The Quality of Silence

by Rosamund Lupton

  I said I’d choose a battleship in a storm, not mountains, because I think a battleship is more exciting. And she signed, ‘Thank you, Ruby, from now on that’s how I’ll see it too.’

  Mum sometimes says ‘big as a battleship’. I don’t know anyone else who says that.

  So I’m thinking of Brahms’s first symphony and I see that big battleship, grey and powerful, pushing through giant waves, and above are all these dark clouds, those ones that look like they’re an army, mustering all their forces on the edge of the sky. I have a few seagulls too, doing that thing that seagulls do, kind of chasing after the ship, then dashing up into the sky. And the seagulls are the high notes, the ones a reed instrument makes, because birds sometimes live among reeds.

  When we were still friends, I asked Jimmy what his favourite piece of music was, apart from pop, because he’s really musical and is learning the piano and the cello too; and he said Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto. He told me it sounded like catching the wind with silver lassos. And I think he must have loved me to tell me that.

  Chapter 8

  Snow had drifted along the sides of the road, narrowing it to a single lane. Yasmin felt the darkness closing around them. Twice she’d almost fallen asleep but had forced herself back into consciousness again.

  She’d heard Adeeb asking Ruby about music and she’d flinched, thinking it was insensitive. But Ruby had answered his question, on that awful machine, and Yasmin had felt the wind knocked out of her. Ruby was asleep now, so she couldn’t ask her how she knew about this music.

  Ruby hadn’t let anyone hear her speak for two years now; point blank refused to talk at all. Yasmin had tried everything and was constantly on her case, which she hated doing, and was furious that Matt took the easy soft option of ‘just let her be’. Speech therapist after speech therapist had drawn the same silent blank. One of them had encouraged Ruby to sign up to Twitter, and every time she tweeted Yasmin felt sadness pinch her that she was talking to strangers. If only she could speak with her mouth, Yasmin was sure she’d have friends.

  When Ruby’s hands had made the shape of wings for an angel it had moved her. Driving through this dark night, she’d thought about the sign for dawn – a circle made between your thumb and finger coming up from your arm as the horizon.

  She’d remembered vividly Ruby’s excitement after an English lesson on her gifted and talented programme.

  ‘We learned about onomatopoeia!’ Ruby had said, the moment Yasmin met her at the school gates. Yasmin hadn’t understood why words that sound-like-the-thing-they-describe had lit up her face.

  ‘Sign language is onomatopoeia all the time, Mum. Visual onomatopoeia!’

  Yasmin had been struck by the truth of it.

  But most of the world, almost everyone, didn’t know sign language, so however beautiful and visually onomatopoeic the sign for ‘angel’, Ruby must learn to say it with the roof of her mouth and her tongue and her lips.

  It wasn’t that Yasmin wanted Ruby to speak so much as she wanted her to be

  heard.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Adeeb said to her quietly, knowing she was awake.

  Even though he needed to be concentrating on driving she felt there was something deliberate in him looking so determinedly ahead and not at her.

  ‘Your husband, he was at Anaktue?’

  His voice was kind and she felt the tension of her lies.‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘The wildlife film-maker?’ Adeeb asked.

  Ruby’s gadget was still on, Adeeb’s words coming up as type. Yasmin closed the laptop.

  ‘He isn’t dead.’

  Adeeb heard the frightened vehemence in her voice.

  ‘But no one’s looking for him,’ she continued. ‘Everything has burned down so he doesn’t have any shelter, at best a tent but maybe not even that and he might be hurt. It’s twenty-two below freezing here, much colder where he is, and I don’t know how long he can survive.’

  Adeeb didn’t know the right thing to say or do. The police had said on the radio that the wildlife film-maker was dead.

  ‘The police—’ he began.

  ‘They’re wrong,’ she interrupted. ‘Will you take us with you to Deadhorse? Then we can get a plane to Anaktue.’

  Deadhorse was over three hundred miles away.

