The Quality of Silence

by Rosamund Lupton

Ruby was still logging into her email account and was barely aware that there’d been any danger.

  The slow calm voice was back on the CB. ‘You OK out there, lady?’

  ‘Yes. Thank you.’ Her voice was strung tight.

  ‘You have to dry the brakes out, or they don’t work.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said again. She’d go on saying thank you to whoever this was.

  ‘No problem.’

  She thought she recognised the slow calm voice as a trucker who’d turned her down, slowly, at one of the yards. She understood now why truckers and dispatchers had virtually laughed in her face at the idea of her and Ruby coming on this road, and that was an absolutely fair and pretty moderate response. They hadn’t been cruel or unhelpful, just realistic.

  ‘You take care of yourself out there, OK?’

  ‘Thank you. Yes.’

  Then another voice came on the CB. ‘Who you chattin’ to, Coby?’

  ‘Not yet been introduced,’ said the trucker called Coby in his measured sympathetic voice. ‘But from her accent, she’s gotta be English and I’m guessin’ she’s the same lady wantin’ a ride to Deadhorse this afternoon . . . ?’

  Yasmin didn’t say anything.

  ‘Someone let you hire a rig?’ Coby said and chuckled. ‘Who’d have thought it.’

  ‘She’s got a licence, right?’ asked the other trucker.

  ‘Must do,’ Coby said.

  Yasmin didn’t know what to say and, as she said nothing, the truth became clear.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ said the other driver. ‘If you ain’t trained to drive a truck then you gotta stop, pull over some place safe. You got that, lady?’ She imagined him with fiery red hair and freckles, alarmed and cross, but not aggressive.

  ‘I have to get to Deadhorse. My husband’s missing and I have to find him.’

  ‘Ain’t that somethin’ for the state troopers?’ Coby asked.

  Yasmin didn’t reply.

  ‘The road will kill you,’ said the fiery red-headed driver. ‘Or you’ll kill someone else. You gotta pull over.’

  ‘No,’ said Yasmin. ‘Not till I’ve found my husband.’

  ‘You don’t get it, ma’am,’ the red-haired driver said. ‘It’s not safe to have you out here. Not safe for you, but not for us either. You’ll cause an accident. Or you’ll break down and we all get held up and there’s a likely storm blowin’ in and that ain’t safe either.’

  ‘I’m sorry, really. But someone has to get to my husband and at the moment that’s me.’

  ‘Reckon you’re one helluva lady,’ Coby said in his kind voice. ‘Least we can do is get you to Deadhorse in one piece. What’s your position?’

  Yasmin checked the road marker on the side of the road, which marked off the miles from Fairbanks. ‘MP 117,’ she said.

  ‘You’d best learn some rules of the road,’ Coby said. ‘First off, big trucks have right of way. What you drivin’?’

  She didn’t want to tell him that it was Adeeb’s rig; that she hadn’t actually hired a rig, which presumably would have some kind of paperwork and insurances on it, but just taken one.

  ‘Eighteen-wheeler, forty tons’, she said, remembering Adeeb telling her this.

  ‘OK, that’s big, but there may be bigger than that on the road and you give way to ’em. Other than that, it’s your right of way goin’ north. Keep your headlights and tail lights clean. You’ll have to stop and clean the muck off ’em once in while. What am I missin’?’

  ‘Never stop where you can’t be seen,’ the red-haired trucker said. ‘Bridges, bends, hills. Keep watchin’ your rear-view mirror and if anyone’s behind you don’t go breakin’ too sudden.’

  ‘If you break down get off the road and set flares.’

  A third voice came on the CB. ‘You got a gun?’

  She thought she recognised the voice, but couldn’t place it. American accents were too new to her to make subtle distinctions and match to a face.

  ‘No.’

  ‘OK, so if you break down and there’s wolves, which I ain’t never seen myself, you stay in the cab,’ he said.

  ‘You gotta listen in to the weather reports,’ Coby said. ‘Our dispatcher is updatin’ us all the time and I’ll put it out on CB, OK? There’s a blow headin’ our way – that’s a storm, right? – possibly a big one. So keep listenin’.’

  ‘Thank you. Yes.’

