She drove towards the parking area. The two-way road was poorly lit, with dark shadows between the street lights. There were about fifteen trucks already parked, and another truck driving in ahead of her. Presumably all of them were waiting out the storm.
She drove around the parking area then back towards the Dalton. In the shadowy space between two lights she pulled over and stopped. From here she’d see him arrive. And once he’d driven past them they’d slip away. Hopefully, he’d spend a long time searching for her and they could get a distance ahead of him.
She turned off all the lights, including the interior one in the cab, just leaving the heater on. Snowflakes tapped noiselessly and relentlessly against the side window, soft battalions pressing at the huge windscreen in front of her. In the dark and the warmth, her face slackened with tiredness. She opened the window a crack and the narrow band of icy air kept her awake.
Eight minutes later, blue headlights came towards the truck park on the other side of the road. She’d made a terrible mistake; headlights coming towards them would flood the cab with light. She bent down, lying across Ruby, in a futile effort to hide.
Moments before his lights reached them, the driver turned them off. He must have wanted to hide their distinctive colour.
She was still lying across Ruby, so didn’t see him in his cab as he passed them just a foot or so away; she just made out that he was driving a tanker.
She turned on the engine and drove away, only putting on her lights when she reached the road. She checked her driver’s mirror: no blue headlights from the tanker just the receding lights of Coldfoot.
Adeeb had told her Coldfoot got its name from gold prospectors who’d get this far north then lose their nerve and turn around. She understood the loss of nerve. Driving away from Coldfoot felt like you were pulling against a rope that tethered you to safety and any further it would break and you’d be away from the shallows and into the deep ocean. The people who built Coldfoot knew that this was as far north as a person could reasonably go. She felt the diminishing lights tugging her back to warmth and shelter. She drove on. The lights of Coldfoot dwindled and then she went round a bend and they disappeared.
When she looked in her driver’s mirror there was just darkness behind her. She knew the tanker driver would only be at Coldfoot until he realised she wasn’t there and then he’d come after her. She listened to the CB but there was nothing about her; anyone who’d heard her earlier conversation with Coby would assume that she was heading towards Coldfoot or had already arrived there and was waiting out the storm.
She passed a milepost; they had 239 miles to go until Deadhorse, with no kind of services along the route.
She drove another ten miles; the snow was getting heavier and the wind fiercer, outriders of the storm to come. She felt sleep deprivation dulling her reflexes and dragging on her limbs.
A truck came towards her, hurrying towards Coldfoot, its headlights fuzzy through the falling snow and darkness, but still bright in the cab as it passed them, startling Ruby awake.
‘Are we nearly at Dad?‘ she asked in that awful machine voice.
‘Still a long way to go.’
‘Is it morning yet?’
‘Yes.’
It was 6 am. Yasmin’s body and mind, calibrated for a circadian rhythm, felt trapped in the darkness of night, as if in a fold of time. There would be no more lights from a human habitation to provide a man-made sunrise.
As she drove through this dawnless beginning of a new day, her eye muscles were losing the strength to focus. Her right leg went into spasm. Around the light tunnels made by her headlights she thought she saw the darkness move, a thing with sinews and a pulse. And then abruptly it liquefied, black water surrounding them.
She saw a passing place a few metres ahead. She managed to manoeuvre the truck into it. She hadn’t factored in a stop in their journey to Matt, but she couldn’t physically drive any further. She asked Ruby to wake her up in fifteen minutes.
She closed her eyes. In the dark and the quiet, she remembered back to her first visit to Cley with Matt, the sound of the sea thumping and hushing next to them. They’d undressed in the dark and she realised that she loved the smell of him and the sound of his voice as much as the way he looked and his ease with talking about things that mattered.
