CREEPY: looks like hands turning into jellyfish; tastes like cakes that are alive; Feels: too close

  Chapter 5

  It was inhumanly dark. Yasmin’s eyes couldn’t make sense of the blackness. They’d been driving for seven hours and she’d long since stopped looking for glowing halos from far-off cities or towns because there were no cities or towns. Clouds made a barricade over the earth, so there was no moonlight or starlight; nothing to pierce through the weighted darkness apart from the truck’s headlights. Adeeb had told her that they shone for a quarter of a mile ahead, and to Yasmin they seemed like a search beam over an immense black ocean; a person disappeared in such a scale.

  She remembered her terror of the dark as a child, how sometimes it had stopped her from even breathing, and it was linked to her being flung to the edge, a void in the centre of her life, where once her mother had been.

  Her brothers and father had thought her fearless; they’d enjoyed her fists in the air to settle an argument, her bruises and grazes; the kid’s got balls. It was one way to try and fit into the all-male family. But being physically unafraid was easy; because after her mother died, what was there left to be scared of? Eight in the evening in February when they’d left the hospital. She’d tried to get out of the car but her father had put the child-locks on – the metal handle digging into her fingers, the smell of old takeaways, stale cigarettes, her nine-year-old arms in the cheap fleece too weak to force the door open and she couldn’t rescue Mum. Couldn’t stop them putting her into a dark box and nailing it shut.

  Darkness was death and grief. But she’d hidden her fear from everyone, suffered her night terrors alone.

  And then one night, ten months after her mother had died, she’d pulled up her bedroom blind and looked out of her window at the dark, confronting her demons, determined to face down her fear and had seen stars, like thousands of tiny celestial nightlights.

  Through the rest of her childhood the stars had comforted her, not only for their lights in the darkness but because as she looked at them she could imagine herself far away, as if the pain of grief was soldered into their flat and street and all the places she’d ever been with her mother, or seen on TV with her even, and that if she could only imagine herself far enough away grief couldn’t follow her there.

  Her comfort from the stars had matured into an intellectual fascination and they had become more not less astonishing as she’d studied them.

  This road was eerie, an endless strip of ice through the dark, but it hadn’t been nearly as perilous as she’d feared.

  She felt Ruby move closer to her and
she put her arm around her. Her determination to find Matt wasn’t driven solely out of her love for him but out of her love for Ruby too. She couldn’t bear for Ruby to suffer the appalling bereavement of losing a parent; the terrible violence of that grief.

  She remembered putting on Matt’s wedding ring at the police office, and knowing that he had to be alive, not only because of her love for him, but because of Ruby sitting next door.

  The road is made of ice and we’re driving on it! Cross-my-heart true! Our headlights show it all white with snow and mucky bits sticking on it. Around our headlights it’s dark and it’s like driving into a ghost train tunnel and never seeing the end.

  Mr Azizi said in winter they pour gazillions of gallons of water onto the old gravelly road and then it freezes. He said ice is the only thing that won’t break with big trucks driving on it, because ice is very, very tough. I think he wanted to make me feel safe but there was something in his face that meant he thinks this isn’t a good thing. He told me about the ice before we left Fairbanks, when I could still read his lips.

  Dad still hasn’t emailed back. But it’s really hard for him to check his emails. His satellite terminal is a lot more tricky to use than Mr Azizi’s because you can carry it around.

  Mum and I are coming out here at Christmas, which is only four weeks away, and Dad and I are going are going to write a blog together – aweekinalaskablog.com – about all the animals and birds we see. Dad got me a special cover for my laptop so it will work in the cold and I’ve just put it on because I think we should start our blog as soon as we’re all together.

  Adeeb checked his mirror. For the last fifteen miles or so, he’d seen blue headlights in the dark behind them, like two azure damselfish. HID lights were rare on the Dalton. The damselfish truck seemed to be following him, speeding up when he did, slowing when he did. He’d had a rookie follow him a couple of times, tailing him so he’d learn what to do, and so Adeeb would be there in case of any accident, but there was no rookie following him today. Nor could it be a friend, keeping mutually watchful eyes on one another. He had a reputation for keeping himself to himself, a reputation he felt had been created for him rather than earned. Marked as a loner he’d felt acutely alone on his trips north.

  In a few minutes they were coming to the first steep incline and his hands gripped hold of the steering wheel in anticipation, as if he’d be holding on to it rather than using it to steer. He dreaded the hazardous driving ahead and feared the ice.

  Before his friend Saaib’s accident, he had thought that ice, like glass, was delicate, the very fact of its transparency making it not quite solidly formed. He’d wondered how ice could really take the weight of a truck.

  When Saaib arrived in the UK he found work in the pouring room of a glass factory. It was a huge room, Saaib said, with a totally even floor, into which was poured – carefully, by special machine – molten glass, which then solidified into a perfectly even sheet on the even floor, before being cut. But one morning something went wrong with the careful special machine and the molten glass gushed into the room, too much and too fast, and the liquid glass forced its way out of windows and doors and set light to whatever it touched. Only the level room, made of marble, could withstand the heat; outbuildings and offices were destroyed in the fire. Saaib had been badly burned. Since then glass and ice had seemed not only tough to Adeeb, but vicious, murderous even, and all the time their transparency belied their power.