  She put down the CB, glad of friendly voices in the dark; no longer feeling so isolated or afraid. Company of some kind felt like daylight.

  She’d used the word ‘my husband’, emphasised it, as if it was married love that was making her risk so much to get to him; each year adding legitimacy to this journey; the vows and commitment of marriage condoning the danger. She’d tried to persuade herself of that too. But she knew that it was only one of their eleven years, and that it was winter sun slanting through a window, a flock of geese on marshland, her face held in his hands, that was driving her.

  Ruby’s hand was tapping on her leg; her face was lit up

  ‘There’s an email!’

  She was jolted by hope. But it wasn’t from Matt; of course it wasn’t. She checked her mirror; just blue headlights a long way behind them. She stopped the truck on a straight stretch of road, leaving her headlights on so they’d still be visible, and took the laptop from Ruby.

  Chapter 10

  A photo of a large animal, savagely killed, filled the screen. One of its eyes was missing; a leg had been ripped from its body, a bone gleamed nakedly white. Yasmin’s body reacted instinctively, leaning across Ruby to protect her from the violent attacker out there somewhere in the dark. The sender was Akiak@alaska.account.com.

  ‘It’s a musk ox,’ Ruby said, finger-spelling ‘musk ox’.

  Who was this Akiak? How did he get her email address? Why did he send her this? She’d given the cards Ruby had written to anyone who’d take one, never pausing to think that it might not be safe.

  ‘We can tell the police that Dad is alive.’

  ‘This isn’t from Dad.’

  ‘It is! Dad must have a friend called Akiak and borrowed his computer, just like I thought he would.’

  ‘Dad would never send us this.’

  She looked out at the darkness. She’d felt a sense of being watched, hadn’t wanted to give way to it; thought she’d been tilting at black-shrouded windmills, but the feeling had persisted.

  Akiak sounded like an Inupiaq name. Perhaps Matt knew him. But she’d never asked Matt about the people here. Angry and hurt about the time he’d chosen to spend in Alaska – another three months after his first assignment finished – she’d tried to be uninterested, not to endorse this other life of his with questions; maybe hoping that her lack of interest would be catching, a kind of emotional and intellectual osmosis, and he wouldn’t want to return.

  The subject was DSC_10023; 68950119 149994621 was just underneath the photo. None of it made sense to her.

  ‘Did Dad ever mention Akiak to you?’ she asked Ruby.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Ruby replied. ‘But Dad’s borrowed his computer so they must be friends.’

  Surely Ruby didn’t believe Matt would send her a picture like this?

  ‘I think Dad wanted to send this to work,’ Ruby said. ‘But he’s using Akiak’s laptop so he won’t have his contacts. But he knows your email address off by heart.’

  Ruby was trying so hard to make it plausible the photo was from Matt and Yasmin realized that Ruby no longer took what she told her on trust. She’d said that Matt was alive, but it wasn’t enough for Ruby so she was creating her own evidence.

  Yasmin studied the photo, hoping to find some clue as to Akiak’s identity and where he was. The mutilated musk ox was lying on the snow, lit by the beam of a torch, she thought, darkness around it. She clicked the cursor on the photo, enlarging it. She couldn’t see any blood, but it could be hidden in the animal’s thick fur, or the animal had been mutilated after it was dead. Perhaps this man, Akiak, had just f
ound the musk ox, but would that make it better? It still didn’t explain why he’d photographed it; why he’d sent it to her.

  She tried to see a landmark in the photograph, but there was nothing apart from the butchered animal on the featureless snow. The email had been sent five minutes ago.

  Mum doesn’t think the email is from Dad. And it is a horrible picture. But sometimes horrible things happen in the wild. And Dad says you have to look at animals as they are, not Disney-fy them. This musk ox is strange, which is probably why Daddy wants it for work.

  ‘Wolves kill musk oxes,’ I tell Mum. ‘It’s really hard to find food in the winter so they eat every little bit of what they catch. They wouldn’t leave an ox like this. That’s what’s so horrible and weird. It hasn’t been killed to be eaten. And there’s another funny thing too. Least I think so. It looks like a big adult male because its horns are really big and wide.’

