The Quality of Silence

  The cold was freezing her eyebrows and eyelashes, but it had also forced her awake and sharpened her thoughts.

  If this man wanted to attack them why would he bother to first frighten her with an email?

  Fear must be the point.

  He wanted her to turn around.

  Her thoughts were staccato, bullet-point thinking, as if in this sub-zero temperature mental processes, like physical ones, had to be done with the utmost economy.

  Why would anyone want to prevent her from getting to Matt? He had no enemies or dark hinterland. He was a wildlife cameraman and the worst thing he’d ever done was kiss a woman who wasn’t his wife.

  Maybe the man who’d sent the threatening email wanted to stop her from going to Anaktue, rather than to Matt, but it was hardly likely that she’d find something the police had missed.

  The only thing that made sense was that Matt knew something, most likely about Anaktue, and this man didn’t want her to rescue him because then the secret, whatever it was, would get out.

  The scraper fell onto the ground and she picked it up. She hadn’t done up the glove on her left hand securely and ice came inside the glove, burning like acid against her skin.

  What could Matt have discovered?

  Ever since the airport, when he hadn’t been there to meet them, she’d absorbed what everyone had said, seizing on anything as potentially vital. Now, as she cleaned the red tail lights encrusted with snow and ice and dirt, she thought back.

  ‘All the hydraulic fracturing companies know where Anaktue is. They’ll have source rock samples and drilling data for Anaktue.’

  ‘Anaktue is sitting on hundreds of thousands of barrels of shale oil.’

  ‘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.’

  ‘No longer going to pursue it out of respect to the villagers.’

  ‘Yeah right. And tourists come to Alaska for the sunshine.’

  Their voices in different places and times threaded together into a common theme.

  Surely to God the police would have found out if the fire was a murderous land grab. Surely they’d have discovered it was arson.

  But now she was outside in this degree of cold, when it was a struggle simply to clean the truck’s lights, she realised how hard it would be to investigate a crime. She was working at the lights in minus twenty-eight, and the cold was predatory and remorseless. Arctic clothes protected her now but Anaktue, miles further north, would be colder still.

  And the unutterable darkness. They’d have needed to work with artificial lights, positioning them, choosing what they lit and not knowing what they had left in the dark. What kind of conditions were those to get to the truth; when you didn’t suspect anything other than catastrophic human error?

  She thought about Akiak. Perhaps the name wasn’t an alias but his true identity. He could have wanted to allow the fracking company to drill. The man in the cafeteria said they’d been offered a hundred thousand dollars.

  The sub-zero temperature had welded dirt onto the tail lights, and she had to turn the scraper around and use the handle to chip at it, her knees aching from crouching, her left hand stinging with pain.

  Could she convince the police that the fire was a land grab; that she thought Matt knew about it; that someone was trying to scare her off?

  But it was just guesswork and conjecture and she had nothing to substantiate it. Again, she faced the risk that the police would simply prevent her from getting to him and they wouldn’t be convinced to go in her place. Now that she was out in this killing cold she was more afraid for him. Even if he had his emergency supplies with him, she didn’t know how long he could survive.

  Ruby joined her outside. Yasmin was alarmed, but saw that Ruby was properly dressed, with all her arctic clothes, and that she’d remembered to pull her balaclava down over her mouth and her gloves were correctly fastened.

  Light from the cab spilled down enough for them to see sign.

  ‘Did Dad say anything about an oil company wanting to frack Anaktue’s land?’ she asked.

  Ruby nodded and Yasmin was startled.

  ‘They didn’t want them to,’ Ruby continued. ‘Corazon organised everybody.’ In the light from the cab Ruby finger-spelt ‘Corazon’.

  Snowflakes started falling, twisting in the amber light.

  ‘He told you about Corazon?’ Yasmin asked.

  Ruby nodded. ‘She’s super-clever, Dad said.’