  Yasmin closed her mouth against a scream so that Ruby couldn’t see her fear. They were plunging down a sheer drop into the darkness. She watched Adeeb locking the differential gearing in the rear axle, so that each wheel had all the torque it could, but it wasn’t working because they were going too fast down this precipitous slope; surely this was too fast. They got to the bottom and the momentum sped them up the opposite slope. They reached the top. She was shaking from adrenaline.

  She turned to Ruby who smiled at her, showing no sign of being afraid, as if this was an adventure. She was excited about getting to her dad and excited about the road itself, not realising how dangerous it was because how could a mother who makes you eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day and has a homework schedule stuck to the fridge do something that puts you at risk?

  ‘I‘m sorry I frightened you,’ Adeeb said to Yasmin. ‘I had to drive fast enough for us to get up this side. Too slow is as dangerous as too fast. I should have warned you; should have warned you about the whole road before we left Fairbanks. It’s just that sometimes I don’t remember how bad it is until I’m driving it again.’

  ‘I asked you to take us,’ Yasmin said.

  ‘Do you want to go back?’ he said. ‘Because I’ll take you.’

  The cab’s thermometer measured the outside temperature as minus twenty-four, already colder than Fairbanks. At Anaktue the average temperature in winter was minus thirty and could reach minus fifty, without the windchill. This road was dangerous, yes, she knew that now and wished to God that Ruby was somewhere safe, but if she left Matt there wasn’t a risk that he would be hurt but a hundred per cent, no margin of error certainty that he would die.

  ‘I want to go on’, she said.

  I keep thinking we’re going to skid and I grab hold of Mum, like you do on a roller coaster. In our headlights you can see this ginormous pipe running right next to the road. It looks like a huge black vein in a white body, and inside there’s all this slushy warm oil pumping along.

  I’m squashed up next to Mum and she’s got her arm around me and it feels really nice. Normally I don’t do this, because I need to practise for being eleven and grown up and at secondary school and everything. I wish she’d tell Mr Azizi that we want to go all the way to Deadhorse because I’m sure he’ll say yes and then she won’t look so worried. I hope that if I go to sleep when I wake up we’ll be near to Dad.

  As Adeeb navigated their truck round hairpin bends and down hills more like ski-runs than a road, Yasmin focused on the drive axles and the air-actuated clutch and how power flowed to the tyres without any differential action, giving each wheel all the torque the road permitted. She’d never enjoyed the engineering part of physics but out here, in this truck, she was glad she knew how Adeeb was keeping control because she understood why, for the moment, Ruby was safe.

  Ruby had fallen asleep, tired out from the long flight, the trauma of their arrival and the anxiety of trying to find a way to get to her Dad. Of course she was exhausted. Ruby’s head slipped a little and she juddered momentarily awake before settling into sleep. Yasmin stroked her hair and tried to stop her head from slipping down. If the danger to Ruby became too great she knew she would have to ask Adeeb to turn around or get a lift in a truck going back to Fairbanks. But for now they would keep going.

  As Ruby slept, Yasmin strained to see more of the vast landscape surrounding the ice-ribbon road.

  The scale of Alaska frightened Adeeb; a million and a half square kilometres, and the only sign of humanity through his windscreen was the ice road itself and the trans-Alaska pipeline running alongside it; technological marvels they might be, but Adeeb didn’t think they felt either human or civilising.

  At the beginning of their journey, he and Yasmin had spoken about the mechanics of driving his truck. She said she’d studied a bit of engineering as part of her physics degree but hadn’t specialized in it; she’d chosen astrophysics. Adeeb thought that a woman studying astrophysics was one definition of freedom.

  But they hadn’t actually talked – not about whatever it was that preoccupied her, had made her lie to him and bring a child to the Arctic Circle in winter. He guessed that she didn’t want to talk to him about it and it wasn’t something he could ask her. He hoped he’d be able to help her, if she did volunteer it.

  His headlights illuminated five spruce trees at the edge of the road, whitened by snow and ice. Although the trees were over a century old they were barely three feet high; it was a brutal place to grow. Further north, there were no trees
at all. He’d read about northern Alaska after his first journey to Deadhorse and the Prudhoe Bay oil wells, in the hope that knowing a place would tame it in some way, soften it a little, but the opposite had happened. He knew now that a landslide a hundred feet wide was moving towards the ice road, frozen soil and rocks and shrunken trees stealing closer by a few centimetres a day, gaining speed and destroying anything in their way; as if the land itself, like the cold, was not just passively hostile but actively aggressive.

  Worse than the dangers of the road and the cold and the isolation was the absence of colours; just the white snow in his headlights and then the dark. In this monochromatic landscape he felt a craving for colours like a need for warmth. He thought of Leyla Saerahat Roshani and wondered if she had a lonely Afghan driver in mind, when she wrote her poetry:

  ‘I plant my eyes/in the mirror/so that a sign/small and green/may emerge, proclaim/the eternity of Spring.’

  But he’d never seen anything green and spring when it came would be brief.

  His love of poetry, like his knowledge of English, was a gift from his mother, a teacher in Zabul before the Taliban stopped her from teaching.

  For the last thirty miles he’d seen Yasmin staring through the windscreen, as if searching for something, more tense with every mile they covered, and he wanted to tell her that he’d never seen anything out there. Perhaps he’d been too focused on the road but he believed there was nothing to search for; nothing to see, just a sterile wasteland of snow and ice. Even the predatory packs of wolves, for which truckers carried loaded guns, were probably more myth than truth.

  A truck passed him, going the other way towards Fairbanks. The glare of the truck’s headlights momentarily flooded his cab, shining on Ruby and Yasmin.