The Quality of Silence

by Rosamund Lupton

  Now I’m jumping and so is Mum, though a crouched kind of jump, and we’re waving our arms like someone we know is winning a race and we’re cheering them on and we decide it’s Bosley in a dog race, though Bosley would just run to the crowd, wagging his tail, and ask to be stroked. Our arms keep bumping into each other so we can’t do really big arm waves.

  Mum says I’m one of those people at airports with the flags telling the planes where to park and I have a jumbo jet with a short-sighted pilot so I have to make super-big arm movements.

  ‘You told Mr Azizi you liked music?’ she says and then she finger-spells ‘Brahms’.

  I didn’t know she’d listened to me talking to Mr Azizi.

  ‘His symphony has a battleship in a storm in it,’ I say and Mum smiles. I think Mum might feel like we’re inside the music too.

  ‘What other music do you like?’ Mum asks.

  But it’s her turn to tell me an interesting thing.

  ‘Please, Ruby, I’d love to know.’

  ‘I like pop too,‘ I say. ‘The Beatles most of all because of the pictures in their songs.’

  ‘“Yellow Submarine”?’ Mum asks. ‘I love that one.’

  ‘Yes and “Octopus’s Garden”. I like “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” the most. And I do quite like Rihanna’s diamonds and star song too.’

  It’s tiring signing, like my hands have just run a long race. You can’t see our faces in the windscreen any more. There’s ice on the inside of it, in swirly patterns; in some places it’s much thicker than other places.

  ‘Ruby? We’re talking about music?’

  ‘Sometimes I like dancing to it,’ I say. ‘If the music’s on loud enough.’

  I use the American sign for dancing, making a dance floor with my left hand and dancing two fingers on my right hand.

  I look at Mum and I can see from her eyes, behind the goggles, that she’s happy about this and I wish I’d told her before.

  ‘I can sort of feel the music on the floor, if there isn’t a carpet, and then through the rest of me. And I can copy the other person dancing and if they sign the words that’s really good too.’

  Jimmy said I was an awesome-sauce groovy dancer. (‘Groovy’ was our word that week, and we thought it’s a hippy-in-purple-bell-bottoms word.)

  ‘Where do you dance?’ Mum asks. She really wanted me to do ballet at school but I don’t like ballet.

  ‘At Jimmy’s,’ I say. ‘His mother always yells at him to turn the music down but he won’t.’

  She said the music was deafening! which Jimmy and I thought was pretty hilarious.

  ‘Good for Jimmy.’ Mum says. ‘I’ve got a great idea. We can dance!’

  The air stings when you breathe, like you’re breathing in siafu ants with their sharp pincers. I think if you touched the door handle without gloves your skin would stick to it.

  ‘I will sing,’ Mum says. ‘Rihanna!’

  I pull a face at her, though she can’t really see it because I’m wearing a face mask. But she knows and I can tell she’s laughing at me.

  ‘I’ll be John Lennon not Rihanna then,’ she says, and her eyes are still smiley behind her goggles.

  She pulls down her face mask so I can lip-read her singing ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ and she signs at the same time. Dad says that singing is lovely for the sound it makes, even if you don’t understand the words. And I think signing is like that too. Like it’s beautiful just for itself.

  You make singing and signing with the same letters.

  Mum is signing and singing about tangerine trees and marmalade skies. And it’s good thinking about them because it stops you thinking about the cold and being frightened.

  Mum’s words are little puffs of white and it’s funny that words look like that; like you can see that they’re made of breath. I wonder if each word has its own special shape. Speech therapists have told me about breath sounds and now I can see them. Maybe if we lived somewhere this cold I’d learn to read word-shapes in the air.

  Mum’s singing Rihanna’s diamonds-star song now. We both want to giggle when she signs ‘a shooting star’. And I haven’t told anyone this, but last term Mum told me about sex, as I’m going to go to secondary school next year and I need to know grown-up things. She told me that the sign for ‘star’ looks very like the sign for ‘vagina’ so you really have to watch out when you sign ‘star’. Then we both giggled for ages and ages, and she said she thought that a star was a nice name for it. So when she signs ‘star’ in the Rihanna song we laugh, but it hurts to laugh because the siafu ants sting you all the way down inside.