  Yasmin saw Ruby mastering her horror at the photo, trying to be every inch her father’s daughter as she responded to wildlife with an open mind not city-girl squeamishness.

  ‘When wolves kill a musk ox, the whole wolf pack has to do it,’ Ruby continued. ‘Because musk oxes are so big. The wolves surround them and then try to get one away. They choose the weakest, which means a young one or a baby. So I think that’s why Daddy’s taken the photo because wolves have killed an adult and just left it after they’ve killed it.’

  What could Yasmin say to her? Better to let her think it was wolves behaving in a strange way than a sadistically violent human.

  If Akiak was out in the dark wilderness, he’d be using a snowmobile or sled and huskies; there were no other options over the terrain.

  She opened the window, the cold air numbing her cheek, and listened but could hear only the wind. How close would a snowmobile have to be before she could hear it or see its lights? A sled would be quiet and invisible.

  Akiak probably wasn’t his real name because whoever sent her this photo would surely want to hide his identity. She couldn’t think why anyone would want to threaten her. Maybe there was a reason and she was just too tired to see it. She longed for mental clarity. If she could sequence things together perhaps something important would reveal itself, but her thoughts frayed around the points where they should connect. She hadn’t slept for over twenty-four hours.

  After her instinctive physical reflex to protect Ruby, her next instinct, or perhaps deeply ingrained belief, was that she must tell the police. But then they would know that she was out here in Adeeb’s truck, and they’d come and arrest her, or come and protect them, whichever it was, they would stop her from getting to Matt.

  Behind them the blue headlights had stayed the same size, static in the darkness. So he had stopped too. Maybe the driver and the man calling himself Akiak were one and the same person, but the idea didn’t bear logical scrutiny. No one could kill and butcher a musk ox, take a photo and email it while also driving on an ice road.

  She’d told herself before that if the danger became too great she’d ask Adeeb to turn around or get a lift with a trucker going back to Fairbanks. Now it was up to her to turn around. She wouldn’t do that, not yet, but she felt the time when she may be forced to make a choice was getting closer and that she would have to choose Ruby’s safety.

  She couldn’t think about what it would mean for Matt if she turned around, but the consequence haunted the edges of her mind; a dark shape in the shadows.

  She started driving again. The light from their headlights was becoming dimmer, hardly penetrating the darkness, as if a lid was closing on them.

  I know it was Daddy who sent us the email. But the police would probably be like Mum and go ‘it’s from someone called Akiak’. Maybe Dad wants to start our blog early too.

  I like thinking of Dad in his Inupiaq furry parka sending the email to us. But Dad in his furry parka sort of turns into Dad in a Superman T-shirt, with his eyes all crinkled up against the sun. It’s such a warm bright memory that I want to step right inside it.

  We were trekking up Mount Cairngorm with Mum saying that in a previous life I must’ve been a mountain goat and Dad said a short-haired one, because I was just wearing shorts and a T-shirt but that was because we walked really fast so I got hot. At breakfast, Dad said he wanted us to practise posting the blog we were going to do together at Christmas time. He gave me a special cover for my laptop and downloaded the software for his satellite terminal; like I was his proper partner. He said in Alaska we’d have to climb a hill to get a satellite link so it would be good to practise that too.

  We got to the top of Cairngorm and he showed me how to connect the laptop to the satellite terminal.

  ‘Then you turn it on,’ Dad said.

  ‘Well, duh,’ I said and Dad said with technology you need to be pedantic; and Mum said the word ‘pedant’ comes from the Greek, meaning ‘the slave who escorts children to school’, and that it was no fun being a pedant so I shouldn’t be too hard on Dad. And they both laughed. And I could see how much they liked each other, just for a little bit, like best friends laughing at the same thing; like me and Jimmy and the word ‘tortoise’.

  ‘Did you know that a group of satellites is called a constellation?’ Mum said and I said ‘I love that!’ But Dad isn’t that interested in satellites. He says he’s just glad when ‘it does what it says on the tin’.

  Dad had bought us all special arctic work gloves, which are meant for people who do tricky jobs in really cold places. He says mittens are warmer than gloves because your fingers are like ten little radiators, but you can’t sign in mittens. He wanted us to practise in the gloves like a dress rehearsal. We could sign in the special gloves, but we couldn’t type in them so we had to take them off.