He’d said it was incredible that they’d met one another, both in a lecture of a subject neither was taking. What were the chances? She said that four and a half billion years ago, give or take, comets bombarded the Earth, bringing with them ice, which melted into water. ‘You have proof of that?’ he asked. ‘Crashing a satellite into a comet and measuring the amount of water,’ she replied. ‘And?’ ‘A billion litre water bomb in space,’ she told him. ‘The comets crashed and volcanoes erupted, blowing out steam that turned to cloud and it rained for thousands of years. People quibble about the exact amount of water and from where but however it got here, voila . . .’ She pointed at the sea. She said the chance of a planet with water to sustain life was trillions and trillions to one, so remote as to be unimaginable. That was the miracle. Them meeting each other four billion or so years later, not doing the same course, wasn’t so much of a long shot.
She remembered the warmth of him next to her and the bumpy shingles under their blanket and then she felt she was falling into the solid core of the Earth and Matt.
Chapter 13
Ruby was asleep next to her. She switched on the cab’s light and saw her own face as a chiaroscuro in the windscreen against the darkness outside.
She put on the truck’s headlights, but there were no light beams. The blackness outside was solid. Her old terror of being trapped in a coffin under the earth slithered around her. Her breathing shallow, she flicked at switches. The wipers pushed snow clear of the windscreen like snowploughs.
In the beam of the headlights, she saw heavy snow, with gusting winds blowing it violently fast across the road in front of them. She looked at the clock in the cab. She’d been asleep for three hours. She hurriedly checked her driver’s mirror, but there was no sign of the blue headlights. A delineator post showed that a foot of snow had fallen while she’d slept. The thermometer read minus forty outside.
She put on the CB. Drivers were talking to each other from depots at Fairbanks and Deadhorse and the truck stop at Coldfoot. No one else on the CB was out on the road.
There was another email on Ruby’s laptop. He had sent it while she slept.
All she could see in the photo was snow and she felt relief. The torchlight was weaker than the previous photos, the white of the snow bleeding quickly into the dark around it. She reluctantly clicked the cursor to zoom further in and saw black marks. There were animals partially buried under the snow, their white coats indistinguishable from it; just black lines of fur, like kohl around their dead eyes, and the black tips of their noses giving them away. There were five animals in all, but there could be others. She tried to see how they had been killed but couldn’t see any blood or injury; maybe the torchlight was too poor.
Was he warning her that this is what would happen to them – buried without trace under the snow?
The subject was DSC_10025; 68945304 149992659 under the photo.
She turned up the brightness on the laptop screen to maximum. In the bottom right hand corner of the photo, she could just make out the shadowy image of a husky dog, with a part of the harness, a buckle perhaps, glinting faintly in the torchlight. So whoever this man was he was travelling by sled, silent and invisible in the dark. How close was he to them?
The light had woken up Ruby. She was about to shut the laptop but Ruby had seen the photo.
‘Arctic wolves,’ Ruby said.
* * *
I think Dad’s sent the photo to show what poachers have done. Because it’s only people who kill wolves.
But they still have their beautiful thick white coats and a poacher would take their fur.
They must have got caught in a blizzard and buried. Pr
obably a bank of snow fell on them or an avalanche even.
‘We have to tell the police that Dad’s alive,’ I say, because surely now we’ve
had THREE emails from him Mum’ll realise they’re from Dad.
But Mum doesn’t say anything and I know she still doesn’t believe me, so the police wouldn’t either, and I don’t know how to make anyone believe me. In our headlights there’s huge sheets of snow, like shape-shifting ghosts haunting the road.
Yasmin was driving again. The snow came thick and fast towards the windscreen; the wipers on maximum speed.
Abruptly, their headlights were extinguished and they were driving in total darkness. She slowed quickly, trying not to skid, praying they would keep on the road. And then the snow fell away from the windscreen, a fat sheet of it. The snow had accumulated on the roof while she’d slept and then fallen onto the windscreen like a blindfold.
She heard Coby’s voice come onto the CB, less calm than usual. ‘Anyone yet seen that crazy woman?’
So she’d gone from gutsy to crazy; she thought that fair.
‘I’m here,’ she said.
