The Quality of Silence

by Rosamund Lupton

  He should never have brought them. He hadn’t thought it through properly. He’d been too selfish to think it through properly. He realised now that he hadn’t been motivated by chivalry but by a selfish yearning for company on the road. His headache, which had felt so mild in Fairbanks, bothered him more now.

  Only a sliver of wilderness could be seen in the beam of the headlights but enough for Yasmin to see that it was relentlessly barren. Matt had told her he’d come back here to film animals. He’d told Ruby all about the winter wildlife. She’d suspected that he was, at best, exaggerating so that Ruby wouldn’t know the real reason he was staying away from home. Yasmin had never challenged him because she’d thought it was a screen that protected both of them from a painful truth, not about Corazon – she didn’t know about her then – but that he found home life stultifying, her stultifying, and needed to get away. Too decent to formally separate, too loving to cause Ruby anguish, he’d used winter wildlife in Alaska as a necessary fiction. For mile after bleak mile that fiction had stretched and broken.

  She remembered the prolonged quiet during their phone call eight days ago, the time it had taken for her angry words to reach him and then his words travelling back to her across the globe – ‘I kissed her because I missed you.’

  It had made no sense. But the reason he’d returned to Alaska in wintertime had become clear.

  She fervently hoped she was wrong; not because it would mean that Matt was, kiss apart, faithful to her. In the great scheme of him being alive or dead that really, astonishingly, didn’t matter to her now. But because if he’d told her the truth about coming here for the animals there was a chance he’d been away filming when the village burned down, and that would mean he’d have his survival kit with him and not be out there in the killing cold and dark unprotected.

  Two months after their knitting expedition, she’d asked him to meet her at Cambridge station. When he saw her on the platform, she was wearing wellies and carrying a large, oddly shaped holdall and he later admitted he’d feared that loving her would not always be straightforward. At King’s Lynn their train terminated and they got the last local bus of the evening, winding their way along the coast in the dark, the only passengers, until they reached the seaside village of Cley. He’d followed her over the wet shingle, the sea roaring-hushing alongside them.

  ‘Look,’ she said, pointing up.

  He looked at the enormous dome of the Norfolk seaside sky; an upended cosmic glitter jar knocked clumsily across it.

  She took a telescope and tripod out of the holdall, digging the tripod into the shingle and calibrating the telescope.

  ‘Now look.’

  He’d thought she was going to show him the moon up close, or a planet and he’d see rings or satellites or whatever planets had. He hadn’t been prepared for it at all. The thousands of stars he’d seen with his naked eye had turned into hundreds of thousands; and all the time they had been there, these stars beyond stars.

  They’d fallen asleep on a rug over bumpy shingles; the rhythmic thumping and sighing of the sea near to them. When she woke up, dawn was lightening the sky and had turned the stars invisible. Matt was already awake. He took her face in his hands.

  ‘What . . . ?’ she asked.

  ‘I see you,’ he said and she felt like landfall spotted by an explorer too long at sea.

  I’m pressed against Mum and I can feel her heart beating really fast; like the little shrew Tripod caught (even though he’s only got three legs he still catches them). I know she’s thinking about Dad. She hasn’t seen that I’m awake so I look at her for a bit and she’s staring out of the windscreen and she’s biting on her lip, like she wants to cry and is having to stop herself.

  I feel like I’m spying so I wriggle a bit, so she knows that I’m awake. She gives me a squeeze-box hug.

  I shouldn’t have let myself fall asleep. I thought Mr Azizi would look after her, but he has to drive this truck, and he doesn’t know Mum well enough to see the signs of when she’s upset, things she’s never done before, like biting her lip and not crying.

  I think she’s worried that it’s scenario one and Dad doesn’t have anything with him. But I know that he’ll be OK. His Inupiat friends showed him how to make an aputiak, which is a kind of igluNot the big sort, with rooms and everything, but the kind they make when they go on a hunting trip, just temporary, till Mum and me get there. So I’m sure he’s built himself an aputiak and he’s just waiting till we come and find him. He told me it’s snug inside.

  ‘How can it be when it’s made of SNOW?’ I said.