  He showed me how to upload a photo onto our blog page. He was really excited about it too. But Mum wasn’t smiling any more. She didn’t know about our blog. She’d thought he was just showing me his satellite terminal. She hadn’t been there at breakfast. I lip-read bits of what she was saying; there was a lot of ‘reals’ – ‘. . . real friends . . .’. And ‘. . . I don’t want a virtual world for our daughter but the real world,’ for another example. And she said something about being lonely and isolated, but I didn’t watch her mouth any more.

  I was worried Dad would tell me we couldn’t do it, but he just kept showing me what to do. When you get a connection there’s a little picture of a satellite that flashes. In Scotland it only took a minute; Dad said there are so many satellites above Europe they’ll need to get traffic lights and lollypop ladies up there. But in space above Alaska there’s hardly any so when he saw the flashing satellite he’d have yelled ‘Hoorah!’, which he yells in American sign – fists beating once on your chest then going up in the air HOORAH – even though I wasn’t there, I know he yelled it in sign because he really likes that sign – then he put Mum’s email address, and his little box sent his photo up into space and then to us.

  In Scotland I didn’t get how super-coolio a satellite terminal is, but it’s a wonder of the world. Because in this huge dark cold place, with no houses or wires or anything, Dad’s little box connects up to space and he’s sent us an email. It’s like that mollusc that was 507 years old and was alive at the same time as Henry VIII. A Tudor mollusc! Some things are just catch-your-breath amazing.

  We’ve stopped in a pulling-over place because Mum has to clean the lights. She’s putting on her arctic clothes, which takes ages because there’s so many layers, and while she’s doing that I email Dad again: ‘Please tell us it’s you! PLEASE!!’ I just pressed reply, so it’ll go into Akiak’s inbox. Dad isn’t nosey so he might not even look at his friend’s inbox. He hasn’t got my other emails, because he’d have to log in to his own account, which is fiddly so he’d have to take his gloves off for ages and just have liners on and he might get frostbite. So he won’t do that. If he loses his fingers he won’t be able to talk to me.

  I’m sure the photo is for Dad’s work, not our blog. But just
in case I’ll upload it. I won’t publish anything yet, not till Dad’s here, it’s our blog together.

  Mum was really upset by Dad’s photo. I shouldn’t have told her how weird it is. But I know lots of great things about musk oxes.

  ‘Musk oxes look fierce with their big horns,’ I tell her. ‘But they’re not at all, they’re gentle vegetarians. They’ve got long hair that looks like a beard—‘

  ‘Can you use your words, please, Ruby?’

  I am! I am signing my words.

  Yasmin waited and Ruby turned away from her, as she always did. But Yasmin wasn’t going to stop asking her. Her determination that Ruby would speak, that one day her daughter would be heard, was undiminished. She refused to be intimidated by an email. She was going to find Matt and he was going to be OK and Ruby was going to speak with her own voice and if the man who sent the email was watching them out there in the darkness then he would just have to watch her as she made that future happen.

  Wearing all her arctic clothing, she put on the work gloves Matt had bought them all. Mittens wouldn’t give enough dexterity to grip the scraper. She got out of the cab, closing the door quickly to keep Ruby warm.

  She took a breath and the freezing air went into her lungs and she felt them going into spasm. She gasped and more cold air went into her lungs and it was as if she was drowning.

  She pulled her balaclava down over her mouth. She took a breath and this time the air warmed between the balaclava and her skin before she breathed it in and the air reached her lungs.

  Breathing carefully, she started cleaning the huge tail lights with a scraper; the air from her exhaled breath, trapped within her face mask, froze against her skin.

  Cold felt like it was a hunter and she was warm prey. Behind her the desolate winter landscape was reddened by the glow from the tail lights.

  As she crouched, trying to scrape off the ice and dirt, she looked for the blue headlights, hoping to see them. There was no sign of them in the darkness.

  She’d dismissed the idea that the driver and the man who’d sent the email were the same person because it wasn’t practically possible. Instead, she saw the blue lights driver as their protector because with him behind them the man calling himself Akiak wouldn’t risk an attack.