  Mum says that there’s no such thing as a shooting star. It’s really little bits of dust and rock falling into the Earth’s atmosphere and burning up; and I think that would be an even better song because it’s really exciting and also you wouldn’t have to worry about the vagina/shooting star thing.

  We’re not doing proper dancing, we’re just kind of moving as much as we can and pretending it’s dancing. Then she stops signing and dancing and under her goggles her eyes aren’t crinkly with a smile.

  ‘You don’t spend so much time with Jimmy nowadays?’ Mum says.

  There’s a song they used to sing:

  Jimmy and Ruby,

  Sitting in a Tree,

  K-I-S-S-I-N-G

  The tree and G rhyme, they said.

  We don’t have a tree in our playground. Even if we did I’d CLIMB it with Jimmy, or make a camp.

  It’s a fail, rinky-dink song.

  ‘Ruby . . .?’ Mum says.

  Yasmin waited for Ruby to sign to her, but she didn’t. Matt had told her Jimmy and Ruby weren’t close any more, and she’d been upset for Ruby but thought it might encourage her to make new friends.

  Next to her Ruby was so still. And Yasmin could feel in Ruby’s stiff unmoving body, her terrible loneliness.

  ‘Right then, my Ruby, let’s carry on dancing!’

  She shouldn’t have asked her about Jimmy. She had to keep her moving. If only they could walk, run, jump up and down properly, but they were caged in this small freezing cab until the storm abated. She’d got her face mask still pulled down so that Ruby could see her lips clearly, as well as her fingers signing, anything that would help Ruby to focus and stay awake.

  The thermometer read minus twelve in the cab now, minus fifty-eight outside. She was meant to wait another twelve minutes to put on the engine, but wasn’t sure Ruby could wait that long.

  It’s getting so hard to breathe, my lungs are filling up with ants and there isn’t room for air any more. There’s a monster made of cold, hard as the edge of a pavement, coming towards us in the dark and it’s cutting through the windscreen and doors and windows and the only weapon against it is heat, but we don’t have any heat. I’m trying to dance to make it go away, holding on to Mum’s hand, but I can’t dance; my legs won’t move. The monster is coming closer to me, and it’s showing me its teeth, rows and rows of them, sharp as scissors, and it’s going to tear me up into little shreds and I sign to Mum ‘Help me!’ and she puts on the engine. Straight away.

  The heater’s been on for three minutes and Mum has put on the proper light and my laptop is charging up. The window has to be open, but just a little crack. The ice on the windscreen is still thick and swirly and you can see your breath, but the air doesn’t sting so much when you breathe it in and the monster has slithered a little way away, but he’s watching us, right there in the dark. Mum opens up my blog page and I wish she’d close it.

  ‘How much longer do we have?’ I ask Mum.

  ‘Two minutes.’

  I try not to be afraid of turning the heater off again.

  ‘It’s a great blog, Ruby. I read it while you were asleep.’

  I shake my head and I’m angry; I was so stupid to think those emails were from Dad.

  ‘I wrote something for you. Not a blog. Just something interesting.’

  I look at the laptop and go on my blog and see she’s typed
. And it takes up a whole page on its own.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I’ll tell you in a minute. I’m saving it for my interesting thing for you.’

  One minute left and the monster is prowling around us, his claws scratching at the windscreen, waiting to break through it, and Mum must know that because she takes hold of my hand in hers and squeezes it. And then she takes her hand away so she can sign to me and she says, ‘This storm will end. And we will be all right.’ And I try and be like her and be brave.

  ‘I have to turn the engine off again now. I’m sorry.’

  The cab had warmed up to minus two with the engine running; it hadn’t even got back to freezing and it would plummet again now. Yasmin was afraid that the temperature would drop much lower this time.

  ‘OK, you park an aeroplane and I’ll tell you an interesting fact.’

  ‘About the full stop?‘ Ruby’s signing was slow.

  ‘Yes.’

  Ruby stood up, and Yasmin saw it was hard for her to balance. She hadn’t warmed up enough. Yasmin would have to turn the engine on again soon, but she’d leave it as long as she possibly could.