  ‘Snow’s a brilliant insulator, lots of pockets of air, so it keeps the cold out. And your own body heat makes it cosy too.’

  ‘“Cosy?”’

  ‘Cosy. And sometimes they use a qulliq which is like a lamp and a heater all in one. It’s a stone bowl and you burn blubber and that makes it toasty. Want to know something interesting?’

  He knows that I always want to know something interesting.

  ‘In late spring it just melts away. No skips or landfill or foundations left behind. Not even a wheelie bin amount of rubbish or a waste-paper basket amount. It all just disappears right back into the earth.’

  We have our own signs for things. So for ‘aputiak’ we make the letter A and then a curved shape like the roof with our hand. He learned signing when I was a baby. He said that he would learn a sign and it would take him ages and then he’d show it to me and it took me ten seconds flat to get it. He told me that instead of babbling with my mouth like other babies I babbled with my hands. He always has a super-big smile when he says that.

  I pull away from Mum a little bit to free my hands up, and I tell her that Dad will have made an aputiak, which I finger-spell because Mum doesn’t know my and Dad’s sign for it. I show her the special sign and tell her that his friends showed him how to make one and it’s really cosy. I think it’s made her feel better because she smiles at me.

  ‘Do you think Bosley misses us?’ I ask. The sign for ‘Bosley’ is a finger wagging like a tail, which everyone in our family knows is especially for Bosley.

  ‘Very happy. Mrs F. spoils him,’ Mum says.

  ‘Did you pack his bed?’

  ‘Of course. And all his toys.’

  I don’t need to worry about Tripod, because Mrs Buxton is coming in to feed him every day. Mum says Tripod is like a teenager who can’t wait to have the place to himself. I like thinking of everyone snug and asleep – Tripod on the sofa, where he’s not allowed, and Bosley in his special bed and Dad in his aputiak.

  Out of the window there’s a giant wizard’s black cloak and hidden the other side are animals and birds and fish and insects. There’s caribou and moose and snowy owls and snowshoe hares and otters, all awake, and bears will be hibernating in their dens, but they still move around in their sleep, and under the ice on the rivers there’s frogs sheltering at the bottom because that’s the warmest place.

  I know I’m weird liking caribou and musk oxes. Tanya and the girl gang like ponies most, then kittens and puppies. Hamsters and guinea pigs are OK to like too. Caribou and tundra bees would just be seen as weird like me. But they’re super-coolio! You’d think a bee wouldn’t survive a minute in the cold but it shivers its tiny muscles to make heat and then traps warmth in its soft coat. My top favourite animals are river otters and their babies are about five months old now. Dad’s seen them playing tag and he’s watched them playing hide and seek too. Cross-my-heart true!

  I wouldn’t be popular with Tanya and the girl gang even if I could hear and talk like them. I don’t like glittery lip balm or fashion-design kits and I like river otters more than ponies.

  Mum’s still squeezing me, a little too tight, but I don’t mind.

  I look out of the windscreen, just to the edge of the road, rather than all the way ahead, trying to see what’s out there. I think tundra bees are hibernating but maybe one is out there, flying along next to us. I must make some kind of sound beca
use Mum and Mr Azizi both look at me. I point and Mr Azizi checks there’s no one close behind us and stops the truck, right in the road because there’s nowhere else to stop.

  A little way ahead, on the very edge of the road, the snow and ice is all sparkly because no one has driven on it; in our lights it looks like diamond dust.

  In the diamond-glittery snow is the shape of two wings, as if an angel has crashed and has got up and left her wing prints behind, or maybe just landed normally on her feet and then decided to lie down in the snow for a bit.

  ‘What is it?’ Mum asks.

  I make two wing shapes with my hands, the sign for an angel, and it’s like I’m making a mirror with my hands for the wing prints in the snow. I smile so she knows I’m only joking about the angel.

  ‘I think they’re wing prints made by a ptarmigan,’ I say, finger-spelling ‘ptarmigan’. Dad showed me pictures, which is how I know.

  A ptarmigan is as good as an angel, better even. But Mum doesn’t know about ptarmigans.