  ‘The road gets more dangerous the further north you go,’ he said. ‘After the cafeteria place, which we’ll get to soon, there’s nothing else for sixty miles until you get to Coldfoot. There’s a tiny village called Wiseman eight miles later, but it’s three miles off the Dalton and the road’s been closed for weeks. Then it’s two hundred and fifty miles of nothing, worse than nothing. There’s no hospitals or any kind of medical aid or help. If we break down, if the storm comes early, there’s no one to call for help because no one can get to you.’

  ‘We love him.’

  * * *

  Yasmin saw Adeeb look across at Ruby who was sleeping.

  ‘She and her father, they have this closeness. I can’t explain it properly. She’d be lost without him.’

  Adeeb nodded and she wondered if he also knew the pain a child feels when a beloved parent dies; the terror of it; shock waves rippling out and out and there’s no circumference to contain them.

  ‘I wish I hadn’t had to bring her,’ she said. ‘That I didn’t need to be doing this, but I have no other choice.’

  Adeeb admired her hugely – her determination and her love for her husband and her courage. And she was fiercely loving and protective of her child, he could see that. He knew that she wasn’t undertaking this journey lightly. But still.

  ‘If it was your wife out there . . .’ she said. ‘What would you do?’

  And everything was clear. Because, yes, he’d get a lift with a stranger, however dangerous the road, his boys with him if they had to be, and he wouldn’t stop till he reached her. Nothing would persuade him otherwise.

  The forecast storm wasn’t due to hit till after they’d reach Deadhorse. The headache that had been bothering him hadn’t got any worse and was caused by the worry he always felt when he was driving this road. He was one of the most experienced drivers, probably the most cautious because he had his own rig to look after, as well as being a natural neurotic. If anyone could get them there safely he could.

  ‘I’ll get the next weather update,’ he said. ‘If we can definitely get to Deadhorse before the storm then I’ll take you.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  He smiled at her. ‘My mother would have loved to have met you,’ he said.

  What would she have made of a woman who’d studied astrophysics? Who’d travel with her child across northern Alaska in winter out of love for her husband? She’d have thrown up her hands into the air, bangles jangling, her eyes widening, her whole being taken up with being amazed.

  She had died three months before they left Afghanistan and came to the USA to seek asylum. His mother would have thought seeking asylum made him sound like a lunatic in one of her Dickens novels. And that was pretty much how he’d been treated, when people weren’t afraid he was going to blow them up. His mother wouldn’t have imagined that.

  We’ve stopped and the bright light’s on. I quickly open up Voice Magic. Mum is showing Mr Azizi the map and they’re talking about Anaktue. So Mum has told him and Mr Azizi has said yes! I knew he would! And Mum looks different now.

  Mum says there’s a river and in a hundred and seventy miles it loops near to this road. She traces the river with her finger. ‘And then it goes north for about thirty-five miles all the way to Anaktue.’ Her finger touches Anaktue lightly, like it’s precious. Mr Azizi says someone needs to have built a road that joins the river to the Dalton. And the river-road we passed was for a mining company so they’d have checked it was safe. It would be too risky for us to use a river-road that no one had checked. And he keeps on saying ‘we’ and ‘us’ so I keep feeling happy because even though we can’t drive on the river, he’ll still help us to get to Dad
. He says we’ll stop at the cafeteria and get some extra food and water.

  I know it will be all right now so I close my eyes and go back to sleep.

  All Matt had to do was say ‘Will you . . .?’ for her to know the end of the sentence and say ‘Not yet.’ He’d protest that he was simply asking, ‘Will you . . . pass the beer/not make such a racket/look at that beautiful sky up there/stop hogging the duvet/kiss me,’ but the locations gave him away and each time they had a picnic on the beach, or coffee in a bird hide, or looked at a sunset/sunrise/storm/blue skies or skies of any other kind and almost every time they made love, she’d know he’d ask, ‘Will you . . .?’

  He wasn’t crushed when she said not yet, or even disappointed. Made resilient by a loving past he didn’t perceive rejection. He thought she wanted to get to know him better first, and fair enough. She should know everything there was to know about the person she was marrying before committing the rest of her life to him; never realising that it was the other way around.