  I can’t believe Mum and me are chatting out here in the freezing dark. It’s like we’re teeny people talking at the bottom of a deep freeze, with just a little yellow pilot light on, and the lid shut. But I know why. It’s because out here you think about the big things. And I think that this is big for Mum, because Corazon and her twin brother, Kaiyuk, are Dad’s best friends out here. A best friend is what stops you being lonely.

  As we’re chatting at the bottom of a deep freeze, I want to tell her that I’m sad that she didn’t ask Dad about his friends, because when he was home she never really asked him anything about Anaktue or Corazon and Kaiyuk and I know he’d have been super-pleased if she had.

  Mum signs to me that she has to turn the headlights off before she can clean them. They’re so bright that she wouldn’t be able to see afterwards. She tells me to get back in the cab, but I just pick up the torch that she’s left wedged in the snow and shine it so that she can see to get back into the cab, because the steps are covered in ice.

  She turns the headlights off and you can’t see the road ahead any more and it’s like this little patch of light from the cab where I’m standing is all there is in the whole world.

  I keep holding the torch so she can see her way back down again. She shakes her head because I didn’t do what she said and get in the truck, but I can tell that she’s smiling at me too, even though she’s got her face mask on.

  I go with her to the front of the truck and hold the torch while she bends down and scrapes at the huge headlights.

  It’s horrible having the balaclava pulled over my mouth because my breath turns damp inside it and then gets icy. Dad said that Inupiat parkas have big furry hoods so that the freezing air warms up before it gets to your nose and mouth, like there’s a warm cushion of air against your face, and when you breathe out your breath doesn’t freeze against your skin. Though he says it doesn’t work on snowmobiles because the cold air comes at you too quickly. He wears an Inupiaq parka with a big furry hood not one like mine from an outdoors shop.

  I hope Dad’s with Corazon and Kaiyuk. He said he was friends with Kaiyuk first and then he met Corazon and it was like meeting a woman version of Kaiyuk. Dad wishes he has a twin sometimes, and asked me if I did. I said no, because truthfully one of me was probably enough for everybody and he laughed and said it absolutely wasn’t, but there could never be two of me.

  Corazon and Kaiyuk know this old lady, I think she’s their great-great-aunt, and when she was young she helped stop the government test a nuclear bomb right by where her village fished. The government man said the village should be grateful for a harbour and they were so good at nuclear bombs they could make a harbour in the shape of a polar bear. Their great-great-aunt said that for one) they didn’t need a harbour and for two) she’d rather have a real polar bear. Dad and I think that she’s super-coolio.

  Mum hasn’t been saying anything, just cleaning the lights, then she turns to me and I can see her face in the torchlight and also her hands.

  ‘Did Dad say anything else?’ Mum asks me. ‘About the oil company?’

  She takes the torch so that she can see my hands.

  ‘He said oil is made by plants and animals that died in ancient seas,’ I say. ‘It takes millions and millions of years and we are looters and hooligans, thieves from the future.’

  He was upset and cross. ‘They drill two miles down – two miles! – and then they go out sideways
and crack the rock with poisons into bits so we can force out the gas or oil, and do you know what we do with the gas and oil that has taken millions of years to make, deep under the earth?’

  ‘Run a tumble dryer on a sunny breezy day?’ I said, knowing it would be something like this. Dad really doesn’t like tumble dryers.

  ‘Exactly. Or accelerate a car down a clear stretch of road. Millions of years . . .’ He waved his hands up in the air. ‘Gone in forty seconds.’

  Mum holds the torch for me so I can see my way back up to the cab.

  As Yasmin climbed the steps, she checked again for the blue headlights. There was still no sign of them. He must have turned around.

  She joined Ruby in the cab, the fabric of their clothes stiff with cold. They changed out of them, the warm air painful on their skin, the ice on their clothes melting. Yasmin found a towel, a swimming one of Ruby’s that had incongruous suns all over it, and wiped up the icy water. Her hands were still stiff and awkward from scraping the lights, and the skin on her left hand looked scalded. Ruby had to help her take off her jacket. Her face mask had stuck to her skin with a layer of ice and she had to rip it away, leaving her face raw.