  ‘It’s an amazing bird,’ I tell Mum. ‘Which stays in Alaska all winter. Its feathers turn white in winter so you can’t see it in the snow.’

  Jimmy would say ‘AWESOME SAUCE’ and it is. It’s BEAUTIFUL; these perfect wing prints in the diamond-glittery snow, with Mr Azizi’s headlights like a spotlight and then just darkness all around it.

  Dad told me ptarmigans fly into snow banks when they want to rest so a predator won’t see their footprints.

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  AWESOME-SAUCE-BEAUTIFUL: touching a black spot on a cheetah’s fur; a lemonade sea w/ fizzing waves; a ptarmigan’s wing prints in snow

  Chapter 6

  Four months after their first star-watching stay on Cley beach, she’d gone with Matt to the Insh Marshes at Speyside; damply cold in January, the rain dismal. She stood next to him in a bird hide that smelled of wet anoraks.

  ‘So this is twitching?’ she said.

  ‘Or birding.’

  ‘That sounds kinky too. All this furtive hiding in hides and peering at things with binoculars.’

  He laughed then showed her greylag geese and whooper swans, which wintered out there in the flooded marshes. She loved his passion and his knowledge and how it transformed the wet miserable place into something entirely different. She quizzed him, wanting to learn, to be fascinated too by snipe, wigeon, redshank and curlew. They planned to come back in summer to watch the lapwings.

  ‘Did your dad find you in the cabbage patch one night?’ he asked. He’d already met – at his insistence – her father and brothers.

  ‘A mulberry bush; cabbage patches only have dolls from America.’

  ‘Ah. Marry me?’

  She saw a sign on the side of the road, illuminated by their headlights: soagil energy vehicles only.

  ‘Where does the road go?’ she asked Adeeb.

  ‘It’s most probably an access road to a well,’ he said. ‘They’re starting to frack the interior of Alaska now. Sometimes they make the road out of gravel; other times they link it to a river.’

  ‘And the river’s frozen over?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes. A natural ice road. Though it can need reinforcing.’

  She checked Adeeb’s map, holding it up to the small interior light. There was nothing on it to mark Soagil Energy’s road. Perhaps there was a river-road to Anaktue.

  She found the River Alatnak, which started south in the Brooks Mountains and flowed north to the Arctic Ocean. Two hundred miles north of where they were now the River Alatnak looped close to the Dalton and then went thirty or so miles all the way to Anaktue. Maybe it would be possible to drive on the river to Matt. But she couldn’t ask Adeeb, not yet. She still hadn’t told him their real destination. She didn’t know how to convince him to take them and was afraid that he’d refuse – with kindness and sympathy, but still refuse – and she’d have no way of reaching Matt.

  ‘Marry me?’ he’d asked again, in case she hadn’t heard the first time.

  ‘Dad would have to give me away, me being his chattel and everything, before becoming your chattel.’

  ‘But he simply found you in a bush. Please?’

  ‘Not yet,’ she’d said.

  In his mirror, Adeeb caught a glimpse of the damselfish headlights in the darkness behind them. He put on the radio, ostensibly to get the news and the hourly weather report, but in truth it was because the radio station played classical music. As he listened, Adeeb liked to imagine he was back in his childhood home of Zabul, looking at the field next to their house in springtime, the rows of pink flowering almond trees, like a blossoming corps de ballet.

  Ruby was studying him and he realised that he was tapping his fingers on the steering wheel. ‘I’m thinking about blossom,’ he told her, slowly and carefully. ‘And I’m listening to Chopin.’ Then he looked back at the road; the windscreen a pink- blossom lens created by the music.

  Mr Azizi just turned to me and said he was listening to Chopin; as if I’d understand; AND he doesn’t ask me if I want him to turn it up REALLY LOUD and he doesn’t ask if I play the drums. He is the Superb Mr Azizi!

  Most people think that I want LOUD and THUMPING so I can feel the vibrations; like I’ll be grateful that sound has got through to me any old way it can.