  ‘If you printed out that page in your laptop,’ Mum says, ‘the white paper would be space, and the full stop is the size of the Earth.’

  I look that the . and think of Mum and me and Dad living in a . and how we would fit.

  ‘It’s not very accurate,’ Mum says. ‘The full stop should be in a whole book of blank pages. And not just one book but hundreds of thousands of books in thousands of libraries.’

  I look at that . We’re so teeny-weeny-incy small. Like we don’t matter at all.

  Mum is smiling. ‘And you know what’s amazing?’ she asks and I shake my head. ‘That there is a full stop! That there’s this amazing planet called Earth, with water and an atmosphere that can support life. And we are here. What are the chances of that, Ruby?’

  I try to smile back at Mum, but it’s tiring to move my lips into a smile.

  ‘Keep waving your arms,’ Mum says, but I can’t wave my arms. My jumbo airbus will crash into the plane next to it.

  ‘Tell me about your visit to the school for the deaf,’ she says.

  She knows that’s something that would wake me up. But I’d like her to tell me more about our full stop planet. And it’s her turn to tell me interesting things.

  ‘I’d really like to hear about it,’ she says.

  * * *

  Yasmin remembered Ruby and Matt coming home. Ruby had said, ‘It was just school, Mum,’ and she’d been relieved that Ruby hadn’t pleaded to go there.

  But just-school-Mum was huge. Her mainstream school was lonely, exhausting, often cruel. Never just school.

  Ruby was signing, but her movements were slurred and Yasmin couldn’t understand her.

  I want to tell Mum that I wasn’t the-deaf-girl, I was Ruby. But when I try to sign the words my fingers won’t work properly. I want to tell her that at the school for the deaf you could be good at silly faces or rubbish at maths, but think of brilliant games at break-time and tell ginormous lies, which are funny so no one minds and everyone gets your jokes first time and understands you and gets to know you. Even if they don’t right away, they will. And the best part is that if people get it wrong about you, you can change that. The girls there probably like ponies and kittens more than river otters too, but I can tell them why river otters are super-coolio.

  My thoughts are like that pretend little rabbit whizzing round the race track and my fingers are the greyhounds trying to catch the thoughts and turn them into words, but my fingers are too slow and I can’t sign to Mum.

  I can feel that little rabbit getting slower and slower then lying down. I’m being mugged by sleep and I know that I should STAY ALERT, RUBY, but sleep will be warm. My head feels heavy, like I’m a bobble-head; like all of me is now just my head and the rest of me is made of rubber.

  Mum is tapping me, and signing and she’s saying, ‘RUBY, YOU MUST STAY AWAKE!’

  He is right behind me. My legs are too heavy to move. I can’t run away. The monster clamps his jaws all the way around my face and my arms and legs and his scissor teeth are biting into every bit of me.

  Ruby was losing consciousness. Yasmin fumbled with the ignition and turned on the engine. Carbon monoxide poisoning was a risk but she would die of hypothermia if Yasmin couldn’t get her warm. The temperature in the cab had dropped to minus twenty. Outside it was minus fifty-nine. Ruby was unconscious.

  They’d had the heater on for ten minutes now. It was sixteen below freezing in the cab. Yasmin took off Ruby’s face mask, and saw how pale she was. She put her mouth against Ruby’s face, and breathed warmed air from her body onto Ruby’s cold skin. She wished that she could shout and wake her up with sound waves beating against the drums in her ears so close to her unconscious brain. But she could only use touch. And she couldn’t wake her up.

  How could she have done this to Ruby? She could no longer remember the steps and decisions that had led to Ruby being unconscious next to her. Could no longer remember her reasons and justifications. But she couldn’t use energy on self-hate, not yet; she had to stop Ruby from dying.

  She knew what she had to do, but wasn’t sure how she knew, wasn’t convinced she’d remembered correctly. It was counter-intuitive, but she undressed, her fingers fumbling and painful. The warm air from the heater stripped the layer of numbness off her body and the cold was skinning her alive. She undressed Ruby too, trying to keep her in the sleeping bag, and keeping on her face mask and hat. Then she squeezed into the sleeping bag with Ruby. Ruby seemed smaller and slighter, as if getting this cold had taken away her weight.