‘Jeez. Yasmin. I’ve bin real worried about you.’
‘I fell asleep.’
‘You’re in your cab? I just been looking in all the trucks.’
She wanted to tell him the truth, but the tanker driver may be still be looking for them in Coldfoot, and might hear this.
‘Yasmin?’
But surely he’d have discovered by now they weren’t at Coldfoot and would already be coming after them. As she debated about what to say, Coby must have guessed the truth.
‘You went past?’ he asked.
She was silent.
‘Jesus. The storm’s goin’ to hit in two hours.’
Two hours. It was impossible for her to get to Matt; even a quarter of the way to Deadhorse.
‘That soon? Are you sure?’ she said.
‘Comin’ in real fast. Much quicker than they thought. You’ve gotta turn round.’
‘My husband’s out there. He won’t survive.’
‘I’m real sorry about this, lady,’ another driver said. ‘But you won’t get to Deadhorse and there’s no safe place to stop on the way. Once you cross the mountains, you’re on the north slope arctic plain; ain’t no trees to stop the wind. Storms blow across there like it’s turned into hell itself. Eighty-eight thousand square miles of nothin’. Do you know how big that is? State of Utah. Bigger even.’
‘It just ain’t an option,’ another voice said. ‘The winds will knock you clean over, the snow can bury you, you can’t get out of your truck for anythin’, so you can’t fix your brakes, your lines, nothin’. If your engine goes you freeze inside your cab.’
Then came Coby’s voice, slow and kind. ‘There just ain’t the time for you to reach Deadhorse, Yasmin. Not even if your truck were a turbo and it was July, OK? You gotta wait it out in Coldfoot. Your husband’s just gonna have to wait for you.’
In a storm like this without protection? When even experienced drivers in their nice warm cabs in massive trucks were taking shelter? Through the closed windows of the cab she could hear the wind.
‘You turn around now, you hear me?’ Coby said. ‘But first, you’re goin’ to need to put on snow chains. It’s comin’ down real fast now and’ll be gettin’ slippy.’
Slippy. Something a little girl would say of a polished wooden floor in her socks. She momentarily loved Coby for his understatement.
‘So you need those chains, even if you wanna kill yourself and keep drivin’ you need those chains. Do you know how to put them on?’
She understood that he’d get her to put on the chains and then he’d persuade her to turn around. He was doing this one step at a time with her, patiently and kind.
‘No.’
‘OK, they’re stored by the wheels, under the truck. You lay ’em in front of the wheels then roll over them, then hook ’em closed.’
‘OK.’
‘Then you look for a turning place.’
‘Thank you.’
She hung up the CB and checked her driver’s mirror. No one behind her. She stopped the truck. Ruby had put on Voice Magic and had been listening to this.
‘We are still going to Dad,’ Ruby said. ‘You told the people before that we’d stop at Coldfoot but we didn’t, so we are still going to Dad.’
A statement not a question, because it was unthinkable for them to leave him in an arctic storm. Yasmin’s terror of abandoning him, that had first haunted her mind and then become a presence on the road ahead, was right in front of her in the darkness.
For now, she had to focus on putting on snow chains, because whatever she did they needed snow chains.
As she pulled on her arctic clothes, she saw herself, so many years ago, walking along the sunny leafy pavement from the deli towards the newsagent; the beaten-up car mounting the pavement and Matt pushing her out of the way. Through the sound of the arctic wind, she heard the reverberating clang as the car hit the lamp post; the horn blaring senselessly loud and urgent as the driver slumped forwards, just sixteen years old.
That night she and Matt had talked and she had known why they could marry. It wasn’t because he’d put himself between her and the car, but because they talked about the boy – what made him do it; what kind of home and family and education; what kind of hopelessness – because Matt used his full intellect to try to understand what had happened.