  She’d known she wanted to marry him from the time he’d held her face in his hands and said, ‘I see you’; she wanted him to look at her face and say that and fully know what he was seeing. But she’d feared that wasn’t possible.

  Adeeb pulled into the parking area by the Portakabin cafeteria; Ruby was still asleep. A young trucker had set the cafeteria up this winter, understanding drivers’ need for a dose of company before the long lonely drive north and somewhere friends could swap war tales on the way home to Fairbanks. Adeeb had never stopped on the way home.

  He was glad to have a break from driving. In the last five miles, his vision had occasionally blurred. He must be more tired than he realised. He wondered if he should get out, but the cold would make his headache worse; ‘Brain freeze!’ his boys yelled, when eating ice cream, clutching their heads. The cold was bad for a headache.

  The parking area was occupied by two Soagil Energy trucks carrying pipes, an FBF tanker and three Am-Fuels trucks, with prefab houses. Adeeb guessed the Am-Fuels trucks were headed south towards Fairbanks, because from the looks of the prefabs they’d been in Alaska a while. As he parked, the Am-Fuels drivers got into their trucks and, as Adeeb had predicted, headed home towards Fairbanks.

  He said he’d look after Ruby, while Yasmin went to use the toilet and buy food.

  Yasmin put on her arctic parka and face mask and mittens before getting out of the truck. Even so, the cold shocked her; it was like plunging into a lake not air. She smelled the cold and then realised that it was an absence of all odours. She wondered if it was because her airways were not functioning properly – she could feel the little hairs in her nose freezing – or if it was that in this degree of cold no molecules could permeate the air.

  The cafeteria was warmer, with the tang of coffee and sweat. There were truckers, sitting at two Formica tables, snow from their boots tracked onto the floor. She was aware of their stares as she bought drinks and sandwiches from a shy young man serving. As he packed them into a bag for her, she asked him about Anaktue. Maybe there’d been talk about it here.

  ‘It was that place on the news, right?’ he said. ‘That Inupiaq village that burned down? Stored their fuel right by their houses.’

  A trucker with a hugely fat belly turned from a table towards her. ‘Aint that the place sittin’ on a whole load of shale oil?’

  A man at the other table turned so that the two tables were now in one conversation. ‘Heard they were given MacBook Air laptops and that was just to read Soagil’s paperwork.’

  ‘Heard that too,’ another said. ‘And that they could have had a hundred K. Enough to buy a whole herd of fuckin’ caribou.’

  ‘But they still wouldn’t allow them to frack?’ Yasmin asked.

  ‘That’s right,’ one of the men replied.

  The shy young man talked to the truckers rather than Yasmin. ‘I met an Inupiaq guy, couple of months back, lived in Anaktue, but he’d bin workin’ at Soagil’s regular wells at Prudhoe? Said he’d be fired if his family didn’t sign.’ He looked around, as if startled he’d said so much.

  ‘They work at the Prudhoe oil wells to get cash?’ Yasmin asked, wanting to keep the conversation going.

  ‘Yeah, lot of ’em still doin’ their own huntin’ for food, pretty much self-sufficient some of ’em, but they need to buy snowmobiles and fuel and such. So durin’ the winter that’s what they do.’

  ‘The Governor said that the fracking companies wouldn’t try to frack Anaktue’s land now,’ Yasmin said. ‘Out of respect to the villagers.’

  The man with the belly leaned forwards. ‘Yeah right. And tourists come to Alaska for the sunshine.’

  A door slammed and Yasmin turned. It was Ruby, in tears, her expression desperate, her parka wasn’t fastened. Ruby ran to her and started pulling her towards the door. Yasmin was aware of truckers coming with them; one of them was doing up Ruby’s parka and pulling up her face mask to protect her from the cold. The only protection she’d been wearing properly was her mittens.

  In the cab, Adeeb was hunched over the steering wheel, barely conscious.

  Two of the truckers managed to get him out of the cab. Between them they got him inside the cafeteria.