  The heater was puffing out warmed air, the interior light was bright and the cab felt like a sanctuary. But with the warmth came tiredness again. At some point she would have to stop and sleep a little while, but not yet.

  She put on the CB, checked there were no vehicles coming in either direction, then pulled out onto the road to the north. The headlights shone further and more brightly, illuminating a light tunnel a quarter of a mile long of tumbling snowflakes.

  Chapter 11

  The wind had strengthened, gusts of snow billowed across the road like chiffon veils. Yasmin moved her head from side to side, trying to ease the tension in her neck. She checked her mirror again but there was still no one behind them.

  She was so proud of Ruby, holding a torch in the freezing cold and not complaining once. Hardly anyone knew about Ruby’s courage, nor how bright and funny she was, because she didn’t speak to them. But one day she would, and then everyone would know her too.

  She and Matt had argued incessantly about allowing Ruby to sign or making her use her oral voice; and about the laptop and the internet and for the last year the huge decision about where Ruby would go to school in September. The mainstream secondary school had an excellent learning support department, but Matt didn’t trust it. ‘She’ll be special,’ he said. ‘You know that’s how they tease each other? You’re “special.”’ Yes, Yasmin did know that. And it wasn’t each other, it was Ruby. She nodded and their eyes didn’t meet because they had failed as parents in protecting their child. Yasmin thought that secondary school would be better than primary school, they’d talked to the head teacher who’d given reassurances, but Matt hadn’t been swayed.

  ‘She has to learn to survive in the real world,’ Yasmin had said. Why didn’t he understand that? ‘If she does that now, the tough part now, while we’re there with her, helping her, then—’

  Matt had interrupted her, ’It’s not working at the moment.’

  ‘Not now maybe but—’

  ‘The real world thing, it’s bollocks. The world is a million different places and Ruby will find the place she wants to be.’

  Then Ruby had come downstairs and interrupted them, but their argument had continued, in disrupted fragments, with nothing gained or conceded on either side because when you argued about your child there was no compromise or turning away from what you believed was right.

  Secretly, Yasmin yearned to be kind to Ruby; to stop trying to make her speak with her mouth and to let her sign and to spring her, right now, out of the mainstream school where she was so unhappy. But if she did that she’d be a coward. She had to find the courage to look down the road at eighteen-year-old Ruby, twenty-five-year-old Ruby, Ruby the age she herself was now; when her parents wouldn’t be there to help her, not every day like Yasmin was now. She had to do the right thing for Ruby and risk Ruby hating her, because she was doing it out of love.

  She checked her mirror again. There were blue headlights behind them.

  There had been no sign of him when she’d been cleaning the tail lights. Or when she’d turned out of the passing place. She’d been sure that he must have turned around. Instead, he had turned his lights off and waited, hidden in the darkness, to follow her again.

  She thought of the man with the dyed blond hair at the airport – Silesian Stennet – and his unnerving refusal to break eye contact with her, following her down the corridor, taking hold of her arm.

  She didn’t think that an obsession so extreme could be formed in minutes, but she remembered his pale dyed hair streaked with sweat, offering to look after Ruby, wanting her to owe him even as he professed otherwise, ‘You wouldn’t be beholden.’ And there’d been other men, ostensibly sensible men, who’d claimed coup de foudres upon seeing her; lightning bolts landing all around her, jolting her, but only later when she learned of them.

  The voice who’d asked her if she had a gun, was it Silesian Stennet? She couldn’t remember his voice at the airport clearly enough to do a match with confidence, but it could well be the same man. She knew she’d heard it before.

  But she hadn’t seen Silesian Stennet since the airport so he didn’t know she was out on the Dalton.

  She checked the blue lights again; they were keeping an exact distance behind her.

  She took hold of the CB mouthpiece. ‘MP 156 heading northbound. Can the truck heading north behind me tell me who you are?’

  There was nothing.

  The silence on the CB was broken by Coby’s warm slow voice. ‘Gutsy lady, did I just hear you on the CB again?’