  Ruby was shivering violently as Yasmin held her. She felt her own body getting colder and hoped that her warmth was going into Ruby’s body.

  She’d seen cold as a predator, made of the dark, as if it was alive. But she felt it now as vastly cruelly impersonal; a frozen darkness absorbing you into itself. She felt it filling her hollow spaces, embedding itself as icy marrow in her bones and then consciousness seeped away from her into the arctic blackness.

  Chapter 18

  Ruby wasn’t shivering any more. Yasmin felt raw dread. Then she heard Ruby’s breathing, even and steady, and felt the warmth of Ruby’s skin. The thermometer showed the temperature of the cab had risen to twelve above freezing, outside it was minus twenty-five.

  Yasmin had been asleep for almost two hours, with the engine running and heater on. It was only luck that there hadn’t been a fault in the exhaust system under the cab and no carbon monoxide leak. But surely they were due a dollop of luck. The ice on the inside of the windscreen had thawed into puddles.

  Mum wakes me up, smiling at me, and I feel happy but I don’t know why.

  The storm is over! It’s NOT COLD ANY MORE! The ice monster is melted all over the dashboard and I am pouring Mum bubbly champagne and pulling party poppers and I feel tingly alive, like every single cell of me is alive and cheering and throwing fire crackers out of the windows and into the snow.

  The cab isn’t rocking at all any more, not even a teeny bit. And things smell again; my hair smells of toothpaste! Mum signs to me that the police will be here soon. I say, ‘And you’ll make them get Dad in their goddaM helicopter?’ Mum says absolutely! and not to swear and to put some clothes on. It ought to feel weird that I’m not wearing anything but it isn’t.

  She says I am her brave girl.

  When they’d arrived at this place in the storm, Yasmin had only been able to see a few metres ahead, now the headlights revealed a snow-covered expanse, stretching as far as the headlights shone and then on into the darkness to the Arctic Ocean. She knew now that there were animals and birds out there surviving the cold and dark, and knowledge of them softened the barren harshness of the landscape and gave it a beating warmth.

  ‘What if it’s really hard to hijack the police’s helicopter to go to Daddy?’ Ruby asked.

  ‘I don’t think a hij
ack will be needed. I think we’ll have earned their respect by crossing over a mountain range, beating an avalanche and surviving a polar storm in the middle of the tundra. They’ll listen to us now.’

  Ruby laughed. ‘Yes.’

  The police would also believe her now about the tanker chasing them, because surely no one would drive over the Atigun Pass in an arctic storm because of a phantom.

  ‘But what if they think we went over the edge of the mountain?’ Ruby said.

  ‘When we threw Mr Azizi’s clothes out of the window and made the tracks?’

  ‘The snow will have covered our tracks and the clothes before the storm finished even. The police will find us soon.’

  We don’t say anything for a little bit, just feeling happy and warm, and then Mum signs to me, ‘Why don’t you like using your mouth to speak?’ I’m worried she’s telling me off; that I’ve failed, like I always do. But she’s not. I can see she’s not. She just really wants to know.

  ‘When I sign or type I see the same words as the person I’m talking to,’ I tell Mum. ‘Like now. I see my hands and you see my hands and we see the words together. But if I speak with my mouth, then only the hearing person hears my words. I don’t.’

  I stop talking, because I’m a fail, but I’ll tell her, ‘I’m frightened when I talk with my mouth-voice.’

  Mum doesn’t hug me, which is good, because I don’t want her to hug me. She looks at me really seriously like she wants to know more.

  ‘It’s like I’m not there any more,’ I say. ‘When I talk with my mouth-voice I disappear.’

  Mum nods. I can see she understands.

  Yasmin remembered shouting for Matt in the storm. But although her mouth and tongue had made the right shapes for his name and her lungs had forced out her breath as loudly as she could, his yelled name had been obliterated by the hurricane-force wind and she didn’t know if she’d made any sound at all. It had made her feel disorientated and exposed, as if she’d created a void around herself.