  The world had become blurred to Adeeb and wouldn’t come back into focus, and then he’d lost his balance and couldn’t swallow. He’d felt small arms around him, a child’s arms, but his boys were hundreds of miles away. He’d tried to open his mouth but couldn’t speak.

  He’d known then why he hated this ice road, truly feared it. Because this was how it ended, a bleak road to dark nothing; that was why he’d yearned for colour.

  And then stronger arms were around him and he was being pulled out of the warmth and into the cold. And then it was warmer again. A woman was talking to him. He hoped it was Visha. She was telling him that he was being taken to hospital in Fairbanks, that a driver was taking him. But Fairbanks was the wrong way. And then he remembered the slender, graceful woman and her child and he knew what she would do. He had to warn her about the shrieking winds and the killing cold and tell her that avalanches could bury a truck even as it was moving and that even inside a forty-ton eighteen wheeler a person was nothing more than a poor, bare, forked animal, that it was too dangerous for her and the little girl, but he couldn’t open his mouth to say the words.

  He heard her saying that she was putting a cheque into his jacket pocket and if anything happened to the truck she’d make sure it was paid for. Then he felt, or thought he felt, her lips on his forehead as she kissed him.

  He thought of his gentle, intelligent, brave mother; his mother of excited bangle-jangling and tenderness and poetry, beaten from her classroom by the Taliban. He’d grown up with a hatred of the Taliban as fierce as his love of poetry; natural for him to become a translator for the American army. But he should have thought about the consequences. They’d had to leave so quickly. Relieved that his mother had died so he didn’t have to leave her. Terrible to be relieved. There were men around him, concern on tough faces, being kind to him; offering him sanctuary after all.

  I woke up because Mr Azizi had kind of fallen across me. He was so white and his eyes were closed. I typed on Voice Magic and told him to wake up, but he didn’t hear and I couldn’t make Voice Magic go louder. I tried to talk to him loudly, feeling for the sound vibrations in my throat, like my speech therapist tries to make me, but it didn’t do any good and I don’t know if it was me not being able to mouth-talk loudly or because he just couldn’t hear me. Then I kind of hugged him, trying to get him to sit up, trying to make him better, but I couldn’t. I quickly put on my parka and my mittens, but then I couldn’t zip up my parka. I opened the door, which was really heavy, and then I ran to find Mum.

  Two men are carrying Mr Azizi into a truck and another man’s got a blanket and has wrapped it around him. It feels like we’ve been alone for ages, me and Mum and Mr Azizi, and now we aren’t and people you might think would be rough, because they look like that, are
n’t one bit.

  The truck with Mr Azizi in it is leaving now, going back to Fairbanks. Mum says he’ll be OK once he gets to hospital. She thinks he’s had a small stroke, but he’s getting better. I think she’s right because just before he left he lifted his arm like a little wave, and he couldn’t do that when he was in the truck with me before, so I think he must be getting a bit better.

  There’s no lights out here in the car park. It’s so so cold; like an ice rink has wrapped its way all around you in a jumbo ice sheet. Mum told me to wait in the cafeteria, but I want to make sure that Mr Azizi is all right. The lights on the back of the truck with him inside are red and I follow the little red lights till I can’t see them any more and now it’s just dark.

  I haven’t thought about Dad.

  I’ve been thinking about Mr Azizi, not Dad.

  I should have been thinking about Dad too.

  Dad more because Mr Azizi will be all right now, he’s going to hospital and he’s in a nice warm cab and people have put a woolly blanket around him, but Dad might not have anyone with him. And I don’t know if he has a blanket. And we have to get to him. But how are we going to do that without Mr Azizi?

  The other drivers and Mum and me go into the cafeteria place to warm up and I’m waiting for Mum to ask someone to take us to Dad. I stand so I can watch her lips. She tells them that we are waiting for our tour party to get to the Arctic Circle.

  But why’s she said that? One of them looks like he doesn’t believe her, he’s asking her something, and then she says something back and he looks like he believes her now.