And because while their leafy-neighbours exchanged outraged emails about the joyriding delinquent getting what was coming to him and ‘thank God nobody innocent was badly hurt’, Matt had felt grief for the boy. Because the following day he’d found the mother by the lamp post with her cellophaned carnations and bought parcel tape from the newsagent, and tied the flowers onto it with her.
‘You are my prince’s kiss,’ she said to him. ‘And goodnight kiss and shoes that fit and a glass slipper and with you there’s no such thing as a vacuum in nature, nor in me any more, and I love you.’
The snow is like thick net curtains, from the sky to the ground, layers and layers of them. Mum is putting on all her arctic clothes, because we have to put on snow chains.
‘I can help,’ I say.
She shakes her head.
‘I can shine a torch again,’ I say. ‘And if I get too cold then I’ll get back in here.’
‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘But I really don’t want you to come outside, OK?’
‘OK.’
‘Promise?’
‘OK.’
Mum’s still looking at me, waiting.
‘OK, I promise.’
She wouldn’t let Ruby go outside again; a child would become hypothermic faster than an adult. She tugged her Arctic work gloves on over her liners and went out, closing the door as quickly as she could.
The cold was shocking in its violence. She’d thought the colour of cold was white, like snow, or blue perhaps, like on a cold tap, but cold like this was conceived in a place without daylight and was black, the absence of all light and colour.
She heard a piercing scream, then realised it was the sound of the wind gusting newly fallen snow across the hard-packed snow beneath; white wraiths crossing the road and barren terrain.
She shone Adeeb’s torch and found the chains. She tried to unhook them, but couldn’t hold the torch at the same time. She wedged the torch into snow and shone it under the truck. The chains seemed welded by cold into the hooks that supported them. It was hard to get a grip. After three attempts, she managed to get purchase on the chains and, using all her strength, tugged them free.
She had to move the torch again to shine it at the wheels. Then she laid the chains in front of them.
The snow around the wheels turned pale blue. There were headlights in the darkness behind her.
He’d realised they weren’t at Coldfoot and come after them. Her conversation with Coby on the CB would have just confirmed it. She couldn’t tell how close he was.
&
nbsp; She felt that the tanker behind her and the man sending the violent photos were working together and they were closing in.
The wind became a caterwauling siren, getting louder; the boy’s terrified face in the darkness. He’d died before they got there.
Her goggles had fogged in the extreme cold. She felt for the steps to the cab and managed to climb up and get inside, but couldn’t find the handle to pull the door closed.
* * *
I put on my gloves then I lean across Mum and reach out for the door and tug it shut. I can’t see Mum’s eyes in her goggles, which means she can’t see out. I help her to take them off and I wipe them clear for her. She drives very slowly, just a tiny way. She puts on her mask and goggles and goes outside again. I watch her out of the window in case she does need my help after all.
Crouched by the truck, Yasmin studied the tanker’s lights. They weren’t getting any bigger, so he’d stopped too. It was as if he was biding his time. The screaming of the wind in the dark changed into a low-pitched moan as it eddied around the truck. She’d left the torch wedged in snow, pointing at the wheels, but it had become buried. She scraped around in the snow with her hands to feel for it, but her gloves were too thick. She took them off and just wore liners as she felt for the torch. After two minutes, she found it and hurriedly put on her gloves, then turned it on. In the torchlight she saw the tyres had missed the chains by a few centimetres. She’d have to do this all over again. And she needed to do it quickly, but there was no way to do it quickly.
She felt time falling away from her in the gusting snow.
She would never get to Matt in time to beat the storm.
The low moaning of the wind and the tanker behind them pressed her fear hard and tight.
She looked up at the cab, the amber light illuminating Ruby’s small face at the window.
She looked out into the blackness and saw the mutilated musk ox and the raven and the buried wolves and heard the storm building.
There was horrifying clarity; the choice she had to make sharply focused, right bang up in front of her. She had to turn around. There was no longer any other option. It’s what Matt would want her to do, and she felt that without needing to articulate it as a thought. Ruby’s life trumped everything.
The Quality of Silence Page 14