  ‘Is it you behind me?’ she asked Coby, desperately hoping that it was.

  ‘I’m at MP 170. Can’t see anyone in front of me right now,’ he said.

  So he was twenty miles north of her.

  ‘Just got the latest on the storm,’ Coby said. ‘Anyone else out there gotten this?’

  ‘Big blow,’ someone said. ‘Massive fuckin’ blow.’

  ‘They’re sayin’ hurricane force winds,’ Coby said. ‘Minus fifty. They don’t know for definite when it’ll hit. Reckon ’bout seven hours.’

  ‘Bin told there’s a risk of avalanches at the Atigun Pass,’ another trucker said. ‘Ain’t had the time to clear the snow from yesterday.’

  ‘Fuckin’ hell,’ a trucker said, and other drivers were swearing too.

  ‘Avalanche buried a truck three weeks back,’ Coby said, explaining the oaths to her.

  ‘A north wind blows in, only takes an hour to load a slope,’ another driver said.

  ‘Ain’t no one settin’ out now from Fairbanks or Deadhorse,’ came another voice. ‘Leastways not from Northern Haulage and I reckon other companies will be the same. Too damn expensive to risk losin’ a rig in a blow.’

  ‘You gettin’ this, gutsy lady?’ Coby asked in his unhurried tone.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Reckon we should be on first name terms.’

  ‘Yasmin.’

  She saw that next to her Ruby had turned on Voice Magic and was following this.

  ‘Where are you?’ Coby asked.

  ‘MP 150.’

  ‘OK. Too far from Fairbanks to turn around. Best thing, go on to Coldfoot, twenty-five miles from you; hard drivin’ but nothin’ worse than you’ve already done. Hole up there and wait this thing out. I’ll be there first. Have your coffee waitin’.’

  ‘Reckon you’ll be queuin’ for that,’ another driver said. ‘Anyone can’t get back to Deadhorse or Fairbanks’ll be waitin’ there.’

  Was the driver with blue lights behind her listening in? She was pretty sure he would be. Adeeb had said all the truckers listened in to the CB.

  ‘See you there,’ she said. ‘If they have a motel, I may stay over.’

  She hung up the CB.

  ‘We can’t stop,’ Ruby said. Voice Magic gave her wo
rds the same techno-impersonal tone as ever but Yasmin felt Ruby’s body shaking.

  ‘We’re not going to stop,’ Yasmin replied. They had seven hours, maybe a little more, to get to Deadhorse and while the drivers had been speaking on the CB she’d calculated their average speed and the distance to travel and they could make it.

  ‘We’re still going to Daddy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Once they got to Deadhorse, she’d persuade a taxi plane to fly to Matt. Minus fifty. Hurricane winds. She had to reach him.

  She was afraid of the risks to Ruby, of course she was, but perhaps she’d been conjuring up additional dangers where none existed. The blue lights were still behind them, but it didn’t mean the driver was following them. Dozens of truckers must be driving this route. He could have simply pulled over for a rest break and turned his lights off. Or perhaps he’d been cleaning his lights too and had turned them off as she had. There had been no more emails, thank God. Perhaps it was just some kind of one-off weird spam. Exhaustion could have been making her paranoid and in this landscape it was easy to be afraid.

  As she drove on, she thought about her and Matt’s first meeting, no coup de foudre involved. He later told her that he’d seen her around the university, but he’d been unfairly dubious about a person so unreasonably beautiful. Or possibly, he’d said, it was some kind of Darwinian self-preservation thing about the competition being too fierce and him keeping his tusks or horns or antlers safe.

  And then he’d spoken to her and got to know her and had fallen in love with her and had been afraid, he’d admitted, of these feelings he had for her. But there it was. There he was. Slain. No help for it. And she’d felt they were kindred spirits even in their fear of love. As a physicist, she knew the equations and consequences for when an object plummets from a height, but there had been nothing rational or logical about her falling and no equation for where or how it would end.