  They’re always putting percussion sticks into my hands and asking me to hit something (but not them!). And just because Evelyn Glennie is a musical genius doesn’t mean that because I’m deaf I will be too. They think I’d love to learn the drums, or the cymbals or a rinky-dink plinkety-plink glockenspiel. (Jimmy said it sounds rinky-dink plinkety plink.) But I’m terrible at them all. Our last school concert, in front of parents, I air-glockenspieled. Dad thought it was hilarious. Even Mum was trying not to smile, but I know she hoped I’d love a percussion instrument and join the orchestra and go on the orchestra trip and be a part of something (the hearing world with me thumping at something in time with everyone else). ‘Hitting something isn’t integrating, Mum,’ I said to her (I’d lip-read her saying ‘integrating’ to Dad loads of times) and then I felt bad because it made her sad.

  It was just after then that a harpist came to do a concert at school to ‘inspire future harpists’ and because Mum was there I didn’t make a fuss about putting my hand on the harp for a bit of the concert. I did mind, but I wanted to make Mum happy, so I stood there with my hand on it. Everyone else was bored. Feet shuffling, rows and rows of fidgeting, not a future harpist in the place, but it was lovely. It wasn’t thumping vibrations, but like wings beating fast, like a hummingbird, so fast you can’t even tell they’re moving, or like when you pick up a shrew that Tripod’s been chasing and it’s got these super-fast little heartbeats and you can feel how fragile it is but also so alive. If I could choose a musical instrument to play it would be the harp. Not sure that you can go on an orchestra trip with one of those as it wouldn’t fit in the coach.

  Mum and Mr Azizi’s faces have gone still. They’re really concentrating on something and I don’t think it’s the music because Mum’s never said anything about liking music.

  * * *

  The headlines on the news was Anaktue. Although the radio was already loud enough, Yasmin leaned closer towards it.

  ‘Here in the studio we have our Governor of Alaska, Mary-Beth Jenston,’ the radio reporter said. ‘And on the line is Captain David Grayling, the state trooper who was in charge of the search and rescue mission at Anaktue.’

  The presenter’s voice was neutral but the news should be done as drama, Yasmin thought, should recognise that it was about people’s lives; that a wife was listening to this; that a child was in a truck on a dangerous road because there was nowhere safe her mother could leave her.

  ‘Captain Grayling, coming to you first, can you give us an update on the situation at Anaktue?’

  She’d done this while Mum was ill; her mind going into overdrive, creating a running commentary that she couldn’t switch off as a kind of wordy shie
ld against emotions; leaping cruel hope as well as anxiety.

  ‘Unfortunately, I can only confirm that twenty-three Inupiat people died in the fire, including three children,’ Captain Grayling said. ‘There was also a British man, who was a wildlife film-maker. All of the relatives have now been informed.’

  Yasmin saw Adeeb looking across at her and only then realised that her face and palms were damp with sweat.

  It was clear to Adeeb that Yasmin was distressed and that she was trying to hide it. He turned down the heater.

  ‘Isn’t it odd, Captain Grayling, that a fire takes hold so fast?’ the radio interviewer asked.

  ‘A stockpile of snowmobile fuel and generator diesel caught fire and exploded,’ Captain Grayling replied. ‘A devastatingly intense fire would have been the result very quickly.’

  ‘But how did this fire begin? Surely fuel doesn’t just catch light out there in the snow?’

  ‘There was most likely an initial fire and small explosion inside a house,’ Captain Grayling replied. ‘We think gas for a heater or cooker caught fire, probably because of an electrical fault or carelessness, and the fire then spread to the snowmobile fuel and generator diesel, causing the large explosion.’

  ‘But a village being wiped out by a fire in minus thirty is suspicious surely?’

  ‘No, as I just said, it can happen,’ Captain Grayling replied. ‘If you cook with gas canisters and there’s a leak. If you stockpile fuel too close to houses. We have issued warnings to villagers and homesteaders throughout Alaska to store their fuel at least twenty metres from their homes. I’d urge your listeners to do the same.’

  ‘Thank you for joining us Captain Grayling. Now if I could turn to you, Governor Jenston?’

  ‘Good evening. I’d like to offer my heartfelt condolences to the families and friends of the victims of this terrible tragedy.’

  ‘Thank you for coming on our programme.’

  ‘I’m glad to have the opportunity to be here.’